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Monday 1 December 2008

Where Three Roads Meet

Old wine in new skins

Molly Guinness

Su Tong’s myth is less well known in England; when Meng Jiangnü’s husband was forcibly taken north to help to build the Great Wall, she set off after him with winter clothes. When she arrived to find he had already died, she cried so much that part of the wall collapsed. There is a temple dedicated to her at the foot of the Wall. Tong, translated by Howard Goldblatt, has created from this tale a novel of unremitting misery. His heroine, Binu, comes from a village where tears are forbidden. The girls are taught from a young age to cry through their hands, ears, hairstyles, breasts; anywhere, in short, but the eyes. Binu was always lachrymose. ‘Anyone walking past her felt as if a rain-cloud had floated by, leaving drops of water in the air, which then landed on their face.’ Most of the village women hate Binu for her beauty and her pure heart and she can only persuade a blind frog (who is the reincarnation of another desolate woman) to go north with her. She meets only hostility and cruelty on the 1,000-li journey upon which she embarks, having first buried a gourd under a suitable willow, for she was a gourd in her previous life and unto gourd she will return. Everywhere she goes she meets wretchedness, but everyone else suffers passively; no one will join her: ‘the sluggish crowd had abandoned all but the act of waiting.’ The brutalising effects of hardship are demonstrated again and again. Binu seems to be the only person left in China with any goodness at all. Someone tries to hire her to make medicine out of her tears as they are so big and delicious, but most people immediately go on the attack with little or no provocation. The pace is slow, the tone lugubrious, and if people aren’t busy sheltering from rainstorms of tears, you can be sure they’re round the corner turning into deer or butterflies or vegetables.

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