Read Old Land, New Tales: Twenty Short Stories by Writers of the Shaanxi Region in China for Free Online Page B

Li Shisan.
    Facing the plateau against the Weihe River plain, Li Shisan tottered step by step and spat out a mouthful of blood, moistening the dry, trodden earth beneath his feet with an undignified mixture of water and blood.
    He spat another mouthful of blood as he struggled upon a field ridge.
    When he felt yet another spray of blood welling up, Li Shisan knew it would be his last. Twenty lis away from the village, he turned around, gazing at the green central Guanzhong Plain across which the Weihe River flows, and spat out his last mouthful of blood onto the earth road, no longer seeing the sun and clouds over the Weibei Plateau.
    About the Story
    It was the late 1950s. One Saturday, I was coming home from school to get food for the next week. On the road I saw people of all ages, carrying their small wood stools in their hands and steamed buns in their handkerchiefs, hurrying to Ma Jia village to see the movie
Huoyan Ju
—the first Shaanxi opera to be put on the big screen. By sunset, the space in front of the stage was filled with people who’d traveled from neighboring villages, carrying their stools and their food. Back in my village, I’d hurried to finish my meal and join my friends to go see the film. Huoyan Ju, the play’s legendary horse who could walk a thousand li in the daytime and eight hundred li at night, was undoubtedly miraculous—but it was Huang Guiying, the beautiful heroine, who left a deep impression on me. In the play, Huang Guiying was unswervingly faithful to her love, having compassion for the poor and eschewing the rich; only under duress did she resolutely marry the son of a high official. The image of Huang Guiying offered the hope for a bright future to the poor young men in the countryside as well as the better-off youth in the towns.
    Fifty years later, I learned that the composer of
Huoyan Ju
was Li Shisan.
    Li Shisan (1748–1810) came from a small town in Weinan County; his birth name was Li Fanggui. Li studied very hard, hopingto do well on the imperial examinations for civil servants. He worked his way up in rank until he earned the “empty” title of an official candidate for a vacancy. Suddenly, at age fifty-two, he woke up from the disappointments of bureaucracy and had no more interest in fame and honor.
    At that time, shadow plays were very popular in the area north of the Weihe River. The shadow-play troupes were anxious to find good scripts, so they turned their expectations to this learned man. Li Shisan could not resist the enticement; he promised to give playwriting a try. Thus his first play,
Chunqiu Pei
, came into being. In the two hundred years since, it has been adapted by many opera companies, from the Shaanxi Opera to the Peking Opera and beyond. When this play began to bring him great fame, he decided to take the name of his home village as his pen name. His playwriting career really began when the name of Li Fanggui fell into oblivion.
    In order to prove Li Shisan’s identity as the first productive playwright of Wanwan Tone, a branch of the local Qin Opera in Shaanxi Province, I went to consult with Chen Yan, a contemporary playwright. My assertion was proved true. Only ten years passed between Li abandoning his official career in favor of playwriting and his death at age sixty-two under the terror of threats from Emperor Jiaqing. (Various accounts claim that Li was frightened to death or enraged to death.) In that brief decade, Li Shisan wrote eight plays and two playlets, collectively known as his Ten Great Plays. Most of them have been adapted by nearly all the major Chinese opera companies and have held their appeal to audiences for more than two centuries.
    I can’t help imagining how amazed Li Shisan would be to hear his plays, the work of a Shaanxi composer, performed in all the different dialects of China. Imagine if Li, unable to speak Mandarin and never having even heard the different southern dialects, had a chance to appreciate one of his plays