The Gift Ledger
Tian Musheng, a poor village carpenter, keeps a 'gift ledger' of every wedding, funeral, and feast he must attend with cash. As the sums swell, the custom that once bound neighbors in mutual debt becomes a one-way levy on the poor, draining the money he needs to care for his ailing wife and house his son. A quiet indictment of how entrenched custom devours those who can least afford it.
The Gift Ledger
Tian Musheng could not read, yet he kept an account clearer than anyone's in the village. It was a blue exercise book, its cover worn pale, and the villagers called it his gift ledger. Upon its pages he recorded every name, every occasion, every sum: who had added a grandson, married off a daughter, buried an elder, raised a roof, even passed an exam or paid for an operation.
Musheng was the old carpenter of Willow Creek. In his youth they had called him deft Musheng, his plane shaping dowry chests and roof beams into something like flowers. Now the plane lay rusted; the village hired crews from town to raise its houses, and he was left to set out a few tables and chop a little meat at weddings and funerals, just to earn a meal.
And a meal was hard to earn. The rule of Willow Creek held that if you missed a red-and-white affair, you had broken off dealings; and once dealings were broken, no favor would ever come your way again. When trouble fell, not even a pair of shoulders to bear the coffin. Musheng kept his ledger not in hope of return, but for fear of the finger in his back: Musheng's household grudges even a wedding coin, and he calls himself a craftsman.
The gift sums grew heavier year by year. A decade past, a newborn had cost twenty yuan; now two hundred was the floor, and kin paid five hundred. The exam feast was a newer fashion: let a child scrape into a vocational college and still ten tables must be set, for not to invite was to exile oneself from the village. Musheng reckoned roughly that in the past year the gifts he had given equaled two months' wages of his son Xiaojun, away on the city's scaffolds.
Xiaojun, his only son, tied rebar on a provincial construction site, sending home fifteen hundred a month. Musheng kept five hundred for living and sent a thousand into the ledger. One evening Chunxing, his wife, could not hold her tongue: The gifts you give have emptied our own rice jar. Musheng slapped the blue book upon the table. What do you know? In these times, favor is life itself. Give no joy to others today, and when your own sky falls tomorrow, who will come?
Scarcely had the words left him than the sky did fall.
Old Li at the east end reached seventy-nine and died in his sleep, a happy funeral; Musheng gave three hundred. Within half a month the village head's second boy passed into a provincial school, twenty tables laid, and on the gift list shone plain as day: Tian Musheng, five hundred. Musheng held the invitation, his hand shaking. Five hundred was half a month's food for him and Chunxing. But the head's face no one in Willow Creek dared refuse.
The crueler blow came after the harvest. Guifang at the west end married off her girl; Musheng had just given four hundred. Then Old Madam Liu beyond the slope suffered a bleed in the brain, and money was gathered house to house for her cure; Musheng emptied two hundred more. By the twelfth month the blue book held more than forty entries. All told, he had given upward of six thousand and received less than three, and what he received came mostly from the few contractors and mine owners of the village, whose gifts only grew larger and their accounts thicker, as though the poor were bleeding to fill the rich man's hall.
Musheng turned the pages by lamplight and grew afraid. He had meant to save a sum toward a down payment for Xiaojun in the city; the boy had found a girl whose family demanded a flat within the walls. But the ledger was a bottomless bowl, scooping his days empty one spoon at a time.
As the year's end drew near, Chunxing coughed through the nights, and Musheng groped his way to town for medicine; feeling his pocket at the door, it was empty. The gift money was long since given away. He crouched by the cold hearth, listening to Chunxing's cough, and for the first time understood that this book, kept half a lifetime, recorded only the warmth and cold of others, never a single line of his own.
On New Year's Eve snow bent the willow at the village mouth. Musheng spread the blue book upon the table and turned it page by page. The first entry was thirty years back: a neighbor's wedding, five yuan given, and the family had asked him to a bowl of braised pork. The last was yesterday: the head's niece married, and he had clenched his teeth and given six hundred.
Suddenly he laughed, tears in his eyes. The fragrance of that bowl of pork thirty years gone had long since faded; the debt of those six hundred, rooted like a weed, bowed his back so he could not stand straight.
Chunxing called from the inner room: Musheng, it is time to hang the couplets.
He answered, closed the book, and pressed it beneath the kang mat. Firecrackers cracked outside; red paper littered the ground like the red figures in his ledger that could never be repaid.
He recalled an old saying: a favor is a debt, and a debt must be paid, yet of all the debts in this world, some are meant never to be cleared.
The favors of Willow Creek were a ledger that could never be balanced.