Chen Qiufan Read online

  The Ancestral Temple in a Box

  — by Chen Qiufan, translated by Emily Jin —

  “Mr. Huang has a few words to say . . . ”

  Everyone in the room stood up at once. The intelligent care robot, however, slowly turned its face in my direction. Emojis flashed on the blue screen. I wasn’t sure whether I understood what those emojis meant.

  “ . . . to you, in private,” the robot continued.

  I took a deep breath. All the pairs of eyes landed on me at once. It was as if my body was soft mud and the gazes of my family members were loaches, about to rip apart my skin, penetrate my flesh, and bury into my body. I knew what they were thinking; but now, I have lost all the strength to fight back.

  The man who used to carry himself with such pride and charisma lay before my eyes, shriveling, crumbling, and wasting away, leaving behind an empty shell made out of thin paper. I was scared that even a heavy sigh would blow him away. A rotting scent permeated the air. Every fifteen seconds, the automatic mist spray system would purr lightly, as if a cat sneezed. The flow of time in this room, thick and sticky, indefinitely slow, felt like resin gradually hardening into amber.

  Fear rose up in my stomach and gushed up my throat. Yet I quietly waited for Father’s last words. For all my life, every conversation I have had with my father usually ended with his scolding and my utter silence. I was afraid that this time it was finally Father’s turn to be the silent one.

  “Sonny, you’re here . . . ” Father’s trembling voice tore through the silence. His accent, laden with the scent of soil from Southern lands, sounded distant and strange. Our family has left our Teochew homeland long ago. More so, ever since I chose to become a wanderer in the virtual world, busy occupying myself with technology, I have long been estranged from my kin. “My time is up. There’s one last thing I want to ask from you. Only you can do it for me . . . ”

  “Don’t say that, Dad! No matter what you want to do, once you recover—I’m sure you will—we can do it together . . . ”

  “There’s no need to comfort me. Isn’t it strange? The older you get, the more things from your childhood you are able to recall. Remember that story I told you? When I was seven, my father—your grandpa—took me to our ancestral temple . . . ”

  I had no idea what he was about to tell me. A few years ago, when machines revolutionized the traditional craft industry, the impact also extended to our family business: handmade gold-lacquered wood carving. I, an advocate for using new technology to aid traditional arts, was completely at odds with Father who insisted upon doing things the old way. Back then, our conversations were nothing but explosive arguments, often ending in cold wars that lasted for days. At some point, he even considered kicking me out of the succession line. What’s the point of telling me this story again?

  “The wobbly car ride went on for hours. I couldn’t even feel my own butt anymore. Finally, we arrived at the Huang clan’s ancestral temple. What an enormous space! The pond in front of the gate was symbolic for ‘collecting a pool of wealth.’ A pair of proud stone lions, male on the left and female on the right, guarded the gate. The top of the roof was decorated with figures from mythology: birds and animals, long and feng, rows and rows of deities . . . ”

  The image of a Disney carnival parade flashed through my mind as Father carried on, describing every detail of that mysterious building. I shook my head to get rid of the ridiculous thought.

  “The memorial tablets of all our ancestors lined the large altar in the main hall. Dad ordered me to kneel and kowtow, to pay respect to our ancestors. I refused. But I don’t even know them, why should I kneel to them? I argued. So Dad scolded me for being disrespectful and spanked me. I cried and cried . . . ”

  Father’s voice grew weaker. He was like a balloon, hanging limply in midair, about to let out its last breath. I could almost see him sinking deeper and deeper. I leaned forward and pressed an ear close to his lips. The rotten smell was so heavy that I almost couldn’t breathe.

  “That happened eighty years ago. Back then I didn’t understand why honoring our ancestors was important, but now I do. Every falling leaf must return to its root. After I am gone, sonny . . . visit me at our ancestral temple often. Please. By then, you’ll be leading the Huang clan . . . ”

  Clearly, Father’s consciousness was slipping away. His words did not make much sense. Halfheartedly agreeing to his request, I fumbled for the emergency button next to the hospital bed. The last time Father even went home to visit was a few decades ago. I was pretty sure that his memorial tablet did not make it into the ancestral temple. Even if it did, how on earth would I be able to visit the place often, given that it was thousands of miles away? As for leading the Huang clan . . . that sounded more like a joke to me than anything else. The families in our clan were at each other’s necks fighting over inheritance. Yet gazing at Father’s dying face, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him about his will.

  “Promise me you’ll go there . . . ”

  “Yes, Dad. I promise you.”

  As if some mysterious force squeezed the last air out from the humanoid balloon on the sickbed, the rotten odor disappeared at once. The automatic mist spray system sneezed again. Doctors and nurses rushed into the room with more machines. Stiffly, I stood by the bedside in silence and waited for a death sentence that had, in fact, already arrived.

  * * *

  The third day after Father’s funeral, I discovered a red envelope he left me. In the envelope was a small card printed with an IPv6 address and a strange logo.

  It took me a while to locate an adequate access device for the address. Tech geeks call the adapter “the white box,” a kind of advanced virtual reality system that could scan your neural patterns and mix them in with an algorithm to produce a quantifiable, controllable neural signal input. The white box was much more effective than all the other virtual reality devices, and yet more feared: no doubt, it would change your fundamental cognition in some way that you could not predict.

  I had no idea how Father came across such hip, quirky technology. My impression of him was still frozen in the moment when he bellowed at me for my ignorance and disrespect toward my ancestors and forgetting my roots, because I had dared suggest that we replace traditional craftsmen with machines. Heavily panting, eyes wide and cheeks beet red, he resembled a dragon about to spit fire.

  That dragon now lay six feet beneath the ground, in a small wooden box, accompanied by nothing but darkness and dirt.

  Without further hesitation, I connected myself to the white box, entered the IPv6 address that Father left for me and pulled the soft eye mask over my eyes. Not only that I wanted to honor my promise to Father, I was also curious about what he was up to. The system logged me in immediately after scanning my iris. Seemed like someone had already registered an account for me.

  At first, I was surrounded by thick, pale fog. My eyes couldn’t discern anything. A few moments later, I heard a feminine voice echoing faintly in my ear, “Mr. Huang, we have detected that the default travel speed does not match your neurological composition. Would you like to switch over to fast mode? Please confirm.”

  The walking figure of Father, limp and slow, flashed through my mind. I understood what she meant. Father was the first to access this IPv6 address, after all.

  “Confirm,” I responded.

  All of a sudden, the center of gravity shifted. Terrified, I crouched to the ground and pressed my palms hard on the floor to keep steady. The fog gradually dissipated. I looked down and found myself hovering ten thousand meters above earth. A village surrounded by mountains and rivers, spread out like the pattern on a turtle’s back, lay beneath my feet. The next second, the landscape gushed toward me like a ferocious
tide, rapidly enlarging in my sight. I could even see the gray ridgeline of the village house roofs. I was falling. I shut my eyes tightly and swallowed a scream.

  After what seemed like forever, the fall came to an end. I slowly opened my eyes and found myself standing on a vast plaza. The brightness of various objects shot up as my eyes landed on them, highlighting them from the background, as if my gaze was some kind of a spotlight. The voice in my ears explained each object to me as I peered around—now I understood it was a beginner’s tutorial.

  No doubt, this was the place of Father’s last dream. The placid pond, glistening in the light; the horse-hitching post, erect by the gate; the magnificent screen wall, inlaid with colored porcelain that depicted the shapes of sika deer, qilin, and wing-spreading cranes; the roofed porch and the gate frame, made of gray-white marble; the black-lacquered wooden plaque, engraved with four characters in calligraphy that shimmered with gold, “Huang Clan Ancestral Temple”; porcelain statues of mythical creatures and deities on the roof ridgelines and eave corners . . . I stood, stunned, my mouth hanging open in awe.

  Father was not exaggerating. The ancestral temple he described to me really existed.

  The glorious sight did not reduce my confusion, though. Someone out there, for some unknown reason, went through all the trouble to reproduce the Huang clan’s ancestral temple in a virtual space. It was a most unlikely combination. Wasn’t it the ancestral temple, a standing embodiment of ossified traditions, that restrained Father from embracing the bold technological inventions of the new world? Now, it appeared to me that the older generation was preserving such tradition by betraying it. Why did Father lead me here? To become a replica of him, abiding by our ancestor’s values, following every single rule that was ever written, and watching with hopeless eyes as our entire clan declines?

  Trotting along the path, I entered the gate and walked through the front courtyard. The sun shone from behind the hollow-carved grill door, casting strands of light onto the floor of the middle hall that reminded me of the shape of a barcode. I glided through the back courtyard. Everything before my eyes unfolded with symmetry, structure, and routine, characteristic of the era that Father lived in. An era long gone.

  My revolutionary vision was to introduce embodied robots to the traditional craft of gold-lacquered wood carving. A robot like that could connect to and synchronize with every muscle and nerve signal of a human gold-lacquered wood carving craftsman. In a way that magically resembles traditional one-on-one master-student learning, the robot would observe and learn every intricate detail of the craftsman’s hand movement, then reproduce the choreography on digitalized raw materials in a virtual space. The simulated mechanics of materials are as precise as four decimal places. Coupled with generative adversarial networks, relying only on a small set of data, we could train highly efficient robot craftsmen. What’s more, a robot craftsman would never experience fatigue and illness or need any breaks at all; its spatial perception and accuracy of motion are literally two orders of magnitude higher than that of humans. Honestly, I couldn’t think of any valid reason to reject this proposal.

  It was Father who buried his head in the sand, refusing to confront the machine-dominated reality.

  I finally arrived at the heart of the ancestral temple: the main hall. Otherwise known as the slumber chamber, it was the place where spirits of the dead rested in peace in their eternal sleep. Colossal red-painted wooden structures extended upward like Aztec pyramids, as if about to disappear into the vast sky beyond, yet once I fixed my eyes on them, they appeared to be confined by the enormous hall. An impossible optical illusion. Memorial tablets of my ancestors, carved from camphor wood, lined the wooden structures like books on the shelves of a library. They were organized by the order of relatedness to me: from the most distant relatives to the closest blood kin. I searched for Father’s name in the forest of memorial tablets. Whichever tablet my gaze landed on, the name carved into the tablet would glow with a golden light. Amongst all of the Huang-surnamed ancestors were all kinds of people, government officials and wealthy merchants, peasants and commoners, yet at this moment, they were all equals to me. Every single one of them was a cog or gear on the giant machine of the Huang clan’s collective memory.

  Father’s memorial tablet was there, too. I gazed fixedly at Father’s name as I murmured to myself, “Dad, I’m here to visit you.”

  The guide spoke. “Mr. Huang, would you like to activate the system?”

  “Activate?”

  “Please kneel on the mat, put your palms together, and kowtow three times.”

  * * *

  “What the hell?” My eyes widened as I saw Father, looking about ten years younger, emerge from his memorial tablet. Just like witnessing the genie squeeze out from Aladdin’s lamp, I thought to myself. Father, shifting around and stretching his arms and legs, seemed to be having some mild difficulties with his new body. He was only an AI-generated virtual avatar, after all.

  “Sonny, you’re here,” he greeted me. Even his accent and the slow, sluggish way he spoke were perfectly reproduced. How much money was spent on this thing?

  “Uh . . . yeah. It’s me. I’m here. ” I didn’t know what to say. It felt way too awkward to call this avatar “Dad.”

  “I knew you’d come. You’re different from the rest of them. You’re smart and curious, a real fast learner . . . ”

  How ironic. Those were the exact words that Father used to scold me with. I assumed that he had sent the same invitation to my older brothers, too—my competitors. Although our ages were not so far apart, their views on technology and art very much aligned with that of Father’s. Abandoning our traditional handicraft is the same as betraying the art, betraying our ancestors, and generations of wisdom they passed down. The same old words. I secretly speculated that if given the chance, they would probably tattoo the word “traitor” on my forehead and kick me out of the family.

  “I’m sure right now you are wondering what this is all about,” continued Father. Seemed like he was programmed to finish this conversation no matter whether I responded or not. “Thirty years ago, Mr. Ma launched his new project on the digitalization of Teochew ancestral temples all around the world. That’s right—the Mr. Ma who single-handedly founded the biggest technology company in Asia. What a sight, that ancestral temple of the Ma clan! Mr. Ma believed that ancestral temples serve the same purpose as instant message software: it brings together people of the same clan, regardless of their generation or geographic location. Many young people, however, have long forgotten about ancestral temples. Mr. Ma’s vision is to revitalize ancestral temples with the help of technology.”

  I cut him off. “Aren’t you against the idea of using technology to change traditional culture?”

  “Sonny, you must understand that there are certain things I cannot say out loud. I need to be careful with my words in front of the clan, but you’re different. You belong to the new generation, and you don’t have to watch your mouth when you speak . . . ”

  “Isn’t it too late, though? Look, if the line of succession for our business is determined by age and seniority, then I am neither the oldest nor the most experienced. As of you, you’re already . . . ” My voice cracked and trailed off.

  I must admit that this AI avatar of Father was extremely well made, in particular its speech communication, to the point that I couldn’t help but feel like I was speaking to Father in person once again. The word dead choked in my throat.

  “I am already dead, you’re right,” the younger version of Father before my eyes grinned at me, a painful resemblance of his living self, “But the rest of you are alive. You are the future. Tell me, why do you want to replace humans with machines?”

  “Everyone is using machines. They are faster, more stable, and cost-efficient. If we don’t jump on the trend, the entire market will be taken over by machine-created wood carving. By then, there will be nothing left for us to profit from.”

  “Well, nowadays
, humans are colonizing space; 3-D printing is everywhere. Why do people still care for gold-lacquered wood carving? Because they are cheap? Easy to carry? Sturdy? Or beautiful?”

  I was stunned by this question. I was born into a family that practiced gold-lacquered wood carving for generations and took fierce pride in their skill; yet with my head buried in digital art and cutting-edge technology all the time, I had never put my thought to it. I knew nothing, I realized, about the symbolic or realistic implications, the aesthetics or the history behind this specific form of craft. How did it survive thousands of years?

  “Perhaps people were just nostalgic,” hesitating, I answered, my voice timid.

  “Heh! You’re too smart for your own good. You think with your brain all the time, yet you never feel with your body. Look . . . ”

  He pointed at the marble columns shaped like elongated winter melons. Above the columns was the major summer beam, hovering over the secondary beam that signified fruitfulness and prosperity. The column caps, beams, dougongs, girders, and lintels glistened with a gold spark. I recognized immediately that they were gold-lacquered wood carvings.

  Legend had it that this craft originated in the Tang dynasty. Equipped already with unparalleled wood carving skills, those Tang craftsmen drew inspiration from the cavalier perspective seen in Chinese ink wash paintings and attempted to recreate the same effect on wood: merging scenes from different time-spaces together into one grand visual narrative. The scenes were depicted by intricate openwork carving on wood, layered one next to another, so that they could be represented in the same space altogether. Finally, the craftsmen painted the wood carving in rich, thick gold. The finished artwork thus became a limbo where the real and the imaginary, the prologue and the denouement, the cause and the effect collide and melt into each other.

  What did Father want me to see? I swallowed my question when, all of a sudden, all the wood carving came alive.