A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
very wrong with it. My grandfather soon heard fragments of a grim story.
When given to my family, the house had lain empty for some two years. Previously it had been the residence of a high official who had initially supported the wicked Dowager Empress in her plot to keep her son, the Emperor, weak and subservient. But for some reason the former owner changed allegiance, and was quickly perceived as a threat to Tzu Hsi’s power.
The Empress, who seemed to know everything whispered in the shadows, struck quickly and violently. The official was executed in Peking, and all his family in Canton – relatives, children, even servants – were given the “imperial favor” of dying at the hands of soldiers or of committing suicide as the soldiers watched.
The mansion became a scene of unspeakable gruesomeness as soldiers stabbed weeping women and children, while other unfortunates fell on their own knives, hanged themselves, or jumped to their deaths down the deep well in the inner garden. That was the house of suffering and sorrow that Tzu Hsi gave smilingly to my father, knowing he had no choice but to accept.
On the day my grandfather came to officially claim the mansion, he was borne in a palanquin carried by four men. A fearsome guard with a sword led the way. At the rear came ten others, carrying household possessions. When the procession reached the outer gate, Grandfather got out of the palanquin and prepared to ceremonially enter the house as its new master. But he took only a few steps and halted in amazement.
There on the road in front of the gate was a sewer grating, and on the curbstone beside it sat two uncanny creatures, like shrunken, shriveled old men, with outsized heads on tiny bodies with unnaturally small limbs. They were no more than two and one-half feet tall. Each had a palm leaf in his hand, and with these they waved my grandfather away, as if saying “Go back! Go back! Go back!” Even stranger, he found that only he could see them.
When he recovered his composure he addressed them politely, asking leave to pass. Still they motioned him away. Finally he lost patience and pushed forward. It was as though he walked into an invisible wall. He stumbled and fell, hurting his leg. But he was, as I have said, a man of violent temper and a general, and not to be dissuaded from his path, not even by big-headed ghosts. He managed somehow to get to his feet and awkwardly limped into the house, thus completing the ceremony of ownership.
When he came to the mansion a second time, the strange creatures again blocked his path, waving him away. Having already had his pride offended, he drew a large scimitar and struck at them. He succeeded only in damaging the valuable weapon, which also had been a gift from the Emperor. To harm an imperial gift was considered exceedingly shameful, and presaged ill fortune.
Grandfather, however, being headstrong and proud, was so furious and wrought-up that he planned a great defiance of the ghosts. He bought strings of big firecrackers and brought them on his third visit. There sat the strange, wizened creatures, waving him away. He hesitated not a moment, but lit the long strings of firecrackers and threw them directly at the ghosts. There was a great volley of sharp explosions, and my grandfather walked through the smoke and smell of burnt gunpowder and entered the house in triumph.
That night he fell ill. And as he slipped into an uneasy sleep, he had a peculiar dream. The creatures from the curbstone before the gate appeared to him, saying they had tried repeatedly to warn him away from the evil house. But not only had he ignored them, he had insulted them. So now they were departing, leaving him to his fate – his son would not live to carry on his name.
The illness never completely left my grandfather. At first he tried to forget the troubling dream, but disturbing events called it repeatedly to mind. His son – the Little Master – was only some four years old when odd things began to happen around him. Servants often heard him playing with someone, yet when they checked he was always alone. As he grew older they frequently heard him talking to another as he studied, but when they peeked in, no one was there but the Little Master. Such strange happenings played so on the mind of my grandfather that he would not leave the child alone within the house, and when they went out he was always near the boy and always carried a sword.
And then Grandfather ordered the well in the inner garden filled in. Too many strange sounds had been heard coming from it – weird voices, mutterings, whispering, singing, and sighing.
Time passed, but my grandfather did not relax his vigilance. The boy, now thirteen years old, practiced martial arts daily with a sword he kept hung high on a nail. One day after practice he went to return the weapon to its place. He had to stand on a stool to reach it.
There are two versions of what happened next. One says that as he reached up to hang the sword he slipped, and the nail-head, which somehow had become sharp, caught his hand and tore the skin as he fell. The other account, told by the servant who witnessed the event, says that as the boy stretched his arm up to hang his sword, a hand reached out of the wall, grabbed the lad’s wrist, and pulled his palm onto the sharp nail. The servant screamed and reached for the boy, but the Little Master slipped off the stool, the nail ripping his hand open as he fell. It little matters which version is more accurate. The wound became terribly infected and the boy soon died of tetanus. My grandfather’s dark dream proved true.
In spite of his great sorrow, my grandfather remained defiant. The ghosts dared to take his son? Then he would have another! And so within two years he adopted a young boy born to my aunt as his own.
A Chinese proverb states that no matter how great a family may be, its wealth will not outlast three generations. The life of the Herb Doctor, Ch’ing Yu Chou, who took up residence in our mansion, exemplified that.
He was born into a family of Manchu origin, descendants of the strongly-built warrior people who rode into China on horses and took the reins of power centuries before, initiating the Ch’ing Dynasty. For three generations his family had produced big, strong sons who became generals, military killers. The third-generation general, like those before him, was powerful and imperious, and had taken many lives. But when he produced an heir, the child was born premature and weak. And though the man had many wives, no more children were born to him. So the aging general watched with concern as the sickly boy grew into his teens. Each year it became more obvious that the son had neither the strength nor the inclination for a general’s life.
The old father found himself thinking about his own life. Looking back over the years that lay behind him like withered petals, what had his wealth and power really gained for him? Once he began such thinking, he could not stop. With growing uneasiness he recalled the men he had killed with his fierce strength, and he looked again at his gentle son. What would become of the boy in this vicious world?
At that moment something changed deeply and completely in the old general. He decided to abandon his riches and authority for the tattered robes of a Buddhist monk. He would live out his remaining days in a quiet monastery, where he hoped to find peace both in this life and the next.
He gave his son in adoption to a Buddhist family and set out for a distant temple. There he had his head shaved and exchanged his fine silk garments for the coarse robes of a follower of the Enlightened One.
He had taken careful thought beforehand for his son’s future, making arrangements for his education in the art of herbal medicine at another temple so that the boy would have a vocation and could make his own way in the world. His son thus began learning as a child the skills that would later save my life.
As the gentle, quiet boy grew into a young man, he found that he liked the peace and tranquility of monastic life. He thought to become a monk. The master of the temple, however, had long watched him closely, and told him plainly that he was not of the right material. The master had rightly discerned that the general’s son was homosexual, and consequently that it would not be good for him to live shut up in a community of men, any more than it would be advisable for a young heterosexual monk to live in a community of nuns. So though the young man liked the quiet, pious life of the monastery, he could no longer remain there.
Nonetheless, when he returned to the “World of Dust,” he lived in it much like a monk. In his