Old Zhou's Puppets

Old Zhou is the last puppeteer left in these parts.

His stage is the crossroads: a bamboo pole hoisting a square of blue cloth painted with a crooked Monkey King, a camphor-wood box hanging beneath. Open the box and there are seven or eight little figures inside, faces sealed with tung oil, their brows and eyes traced in fine brush — some smiling, some angry, some knotted into worry. Old Zhou lifts them out one by one, winds the silk strings around his fingers, and in the lamplight he gives a pull, and the wood comes alive — it bows, it turns somersaults, it raises a sleeve to wipe its eyes.

Old Zhou's masterpiece is "The Broken Bridge." After the flood at Jinshan, Lady White finds Xu Xian at the bridge, hating him and pitying him at once. Old Zhou works alone: in his left hand Lady White, in his right Xu Xian, and the two strings spread apart so the two figures stand face to face behind the cloth — one lifts a hand, the other lowers his head. The wonder is the weeping. A wooden head cannot shed tears, yet Old Zhou makes the audience hear them. From his throat comes a thin, husky tune, not loud, as if squeezed out of a crack in the wall: "Cruel one, how could you be so heartless." Plenty of women in the crowd would be sniffling by then.

Asked how he pulls them so alive, Old Zhou says: a puppet's joints are all in the strings, but the strings are not worked by the hand — they are worked by the heart. When the feeling in you arrives, the wood arrives; when you are empty inside, the strings may be taut as wire and the figure is still dead. The apprentice could not follow this, and Old Zhou did not explain. Forty years at this trade, one apprentice only, who ran off after half a year — said he bent over eight, nine hours a day and earned less than two catties of meat.

Old Zhou never married. Long ago someone spoke of a match; he went to look once, came back, wiped his box clean, and never mentioned it again. Later, when people asked if he was not lonely on his own, he pointed at the little figures in the box and said, they keep me company. It sounds forlorn; he said it plainly, the way you'd say he'd eaten two bowls of noodles that day.

Once at a temple fair he performed three nights running. The third night it rained, and the crowd thinned to nothing. Old Zhou did not pack up. He sat alone in the empty ground and played "The Broken Bridge" once more. Not a soul before the stage, only rain slapping the blue cloth. Still he worked Lady White in his left hand, Xu Xian in his right, still sang that line about the cruel one. Halfway through he stopped, stared at the empty stage a while, then smiled to himself, put the puppets back in the box one by one, blew out the lamp, shouldered the pole, and left.

The next day someone asked him: it was raining, nobody there, who were you performing for? Old Zhou said: for them. After a pause: and for myself. He said, I've sung other people's plays all my life; when night comes, a man ought to sing one for himself. Those wooden figures on the stage have lived a thousand people's joy and sorrow in his place; the man pulling the strings below had nowhere to tell his own. Year on year, even his own loneliness he learned to hide behind the wood.

Now Old Zhou is sixty-eight. His eyes are still sharp, his fingers still deft, yet the craft in his hands is plainly about to break off. He says let it break — to force it on would only leave the next man living his life among a heap of wood, and that's a pity too. Every year at the twelfth month he still rubs the box bright and sets it in the middle of the main room, waiting for someone to ask. If no one asks, he performs a play to the empty house, for the wall. The wall does not clap; he does not mind.

He has kept company with wood his whole life, and long since grown used to a kind of bustle that needs no answer from anyone.