It would make for a better story if it had been Meng Jiangli’s grandmother who had terrified him with ancient, eerie tales of ghosts and demons and ox-faced, soul-eating deities, but there was the small matter of the egregious Mr Mao and his revolution and then his cultural revolution – ‘smashing the four olds’ – to consider. What could his grandmother possibly know of ancient tales? It was, rather, Meng Jiangli’s sister who had read to him stories out of Pu Songling’s book, published in 1766, ‘Liaozhai Zhiyi’ – stories of shape-shifting foxes, the dead who rose and ate the faces of their kin, Xing Tian whose nipples were all-consuming eyeballs, enemy of the supreme deity . . .
In his new homeland – island nation with the population of a suburb and air so clean you could see through it – the Moon shone as bright as had the Sun in the Shaanxi Province of his childhood. It had been not just the continuous roiling columns of satanic industrial coal smoke that had rendered the Sun at noon a pale white disc, there had been also the fine dust lifted high in the air in the eroded west that filtered down – a brown talc – over everything. Women with large besom brooms had swept all day outside their shops.
Shanghai had been cleaner if morally more corrupt, but gun violence and knife fights had long been part of the underworld of that most cosmopolitan of cities.
It was in Shanghai that Meng Jiangli started working for Mr Lu.
In his new homeland it seemed almost unnecessary for Mr Lu to be accompanied at all times by a pair of armed fighters but it had not been so in Shanghai.
In Western Springs Park at 11.30 p.m. the southern Moon shone brightly. Su Dongpo and Meng Jiangli, with Mr Lu, entered the silent, empty park from the Great South Road side while the other ‘businessman’ and his thugs entered from the far side by the Auckland Zoo.
In the middle of the little, humped bridge over the dark lake the two suited men met while the ‘muscle’ waited at opposite ends of the bridge. Business.
After this, thought Meng Jiangli – retirement; a health-supplements shop; a nice, newly built house; his mother happily installed from Shaanxi. Surely here, in this innocent place, he would be free of hungry ghosts, flesh-eaters, the angry dead. But out at Ihumatao, the surveyors were driving stakes into the heart of the land and bulldozers were crushing the bones of the ancestors as they fabricated new suburbs from tapu land.
Barnaby McBryde
In his new homeland – island nation with the population of a suburb and air so clean you could see through it – the Moon shone as bright as had the Sun in the Shaanxi Province of his childhood. It had been not just the continuous roiling columns of satanic industrial coal smoke that had rendered the Sun at noon a pale white disc, there had been also the fine dust lifted high in the air in the eroded west that filtered down – a brown talc – over everything. Women with large besom brooms had swept all day outside their shops.
Shanghai had been cleaner if morally more corrupt, but gun violence and knife fights had long been part of the underworld of that most cosmopolitan of cities.
It was in Shanghai that Meng Jiangli started working for Mr Lu.
In his new homeland it seemed almost unnecessary for Mr Lu to be accompanied at all times by a pair of armed fighters but it had not been so in Shanghai.
In Western Springs Park at 11.30 p.m. the southern Moon shone brightly. Su Dongpo and Meng Jiangli, with Mr Lu, entered the silent, empty park from the Great South Road side while the other ‘businessman’ and his thugs entered from the far side by the Auckland Zoo.
In the middle of the little, humped bridge over the dark lake the two suited men met while the ‘muscle’ waited at opposite ends of the bridge. Business.
After this, thought Meng Jiangli – retirement; a health-supplements shop; a nice, newly built house; his mother happily installed from Shaanxi. Surely here, in this innocent place, he would be free of hungry ghosts, flesh-eaters, the angry dead. But out at Ihumatao, the surveyors were driving stakes into the heart of the land and bulldozers were crushing the bones of the ancestors as they fabricated new suburbs from tapu land.
Barnaby McBryde
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