The Invisible Valley Read online

  —Alright, I’m leaving now, Fong said, then she turned and walked out the door.

  As she left, Lu Beiping watched the swaying curves of her limbs, so round and perfect they made one ache.

  Months later it would dawn on Lu Beiping that Fong had been waiting for the first convenient moment to break off the thing between them, and that the ghost wedding had provided her with just the excuse she needed. She’d even taken care to sever the last remaining vestige of their bond—that frozen fish. At the thought, Lu Beiping laughed out loud.

  The sun was in his eyes now. He decided to go down to the well to wash his face. When he stepped out the door he felt like he was treading on loose soil, his feet sinking into cushions of dust, and as he carried his twanging bucket alongside the re-ed dorm building he imagined faces watching him from every window. Stop imagining things, he told himself. But he thought for sure he’d heard laughter. As he picked his way down to the well in the bowl-shaped hollow below the mess hall, the slope above him seemed like an amphitheater, its seats crowded with silent spectators waiting for him to speak. Standing at the well’s edge, he swore at the top of his lungs.

  —GOD! DAMN! MOTHER! FUCKING—he went on to evoke the female reproductive tract with the most eloquent profanities in the Cantonese language, words that he’d never have said ordinarily even if a thug in the alleys of Sam-kok Market had been twisting his ear—BITCH!

  No response, not even an echo. His maledictions were swallowed by the silence of the morning, as if they’d fallen into a pile of cotton balls.

  As he climbed back up the hill, he passed the division clerk, whom he recognized as one of the people who’d poured him beer last night in the smoky clamor of the foreman’s cookhouse. The man nodded at him and smiled pleasantly. No work today? he asked. With a small blackboard tucked under his arm, probably from the evening literacy school, he hurried on his way.

  Lu Beiping stood frozen for a moment, struck by a sudden thought. At first he’d imagined that the whole company would take delight in his suffering, slapping their thighs at the ridiculous charade of Lu Beiping being crowned “ghost son-in-law.” What he hadn’t realized was that this role had a flip side—he was the foreman’s son-in-law now, ghostly status notwithstanding. Nobody dared laugh at the foreman’s own kin. The camp, with its dirt paths and long brick-and-plaster barracks, was exactly the same as before the raion-supplement party; nothing had changed. But now its everyday appearance seemed faintly uncanny, and this unnerved Lu Beiping, like a subtle insult to which he had no retort.

  As he pushed open the door to his room, he glimpsed, at the edge of a nearby stand of rubber trees, a woman clad in black, sitting on a small cane stool. It was Mrs. Kau—his “mother-in-law” (ha!) who’d shanghaied him into marrying her dead daughter (good god!) and who now, for some strange reason, was sitting near his dorm room and studying him (monitoring him? protecting him?) with an unfathomable gaze. He supposed he ought to pitch a fit, make some kind of a scene; but then a great lassitude overcame him (what was the point of making a show of force to your mother-in-law?) and, pretending he hadn’t seen her, he let the door slap shut behind him.

  His world had changed overnight, changed utterly and irrevocably. He had become a stranger to himself, and the world had become alien to him.

  (Crazy, right? Lu Beiping said to Tsung. It’s hard to imagine a more surreal transformation than that. But what made it so odd was that it didn’t feel in the least bit unreal.)

  All day the image stuck in his mind: Mrs. Kau, dressed in black, sitting by the rubber trees, watching him.

  And as he pondered that image, he couldn’t help imagining—no, it was silly—a face, the face of a girl he’d never known: Han, his ghost bride.

  He lay in bed, writing in his diary. He knew that Chu had begged leave for him that morning.

  —It’s been a big night for you, Chu had crooned ghoulishly in his ear, just as the first rays of dawn were filtering through the window and Lu Beiping was drifting back to sleep: I think the foreman’ll understand!

  Then Lu Beiping had rolled over and vomited again.

  Three days later Lu Beiping, driving a herd of cattle, set off deep into the hills.

  Chapter 2

  Smoke on the Mountains

  Fiery sunsets aren’t an unusual sight in the tropics of Asia, but it’s only on Mudkettle Mountain that you’ll see snakeclouds. On clear evenings these bright red cloud formations come teeming over the horizon like bloody apparitions, thick and bulbous and coiling, filling the sky with eccentric shapes. Perhaps it’s some vagary of the climate in this hundred-mile reach of the Hainan highlands, where deep jungles breathe out miasmic vapors, that produces these fantastic displays: pendulous scarlet coils, each coil haloed with black, the scarlet made more bloodcurdlingly scarlet and the black more chillingly black by the contrast. Looking up, you could easily believe—as many here do—that a thick, cold mass of “snake air” is writhing in the sky above you, flicking out invisible forked tongues. The Cantonese frequently use the word “snake” to describe objects of a particularly striking hue, so the big red imported apples in Canton markets are colloquially known as “snakefruit,” and the brilliant-green, thick-leaved, aromatic grass that grows in the hills is often called “snakegrass.” Some say that this explains the clouds’ curious name. But the locals would tell you, as they told the re-eds fresh off the ships from Canton, that the snakeclouds owe their name to the mountain’s pent-up snake air. Deep in the mountains there dwells a giant thousand-year-old python: the Snakeweird, font of the land’s bounty and of its ruin. Never, never, wake the Snakeweird. As Lu Beiping drove his cattle into the foothills, the thought of the Snakeweird was never far from his mind. Never mind if what they said was true; here he was, having recently donned the eerie mantle of “ghost husband,” pressing ever deeper toward the monster’s legendary haunting place. He felt as if he were departing from the land of the living and crossing into the country of shadow—thinking this, he felt a pang of dread, and a faint tingle of excitement.

  They call this place the Mudkettle. Mudkettle Mountain is actually the westernmost arm of a range called the Mo-Sius, and the Mudkettle is the large, thickly forested valley encircled by the mountain’s several peaks. Out through this valley flows Mudclaw Creek, its looping course tracing out the five fingers of a hand or claw, separating the plantation’s rubber groves and windbreaks from the wild forestland above. For the first few days, Lu Beiping grazed the cattle mostly between the thumb and forefinger of Mudclaw Creek, where the slopes were gentle and the forest open, so it was easier to control the herd. The work was new to him and the animals were unruly, so he played it safe, fearing that he might commit some beginner’s blunder that would rob him of this fantastic new job. Every day at morning bell he’d herd the animals out of the corral near the trailhead, up through a dozen sectors of rubber forest and over five or six hills, till he reached this semi-wild place where grassy meadows opened between rank vegetation, and the cattle could eat their fill. When he could, he’d drive them farther, quickening his pace and calling sharply, leaving behind the clangs of the work bell and the shouts of the grove hands. Before long he found himself in the midst of a tropical rainforest, tall curtains of vines and epiphytes rising on all sides, a daunting labyrinth that was a challenge for the cattle to navigate. But once they got through, new vistas greeted him: narrow creek-cut gullies filled with emerald profusions of grass, in any one of which the animals could happily feast away the day. Then Lu Beiping would find himself a sunny slope, recline into the shade of a broad-leafed tree, open his satchel, fish out a book, and, with his right leg swinging over his left, sink into the bright dreamworld between its pages, while the air around him prickled with the contented munching of the cattle.

  This was a typical Lu Beiping pose. Or rather, it was a pose typical of a certain sort of character rare but conspicuous among kids who’d been downcountried for re-edu
cation: the loner, the introvert, the solitary outsider. Among the more radical re-eds—the mainstream ones, that is—you’d never see that dangling right leg. It marked a person out as an eccentric, wayward type who’d have been common in less extraordinary times: the ravenous but homework-hating bookworm, the non-stamp-collecting oddball obsessed with basketball stars, the meticulous bather whose room was never neat, the deadpan joker who spoke only to mock. Lu Beiping was just such a character, typical among late-adolescent males. But in that drab, gray era whose knee-jerk conformity erased all usual expressions of age and sex, it was this ordinariness that made him unique.

  I like your independent spirit, Fong had always told him. She said it in a vague, lofty tone that he knew was meant to convey Seriousness, a quality by which, in those days, a person’s worth as a human being was frequently judged. It was now clear to him that, just as her habit of praising Sergeant Fook for his Competence—You’re so competent, sir—reflected her own slippery kind of competence, so her desire to appear Serious reflected her own triviality. The most beautiful women have trivial minds. What novel was that from? He wouldn’t call her one of the most beautiful women—but if there was one thing he was sure of, she was damn trivial.

  He laughed. Well, he had to admit that ever since that fateful evening last week, he’d been a little jealous of Mr. Competent. Even his vacation in the mountains couldn’t cure him of that.

  Speaking of which, this new job, which had all the appearances of a special arrangement that Lu Beiping had purposefully contrived, had in actuality just fallen into his lap, foreman’s orders. The morning after the ghost wedding, as Lu Beiping lay truant in bed after heaving out his insides for the second time, Fook had dropped by his dorm room to inquire about the new propaganda piece for the wall gazette. Lu Beiping curtly refused. He wanted a new assignment. He couldn’t bear the thought of watching his former girlfriend and his own squad leader dallying around right under his nose. Fook said quietly: Listen, Lu, there’s an inspection team coming to camp this week, why don’t you just write the prop piece and then I’m sure the foreman’ll see to your redeployment. There was a beseeching note in his voice, as if he were begging on the foreman’s behalf. But as it turned out, Lu Beiping didn’t have to write the piece after all—later that day a call came from battalion HQ saying that the inspection team would be arriving ahead of schedule. When the foreman hung up the phone he went straight to the trailhead, cornered the cowherd, Gaffer Kam, and demanded the keys to the corral that the old man kept tucked in his waistband, which shortly afterward Fook dropped with a clink into Lu Beiping’s palm.

  What a boondoggle. The job was usually reserved for those members of the unit who were officially registered as elderly, handicapped, or otherwise unfit, and with good reason: Though the hours were long and it put you outdoors in all sorts of weather, once you got the animals to a nice grassy slope you could just kick back and relax. They were meat cattle, seventy-eight head in total, loaned from battalion HQ for the sole purpose of fertilizing the rubber groves, and as long as they ate plenty, shat plenty, and the “corral count” stayed high, you could lie around reading novels and nobody would mind your business. Only later would Lu Beiping realize how much the Gaffer resented him for taking this job away from him. Needless to say, he was grateful to leave behind the sweat-dripping, hoe-swinging life of the grove hand—he was his own squad leader now, commander of bovine battalions. Better this, even, than substitute-teaching in the base-camp schoolhouse, the assignment Fong had always coveted.

  —Hell, I wish I’d picked up that piece of paper, Chu lamented theatrically when he learned of Lu Beiping’s good fortune. Ghost husband? Sure! I’d love to be the foreman’s special boy. Get drunk, lie around for a few days, drag yourself out of bed and land the best slacker job in the world. Now there’s a position with benefits!

  —Well, Chu, when I get down to the Land of Shadow I’ll file for a divorce, then Han will be fair game for you. How’s that sound?

  —Whoa, not so fast . . .

  Marrying a ghost: The thought made Lu Beiping chuckle. When he was little, after his father spanked him, he’d ask his mother: When can I get married?—leaving her to wonder at the strange non-sequitur. Of course, every little kid fantasizes about marriage. For a child, marriage symbolizes adulthood, freedom, independence; it means coming into your own, having a job and a family; it means being in charge and getting anything you want; it means Love, and Romance, whatever that means. But what did it mean to marry a ghost? What does ghost marriage symbolize? In those days, among re-eds, one’s Political Issues were a topic often discussed loudly and publicly, and when one “resolved” them—by getting recommended for Party membership—it was an achievement to be trumpeted to all. But Personal Issues—love, marriage, sex—were freighted with a host of ominous-sounding abstract nouns. One night, he and Fong had been standing by the well, talking quietly, feeling a tacit understanding growing between them, and Lu had reached out to touch her arm . . . only to be repulsed as if by an electric shock. My god! she gasped. What are you . . . what are you doing? I didn’t think . . . I hadn’t imagined you’d harbor such, such . . . Low-minded Sentiments!

  Lu Beiping was dumbfounded. Speechless, his vision swimming from embarrassment, he watched her sashay briskly away with her still-empty water bucket ka-wonging on her hip, rubbing ruefully at the hand that had just touched and been slapped away by a woman’s. He felt like she’d spoken to him in a foreign tongue. Low-minded Sentiments? What was that supposed to mean? That and Interpersonal Entanglements, Inappropriate Intimacy, Male-Female Liaisons, Deviance Issues, Lifestyle Issues: clanking polysyllabic jargon probably invented by some hairy-cheeked occidental like Heidegger or Hippocrates. That searing glance, that trembling touch, those heart-quickening curves, all reduced to Entanglements and Liaisons and Issues . . . god! It made the whole thing seem like a terrible chore.

  Well, he thought, now things are different. I’m “married.” And that means—(yes, it’s true!)—my Personal Issues (ugh . . . )

  are resolved! Ghost-married . . . to Han. Who is Han? Who is this mysterious woman—my “wife”? Ghost wife, ghost husband. Shadow bride, shadow groom. Ha! In those tasteless, insipid, white-rice-and-pot-likker days, could one imagine a more tantalizing, titillating, fantasy-kindling spice for the imagination than—being married to a ghost?

  So, Lu Beiping imagined with relish: What if right now Han came gliding out of the mist-clouded forest, searching for her shadow mate? What would I do? Lying between the gnarled roots of a tall fruit tree, leaf-filtered sunlight shimmering in his eyes, he tried to picture her face. A gentle oval, maybe, slightly pointed at the chin, like one of the leaves of that epiphytic plant dangling from that branch on the far side of the creek. Her hair: a ponytail tied high up on her head. No, not a ponytail, that was too much like Fong; how about pigtails then, a pair of thin pigtails hanging behind her ears. She’d be shy and quiet, with a delicate voice, not loud-laughing and shrill-giggling like Fong. Her footsteps: quiet and delicate too. Not quiet—soundless, coming from There. A wrinkled baby-blue blouse, a bit too small for her frame. I’ve seen you before, friend Lu.

  A voice quiet as a mosquito’s buzz.

  The day you city kids arrived from Canton. Remember? I was standing at the edge of the road with a group of students from the village junior high. They were banging drums and gongs, and I was standing in front, waving a red flag with tassels. I was class prefect. Your truck braked and spattered me with mud, and I heard you all clamoring in the back as it lurched to a stop. Then a boy jumped out, shouting frantically: Where’s the bathroom? Where’s the bathroom? That was you, right? You charged over to us, yelling: I gotta go! Where’s the bathroom? We all burst out laughing. None of us had ever heard of a bathroom. Finally we figured out what it was you meant, and little Leung pointed toward the woods and said, The squat’s over there, the privy. Bathroom, right? We girls watched your face turning colors and gigg
led till we got stitches in our sides.

  Wow, sounds like I made quite an impression. How cruel of you, laughing at a guy in such desperate straits.

  We couldn’t help it! You sure did put on a show. I’ll never forget the look on your face as you stood staring off into the woods, before you went staggering off down the path, all hunched over on one side, hee hee hee . . .

  So, Han, since you mentioned it, do you want to know where I actually took my first piss in Tam-chow County?

  Shame my ears.

  There was such a big crowd at the base-camp entrance—the foreman and all the farmers, everyone cheering and banging drums and shooting off firecrackers—that I couldn’t just walk over to the forest and drop my pants in broad daylight. So I hobbled to the crossroads like a wounded soldier, my bladder ready to burst, and made a dash for a little thatched hut I saw not far from the path. An outhouse, I thought: a privy. It was dark as a cave inside. I tore open my pants and let it rip. Whoooosh! It was heavenly. Then my eyes adjusted to the dark, and guess what I saw? A stove. I’d pissed straight into a peasant’s frypan. What are you laughing at, Han? You think this is funny? Only later, after I started work, did I finally figure out whose kitchen equipment I’d anointed. Can you guess? Yes! It was Choi, the lady who goes around beating her breast and crowing, Mercy me, mercy me! I took my first piss in Choi’s cookhouse! Hahahahahaha—

  Heeheeheeheehee-kreek-KREE-kreek-KREE-kreek-KREEEEEEEEE!

  A jungle partridge, spooked by his laughter, exploded out of a thicket at the edge of the creek and flapped right past him, its wings almost grazing his head. Jolted back to reality, he threw a glance around the forest. Goose bumps rose on his skin. The air smelled rank and moldy, with a hint of a burnt odor, like the smell of angelica root. All around him shimmered blue-white ripples of mist, like cirrus clouds or sheens of diffracted light, gliding slowly through the air. Through the humid curtains of summer heat he made out a faint buzzing sound, growing louder and then fading, tensing and then relaxing, as if someone were plucking at the mountain’s nerves. His vivid fantasy flashed once more before his eyes, and the soles of his feet went cold. The cattle—where were the cattle? They had all disappeared. Had they . . . had they sensed her presence, and been scared away?