The Man on Paper
In riverside Qingxi, painter Shen Molin is asked by a widow to paint a memorial likeness of her drowned husband, and told never to uncover it at night. Suspicious, Shen visits on a stormy night and finds the painted smile widening in the candlelight, a charcoal 'wrong' on the frame. He investigates quietly, re-frames the work, returns it with a veiled warning, and on rainy nights sits before his own unfinished self-portrait, certain its eyes hold something his do not.
Shen Molin had run his painting shop at the east end of Qingxi Town for thirty years. It was a small place by the river, with a wooden sign over the door reading "Shen's Portraits." Townsfolk called him Master Shen, or just Old Shen. He painted funeral portraits, temple icons, and ancestral likenesses; the craft had come down from his forebears, and it lived or died by a single word—resemblance. If it did not look like the person, he would rather not paint at all.
Master Shen was stubborn, wedded to his own logic. He believed in neither ghosts nor gods, and had no patience for strange talk; should anyone claim a painted face moved at night, he would roll his eyes. Yet what happened that autumn, he never dared tell in full, not even as an old man.
It began in early September, after half a month of rain. Qian Sue, the widow who ran the tofu shop, came to commission an ancestral portrait of her late husband, to hang in the hall for the descendants to honor. Her husband, Qian Youde, had fallen into the river the previous winter; when they pulled him out, his face was bloated and pale. She had no proper photograph, only an old group picture, and she asked for "the smiling look he had in life," as warm as could be.
Master Shen took the job. He traced the outline from the photograph and filled in the features from her description, and after three days he had the smile alive on the paper—cheeks a little full, wrinkles piling at the eyes, like a good-natured old man just off his wine. When Qian Sue came to collect it, she studied the face a long while, then said, "Master Shen, I have one unreasonable request. Once it is hung, do not lift the cloth at night. Let it be."
Master Shen frowned. "The painting is dead. Whether the cloth is lifted or not, it would not know."
Qian Sue said nothing more. She rolled the scroll with care, paid him double, and left under her umbrella.
Master Shen meant to let the words drift past him. But on the third night the rain came hard again, and as he tossed in bed he remembered how Qian Youde had died—the fall into the river last winter, the town's whispers that Qian Sue had been quarreling with her husband, that someone had seen the two of them struggling on the riverbank. Master Shen had met Qian Youde once; a silent man, slow to anger. For such a man to end up on the bank in a struggle, the matter was not simple.
He threw on his clothes and walked through the rain to the Qian house.
In the hall of the Qian home a single oil lamp flickered. The ancestral scroll was already hung, covered with a blue cloth. On the offering table stood wine and food, and three sticks of incense in the burner were nearly spent. Qian Sue was not there—asleep, perhaps. Master Shen reached to lift the cloth, when the lamp wick cracked and the light failed for a breath.
In that breath he saw clearly—the blue cloth had slipped, and in the wavering lamplight Qian Youde's face on the paper seemed to grin wider than he had painted it, the whites of the eyes faintly greenish, as though damp.
Master Shen's hand hung in the air. In his life he had painted hundreds of faces, of the dead and of the living, yet never had he seen a painting widen its own smile.
Still, he lifted the cloth. In the lamplight the paint was dry, the ink lines unmoved. He breathed easier and was about to cover it again when he noticed the back of the frame—the old elm frame Qian Sue had brought, with a crooked character scratched in charcoal at its edge: "wrong."
Master Shen's heart sank.
He carried the scroll back to his shop that very night, not daring to leave it there. The next morning he walked the riverbank, then stopped by Old Zhou's place next to Qian Sue's mother's house, offered a cigarette, and drew the truth out in idle talk: on the night Qian Youde fell, Old Zhou had heard a woman weeping on the bank, a moment before the splash. The town had suspected for a long while; no one had dared speak.
Master Shen pinched out the cigarette. He was no magistrate; he could not, and would not, solve the case. He only had the scroll re-mounted, scraped away the character "wrong" from the back, and pressed his own idle seal in its place. Two days later he returned the painting to Qian Sue, saying only, "I re-mounted it; the old frame was worm-eaten, so I gave you a new one. From now on, leave the cloth off. Let it hang open and bright."
Qian Sue took it, her hand a little unsteady, and asked nothing.
At the door, Master Shen turned and looked at her once. "Sue," he said, "the painting is dead; the person is alive. Lay your troubles on paper and the paper rots, but the troubles do not."
Qian Sue kept her head down and did not answer.
After that, Master Shen kept his shop as before. Yet on every rainy night he would bolt the shop door tight and sit by the lamp, lost in the unfinished self-portrait on his wall. The man in the painting sat as he sat, looked outward as he looked—only those eyes held something his own did not.
He never worked out what it was.