Empires of Dust

Jiang Zilong

Description

The story of Guo Cunxian from the village of Guojiadian in China's rural northeast. Cunxian and his family must forge a path through the turbulence of Communist China's early years that threatens to return the windswept village to the dust from which it emerged. Eventually they rise to dizzy heights. But will their sacrifices be in vain?

Sujets

• Historical fiction
• Sagas

Informations

• Publié par: Alain Charles Asia
• Date de parution: 11 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910760543
• Langue: English

Extrait

Empires of Dust


Jiang Zilong

Translated by Christopher Payne And Olivia Milburn

Sinoist Books
Paperback published by
ACA Publishing Ltd.

eBook published by
Sinoist Books (an imprint of ACA Publishing Ltd).

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Author: Jiang Zilong
Translators: Christopher Payne and Olivia Milburn
Editors: Martin Savery and David Lammie
Cover art: Daniel Li
Published by ACA Publishing Ltd in association with the People’s Literature Publishing House
© 2018, by People’s Literature Publishing House, Beijing, China
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED IN MATERIAL FORM, BY ANY MEANS, WHETHER GRAPHIC, ELECTRONIC, MECHANICAL OR OTHER, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING OR INFORMATION STORAGE, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, AND MAY NOT BE USED TO PREPARE OTHER PUBLICATIONS WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but the publisher can accept no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for any liability occasioned by relying on its content.


Paperback ISBN: 978-1-910760-33-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-910760-54-3
A catalogue record for Empires of Dust is available from the National Bibliographic Service of the British Library.
Contents



PART ONE

1. The Dragon Phoenix Trees

2. The Hoe

3. Food Substitutes

4. Cutting Coffins

5. Lease Holding

6. Land Grab

7. Earth And Soil

8. Burning Down The Frog Marshes

9. The Great Debates

10. Undermined

11. Attacked On All Sides

12. A Time For Weddings

13. Women’s Fate

14. A Wintry Spring

15. A Woman And Her Pigtail

16. Curses

17. Uproars

18. Death

19. Bachelors’ Hall

PART TWO

20. The Merry-Go-Round

21. Jangkulembi

22. The Appearance of Money

23. Verbal Diarrhoea

24. Even in Death, Guo Cunyong Can Still Get You

25. A Fool Cannot Deal with a Bastard

26. Under Arrest

27. Death in Life

28. Miracles Do Happen

29. Chen Kang Paints a Picture

30. Judgment Day


Endnotes

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher
PART ONE
1

The Dragon Phoenix Trees

G uojiadian – despite the name, this wasn’t an actual store that bought and sold goods. In fact, it was the name of a country village of roughly two thousand households, nestled in a small sunken corner of north China, in a district by the name of Haijin, not too far away from Shenyang (Mukden). The villagers would say that when it rained, the village would flood; when it didn’t, there’d be drought; there wasn’t much by way of suitable weather. Life was hard, the people were poor; its only rather dubious claim to fame was its number of single, unmarried men – its so-called bare sticks. Throughout the town’s history, there was an unwritten rule known by everyone: whoever wished to use a brick to murder someone wouldn’t have to pay with their own lives, nor would what they had done necessarily be considered a crime. After all, any such yarn could only be false, nothing more than exaggerated rumours and hearsay. Why? That was easy: there wasn’t a single brick in Guojiadian. The village had risen up from the mud and the sand; all that one could see was the yellow earth stained white in places. When the wind blew, it would whip up the dirt and blind you; when it rained, the houses would collapse having been so shoddily built out of mud. In a village such as this, a place totally bereft of bricks, how could a person kill someone with one?
Residing in Guojiadian was a man by the name of Guo Degui; a docile chap, as pliable as the clay from which the village had been built; a man who worked himself to death building two new rooms for his home. He had married the daughter of a reasonably well-off family from the neighbouring village of Miaojiazhuang, and so, to save face, he endeavoured to work his hardest in all things: two years after their wedding ceremony, she gave birth to twin boys. The village elders, following rural custom, picked two resounding names for the two little boys: Guo Jingtian and Guo Jingshi. They explained to Guo Degui that the heavens had done him a good deed; that his lot in life had changed for the better. In truth, Guo Degui’s ‘father’ was actually his mother’s older brother, for he had been given to them to help continue the family line, his uncle having had no children of his own. Now he had had two sons, a sign, perhaps, that his parents’ generosity in giving him up had been repaid, that his family would now prosper. On balance, he had fulfilled half the duty of a man’s life: he’d had not only one, but two sons. All that remained was for him to build two new rooms so that they could one day have wives of their own.
But in Guojiadian, to realise such good fortune wasn’t an easy thing to do. Since ancient times, ‘a person’ and ‘a mouth’ went hand in hand, so that village numbers were counted by how many mouths there were to feed. To have a son meant ‘adding an extra mouth’; after all, every person has a mouth and every mouth must eat. The Guo family now had two new mouths to feed and, what’s more, these mouths couldn’t help but be a poor family’s ‘sacred little treasures’ and, at the same time, be as demanding as hell. The whole family seemed to revolve around them. Every morsel of delicious food, rare as it was, inevitably made its way into their perpetually hungry bellies. Before long, their joyful grandfather and contented grandmother, bursting with glee because of these ‘sacred little treasures’, died one after the other while slaving over the stove.
Contrary to expectations, Jingtian and Jingshi both grew up strong and robust, two hardy lads. Watching them get bigger day by day, Guo Degui’s heart should have been overjoyed, but it wasn’t. He knew that he had to get started; he had to build rooms for them. As everyone in the village knew, there were three tiresome chores: moulding mud into bricks, weeding fields and shucking wheat. From digging up the earth to form bricks, to pounding the soil for the foundation; to laying the bricks for the walls and raising the roof girders; all the hardest work was carried out by Guo Degui. The two boys weren’t yet men so they couldn’t help with such an enormous task and, even if they could have, he wouldn’t have asked them. This was his lot in life, his task to complete. As he was spreading the reeds to roof the rooms, using leftover wheat husks and mud to seal them, an iron shovel to tap, tap, tap it all down rhythmically like exploding firecrackers. Everything went black, he felt a tickle in his throat and spat up a crimson stream of blood. His eyes opened wide. He thought to use the shovel to fling the reddened earth off the roof but, to his surprise, his arms didn’t have the strength to lift it, his mouth filled with a salty taste before it spouted mouthfuls of blood. He thought to close it but couldn’t and soon more blood rushed out, fiercely flowing now, whereupon he fell into the mud, convulsing violently. In the twinkling of an eye, this hardy man took his last breath and expired.
The family of Degui’s wife wasn’t much better off, and so they couldn’t help her. Being a poor woman was difficult enough; being a poor widow was harder than death, but it also wasn’t something you could have scruples about. There was naught to do but bury her husband and ask the townspeople for help to finish the roofs. Before long, they had frittered away their food and so the widow Guo locked up the family home, lowered her face towards the ground, took the two boys in tow and left the village to beg for alms in the bigger cities. In Tianjin, Beijing, outside the Great Wall to the west of the capital and beyond the Shanhai Pass to the east, for many years she roamed the land begging for food. Some years she would return to Guojiadian for the Lunar New Year festivities and in good years she would return to help plant and harvest crops. She had rules when begging for food: she would smile apologetically, accept people’s loathing, bear hardships and endure torments, beseech the grandfathers and talk to the grandmothers, and humbly receive humiliation. All of these things she would bear, but only her. She wouldn’t permit her two sons to live a life that wasn’t human. In silence, she had accepted her husband’s lot in life. She had to preserve the Guo family line and rear the children into adulthood. Every place she went, she would first find lodgings for her children before wandering off to beg; every morsel she obtained would be brought back for them to eat. If she had managed to beg a fair amount, she might have a mouthful for herself, if not she would always let them eat first. Nevertheless, Jingtian and Jingshi grew up fast and strong, so before long it was a wonder how they could bear to see their mother endure such a life. The two brothers had grown up much alike, as if they’d been carved from the same material. Their faces were identical with tall, straight noses, their arms were long and their hands large, and they both had the physique of one day being able to handle heavy work. The older boy, Jingtian, had a somewhat ferocious temperament. He was crafty and astute, and before long there was really nothing that he was afraid of standing up to. During all the years of wandering with his mother, eking out a hard living, he had begun to pick up skills along the way and discovered that he had quite a knack for mending farm tools, cobbling together doors and windows, hammering in horseshoes and repairing pots and pans; indeed, he even learned how to make Buddhist incense sticks, of all things. Guo Jingshi, on the other hand, had an honest and sincere temperament, and was mild and gentle in comparison.