The Six Games #

About This Story

Author: Chen Zhou 沉舟 (Douban id: sunken_ship)
Source: ONE · 一个, two-part serial — Part One | Part Two · Chinese original: 六番棋
Collected in: Huanxiang de Lanhe (Guangxi Science & Technology Press · Zhi Liao, January 2024)
Award: Second Prize, Third "Story Big Bang" Contest (ONE × Ourlife Studio)

Synopsis: China, the 1930s. Lin Rongxing — the xiangqi prodigy the chess world will christen "the Little Barber" — is fished out of a Wuxi teahouse as a boy, and dies alone in the rubble of wartime Shanghai a few years later. From the street back to the street: in between sweeps half the chess-playing Southeast — the bamboo blinds of the Huxinting teahouse, the coded banquet of a Hong Kong restaurant, the neon arena of a Canton department store. Watch him raise his crimson tower; watch him feast his guests; watch his tower fall.

How to read: The six chapters bear the six day-signs of the rokuyō calendar (Tomobiki, Senshō, Shōkichi, Taian, Shakku, Kūbō); each opens with the matching oracle verse of the Chinese folk almanac (the xiaoliuren "Six Omens," here rhymed), under the sign's Chinese name. The "six games" are the six boards on which the hero's fate turns. Several masters here — Zhou Deyu, Huang Songxuan, Zhang Jinrong, Xie Xiaxun — were real stars of the Republican-era xiangqi world; moves follow the traditional Chinese notation of files and points.

Part One #

Prologue #

“What's your name?”

“Lin Rongxing.”

“Know a man by the name of Wang Yiming?”

“Don't know him.”

I. Tomobiki — The Day That Draws In Friends #

The onlookers stood like cranes, ringing a well; at the bottom of the well a circle closed around the square of a xiangqi board. Two players sat socketed into the well's wall, one old and one young. The old one was broad of build: once he sat down, the flesh of his belly folded layer upon layer, like an accordion crushed flat. Not that the old one was so very old — but the young one was far too young. His grubby cheeks, collarbones and wrists made you feel that if you dipped him in the water under Qingming Bridge and scrubbed, you might wash up a little lotus-root doll.

A gentlemanly-looking man, hearing the crowd gather and rustling among themselves the very name he had come in search of — “Little Yangzhou,” “Little Yangzhou” — was intrigued, and wedged himself into the human wall to see what was afoot.

At the third ring from the inside he could squeeze no farther. Even on tiptoe, the gentleman could only glimpse different parts of the board through different gaps between shoulders, piecing them together in his head into a whole game. The boy played at terrific speed, and the heads in front kept shifting; every time a black-haired back-of-the-head cut off his line of sight and he found a new peephole, the position had changed beyond recognition, as if a fresh game had begun. Before long, the fat man's Chu River had turned into a sieve, sifting the boy's chariots, horses and cannons through in a rustling cascade. In another blink, the crowd burst out: “Little Yangzhou has won! Little Yangzhou has won!” — and all around, front to back, the cheer passed from mouth to mouth.

Presently the uproar raggedly subsided: the fat man had risen with something to say. Only from the third sentence on could the gentleman make out his words: “When I came here the other day, I declared that in all Wuxi, whoever could eat my old general should have the piece itself as a gift. Today this young brother has beaten me. A gentleman does not weigh his gold, but he never weighs down a promise — this tortoiseshell general is his. The young are to be feared, little brother; and a lucky star shines on you today — the dragon appears in the field!”

As the fat man spoke, the crowd pressed one band tighter to get a look. Just before the last crack between arm and arm closed for good, the gentleman caught a glimpse, through it, of the general the fat man held out to the boy: it was quite unlike the other pieces.

His speech done, the man folded up his chess stand, took up the set now missing its black general, parted the crowd that pressed in to congratulate his opponent, and strode off. The onlookers drifted away too, until only a knot of loafers and drifters, and a few who by their dress were teahouse waiters, clustered around the boy, egging him on to hold the piece up and fondle it a while longer.

The chess stand had been set up in front of a teahouse, whose doorway bore a couplet: “Three feet of chill, quenched at the dragon's lips; one limpid pool — need Tiger Run alone smell sweet?” Watching the bustle cool into quiet, the gentleman stepped across the threshold. The proprietor received him and seated him in an upstairs alcove; as he was about to withdraw, the gentleman asked, by the by: “What was all that outside?”

“Ah!” said the proprietor. “The other day an itinerant chess-player turned up with a set whose black general is carved of sleek, dark tortoiseshell. He talked big — said that as far as the eye can reach from the top of the Longguang Pagoda on Xi Hill, if one man could be found who could lift that general off the board, it need never go back in his basket. Bold words from a bold hand: our local players, stung, took him on one after another, and every one went down. But there's a boy who runs walk-on parts at the Chong'an Temple theater, name of Lin Rongxing. His people are from Yangzhou; his parents died early, and he scraped along from meal to meal till he drifted here years ago with a Yangzhou-opera troupe. Walk-on work is idle work, so he was forever running to the teahouses to watch the chess. I never chased him off — I'd even send him on an errand now and then. He watched long enough to start playing, and once he started he usually won; being a Yangzhou boy, everyone called him ‘Little Yangzhou.’ Some waiter in the shop must have seen how cocky the stranger was and coaxed the boy over — and damned if he didn't win it, the little rascal!”

“And this ‘Little Yangzhou’ — just how good is he?”

“That I couldn't tell you — I'm no judge of chess. Only, over in Wu County nearby there's a rising young player, Hui Songxiang, only seventeen himself — a year older in age and a year longer at the game. The two have met across the board, and Hui can spot Lin both horses. — This Little Yangzhou hasn't offended you in any way, has he?”

“No, no — nothing of the kind.” The gentleman beamed benevolence, and nodded with a small sigh: “Of the ten best moves played under heaven, three are played in Yangzhou. When he comes into the shop, send him up to brew my tea.”

The proprietor assented at once and backed away, though with a lurch in his stomach, not knowing which way to take this. The gentleman simply set out a chess set of his own and began replaying positions from the Zhuxiang Studio Manual to pass the time.

Downstairs, sure enough, the waiters came in escorting Lin Rongxing with whoops and fuss, and the proprietor stopped them full-face in the passage. Seeing the proprietor had words for Little Yangzhou, the rest melted away. He jerked his lips toward the upper floor: “Go brew tea for the guest in the ‘Gazing-at-Li’ alcove.”

Fresh from victory, Lin Rongxing's high spirits had not yet reined themselves in; he blurted: “I'm not one of your hired hands — I only come to watch the chess and lend a hand when I'm free. Since when do you get to order me around?”

The proprietor took no offense. He gripped Lin Rongxing's arm, tucked him close and murmured: “Don't be a fool. Serve him well — there may be a tip in it.”

At the word “tip,” Lin Rongxing's spine went soft. He lifted a kettle off the bamboo stove, wiped the tortoiseshell piece on his front flap, stuffed it in his pocket, parted the bead curtain and entered the alcove. The gentleman had glimpsed all of it through the beads, and thought: this child has known real poverty. The truly poor lose all feeling for money and goods beyond their ken — it comes to the same as despising wealth. Even for a treasure like tortoiseshell, a greasy lapel and a pocket without a button were the highest honors he knew how to pay.

When Lin Rongxing came in, the gentleman was in the middle of a composition called “Distant Waters, Voyaging Sails,” and did not look up, absorbed in working out the moves. Lin Rongxing strained the tea, and could not keep from stealing glances at the board. Taking advantage of his distraction, the gentleman stole glances at the tea-boy in turn: he saw the boy's eyes sweep the board once and fix on the red elephant — and a sidelong flick at the manual in his own hand confirmed that the elephant was indeed due to fly next. The boy watched the chess; the gentleman watched the boy; nobody watched the tea. The teahouse drew its water from the Hui Hill Spring, and Hui Hill water is the heaviest of waters: the surface swelled a half-brim above the cup's rim and still did not spill — until at last it could bear no more and burst in a crash of mermaid pearls and dragon scales across the table. Both came to their senses and mopped in a flurry, Lin Rongxing stammering apologies, while the gentleman put in, all smiles: “You understand chess?”

Lin answered: “I've played a few games — my horses, at least, keep out of the elephant's fields.”

A sly light flashed in the gentleman's eyes. “Play a few games with me, and I won't tell the proprietor about this.”

The gentleman knew perfectly well the boy was no employee of the teahouse and could not be threatened by it; the boy, for his part, knew the proprietor had sent him up and would not be anxious for his return. So with mutual courtesies they sat down and played. Watching the youngster, the gentleman was half charmed, half appalled: his own pieces were not tortoiseshell, but they were carved paulownia, waxed to a sheen — and every piece the boy's sweaty fingers picked up kept a crisp fingerprint. Yet every piece that kept a fingerprint was also played onto a vital junction. The gentleman was somebody; the first two games he naturally won. But he could see the boy's edge was fierce: even with his nose and mouth stopped, this one would gnaw a chunk of flesh out of your palm before he died.

In the third game, as the battle reached the midgame, cries went up downstairs for the lamps to be lit. The gentleman was weighing a cannon against a horse when the noise stirred his concentration, and he advanced the wrong steed. The boy clamped onto the blunder at once and never let go. The gentleman's manner, by contrast, loosened into ease; finding the hand-talk congenial, he opened a conversation:

“You work at the theater — till what year does your contract run?”

Lin Rongxing pushed Chariot Four forward five and answered idly: “No contract. A day's work, a day's food. When the seats won't sell, the boss begrudges even feeding this mouth of mine.”

The gentleman stepped his general up one from the fourth file, and asked: “Then what will you live by, after this?”

A thought turned over in Lin's mind: this guest is about to lose, and he's baiting me with talk. Sliding Chariot Four across to Six, he cut the talk short:

“Anything will do.”

The gentleman answered with General Four across to Five, and asked again: “Is there nothing you especially love?”

Little did he know that Chariot Three, pulled back one, had been waiting there all along; Lin chased it down, ignored the question entirely, and rapped out “Check” — then pursed his lips, tipped his chin up a fraction, and waited to be admired. The gentleman never once glanced at the board; he had known himself beaten ten moves ago. Plainly the boy had no winding alleys in his heart; roundabout ways would not do. He narrowed his eyes slightly, fixed Lin Rongxing's two eyes with his own — left eye holding his right, right eye holding his left — and said slowly: “Do you want to go on learning the opera, here in Wuxi — or learn chess with me, and go to Shanghai?”

Lin Rongxing let the words soak in slowly, slowly, before their flavor came through. All his life there had been exactly one road not yet walled up before his eyes, and he had followed its bends and twists to this day. Now, for the first time, the road of his life forked. He did not know how to choose.

But then he thought: whether you sing the opera better than the next man depends on fashion — this way is good, that way is good, sometimes this, sometimes that. Chess is different. A general has four air-holes at most; stop them all, and no silver tongue, no seniority, no family learning, no lineage of masters can talk the dead back to life. Down the road of chess he could fight for a first place that was truly, properly first — pleated and stuffed and undeniable — and rise above the crowd. So, just as the gentleman began to feel he had been rude to set so great a dilemma before a stranger and was about to move his eyes aside to let the boy climb down, Little Yangzhou's wandering gaze suddenly focused, and he said, sharp as a chop: “I'll learn chess!”

But at once he wilted again: “Only — the theater — I can't just walk out on them…”

Pressing down his excitement, the gentleman waved a hand. “None of that is yours to worry about — I'll have it all arranged. I'll be away a few days; go back to the theater and carry on as usual. Before long I'll come for you.”

So Lin Rongxing went back to the theater for the time being. That night passed without word, and the next day likewise. On the third he whiled away another day at the teahouse chess tables, and when he returned the gongs and drums were already in full uproar. That night they were playing The Handan Dream; Elder Lü was already in costume, calling for his magic pillow, about to go on. Lin Rongxing hurried to fish the pillow out of the props heap — and suddenly felt the troupe master behind him. His shoulders hunched by reflex, braced for the rattan cane; but the master not only did not strike, his tone was gentler than usual by three parts:

“The kid's got something, eh — Mr. Wan told me all about it. He's off to Yangzhou on a chess tour these days; on his way back he'll pass through Wuxi and fetch you to Shanghai. A month at the outside.”

Little Yangzhou was blank: “Who is Mr. Wan?”

“What,” said the master, “you win a game in that teahouse and don't even know who you beat?”

“Who?”

Half amused, half exasperated, the master squinted at Little Yangzhou and said:

“The great Nanking master — Wan Qiyou, the one they call ‘the Ever-Victorious General.’”

II. Senshō — The Day of First Victory #

Wuxi folk call their town “little Shanghai”; it turned out big Shanghai was big indeed. He had been in Shanghai a year now, and the city's manifold apparitions were like stage flats: the few steps he had once walked as a spear-carrier were enough for them to wheel away and change out the whole world. Last night “the Little Fiend” Ye Jinghua had taken him to the Great World amusement center to see the “X-ray”; today he was already smelling the duck-blood soup at the food stalls by the City God Temple. Thinking back on it, that black round peephole floated up again in Lin Rongxing's mind.

The “X-ray” was a cramped booth on the fourth floor of the Great World, pinched between a storytelling house on the left and a dance hall on the right like a deep, narrow alley. Its front was hung with heavy curtains, queer black glass lamps glowering on either side, and the proprietor kept his post on a folding stool beside it. Called an X-ray, it was really only a peepshow with X-ray aspirations. The Little Fiend had seen it before; he paid two dimes and told the baffled Little Yangzhou to look for himself. The proprietor, without rising, drew back the curtain to reveal a panelled door, and in the door a round peephole glazed with glass. Little Yangzhou put his eye to it: the alley beyond was all darkness, save for a light at the far end, and under the light stood a beautiful woman in splendid dress. As he watched, the light dimmed and brightened — and the beauty stood naked as her birthday. Before he had looked his fill, the light dimmed and brightened again — and the naked woman became a stark, staring skeleton, thus making good the motto on the signboard out front: “The Bodhisattva of the Collarbone, dispensing expedient grace.” Little Yangzhou felt like a man who has bitten into a clam and found fine sand from the sea bottom: chew on, and there was nothing left to chew; spit it out, and he begrudged the meat; swallow it sand and all, and he rebelled; hold it whole in his mouth forever — impossible. He could only turn away, purple-faced and sullen, to find the Little Fiend leaning on the railing, laughing at him with mischief written all over his face.

That night Little Yangzhou tossed and turned: the moment he closed his eyes he saw the naked woman, as if she were painted on the inside of his eyelids. But her image was always blurred, and if he forced it into focus, there at once, superimposed beneath the net-fine fabric of her skin, appeared the mildew-mottled white bone — as if what his eyes emitted were X-rays. And if he tried to peel the woman away from the skeleton, the picture blurred again. So he tormented himself half the night before he finally slept, and he was still a little dizzy now. Which is why, hearing a call for tea from a nearby pavilion and seeing a zigzag flat bridge lying across the lake before him, he concluded that he had crossed the City God Temple grounds and come to the Huxinting Teahouse — and lifted a leg and marched straight in.

The moment he entered, Little Yangzhou was stricken. The walls of this teahouse were set with frosted-glass electric lamps in the shape of fuchsia bells, burning even by day; the ochre-lacquered tables were spotless, as if carved out of pig's-blood curd; the chairs were all Qiongzhou white-rattan work, clear-varnished, glossy but not greasy, slick but not slimy; the floor tiles were cut from the “seashell-flower” stone of Guizhou, sliced across the fossil shells so that their surfaces bloomed with chrysanthemum-petal veins. A stairway led to a second floor, and beside it was set a shining glass mirror so flat and even that the storytelling and the silk-and-bamboo music drifting down from above seemed to strike it and rebound in tiny ripples. Then he looked at the patrons: the men were all modern young gentlemen, their hair so neatly in place it might have been embroidered on by Suzhou needlewomen, strand by countable strand; and their companions' foreign dresses were each more fashionable than the last, the soft bosoms they bared more translucent than glaze. Quite a few of the patrons were already looking his way. A tall waiter came up to Little Yangzhou and, politely looking down at him, asked: “May I ask whom you are looking for?”

The waiter was as tall as a foreigner; even with his body bent in an elegant half-bow he still overtopped the boy by a head, and Little Yangzhou felt one ought to begin reading him from the legs up. Two straight trouser legs, pinched at the waist, drew out a rump line like a horse's hindquarters; a starched shirt braced about his chest completed the very breastplate of a peacock. Little Yangzhou thought of how he had specially spruced himself up for a senior's invitation — and he couldn't match even a waiter. Timidly he asked: “May I ask — is this the Huxinting Teahouse?”

The waiter, unperturbed, replied: “There are two teahouses behind the City God Temple. Ours is the Spring-Wind Pride Pavilion; the Huxinting is across the way, just over the Zigzag Bridge.”

Little Yangzhou fled in disarray as if pardoned. Setting what he had just surveyed beside the Simeixuan, the Tianchan, the Changchun — the teahouses the chess world held to be the haunts of great names — he caught, in that one glance, a sight of exactly which class of this world his own circle belonged to.

The air of the Huxinting Teahouse felt much safer. The bad breath of men smoking inferior cigarettes, the clatter of lids on the old Yixing clay pots the patrons brought from home, the deliberately over-amplified greetings of acquaintances showing their warmth — all of it closed around him like a gang of loyal but unpresentable old friends. The melon-seed shells carpeting the floor, telegraphing through his thin cloth soles, for the first time made him feel a disgust he could not check. He climbed to the second floor, where “the White Lotus Chief” Li Wushang and “Little Hubei” Lei Haishan were already waiting in a lakeside booth. Rites exchanged, they sat. The longer Li Wushang looked at Little Yangzhou, the more he liked him. In the year since coming to Shanghai, the boy's bearing and looks had utterly changed; for a lad of his age, the covered smiles the pampered young ladies of the ten-mile foreign settlement hid behind their fans taught faster than any ruler or bamboo whip. These days he kept himself easy and dashing, his two cheeks like ivory freshly carved, the dust just blown off. Little Yangzhou's mind still had not cleared, and he stayed somewhat tongue-tied, so his “Big Brother Lei” nudged him with a shoulder: “Aren't you going to thank the Chief?”

Li Wushang hastened: “Not at all, not at all. It so happens Old Zhang came to Shanghai selling crickets and ran into me at the Lingyun Pavilion. He asked what young talent Shanghai had, and I told him: lately a crop of little ones has come up — ‘Little Yangzhou’ Lin Rongxing, ‘the Little Fiend’ Ye Jinghua, ‘Little Hangzhou’ Dong Wenyuan, and alongside ‘Little Hubei’ Lei Haishan, who made his name a few years earlier — together they're called ‘the Four Little Ones of Shanghai.’ And I gave you a special introduction: how Little Yangzhou was discovered and recommended by the Ever-Victorious Mr. Wan, then apprenticed under Luo Tianyang of ‘the Three Dragons of Jianghan’; how in scarcely a year your skill leapt forward; how among the Four your killer instinct is the fiercest, and with an art swift as wind and rapacious as fire you've already beaten a string of first-rate masters — even ‘the Commander-in-Chief,’ old Mr. Xie Xiaxun, has pushed over his board and conceded to you. Old Zhang's interest was roused: he named you, Little Yangzhou, for a match. Seize today's chance and show him what you're made of.”

Little Yangzhou, his mouth running over with thanks, demurrals and acceptances all at once, fished the tortoiseshell general out of his inner pocket and turned it round and round in his hand. Lei Haishan asked: “And what's the story with that?”

Lin grinned sheepishly: “I won it off a fat wandering player. My luck began that very day. Before I cross swords with a strong opponent, I always give it a rub, to take on some of the luck.”

Li said: “I've heard of it. Let me see.”

Lin Rongxing handed the piece over, and Li Wushang examined it minutely. The piece was drum-shaped, an inch and a bit across, slightly larger than common, black through and through yet half-translucent. On its top face was incised, in the seal manner of Li Yangbing, the character “General,” the strokes filled in with toad-green. Around the side, along the upper and lower rims, ran two rings of nail-head bosses fine as millet, and between them was carved the Ten Precepts of Xiangqi in characters gathered from Banqiao's hand: Covet no victory; cross the border slow. Strike, but mind your own camp; give a piece to seize the go. Lose the small to win the great; cornered, let it go. Never force the pace; let each move answer its fellow's blow. If he's the stronger, hold your walls; if you're the weaker — call the draw. The script sprawled like paving-stones in a lane, head to tail in one unbroken chain. The underside bore a picture: the endgame “All That Blazes Burns Out” from The Marvel of the Rotted Axe, the red side in relief, the black intaglio — a thing to ponder. On one flank, nearly invisible, was a catch: press it and the top lifted on a hinge, revealing the whole piece hollowed into a secret cavity, a treasure-box for some trinket. If one looked closely, the cavity's four walls were engraved, in lines fine as a fly's leg, with four outline scenes — utmost fineness containing utmost breadth. Clockwise from the side beneath the General's crown: “Lü Ziheng offering himself at the board,” “Wei Xuancheng beheading the river-dragon across the chesswood,” “Yang Jiying pacifying the tribes among the pieces,” “Cao Ziwen giving his life within the game.” The cavity's top and bottom inner faces also bore pictures, done in maki-e: a spray of plum blossom and a stack of oranges, standing for the two great manuals together nicknamed “Orange-and-Plum” — The Secret in the Orange and The Plum-Blossom Manual. Li Wushang admired it through, restored the catch, and handed it back. Lei Haishan said to Little Yangzhou: “Well? Doesn't your master treat you right?”

“How so?” said Little Yangzhou.

Lei said: “Hey — you ungrateful pup! Any other master, with a treasure like this in his apprentice's hands — who wouldn't have skimmed it clean away?”

Li concurred: “Tinker Luo is a straight one.” Little Yangzhou's master had started out as a tinker; his birth name had been lost in childhood, and people called him simply “Luo the Tinker.” After he made his name, he borrowed a homophone and became “Luo Yangtian” — Luo Skyward — and later inverted it to “Luo Tianyang,” taking the meaning “renowned under heaven.”

Little Yangzhou saw the light: “Yes, yes — my master has been generous to me indeed. Today, for instance: Senior Zhang stakes such a big purse to play me, and he won't take a share.”

Li pointed at him and teased: “Look at that — not a move played and the purse is as good as spent. But this Zhang Jinrong today — don't you take him lightly. He is one of the famed ‘Three Heroes of Huaiyang’; his style is to think densely and cover all ten thousand angles before he lets a piece fall, and when he thinks long it can run to one or two whole watches — hence the name ‘the Slow Master.’ An ordinary opening from him is nothing but orioles warbling through the flowers, a spring murmuring underground; by the time the silver vase shatters and the armored cavalry bursts out, it is too late for regrets. Your own game is built on the short and the fast, a sharpness nothing can match; today, above all, guard against pride and haste: at the kill, do not hurry.”

Lei Haishan glanced at his watch and picked up the thread: “Speaking of slow — Old Zhang is three quarters of an hour behind today, isn't he?”

Li Wushang pressed his lips in a smile and traded a glance with Lei Haishan, as if long acquainted with this Zhang Jinrong's temper. Just then Lei suddenly hushed and said, jittery: “Listen — speak of Cao Cao, and Cao Cao arrives!”

All three froze and listened. Through the teahouse hubbub came, faintly, the sound of feet taking the stairs: first one step, barely there, then nothing, until you almost doubted it had been a footstep at all — and only then the next. At the fifth, Lei Haishan snorted with laughter: “I waited for the old gentleman in this very place, back then — that's how I know this staircase has seventeen steps.” He and Li Wushang traded another snickering look. Li turned aside, lowered his voice, and repeated his earlier point for Little Yangzhou: “Old Zhang is the painstaking-poet school of chess: to settle one piece in place he'll twist off several whiskers. Your game is crossing a bog on a rainy day — you spy out every foothold along the way first, then step where each step breeds the next, hurrying on by plan for fear the water rises and wets your shoes. Old Zhang's game is seeking a bird-path in the woods: every step for him is dark willows and bright flowers, a world within a world, so every step must be treated as a wholly new position, the whole board reviewed afresh. Today you meet him — the outer school against the inner school. There will be a savage fight. Mind yourself.”

After this long speech, and a further while, the Slow Master finally ascended whole, head to foot, onto the second floor. The four exchanged greetings; Little Yangzhou cupped his hands to bow — but Old Zhang's bow came first, before Chief Li: a single pump of the joined hands, then a stop; he did not, as ordinary people do, swing his body as an axis and sweep the arc around to cover all three. Little Yangzhou could neither lower his hands nor keep them raised; while he dithered, Old Zhang's bow turned to Little Hubei: another pump, another stop. Little Hubei, knowing the score, only now raised his own hands and returned the bow. That done, the bow came to Little Yangzhou — another pump — and the rites were at last complete. Then they sat. Little Yangzhou bent and dropped; his trousers touched the chair seat, though the flesh of his legs had not, when he noticed Li and Lei still standing motionless. Rear end in the air, he looked up: over yonder, Old Zhang was lowering himself slowly, ever so slowly. Little Yangzhou had to rise faintly once more; only when Old Zhang was settled did the three sit down in unison.

Old Zhang was a character: coming to meet guests with all ten fingers pitch-black with grime. Chief Li opened the conversation: “Been rummaging the old books at Juling's again? Picked up any treasure?”

Old Zhang chuckled and rubbed his hands. “None. Last time I dredged up a Seven Stars Gathering, written by a Dane named Green who traveled in China — capital stuff. The Baoguang shop next to Juling's, open a dozen years, has closed. The age is going slack.” Terse words — but slowly said; it was now past mid-morning, and with every character he uttered, the sun-shadow of the teacups on the table shortened by a hair.

After a little more small talk, Li and Lei moved to the neighboring booth and ordered tea of their own. On Zhang and Lin's side, the summer blinds of mottled Xiangfei bamboo were lowered on three sides, so that outsiders should not easily learn how the battle between old and young came out. The two arrayed their forces along the Chu River, and the campaign began.

Once the armies were engaged, Li and Lei, behind the sparse-and-dense bamboo blind, kept up a pretense of chatter while their ears pricked to the sound of pieces falling on the board. After each soft “pock” there always came, hard on its heel, a crisp “crack” — but after the “crack,” an age would pass before the next “pock” arrived. So the intervals ran short-long, short-long, the short as if unthinking, the long seemingly without horizon. After a dozen-odd cycles, on the heels of a “crack,” Old Zhang's voice suddenly opened up:

“Young man — do you take my play for something with no depth in it, not worth the thinking?”

Chief Li's heart clenched; holding his breath for what came next, ready to hurry over and mediate at any moment, he heard Lin Rongxing's voice:

“You mistake me, senior. I simply play a plan once I have it; I never meant to keep it slow.”

Chief Li slapped his own thigh in the dark: this Little Yangzhou really had no idea how to talk. From the master's side came only the ghost of a grunt, then nothing. A long while later, another “pock” — and Li and Lei let out their breath and settled back to watch the weather change.

But from that moment the long intervals began to shrink, while the short ones did not lengthen by a hair. Lei Haishan leaned to Li Wushang's ear and breathed: “Old Zhang's temper is floating. Meeting another's strength with his own weakness — I fear he's done for.” Chief Li signed for silence. Just then, after a “pock,” the customary “crack” suddenly failed to come. They waited left, they waited right — nothing — until they almost suspected they had miscounted the intervals, that the “pock” had really been the “crack,” or that Little Yangzhou had moved so fast the “crack” had merged into the “pock” and been swallowed. The two cups of tea on the table went from hot to cold untouched; then, with a heaven-splitting “crack,” the sound returned, and after it the long-short rhythm resumed — except that not only were the longs growing shorter, the shorts were growing shorter too. Five exchanges had not passed before Little Yangzhou's voice sounded: “Check.”

Then the sound of Old Zhang answering the check. Hard upon it, Little Yangzhou again: “Check again.” Old Zhang replied with a “pock,” and on its heel: “A third check.” After that there was only the mahjong-rattle of pieces swept back into the box and a new game being set. Chief Li and Little Hubei traded a look.

In the second game, the long intervals strained to close on the short; it sounded now like a lame man walking, one step deep and one step shallow. After some dozens of exchanges, Little Yangzhou called “Check,” and at once came the sound of the pieces going back to their places.

In the third, the gap between long and short shrank further still, the shortest long just reaching the longest short. At about half the usual count of moves, Old Zhang abruptly spoke, his tone already hurried into vexation: “I resign this one. Let's start again.”

Near the end of the fourth, by the sound of it the greater half of the pieces had already taken rebirth beyond the ko-fight, when Old Zhang suddenly spoke again — and bellowed just two words: “There's a ghost!”

The sun slid past the zenith; the games reached six. Master Zhang tore aside the blind and burst out; before Li and Lei could even rise to greet him, they heard him cry, at a speed unknown in his born life: “A ghost! I — the Slow Master — have lost half a dozen games in one morning!”

Little Yangzhou followed at his back, wearing a smile of mingled alarm and elation. Zhang Jinrong turned and, half angry and half fond, pointed at him:

“When Chief Li sang your praises the other day, I didn't believe it. Seeing you today — extraordinary indeed. Fairly speaking: if you can take six games off me, Shanghai holds few opponents left for you. If you would see the sky beyond the sky, you must seek it in the south. A man on the rivers and lakes needs a name that rings. Yangzhou gathers the beauty of all East China — the street-name ‘Little Yangzhou’ does not measure up to you. The way you play, you drive the blade like water, and split bamboo as if it were rushes. Today I give you a street-name: call yourself ‘the Little Barber.’”

III. Shōkichi — The Day of Small Blessings #

In the autumn of 1935 — the twenty-fourth year of the Republic — Li Wushang, in the guise of a merchant, took “the Little Barber” south by sea on a chess visit to Hong Kong. Zhou Deyu, doyen of the Hong Kong chess world, gave a banquet in their honor at the Dasanyuan restaurant.

Li Wushang was a figure of note in Shanghai chess circles, and not on the strength of his play alone. He had a quick ear and a wide acquaintance; he could open doors and hold down a room; so the police had enrolled him as an informer, a post with a whiff of the justice-of-the-peace about it. On the strength of these several connections he had been honored as “the White Lotus Chief” — which had not the least thing to do with that sect, the one forever rising for the Ming against the Qing or for the Qing against the foreigner. It was for all this that the company asked him to take the seat of chief guest. Lin Rongxing was the youngest in years, but newly arrived and a stranger to the place; his soft Wu speech against the room's babel of southern and northern accents was chicken-talk with ducks; and besides, everyone knew the true purpose of this southern journey was his challenge to Zhou — the old one had only come to build the stage; the young one would sing the opera. So he was given the seat of honor immediately at Li Wushang's right. It was a rare occasion for the Little Barber to survey a banquet table from any direction but the one the dishes came from; a round table looks the same from every side, and yet it was different. Zhou Deyu took the host's seat, and among the chess-loving guests in attendance were Liu Dianguang of Yaozhi Middle School, Luo Weichao of the Central South Athletic Association, the Western doctor Shi Wenwei, Li Shanqing of the Confucian Society, and others. The restaurant was plainly of the first grade: the mere fact that ceiling fans hung overhead — the same fans that, a month or two ago, had still been fanning the diners — was enough to strike the Little Barber as beyond belief.

When host and guests were seated, Li and Lin each let their wondering eyes linger two instants on the maid who showed them to their places; whereupon Zhou Deyu said: “Hong Kong has fine flowers in September too — shall we look at some?” All applauded the idea, and Zhou seized brush and ink and dashed off several slips. Then tea was served — wild cloud-and-mist tea from Tai Mo Shan in the New Territories. The Little Barber sipped twice and found it nothing much. In truth he had never drunk good tea in his life; but since the day he could tell one taste from another, every tea he drank, good or bad, had been brewed with Wuxi's Hui Hill spring water. So what he tasted was not the tea but the water. And Hui Hill water was the very spring Lu Yu himself had graded “the Second Spring Under Heaven” — the First being, by universal consent, a misgrading. Small wonder, then, that since leaving Wuxi, whatever tea Lin Rongxing drank was “not as good as home's” — though people still called him “Little Yangzhou,” “Little Yangzhou” — for Wuxi was what he now called home.

With the tea came three little dishes: a dried one — chick peas and walnuts; a candied one — preserved Nanhua plums; a fresh one — jackfruit. Li Shanqing said: “This jackfruit grew on a tree in the Hong Lok Yuen gardens at Tai Po. All the jackfruit trees of Lingnan, they say, were propagated from the two before the South Sea God Temple at Panyu.”

Lin Rongxing asked: “This ‘tree boluo’ — is it the boluo people usually mean?”

“No, no,” said Li Shanqing. “Boluo grows in boluo fields; the tree boluo grows on the boluo tree — it is also called boluo-mi.”

Lin, more confused than ever: “And this boluo-mi — is it the boluo-mi the Zen school means?”

“No, no,” said Li again. “The two have no connection whatsoever.”

At this Zhou Deyu laughed openly: “There Shanqing is wrong. I think this little brother has quite an affinity with the Buddha — he saw at a glance that the two are connected. Boluo-mi — pāramitā — is a stage of the Bodhisattva path, the perfection that looses one from vexation and ferries one to the farther shore. And because this fruit is sweet, and eating it melts sorrow away as if one ascended to Paradise, it borrowed the name. The Compendium of Materia Medica analyzes it in detail.”

Shi Wenwei joked: “Zhou of Guangling — born to a family of doctors, sure enough; three sentences and he's back to his trade.” Everyone laughed.

As they chatted, Li Wushang introduced Lin Rongxing once more — the same things his letter had said, adding that the boy had later transferred to Bao Zibo's school, studied with him likewise a year, and had now graduated. Bao Zibo was called “the Slow Vajra”; he and “the Slow Master” Zhang Jinrong shared the one word “slow” — both masters of the simmering, gentle fire whose best games are won by long stewing. Lin Rongxing, that barber's blade newly ground and freshly set to work, had drawn nurture from the opposite style, and now took the best of all schools, armed for attack and defense alike; in Shanghai he had no opponent left, and so had gone south to fetch scriptures. Li Wushang, saying all this, naturally toned the boy down a few degrees, but that was the gist. He had barely reached this point when several comely, well-turned young women, cradling coconut fiddles, zithers and lutes, arrived in a colorful cloud, shown in by the house to take their seats before the screen.

“Ah — so those are the flowers. Yes, they do bloom into September,” Lin Rongxing thought to himself.

Meanwhile a dish of century egg with pickled ginger arrived, with a bottle of the foreigners' before-dinner wine. The wine had a foreign name, all its sounds strung into one string; the Little Barber didn't catch it, couldn't have repeated it if he had, and didn't dare ask again. Anyway it tasted sweetish — sweeter than the Suzhou baked pears sold on the streets of Wuxi. Liu Dianguang said something to the waitress in Cantonese; the waitress turned and repeated it to the girls in Cantonese; the girls twittered a few trial notes, and then began to play and sing with oriole throats and swallow warbles.

The ancients said: silk is not as good as bamboo, bamboo is not as good as flesh — strings below pipes, and pipes below the voice. The Little Barber had never understood this; today he understood. Of what the girl sang he could not make out a single word — and precisely for that reason he could only hear her voice as an instrument made of flesh: no clever human words, only a string of resonant tones, and he felt as soothed as if someone were lightly switching the hollow of his back with a deertail whip. He asked Chief Li: “What is she singing?”

Li Wushang was, if anything, even less a Wu man than the Little Barber — how should he know? Li Shanqing, hearing the question, explained: “She is singing a famous piece of the dishui nanyin, ‘Autumn Regrets on a Traveler's Road.’ It tells of the scholar Miu Gen and the singsong girl Mai Qiujuan, who met at Mid-Autumn and lost their hearts at first sight; two blissful months they had, and then fate, stingy and star-crossed, parted them by ten thousand folds of mountain and water. The next autumn eve, Miu Gen, pining for his love, composed this tune — and so its opening lines run: The cool wind keeps its tryst; the autumn moon knows no end; and my heart, pining for my darling, turns each day to a year.”

As long as he only listened to the tune, the Little Barber got on passably; once Shanqing explained it, he was instantly lost in it. Afterward the girls sang several Cantonese ballads — “The Long-Haired Dream,” “A World of Flowers,” “The Waters Will Recede” — and when the first soup came up, a velouté of chicken and corn, he noticed none of it. Chief Li, warming to the music, marked one of the girls as especially pleasing, and turned to say so to the Little Barber — when he caught him, he knew not since when, holding the tortoiseshell piece out of his pocket under the table, its lid open, peeping at it in secret. Inside the piece, which used to be bare emptiness, there was now a faint glimmering light, as if it held a girl's ear-drop. Lin Rongxing, seeing Li turn, curled his four fingers into his palm, clicked the lid shut, and stuffed fist and all back into his pocket. Li Wushang, a man of the world, let his face go blank; what he had been about to say would not do now, so he found another thread and murmured: “Don't forget what I told you this afternoon.” Then he went back to listening as if nothing had happened.

What he had told the Little Barber that afternoon, he had already told him several times. This Zhou Deyu is your fellow townsman, head of “the Three Swordsmen of Yangzhou.” Three years ago, in the East China–North China inter-regional match, playing for Jiangsu and Zhejiang, he crushed Zhang Dekui, champion of the five provinces of Jilin, Heilongjiang, Zhili, Shandong and Hebei, and was crowned “Chess King of Seven Provinces” — and even your Mr. Wan was only his second that time. Now he lives abroad in Hong Kong, and the waves of the southern seas have gone calm for him; his fame is unrivaled. In his day his father, Zhou Huanwen, held the chair of “first hand of Jiangdu in the late Qing and early Republic” — yet twice met Zhang Jinrong in the prime of his strength, and twice lost; in a rage he removed to Shanghai, and to secure an heir for his art, once hired Luo Tianyang to play his young son Deyu a full hundred games. On that count, he is your elder school-brother. Later, when Zhou Deyu's game ripened, he challenged Zhang Jinrong in his turn: seventy games they fought, and he won three of every five — his father's shame avenged. On that count, for you he is the Fan Cliff seen from Proud-Coming Peak: the mountain beyond the mountain. If you cry him battle, your chances are good — but I hear he has lately been collecting your game records, so he must know that too. Today's welcoming banquet may hold other calculations. I notice the guests he has asked to keep us company are none of them chess-wood men; all are idlers who brush the edges of the game. I don't know what he means by it. Tonight he may have something to say, or he may not. If not, well and good; if he does — think it through before you answer. Above all, mind yourself.

Mind yourself, mind yourself — the Little Barber was always being told to mind himself. But what exactly he was to mind, nobody said. The world was perhaps more perilous than a chessboard, and every square of it wanted minding. And yet: before he came to Shanghai he had not been more careful than he was now, and now he was certainly not weaker than he had been then; he had come through then in one piece — why should one false step now mean damnation beyond redemption? The way of the world was a strange thing.

As the last ballads wound to their close, the dinner wine came up — “Pearl Red” from Meizhou — with a cold dish of blanched blood clams. The waitress moved the girls' stools behind the guests, and they sat again in an encircling ring, one girl to a man. Lin Rongxing was at this moment somewhat lukewarm toward the one behind him; Zhou Deyu, seeing it, said: “What, is the flower not pretty? We can always pluck another.”

Luo Weichao chimed in: “When Kang Youwei came to Hong Kong he wrote: He dreads the clear songs, this guest apart; wreathed in flowers, he keeps a monk's heart. Can he have been describing our young friend Lin?”

Liu Dianguang cut in: “This time next year, you couldn't have them if you wanted them. The Governor issued the ban two years ago: three years' grace, then the flowers of the smoke are all uprooted. Pluck the bloom while the bloom's in reach — don't strip a barren bough in vain.”

Li Wushang knew what was what, but he could not help feeling awkward; turning to look at Little Yangzhou, he found him so naturally endearing that he offered, half teasing, half consoling: “She's only here to make you happy. Nobody's asking you to marry her.”

It was Chief Li who had hit the vital point. At these words Lin Rongxing silently drank the sip of Pearl Red the girl offered — and the matter was considered closed.

With this the “phoenix head” of the feast was complete; next came the “pig's belly.” A great Jiangxi porcelain platter, borne in at eyebrow height, made its way over the company and landed in the center of the rosewood table, in the circle of light thrown by the mica chandelier shaped like a bauhinia blossom. On the platter lay one great waning-moon of amber fat, half translucent, its surface pleated with radiating folds, each fold soaked through with a thick, limpid, mellow stock. Li Shanqing played the cheerleader:

“This is the red-braised whole skirt-fin. Hong Kong fashion differs a little from the outer rivers'. There, a bird's-nest banquet ranks highest, then sea cucumber, then shark's fin. Here we honor the fin banquet alone; abalone, fish-maw, sea cucumber, bird's-nest — all below it. Please, everyone, taste.”

Hearing this, Li and Lin, measuring the plate's thriving sea-treasure backward against the two characters “fish fin,” both concluded it could only have been cut from a young leviathan. Lin Rongxing filled a bowl and finished it to the last drop; the final mouthful was still unswallowed when he wanted another. Li Wushang tugged his sleeve under the table and hissed:

“Show some promise. They won't be feeding you only one good dish.”

So reminded, the Little Barber no longer dared chew even the mouthful he had; he held it until his own saliva had soaked it soft, then pressed his lips tight and prepared to gulp it whole. Zhou Deyu, seated easy in the host's place, surveyed the company, found the mood convivial, and with a smiling face addressed the Little Barber across the table:

“On this journey south, worthy nephew Lin — is it fame you want, or profit?”

The words were hardly out when even the steam rising faintly from the shark-fin soup froze. The Little Barber froze too, forgetting the unswallowed mouthful. Zhou Deyu added one more sentence:

“If it is profit, then you and I must not cross swords; for once we play, you will have your fame — and profit will be hard to come by. You are young. In our trade there is a saying: in the opening, never trade a cannon for a horse.”

At that moment Li Wushang's heart was like a pair of buckets slung on a pulley's two sides: one sank to the bottom — tonight's banquet was indeed only to bar the way; one hung hoisted — what would the Little Barber decide? Yet they were at table; there was no putting heads together before the whole company — and if the Little Barber did turn to ask him, he was not sure himself what was best. But the Little Barber never once slanted an eye his way, and plainly had no thought of consulting anyone; only — from habit or from nerves — the hand beneath the table kept fondling, through the cloth, the piece in his pocket. Then they saw his Adam's apple leap high, clearing his mouth; and just as everyone was calculating whether to rescue the cold silence, he spoke:

“What does a boy know? — fortunate enough to attend this splendid feast. A little small profit would be ten thousand lucks; how should I dare speak of empty fame. I want profit.”

At these words, Zhou Deyu was like a lay-figure made true to life in every part, into which an immortal suddenly breathed a breath of life: his whole body loosened from its stiffness, flowers bloomed on both cheeks, joy climbed to his brow-tips. Just then roast suckling muntjac came up, and Li Shanqing hastily tossed a thread of talk into the ring:

“This four-in-one suckling beast is called the muntjac: like a river-deer but horned, like a dog but larger, near the wild boar in temper, in shape the russet muntjac's twin. It shows itself now and again on Hong Kong Island, in the New Territories, on Lantau. Fin of the sea and this on one table — treasure of mountain and treasure of sea complete!”

They chatted a while, and the second soup came up. Li Shanqing supplied the voice-over: “Another local specialty: watercress soup with fresh and dried duck gizzards. Watercress from the paddies, stewed down with fresh gizzard and dried gizzard till the leaves go blackish-yellow, then longan and lean pork to round the flavor. You who are new to Hong Kong may find it strange — but if you can manage a third mouthful, you will miss it all your life.”

Then came Portuguese smoked conger, and on this too Li Shanqing had his say: “These days, outer-river folk entering a Hong Kong restaurant always order the garoupa first. In fact, Hong Kong folk have a ranking for fish: first the conger, second the pomfret, third the mackerel. The garoupa doesn't even make the list; it got famous only because it's meaty and short on bones, and diners are lazy. The conger is the richest of them all. Locally we steam it, fry it, braise it — but today it's none of those: we're giving you a novelty, the Portuguese smoked way.”

The Little Barber filled a bowl of the gizzard soup and hardly dared touch it; he picked up a morsel of smoked conger and found that strange too; he went back to the roast muntjac. A banquet, by and large, has three stages: in the first, everyone joins one common topic; in the second, the company breaks into little circles, each on its own topic; in the third, the rest fall silent while the most talkative man still holds the floor, and everyone's attention returns, as in the first stage, to the whole table. They were now in the second stage. Amid the bustle, Zhou Deyu — addressing no one in particular, and not quite talking to himself — said, as if it mattered and as if it didn't:

“In all things under heaven, you want a good beginning, a lucky omen. Set a banquet: the first dish must be the great skirt-fin. Set a game: the first blow must be the central cannon.”

As he spoke his gaze fixed on nothing — yet on the three words “central cannon” it swept across the Little Barber as if by chance and as if by design. The Little Barber's full set of teeth was at that moment wrestling an under-roasted muntjac tendon; hearing this, he raised his eyes and met Zhou Deyu's dead on. In that same instant the table split open a silence too short to measure — no longer than the slit a bookmark, long pressed, leaves between two pages — and then the feast's clamor closed over it again. The Little Barber's heart was bright and clear. He chewed down the tendon and answered, in the same pointed-and-pointless way, unhurriedly:

“Where there's a one, there's a two — and the two always has hooves on it. Behind the great skirt-fin comes the roast muntjac; behind the central cannon, the right horse rears.”

Before his voice had fallen, roast fat snipe came up, and Li Shanqing held forth: “The snipe — that's your curlew bird; this season they are flying south, and by the Shenzhen river mouth they are thick as crucian carp crossing the stream. Hong Kong folk don't care for duck, but they prize the snipe above all.” He finished; the company murmured its praises and went back to their cups and chatter as if they had no wits at all. Zhou Deyu took up the thread:

“In the sky the north-geese fly in file; on the ground the muntjac go in pairs. Where there's a hen there must be a cock — how about Horse Two advances Three, to make a pair?”

The Little Barber answered at once, as if no thought were needed: “A horse may glare in eight directions; it cannot match one chariot that freezes ten. In war, engage with the regular, win with the irregular. Longan and lean pork — regular flavors; watercress and fresh-and-dried gizzard — irregular flavors. Regular and irregular breed each other, and so the supreme flavor is made. The regulars are already on the field: time for an irregular — Chariot One advances One.”

The next course was borne in; the lid lifted on — of all things — the celebrated five-snake soup. Li Shanqing followed up: this soup was stewed from five of Hong Kong's own venomous snakes — banded krait, Chinese cobra, tree snake, banded wolf snake, and the hundred-flower snake — skinned and simmered together. Everyone took a share, then drifted seamlessly back to their separate talk. Only then did Zhou Deyu say:

“As the saying goes: a chariot played straight never sinks with the setting moon — the chariot wants regulars, not irregulars. The young only fear bringing the chariot out late; little do they know that of this century egg and pickled ginger, it's the old ginger that bites. Chariot One slides to Two — that is the straight and proper path.”

The Little Barber stayed right on his heels: “Cold dishes can't match hot dishes; cold steel can't match firearms. Pickled ginger bites, but it can't bite like warmed Pearl Red. Cannon Eight slides to Seven — where there's fire, there's the bite.”

Next came deep-fried betel-nut taro “shrimps.” The betel-nut taro is a mother-taro that shows an areca pattern when cut; shredded fine and fried to shape, the shreds look like little shrimp fritters dipped in batter — hence “taro shrimps.” Li Shanqing finished his gloss, and the company, as if nothing at all were afoot, spread the smoke-screen of their chatter once more. From behind that screen Zhou Deyu let fly:

“Betel-nut taro shrimps: called betel, yet not betel; called shrimp, yet not shrimp. War is the way of deception: empty, seem full; full, seem empty. Horse Eight advances Seven to make a screen — and behind the screen, the plans unfold.”

The Little Barber pressed him hard: “As they say: when falsehood plays the truth, truth turns falsehood too; where nothing is, there something shows. A wine-feast without wine is no feast; elephant-chess without the elephant is no chess. If his marshal hides behind the screen, then I play Elephant Seven to Five — and invite my old general into the command tent.”

To crown the “pig's belly,” rock-sugar lily bulbs. Lilies grow wild on Victoria Peak and West High Hill, but the ones in this bowl came from Nanxiong in northern Canton. Zhou Deyu waited until the company had tasted, and then:

“A snipe near the water is in danger; a central pawn at the river is near death. Yet without Soldier Five advancing One into the tiger's den, how shall a little pawn cross the river and serve as a great chariot?”

The Little Barber showed no fear; he returned plum for peach: “The sea is wide for fish to leap, the sky is high for birds to fly. Snipe and conger ended on the plate and in the mouth precisely because they clung to their square inch of ground. If I slide Chariot One across to Six, mounting straight into the blue clouds — who's to stop me charging and galloping where I please?”

The rearguard arrived at a leisurely pace: soft-shelled turtle with yam and goji. The menu said “water-fish”; the Little Barber craned at the tureen — it was the common terrapin, stewed with bright red goji berries. By Shanqing's account this water-fish was of the golden-coin turtle kind, shipped in from Canton. When the rest of the company had, as if by silent agreement, dispersed their attention, Zhou Deyu picked up the thread again:

“Speaking of that banded krait — there's a trick to catching it: drive the snake into its hole, then stop both ends. So there's no help for it: Horse Seven advances Five — two horses like shears. Where will you run?”

The Little Barber picked up a piece of jackfruit and answered: “I eat a boluo-mi — ferry me, pāramitā: Cannon Two advances Four, straight to the far shore of the Chu River.”

“The lily bulb is small, yet it orders the inner organs; a pawn is trifling, yet the whole game hangs on it. Soldier Five advances One.”

“The central pawn guards the general's gate: with no cause, do not lightly advance it. The sacred tortoise lives long — but let him drag his tail one light step forward, and he's a turtle caught in a jar. Pawn Five advances One — take the soldier.”

“Have you not heard: never eat a baited soldier? The water-fish shortened its days not for dragging its tail forward, but for greedily swallowing the bait. Cannon Five advances Three — eat the pawn: check.”

“The blood clam has its shell and does not fear the scalding water; the old general has his guard and does not fear the cannon's call. Guard Six to Five — save the general.”

So it swung back and forth like a pendulum, past twenty exchanges. The others made east-and-west talk on their faces while inwardly not a word was lost on them — though a few, poor at blindfold chess, had long since lost the thread and no longer knew which piece stood where. Yet they had only to watch the two players' bearing: the Little Barber still chewed his courses at his ease, using his mouth for chess only in the gaps between one mouthful swallowed and the next raised; Zhou Deyu, by contrast, often had to eat a whole round of the table, stalling long, before he produced his parry. Everyone guessed whose road ran broad and whose ran steep. In Li Wushang's heart it was clear as a mirror, plain as watching fire: five moves out, he suddenly saw it — Zhou Deyu was going to lose. Zhou saw it too. He hesitated a long while; there was truly no good move; then he darted a look at Shi Wenwei. The doctor, already lost in fog, understood everything at once, hurriedly withdrew from the small-circle conversation he was nominally conducting, and addressed the whole table:

“Speaking of Hong Kong folk not caring for duck — they can't even make a decent cured duck, and I never understood why. Later I learned: to cure a duck you must hang the whole bird high, wind-dried, never shade-dried — only then does the flavor come out. So the whole art of a cured duck lies in one thing: you hang it up.”

On the two words “hang it up” he gave his head one heavy nod. Li Shanqing and Luo Weichao, seeing this, knew at last that the battle was decided, and smoothed things over with a chorus of “Quite so, quite so — hang it up, hang it up.” Zhou Deyu, seeing the steps laid for him, chimed in with a “Quite right — hung up it should be,” and came down from that high platform. Liu Dianguang raised a hand in a small signal, and the banquet's “panther tail” made its entrance: a staple — Nanyang coconut New-Year-cake pastries — with four side dishes, two meat and two vegetable: steamed rice-worms, crisp-fried oysters, betel-purple sweet potatoes, and Savorne ice cream. Shanqing, in a hurry to change the subject, rattled on at length: rice-worms were banned by the Hong Kong government — these had been smuggled from Zhongshan via Macao; the oysters came from the Bao'an oyster beds; the betel sweet potatoes cook up purple; the Savorne ice cream was an East-meets-West dessert, its ice supplied by the Dairy Ice & Cold Storage Company on Ice House Street. Last of all came Lingnan's most celebrated fruit, the lychee, to make the mouth water and cut the grease. The company returned to its cups and merriment, and in the midst Zhou Deyu said to the Little Barber:

“Hong Kong is full of big stakes. I'll make the introductions; you need only campaign on all sides. If you lose, the stakes are on me; if you win, we split the purse fifty-fifty.”

They ate on until the meats and fruits were spent, the cups and plates a shambles, spirits flagging and the moon full in the west window — and then the party broke up. The Little Barber strolled with Li Wushang along the seaside road back to the hotel, turning his head several times on the way toward the Dasanyuan's bright windows, paned with oyster-shell “sea-mirrors” and glowing with lamps the color of mandarins. In his heart there seemed to be a thorn, pricking him to take each thing he had met at tonight's banquet and compare it, piece by piece, with the thing that held the same place in that other scene. And at this hour the flower-girls he had not been able to look at, the gizzard soup and the smoked conger he had not been able to eat, had all wondrously turned into evidence of some kind of superiority. Only when he had safely established that — excepting the tea, which was not good enough — item by item everything had been outdone, did he turn over on the velvet bedding and, facing the waning gibbous moon sinking over Victoria Harbour, fall asleep.

---

Part Two #

IV. Taian — The Day of Great Peace #

“You registered two weeks ago, correct? We have your record here. Now we need to confirm that your identity matches the information given at registration, and then you may mount the platform and make your challenge. What is your name?”

“Wang Yiming.”

“Age?”

“Eighteen years of age.”

“Young indeed. Where are you from?”

“Yangzhou, Jiangsu.”

“You sound it. Yangzhou folk do know their chess. Permanent residence?”

“Shanghai.”

“Your contact address in Canton?”

“The Bund, the East Asia Hotel at the Sincere Company.”

“Very good, all in order. Let me go over the rules of the platform match once more: you are playing the evening session, four games in all; you may resign or withdraw at any time. Beat the platform-holder and there are prizes: the top prize is the silver tripod standing to the right of the platform. Win three games running against the holder and you may carry the tripod home; two games running — four tins of Mei Li cigarettes and eight admission tickets; one game — one tin of cigarettes and four tickets; even a drawn game earns two tickets. Note that ‘running’ means the wins must run together: a loss or a draw between two wins counts them as a single win, and separate runs are not added — the prize goes by your longest run. Any other questions? No? Then you may follow the master of ceremonies onto the platform.”

So the platform clerk watched a fluffy-cheeked lad — long, fine brows, a delicate nose, dressed in a Japanese sailor-suit — led by the master of ceremonies through several hundred pairs of curious, marveling, doubting, contemptuous eyes, to a spot beneath the rainbow arch formed by the huge characters “The Sun Company's Public Xiangqi Platform.” At any ordinary time, that gaze of his, projected through his spectacles, would never have lingered more than three seconds on a challenger who knew not the height of heaven nor the depth of earth. Stagehands had already flipped the vertical sign hanging at the platform's right — “Day Platform-Holder: Zhao Pei” — to reveal the other side: “Night Platform-Holder: Huang Songxuan.” Another stagehand pasted three square cards, reading “Wang,” “Yi,” “Ming,” on the platform's left, covering the previous challenger's name.

At the same time, a broad-built merchant-gentleman with a square face, wearing a Sun Yat-sen suit and a bowler hat, chose a seat in the second-floor café, by the railing over the walkway, from which the whole platform could be surveyed. This “Sun Department Store (City Branch)” was five floors high; the platform stood in the building's central well, with two hundred-odd chairs and stools set before it for the chess fans. Behind the seats an open space was left, where latecomers could stand and lend their voices, or look down from the railings of the other floors. The house was already over ninety percent full when, at six o'clock sharp, the master of ceremonies opened the proceedings, introduced Wang Yiming, and called out Huang Songxuan. Wang saluted Huang; Huang returned the salute; the board was opened and the challenge joined. On the platform besides the two players remained only a chess-attendant; behind them stood a giant board lashed together crosswise and lengthwise from bamboo poles, with a hook at every intersection, and at each move the attendant, with a forked rod, hoisted a piece the size of a dried cow-dung cake to its proper place.

The armies had no sooner drawn up along the Chu River than a small boy with a cigarette case slung over his shoulder and a peaked cap on his head came dawdling and hawking his way over. Only when he reached them did it become clear that what the case held was betting tickets for the chess. The man in the Sun Yat-sen suit asked him: “What are the odds on Wang Yiming?” “Five to two,” said the boy.

“Not too long, then,” said the merchant.

“Heavenly King Huang never wipes a man out; so long as you can play with a speck of method, he won't let you lose everything. Some people even bet on the young greenhorn to win.”

“‘Never wipes a man out,’” the Sun Yat-sen suit repeated; he blinked, looked the boy up and down with meaning, and said: “Then I'll place a bet — on the young greenhorn to win.”

He was just reaching for his money when a chess fan at the next table, also watching the platform, turned his head and asked in a Mandarin deliberately chosen and therefore not quite standard: “By your accent, you're not from these parts?”

The Sun Yat-sen suit slowed his money hand: “No — Shanghai. Just passing through.”

“Then perhaps you don't know the South China chess world very well?”

The Sun Yat-sen suit blinked again, and again with meaning: “Not much, it's true.”

The fan had found his chance to open the floodgates: “This Huang the Seventh made his name in Canton the decade before last: first battle, swept the Guangxiao Temple clean; second, outplayed Xu Rongzhai; third, crushed Guo Naiming. He is the first phoenix of ‘the Three Phoenixes of Guangdong’ and the central Buddha of ‘the Three Precious Buddhas.’ In the all-Guangdong championship of the xinwei year he took the laurel with a flourish, stood alone at the head, and thereafter, at the head of that year's second, third and fourth, shared the fame of ‘the Four Heavenly Kings of South China.’ In all the world as it stands, within the four seas and the eight wilds, only the Seven-Province Chess King Zhou Deyu, now in Hong Kong, is believed able to measure swords with him. He has held this platform for years, unshaken — and now from who knows where comes this newborn calf that doesn't fear the tiger — and ‘Yiming,’ ‘One Cry,’ is it? A dud firecracker! The chess proverb says: seize every crack the moment it shows; pile small wins high and the great win grows. Betting on that rube is one throw for everything. Betting on Huang the Seventh is a stream that never runs dry.”

“Ohhh —” the Sun Yat-sen suit drew the sound out long, deliberately. “Then I bet on the rube.”

The boy, long since impatient, made change and flitted off. The fan, snubbed, turned back to the chess. Who would have thought that in the space of that one speech the weather on the board had already run far beyond expectation? On the twenty-seventh move, Wang Yiming suddenly played Horse Four back to Eight: light cavalry raiding the central cannon while bogging the yellow chariot down at the frontier — and on his right wing a killing air instantly leapt toward you; the sharp-eyed below the platform were already letting out little gasps. On the thirty-third, Horse Six advanced Eight, the cannon locked the chariot's road, a thousand jun of weight settling by degrees on its roof; a few thigh-slaps sounded through the hall. Then, maneuvering to perfection, on the forty-eighth move Horse Seven fell back to Eight to tread on the chariot, while the seventh-file chariot was bared to seize the elephant — drawing the bow left and right, the string singing. Below, the cheers for Wang Yiming and the catcalls for Huang Songxuan swelled together into an uproar. From there he drove deep, smashed the elephants, pressed on in three files at once — left, center and right — a grand army in linked camps straight against the city wall. Huang Songxuan rallied thrice and thrice stumbled, and in the end could not escape his fall. The whole hall was in an uproar; the less steady tore up their tickets on the spot and threw them down. The man in the Sun Yat-sen suit merely crooked his mouth and laughed without a sound.

During the interval, several men exchanged a few words with the cigarette boys drifting through the hall, then converged on a barbershop on the third floor across the well, where a fat moneybags with cheeks full of lather was being shaved. Li Wushang was a man of the road; he knew that was the bookmaker of the underground betting pool.

In the second game Wang Yiming opened with the palace-crossing cannon. The cigarette boy drifted over again, and Li Wushang asked him: “What are Wang Yiming's odds this game?”

“Four to one.”

“He won — why have his odds gone long?”

The fan from before had not had the face to look at Li Wushang; now, finding his steps down, he turned back at once: “Who'd have thought Huang the Seventh would play his gift game first today. After this he certainly won't lose again.”

The cigarette boy, seeing someone had answered for him, said no more. Li Wushang, perfectly calm, placed another bet on Wang Yiming. On the twenty-fifth move, Wang erred with Chariot One across to Four, and thereafter the platform-holder led him on step by step into the snare and pressed the palace home to mate. The spectators who had taken offense for Huang Songxuan the game before burst into vengefully warm applause. The fan beside him turned and said: “See?” Li Wushang's mouth was still crooked; he stacked the two betting slips together under the coffee mat, and laughed without a sound.

For the third game, Wang Yiming's odds lengthened to six to one. The bookmaker opposite had come out to watch, a towel hung round his neck, both hands on the railing. At the forty-eighth move, Huang did not play Cannon Eight advancing Seven, but Cannon Three across to Five; Wang gave up a chariot to trade for the elephants and broke the deadlock open — whereupon Huang applied to seal the board and rose to go to the toilet. The bookmaker threw his towel to his attendant and likewise turned toward the rear. Chief Li had seen every face of the world: he settled his bill first, told the waiter to hold his seat, left his bowler on the table, and beat them all to the lavatory, locking himself in a stall. Presently he heard someone come in to piss. Li Wushang could not help laughing in the dark: so the Heavenly King had really come to use the toilet — the nameless pawn opposite must have scorched him head and face; he'd clearly relieved himself at the interval, and now here was another great urgency. As he pondered, another voice — slick and sinister — sounded at the door:

“Seventh Uncle! You're making money — why didn't you call your little brother in?”

“Nonsense. What money am I making?” — from the pissing place, a steady voice with anger showing through.

“Everyone bet on you to win, and counting this game you've already lost two. Boss Fu set the kid's odds opposite to mine and they keep shortening — this time he's sure to rake in a basin and a bucket. How much kickback is he giving you? I can give it too.”

“Isn't that why they say Boss Fu understands chess better than you? Thrown games — hmph! If I play badly, that's me throwing the game; when another man plays well, how could I have thrown it to him? The back half of that first game was first-class master play, plain as day — can't you read a game? Besides, I've never had dealings with you betting people, as you know: bet if you like, but I play my own game. And I have a question for you: everyone who has ever challenged the platform — you always looked into his background first, to set the odds, and reported to me on the way. Had I known he was this strong, I'd have laid a banquet to bar the way from the start. Why didn't you come tell me this time?”

“We really found nothing.” Counter-checked, the voice lost some of its wind.

“Impossible. The study of chess is like the study of arms: you must rub against living men to grow. Even a player unknown to the rivers and lakes, to reach this height, must have family learning if not a master's lineage — it was never drilled out behind a shut door with a manual. He has a background. — ‘Wang Yiming.’ That may be a cover name. Yiming — ‘one cry.’ As the saying goes: the bird that never sings, sings but once — and the whole world is startled.”

“Then I'll set my men checking again — but it's too late now. Seventh Uncle — how do you rate your chances next game?”

A short silence fell here. “If we played alternate first move, I'd be sure of myself. But the platform rule is: the holder yields the challenger the fixed first move…”

The other voice, less comforting the first than talking to itself, burst out through clenched teeth: “No matter. If he dares break my bank, I'll chop off his hands!”

From Huang Songxuan's mouth came a string of grunts strongly disapproving of this idea, and he went back to the hall first; the other man left after him. Li Wushang waited until the sounds had gone far before unlocking the door and coming out. He had heard the conversation distinctly; thinking the danger was like eggs stacked in a pile and no time was to be lost, he hurried back to the front. Huang Songxuan was already seated again on the platform, deep in the resumed game. By now the chess fans of the City of Five Rams had heard a hard case had arrived tonight, and came running at the news. The middle rows stood up in excitement; the back rows simply stepped onto their chairs; the seatless swarmed upstairs. Four or five hundred people at the least had crammed into the hall. Li Wushang squeezed out the main door with difficulty, stopped a rickshaw under the arcade, and told the puller thus-and-thus and so-and-so. The puller nodded, and went nowhere. Just then an unprecedented clamor burst from the building: judging by the extra-loud shouts within it, Wang Yiming had just won the third game.

Li Wushang plunged back into the building, threaded the gaps to the second floor — the waiter could barely hold his empty seat — hurried over and sat down, tipped him, and finally felt a warmth toward the talkative fan, because with hardly a bend in the road he could steer the conversation to his own purpose:

“How many bookmakers are working this building at present?”

“Two: Boss Huo of the Canton gang, in the barbershop across the well on the third floor — you can see it from here; and Boss Fu of the outer-province gang, usually up in the fourth-floor theater listening to the opera.”

“Why hasn't the other bookmaker's tickets come round to be hawked?”

“They have their turfs. The lower three floors answer to Huo; the fourth and fifth answer to Fu.”

Such heart-to-heart frankness — the only flaw being that once a man had the information he wanted, he still had to spend a little friendly effort shutting the tap. Next Li Wushang asked the waiter for paper and brush, sealed a note, went down to the first floor, and asked the platform clerk to give it to Wang Yiming when the match ended. Then he climbed back up, learning on the way that in the fourth game, now in progress, Boss Huo's odds on Wang Yiming held at six to one — perhaps because more than half of the newly flooded fans were Huang partisans. At the turn of the stairs he found a newsboy who had just been bullied by little hooligans, and in a dialogue neither side quite understood, told him to buy up loose tickets placed on Wang Yiming at double their purchase price — only ones booked with Boss Huo, as many as could be got — and bring them to him. When all this was arranged, he returned once more to the café, once more reclaimed his seat from under the tigers' glare of the watchers, tipped once more. The fourth game was fiercely deadlocked: three straight wins over the holder being now beyond reach, yet two straight being a thing unheard-of since the platform opened — everything hung on this last battle, and both players exerted themselves to the utmost. Only at exactly sixty moves did Huang Songxuan gradually show his strength failing, the decline beyond retrieval — and with that the betting tickets too were sealed. The newsboy came hugging the tickets he had bought, and opened his mouth to extort; Li Wushang smacked his backside twice, paid him the agreed fee, and, not waiting for the final score to show, rolled up the tickets, found his way out, hailed another rickshaw, and flew off.

Now, Lin Rongxing on his side fought Huang Songxuan deep into the night, and when it was done he was two net games up; thunderous cheers rose below the platform. All but Huang's most loyal partisans felt, to some degree, the carnival thrill of a prohibition broken. When the master of ceremonies read out his false name in declaring the result, the sound pulled Lin Rongxing back into a reality more dreamlike than dreams. Only then did he know how unreal the name “Wang Yiming” was to him — as if it were really his opponent's name, and the winner just now had also been his opponent. Huang Songxuan received from the master of ceremonies four tins of Mei Li cigarettes and eight admission tickets, and bestowed them in full count on the milk-mouthed winner. Lin Rongxing murmured his “you let me win” amid the senior's ill-concealed astonishment. The platform clerk handed over a sealed note; Lin Rongxing opened it and read:

“Trouble. I've gone back to the hotel. Once you have your prize, come at once. A rickshaw is waiting for you at the door. Do not linger on the way.”

Lin Rongxing read it, showed nothing on his face, and played along with the ceremony to the end — a ceremony he was not, in truth, entirely willing to be done with. Then he came down from the platform and passed through the crowd's still-unsatisfied stares and praises, and the hostility and muttered curses that truly delighted him most. For one instant he was transported back to the moment when, tortoiseshell piece in hand, he had been escorted into the teahouse by the crowd — and a nightmare illusion came over him, of running with all his might and yet treading in place. But the dazzling glitter of the cigarette tins and the undercurrent flowing from the note would not permit him to dwell on that illusion for even a flash of lightning. He found himself standing under the arcade: sure enough, a rickshaw was waiting. He mounted; the crowd split open a viscous gap that kept healing over behind the wheels; then the rickshaw threw the crowd behind it and sped away down the neon avenue of night Canton.

The East Asia Hotel was reached in one breath. Following Li Wushang's earlier instructions, the puller stopped below the building to wait. Lin Rongxing hurried upstairs and went straight to the door; an arm shot out from behind it, which opened a crack into the wall, and yanked him in; then Li Wushang's head poked out, scanned both ends of the corridor, and withdrew. The door-seam closed; the lock turned. Lin Rongxing looked at the luggage, all packed and ready, and asked: “What happened?”

“No time to tell you. I'll explain later. You have to run. Everyone thinks you're on your own, which is why I came back here first. I have a plan, and the key to it is that nobody must see the two of us together. We swap outfits. Quick — strip.”

The Little Barber half understood and half didn't, and simply did as he was told. Undoing the buttons of his Sun Yat-sen suit, Li Wushang went on: “In a minute I go down first, out the front door. You come down after me and leave by the water route at the back. Tonight we move separately; find any quiet place to spend the night. There's a nine o'clock train back to Hong Kong tomorrow morning; we meet at the station at a quarter to nine.” Sucking in chest and belly, he tucked the two fronts of the Japanese sailor-suit Lin had traded him around from the back waist to fasten them over his stomach, and said through held breath: “When you're back in Shanghai, eat more meat. You still need to grow.”

A few minutes later, a man in a sailor-suit two sizes too small, carrying a suitcase and a bundle-bag, came downstairs and checked out. He walked to the rickshaw parked beside the hotel's main door, stood in the half-light where a little distance would hide the bad fit, and — counting on the Little Barber having said few words tonight, so no one would remember his voice — deliberately asked the puller, at a volume the bystanders could hear:

“Any boats still leaving port at this hour?”

“Jardine's and Butterfield's are done for the night. Only the wildcat liners now.”

“Tianzi Wharf,” said the sailor-suit loudly, already seated in the rickshaw. The rickshaw pulled away, and hard after it, out of the shadows of the arcade pillars nearby, several shadows detached themselves, chasing its trail through the bright arches the street lamps cast one after another — exactly like the vision through the slits of a phenakistoscope, each slit catching the same string of motion at a different phase.

On the other side, a man in a Sun Yat-sen suit two sizes too big also came downstairs — likewise carrying a suitcase and a bundle-bag — crossed the lobby, and turned toward the private landing stage at the rear of the building, which in those days the East Asia alone among hotels possessed. In that era, the Eastern instinct for defense and the Western notion of privacy blended to perfection: the boatman in the hotel's employ, seeing a guest in a suit whose hem covered his thighs, asking for a boat at this hour, with poorly hidden nervousness on his face, would ask no questions at all — on the contrary, he considerately quickened the unmooring. Lin Rongxing leapt into the motor launch, said “Dashatou,” and the launch raced off down the current. Before long he left the boat at the Dashatou landing and found an old-fashioned inn near the railway station for the night. A boy of Lin Rongxing's age has a heart like a whitewashed wall: nothing sticks to it long. Before sleep he did toss and turn, troubled in spirit; but once asleep, his was the heroic sleep of heroes.

He slept straight to broad daylight — and a little beyond it. The Little Barber rushed to the station, bought his ticket, went up on the platform — and was suddenly blocked by several men who stood without any look of standing.

“What's your name?” asked the one in front.

“Lin Rongxing.” The Little Barber, not yet recovered, blurted his true name.

“Know a man by the name of Wang Yiming?” the man asked again.

“Don't know him.” The Little Barber broke into a cold sweat, thankful that no acting of his could ever have matched the crooked-hitting truth of a moment ago. And yet the air of having thought a second too long made his second sentence ring the truer.

“Third Brother — wrong man,” said someone behind.

The thugs were about to go — they turned, and chanced to catch the look on Li Wushang's face as he believed he had found the Little Barber through a gap in the ordinary crowd. The two looks met, and all three parties understood. Chief Li bellowed “Run!” — and he and Lin Rongxing, one for the tail of the train, one for the head, ran for their lives. The thugs likewise split in two and gave chase. At that very moment the signal lamp on the line changed solemnly, the crankshafts of the wheels swung, and the train began slowly to move. Two men were after Chief Li: he feinted half a step and shed one, rabbit-kicked the eagle and floored the other, and with a whisk leapt aboard the last carriage just about to slide past him in the opposite direction. The Little Barber also had two behind him; the front one stretched out a hand that was all but closing on his shoulder. In desperation he leapt at the accelerating door like a mother hen flying up a wall. The man behind, seeing the fish in his hands about to slip, grabbed with all his strength and caught the bundle on Lin Rongxing's back. Before either could put his strength into it, the bundle was torn apart with a bang by the fast-widening distance between the train and its pursuers. Four tins of Mei Li cigarettes scattered clanging over the ground; eight admission tickets were swept away in an instant by the gale the locomotive split open. The Little Barber pitched forward into the car; the man clutching half a bundle-cloth crashed onto the platform, tangled up and tripped the accomplice behind him, and they rolled into a heap where no one could tell whose leg was whose.

Lin and Li, escaped from the tiger's mouth, met in a middle carriage and found seats. Lin Rongxing panted: “What on earth is all this?”

“Need you ask!” said Li Wushang. “We kicked over their platform, broke the rules here — and they've come to settle the account.”

They sat silent a while, breathing themselves even. Lin Rongxing watched the platform recede and the wild grass come on after it, and suddenly said, all smiles: “Lucky I didn't win that tripod — it would have been such a pity now.”

“Don't be downcast.” Li Wushang leaned in close, and said mysteriously as he undid a corner of his bundle to reveal a wad of banknotes stacked neat as a cake: “We've made something bigger.”

“Where did you get all that money?” Lin Rongxing asked in a pinched voice. “And — where were you last night?”

“I drew off the men tailing you and shook them; then I took the loose tickets I'd bought up from one bookmaker — bets on you to win the fourth game — and sold them to the other bookmaker at a discount on the profit, as a hedge.”

Just then, an admission ticket that had somehow not been blown away came floating from the front and sucked itself against the outside of the window glass, arriving as fast as if it had appeared out of thin air. Its four corners flapped madly in the wind while its middle clung fast as if glued. The Little Barber pushed the window open and peeled it off, gently. Department stores had not long since risen in China; people still treated them as curiosities and flocked to see them, so to thin the crowds, even entry had to be paid for with a ticket. For the Little Barber, such a ticket could knock open the gates of glory and splendor — the pity was that it now bore the name Wang Yiming. He folded it in half and in half again, to the size of a silver dollar, then took out the tortoiseshell piece and lifted its lid facing Li Wushang, so that Li could not see what was inside. Lin Rongxing fitted the ticket in, closed the lid, and tucked it back in his pocket as before.

Three weeks later, the chess visit concluded, the two boarded the steamer from Hong Kong back to Shanghai. The Little Barber opened the fried sesame balls he had bought on shore, picked one up to eat — and through the gap it left, glimpsed a chess report printed several days before in the Wa Tsz Yat Po, the Chinese Mail, which had wrapped the balls. He held the newspaper, balls and all, out to Chief Li, a strange light in his eyes, and pointed at the headline deepened in color by the grease. Li Wushang read: SOUTH CHINA OVERLORD AND SEVEN-PROVINCE CHESS KING FIGHT TO A DRAW.

Over the past months, it said, Huang Songxuan, first of the Four Heavenly Kings of South China, and Zhou Deyu, the Seven-Province Chess King sojourning in Hong Kong — the bell-wethers of South and East China respectively — had campaigned at the Yukee restaurant, the Cheung Tai YMCA, the Plum-Blossom Village of Tungshan, Haizhu Park, the Provincial People's Education Hall and elsewhere, seventeen games in all, victories and defeats canceling out, superiority undecided, and so forth.

Li Wushang blinked, pushed the sesame balls back to the Little Barber, and said with a smile: “Zhou of Guangling didn't have the face to tell it, so I didn't mention it to you while we were in Hong Kong. They also played three private friendlies, with the scores agreed not to be published — and in those Huang won one more. Since he was overlord of Canton and Hong Kong to begin with, the world has already promoted him to ‘Chess King of Nine Provinces’; firecrackers have been set off in the streets of Canton. Now, in the whole chess world, he is — this!” As he spoke, Chief Li stuck a thumb up between the two of them and wagged it — as if to say Huang Songxuan, and as if to point it at the Little Barber.

V. Shakku — The Day of Red Mouths #

Night is the clear blue sky crumpled into a ball and thrown into the little pool before you to soak; today it has been stretched flat again, hung out fresh and new to dry — and the places where the color has faded have become the drifting clouds of high autumn. The blue that faded out of it was lent to the green of the pool, and but for one white minnow touching the water with its lips and raising a soft ripple, you might take the pool for a hard, half-translucent crystal ore bared at the surface of the earth. The green the pool could not dissolve precipitated out and settled into the orchid islet at its heart, joined to the shore only by a low causeway that seemed broken and yet ran on. In a corner of the islet's rising ground stood a grave mound, half neglected and half swept. The autumn wind plucked the light-strings of the past-noon sun, and a catalpa leaf, shaken off by the string's sound, fell beside the grave and — being dry and stiff — struck with a noise that seemed to carry great weight.

“What ‘Garden of Bright Waters and Clear Woods’ is this? It's somebody's graveyard, plain as day.”

Lin Rongxing rounded a few grave cypresses and saw, on a Taihu rock built into the bank, Hui Songxiang sitting cross-legged before a board, splitting an “other” out of the “I,” the two selves deep in a game against each other. In his answering letter Hui Songxiang had said: when you come, if I am not at home, I will be at the Garden of Bright Waters and Clear Woods. Lin Rongxing had hunted half the day for that garden without finding it; then, seeing a pretty garden, he turned in — and here it truly was. They exchanged simple greetings, and Lin Rongxing made his complaint, as above.

“You don't know — this really was the Garden of Bright Waters and Clear Woods once, the villa retreat of Xu Bai; only later was it made into Bi Yuan's tomb.”

Lin Rongxing had sent a letter ahead of his visit to Mudu, so Hui Songxiang was not much surprised to see him pop up — only glad, after several years apart.

“It's all going to ruin now. I love this place; I often come walking here alone. The moment you said you were coming to Mudu, I knew I had to show it to you. And — there's something else I've been keeping specially for you.”

With that, Hui Songxiang left Lin Rongxing where he stood and crossed the causeway in high excitement to the grave-keeper's hut on the other side. In a moment he came out again, shutting the door behind him, carrying an earthen jar and a paper parcel, a porcelain cup and sundry small things; he crossed back to the islet, set everything else down on the cliff-stone, and uncovered the jar alone, holding it up before Lin Rongxing's eyes. Lin peered in over the tip of his nose: at first it seemed empty; then a slight sloshing caught the light, and he saw it was full to the brim with clear spring water, a few solid stones sunk at the bottom.

“Guess where this water is from,” said Hui Songxiang.

“Not the Hui Hill Spring? I've only heard that Hui Hill water has this practice of laying stones from the mountain in it. The old folk of Wuxi say that way you can carry the spring far away and keep its taste from spoiling.”

“Exactly, exactly. A Wuxi friend passing through some days ago brought it for me. You were coming, and I remembered how your letters are forever saying that since you left Wuxi no water anywhere can pass your mouth — so I kept it specially against your arrival. Now the sky is bright and the water is still; everything is just right. Let's brew tea with it.”

Lin Rongxing assented again and again. So the two of them took up the grave-sweeping broom lying near at hand, swept the bamboo leaves carpeting the path round the islet into a pile, cut three lengths of bamboo, and built a stove beside the unfinished game on the board. They lit the leaves, set the jar of Hui Hill water straight on the fire with the tea from the paper parcel, and boiled it. At the second boil they poured it into the cup, and the tea's nature was like rain gathered on lotus leaves, like dew condensed on bamboo-sheath tips, a green so tender it could have sliced the snows of March. The Little Barber sipped once and closed his eyes and said no more; a long while later he opened them and said only: “It is Hui Hill water.” Then the two of them clapped and laughed around the stove, judged waters and portioned tea, asked after each other's years apart, and told their travels. Far mountains entered the cup's shadow; the crying of wild geese startled the pool's fish.

Talking and talking, they naturally talked their way back to chess. Hui Songxiang had risen like a new army: only last year, in the five-town league of Su, Xi, Wu, Kun and Yu refereed by Xie Xiaxun, he had taken first place without a single defeat. His favorite opening was “the Immortal Points the Way,” which later earned him the elegant name “the Immortal.” For Lin Rongxing, a year and more had passed since he laughed at South China; though he campaigned often, his tune was too high for many to answer, and a defeat was hard to come by. Drawing his sword and looking around with a blank heart, he found only this Hui Songxiang left — the one who had once spotted him two horses. The Little Barber had come to Mudu truly glad to see an old friend, but he also nursed Sun Bin's heart of revenge. When the subject came up, Hui Songxiang, knowing it could not be avoided, asked casually: “How much shall we play for?”

The Little Barber went into his pocket and scooped out sixteen silver dollars to the very bottom, laid them in his palm, counted off the odd sum, and said: “Six dollars for the road back to Shanghai and these two days' keep. I play for ten.”

At that, Hui Songxiang looked at the silver dollars as at the mouth of Lao-jun's gourd, into which the whole universe might fit — for he saw not ten silver dollars but several hundred catties of white rice. When Lin Rongxing weighed them in his hand, he felt his own wrist ache. Set a chess stand at an ordinary temple gate, and even with the chess star riding high, a dollar a day was the very sky. His face showed nothing, but his heart was already shocked — he could not believe he had looked down on the poor boy of those years — so he simply played the simpleton and said:

“You and I have known each other since we were small; three autumns apart, and now this rare reunion. As your host I have no wish to earn your stakes. Why not make it pure talk across the board, with no money on it — what do you say?”

The Little Barber only wanted to win, and was agreeable either way. So Hui Songxiang dragged over his own chess set — pieces ground from shards of Han roof-tiles that no collector wanted yet no one could bear to throw away. The two cleared the unfinished game and set every piece back in place; being equal in seniority, they played alternate first move. The minnows, smelling the tea-froth cast into the pool, gathered in a school of a dozen or so, as if to watch the battle. In the silences of hesitation over a move they were as if their souls had been stolen, the whole school motionless; each time a Han-tile piece struck the board with its far and frosty note, they started awake, changed formation, and at once fell into a new trance until the next move fell. After a few games: when Hui moved first, he could still fight for a draw; when Lin moved first, Hui lost them all.

Hui Songxiang rubbed his eyes and looked at Lin Rongxing anew — yet his heart was not content; he gathered his fighting spirit, sold off what courage remained, drew up his ranks and fought again. Whether his own force of will had truly taken effect, or Lin Rongxing had grown careless with victory, or somewhat tired, or was yielding three parts out of friendship — in any case Hui Songxiang felt that this game the Little Barber's edge was truly blunter and weaker than before. Then Lin Rongxing even fell into a deep thought such as he had never known. The minnows hung fixed in the clear autumn water; he hung fixed in the bodiless evening wind; two orders of beings, as if their dream-souls had made a tryst, wandered off to the Southern Deep and became the carefree, machine-forgetting Kun-fish and Liezi. At last an osmanthus seed dropped from the branch onto the board, stopping exactly on an intersection that was a contested point. The Little Barber's eyes lit up; as if waking from a dream, he moved his horse over and pressed it down on the osmanthus seed. The minnows heard the clang and flashed away. Ten-odd exchanges later, Hui Songxiang's marshal was cut down from its horse.

When this game ended, Hui rose to piss. When he came back, Lin Rongxing was gone. Hui supposed he was on the same errand, so he strolled about the garden while he waited, stretching his limbs. Rounding a rockery, he chanced to peer through one of its pierced holes, and spied the Little Barber sitting inside the artificial cave, lit by a pocket travel-lamp, a portable pipe lying beside him, fishing out of his pocket one exquisite, lustrous chess piece. Hui Songxiang had heard of that piece: according to those who love to make things up, the Little Barber owed his peerless eminence in the chess world to it — his genius was all inside. Hui was about to look closely for the secret of it, when the Little Barber lifted the piece's lid, scooped a spoonful of black, glistening paste out of it with a little spoon, packed it into the pipe-bowl, and held it to the lamp to burn. Hui Songxiang was secretly shocked and secretly sighed; unable either to advance or retreat, he tiptoed back to the board and sat quietly waiting.

A quarter of an hour later the Little Barber reappeared. He said he too had gone to piss, but the garden's winding paths led to such seclusion he had nearly lost his way back. Hui Songxiang let the tale be told and heard as such tales are, acting the man who knew nothing. By the west-slanting sunlight he saw that Lin Rongxing's face was white as the fresh-broken edge of porcelain, his two cheeks cut in as if the jade-carver had struck one chisel-stroke too many. Then the war-drums sounded again, and from that moment the Little Barber wielded his armies like a god, brilliant moves coming one after another; in two or three passes he had trampled Hui's nine-palace realm flat.

They played several more games, until their fingers took on the cold of Han tiles and the pieces the fragrance of osmanthus, and Hui Songxiang left his seat and bowed, owning himself outmatched. Then they set the game aside, sipped two more rounds of tea, and chatted idly. Lin Rongxing told also of Zhou Deyu's fear before the battle, and of Huang Songxuan's great tumble. A trace of new moon, as if a girl's fingernail had pinched it onto the edge of the sky, was almost sinking behind the hills, yet seemed only just risen. Hui Songxiang said: “I've thought of a first line for a couplet — try to match it: One seat, four friends: the clear breeze, the bright moon, you and me.”

Lin Rongxing searched for the answering line in vain; instead he took a bundle of manuscript from his traveling bag and gave it to Hui Songxiang: thirty-odd games chosen from his own matches, compiled as The Trough-Horse Method for Breaking the Immortal Points the Way; he meant to find a printing house in Suzhou and put it to the blocks.

Hui wondered: “No publishing house in Shanghai will print it?”

Lin said: “I reckoned ten dollars a game, three hundred for the manuscript. They said they'd go back and discuss it, and there was no more word.”

Hearing this, Hui was somewhat embarrassed: “And that asking price — will it find any takers in Suzhou?”

Lin Rongxing thought it over and said: “Where the skill in this book ranks among skills, there its price should rank among prices. I've thought it through from every side, and I see no problem with that.”

“Let me ask around first.” At that, Hui put the manuscript away for the time being. “And what are your plans from here?”

“Back to Shanghai, of course. Shanghai is where I made my name.”

Hui pondered a moment: “The times are turbulent now. For the long run, I'd say: better west than east.”

Lin Rongxing started to speak and stopped several times, and at last let it out: “Zhou Deyu hides from battle and won't come out; when I attacked Huang Songxuan I used a false name. I've run a great long circle, and the Little Barber's name has still never rung out to shake heaven and earth. If I go west, even fewer people will know me.”

Hui Songxiang heard this and was silent a long while; then suddenly he returned to the earlier topic: “Speaking of this game book of yours — if it does get printed, what title do you mean to give it? The Trough-Horse Method for Breaking the Immortal Points the Way — isn't that too long?”

The Little Barber said: “Maybe The Secret Manual of Little Yangzhou; if that's too wild, then something like New Recipes for the Orange Game.”

“Then do you know why chess is called the game in the orange?”

“Everyone says so; I never actually asked anyone.”

“There's a story there. They say that long ago a man of Sichuan grew oranges. When the oranges ripened, two were especially large. He picked them and cut them open — and inside each sat two little old men, absorbed in a game of chess. One of them even said: ‘Our joy in the orange is no less than on Mount Shang; only we could not set deep root or fast stem, and so we were picked.’ Meaning: inside the orange they could have lived on and on; the pity was the orange could not stay long on the tree. Those old men spent their whole lives inside oranges; of the world outside they knew nothing, and felt nothing lacking. We think we are the point of the chess world — but chess in this world is only the very bottom. Beyond chess there is a greater game. The lay folk have a saying about us: ‘A chess-player's life goes nowhere.’ What can fame and profit do? A garden this grand — did it not end as another man's grave field? He chose his tomb-site to enjoy for a thousand ages — and what is it now but broken wells and tumbled walls?”

The Little Barber had no answer for that. Faint evening mist hung at the sky's edge, gradually blending with the outline of Lingyan Hill; overhead the Silver River came out. Suddenly, as if in a trance, the Little Barber said:

“I've matched your line: Three years, five removals: the River of Stars, the sea of clouds, the east and the west.”

VI. Kūbō — The Day of the Hollow Void #

Before Dong Wenyuan fled to Hangzhou to escape the war, he remembered a chess stake, guaranteed by Li Wushang, that he had forgotten to collect — so he came to the door to demand it.

“Look what I've got!” — he fished a tortoiseshell piece out of his pocket and showed it off.

“You can beat the Little Barber?” Astonishment twisted Li Wushang's brows one high and one low into a single complete wave-line of trough and crest.

“I didn't win it — I bought it in a pawnshop.” The look on Dong Wenyuan's face was irresponsible to the point of innocence.

“When did that boy pawn it?” Li Wushang's face changed in a flash; he seized Little Hangzhou by both lapels, eyes glaring round, and barked the question.

“The—the pawnbroker said the day before yesterday.”

“Fart! How can a thing pawned the day before yesterday be sold today?”

“The bosses are all fleeing the war now. Money is the best thing to carry and goods the worst, so the pawnshops are rushing to clear their stock into cash. They say anyone who's already come to pawning things this early in the war won't live to redeem them with the pawn money anyway, so—”

“Bah! Do you even know who you're talking about!” Li Wushang's palm cuffed the back of Little Hangzhou's skull; he snatched the tortoiseshell piece and turned for the door. Little Hangzhou, frightened silent, slumped back against the table's edge as the hand let go of his collar, and still his lips mumbled: “Even if I drop the stake, that piece cost me several good silver dollars.” Li Wushang had just reached the door; he spun abruptly and came straight back, and Little Hangzhou's slumped body snapped straight with fright. Only when Li Wushang had him by the collar again, dragging his face to within inches of his own, did he hear, through his own babble of “forget it, forget it, forget it all,” the fierce demand: “WHICH PAWNSHOP!?”

“Yuanli…”

Two banknotes came flying at his face; by the time they slid out of view, Li Wushang's figure, past the shell-hole in the courtyard, had vanished into the street.

“I really didn't cheat him — I'd barely offered fifty cents and he closed the deal. If he'd only said two words more, I'd have gone higher.”

Only when Li Wushang produced the license issued him by the police bureau did the owner of Yuanli finally admit he had taken in the piece.

“That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking if you know where the man is now.” The license having done its work, the bellyful of rage and vexation Li Wushang had been holding in would no longer hold.

“Ai-yo, officer — we're tradesfolk; we mind the money coming, not the man going. I saw the lad's two eye-sockets gouged in like a monkey's and knew him for a smoker; his wits weren't clear either — kept saying things like ‘there's still one more game to win.’ Being in the grip of it, I reckoned the money wouldn't go on chess-betting, it was bound for opium. But what we gave him really was money, and what he buys with it after is none of our business — we keep no opium in this shop. That piece — he didn't steal it from your residence, did he? Oh no — the original has already been bought by some shiftless little imp. Luckily we still have cloisonné pieces, coral pieces, beeswax pieces: take any you fancy and count it our compensation. This shop has always done honest business; had we known he was a fugitive the police were after, we'd never have helped him fence it. And with the shop in such a state there's nowhere to hide anyone — besides, he's no kin of mine, no friend…”

The owner, terrified of being extorted before he could flee the city, trotted after Li Wushang to see him out, crying his innocence of half a dozen charges that had not been laid on him all the way down the street. In the end it took two Japanese airplanes, just approaching close enough to be heard like mosquitoes, to scare him back into his silver cellar at last. Li Wushang thought: if the Little Barber said that, could he have a game arranged with someone? So he took the shortcut made by a collapsed building and hurried at top speed to the Tianchan Teahouse.

The teahouse still had a few chess-players — less men than ghosts who had died together with the prosperous world. The proprietor said he hadn't seen the Little Barber these two days; some days earlier he had come.

“It's not that he has one more game — it's that he's short one game. He wanted to set up a chess-tea seat here to earn his rice, and I told him his game is too slow” — seeing Li Wushang's boundless astonishment, the proprietor deliberately quickened his speech here — “he'll only play whole games and handicap games. But now the devils' planes come by at who knows what intervals; it's only in the gaps between two runs that the living come out and show their faces — not enough for a whole game or two. When the bombs come down I have to hide myself; I don't expect my customers to throw their lives away lingering over half an unfinished game in my shop. Playing chess in these times means banging it out in a few moves, win or lose, for the kick of it — who has the patience to think camp by camp? I asked him would he play endgame sets; hungry as he was, his pride was high — he insisted endgame sets are all those book-draw positions street players lay out, where following the manual makes a draw and the first to leave the book loses, or else pretty-looking bait positions with traps inside; a man who had beaten the Heavenly King on the Sun Company platform in Canton would not stoop to such games. So I said, if you're that good, why don't you go set up a platform at the Sun Company yourself? Big companies are centipedes with a hundred legs, they have the money, they can afford to keep you. And he left, muttering something like ‘let me win one more game.’ If you ask me, hunger had muddled him.”

The proprietor had always been friendly with the chess folk; today his tone suddenly showed little welcome for Chief Li. Wondering at it, Li Wushang slanted a glance aside — and caught the already sparse customers quietly flashing away, several more of them. His comings and goings at the police bureau were known; anyone with a spot of dirt on his backside mostly wanted to hide at the sight of him. Feeling himself unwelcome, and having gained the Sun Company to pin some hope on, he did not press the matter, and came out forlorn.

A great fire had sealed the familiar road; Li Wushang had to go the long way round, met another Japanese bombing raid on the way, and so it was nightfall before he reached Yu Ya-ching Road. Dimly he felt that in the wind blowing from the south there came gusts of stench.

“That was the first time I knew that even something as heavy as a man, when it's splashed into the sky, draws the same arc as a drop of water. I used to think a man's arm and body were joined fast enough at least, that human skin and flesh could take a good pulling — I never thought they could part like that, crisped as if in a frying-pan.” The Little Barber, the day he said this, was half in the grip of the drug and half unable to recover from fright, and the words came out as if through the shivers. Smelling this stench, Li Wushang heard that voice of his winding again at his ear.

That was only the second day of the war. Ye Jinghua's home was gone; he wanted to go to the temporary relief station in front of the Great World to draw relief. The Little Barber could not go back to living on alms; he walked with him to the neighborhood, meaning to look for odd jobs in the concessions. The two parted on Route Kraetzer, only a few streets from where Li Wushang now stood; the Little Fiend turned and plunged into the man-mountain-sea of refugees. In the blink of an eye, two bombs fell on the crossing before the Great World; three thousand died on the spot. The corpse-pus seemed to have soaked into the cement skin of the ground, and afterward one could always catch a thread of foul smell drifting out. The Little Barber picked his life back up: an arm had fallen right in front of him, the hand still claw-shaped, resting squarely on the instep of his foot. As for his wits not being clear — from then on he was forever in a daze.

The local speech had a word, “street-last” — a last being the wooden form a cobbler builds a shoe on — for those idle, good-for-nothing bums who muck about the streets all day, as if the street itself were kept in shape by their lasting, and would sag the day they were gone. Seeing near half the shops in Shanghai's Sun Department Store closed, Li Wushang remembered the beauty of that word. Customers were few, many shopfronts shut tight, and the space within the building felt shrunken — as if truly, with the lasts drawn out, the walls had caved from the street-facing windows inward upon the counters. The Little Barber had always admired Li Wushang's charity feat of joining with his master Luo to hold a platform match on the roof garden of the Sun Sun Company for the relief of the northern Anhui floods in the twentieth year of the Republic. After the Canton Sun Company battle, he grew downright possessed. Last year, when the Sun Company opened its Shanghai branch, everyone who went to tour the store went to see the one-and-only escalator in all Shanghai and the hot-and-cold air pipes; he alone faced the basement market — also a first then — and said: “My platform will stand right here. A market in a basement is a first on the Shanghai Bund; on the Shanghai Bund, I too am a first. First matched with first!” But before the thing could come to pass, the cannon of Zhabei startled the remnant of the dream awake.

“There really was such a young man who came and asked. But his game is too fast. At a time like this, with everyone's hearts panicked, what people need is something they can sink into for a long while, to numb the pain and draw their attention away. If he mates his opponent in a handful of moves, the customers will naturally remember the war outside again — who'd be in the mood to shop then? Besides, I doubt he could hold any steady job. His eyes have no spirit, his talk is all incoherent, and he keeps muttering — it sounds like ‘only this one game left.’ In his condition, in short, he won't do for a platform-holder.”

This, again, was the opinion of the Sun Company's manager.

“Why isn't there a kind of money that cashes out into skill?” — the night the Little Barber came back from Lei Haishan's house, he stared blankly at the candle flame and said this, front words not matching back words.

“What?” Li Wushang didn't understand.

“Say I have rice and you have cloth. I sell my rice for money, and then I can buy your cloth. Rice maybe can't trade for everything, but turned into money first it can trade for everything. With endless rice I could buy endless cloth. Skill is the same — skills don't connect; a man learns this one and can't learn that one. But if only there were a money like that between skill and skill — Big Brother Lei's chess, if it were sold for that money, and that money used to buy the skill of a copper head and iron arms — then when the little Japs press-ganged him, he wouldn't have died. A game as hard as his, traded for copper-and-iron, would have made the hardest copper head and iron arms of all; it never should have come to this, two days after they took him, used up into such a state…”

That was the last time Li Wushang ever saw Lin Rongxing. Lin had meant to borrow some money from Little Hubei; instead he left the last few coins on his person to the unforeseen widow and orphan, and had to come cadge a meal off Chief Li.

Only when he nearly walked between two people quarreling did Chief Li realize he was passing the backstage of a street student drama troupe. On the right was a sallow, skinny little fellow, just driven down off a wooden-plank staircase. At the top of the stairs, holding the pass, stood a schoolgirl in the costume of Liang Hongyu, half involuntarily bracing a posture to hold up her branching, twining outfit. Her freely developed bosom towered like the counter in a pawnshop; a pair of upward-slanting eyes, pulled tight by the head-straps, looked down over it. With the stage-tone still on her lips, measured and even, level and oblique, she said:

“You're truly starved silly, grabbing any doctor in a deadly illness. This is a stage, a garden of art; we don't offer you performance-chess, not even at the interval. He who knows the times serves art — and what are the times? Resist Japan and save the nation. Even our repertoire now chooses only loyalty and righteousness, never wind and moonlight. That little cleverness of yours, that trifling-away-the-will — it's out of fashion!”

The little fellow, seeing the rice-bowl beyond his grasp, resolved instead to fight for his pride, and declared: “Times, times — you keep saying the times. Let me tell you: before the war, people played chess; after the war is done, people will play chess. Most of the time the world is not fighting — so most of the time, it's chess-time. This little cleverness, this trifling-away-the-will, is the thing that lasts longest of all.”

Liang Hongyu would not yield an inch; she shook her tasseled pheasant plumes and answered ringingly: “Why do you chess people all say the same thing? Two days ago a chess-player brother, starved to a pointed mouth and monkey cheeks, came asking too — and I told him: can your cannons shoot down Japanese airplanes?”

Li Wushang's patience, held all day, suddenly broke; he barged in and said: “You little chit! Do you know how much work that little chess-player of the other day put into forging his cannon?”

“How much work could it be?” — the schoolgirl with Liang Hongyu possessing her, killing pairs as they came — “Let me tell you: a magician came here once too. He could light forty candles, set an inch apart in a row; clap his hands on one side, and thirty-nine went out together, leaving only the last; clap his hands on the other side, and that last flame leaned over and, licking the smoke, relit the other thirty-nine one after another. He spent his whole life practicing just that. Would you call it amazing? Amazing. And what use is it?” No sooner said than, giving no one a chance to answer, she tossed her pheasant plumes and strode back inside.

Li Wushang, with one great breath and nowhere to vent it, turned to the little fellow. The fellow put on a sulky face and made to go; the more Li Wushang looked at him the more familiar he seemed; he blocked his way with one grab and, his face changing completely, said: “This afternoon at the teahouse — why did you slip away the moment you saw me?”

The little fellow, grateful for the fellowship of having quarreled side by side, stopped mumbling and even leaned toward him: “Chief Li — are you looking for the Little Barber?”

At the words “Little Barber” Li Wushang fell into a flutter: “You've seen him?”

The little fellow said: “Just the day before yesterday. He came to me wanting to buy opium. His money was nowhere near enough for opium anymore, and he begged me, saying: a few days after the Little Fiend was bombed to death, he started coming to him in dreams, one arm gone. The Little Fiend said a skeleton had picked up his arm and wanted to play him at chess for a stake; if he won he could take the arm back. He played three days and lost them all, so he came to ask the Little Barber's help. The Little Barber said he hadn't reckoned on the skeleton being so strong: from then on it cried him battle night after night, and not only did he never win a game, he lost it all the flesh of his two hands and two feet. The skeleton took the flesh and pasted it on its bones, so that little by little the skeleton grew into human shape, and the Little Barber himself drew nearer and nearer to a skeleton. The Little Barber said he only wanted to smoke opium once more and win one last game, to win back his brother's arm for him — he wanted nothing else. He looked so pitiful, ridden by that nightmare, that I gave him a packet of opium ipecac to ease the craving.”

“Where is he? Where is he now?” Li Wushang seized the little fellow by both arms and shook him.

“He's on Guangxin Road, sleeping by the street. If he hasn't moved on, you'll find him there.”

By day the enemy planes bombed in waves; at nightfall the national army counterattacked. Li Wushang wound this way and that and finally reached Guangxin Road. Thanks to a few fires of war not yet burnt out, which carried on the old-time charm of brightly lit streets — otherwise it was black as the countryside. The houses on both sides had no roofs left, only upright walls that had chanced to slip through the seams of the shell-rain and survived. The whole street offered just one wall-corner for shelter, and there, on the ground, were indeed several heaps of rags. Li Wushang, not knowing where to go, paced the front three or four times, half waiting and half searching, before he found that of those heaps of rags, one heap was Lin Rongxing. Only by treating the nightmare he had just heard as true, and subtracting a great deal of flesh from his memory of the Little Barber, could he confirm this small, wasted shape by the wall's foot, a shape that seemed to be collapsing back toward the beginning of life. The Little Barber's cheeks were white in a way that made one think of cleanness, as if the color of the bone were showing through the thin layer of skin stretched over it. Li Wushang lifted one of his hands — and it seemed as heavy as before, for the arm had stiffened, and one hand carried with it the weight of the whole body. Li Wushang bent down and gathered him up. From the Little Barber's pocket dropped an ear-drop, and an admission ticket. The ear-drop sank into the mire; the ticket blew away on the wind.

---

Colophon

• First collected in the author's story book Huanxiang de Lanhe (Guangxi Science & Technology Press, January 2024).
• Second Prize, Third "Story Big Bang" Competition.
• Editor of the Chinese original: Jia Long.
• This English text is a private, unofficial rendering of the web serial, made for personal reading only; all rights to the original belong to the author, Chen Zhou.

About the Author

Chen Zhou (Douban id: sunken_ship)
"A symmetry searcher; a Khitan; a writer in the zuō sense of the word." (a self-description: one who writes, and asks for trouble)

PhD in theoretical physics; once a part-time counselor; now a meteorologist by trade. Winner of the 47th Youth Literature Award (senior fiction); multiple Douban Read Xiaoya Awards; shortlisted for the 7th Worldwide Chinese Young Playwrights Award and the Mr. Po Prize; author of Huanxiang de Lanhe.