Sandalwood Death

Author’s Note


As this novel was taking shape, friends asked me what it was about. I had trouble coming up with an answer, though I tried. Not until a couple of days after I handed the final manuscript in to my publisher, and I could breathe a sigh of relief, did it occur to me that it is all about sound. Each chapter title in the first and third parts—“Head of the Phoenix” and “Tail of the Leopard”—is in the style of speech of that particular narrator: “Zhao Jia’s Ravings,” “Qian Ding’s Bitter Words,” “Sun Bing’s Opera Talk,” and so on. In Part Two, “Belly of the Pig,” I employ an objective, omniscient narrator, though in fact it is in the style of a historical romance whose narration follows the oral tradition, complete with chorus—again, at bottom, sound. It was sound that planted the seed for the novel and drove its creation.

Twenty years ago, as I set out on the road to becoming a writer, two disparate sounds kept reappearing in my consciousness, ensnaring me like a pair of enchanting fox fairies and, in their persistence, often putting me on edge.

The first of those sounds—rhythmical, resonant, powerful, evoking a somber, blue-black color, weighty as iron and steel, and icy cold—was the sound of trains, specifically those on the historic Jiaozhou-Jinan line, which has linked the cities of Jinan and Qingdao for a century. For as long as I can remember, gloomy weather has been the backdrop for train whistles that sound like the mournful, drawn-out lowing of cows: hugging the ground, they pass through the village and enter our houses, where they startle us out of our dreams. They were followed by the crisp, icy sound a train makes as it crosses the majestic steel bridge over the Jiao River. Back then, the two sounds—the whistle and the wheels on the bridge—coalesced with the overcast sky and humid air to merge with my emotionally starved, lonely youth. Each time I was awakened by those two sharply contrasting sounds in the middle of the night, my head filled with vivid images from tales of trains and railroad tracks told to me by people of all kinds. They first appeared in the guise of sound, followed by visual forms as annotations of sounds. Put another way, the visual images were mental associations with sounds.

I heard, then saw the tracks of the Jiaozhou-Jinan rail line, which were laid around 1900, when my grandparents were infants, by gangs of pigtailed Chinese coolies who carried wooden stakes across fields some twenty li from my village under the direction of German civil engineers with equipment brought from home and, so I was told, inlaid with tiny mirrors. German soldiers then cut the queues off many strapping young Chinese men and buried them under railroad ties. Shorn of their queues, the men were instantly turned into useless, almost inanimate, objects. After that, other German soldiers transported Chinese boys on donkeys to a secret spot in Qingdao, where they trimmed their tongues with scissors so they could learn to speak German in preparation for becoming future managers on the completed rail line. A preposterous legend, obviously, as I learned later, when I asked the director of the Goethe Institute whether Chinese children had to have their tongues surgically trimmed to learn German. “Ja,” he said with a deadpan expression, “das ist korrekt.” Then he burst out laughing, proving the absurdity of my question. And yet this legend has gained staunch adherents over the years. We refer to people who can speak a foreign language as “trimmed tongues.” In my mind’s eye, I can see a long line of boys on donkeys walking along the muddy banks of the twisting Jiao River. Each donkey is carrying two baskets, with a little boy in each one. They have an escort of German soldiers. Slightly to the rear of this procession is a contingent of weeping mothers, their sorrowful wails reverberating in all directions. I heard that a distant relative of mine, who was one of the boys sent to Qingdao to study German, later took a position as general accountant for the Jiaozhou-Jinan Railroad at an annual salary of thirty thousand silver dollars, and that even his family’s servant, Zhang Xiaoliu, went home and built a mansion with three courtyards. Here is a sound and an image that swirl around in my head: a dragon hidden deep underground moans in pain as the rail line bears down on it. When it arches its back, the rail line rises up, sending a passing train off the tracks and onto its side. If the Germans had not built that line, Northeast Gaomi Township was destined to become a capital city. But when the dragon turned, flipping the train off the tracks, the dragon’s back was broken, which destroyed the feng shui of my hometown. And I heard another legend: The rail line had just been completed, and a number of local young men thought that the train was a giant beast that fed on grass and grains. So they came up with a plan to build a branch pathway out of straw and black beans to lead the train over to a nearby lake, where it would drown. The train was not fooled. They later learned the facts about the trains from the train station workers, who were third-generation Russians, and they were devastated to have wasted all the straw and black beans. But one fantastic story had no sooner ended than another followed on its heels. The Russians told them that the train’s boiler had been forged from a gigantic gold ingot. Otherwise, how could it withstand the buildup of heat year in and year out? They believed every word the Russians said, because of the adage “Real gold is fireproof.” In an attempt to make up for the wasted straw and beans, they removed a section of track, causing a train to flip over. But when they converged upon the locomotive with their tools, there was not an ounce of gold to be found.

Even though my small village was no more than twenty li from the Jiao-Ji line, the first time I actually stood near the tracks and witnessed one of those impressive monsters scream past was one night when I was sixteen, out with some friends. I will never forget the striking image of that scary single light in front and the awesome roar of its engine. Now, although I later rode trains regularly, none, it seemed to me, was anything like the one I saw as a youngster back in Northeast Gaomi Township, nor like any of the trains I heard about back then. Those were living creatures, while the trains I rode in later were inanimate machines.

The second sound is the opera popular all over Gaomi—Maoqiang. Its songs are sad and dreary, especially those sung by the dan, or female characters, which, simply stated, are tearful accountings of the oppression of women. Everyone in Northeast Gaomi Township, both adults and children, can sing snatches of Maoqiang opera. This talent—natural, it seems, and not taught—has long been a fact of life among Northeast Gaomi Township residents, passed down from one generation to the next. Legend has it that when an old woman who had followed her son north beyond the Great Wall was dying, a visiting relative handed the son an audio tape he had brought from home, and when the unique strains of Maoqiang arias emerged, the old woman, whose life was ebbing away, suddenly sat up, her face imbued with a healthy glow, her eyes bright and clear, and when the tape ended, she lay back and died.

As a boy, I often tagged along behind bigger kids from the village chasing will-o’-the-wisps on their way to neighboring villages to watch opera performances. Fireflies danced in the air, adding their light to the glow of the earthbound will-o’-the-wisps. In the distance, foxes barked and train whistles blew. From time to time we spotted beautiful women in red or in white sitting by the roadside crying, their sobs and wails sounding very much like Maoqiang arias. We figured they were fox fairies and gave them a wide berth, taking pains not to provoke them. I had seen so many operas, I had committed many of the arias to memory, filling in the blanks by making up my own lyrics; and when I was a bit older, I took bit parts in village stagings, playing villains. At the time, only revolutionary operas were performed, so I was either a spy or a bandit. Things loosened up a bit in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, when folk operas were added to the revolutionary corpus. The Maoqiang opera Sandalwood Death was born. As a matter of fact, the story of Sun Bing’s resistance against the Germans had already been performed on the operatic stage by Maoqiang actors in the last years of the Qing, and some local elders could still sing some of those arias. Using my childhood talent for writing jingles to start rumors and spread gossip, I teamed up with an illiterate old villager who played the erhu, sang opera, and was a master storyteller to write a nine-act opera we called Tanxiang xing. An elementary-school teacher who had been labeled a rightist, and who loved literature, gave us a lot of help. The reason I had gone with the other kids to see the train that first time was to get some real-life experience in order to enhance the opera.

Eventually I left my hometown to take a job elsewhere, and my interest in Maoqiang decreased, owing to the pressures of work and the trials of everyday life. A dramatic form that had once stirred the hearts of Northeast Gaomi Township residents went into decline, and even though one professional drama troupe remained, they performed infrequently, and that caused the younger generation to lose interest in Maoqiang.

I went home for a visit over New Year’s in 1986, and the moment I emerged from the train station, my ears picked up the sadly moving strains of a Maoqiang aria coming from a diner on the edge of the station plaza. The sun had just burned its way into the sky, so the plaza was virtually deserted; the forlorn lyrics merged with the shrill whistle of the train as it pulled out of the station, and my heart was filled with mixed emotions. I had the feeling that these two sounds that had accompanied me as I grew up—trains and Maoqiang—were seeds planted in my heart, where they grew and matured to become the underpinnings of one of my important creations.

I began writing Sandalwood Death in 1996. After I had written some 50,000 words, all caught up with fantastic legends surrounding trains and rail lines, I set the work aside for a while. When I came back to it, the resemblance to magical realism was too obvious to miss, so I started over. Some of the best writing fell into that category, and had to be jettisoned. In the end, I decided to focus less on trains and the sound of trains, and put Maoqiang center stage, as it were, even though that may have diluted the overall richness of the novel as a whole, in favor of stronger images of the people and a purer Chinese style. It was a sacrifice I willingly made.

In the same way that Maoqiang cannot be performed in grand halls alongside Italian opera or Russian ballet, this novel of mine will likely not be a favorite of readers of Western literature, especially in highbrow circles. Just as Maoqiang is performed on open-air stages for the working masses, my novel will be appreciated only by readers who have an affinity with the common man. It may in fact be better suited to hoarse voices in a public square, surrounded by an audience of eager listeners, not readers, who participate in the tale they are hearing. With that open-air audience in mind, I have taken pains to fill the work with rhymes and dramatic narration, all in the service of a smooth, easy to understand, overblown, resplendent narrative. Popular spoken and sung dialogues are the progenitors of the Chinese novel. Nowadays, when what was once mere popular entertainment has become a refined literary offering suitable for grand temples, at a time when borrowings from Western literary trends have all but brought an end to our popular traditions, Sandalwood Death may be out of keeping with the times, and might be thought of as a step backward in my writing career.