Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

animal, always wary. We could never be sure when he was sleeping and when he was awake. But the first thing I saw each time I awoke were his bright green eyes. So I have a mental picture of how he slept in his cave and of the look on his face as he lay there.
    His body stayed the same as always — that is, his bone structure didn't change. His muscles, however, twitched from the constant tension. Blood flowed powerfully through his tiny veins, building up strength, like a taut bowstring. The nose on his thin, oblong face was hard as iron, his eyes burned like charcoal fires. The tangled, iron-colored hair on his head looked like a raging prairie fire.
    As the fog expanded it became thin, transparent, and buoyant. From within its wavering, crisscrossing, white silk bands emerged the tips of the underbrush, the creeping nets of vines, treetops in the forest, the rigid face of the village, and the ash blue teeth of the sea. The fiery red faces of sorghum stalks often shone through the fog. But as the fog thinned out, the frequency of sorghum faces lessened. The brutal Japanese landscape mercilessly filled the gaps in the fog, and forced out Granddad's dreams of his homeland. Eventually the haze retreated to the wooded valley.
    The red glow of an enormous ocean filled Granddad's eyes. Ash blue waves licked lazily at the sandy beach, and a blood-red ball of fire burned its way out of the depths of the ocean.
    Granddad could not recall, nor was there any way he could recall, how many times he had watched the dripping wet sun leap out of the water. The blood-red fire of hope, so hot it made him tremble, raged in his heart. A vast stretch of sorghum formed neat ranks in the ocean. The stalks were the erect bodies of his sons and daughters, the leaves were their arms waving in the air, sabers glinting in the sunlight. The Japanese ocean became a sea of sorghum, the undulations of the ocean were the rising and falling chests of sorghum stalks, and the coursing tide was sorghum blood.
    According to an entry in the historical records of Hokkaido's Sapporo city, Yoshikawa Sadako, a peasant woman from the nearby village of Kiyota, went out to a rice paddy in the valley on the morning of October 1, 1949, where she encountered a savage who violated her. A Japanese friend of mine, Mr. Nagano, helped me locate this material and translated it into Chinese for me. The so-called savage was my granddad, and my purpose in citing this material is to pin down the time and place in which an important event in my granddad's narrative occurred. In the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1943, he was captured and later taken to Hokkaido as a conscript laborer. In the spring of 1944, when mountain flowers were in full bloom, he escaped from a labor camp and began his life in the mountains as part man and part beast. By October 1, 1949, the day the People's Republic was proclaimed, he had spent more than two thousand days and nights in the forest. Now the morning I'm describing, aside from the great fog that made it easy but more gut-wrenching for him to recall the fervent life he and his loved ones had led back home, has no particular significance. What happened later that afternoon is another story.
    It was a typical Hokkaido morning. The fog had dispersed and the sun hung high above the sea and the forest. A few dazzling white sails drifted slowly on the water. From a distance they didn't seem to be moving at all. Strips of brown seaweed lay drying in the sun on the sand. Japanese fishermen gathering the seaweed wriggled in the shallow water, like so many large brown beetles. Ever since suffering at the hands of a gray-bearded fisherman, my granddad was filled with hatred for the Japanese, whether they wore cruel or kind faces. Now when he went down to the village at night to steal seaweed and dried fish, he no longer experienced the worthless sense of guilt. He went so far as to rip up the fishing nets drying on the beach with a pair of rusty old scissors.
    The sun baked down. Even the wispy fog in the valley had dissipated, and the ocean was turning white. On trees all over the mountain, large red and yellow leaves mingled with the vibrant green of pine and cedar, like tongues of fire. Sprinkled amid the deep reds and greens were columns of pure white — the bark of birch trees. Another lovely autumn day had quietly arrived. After the autumn came the severe winters, those bitter Hokkaido winters, the kind that forced Granddad to hibernate like a bear.