Free Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings Page B

wall; where the past spilt over into today. Besides, it would be madness to follow the Japanese south, and, if there was to be no escape, why not go against the grain, towards the eye of the hurricane: Manchuria, which grew closer and closer each day.
    Occasionally he strayed close to the train tracks he had once longed for, but he always backed away, so as not to be mistaken for a deserting railway worker. The only things that seemed to rush past him were goods trains, carrying coal. Some days he passed villages where rickety stalls served watery dumplings and dried-flower tea brewed from warmed-up rainwater, villages too small for the invading troops to have bothered stopping at as they marched through. Half starved, he would eat until he felt ready to retch. He stole sleep on porches and in railway storehouses. Just a bit further, keep going, I’ll get there soon, he told himself.
    He stopped in small cities, towns, villages. He worked as a servant , a childminder for a rich family, a farm hand, an oddjob man on building sites, a carpenter’s apprentice. Yet in every place his feet would begin to itch, his hopes would carry him on. He kept walking. The seasons changed from bracken to jasmine to gingko. His bare feet blistered into hooves.
    His seventeenth birthday snuck up on him and yet he kept on pushing north, pursuing that part of him he could not yet name, following dirt roads etched through the granite and long grass by the stubborn steps of driven mules. Wheat fields, barley fields, whole days spent longing for his parents.
    And as he walked, Jinyi thought of those snippets of conversations he had heard in the backrooms of restaurants: that the Communists would bring the country a new beginning so that getting a job wouldn’t depend on knowing someone’s uncle or brother or providing them with a fistful of cash; so there wouldn’t be any more foreigners squeezing the marrow out of the country; so rice would be shared equally between everyone. Jinyi’s stomach whined, moaned. He found these ideas hard to believe, knowing, after all, that with a little rice wine and the promise of better things peoplecan get carried away. If it were possible to swap lives, he reasoned, the whole world would already have become an electric storm of flitting souls.

    Walking is hard work. I should know, I trudged behind him most of the way. Why did I bother? I know what it is like to spend your life chasing an elusive dream. And since we’ve got a little time, on the long trek between Hebei and Manchuria, I may as well tell you how I ended up here too.
    My real name is Zao Jun, and before I was the Kitchen God I was an ordinary mortal, just like you. I assume you are already familiar with my face, my finely curled moustache and long black goatee, for there was a time when every house in the country kept my likeness above the stove, and quite a few are now doing so again. There are many who wish to slander me for reasons I cannot quite fathom – if they envy the gods then they have no real idea of what we do – and have put about a story that depicts me as a horny old fool. They assert that I abandoned my wife after falling in love with a beautiful young woman; that I was then visited by bad luck, and lost the young woman, all my money and even my sight; that I stumbled starving through the forests until I was finally taken in and fed by a sympathetic woman who I confessed my sins to; that in doing so I cried such remorseful tears that my eyes were healed and I saw that the woman who had treated me so well was my old ever-loving wife. They go on to say that I was so overcome by shame that I then threw myself into the stove. However, let me tell you that there is no truth in this tale – its only purpose seems to be to tarnish my reputation.
    I would never have abandoned my wife for someone else, for my wife was the most beautiful woman in our village. I loved her the first moment I saw her, following her father to the market