Feathered Serpent: A Novel - Softcover

Xiaobin, Xu

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416583815 ISBN 13: 9781416583813

Publisher: Washington Square Press, 2010

Synopsis

A spellbinding novel following five generations of a Chinese family from the dying stage of the Qing Dynasty of 1890s to the 1990s

About this title

About the Author:

Xu Xiaobin, born in 1953 into an intellectual family in Beijing, is a member of the China’s Writers Association. She spent nine years in the countryside and at a factory during the Cultural Revolution until 1978 when she entered the Chinese University of Central Finance just after universities had reopened and entrance examinations were held nation wide. She began publishing her writings in 1981. Currently she works as a staff screenplay writer at China’s Television Production Center. She has published numerous fictions, novellas and collections of prose.

John Howard-Gibbon is a world renowned translator and Chinese literature scholar. Until recently he held the position of deputy-editor-in-chief of China Daily which is the largest and most authoritative English –language newspaper in China. He has translated many works from Chinese, notably Lao She's Teahouse and Chen Ran's A Private Life.

Joanne Wang earned a BA in English literature from Shanghai; a MA in history in New York. She has worked as a freelance translator for more than ten years, in addition to having worked in publishing for a number of years and starting her own literary agency with a strong focus on Chinese writers.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 1 TWILIGHT IN GOD'S COUNTRY

At three fifteen in the afternoon on a late spring day in the closing years of the century, when the bright green and red swatches of winter clothing had not yet completely disappeared from downtown streets, the doors to the operating ward of the city's most well-known hospital for brain surgery swung slowly open. As quietly as a boat rowed over calm waters, a gurney emerged. A nurse headed the procession, holding up an intravenous bottle, and in the usual order following the gurney were the head nurse, an intern, an assisting physician, and the surgeon in charge.

Although the young woman, whose name was Yushe, had obviously not yet emerged from a full general anesthesia, with the help of the rays of the afternoon sun you could make out her pale face with its bluish yellow blotches. Her head was largely swathed in bandages, giving her face with its bluish yellow tinges a bit of a ghostly air. It was not a beautiful face, its only redeeming feature being her extremely long eyelashes. Right now, with her eyes closed, the lashes completely cover her dark eye sockets, reaching right down to her cheeks with their tint of greenish yellow.

She was one of those women whose age doesn't show, this being especially true in the dim light of the afternoon. Like reflections in a soft golden pool of pleasantly cool water, her completely blurred facial features changed at will, shrinking or expanding in size, gathering together or drifting apart.

Of course, she had nothing to do with Yushe, my feathered serpent painting, with which she shared her name.

At that moment, some people who had been sitting on a sofa came to the gurney, but the dim light of the afternoon rendered them featureless; while my attention was drawn to an apparently young, blond-haired, blue-eyed male foreigner who was standing quietly in the corner.

The first of the people to go over to the gurney was the lady named Ruomu. Seventy-five years old, she was wearing a silk-floss-quilted black vest with cloud patterns embroidered in gold. The fragrance she exuded, as delicate and exquisite as an ethereal grove of bamboo, made the young women around her seem foul by comparison. It was a kind of aristocratic fragrance so deeply embedded in her being that no one could take it from her.

Ruomu's snow-white skin was unusual, something associated with women of the 1940s or even a bit earlier. Today such truly snowy whiteness, which was a result of the skin never being directly exposed to the sun, has largely become a thing of the past. So when the head nurse first saw her she felt a bit overwhelmed. There were no wrinkles on Ruomu's face, but, quite out of keeping with this, there were big bags hanging below her eyes like two chilly, burnished pendants. Her nose was reminiscent of the hooked beak of a raptor, and her lips, shaped like the leaf of the peach tree, were daubed with crimson lipstick, giving them a rich red luminescence. These, too, were some of the marks of a declining aristocracy. There is no way that a later age can carry on the strengths of a previous generation. In the past Ruomu had the kind of beauty that could overturn cities or topple empires. The lines of her face were delicate yet firm, a perfect contrast to the fuzzy lines of Yushe's face. Even though she was over seventy, the power of her beauty was overwhelming. Despite the fact that there were no wrinkles in her old face, it remained, nonetheless, a bit frightening.

With a very obvious look of gratitude in her eyes, Ruomu raised her intertwined hands to block the progress of the oldest of the doctors. The moment she did this, it gave the doctor a bit of a fright, as to him those hands appeared to be a set of beautifully preserved white bones.

The operation was a success -- an unprecedented success. The chief surgeon had performed a frontal lobotomy, skillfully removing the germinal layer of the patient's brain. In guiding his precision scalpel through the complex network of nerves as tangled as unkempt hair, the surgeon had not damaged a single one. The decision to operate was made as a result of intense pressure from the female head of the patient's family. Her reasoning went this way: she wanted to have the germinal layer of her daughter's brain removed in order to preserve the girl's mental health and allow her to live out the rest of her life as a normal person.

Now her wish had been realized.

This beautiful seventy-five-year-old woman was none other than Yushe's mother. Right now her attention is riveted on her daughter, who is still under the anesthetic. Slowly, the loving mother's tears begin to ooze forth, as warm as spring waters bubbling up beneath a snowy sky.

2

In the early years of the 1960s, this now famous scenic area had not yet been recognized as such. Quite to the contrary, it was seen as a barren and desolate retreat for some of those who didn't fit in with the society of that time. Rising up fairy tale-fashion in the middle of this copse of tall deciduous trees was a small log cabin. Beyond the eye-catching golden glitter of leaves, an intense blue corner of the heavens exuded an inexplicable aura of tranquility.

There are mysteries in life that are beyond our ability to control. All we can do is yield to their power to carry us to those ancient visions floating about in the heavens. But those old stories, worn away as they have been by the wind and rain, can never fulfill us. What I want to describe is the fantastic changes in the scenes of my story that make it different. We must adapt to such changes ceaselessly.

In the twilight, these forests, with their great trees ablaze with a mysterious golden radiance, made the rest of nature seem like a lifeless graveyard.

There is also a lake. Fundamentally, in this story of ours, we should have eschewed such seemingly fairyland scenes. They are obviously not that realistic. This is especially true of the lake in front of the log cabin. Seemingly born out of the blue, the lake took form before the backdrop of the forest. The water of the lake was as blue as a translucent piece of crystal. Looking rather like coral, the weeds on its bottom sprouted countless beautiful tendrils. In the early 1960s, when Ruomu accompanied her husband when he was banished to this place, under absolutely no circumstances would she put her hands into that water. She was afraid that it contained a blue dye that could poison people, and that if she were to put her hands in it, the dye would get into her joints and she would never get rid of it. It was only after her little daughter stuck her hands into the water in play that Ruomu finally overcame this taboo. The little girl's name was Yu, or "feather," which she carried right from birth. It was only because she was born in the year of She, the "snake" or "serpent," that, pushing things a bit far, I threw the two words -- "feather" and "serpent," or feathered serpent -- together. Of course, there were also some other reasons, which you'll have to look for carefully as the rest of the story unfolds. Yushe's birth was a great disappointment for Ruomu, who had been hoping for a son. And the little girl was a long way from sharing in the kind of beauty her mother could have expected. Aside from the amazing eyelashes, there was simply nothing exceptional about her. But when those eyelashes fluttered, they made you think of the opening and closing of a black feather fan. That's what led Ruomu's mother, Xuanming, to give her the name Yu.

The names of Yu's two older sisters, on the other hand, were Ruomu's concoctions: at the time of the birth of her first daughter, silks and satins held a special interest for Ruomu, hence she named her Ling, a kind of delicate satin; when her second daughter was born, Ruomu had taken up playing the xiao, or vertical bamboo flute, hence that daughter's name was Xiao. At Yu's birth both her sisters were attending school in a large city a long way from the family's log cabin in the desolate retreat.

At that time, Ruomu's mother, Xuanming, had just entered her sixties. She was born around the close of the nineteenth century, and her entire body gave off the melancholy gloom of that era. When Xuanming was alive, Ruomu would always sit in the wicker chair in front of the window and slowly clean her ears using a special solid gold ear spoon. Yu could not remember Ruomu ever going into the kitchen. Whenever it was time to cook, Ruomu would take up that solid gold ear spoon, while Xuanming would jump to her tiny feet and disappear into the kitchen. Those tiny bound feet were exquisite beyond compare.

As Yu remembered, Xuanming's feet were singularly special, and Yu had a passion for anything and everything out of the ordinary. In the evenings, when Xuanming had taken off her shoes, tiny little Yu, lifting up her grandma's feet in both hands, would kiss them. Every time she did this, Xuanming's dignified face would brim over with affectionate amusement. "Smell bad?" she would ask. "Bad," Yu would reply. "Are they sour?" "Sour." This indispensable little daily ritual of theirs always pleased Xuanming. Relegated to a lonely corner, those black satin shoes were reminiscent of the little folded paper boats that Yu liked to make. Their toes turned slightly upward, just like the bow of a real ship, and each featured a diamond-shaped piece of green jade.

For Yu, everything connected with Xuanming was both enigmatic and alluring. She had a very large chest made of a fine variety of rosewood called jin hua li. One of the most revered materials used in home finishing in the 1990s, proclaimed to be "worth more than its weight in gold," it was the finest material for hardwood floors. The cabinet had twenty-two drawers of various sizes, the keys to which Xuanming would clutch tightly in her hand. She could very quickly and accurately pick out the right key for each and every one of those drawers. Later on when she had lost her sight in both eyes, she could still do this. The moment she ran the tips of her fingers over those cold bits of metal, she could determine precisely which one was which. Xuanming was very...

About this edition

• Publisher: Washington Square Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1416583815
• ISBN 13: 9781416583813
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384