Stories from Fujian, China: Second Volume of Collected Stories of Jianhui Gao

By Jianhui Gao

The essays are about the daily life. Seven of them have been published in Chinese in (Sanming Daily). Here, the author has translated the essays, published and unpublished, into English for this book.

Of all the fictions, five have also been published in both Chinese and English by AuthorHouse entitled A collection of short stories by Jianhui Gao. Here the author added other six fictions. He wishes they could interest the readers as they have an exotic flavor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504937627

Jianhui Gao

About the author: Jianhui, Gao, male, born in 1950, a retired, medium-titled, English-teaching teacher. Graduated from the English Department, Ningde Teachers’ Institute, after he was out to grass, he worked hard at English studying and English reading. His ancestral home is ShouNing County, Fujian province. Now he lives in a county among the mountains in the west of Fujian province, China. About the English proofreader: Chen xin Ms. Chen Xin, a graduate of Fuzhou University, majoring in English, she works in a foreign enterprise. She obtained her MBA in Strategic Carbon Management from the university of East Anglia in 2011. She is from Fuzhou city, Fujian province, China. E-mail: [e-mail]

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The Nanyang Township

This morning we took the bus on schedule to NanYang Township (small town). The bus ran along the highway which is parallel with the river most time. The river water after raining was somewhat turbid. Among the verdure on the hillsides or on the banks across the river and the streams, the villages were no longer the type of houses with earthen walls and black pan-tiled roofs. The newly-built houses are of two or three storeys or more, whose walls are made of red or gray bricks. Some of the steel-bar-embedded, concrete-roof bungalows and western-style villas stand on the terraced slopes, some of them scattered on the higher bank. Some villages that are familiar to me flashed away when I looked out of the bus window.

We reached NanYang township. It is nearly thirty years since I left NanYang township. At that time it was, and now it is still where the above villages' government (below the county government) is located. In the evening once we often walked on the highway which passes the small town. Under the one-arch bridge made of stones the pellucid stream water rippled. When we walked from the street to the highway, we should pass through the one-arch bridge. At that time a teacher and I often went fishing at some curves of the stream. The teacher used the earthworms, crickets and some insects as the baits. In the gurgling, rapid fords, as soon as he flung his bait at the string's end, a skipping small fish was off the water. He said that the fish in spring were fond of warmth. Most of them went to the shallow water of the fords. I took his advice on fishing, so each time the fish I hooked gradually increased from seven or eight fish to over ten.

Now the stone-made arched bridge and the small bus station disappeared. NanYang township ahead of me is obviously a little township with innumerable buildings, a wide street and quite a few lanes. At that time a colleague of mine and I once lived in a wooden house with two storeys. The first floor (i.e. the ground floor), whose utility I have forgotten, was dark. Along the wooden stairs to the second floor, there was a room with the wooden-board walls. My colleague and I lived there. In the night, we listened to the gurgling stream running below the window, which is another stream going by NanYang township and meets with the stream under the stone-made arch bridge. The tranquility of the small town’s night came with wisps of night haze. In the morning we went to the canteen less than one hundred meters away for breakfast. It was the township government's canteen. At the time a piece of simmered pork about the size of half a palm was one tenth yuan (0.10 yuan in RMB). I still vaguely remembered its special fragrance. For several times a day we walked to and fro on the smooth, auburn flagstone-made path by the stream. The wooden houses on another side of the path were also old, whose wooden walls were scrubbed very cleanly by the houses’ owners. The houses were as simple and pure as the jute-made or ramie-made apron worn by the maiden in old, remote village on her abdomen. I also remembered that at the end of the township there was an old house, only a stone's throw from the arched stone bridge and the small bus station on the highway respectively. The house was big and very old with ragged earthen walls. Being looked at from the street of the small town, the house which one could reached by walking on a stretch of earthen trail like the earthen ridges between the paddy fields, had black pan-tiled roof, opened gate and dilapidated windows. The house showed its beams and wooden floor boards on its hollow upstairs over the earthen walls. By the look of it, one knew it was an old, abandoned house. I had been to the old house for several times. A teacher, older than I, and his family lived in some rooms in one side of the empty house. However, the two or three rooms and a kitchen were scrubbed cleanly. In the night they slept in the house which almost couldn’t stop anyone from coming in. The teacher was a non-native. Where was the owner of the house? What happened in the house long time before? I think highly of the teacher and his family as they lived so simple and didn't envy other teachers who lived in better houses than they did.

Oh, the dumpling shop and the rice-brewed red wine shop where I often went to buy the dumplings and the red wine are missing. Also does the made-of-rice-powder-steamed-thin-pancake shop disappear, which once stood by the stream, and whose long pillars on one side, made of Chinese-fir-trunks, stuck to the stream water, whose another side was the wide window from the height of a man, when its pieces of wooden boards were taken away in the daytime, the window brought in the breeze from all directions. The each steamed thin cake was steamed on the delicate sieve plate made of bamboo thin strips. (In fact the sifting plate has so tiny holes that anything can't be sifted from it.) The shop keeper scratched the round bamboo sieve plate for a circle with a chopstick, a round white rice cake, as thin as the leaves of lotus, is rolled, and he put the cake in a bowl with some dressing of sauce and chives. When the traveler ate it, the village would become a place which he wished to visit again. And the bean-curd in the bean-curd shops, the pork on the pork-stalls, the daylilies picked from the hills and the streamside….

This time we came to NanYang small town mainly for burning the incense for our maternal grandma. Maternal grandma was very ordinary in her life. When she was nineteen years old, her husband, our maternal grandpa died of illness, then she had been a widow until she left the world. To place her ashes in the cemetery of the temple should agree with her wish too when she was alive. We walked on the twisted hill path, passed the temple and a three-storey building beside the temple, came to the cemetery. We brothers and sisters ignited the incense, and blessed her in the paradise, then set some fruits and cakes on the flat stone which grandma liked to eat in her life. We also burned some hell's money according to local customs. After that we also ignited some firecrackers. The tomb was on the hillside. There is a village in the opposite valley afar. The tea bushes and camellia trees are very exuberant on the hill. below the tomb there are many plots of dry terraced land and paddy fields in the valley. The opposite hills are not high, and covered with shrubs and pine trees. The surroundings are very green.

I think of the town-level middle school here in NanYang small town where I taught about thirty years ago. At the time I didn't know that there was a small temple here. But whenever I walked on the highway in the evening, I often looked at the hills thither, imagining that on the hills with the mist like their veils there were white pear flowers and the camellia flowers, also white, blooming. Now we passed by the temple again. The Buddhism worshipper, a vegetarian woman who has lived in the temple for several decades, greeted us. It was said she adopted two girl babies many years before. Now one girl was studying in a vocational college, another girl was working in a factory. I looked at the serene temple. Here the hills are more beautiful than I had imagined.

(Published in Chinese in <> on June 26, 2012.)

The Eyot (Islet) in the River

You are the alluvial eyot formed in the rushing water with many types of shapes and make yourself perfect perpetually. You have an erudite bosom, holding up the rubbish, silt, gravel, rotten, decaying masses of leaves and sprigs and so on. It is these that bring you life’s buds. And then gradually there is the green grass, or shrubs, perhaps at the beginning only tiny one or two clumps of them. Eventually, they spread all over the islet. There are also bulrushes, bamboos, moss…. Whenever the bus runs along the bank of the river, I see the emerald eyots on the green, rippling river, my eyes brighten up right away, praising your uncompromising life strength sincerely. I like the line of white egrets taking off from your bosom in the misty drizzle, the quivering necks and spreading wings being exquisite poems which the fading spring left. I like the rustling boat harboring on your bend, and a fishing man wearing a coir raincoat and a hat made of the bamboo thin strips with bamboo leaves embedded in between leisurely angling.

In the night, the cliffs by the river are so craggy, the solitary moon above the mountains is so serene and bored. The nocturnal birds are so cryptic and covert, while you are so smart and deliberate. You separate the green water friskily. I wonder who has built the big dam across the river?

Have you experienced something on a deserted, wild eyot in your busy life? Do you vacillate in the scourging cold wind and the sunshine on a sultry day? Are you as serene as the void vale in the imminent storm or the freezing sleet? Have you once embraced the breezes of friendship, and cherished the smiles of the first flower buds? Have you once changed the sighs of flowing water into diligent pursuance, and never doubted the sunlight of dawn will brighten the stray, solitary wild duck or the stranded boat?

In spring you are often shaded in the hazy mist and wrack like a virgin. Looking at the eyot afar, I really have a feeling of an ethereal mirage. At summer nights, the breezes flow, occasional lamps glint. It’s the fishery boat at night coming upriver, the bamboo pole touches the riverside’s cobbles producing crisp music like the chirps of the insects. The fishermen often cast some fish-nets, hooks with bails by the eyot at night, then they go to get in the fish at dawn the next day. The eyot is somewhat wild but keeps steps with the rhythms of modern life in the city…

(Published in Chinese in <> on March 24, 2009.)

Building a House

Now, like in many other villages, in my home village there are many newly-built fashionable houses with red-brick