Mai Jia - Decoded

I spent every holiday for two years on the railways of southern China, travelling the country to interview the fifty-one middle-aged or elderly eyewitnesses to these events; it was only after having compiled thousands of pages of notes that I finally felt able to sit down and write this book. It was my experiences of travelling round the region that meant that I came to understand why the south is different. In my own personal experience, after arriving in the south, I would feel as though each one of my pores was tingling with life — breathing deeply, enjoying every minute, my skin became smoother, even my hair seemed to become more glossy and black. It is not difficult to understand why I decided to write my book in the south

— what is harder to understand is why having moved there, my writing style also changed. I could clearly sense that the soft air of the south was giving me courage and patience in my writing — a task which I normally find extremely troublesome; at the same time, my story began striking out in new tangents, just like the lush growth of a southern tree. The main protagonist of my story still has not appeared yet, though he will soon arrive. In one sense, you could say that he is already here, it is just that you have not seen him; in the same way that when a seed begins to sprout, the first shoots are invisible below the surface of the well-watered soil.

Twenty-three years earlier, the brilliant Rong Youying had gone through appalling suffering to give birth to the Killer; everyone must have hoped that such a thing would not happen again. However, a few months after the mysterious woman went to live with the Rongs, history repeated itself. Because she was so much younger, the mysterious woman’s screams had a redoubled power, like a knife shrieking against the grinder. Her screams floated through the darkened mansion, making the flames of the lamps flicker and dance, making even the flesh of the crippled and dazed Mr Rong creep. First one midwife came and went and then another, sometimes they emerged to swap one cloth for fresh one, but each one left the room with the heavy stench of blood clinging to her body and splashes of blood everywhere, like butchers. The blood dripped from the bed down onto the floor, only to spread across and out over the doorsill. Once out of the room it continued to seep into the cracks between the dark stones set into the path, and on until it reached the roots of a couple of old plum trees growing amid the mud and the weeds. Everyone thought that those blackened plum trees in the overgrown garden were dead, but that winter they suddenly burst into flower — people said that this was because they had supped on human blood. But by the time that the plum blossoms bloomed in January, the mysterious woman was long dead and her soul had flown off to become a hungry ghost haunting some desolate stretch of hillside.

Those who were there at the time said it was a miracle that the mysterious woman was able to give birth to the baby at all; some of them also said that having given birth to the baby, for the mother to survive would be adding one miracle on top of the other. That didn’t happen here — the baby was born, but the mysterious woman suffered a haemorrhage and died. It is not that easy to have one miracle happening right after the other. That was not the real problem though

— the real problem was that when the midwife cleaned the baby of blood and slime, everyone was shocked to discover that he looked just like the Killer: the thick mat of dark hair, the huge head, right down to the shape of the Mongolian spot above his buttocks: the two were the same. Young Lillie’s innocent little deception stood revealed now as a nasty trick; the mysterious baby born after his mother’s pilgrimage turned in the blink of an eye into the illegitimate brat of a murderer foisted on his long-suffering relations. If it had not been for the fact that Mrs Rong found some resemblance in the baby to his grandmother, the sainted Miss Lillie, even she would have steeled herself to abandoning him in some uninhabited stretch of wilderness. In fact, it seems that when the question of simply getting rid of the baby was seriously mooted, it was his connection to his grandmother that saved his life and ensured that he was brought up in the Rong mansion.

The baby survived, but this certainly wasn’t a matter of congratulation for the Rongs — they did not even recognize him as a member of the family. For the longest time, anyone who wanted to talk about him called him the ‘Grim Reaper’. One day, Mr Auslander happened to walk past the front door of the old servant couple who were tasked with looking after the baby and they politely invited him in, hoping that he could choose a new name for the child. They were both pretty elderly by this time and found it most unpleasant to speak to the baby like that, as if he had come there to kill them. They had been thinking about changing his name for a while. To begin with they had tried to come up with a name themselves — the kind of baby-name that other children in the village had — but they couldn’t find anything that really seemed to stick; they used it but no one else did. Hearing their neighbours call him the ‘Grim Reaper’ all the time gave both of the old people the willies and they found themselves often having nightmares. That is why, for want of any better suggestion, they were forced to ask Mr Auslander to think of something, something that would appeal to everyone.

Mr Auslander was the foreigner who all those years before had been invited to the house to interpret Grandmother Rong’s dreams. Grandmother Rong adored him, but he was certainly not every rich man’s cup of tea. There was the time when, down at the docks, he interpreted the dream of a tea merchant from another province: that earned him a crippling beating. Both his arms and legs were broken, but that was not the half of it: one of his bright blue eyes was put out. He crawled back to the Rong family mansion and they took him in, thinking of it as a good deed that would help the old lady to rest in peace. Once he had entered their household he never left again. Eventually he found himself a job to do which suited him right down to the ground — as befitted such a wealthy and prominent family the Rongs decided that they needed a genealogy compiled. As the years went by, he came to know the various different branches of the family better than anyone. He knew the history of the clan, the men and the women, the main branches and the illegitimate offspring, which ones were flourishing and which had failed, who had gone where and done what: everything was sitting in his notes. So when it came to this baby, other people might be completely in the dark, but Mr Auslander knew exactly which branch of the family he came from and what scandals surrounded his birth. And it was because he knew exactly who the baby was that picking the right name for him was such a ticklish issue.

Mr Auslander thought about the matter and decided that before choosing a proper name for the baby, they would have to deal with the issue of a surname. What was the baby’s surname? Of course, he ought to be called Lin, but to put it mildly that surname now had unfortunate connotations for everyone. He could take the surname Rong, but it would be most unusual for someone to take their grandmother’s maiden name — it didn’t really seem suitable. It would of course be perfectly acceptable for him to take his mother’s surname, but what was the mystery woman’s name? Even if they knew it, it would hardly be appropriate to use it: that would be rattling the skeletons in the family closet with a vengeance! Thinking about it carefully, Mr Auslander decided to put the issue of choosing a proper name for the baby to one side for the moment and concentrate on finding a suitable baby-name for him. Mr Auslander thought about the baby’s huge head and the suffering that he would face having lost both his parents so young, how he would have to make his way without any help from his family, and suddenly an idea flashed into his mind. He decided to call the baby ‘Duckling’.