Binu and the Great Wall of China. Su Tong,
of the weeping spirits were scattered throughout the Peach Village, Kindling Village and Millstone Village area, where even young children understood their ancestry. In Peach Village and Millstone Village, the right to cry was, in the main, determined by age. Once a child learned to walk, he was no longer permitted to cry. The residents of Kindling Village, on the other side of the river, imposed an outright prohibition on crying, with no exceptions, not even for newborn babies; the honour or disgrace of these ‘opposite-bank’ residents was directly linked to their sons’ and daughters’ tear ducts. Village women, in an impassioned attempt to hold their heads up in the company of others, sought the ministrations of sorcerers, and most of the clever women had command of the proper magic to prevent crying: they fed their infants a concoction of mother’s milk and juice of wolfberry and mulberry; when the recipients of this red liquid were fully fed, they fell into a long, peaceful sleep. There were occasional recalcitrant children whom no one seemed able to stop from crying, making the Kindling Village mothers worry endlessly. They had a secret means of relieving their vexations, so mysterious it invited all sorts of fantastic speculation. Residents of neighbouring villages would gaze across the river and wonder at the peace and quiet of Kindling Village, that and the visible decrease in its population. The primary cause of both, they concluded, was the absence of crying children. Those children who cried – how could they all simply disappear?
The impoverished state of North Mountain persisted, like the rapids of the nearby Millstone River. No one knew where the water flowed to, but every drop had its source, and so the people searched beneath the sky and above the ground, seeking the sources of their own sons and daughters. The heavens heralded the boys’ arrival; soon after their sons were born, proud parents looked heavenward, where they saw the sun, the moon, the stars, soaring birds and floating clouds; whatever they saw was what their sons would be, which is why some of the boys at the foot of North Mountain were the sun and stars, some were eagles, others were rain, and the very least of them was a single cloud. But when girls came into this world, gloom settled over the huts and shacks, and to escape a blood curse the fathers were required to stride thirty-three paces from their front door. They headed east at a brisk pace, heads down, and whatever the ground revealed at the thirty-third pace was what their daughters would become. Naturally, they avoided pig sties and chicken coops, and long-legged fathers could reach the wildwoods at the far edge of the village; even so, the sources of daughters were humble and base. Most would belong to wild greens, melons, fruits and the like: a mushroom, a lichen, a dry weed, a wild chrysanthemum, or perhaps a mollusc, a puddle, or a goose feather – and these were girls who enjoyed a relatively decent fate. The future for the remaining girls, those who would become cow patties, earthworms, or beetles induced indescribable anxieties in parents.
Boys who came from the sky were, by definition, expansive and steadfast, and the prohibition on crying was easier for them to sustain. A good boy knew how to swallow his tears, a character trait in keeping with the principles of heaven and earth, and even with crying boys the problem was easily remedied: from their youngest days, they were told that those disgraceful tears could exit the body through their penises, and so, whenever a parent spotted signs in their children’s eyes that tears were on their way, they would hurriedly push them out of the door and say, ‘Go and pee, hurry up and pee!’ It was the girls who most readily violated the prohibition of crying, but this had been decided by fate. Grass poking out of the ground is saddened by the wind; sweet flag floating at the water’s edge is drenched when it rains; and that is why stories about crying are always about girls.
People at the foot of North Mountain raised their sons differently but with similar results; when it came to raising girls, however, each village had its own Rulebook for Daughters. The one they followed in Millstone Village was rather coarse and crude, and slightly passive: with an emphasis on strength, the girls there grew up playing with boys, for whom crying and peeing were inextricably linked; young women saw nothing shameful in lifting their skirts and squatting on the ground when the urge to cry came upon them, and as soon as there was a puddle on the ground beneath them, their sadness evaporated. Malicious outsiders liked to talk about Millstone Village girls who, even when they reached marrying age, still squatted in full view! They could wear their prettiest clothes, but the hems of their skirts always smelled bad!
The Kindling Village Rulebook for Daughters was full of sorcery, mysteries and darkness. In villages with a sorceress, chimney smoke rose straight into the sky day and night. The girls living there never cried and never smiled; they went down to the river to collect dead fish and the bones of dead animals, their every movement exactly the same as their mothers’ before them, from childhood through to old age. Some Kindling Village girls exhibited a dull, weathered look; after long periods of using bovine bones and tortoise shells to probe the fates of others, they neglected their own, and when they mourned the death of a son or a husband they habitually smeared a mixture of crow droppings and oven ashes around their eyes so that, no matter how deep the sorrow, they were able to mask it. Precise formulas and mysterious magic sapped their energy and turned their faces gaunt and sallow. When people on the riverbank spotted a Kindling Village girl, they felt an indescribable depression. Why, they wondered, did those girls lack youthfulness? Girls in their early teens and older women with dishevelled hair and dirty faces all had the look of wandering ghosts.
Locally, only the Peach Village Rulebook for Daughters had the capacity to foster girls that sparkled like fresh flowers. Some said the manual was unfathomable, while others doubted its absurd legendary qualities, and some even questioned its very existence. For years the people talked, and its mystery grew deeper. A significant part of the Peach Village Rulebook for Daughters was devoted to the matter of abolishing tears altogether. The village mothers had struggled against tears for many years, a long tormenting process of probing into peculiar and secret formulas to make tears obsolete. They examined biological features, drawing on a host of human organs other than eyes as possible outlets, opening new avenues for discharge to the outside. Given the mothers’ range of secret formulas, the girls had a wide assortment of tear-discharge methods, all of them strange.
Girls with large ears learned how to shed tears through them; the secret passage leading from eye to ear was thrown open for the flow of tears. A large ear is an ideal reservoir for tears; even the shallow ears of some girls discharged tears that wetted the neck, leaving the face dry. Girls with thick lips learned how to shed tears through them. Their lips were moist most of the time, rosy like the eaves of a house after rain; the overflow simply dripped to the ground without leaving a trace on the cheeks. With a mixture of envy and derision, people would say, ‘How lucky you are to cry like that, a drink of water right there at your lips, a veritable wellspring!’ Most mysterious of all were the buxom girls, who actually shed tears through their breasts. The distance between eyes and breasts is so great that people from outside villages found this method virtually impossible to believe. ‘Peach Village girls’ tears do indeed travel from eyes to breasts!’ the local villagers would say. But, believe it or not, the virtues of breasts as conduits were openly proclaimed not by the women of Peach Village, but by their husbands. It was probably they who attested to the secret means of Peach Village girls to shed tears through their breasts, since those tears remained hidden in the inner folds of their clothing, suspenseful perhaps, but hidden.
All this brings us to Jiang Binu, whose name, Binu, meant Jade Maiden. She was a radiant young woman, blessed with fine features, whose tears should have been stored behind a pair of large dark eyes. Fortunate to have luxuriant long hair, which her mother combed into pretty buns behind her ears, she was being taught to hide her tears there. Unhappily, her mother died when Binu was still young, and her mother’s secret formula died with her. Binu wept openly throughout her youth, keeping her hair from ever drying and making it impossible to keep the buns neatly combed. Anyone walking past her felt as if a rain-cloud had floated by, leaving drops of water in the air, which then landed on their face. Knowing that those were Binu’s tears, they would flick away the liquid in disgust and wonder aloud, ‘How can Binu have so many tears!’
It would be unfair to say that Binu shed more tears than other Peach Village girls, but her way of crying was easily the clumsiest, and it was a characteristic of her pure innocence that she seemed incapable of devising for herself a clever way to shed tears. So, while the other girls grew up to marry men of commerce or landlords or, lower down the scale, carpenters or blacksmiths,