Old Cui's Living Figure

At the South Gate market, trade came on the third and eighth of every month. Old Cui set his stall beneath the locust tree: an old wooden chest, a few balls of colored dough, a bamboo knife. He had modeled dough figures his whole life, and the town called him Face-Maker Cui.

Most who came wanted a Monkey King for a child or a God of Longevity for an elder. Cui kept one rule he would not break: to model a living face, he must see it three times. The first sight caught the skin, the second the breath, the third the heart. Skin was easy to copy; bearing took watching; and that small thing in the heart would only settle after a few meetings.

That autumn, Shopkeeper Zhao of the silk shop strolled to the stall and asked for a figure of his "nephew," to hang behind the counter so the boy could be recognized. The nephew was coming up from the village to seek his fortune and might not be known at the door. Cui asked to see the boy; Zhao waved him off: the lad had not arrived, so describe him from my words and model as I say. He spoke in close detail: a red mole between the brows, the left ear nicked at the corner, one tooth showing on the right when he smiled, not tall, eyes like his sister's.

Cui took double pay and modeled as told. Under the bamboo knife the dough took shape. The mole placed true, the nicked ear cut clean, one tooth barely shown, and the thing almost seemed a living boy about to sit up in his hand. Zhao studied it long, sighed, and said, "That is him," and went satisfied.

But Cui recalled a thing. The year before, at the east end of town, a family in mourning had asked him to model the dead man's face for the shrine. The deceased was a young man not yet twenty, lying in his coffin, with a red mole between the brows, the left ear nicked at the corner, one tooth showing when he smiled. The very image of this "nephew," to the last mark. Yet that young man had been Zhao's own son, long dead.

Cui said nothing. He only set the figure in the chest and thought: Zhao had taken a new wife barely half a year past. Surely he feared the new woman would not suffer the boy, and so had renamed his dead son a nephew, to slip the family's wealth quietly to that branch of his blood.

A few days on, a boy of thirteen or fourteen truly came to the stall, shyly asking, "Old sir, I seek my uncle, Shopkeeper Zhao. Do you know the way?" Cui looked up. Red mole between the brows, left ear nicked at the corner, one tooth on the right when he smiled. The child was a size smaller than the "nephew" described, yet the eyes were the very image of the young man before the shrine.

Cui understood it all. He rose and led the boy to the silk shop door, and called only, "Shopkeeper Zhao, the figure you asked for is modeled from the living, and the living has arrived."

Zhao lifted the curtain and came out. At the sight of the boy his face shifted through several colors, then steadied. He reached and drew the boy to his shoulder. "The nephew is here. Come in for tea." The new wife peered from the inner room, and Zhao said only, plainly, "A distant kin from the wife's side. One more pair of chopsticks at the table."

Cui pressed the figure into the boy's hands and said low, "Your father, if he lived, would smile just so." The boy understood nothing, only clutched the little figure hard.

After that Zhao fell ill indeed, and did not last the winter. When the rites were done, the new wife cleared the rooms and put the boy out the door with his bundle. The boy went off hugging the figure, and Cui never saw him again.

Some years later Cui grew old and meant to close the stall. In the bottom of the chest he turned up that dusty figure. The mole still there, the nicked ear still there, the one tooth in the smile still there. He brushed it clean with a cloth and laid it back. In the marketplace, many things are never spoken clear, and need not be. A face a little dough remembers outlasts the faces the living do.