INCANTATION by Nina Feng
Rarely is the warning used, a familiar, chilling rhyme children know from tales of the disobedient. Barely whispered before the curse slips into the heart of a little girl or boy. Bu ting lao ren yen, chikui zai yan qian – Chinese children who refuse to behave are haunted by these words. If you do not listen to elderly wisdom, you will repent. For the Chinese, breath and sound may spin into palpable truths; sayings formed on the lips of ancestors invoke forces alive as the dead pulled through sheets of time. Shattering into the present, their voices infuse the living with new power.
Chinese culture is swathed in superstitions, much of which circulates around language; the words you produce may entice devastating or rewarding consequences. It’s as if the flesh confines, secures, the unstable power of a soul; what drops from your lips could transform into heavy talismans that may or may not protect you. Good luck may pool in your footprints. Or hungry spirits, disentangled long ago from mortal limbs, may be roused. Sovereign, dark entities searching for another voice.
My mother raised me on ghosts and luck. Her mother and grandmother fed her stories when they had nothing else to eat. I’d never questioned her beliefs. She’d never fail to hold up a long line at a grocery store, making the cashier fetch a pen without red ink to sign a credit card slip (sign your name in red, bad luck). She would make trays and trays of steamed dumplings every week, her flour-coated hands slipping the small, scalloped pieces into boiling water (eat dumplings, good luck). She was most particular about what she would say, or, what she would not say:
Never say your birthday at night. Ghosts may come and find you.
Never discuss bad dreams before sunrise. Bad luck.
Never use negative words the month of Chinese New Year. A bad year will follow.
As I grew older in America, riddled with Chinese superstitions, I found myself beginning to wonder about these rituals. It was embarrassing to ask for another pen when a bucket of red ones sat in front of my face. But it was mildly terrifying if I resisted. There was safety in superstition; adhering to these rules allowed me to see a little further into the unknown, take safe steps into the future.
For my mother, who grew up in China during a period that tried to eradicate old beliefs, superstitions represented tradition, security. The Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when my mother was nine years old, with Mao Zedong calling for the destruction of the si jiu, the Four Olds – Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. Anything that existed before 1949, when Red China took over, could be destroyed; hair was cut, names were changed. Houses were searched; books, art, temples, burned.
Mao was a jealous man, envious of certain top-ranking officials that were western-educated or perhaps more literate. His insecurities instigated a purging of old ways, including many government leaders, and though he may not have predicted how wildly popular violent “activism” could be, he did nothing to curb the effects. My grandfather, a city police chief, was in a position too high not to be recognized by the Red Guards. My grandparents were separated into re-education camps where professors, intellectuals, and people in high government positions were beaten and forced into hard labor. They broke two of my grandmother’s ribs the first day, and my mother won’t speak of what they did to my grandfather. Daily, the prisoners were required to study the Mao Bible. Daily, they had to pray for Mao’s forgiveness. My grandparents were in re-education camps for four years.
Before they were taken, my grandmother sewed money into my mother’s clothes; she told her it was to be used only in the direst time. My mother never spoke of the money to anyone, always believing their situation could worsen, and returned the three hundred yuan to her mother when she was released in 1970. In those four years, my mother, her sister, and their two brothers would roam from one relative to the next, begging for a home. They traveled to the village their father grew up in, Bi Zhuang, rural, too poor to be of any worth for the Red Guards. My mother and her siblings lived with family who were peasants, their lives steeped in old country superstition.
My mother listened, listened close to village elders, old men who all lived past one hundred, shiny, bald heads like new chestnuts lined up in the sun. Don’t go out past dark, they’d say, the fox ghost will carry you away. She’d edge past them, run back home. The fox ghost was known to change form, snatch children, a creature bred from the death and fear of a neighboring village. Everyone had died from cholera, their empty houses breathing disease.
She always listened, my mother. She had seen words change into reality, had seen the future predicted by a fortuneteller. Her neighbor in the village was told she would never have children. She watched the tiny corpses carried from her home. There would be twelve still-borns.
My grandfather met a fortuneteller when he was twenty. She told him a terrible tragedy would happen twenty-nine years later. 1966. My mother thought of this as she watched her father taken away.
So she kept her lips pursed, her thoughts to herself, staying within the boundaries delineated by the words of the elders. She worked quietly. Every day before the harvest, she’d get up before the sun rose and go looking for grass to feed the animals. The hills were bare, so she’d stick little stones and dirt in the middle of the sparse bundles, take it to the man who would tally everyone’s contributions, marking down every pound my mother brought him, to be exchanged for corn after the harvest. Most days her family would eat leftover cornmeal her cousin swept from the floors of the processing plant where he worked. Tainted with spilt engine oil from the machines, the meal was also mixed with anything edible – black seeds of cotton plants, sugar beet husks. They barely survived on the grainy substance, figures of bone.
My mother endured one day at a time. She couldn’t see into the future, but she knew her parents held the same beliefs as she did, that she was joined with every other being in the country when they looked into the faces of those drab green armies marching by, arms circled in bands of red, slashing fear through the air, through my mother’s guts. She believed her parents would return. Superstition, rituals, beliefs, hope; they are all the same. They hold us together in times of fear, distance unbearable thoughts, throw light into the unknown.
My mother’s family was reunited in 1970. Mao decided the Red Guards might have taken it too far, four years too late. My grandfather got his job back, was even promoted to a higher position, one where he had access to cars and personal secretaries. He was in the Great Thirteen, the highest ranks in government, and was retrained for his position. It’s difficult to turn someone from beliefs they’ve held since childhood, and it’s no different with my family. After my grandfather’s death, I returned to China, found a large, framed photograph of Chairman Mao in his study. I asked my aunt if she liked Mao, who had left her homeless and almost an orphan, and she replied with a smiling Yes.
With the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, a steady resurgence of the Four Olds climbed back into the lives of the Chinese. Some say the return of si jiu is a mistake. With the return of old values is the return of old practices. In 2000, the number of heroin addicts rose sharply, particularly in southwestern China, near the Golden Triangle, one of Asia’s largest sites of opium production. Concubinage and piracy returned, along with violent clashes between village clans. Along with child kidnapping, young brides were sold to elderly farmers by their families.
Before the 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan Province, people reported the emptying of ponds, self-destructive cattle hurling themselves against pens, and a flood of frogs, all thought to be omens of the disaster to come. Government officials were quick to arrest some of the people spreading these “superstitions,” a move reminiscent of 1966. Forty years later, the reasoning is still the same – destiny controlled by gods or spirits represents an ideology that contests belief in the government.
Yet within this oppression, an opening has appeared. Through the resurgence of antiquated practices, a chance to connect with ancestry has emerged. History was diminished into ashes during the Cultural Revolution, blackening the hands of my mother as she sifted through them, looking for her childhood. But people remember, remember their families, remember what was taken from them. To stain our skin with the soot of what remains – if the living embody the voices of everyone lost, if we never lose the language of our ancestors, traditions no longer represent safety, but propel forth dangerous, necessary change.
A single saying may invoke the power of millenniums of tradition. Twenty-four, I can finally sing the old chant aloud, bu ting lao ren yen chikui zai yan qian. It might have taken me twenty years to muster up the courage, but I’ve realized that the power in these words is not meant to harm me. My family holds onto these old sayings not because we fear the wrath of the gods, but because our future depends on remembering this history. Now if I can just learn to use a red pen.
“Incantation” is Nina Feng’s first essay published in a national literary magazine.