Old Pei's Paper Wares

At the very end of Locust Lane stands a low, signless shop. Lift the curtain and you meet a whole roomful of 'people' — paper lads and maids, paper horses and sedan chairs, a gilded paper mansion, standing and sitting like guests who have all quietly caught their breath. The keeper's surname is Pei; everyone calls him Old Pei.

Old Pei is just past fifty. His hands stay soaked in paste year round; his ten fingers are thick as radishes, yet nimbler than a girl's embroidery needle. His craft holds one wonder: to make a paper figure he needs no photograph, only a few words from the family.

'My father liked a grey cloth gown, walked with his hands behind his back, had a mole on his left cheek, and turned his toes a little out.' Old Pei listens, bends a few strips of bamboo, lays on the white paper, touches two dabs of ink, and there stands a paper old man, alive-looking. Some swear that late at night, passing by, they've seen Old Pei's paper figures' eyes follow the lantern light.

But Old Pei keeps two iron rules. The first: no living person on paper. When a neighbor's child begs for a paper doll, he smiles and makes one. Yet should anyone bring the likeness of a living soul and ask him to copy it, his face darkens and he pushes the paste bowl away: 'That, I will not make.' Asked why, he only says, 'Paper is set aside for the dead. The living have their own living to do.'

The second is stranger still: he can tell, by the figure he makes, whether a family's grief is true.

Last autumn the old master of the rice shop at the lane's mouth died. His three sons vied to put on a show. They hauled in a basket of silver and ordered Old Pei to build a three-courtyard paper estate, with four paper sedans, eight paper maids, even a paper mule-cart. Old Pei agreed. Asked about the old man's look and temper, the three sons nudged one another and at last squeezed out, 'Wore silk. Fat.' Old Pei bent over his work three days. The paper estate blazed with gold, but the paper old man at its heart had an empty face, his eyes two blunt smudges staring straight at the roof — whoever looked felt a chill. On the day of the funeral the estate caught fire; in the flames that paper old man would not fall, and only collapsed at the very end — like a man who, to the last, had never claimed all that noisy splendor.

Half a month later Widow Zhou came. Her man had driven carts beyond the pass and frozen to death on the road one winter, leaving not a single portrait. Widow Zhou brought half a basket of eggs and, eyes red, said, 'His left leg limped a little. He hummed the Ballad of the Peddler. Every festival he'd insist on a sip of osmanthus wine, and when he'd drunk too much he'd stroke my face and say, 'Old woman, I've wronged you.'' Old Pei listened, his hands stilled, and with his sleeve he wiped his eyes. He made a paper figure, not tall, slightly stooped, the corners of its mouth tipped upward, truly like a man about to break into a smile. Widow Zhou clutched it and wept aloud: 'It's him, it's him.'

The half basket of eggs he sent back, untouched.

Behind Old Pei's shop sits a wooden box no one may touch. Every Qingming and every seventh-month-half he shuts the door and, alone, fashions a small paper figure inside. When it is done he does not burn it, only sets it on the windowsill. Asked about it, he shakes his head.

In time the lane came to understand: Old Pei's paper figures are made for the dead, but what they measure is the living heart.