Old Miao's Dough Figures

At the mouth of Locust Lane stood an old yellow cloth umbrella and a low wooden table. Upon the table sat half a dozen balls of dough in red, yellow, blue, green, white, and black. Soft as cotton between the fingers, they held their shape once set. Behind the table sat Old Miao, who spoke not a word all day, only pinched.

His given name was Miao the Seventh. Because he had spent a lifetime pinching dough figures, the lane came to call him Old Miao. Others shaped their figures after opera heroes - Lord Guan, the Monkey King. Old Miao did not. He shaped only the living. Whoever stood before his stall, he would lift his eyes for a single look, then knead and pinch three or four times, and there upon the board would appear a little man: brows, eyes, mouth, nose - so true that the onlooker froze in surprise. The tilt of the head, the twist of the lip, even a black mole at the corner of the mouth, all rendered to the hair.

Some said a ghost lived in his hands. Old Miao only laughed. "The dough is not my doing. It is the man who grows himself."

He kept two iron rules. First: a person earned but one dough figure in a lifetime, never a second. Second: he would not shape the dead. When someone begged him to keep a likeness of a mother just passed, he shook his head. "A dough figure remembers the living, not the dead. For the living it keeps a thought; for the dead it only tethers a soul, and that brings ill fortune."

That twelfth month, a stranger came to the lane, in a blue padded coat with long sleeves, his hands always tucked away. He stood by the stall a long while and asked to have himself made. Old Miao gave him one glance, said nothing, and bent to his work. When the figure was done the stranger leaned close - and his face changed at once. For the little dough man kept his hands tucked in his sleeves, yet from beneath the cuff three fingers plainly strayed, pinching a string of coins at another man's waist.

The stranger turned and fled, and was never seen in the lane again. Only later did word come that the households robbed at the northern market had described their thief exactly as Old Miao's little figure.

Old Miao set that little figure beneath the umbrella's ribs. Wind and sun faded its color, yet those three fingers still reached out, stubborn. Asked about it, he said, "What the hands do outlasts what the mouth tells."

At the lane's end lived a widow with a small girl who often came to watch. The girl, Xing'er, loved to watch him pinch, and could stand half a day. Old Miao shaped a Xing'er and pressed it into her hand, taking not a coin. Her mother apologized; Old Miao said, "A child's first little figure in all her life - that one is mine to give."

When Xing'er turned seven, her mother remarried and went south with the man. The day before she left, Xing'er came once more, and Old Miao shaped another: this time the mother and daughter hand in hand. Xing'er ran off clutching both figures, and never returned.

From that day his stall held one more thing: a small wooden box, inside it dozens of little figures, no two faces alike. Asked whose they were, Old Miao would not say. Only the old neighbors knew - these were the living he had shaped over the years: the tofu seller, the cobbler, the storyteller, the ferryman, and the little girl who never came back.

Old Miao pinched dough all his life. He grew no rich, yet never went hungry. He had a saying: "The people in opera live a hundred years past death because they are on paper. The people in this lane wear a new face with each living day. I pinch no dough - I pinch the truth that sits in a man's heart."

The umbrella folded and opened again. The figures stood and fell. Through Locust Lane passed so many, and Old Miao's little box grew heavier with every year.