Jia Pingwa - Ruined City

He took a leather case out from under a table. It was filled with three thread-bound books. “You were born at eight o’clock on the evening of July twenty-third in 1951, weren’t you? Now, wait. I’ll come up with a series of numbers, and you can look them up in these.”

Zhuang was in a fog as Meng wrote out three four-digit numbers. Following the instructions, he flipped through the books to come up with three poems:

One: Cut up goose down when a northern wind blows

Plum blossoms in snow and the bamboo is brighter than ever

The birthday is the seventh month of the intercalary year

And he was born on the twenty-third day

Two: The lost wild goose misses its flock, and tears fall freely

The siblings have different spans of life

Three brothers, each has his own destiny

One suffers a blow and loses his life early

Three: Father was born in the year of the boar and died young

Father and mother are constantly at odds

With the two parents, he loses the father first

While he will see longevity enjoyed by his mother

Speechless after he read the three poems, Zhuang cried out: “I can’t believe there’s such an incredible book. Everything about my life is recorded there.”

“You didn’t believe me when I told you about it before.” Meng closed the book and continued. “This is the most magical of the many books derived from The Book of Changes . It was lost for millennia, and even some of the finest practitioners of divination have never heard of it. According to Abbot Zhixiang, the Huangcheng Library in Xijing once held a copy. Kang Youwei came to visit, asked to see rare treasures that were scattered around the city, and walked off with a few pieces. When the library and the Yunhuang Temple found out that he’d taken an ink stone and a volume of sutras, they wrote to the provincial military governor, who sent a man after Kang. He rode his horse all the way to Tongguan before catching up with him and demanding that he return the stolen items. The incident shook up the whole country. But later they realized that one book was also missing, and after checking the catalogue, they learned that it was Master Shao’s Magic Numbers , a long-sought-after book that no one was able to find. They knew Kang must haven stolen it. No one knew what happened to the book after Kang died. Two years ago, someone with unusual talent in Taiwan claimed to have a whole set of the magic numbers, but he didn’t have the decoding system; he traveled to thirteen provinces in search of it, but wound up empty-handed. I’ve got it right here.”

“You sound so mysterious, but I don’t hear you making any noise about it.”

“You think I’m the type that makes noise all the time? It depends on the matter at hand. I’m telling you now, and you must keep it a secret. This book originally belonged to a sixty-two-year-old man in the northern suburbs who never told how he came into possession of a copy. I’ve heard he’s a Manchu, a descendant of the main branch of the red banner, so the book must have come from the Imperial Palace. For several decades he hid it from everyone, and he worked hard on the decoding system for eighteen years, with no success. I met him at Abbot Zhixiang’s place, and after we’d gotten to know one another, he let on about the book and asked me to work on it. I’ve only gotten the first step solved. Now I can change birth dates and years into four-digit numbers, but all I’m able to tell you is when you were born, your parents’ zodiac signs, the number of siblings you have, and your wife. Beyond that, there is what you were in your previous life and will be in the next one, in which years you will meet with calamity or great fortune, on which day you will make or lose money, and your official position and rank. But I don’t know how to decipher these. The book’s first page says, “Revealing the heavenly secrets will cause you to lose your sight and hearing.” I lost sight in one eye after taking this small step toward solving the secrets.”

Zhuang was dismayed by what he heard.

“Don’t read any more,” he said.

“How can I not?” Meng said. “You can keep your eyesight if you don’t understand this book, but human eyes can only see the mundane world. You lose your sight when you read this book, yet you can see into the future. Which is more important? So I was actually happy when I couldn’t find a cause for my blindness, because I knew that I’d managed to read and understand a tiny bit of the magical book. I was even more energized when I returned from the hospital. I studied day and night, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to make more headway.”

Zhuang had to agree with his friend. “Well, you do enjoy doing this. Why don’t you check on my marriage?”

Meng spent quite a bit of time calculating before coming up with another four-digit number. When they looked it up in the book, they found:

A phoenix graces the dead tree in front of your house

Fortunes in life must be pursued but none are real

It is best to put aside the short term and go for the long

Others will gossip about everything you do .

“What does that mean?” Zhuang asked. “It looks like it’s about Yueqing, but then not quite.”

“I can’t tell you, either.”

“Have you looked into the people we know?”

“Look at this one.” Meng took a piece of paper from the book and handed it to Zhuang, who read it but understood nothing.

“This is about my wife, and it’s dead on,” Meng said. “She’s destined to marry twice. As for others, I don’t know their birth dates and years, so I can’t look into it.”

“Here, let me give you three people. The first is Tang Wan’er, who was born between nine and eleven on the third night of the third month in 1957. The second is Liu Yue, born between five and seven in the morning on the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth month in 1963. And the last is Wang Ximian’s wife, born between five and seven on the eighth night of the last month in 1950.”

Meng looked them all up. Strangely, each of them had only one four-digit number, and the poems did not meet the style of regulated poetry, as had Zhuang’s.

Tang Wan’er:

The lakes and the ocean are places of great leisure

Dip in a rod and hook to fish amid mist and ripples

The affair is over, but not others

The yin could have it but not the others .

Liu Yue:

Happy go lucky but will it last

After obtaining the pearl under a majestic steed

It is soon lost in the water .

Wang Ximian’s wife:

Worrying heart

Pitiful cries

Round after round of vexations

It is over, but not quite .

“Why don’t any of these say anything about their marriages?”

“I may need a different set of numbers to look that up. This is all I could come up with, having only their birth dates and years.”

Zhuang was saddened by the lack of information, but he told himself, It’s better this way. Wouldn’t it be terrible if I knew it all? If everything is predestined and Niu Yueqing and I will not be together in the end, it would be fine to continue dealing with her the way I do now. But what if she and I are fated to grow old together? It would be all right if Wan’er and I are to marry, but if she were to marry someone else, how could I keep loving her when I knew she would belong to someone else in the end? And then there’s Liu Yue, as well as Wang Ximian’s wife, and perhaps others in the future. Based on Master Shao’s Magic Numbers, everything was settled before I was born, and that means what I have, all my accomplishments, my fame, and my entanglements with the women around me, have been preordained. Then what excitement awaits me? He regretted looking these things up in the book.