'1
Siyata Di-Shmaya
Hillerh, I have bad news," said Chen-Hua, waking me from my nap in
our fourth-floor room in the Wenchuan County Teachers Center Guest
House. The news must have been bad, because he usually pronounced all
the l's in my name without difficulty.
"The police are here," Chen-Hua said. "They say we must move
immediately. They say this is not a hotel for tourists. They say we
broke the law by going to the Chiang village today. It is in a
restricted area."
"Restricted for whom?"
"For foreigners. We are close to Tibet."
"Tibet is hundreds of miles from here. Who told them we went
to the
village?"
"I don't know. Perhaps our driver."
Of course. The man had driven like a maniac, using his horn
instead of his brakes. An hour ago he had been in our room, demanding
the two hundred yen promised him for the day. The day had ended for
him in midmorning at the bottom of a pitted jeep trail he had refused
to drive his jeep up, leaving us to climb to the village on foot. In
the end he had settled for fifty — and the satisfaction of snitching.
My watch said five-thirty. Although it was the week of the
summer solstice, the sun had already dropped behind the high
mountains across the river. The river's roar pounded through the open
window like a trucking route.
"Have you told Rabbi Avichail?"
"No," Chen-Hua said.
"Well, he's not going to move now," I said. "It's too close
to the Sabbath. Go tell the police it's against our religion to
change hotels before tomorrow night."
Chen-Hua stood in the doorway beside the earthenware spittoon
that the Wenchuan County Teachers Center Guest House provided for its
guests. He was wearing the green shorts and cream-colored polo shirt
with black squiggles that were the only clothing he had brought with
him and holding the transistor radio he took everywhere. He was
wondering how to explain our religion to the police.
"Go tell them," I repeated.
Chen-Hua must have stopped on his way down to the lobby at
Avichail's room on the second floor, because when I knocked on the
door, Avichail already knew. Dressed in his trousers, a large knitted
skullcap, and a tallit katan, the fringed undershirt worn by Orthodox
Jews, he was steering a head of cabbage through a hand-turned grinder
on the dresser. The hotel table was covered by a white cloth set with
four paper plates and cups, an open can of Israeli gefilte fish, a
bottle of Carmel-Mizrachi grape juice in lieu of wine, and two
crackers standing in for the traditional challah. Avichail's
traveling companion, Micha Gross, sat on a bed, slicing the main
course for our Sabbath meal, thick slabs of Israeli baloney.
"When will you pray?" I asked. There was no pressing need to
decide on a course of action. Chen-Hua was still talking to the
police, a conversation Avichail deemed it best to keep out of.
Whatever came of it, he and Micha would stay put unless dragged off
bodily.
"Six-thirty," he said.
I glanced down at the courtyard on my way back to the fourth
floor. Two soldiers with rifles were standing beside a pickup truck.
Its tailgate down, it was waiting for our bags.
The Teachers Center Guest House was the only hotel that had
seemed livable to us when we arrived the night before in Wenchuan, a
city of fifty thousand in the Min River Valley of western Szechwan
Province. It had toilets that actually flushed, faucets that yielded
hot water, electric fixtures that did not dangle from the walls with
copper wires extruding from their casings like the tongues of
poisonous snakes. No one had told us it was reserved for teachers.
The manager, Mrs. Li, a carefully groomed woman with a smile of hot
lipstick and cool amusement, appeared happy to take our money. The
place looked empty. It would be a blow to have to leave it, even
though Wenchuan was a drab town that attracted few travelers, except
for those on their way to Juizhai Gou, a famed nature reserve a day's
drive past the valley's head to the north.
I showered and stepped out of the bathroom to find Chen-Hua
jumping on his bed. He leaped three or four times, straining to touch
the ceiling, fell back on the mattress, reached for his radio on the
night table, and switched it on.
"Chen-Hua, what are you doing?"
"Exercising." He held the radio close to his ear, playing
with the dial. "It is good for the leg muscles. Soon President
Clinton will give a press conference."
The president was in Beijing. Chen-Hua did not have much in
the way of muscles. He was twenty-one years old, an interpreter we
had picked up in Chengdu, Szechwan's capital, and weighed perhaps a
hundred pounds with his transistor. Yet on our ascent to the village
he not only had carried all our packs, he had run ahead with them
like a gazelle.
"What happened with the police?"
"The police." Chen-Hua had a Chinese habit of thoughtfully
repeating the last part of one's question. "They are considering
letting us stay until tomorrow night. Mrs. Li spoke to someone on the
telephone. I think he was the local party boss."
The radio glued to his ear, he leaned over the edge of the
bed to switch on the television while opening a book. Presently he
asked, "There is an English sentence — 'That was quite an
accomplishment.' Is it also correct to say, 'The man paid the woman
an accomplishment'?"
"No," I said. "What he paid was a compliment."
He looked again at his dictionary and asked, "Then what
exactly is the meaning of the phrase 'A left-handed compliment'?"
I was becoming fond of Chen-Hua. "Suppose I told you," I
said, "that for a Chinese you were extremely intelligent. That would
be pretty lefthanded."
He went back to his book. Troubled, he glanced up from
it. "So you think I am intelligent only for a Chinese?"
By the time I had extricated myself it was time for the
Sabbath prayer. "It will take half an hour," I told Chen-Hua. "Then
I'll come for you and we'll eat."
"Oh, good," he said. Having never before tasted Western
cuisine, he had developed a liking for canned Israeli hummus and
cucumber-and-tomato salad smeared with mayonnaise. His face fell each
time I insisted, desperate to get away from such fare, that he
accompany me to a local restaurant instead of partaking of Avichail's
kosher food.
I returned to the second floor. The soldiers and the pickup
truck were gone from the courtyard. Avichail and Micha, in clean
white shirts, were already swaying back and forth, facing west toward
the river and Jerusalem. Unlike them, I had to use a little prayer
book I'd brought from Israel, because I no longer remembered what I'd
known by heart as a boy. Only now did I notice that, by an odd
coincidence, the book's silver-plated cover was stamped with the
names and symbols of the biblical tribes: Reuben, Simon, Judah, Dan,
Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Ephraim, and
Manasseh.
Avichail's prayer was pleasant. It had a droning sadness like
my father's, a melancholy that asked for nothing but its own
bittersweet longing. Only his melody for "Come, My Love, to Meet the
Bride" was different, importuning. It had a faster, more urgent tempo:
Shake off the dust from thee and arise,
My people, and don thy glorious clothes;
The son of Jesse soon arrives;
My soul's redemption draweth nigh.
When the prayer was over I went to get Chen-Hua, and the four
of us sat down at the table. Avichail recited the Kiddush, the
blessing for the fruit of the vine, over the grape juice and rose to
go to the bathroom, followed by Micha and me. "Oh, wash hands," Chen-
Hua said happily, coming after us. It was the one Jewish ritual that
made sense to him. Hands washed, he asked Avichail, "What will we do
about a hotel tomorrow night?"
"Mmmmm!" Avichail said, putting a finger to his lips and
shaking his head. "Mmm-mmmmmm!" Unable to explain that one was
prohibited from talking between hand washing and bread blessing, he
waited for Micha to take his seat. "Blessed art thou, O God, our
Lord, King of the Universe, who bringeth forth bread from the earth,"
he intoned, breaking the crackers and giving each of us a half. "You
may speak now," he told Chen-Hua.
But when Chen-Hua repeated the question, Arichail still
refused to answer it. It was the Sabbath; vexing and worrisome topics
were forbidden. "Eat," he said, passing the cole slaw.
Chen-Hua took the bowl but not the hint. "My opinion is that
we should leave Wenchuan," he said. "It is boring here anyway. We can
go to Jiuzhai Gou. There is much to see there."
Avichail and Micha exchanged glances. I said, in Hebrew, "I
think it's time to tell our friend what we're up to. We can't go on
hiding it from him."
"I'm not so sure," Micha said. "If the police question him,
he may talk. What do you think, Eliahu?"
Avichail said, "I don't think it makes much difference at
this point. You can tell him after dinner. Have some potato salad."
The potatoes had been boiled in an electric kettle and drenched in
mayonnaise too. "Ya ribon o-o-lam ve'olmaya, ve'olma-a-a-aya,"
Avichail sang, breaking into a Sabbath hymn. Micha joined him. They
both had good voices. We sang some more hymns and recited the Grace
After Meals.
When the table was cleared, we went for a walk by the river.
Micha and Avichail fell behind, and I strolled ahead with Chen-
Hua. "So you've had enough of Wenchuan," I said.
"Yes. Jiuzhai Gou is beautiful."
"So is the Min River Valley."
In a way, once you got past the industry in its lower
stretches, it was, with its gray, angrily foaming water bordered by a
narrow strip of farmed land on each bank and towered over by green
peaks, heavily terraced below and shooting up to heights of nine and
ten thousand feet.
"There is nothing in it but Chiang villages."
"Look, Chen-Hua," I said, "there's something you should know.
The Chiang are the purpose of this trip."
"The Chiang?" We had turned onto a bridge that crossed the
Min slightly below its confluence with its tributary, the To.
"They're a people found nowhere else in China."
"But what is interesting about them?"
"Rabbi Avichail suspects they are lost Jews."
Chen-Hua consulted a mental dictionary. "I think lost means
misplaced," he said in puzzlement.
Since he knew no more about the Bible than most Chinese, it
took a long walk up the To's right bank for me to explain. We were
out of the center of town now, and the low current of the Chinese
street lamps left the buildings in dingy obscurity. A few families
still sat at their dinners at the sidewalk restaurants, where the
day's dirty pots and pans had been piled on the outdoor stoves for
washing in the street.
Long ago, I told Chen-Hua, when the Jewish people first lived
in their land, they were divided into twelve tribes: two in the
southern kingdom of Judah and the others in the northern kingdom of
Israel. The tribes were small, surrounded bypowerful enemies, and in
720 B.C.E. the northern capital of Samaria was conquered by one of
them, the Assyrians. According to the Bible, they carried away the
northern tribes into exile and replaced them with people uprooted
from elsewhere. The exiles were never heard from again.
"What happened to them?"
"No one knows. Some think they assimilated into their new
environment and disappeared. Others say that only the ruling class
was carried off and that the peasantry stayed behind and mixed with
the newcomers to form a people called the Samaritans. Their religion
was similar to that of the Judeans, who became the ancestors of
today's Jews. Most of the Samaritans eventually converted to
Christianity and Islam, and today their descendants are Palestinian
Moslems. Less than a thousand of them still practice the old
Samaritan religion."
"You still have not said who was lost."
"For thousands of years there have been legends about the
northern tribes still existing somewhere in remote and inaccessible
regions. People have searched for them all over."
"Has anyone found them?"
"Many have claimed to. The scholars don't take them
seriously."
"Then Rabbi Avichail is not a scholar."
"No. He's a rabbi from Jerusalem who believes some of the
legends are true and has traveled widely trying to prove that. He's
come to China to investigate the Chiang."
"But the Chiang don't look like you Jews," Chen-Hua
said. "They look like us Han."
"That's true." When they weren't wearing their traditional
clothing, I couldn't tell them apart from Chinese. "Rabbi Avichail
believes they may be lost Jews because of some books written by a man
named Thomas Torrance."
It began to drizzle, the first rain we had seen in China.
Chen-Hua and I passed the last bridge across the To and headed toward
the toll gate at the road to Songpan and Jiuzhai Gou. Trucks loaded
with big logs were parked near the barrier. All the way from Chengdu
they had kept rolling by, the logging trucks, carting away whole
forests from up north.
"Torrance was a Scots missionary who lived among the Chiang
after World War One. They still spoke their old language and
practiced their old religion then, not like the villagers we met
today. He wanted to make Christians of them. But the more he came to
know them, the more he believed they were descended from an ancient
tribe of Israel. Rabbi Avichail wants to see if the customs and
beliefs he described in his books still exist."
"But we saw today that they didn't."
"That was only in one village. Rabbi Avichail hopes to find
Chiang who are more knowledgeable. The problem is that the
authorities mustn't know what we're doing. We didn't ask for a
research permit, because it could have been denied us or taken too
long to be issued."
We reached the barrier and turned back. The blurry lights of
Wenchuan were now ahead of us.
"Does that mean we will stay in this place?"
"If we can."
"We will not go to Jiuzhai Gou?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Do you think the Chiang are lost Jews?"
"I doubt it."
Chen-Hua mulled this over while we retraced our steps along
the To. He said, "Hillerh, I am very disappointed."
I couldn't say I was. My expectations had been low from the start.
I first met Eliahu Avichail the year before, in the summer of
1997. For some time I had heard of him as a Lost Tribes hunter, one
of the last of a nearly extinct breed that had once roamed the earth
more prolifically. Scholars and academics considered him a
crackpot. "You've got to be kidding," one said when I told him that I
planned to join the rabbi on an expedition.
Yet in the living room of his small Jerusalem apartment,
through which his grandchildren wandered freely in search of
chocolates and crayons, he had seemed level-headed enough as he
described his travels to Moslems in Kashmir, Tatars in Dagestan,
Knanites in Kerala, the Karens in Burma, and other peoples whose
customs supposedly resembled those described in the Bible. The
Kashmir trip, made in 1982 in the hope of meeting Pashtuns from
across the border in Pakistan, a country for which his Israeli
passport was invalid, was the first. The Pashtuns had caught his
attention when, while teaching in a religious high school, he came
across literature linking them with ancient Israel. In 1975 he had
given a lecture on the subject at the Rabbi Kook Yeshiva in
Jerusalem, the intellectual bastion of modern Israeli Orthodoxy where
he had studied. Tsvi Yehuda Kook, the yeshiva's head and the son of
its founder, sent for him and said, "If this is true, you can't just
lecture about it. Do something!"
It took him a while. For several years he tried to contact
Pashtun informants through intermediaries. Then he decided to look
for them himself. As his interest in lost Jews widened, so did his
travels. They yielded more than mere knowledge. In Portugal he
reached communities of Marranos, descendants of Jews forceably
converted to Christianity at the time of the Inquisition, and kindled
in them an interest in Judaism. From the northeast Indian states of
Mizoram and Manipur he brought to Israel several hundred men and
women who called themselves B'nei Menashe, or Sons of Menashe, and
claimed descent from the Israelite tribe of Manasseh. Mestizos living
as Jews in the Peruvian Andes were also encouraged by him to come to
Israel. The Indians and Peruvians underwent Orthodox conversions and
applied for Israeli citizenship. Neither the country's rabbinate nor
its interior ministry were happy with the development.
"You mustn't confuse the two things," Avichail told me. "The
Peruvians, like the Portuguese, have nothing to do with the Lost
Tribes. Some of their ancestors were Marranos from Spain who fled the
Inquisition to South America. It followed them there, and they went
underground. All the stories about biblical tribes in the Americas
are nonsense."
A white-bearded, mild-mannered man in his sixties, he had an
obsession that sounded rational once you accepted the initial
premise. "If the Bible says the tribes were carried away and will
return," he maintained, "they were carried away and will return. But
you have to look for them in the right places. That means starting
with the Assyrian empire, which was expanded northward and eastward
by the Babylonians who conquered it and by the Persians who conquered
the Babylonians. The exiled tribes could have moved in the same
directions, migrating along trade and caravan routes until they lost
contact with their southern brothers. The Caucasus, central Asia,
even the Far East — that's where you would expect to find traces of
them. And that's where you do find many traditions and practices
reminiscent of Jewish ones — the growing of ear locks, for example,
or the lighting of Sabbath candles, or the Pashtun joi nemaz, which
is like a Jewish prayer shawl. Today, the people who do or remember
these things are Christians and Moslems, but their ancestors must
have been Jews."
The fax phone rang in his study. He went to check it and came
back with a sheet of paper bearing news from Manipur. An outbreak of
ethnic hostilities in the area had forced many B'nei Menashe to flee
their rural homes for the capital of Imphal. "The situation is
difficult," said the message. "Please help and advise."
"What help can you give?" I asked.
Avichail, who ran a minuscule organization called Amishav, My
People Returneth, looked worried. "I don't know," he said. "We don't
have much money. There's not even enough for the next expedition."
"Where would you go if there was?"
"China. There are people there known as the Chiang. They have
Semitic features, believe they are descendants of Abraham — they call
him Biran or Bilan — and worship a single God named Abba-Malakh. In
times of danger they call out to Him, 'Ya-Weh!'" Abba-Malakh meant
Father-Angel in Hebrew, and Ya-Weh, or Yahweh, was how Bible scholars
believed the sacred four-consonant name of the biblical God, once
commonly transcribed as Jehovah, was pronounced. "Their religion
forbids graven images and has a hereditary priesthood that offers
sacrifices like those in the Bible. The B'nei Menashe and the Karens
have traditions of coming from China, too. I suspect all three groups
are related."
"Well," I said, "if you ever do go to China, perhaps you'll
take me along as a journalist. Maybe I could help with the financing."
"Why not?" said Eliahu Avichail.
It was a deal — and one that, several months before our
planned departure, I nearly backed out of. Avichail's knowledge of
the Chiang had been gleaned from a single author, and one day, while
on a visit in New York, I ventured into the East Asian department of
the Columbia University library to see what else I could find. The
catalog listed several works in Chinese, as well as an article in
English, "The Chiang People of Western Szechuan: The Miscalled 'West
China Jews,'" written by Professor V. R. Schuyler Cammann. It began:
The Chiang people were an ancient tribe of non-Chinese aborigines who
lived in the mountains of west China bordering on Tibet until they
were annihilated or dispersed in recent years. Aside from brief
mention of them by occasional travelers, the only relatively complete
accounts of them in English were written by two missionaries who
lived in Szechuan during the first half of the present century. The
first of these writers was a devout Scotsman with a highly developed
imagination, named Thomas Torrance, who gradually became convinced
that the Chiang were descended from ancient Israelites, and discussed
them with this bias. The other was David Crockett Graham, Ph.D., an
American missionary-anthropologist, who gave straightforward factual
reports on Chiang religion and culture, inevitably exposing the lack
of foundation in Torrance's theory.
Drawing on Graham, Cammann proceeded to demolish Torrance.
The Chiang, he wrote, had been shamanistic animists, not monotheists.
They had also had the bad luck during the Chinese civil war to be in
the way of the Red Army's Long March and to oppose it, in consequence
of which they were treated badly by the Communists. "Even if
survivors might still be found in the former Chiang territory,"
Cammann concluded, "it seems most unlikely that they would retain any
traces of their traditional religion."
I phoned Avichail and told him to cancel our trip.
"Why?"
I recounted the gist of Cammann's article.
"So what?" he said. "If I believed what every professor
wrote, I'd never get past my front door."
He thought as much of the professors as they did of him. A
deal was a deal: we flew to Hong Kong and then to Chengdu.
Nevertheless, we did meet there with Professor Shi Ying Pin of
Szechwan University. A specialist in the province's ethnic
minorities, he caused a vindicated look to be sent in my direction
when he assured Avichail that the Chiang, though reduced in numbers
to a mere 80,000, still existed and practiced their old faith. "In
one God?" Avichail asked eagerly. "One God, they believe in
Him?" "Ummm," answered the professor. It was not quite clear what he
meant by that. He unfolded a map on his desk and drew a circle around
Wenchuan to show us where the Chiang could be found. "Ah! Must ask
proper authorities," he replied when pressed for further details.
Although the village we had visited without police permission was not
far from Wenchuan, it seemed remote by the time we reached it. In
fact, it had seemed remote from the road below: a cluster of gray
houses high up on the terraced flank of a steep mountain, with a tall
stone tower looming above them. Such structures, Torrance had
written, were characteristic of the Chiang, built as early warning
systems and defensive bastions against the Chinese armies that
repeatedly marched into their secluded valleys.
The To River foamed behind us. It looked as treacherous as
the Min, though neither had anything on our driver. Chen-Hua had
found him on a street corner during our first morning in Wenchuan.
Before that, stepping out of the Wenchuan County Teachers Center
Guest House, we had passed a group of elderly people sitting on some
steps. The women wore the blue tunics and black turbans that were a
Chiang trademark, according to my guidebook. "Chiang!" I sang out.
Avichail said to Chen-Hua. "Go. Go ask them where their wise men are."
But the old people did not know where their wise men were and
we walked to the corner to hire a four-by-four. Despite our rations
of kosher food that were doled out as carefully as water in a
lifeboat, I was beginning to realize that we were going to rely
heavily on improvisation. If not for me, we wouldn't even have had a
guidebook, a map, or malaria pills. "Is this Eliahu's usual method?"
I asked Micha as we watched Chen-Hua negotiate with drivers.
"His method is siyata di-shmaya," Micha answered, using the
rabbinic term for "the help of Heaven." He had been with Avichail on
many trips.
If it was siyata di-shmaya, however, that made the next
driver agree to take us to a Chiang village, siyata di-shmaya was out
for lunch when he dumped us at the foot of the mountain. "Just head
up that trail," he said to Chen-Hua, not wanting to stress his new
tires. It would take us half an hour, he promised.
It was more like two and a half. We soon left the trail,
which looped around the mountain's far side, and hiked straight up,
following paths and steppingstones that zigzagged from terrace to
terrace and stopping often to catch our breath. Corn, peppers,
eggplants, and pole beans grew in plots so small that some had only a
single plump plant. Barefoot men and women coming down the mountain
with baskets on their backs or water buckets balanced on their
shoulders glanced wonderingly at us without breaking stride. For part
of the way we were joined by some Tibetan boys looking for farm work.
"Ask them, Chen-Hua," Avichail said, "if they know about a
river that spits rocks."
The Tibetan boys, though, did not actually come from Tibet,
where a nineteenth-century Jewish traveler had reported the existence
of the Sambatyon, the legendary river beyond which the Lost Tribes
were to be found. They came from north of Songpan and were ignorant
of Tibetan geography.
The Chiang village looked empty when we reached it. Most of
its inhabitants were presumably in the fields. The houses, built of
chinked stone and stacked on the mountainside so that the flat roof
of one formed the patio of the one above it, did not look Chinese.
They bore the resemblance, remarked upon by Torrance, to peasant
houses in the Middle East.
"Keep your eyes out for white stones," Avichail said.
Torrance had written at length about these stones, describing them as
the Chiang's most important cult objects. Placed on the rooftops,
where the Chiang sacrificed to the one God, their simple purity
symbolized the "effulgence of His glory." We had seen such a stone in
a museum in Chengdu, a rough sphere of quartz, about a foot in
diameter, that looked like a big lump of frozen dough. Yet while we
had passed shiny outcrops of quartz on our climb, no specimens were
visible on the village roofs. The only signs of religion were
Buddhist posters of guardian spirits glued to some of the front
doors. From afar came the chant of children at their lessons.
We headed for the tower along a passageway of roofs strewn
with farm implements, firewood, heavy logs, and bales of wattling.
Lying cracked in an open shed, like a deposed idol, was a stone bust
of Mao Tsetung. Avichail raced ahead, pointing his video camera like
a gun, sprinting up ladders and across parapets like the paratrooper
he had been before his rabbinical ordination.
All at once, in the fortress-like window of the last house
beneath the tower, appeared two small faces. Another peered out from
behind the parapet of the roof, and a fully visible child was perched
on a bare rafter. A woman looked down, too, from a window above the
first.
No one waved or smiled. No one seemed frightened or amused,
not even when Avichail stumbled and nearly went flying with his
camera. The grave curiosity that tracked us seemed entirely intent on
our next step. Perhaps the natives had peered this way from the trees
at the men stepping out of Columbus's ships. Indeed, once we were all
assembled face to face, the explorers and three generations of the
explored, Chen-Hua established that the village had never before seen
foreigners.
"Ask them," Avichail told him, waving off a grimy thermos of
red tea offered by a spiky-haired man, the head of the
household, "ask where are the white stones. Ask about sacrifice."
Chen-Hua looked like someone who, having been sent to knock
on a strange door for directions, is now told to demand the family
Bible.
Avichail's brusqueness startled me too. It had the same tempo
with which he had made for the stone tower and was no way to approach
total strangers. "Chen-Hua," I said, "tell these people that we saw
their village from the road. Say it looked like a good place to
visit. Ask how many of them live here."
There were, the spiky-haired man replied, forty families.
All farmers?
Chen-Hua translated. All.
Did they often get to Wenchuan?
Often. They shopped and sold their produce there. They had
frequent contact with the Chinese. There was no difference between
them. They spoke the same language and lived the same way.
"Ask if they speak the Chiang language among themselves."
Chen-Hua asked. "No," he said. "Only Han. A terrible dialect."
He sounded indignant at having been brought all the way from
Chengdu to hear such terrible Chinese.
"Not even the old man and woman?"
The children's grandparents stood to one side, the old woman
in the Chiang tunic and turban, the old man with a long-stemmed pipe
on which a high plug of tobacco balanced like an inch of ash on a
cigarette.
"No. All the speakers of the old language are dead."
"What is their religion?"
"It is Buddhism."
"Only Buddhism?"
"Only."
"But before Buddhism," persisted Avichail. "There was a
religion before Buddhism? Ask the old people. The religion before
Buddhism, what was it?"
Chen-Hua gave us their answer. "There was no religion before
Buddhism."
"All right," Avichail said impatiently, "let's go. These
people know nothing. We'll talk to the teacher at the school."
The teacher, however, was gone. It was Friday, and the
school, from which we'd heard the chanting children, had let out
early. We walked back down to the road in less time than it took to
climb up and paid the driver of a passing car to take us to Wenchuan.
"Well," I said that evening, "it looks as if Cammann was
right and Professor Shi was wrong. The Chiang have lost their old
culture. We'll never know if Torrance imagined it all or not."
We had come a long way just to learn that.
"Professor Shi!" scoffed Avichail. "We need educated Chiang,
not Chinese professors. If this is a teachers' center guest house,
there must be a teachers' center. We'll look for it in the morning."
Chen-Hua was asleep when I went upstairs. The score of
Titanic, his sleepy-time music, was still playing on his tape.
In the morning Mrs. Li informed us that the police had agreed to
extend our stay at the Wenchuan County Teachers Center Guest House.
She also confirmed Avichail's hunch. At the south end of town, across
the river, was the District National Normal College for Teachers.
Micha and Avichail said their Sabbath morning prayers, and we
set out. Within the confines of a city, walking on the day of rest
was permitted.
Wenchuan was livelier by day. Fruit and vegetable vendors
lined the sidewalks. Han, Chiang, and Tibetan women wove in and out
of the traffic with baskets and babies on their backs. At the little
restaurants, the big noodle vats blew off clouds of steam. The bells
of the bicycles and rickshaws backed the piping of the sparrows in a
brisk, atonal music. The sparrows, suspended from lampposts in their
bamboo cages, were the only animals in town. For pets and beasts of
burden the Wenchuanese made do with themselves.
The District National Normal College started off well. The
first person we stopped — siyata di-shmaya! — was an English teacher
named Frank. All his students, he told us proudly, had English names
too. Though knowing nothing about the Chiang, Frank invited us to his
campus apartment, made a few phone calls, and informed us that a
librarian who was an expert on the Chiang — siyata di-shmaya again! —
lived on the floor above. But the librarian was out of town, and none
of the scattering of Chiang students sprawled on the lawns with their
Han friends were of any help. "Hello, hello!" they called, waving
their chopsticks above their lunchtime noodle bowls, eager to
practice their English. When asked about the old Chiang religion,
they made insouciant gestures of ignorance.
That evening, after Avichail had recited over the last of the
grape juice the Blessing of Separation between the Sabbath and the
week, we went for a ramble in the streets. Chen-Hua strode ahead.
Suddenly he stopped by a sign at the foot of a dim alley and
said, "There's another school here. It is the District Normal College
for Teachers."
If the District National Normal College had been a flop,
what, at nine o'clock on a Saturday night, could we expect from a
mere District Normal College? Yet when we walked up the alley to the
college gate, this reasoning proved unfounded. The student body of
the District National Normal College, of which the Chiang were a
small minority, came from all over China; the District Normal
College, its lawnless compound shabby by comparison, accepted
students from the Wenchuan area alone, among them a high proportion
of Chiang. There were Chiang everywhere: hanging out loudly in the
square by the gate, watching a Saturday night movie in a ground-floor
lecture room, dancing to loud rock music in a hall that smelled of
beer and cigarettes. A group gathered around us, and some of their
friends went to look for a Chiang teacher.
They returned with Mr. Yu, a tall, handsome man with a nose
like a scimitar, our first case of the supposedly Semitic features
ascribed to the Chiang by Torrance. A chemistry teacher, he invited
us to his office, where two other Chiang faculty members joined us.
One, Mr. Wen, had a blinking, rumpled face; the other, Mr. Hsiao, a
beery breath and some command of English. Even so, there being seven
of us in the room, all sometimes talking at once, more was said than
understood.
Enough got across, however, to earn me another of Avichail's
I-told-you-so looks. Schuyler Cammann, we were informed by the Chiang
teachers, was wrong after all. The Chiang village we had been to was
not typical. Being so close to Wenchuan, it had assimilated Chinese
ways. If we ranged farther afield, we would find villages in which
the old language and customs still prevailed. We could even see as
many white stones as we wanted.
"Just what are the white stones?"
Chen-Hua translated Mr. Wen's answer. "They are a symbol of
the white stone god."
"The white stone god, he is the only God?" Avichail asked.
As Mr. Wen was answering Chen-Hua, who was being prompted
by
Micha and Avichail, Mr. Yu was speaking to Mr. Wen; Mr. Hsiao was
addressing us in broken English; and the Hebrew speakers were arguing
among themselves.
"He is the powerful god."
"The most powerful god?"
"His name, it is Abba-Malakh?"
"White stone bring good luck."
"They say there is also the mountain and the sky god."
"Ask, ask if it is Abba-Malakh."
"They do not know the name of the white stone god. Long ago
the Chiang lived in the mountains of Tibet. They had a big war with
their enemies. When their enemies were winning, the great Chiang
chief had a dream. In his dream he was told to take stones and roll
them in snow. Then throw them at the enemy."
"This big chief, he was Abraham?"
"Bilan. Ask if they know Bilan."
"All house have white stone for protect it."
"The enemy thought the stones were snowballs. The stones
killed the enemy. That is why the Chiang sacrifice to them."
"To them or on them? Ask, Chen-Hua!"
Mr. Yu screwed up his face in pain. He was describing a
Chiang cheek piercing ceremony to Mr. Hsiao.
"On them. No. To them."
"You can see for yourself, the white stone is just a
household god."
"He never said that. You're putting words in his mouth."
Avichail leaned over and whispered in Mr. Hsiao's ear.
Mr. Hsiao shook his head. Mr. Wen spoke to Chen-Hua. Chen-
Hua
said, "The sacrifice is made before the stone. The blood is poured
over it."
Avichail whispered again.
"No understand," Mr. Hsiao said.
It went on like that: white stones, sacrifice, rooftops,
blood, snowballs, Abraham. Finally, Micha seized a moment of silence
to ask, "Chen-Hua, is there a traditional Chiang village we could
visit where someone might explain these things to us better?"
Chen-Hua asked Mr. Yu. Mr. Yu spoke to Mr. Hsiao. Mr. Hsiao
turned to Mr. Wen. "Chongfung," Mr. Wen said.
Chen-Hua knew where that was. He had seen the road sign on
the way from Chengdu.
Mr. Wen spoke again. Chen-Hua said:
"Mr. Wen has a friend in Chongfung. He will write him a
letter. We can take a bus there."
Chen-Hua translated what Mr. Wen wrote:
"Dear Teacher Wang: There are some foreigners wanting to know
and have a meet with the priest. Please arrange for them. Thank you."
Siyata di-shmaya!
The next day I asked Avichail what he had whispered to Mr. Hsiao the
night before.
"'Ya-Weh,'" he said. "I thought it might get a reaction."
He went off to buy fruit and vegetables with Micha and Chen-
Hua before taking the bus to Chongfung. I stayed behind to catch up
on my notes, lingering on the stairs to listen to the wild mountain
harmonies of the Chiang chambermaids singing in the kitchen.
Chen-Hua looked flustered when he returned to our room. "Is
anything wrong?" I inquired.
"Anything wrong. No, Hillerh."
But on our way to the bus station Micha asked, "Did Chen-Hua
tell you what happened?"
"No. What?"
"Eliahu saved his life. We were buying peaches from a Chiang.
Chen-Hua was bargaining, and the Chiang began to shout and knocked
him down. A dozen more of them piled on, punching and kicking him.
Eliahu pulled them off and crouched over him to protect him until
they calmed down."
On the bus to Chongfung I asked Chen-Hua about it.
"They were asking for too much money," he said. "They hate me
because I am a Han."
"Look at it their way," I told him. "Here's a chance for them
to earn a few more yen from some rich foreigners, and you keep them
from doing it."
"It's not right to charge foreigners more," Chen-Hua said. "I
would not be doing my duty if I permitted that." He put his
transistor radio back to his ear. "There is a discussion of the Paula
Jones case," he reported.
The bus let us off at the side of the road. Next to it, gray
and scaly, tumbled the Min. Chongfung was on the far bank, which was
reached by crossing a rickety wood suspension bridge. A banner was
strung above the road. Chen-Hua translated its large red
characters: "It says Chongfung, Number One Visiting Place."
A few yards beyond the banner was a ticket window.
Had we found ourselves by the entrance to the District
National Sparrow Reserve, it could hardly have been more absurd. An
official traditional Chiang village! We had been duped. Last night's
teachers were government touts.
"Your number one tourist stop in a place without tourists!"
Micha said. "Well, let's pay up and get the tour."
But there was no tour. There was only a little grocery store
that sold soft drinks and ice cream, a cluster of houses, and a road
running through a valley to a larger cluster on a low hill about a
mile away. A Chiang watchtower rose above them. Having neglected to
bring a tour bus, we walked.
The road passed through corn fields and small orchards of
plums and pomegranates. In the main village we asked for the school,
and at the school, for Teacher Wang. Soon he came. Grunting unhappily
as he read Mr. Wen's letter, he agreed to take us to the priest.
This entailed another long hike to the highest house on the
hill. There were no theme parks or native jewelry stands on the way.
Actually, Teacher Wang told us as we climbed the hill, Chongfung had
been designated a tourist site only three years before because of its
accessibility and adherence to the old traditions. Its inhabitants
had not yet decided what to do about that.
There were indeed white stones in the corners of all the
roofs, ranging in size from tennis balls to basketballs. Avichail
asked Teacher Wang about them. Then he asked about other things. Did
the villagers perform sacrifices? Where? How did they bury their
dead? Was the corpse placed in a coffin? Was it washed first? How did
the people mourn? What were the marriage customs? Did the groom give
the bride gifts? How was a couple divorced? Each answer led to more
questions exploring possible points of resemblance to biblical rites.
A cow came down the stone steps leading up to the priest's
house and we stepped aside to let it pass. At the top of the steps
was a courtyard of mucky earth, from which a short ladder led to the
priest's shrine. Or was it his office? Or his kitchen? Once our eyes
grew accustomed to the dark, windowless room, it appeared to be an
equal part of each. A side of bacon and some strings of sausage hung
from a rafter beside a weak electric bulb. From a second beam a
kettle was suspended by a metal chain over an open hearth. In the
middle of the room stood a center post on which was draped something
furry. A pile of onions lay beside some farm tools on a bench; behind
the bench was a wall with framed photographs; above the photographs,
a shelf was curtained by rice-paper screens. The photographs showed
the priest, in his priestly regalia, with smiling Chinese officials.
His name was Wang Tsu Tsin and he welcomed us in a Mao cap
and a plain shirt tucked into a black skirt. A short, grizzled man
with a shrewdly good-natured face, he had his first question put to
him by me. How long had he been a priest?
Chen-Hua translated the reply with a grimace of
concentration, condensing long sentences into short ones.
"His language is hard to understand. He says he became a
priest as a teenager. His father gave him the knowledge. Only a
priest's son can become a priest."
"Ask if he has sons himself."
"Yes. Four."
"Will any of them become priests?"
"No. None."
"Why?"
"There is not enough money in it."
Avichail stirred restlessly. "What does any of this matter?"
he said. "Ask him, Chen-Hua, to show us what a priest does."
The priest went to the shelf and lifted a rice-paper screen.
He took three objects from the shelf. The first was a highly
burnished wooden staff. A wooden snake was coiled around it. The
snake had a head like a weasel's.
"The bronze serpent of Moses!" Avichail exclaimed. "Torrance
mentioned it."
The priest thumped the staff on the floor and spoke to Chen-
Hua. "It protects him when he comes to the sacrifice," Chen-Hua
said. "The sacrifice takes place on the roof."
The second object was a pair of silver bells. The priest
shook them rhythmically.
"With these he chants."
"To whom?"
Wang Tsu Tsin pointed to the raised screen. "Apimala."
Avichail excitedly corrected him:
"Abba-Malakh!"
The third object consisted of two lacquered wooden tablets
joined by a leather thong. Each was about a foot and a half high and
had a column of Chinese-looking characters.
"Ask what it says, Chen-Hua."
The priest did not know.
"He can't read?"
"He can read Chinese. But this is in an old language. No one
understands it anymore."
"Ask if his father did."
"No. It is very old."
"Try to read it, Chen-Hua."
Chen-Hua took the tablets outside into the sunlight. "This is
not old Chinese," he said. "I don't know what it is."
According to Torrance, the Chiang had once had a written
language and a holy book that was lost. Cammann dismissed this
conjecture. I counted the characters on each tablet. Five. Two
tablets, ten characters.
Or commandments? It was a wild thought.
The priest took the fur from the center post and pulled it
over his head. It was a monkey skin with a head and two eye holes,
through which he looked out. He fetched a drum and slipped his arm
through its shoulder strap. It sounded like a slow heartbeat when he
beat it. He shut his eyes and chanted, shaking the bells. The chant
was slow and halting, like footsteps groping in the dark.
It should have been demeaning, this peep show for strangers
who might leave behind a few yen. But Wang Tsu Tsin did not look
demeaned. He was paid by the villagers for his services, too; perhaps
to his mind there was no great difference. "What did he chant?" Micha
asked.
Chen-Hua said, "He told the god he is coming. He asked the
god not to harm him."
"When does he do this?"
"When someone is sick. Or needs help from the gods."
"Gods," I said to Avichail.
"No," Avichail said. "He said the God."
"Gods. Didn't he, Chen-Hua?"
"Chen-Hua," Avichail commanded, "ask him. Ask if there is one
God. Ask who created the world."
Chen-Hua asked. Wang Tsu Tsin wrinkled his brow. He pointed
to two rice-paper screens and gave a lengthy reply. Chen-Hua said:
"He says something about two gods. They are called Moh-chi-
tsu and Zer-pir-wah. Moh-chi-tsu is a girl and Zer-pir-wah is a boy.
They created people."
"How, Chen-Hua?" I asked. "How did they create them?"
"That doesn't matter," Avichail said. "They are all Abba-
Malakh."
"Of course they're not," I said. "Each screen stands for a
different god."
Avichail turned to Chen-Hua. "Ask him!" he said. "Paper is
God? If I burn paper, no more God? Ask!"
Chen-Hua looked horrified. He appeared to believe that
Avichail was threatening to burn down Wang Tsu Tsin's shrine.
"Ask, Chen-Hua! Burn paper, no God?"
"I . . . I don't want to ask," Chen-Hua said. "I don't
understand this. I don't understand this old man's language."
"Ask!"
Chen-Hua was on the verge of tears.
Micha came to the rescue. "We were told that the sacrifices
take place on the roof. Perhaps the priest will show it to us."
Wang Tsu Tsin led us up another ladder to the flat roof. With
a sweep of his arm, he indicated where he sacrificed the animals
brought to him. Once again Avichail had a list of questions. Was the
animal sacrificed on an altar or on the ground? How was it killed?
Was its throat slit? What was done with the blood? Was it sprinkled
on the white stone? Was the sacrifice cooked and eaten? Did the
priest get a special part of it? Were there purification rites
beforehand? Were there holidays on which the entire village
sacrificed together?
Yes, the priest said. On the harvest festival the whole
village climbed a mountain. He pointed to a peak behind the village.
There was singing and dancing and sacrificing.
"To Abba-Malakh?"
Wang Tsu Tsin nodded.
"Abba-Malakh," Avichail said, "he is the same as the white
stone god?"
Chen-Hua asked and said:
"No. The white stone god is different."
"But he has a name, the white stone god?"
The priest answered briefly. Chen-Hua said, "He has no name."
"Then he is Abba-Malakh! Ask, ask, Chen-Hua."
Chen-Hua did not know what to ask.
"Ask if there is one God or many."
Chen-Hua asked. Wang Tsu Tsin answered. Chen-Hua asked
again.
The priest answered a second time. Chen-Hua clasped his head in his
hands. "There are many gods. There are several gods. There are many
several. He says it would take a month to explain it all. I want to
go back to Chengdu."
He started down the ladder.
I caught him by the squiggles of his shirt. "You can't quit
on us," I told him. "We'll get you back to Chengdu as soon as we can.
Now act your age and translate."
Chen-Hua bit his lip. His thin back trembled beneath my
rebuke.
"Ask the priest, Chen-Hua," Avichail said, "what happens to
him when he dies."
"When he dies," repeated Chen-Hua. He spoke to the priest.
The priest smiled as if asked something funny. Chen-Hua said, "His
body will be burned."
"And his soul? He has a soul? What will happen to it?"
But the priest did not have a soul. "There will be nothing
left," Chen-Hua said.
"All right," Avichail declared. "We can go."
"Just a minute!" I couldn't part with Wang Tsu Tsin like
that. "Chen-Hua," I said, "ask him what will happen when he dies to
the old religion in Chongfung."
Chen-Hua asked. "It will die too," he said.
"But what about the gods? What will they do?"
The priest shrugged. The gods would manage.
"Chen-Hua," I said, "ask if they are the gods just of the
Chiang."
The old man pushed back his Mao cap. "Some are also for the
Han," he told Chen-Hua.
"Let's go," Avichail urged.
"Wait!" I pointed to us three foreigners. "Ask. Are some also
for us?"
The priest said a few words. "Some are also for you," Chen-
Hua said.
There was a bit of comfort in that. "Tell the priest," I
said, "that I wish we had a month to give him." The loneliness of a
god with no one left to look after him was more terrible than any I
could imagine.
We spent the rest of the week farther up the Min River Valley,
ranging as far north as Songpan. We visited more Chiang villages and
received more answers to more questions, none of which altered the
basic picture. In the village of Chaochung we met some young high
school teachers. One said to Avichail: "You are from Jerusalem. I
have heard that many tribes lived there and that one was lost and is
the Chiang. What do you know about this?"
An electric current ran through us. But it turned out that
the young teacher was merely repeating the notions of Torrance that
he had read about in a Chinese book. He and his colleagues seemed
pleased by the thought of being a lost Jewish tribe. The Jews were
powerful and smart.
Avichail was pleased, too. He left some literature and his
address. "They seemed interested," he said. "Perhaps they'll write. I
can only sow the seed. The rest is up to them."
By Friday afternoon we were back in Chengdu.
We viewed our week among the Chiang differently. Although
Schuyler Cammann had been mistaken about the Chiang's physical and
cultural survival, I thought his criticisms of Torrance had stood up.
I couldn't see the remotest connection between the Chiang religion
and the Bible.
Avichail disagreed. To him, the important thing was that
Torrance's descriptions had proved reliable. It was true that we had
found evidence of ordinary paganism in Chiang religion. But Torrance
himself had observed that, whereas the Chiang once lived in
isolation, their modern contact with the Chinese had introduced
impurities into their faith. These could only have multiplied since
the 1920s. The crucial question was what the Chiang religion had been
like in Torrance's day — and to that, Torrance remained the best
witness.
This struck me as wishful thinking. The one puzzling thing
was those strange tablets.
In Chengdu we shared a triple room. Watching Avichail and
Micha set the Sabbath eve table, I noticed that there were only three
plates. "Set another place," I said. "Chen-Hua said he's joining us."
Avichail unscrewed the cap from our last bottle of grape
juice. "No, he isn't."
"Why not?"
"He has a mother in Chengdu. Let her feed him."
"What does that mean?"
"We want to have a proper Sabbath meal."
"For Jews only?"
"The Sabbath was given to Jews."
"I don't get it," I said. "In Chaochung you were beaming
because some Chiang asked you a few polite questions about Judaism.
You said you were sowing the seed. And here's a young man you saved
from a mob who would rather spend a Jewish Sabbath with us than with
the mother he hasn't seen in a week — and you don't want him."
"He's only interested in our food."
"It's not just your awful food. It's —"
There was a knock on the door.
I fled to the bathroom to avoid seeing what came next. When I
finally stepped out, the Sabbath candles were lit and Avichail and
Micha were praying. A dirty plate with smearings of potato salad was
on the dresser. Avichail had fed Chen-Hua supper before turning him
out. I didn't know if that made it better or worse. I sat through the
meal, picking at my food. After the final Grace I rose from the table
and said, "I'm going for a walk."
"Sit," Avichail told me. "We'll have a lesson. You'll take
your walk afterward."
A "lesson" was yeshiva parlance for a religious homily. He
delivered it, propped on one elbow on his bed, by the flickering
light of the candles. Micha lay on his back on a pillow. I sat in the
armchair by the window.
Avichail chose for his text the verses in Zachariah:
And I will pour upon the house of David and upon the inhabitants of
Jerusalem the spirit of grace . . . and they shall look upon him whom
they have pierced and they shall mourn for him as one mourneth for
his only son . . . the land shall mourn, every family apart: the
family of the house of David apart and the family of the house of
Levi apart.
"This passage is knotty," he said. "Who was pierced and why
is he mourned for as an only son?"
He began to unravel the knots. According to the Aramaic
targum of Yonatan ben Uziel, the only son was the Messiah son of
Joseph — the herald, destined to die in battle, of the Messiah son of
David. Although it was the Messiah son of David and the Priest of
Righteousness from the house of Levi who would bring the final
redemption, each of the three figures symbolized a different sphere
of deliverance. They formed a circle within a circle within a circle,
all three needing to be entire for the redemption to be complete. The
son of Joseph stood for the material sphere, the regaining of Jewish
independence. The son of David stood for the religious sphere, the
spiritual perfecting of Israel. The Priest of Righteousness stood for
the universal sphere, the acceptance of Judaism by all mankind.
"And so," Avichail said, "Zachariah speaks of the first
Messiah, who will come from the house of Joseph. But Joseph, Jacob's
most beloved son, was the one son who did not have a tribe named
after him. His own two sons, Jacob's grandsons, Ephraim and Menashe,
received that honor in his place. And just as the southern tribes of
Judah and Benjamin were together known as Judah, from which came
David, son of Jesse, so the northern tribes were known as Ephraim, or
the house of Joseph.
"He who has eyes to see knows that the process of redemption
is already under way. But even its first circle, the regaining of our
independence in the state of Israel, cannot be complete until the
house of Joseph returns. And herein lies hidden a great truth."
A candle guttered and went out.
"For as the house of David represents our people's spirit,
the house of Joseph is the body. All know that the body cannot exist
without the spirit. But not all know that the opposite is also true.
The exile of the ten tribes was a great blow to our people, not
because of the loss of numbers or of land, but because of the exile
of matter from spirit. This is the true exile that we have lived in
for thousands of years. Such was the teaching of my master, Tsvi
Yehuda Kook of blessed memory, and of his father and master, Rabbi
Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook. At the redemption's completion, matter
and spirit will be reunited.We are told —"
The second candle sputtered.
"We are told the Messiah will come riding on a donkey. Why a
donkey?"
He answered his own question.
"Because a donkey is the essence of materiality. Rabbi Yosef
said, 'May I see the Messiah even from a donkey's dung heap.' He
meant that at the end of days all matter will be as holy as spirit,
even the dung of a donkey. All mankind will be holy too."
Avichail's eyes rested on me. He said softly, "But that is
not our task. The third circle of redemption is not given to us to
complete. We are not sent to make Jews of the Gentiles. That is for
the Priest of Righteousness. Our mission is to restore lost Jewish
souls. Every member of the ten tribes is a Jewish soul that stood at
Sinai. This is what the rabbis taught. The soul that was not at Sinai
does not concern us. We have the same obligations to its possessor
that we have to all men, but no more."
The second candle went out. A moment later the telephone rang.
No one picked it up. Observant Jews do not use telephones on
the Sabbath. But by the second or third ring it struck me that, in
all of China, there was no one who could be phoning us. Nor could it
be Avichail's or Micha's families in Israel. They would not call on
the Sabbath either. Even in an emergency this was permitted only if
it was necessary to save a life.
That left my family.
The ringing stopped. Avichail continued his lesson in
darkness streaked by the weak light of the lamps by the river.
Damn him and his donkey dung! And his religion, with its
three circles of redemption and its obligations to all men who could
be made sick with worry because the flow of electrons from a
telephone was comparable to the forbidden act of lighting a fire on
the Sabbath.
Someone knocked. Avichail broke off. Micha went to open the
door.
It was a chambermaid. She said something in Chinese and
switched on the overhead light. Then she went to the phone, picked up
the receiver, and listened for a tone. Getting one, she shrugged at
our failure to respond to the switchboard, replaced the receiver,
said something else in Chinese, and left the room.
Avichail sat up on the bed. "Micha!" he exclaimed. "We'll
have to sleep with the light on all night. Get her back here."
Micha hurried into the corridor and returned with the
chambermaid. "You shouldn't have left this on," he said, pointing to
the light. He was not permitted to tell her to turn it off.
She stared at him blankly.
"This light. It bothers us."
She regarded the light. "No good?"
"No good."
"Ah!"
The chambermaid understood. She went to the lamp on the table
and switched that on too.
"What am I supposed to do now?" Micha asked.
"Learn Chinese," I said. "I'm going for my walk."
The caller turned out to have been Chen-Hua, who had wanted to know
what time he was to come in the morning. It was our next-to-last day
in China, and he had agreed to accompany me to the market and help me
shop for gifts.
It was raining again. Soon the daily monsoons would begin. We
walked along the Jinjiang River, into which the Min emptied in the
plains above Chengdu. A sluggish channel when first we saw it, it now
coursed swiftly with a flotilla of refuse.
Gray China grew bright in the rain. Colorful umbrellas opened
like flowers, and the bicycle riders donned plastic capes of lilac
and magenta. We tramped through the mud of Chengdu's big market while
Chen-Hua told me of his dream of studying computers in America. A man
tried selling me a large turtle. If I ate it, he said, I would live
to be a hundred.
I lingered by the antique stalls. In one I fingered a
necklace made of little hand-carved wooden skulls, no two of them
alike. It was exquisite work, but I wasn't sure my wife or daughters
would wear skulls. "Chen-Hua, look!"
From under some bric-a-brac I pulled out two wooden tablets
like the ones we had seen in Chongfung. Each had five characters.
Chen-Hua took them from me. "These are in ordinary Chinese,"
he said.
"What do they say?"
"They're a pair. This one says, Shu zhong qian kun da, there
is much knowledge in books. And this one, Bi xia tian di kuan, there
is much to write about."
He asked the stall owner about them and told me, "They're
late Ching dynasty. People hung them as decorations in their homes."
So much for the Ten Commandments.
"People do the same in the West," I said. "Well, that's one
mystery less."
"Not really," Chen-Hua said. "We still don't know the
language of that writing in Chongfung."
That was true.
"There's something else that's mysterious," he added. "How do
you explain the fact that both you Jews and the Chiang worship the
same white stone god?"
Could he be serious? "Chen-Hua," I said, "what makes you
think we Jews worship the white stone god?"
"Don't you?"
"Of course not."
"But I thought . . ." Embarrassed by his blunder, he felt
deceived. "Why did Rabbi Avichail make me ask all those questions if
the white stone god isn't part of your religion?"
I had to laugh. It was the strangest moment of a strange
trip. Avichail was right about that. Chen-Hua's soul had been nowhere
near Sinai.
Copyright © 2002 by Hillel Halkin. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.'