It Turned Out She Had a Boyfriend on the Island

1.

I met Ah Hai at market. Among the local stalls of vegetables, fruit and household goods, his stood out: a handcart hung with wooden spoons, chopping boards, chopsticks and marionettes he had made. His hair was braided to his waist; he wore a cowboy hat, leather jacket, faded jeans and battered boots. A guitar rested beside the cart, and whenever no one was buying he played. Everyone seemed to know him. He asked eighty yuan for a spoon. Seeing that every one had been slowly chiselled and was different, I timidly offered fifty, afraid of offending him.

To my surprise he said cheerfully, ‘Take it.’

The walnut-wood spoon felt smooth. He handed me a little bottle of pale oil and told me to rub it in from time to time so the wood would not mould.

After so long in this small town, I had never met anyone like him. ‘Did you make all these things yourself?’

‘All of them. And these CDs have music I played myself.’ He pointed to a stack in cardboard sleeves.

Hesitantly, I said that I played guitar too, though badly.

His eyes widened. ‘Really? Try this.’ He handed me the guitar and I played Kotaro Oshio’s Twilight.

Ah Hai laughed. ‘You clearly practise often.’

Later he said he had noticed me long before: on market days I shuffled past with a book in my hand and a basket on my back, carrying very few vegetables.

After that he often came to the tea shop. He carried an enamel mug used as often for beer as for tea. His playing was instinctive, never confined by chord progressions, and melodies appeared of their own accord. Sometimes I asked him to repeat one.

He would grin sheepishly. ‘Already forgotten it.’

He asked what I read.

I gave him Schopenhauer’s The Wisdom of Life, then took The World as Will and Representation from the upstairs shelf and lent him that too.

Two weeks later he returned them. ‘How was it?’ I asked.

Embarrassed, he admitted he had finished neither. ‘How do you manage to read this?’

‘Schopenhauer is among the easier philosophers. Once you understand him, Nietzsche, Sartre, Russell and Heidegger become clearer.’ I felt a sudden, petty pride that I surpassed Ah Hai in something. ‘Isn’t much of his language plain, like a patient elder teaching you?’

Ah Hai shook his head, unconvinced.

‘You’re so good with wood. You’ll improve quickly at reading too.’

‘This is far harder than woodwork.’ He laughed. ‘How about you lend me books, and I teach you carpentry?’

2.

Ah Hai’s broad courtyard held granaries, a pond, animal pens, chickens and a small garden of mint, greens, coriander and spring onions. He avoided restaurants and sourced everything carefully: village-brewed soy sauce, coarse salt from coastal pans, cloudy local rapeseed oil. Even his fried eggs were delicious. The chickens and rice were old varieties, he said—long-legged birds that ran, and rice that insects ate because no pesticide had been used.

Periodically he ate no meat, saying it dulled the senses and made accidents more likely. Both hands were covered in grimy plasters; one thumbnail, struck by a hammer, was split and black. Counting the wounds, he laughed. ‘Afraid of pain? You cannot do carpentry without getting hurt.’

I laughed too. ‘Perhaps I’ll quit before I collect this many.’

First he taught me the local woods: chestnut, pine, fir, walnut, water-gourd, catalpa and many unnamed species. Living trees could not simply be felled, but dead and fallen ones were plentiful. He cut them into useful sizes, hired mules for large timbers and carried spoon wood down himself.

‘Think of it as a hike,’ he encouraged me on our first trip. At 2,500 metres I was gasping far behind him, body and mind both long out of order. Near noon we crossed scrub forest to a meadow and stream below a grassy slope. Relieved, he said there were no forks and he would wait in the valley ahead, then ran off like a deer.

I washed in the icy stream, rested under the clouds and continued. At the ridge a figure with flying hair called down: Ah Hai, high in a tree, as fearless and delighted as Jack Sparrow on a mast. I asked whether this was the valley.

‘Not yet. I was still afraid you’d get lost.’ He threw down spotted, worm-eaten pears. Their firm flesh was astringent, but left my mouth and throat sweet.

The valley held many dead walnut trees and a lightning-burned clearing of charred trunks beneath open sky. Exhausted, I lay in the shade. As I drifted off, Ah Hai removed his shirt, drew an axe from his belt and split a branch from its trunk. Birds rose through the seams of forest and sunlight.

When I woke, his basket was full. I read two pages of Fear and Trembling. A thin cloud rose like smoke in the clear southwestern sky. Ah Hai glanced up. ‘Let’s go. It may rain this evening.’

We took a shortcut down, crossed a ridge and after two hours saw the town’s cooking smoke and rice fields shining at sunset. Fiery clouds filled the sky. ‘Doesn’t it look perfectly clear?’ I asked.

‘It does. I thought it would rain.’

That night, tremendous rain woke me and I sat listening.

3.

When there was no market, Ah Hai set up in the old square. He sold woodwork, played songs and offered his CDs while passers-by dropped coins into the guitar case. Spoons sold; the intricate puppets rarely did. He was a local celebrity. His clear voice carried across the square, often singing Overload’s song beginning, ‘Light this cigarette; let its glow explode against the night.’

At dusk the town entered a quiet blue glow, darkening little by little into ink. Ah Hai switched on a lamp made from an old horse lantern. Visitors gathered around his music. In high spirits he asked me to play. Something rigid inside me flinched; finally I offered another Oshio piece.

‘Come on—anything.’ He handed me the guitar and freely gave up his seat.

That autumn I studied woodwork seriously. He first gave me branches to strip. After two days with a cleaver, mine looked gnawed by dogs; Ah Hai could square a log with a few axe blows, snap an ink line and plane it true. My blade bounced or stuck and blisters formed between thumb and finger.

‘Find the grain and follow it. Of course the blade catches when you fight it,’ he said like a philosopher. Wood was layered, not the stubborn solid I had imagined; once I understood its growth, it became soft. My strokes settled into rhythm and the bark peeled cleanly. On the third day I proudly stacked the finished pieces, expecting to learn planing. He held my knife to the light. ‘You use it wrongly. I sharpen it and you blunt it again. Look.’

Tiny chips marked the silver edge.

‘Enter the wood at the right angle. It preserves the edge and saves your strength.’ He brought whetstones, a white bucket and grey cloth. ‘Before work, sharpen the knife.’

Each face of the stone had a different grit, with a small smooth stone for polishing. I sat on the step from morning until its shadow shrank at noon, then moved into shade. Grey slurry glittered with metal. I could see no improvement and pressed harder. Ah Hai stopped me: ‘Force rolls the edge; soon you’ll grind away the whole knife. Find the balance, stop when you feel it, and work both sides evenly.’

‘How far?’

He considered. ‘When the edge seems to vanish—when it has no thickness—you can stop.’

Again and again I pushed the blade and rinsed away the slurry. The clutter in my mind flickered like old film, distorted and drifted off. I watched sunlight swell and soften, roof shadows rise and recede. In the pale blue light the blade came into balance: tilted either way, its edge was only a bright line.

I remembered a mathematics teacher defining a line as ‘length without width.’ Could I tell him now that I finally understood? If I stood the blade upright and stepped across, it would divide me; a school of fish would split around it and meet again. The edge had departed the body of the knife and become the very idea of an edge.

4.

Tall chestnuts filled Ah Hai’s courtyard, roaring like surf in wind and dropping nuts all summer. I brought tea things and drank beneath them, at ease among the brick paving and tiled granaries. Once a county grain depot, the place had been privately rented for renovation; Ah Hai guarded it in exchange for living there rent-free.

We bought two geese from a hillside village. They sailed through the pond and courtyard with intelligence, independence and swagger, unlike timid, purposeless chickens. ‘We should be those geese,’ I told him, ‘not chickens.’

‘Why?’

‘Chickens are a rabble.’

I learned to plane table legs, fixing wood to the bench and working towards the ink line. Golden, fragrant shavings curled around my feet. When my back hurt, Ah Hai corrected me: use the whole body, not only arms and legs—‘send yourself forward like a fish.’ Suddenly the motion flowed and one unbroken shaving unfurled with a clean hiss. A good carpenter is a figure skater, dancing on a blade.

For the tabletop he used an old boat plank from a fisherman. Lake water had replaced its organic matter, so insects would never eat it; its surface resembled a riverbed or an old person’s skin. I asked why he did not choose something flat.

‘Don’t you think this is beautiful?’

Meanwhile he taught himself carving. He circled a burl, stared from one angle and asked whether it resembled the Buddha’s head. I could not see it and merely agreed. Days later he had released a smiling Maitreya with chisels, preserving the burl so its features seemed to have grown inside the wood.

The town became a ship sailing towards the pole, darkness arriving earlier each day. As Xishuangbanna’s autumn tea sprouted and we finished our first table, I booked a flight to Jinghong. Tourist season also began: art students, older photographers and backpackers crowded the streets. Ah Hai’s spoons sold quickly, and he plunged back into the mountains.

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5.

Xishuangbanna felt equatorial. Shops closed under the distorted heat, then crowds poured out at dusk among market lights and stalls of shaved ice, grills, salads, fruit and mango sticky rice. After leaving the tea mountains, I lingered two days, sending Ah Hai photographs of Dai pottery and woodblock prints.

He replied with photographs of a woman darker than he was, long-haired, holding a Fujifilm camera, in a black biker jacket and white shirt. Her teeth shone when she smiled; she seemed about his height.

‘Meet Mu Xin,’ he wrote.

Another picture showed them on a wild pear branch, leaf-shadow scaled across their faces. In a blue hand-dyed dress, Mu Xin gripped the branch with closed eyes while Ah Hai gently held her wrist.

Mu Xin was a travel photographer living on a Thai island, where she photographed couples and surfed. She photographed Ah Hai shirtless and upside down high in a tree like an ape, and grinning through a hollow trunk in a headscarf.

Two days before I returned, she flew back to the island but promised to return. Energised, Ah Hai planned a tree house for them. Tropical fruit began arriving by post—custard apples, wax apples, guavas and jackfruit. We ate frantically before it spoiled, but more came; Mu Xin was a tap left running. I dreamed that fruit flooded from the granary and buried me.

I began a chair while Ah Hai sketched the tree house. I had learned mortise-and-tenon joints, half joints, dovetails and butterfly keys, and he no longer helped. We searched the hills for open ground near water and a route for pack animals, settling on the wild pear tree. After repeated talks, the village committee signed a forest lease and we bought large logs, beams, rafters and boards.

His eyes shone as he described their future: ‘When Mu Xin returns, we’ll live in the mountains, keep bees, grow vegetables and have a white horse. We’ll come down only for market. You alone will know where we live, and you can visit.’

‘Why only me?’

‘Because you’re my friend,’ he said easily.

The energy lasted only days. Ah Hai confessed that Mu Xin’s return was delayed: it turned out she had a boyfriend on the island. I did not know how to comfort him and lost interest in my chair. The covered timber lay untouched. He still went to the square, but sang less, leaning against the cart with wine, face flushed and speech blurred.

One day he asked, ‘What if Mu Xin never comes back?’

How could I know? His dejection made us awkward together. I visited less and stayed at the tea shop. In winter’s thinned light my own spirit weakened; perhaps, I thought, that was the end of carpentry.

6.

Later Ah Hai came to the shop, somewhat restored. Apologetically, testing the ground, he asked whether I would help prepare the boards after all.

At the granary I found several new carved heads—wrathful guardians with flying hair, ready to fire lightning from their eyes. His skill had advanced again.

Spring rose and the courtyard trees quietly budded. The mornings were cold but bearable. Ah Hai had cut the pieces and numbered them in brush ink. We sanded and repaired them, then assembled them on the bricks in the shape of the house. I could see it complete: south window, small terrace and ladder, with a bed and folding table in the triangular room.

I made two walnut oars and gave him one. We promised to row together when summer swelled the river.

After work he cooked supper in a hammered copper pot over wood, adding fennel, spring onion and coarse salt. The meat was firm and juicy. When I asked if it was duck, he said, ‘Haven’t you noticed the geese are gone?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Where is the other one?’

‘Mu Xin and I ate it last time.’ He roared with laughter. I had no answer, and the delicious meat turned to straw in my mouth.

At the summer solstice I helped carry the timber uphill with six pack animals. Long beams rolled behind horses; boards and rafters were tied to mules. Goats wandered through streams and forest, bells ringing as they grazed and defecated on the slopes. The pear blossom was nearly gone and small green fruit hung beneath the leaves. A year had passed since my first visit.

We spent two days unloading, covering the wood and building scaffolding. I left the construction to Ah Hai and came down, not seeing him for a long time.

Summer rain followed. Swallows flew low beneath heavy evening clouds and red dragonflies hovered. Each morning the river was mistier and muddier. I tended the shop, studied cast-iron kettles and drank cooling raw Pu’er. One day a woman resembling Mu Xin passed: dark skin, long hair, leather jacket over a brilliant white dress. She glanced inside like an old acquaintance with whom I shared a complicated past, then hurried away. The image stayed with me.

A powerful coastal typhoon reached Yunnan in midsummer. Wind shook the windows and rain leaked through the tiles onto my bed. On a clearer day I set out for the mountain, only for rain to return. Soaked goats shivered in mud; uprooted trees lay with earth still clinging to their roots. From a distance I saw the house’s platform and heavy supporting posts. Ah Hai, in a blue raincoat, moved tools beneath a makeshift shelter. Something stirred in me, but I did not approach. I waited among the trees, then walked back down.

The storm that separated everyone must have separated other things as well. Lightning flamed like dragons for days. Then word came that a strike had started a forest fire. Firefighters cut emergency breaks. Smoke rose from the mountain, lit an unreal rose-red by the sun; for a moment the world seemed frozen and unreal.

Ah Hai abandoned his tools and materials. The one thing he carried down was my thin blue-grey copy of The Problems of Philosophy, marked by a row of black fingerprints.

When I returned in winter, the burned hillside and the tree house’s remains had been black wreckage. After snow, everything looked orderly and white again.

22 December 2021