Forbidden Tales

Prologue

AR KIN WAS the first ex-convict I had ever met. He was arrested for openly criticizing the Communist Party and sent to Xinjiang province, which was China’s Siberia. The whole town thought they had seen the last of him, since nobody ever returned from there alive; so did his wife, who was forced to sign a divorce paper and later married another man. To the surprise of everyone in our village, Ar Kin showed up at her door after serving his full twenty-year sentence.

Rumor had it that he spent his years imprisoned in a labor camp, digging the side of a mountain. He was no longer the handsome young man they said he had been. His back was hunched and his hair had turned white. But his eyes still gleamed with intelligence.

His ex-wife, who did not even recognize him at first, refused to take him back. She had a new family; even his two kids had assumed their stepfather’s surname and viewed that man as their father. So Ar Kin gathered his stuff and, with the money he had saved from his twenty years of hard labor (convicts were paid a little for their work), built a two-room cottage on a narrow dirt road midway between the woods and the Dong Jing River. He lived there by himself, and the townspeople thought it fitting that a social outcast reside at the edge of town, for it gave them the comfort of distance. He was treated like a lunatic or a leper, and rumors always seemed to swirl around him. It was whispered that a younger woman was sometimes seen going to his hut late at night; some guessed her to be a pretty widow from the next town. He supposedly ate grilled meat like a northern nomad, chewed his tea leaves, and ate peppers that would burn your throat like fire. He became a fleeting shadow, never venturing out of his hut during the day.

Once I took my friends Buckle, Jie, and Ciang and walked the narrow, muddy dirt road to the graveyard near Ar Kin’s house, where we pretended to play around the tombstones. When we saw no trace of him inside the hut, we crawled to the windows and strained our necks for a glimpse of the inside. The two rooms were as clean and neat as an army barracks. There was no bed, just a huge rug with animal fur on top. Though I had never seen one before, I had no doubt that it was a tiger hide he had brought home from up north. The furniture in the living room was short-legged, in the northern style, and he had adopted the northerners’ custom of sitting and sleeping on the floor.

Ar Kin became the object of great speculation and curiosity. Even the leaders of the commune whispered about him. It was as if the twenty years of hard labor had forever branded him a criminal beyond redemption. The leaders left him alone to do as he pleased.

An old man rejected by society and abandoned by his own family, he had hit the bottom—no one could sink any lower than that. But in his few public appearances, Ar Kin seemed carefree and untroubled, even content. No one knew where he got all the money to put fish, meat, good tobacco, and liquor on his table. And then there were those great books he was rumored to possess. They said he had dumped most of his belongings on his way home from prison, and all of what he had carried with him was in two huge sacks—rare forbidden books of legends, romances, war stories, mysteries, and fairy tales. I wanted to see where he kept them, but each time we sniffed around his dirt hut, he always showed up mysteriously behind us, staring at us silently until we ran off, scared.

Soon people began to drop by his cottage to chat, have a smoke, and drink tea with him. He never seemed to have to work, yet he kept an endless supply of tea and tobacco for his guests, old and young. In those days it was not uncommon for some poor smokers and tea drinkers to live on others’ supplies. Such people would come to his house to chop wood, clean the house, and run errands for him.

No one knew at what point or why the people of Yellow Stone began to forget who he was and started treating Ar Kin like a person of importance. Maybe it was the day the leader of the labor brigade dropped by and had tea with him. Or maybe it was the day the fat deputy chief of the commune had his first Western cigar at the humble cottage and left with a bottle of rare rice wine. Perhaps it was Ar Kin’s exotic stories about the faraway labor camp and the other inmates, strange and talented characters, that won people over. Or maybe it was just his magnetism.

Many nights I filled my spare time by squeezing into his doorway and claiming a spot on the crowded floor, listening devotedly to his tales of another time and place, after enduring a few slaps on the head from the older folks who didn’t want me there. He was an optimist, and his words made you see the bright colors of spring and the majestic snow-capped mountains of Xinjiang. The sunsets in his tales were especially glorious, and the people with whom he had shared his life the most gifted. We grew to know his roommate at the labor camp, a violinist from the big city of Shanghai, who was still there digging the snow, and the moody poet who spoke his poems aloud only in his dreams in the quiet of night.

In Ar Kin’s slow and casual way of speaking, life in the miserable labor camp was transformed into story filled with colorful characters and beautiful scenery. I laughed and cried over his stories and would lie in bed thinking of those tales long after the lanterns were blown out.

On cold winter nights we gathered about him, listening to him speak as he sat at the short tea table in the middle of the room. On muggy summer nights we would sit around the newly dug well, hanging on to every detail of his tales as if they were the sweetest breeze from the Pacific. There were toothless old men, graying middle-aged ones, young fathers with little babies in their arms, nursing mothers, and starry-eyed children like me. Ar Kin’s tales opened our minds to a world outside our village—a world unknown to us. He took us on a journey as we sat back in his comfortable chairs, letting him fill our hungry minds with endless wisdom and humor.

As I grew older, I began to realize it was not his sharp wit but his spirit that had survived the coldest of winters, drawing us to him like a bright star. His love of life was so infectious, it made me wish I had been there with him as he got up every morning in darkness and climbed the icy mountain. Warmth came out of those bitter stories. He taught us that one could live a happy life in total misery—that happiness came from within.

His was the only place where lantern light still shone after midnight in the whole town of Yellow Stone. I don’t know how else I would have idled away those long evenings. And the best nights were when I was sitting right next to Ar Kin.

On one such evening Ar Kin told us that on the day of his release from the labor camp, one of his best friends, a fellow prisoner, gave him an address. His friend said he would give Ar Kin his books if he was willing to make the journey to the man’s hometown in the mountains near Fujian province. Ar Kin made the trip and paid a few porters to transport the books safely, dodging several checkpoints along the way where soldiers from the Red Army would have confiscated and burned them.

After he had gradually become accepted by the villagers, Ar Kin opened a book renting business out of his home. Ostensibly he rented only the good books that praised the revolutionary heroism of China’s Communist Party. But it was his not-so-secret, forbidden collection of fiction that people really wanted. Some books stayed on the waiting list for months, like Strange Stories from Liaozhai and Shui Hu Zhuan—Outlaws of the Marsh.

During the Cultural Revolution, when all commercial publications were shut down and all the old literature burned and public libraries closed, Ar Kin’s bookstore was heaven on earth. I had to collect two allowances, one from Dad and another from Grandpa, in order to rent the many books I read at Ar Kin’s.

My juiciest Saturday afternoons were there, sitting on a stool in the corner of the room with my pile of ten picture books, forgetting about the rest of the world. The most perfect times were when it was raining hard outside, with the music of raindrops beating the surface of the river nearby. With peace and tranquility and a book in hand, I would glide into a magical world, staying there until I could no longer hold my pee or I got so hungry that I couldn’t read anymore. Some books were so good, I rented them five times. I even brought my friends Buckle, Ciang, and Jie to read with me on the afternoons Ar Kin was in a good mood.

My favorites were the Monkey King stories, in which the monkey could change colors and shape at will, and appear in any form. He was loyal to his master, a Buddhist monk who was making the long trip to the west to seek truth. There were other war books and romances, but none captured my imagination as much as the Monkey King did.

One day I overheard a town cadre, a public official, tell his friend that Ar Kin was running a risky business, and if he wasn’t careful, he would end up in prison once more when the next political movement came along. Soon afterward my parents began to check my school bags for the rented books and whispered to me that no more forbidden books were to be brought home. I felt cheated—and scared. I could tell that another political purge was on its way when my parents became nervous and began whispering. It was time to kill another chicken to scare the monkey, as the saying went. But who would it be?

Late one night we were awakened by whistling, shouting, and screaming. There was a fire at the edge of town; I could see the distant flames from my window. My heart sank when they told me that it was Ar Kin’s home on fire.

As his books burned, the heat and flames carried the ashes high into the black sky. His neighbors passed buckets of water drawn from the nearby river to quench the fire, but it was the dry season. A west wind fueled the fire, and the little cottage burned to the ground.