Binu and the Great Wall of China. Su Tong,
nothing more.
Qiliang was a handsome, good and honest young man, but an orphan nonetheless, raised from infancy by a widower, Sanduo, who had found him beneath a mulberry tree. Local boys speculated that these two had fallen from the sky, that they were the sun and a star, or that they were birds or a rainbow.
‘Qiliang,’ they would ask, ‘what are you?’ He did not know, so he went home to ask Sanduo.
‘You did not fall out of the sky,’ said Sanduo. ‘You were carried home from under a mulberry tree, so perhaps you are a mulberry tree.’
After that, the boys all laughed at Qiliang, calling him a mulberry tree. Knowing that he was exactly that, Qiliang tended Sanduo’s nine mulberry trees day in and day out, eventually becoming the tenth tree. The trees did not speak, so neither did Qiliang.
The others said, ‘Qiliang, you are a mute who is unwilling to learn a trade and knows only how to tend those nine mulberry trees. You cannot make a living that way, so one of these days you will have to cut down those trees for betrothal gifts, won’t you? Who would marry you? Binu is the only girl in all of Peach Village who might consider it, because she is a gourd, and gourds hang from mulberry trees!’
So Binu married Qiliang; it was, it seems, the gourd’s fate, and the mulberry’s.
But it is common knowledge that, of all the males from Peach Village who died away from home, only Qiliang died in a place that was known to everyone in seven prefectures and eighteen counties, and that, of all the Peach Village women who were given to crying, only Binu’s crying travelled far beyond the mountains. That was one of the great events in the history of Blue Cloud Prefecture, and the greatest moment in Peach Village’s history of crying.
At noontime on the day of Qiliang’s disappearance, Binu could cry only through her hair. She stood on the road gazing north, tears falling like rain from the buns behind her ears, wetting her green skirt. She saw Shang Ying’s wife, Qiniang, and Shu’s wife, Jinyi, who also stood on the road gazing north, grinding their teeth and clenching their fists; their husbands too had disappeared. Qiniang cried through her ears, from which a glistening tear drop emerged; Jinyi wept through her breasts, and since she had recently given birth to a son, whom she was suckling, the tears she shed were mixed with milk, soaking her silk clothes so completely that she looked as if she had climbed out of a water-filled ditch. On the afternoon of Qiliang’s disappearance, a great many of Peach Village’s men left without a trace, leaving behind wives, parents and children to tremble under mulberry trees.
Someone said to Binu, ‘The half-load of mulberry leaves that Qiliang had picked is still lying on the ground.’
So she went to where the nine mulberry trees stood, despondent, and there she saw the basket of leaves. She sat down and began to count, but her count kept going wrong. Every spot where her hand rested, glistening drops of water rolled off the leaves and fell to the ground, for now her palms too were shedding tears. She carried the basket over to the silkworm shed, splashing water on the sun-drenched path as she walked. When she removed her shoes, she discovered that her toes were shedding tears as well, that they too had learned how to cry.
Now that Qiliang was gone, the silkworm shed seemed emptier than usual. Binu dumped the leaves into the silkworm pen, wetting it in the process. Worms that had not yet ‘climbed the mountain’ scuttled out from under the covering, refusing to eat tear-soaked leaves. Overnight, many of the silkworms had climbed up onto hemp racks that Qiliang had made, but they stopped spinning silk, disappointed with the last basket of mulberry leaves their patron had picked, and longing for the life-giving promise of the spring baskets. Binu hung the empty basket from a rafter, from which beads of water now dripped to the floor. She spotted Qiliang’s jacket, also hanging from a rafter and giving off traces of his sweat. One of his straw sandals lay by the silkworm shed door; she looked everywhere for its partner, but could not find it anywhere.
Binu walked slowly out of the silkworm shed, still searching for Qiliang’s sandal; she searched from dusk till late at night, but found no trace of it. Refusing to listen to the counsel of others, she insisted that the sandal was hidden in the folds of dusk. The next morning found her pacing the ground beneath the nine mulberry trees; suddenly a straw sandal came sailing out of the Leng family mulberry grove on the other side of the road. The Leng family daughter-in-law cast a look of pity at her and said, ‘You can stop looking. Isn’t that Qiliang’s sandal?’
Binu picked it up and, after a mere glance, flung it back. ‘That rotten sandal? I don’t know whose it is, but it isn’t Qiliang’s!’
The Leng family woman glared at her. ‘You’re a girl who doesn’t know what’s good for her,’ she said angrily. ‘Has your soul fled just because your man is not at home? When a man leaves, his hands go with him, so do his feet, even that appendage between his legs is gone. So what good is a pair of straw sandals?’
Her face burning, Binu ran out of the grove onto the road, but even then she kept her head down, still searching for Qiliang’s missing sandal, which hid from the sunlight, out of sight. Downhearted, Binu tramped up and down the public road leading out of the mulberry grove every day, always searching.
Villagers knew she was looking for the sandal, and, when they saw her, they pointed and said, ‘Qiliang took Binu’s soul up north with him.’
Chickens and dogs, not knowing what was happening, flew off or ran away when Binu drew near, hiding from the woman who stubbornly retraced her steps over and over. Even the roadside grasses acknowledged her sorrowful footprints: an invisible patina of tears overlaid each spot on the road where she had walked, and all the lush day-lilies and calamus along the way bowed down to her as she passed, piously proclaiming that, in their domain, there was no sandal here, no sandal here!
Binu searched for the missing straw sandal from summer to autumn, but did not find it. One day during the autumn she met a woman washing woven cloth on the riverbank. The woman told Binu that the cold weather would arrive soon, and that her children’s winter clothes were not yet ready. Oh, how she wished she had another hand – one to wash clothes, one to make new clothes, and a third to mend old clothes. So Binu went down to the river to help. Yarn floated gently on top of water that had already turned cold, and as Binu held the still warm white yarn in her hands, she saw Qiliang’s naked back in the autumn wind. ‘The cold weather sneaks up on you,’ she said. ‘They say that there, on the other side of Great Swallow Mountain, they feed people. But do they give them clothing as well? When Qiliang left, he was not wearing a shirt.’
Washing the fabric also washed Binu’s deepest worry up out of her heart and, with the coming of autumn, she was no longer seen on the road. The people of Peach Village heard that she had stopped searching for the missing sandal, and they assumed that a soul once taken from them had returned to the life of the village. Women came to Binu’s hut, in part to share their thoughts on waiting in an empty house, but also to pry into her private affairs. With discerning eyes, they spotted traces of her tears around the stove and on the bed, and their noses picked up the bitter, sour scent of those tears, which spread through the room.
Without warning, a large drop of water fell from the thatched ceiling onto the face of one of the women. As she wiped the water from her face, she cried out in alarm, ‘Mother of mine, Binu’s tears have flowed up to the roof!’
Another woman went to the stove and removed the lid on the cold pot, revealing half a pumpkin. She took a taste. Her brow crinkled. ‘That pumpkin broth has tears in it. It’s bitter and sour. Binu, are you cooking this pumpkin in your tears? Whoever heard of such a thing?’
Standing in the rain-cloud of her own tears, Binu was wrapping up a large bundle. In it she had placed a finely tailored winter coat embroidered in a colourful pattern, a sash and a pair of boots lined with rabbit fur. That, the women thought, must be a bundle intended for Qiliang. Well, who wouldn’t want to prepare a large bundle for a husband who had left home in such a hurry? They asked Binu how much the handsome coat had cost her, but all Binu could tell them was that she had traded away the nine mulberry trees, plus three baskets of silk from her cocoons and her spinning room.
The women shrieked in alarm.