Faces in the Crowd: 36 Extraordinary Tales of Tianjin by Feng Jicai

Author:Feng Jicai
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Sinoist Books
Published: 2019-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Golden Fingers

Golden Fingers was a very capable man, but he was jealous and small-minded and couldn’t bear anyone else being more successful. If you did better than him, he’d find a way to get back at you, and it was always a horrible way, something that would make your life completely miserable.

There are some places where he might have got away with behaving like that, but in Tianjin he was asking for trouble. All kinds of people fetch up in a port city, and there are men with brilliant abilities everywhere you look – in fact, you soon realise that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. Who knows what kind of person you might just have annoyed?

Golden Fingers was a scholar from the south that General Bai had invited to join his household to help keep him entertained. However, our story doesn’t begin with Golden Fingers; it starts with General Bai.

General Bai was a military man, with the rank of major-general. The higher he was promoted, the more conscious he was of the dangers inherent in his official career. After he resigned his position, he decided he was best off moving to the Foreign Concession in Tianjin. Western-style buildings were so comfortable, what with the running water and electricity, and foreigners were in charge here, so local officials couldn’t interfere. It was the perfect place for him to feel safe and sound, so he moved there with his entire family.

General Bai was a very wealthy man, but he had no interest in wine, women, or gambling. He had just one love – calligraphy and painting. In those days, if you were rich and powerful, you would quickly acquire a host of flatterers. If you liked to warble a bit of opera but were as hoarse as a crow, they would say you could rival Yu Shuyan; if you could write a line of wobbly characters, they’d say you were every bit as good as Hua Shikui – in fact, they might go so far as to say that Hua Shikui wasn’t a patch on you. So when General Bai expressed an interest in calligraphy and painting, he quickly found himself boxed in. Thanks to someone introducing him, he soon got to know Golden Fingers, a painter from Lingnan.

As to what Golden Fingers was actually called, nobody knew. Everyone was too busy looking at his fingers. He didn’t paint with a brush; he used his fingers. In those days, there was nobody in Tianjin who painted with his fingers. Fingers are like sausages after all – without hairs, what is there to paint with? But in spite of that, he could paint landscapes and flowers, plants and birds, horses and ladies with their faces, eyes, eyebrows and little cherry lips. When you have someone who can paint with their fingers, watching them at work is actually much more fun than seeing the final product. When General Bai invited him to move in

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