Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu

Author:Qian Zhongshu
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811223546
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

7

A MUSTACHE usually consists of two downward strokes. Wang Ch’u-hou’s mustache was just a single strip. He had grown a mustache twenty years ago, at a time when officials all groomed bushy upper lips. Anything less than that would have been inadequate to mark their status; it was like the ancient philosophers of the West who always wore a long beard under their chin as a sign of wisdom. When he was a secretary at the office of the provincial military governor, the marshal’s caltrop mustache was so impressive that it looked like it had been transplanted from a Jen-tan medicine advertisement. He didn’t dare grow that kind of mustache for fear the marshal would consider him presumptuous. While the marshal’s was a round-horned black caltrop mustache, he desired no more than a small sharp-horned red caltrop mustache. For some reason people who don’t bear arms can never really grow a proper-looking mustache; it is either too sparse or limp or droops downward from either side of the mouth like commas in Western-style punctuation, neither arching upward nor curling gracefully. On the other hand, Wang’s heavy black eyebrows could have competed strand for strand with the eyebrows of the God of Longevity.1 It was as though he had accidentally sheared off his mustache and eyebrows all at once the first time he shaved and had tried desperately to press them back on, only to get eyebrows and mustache mixed up, so that on his mouth were the eyebrows which would never grow, while on his forehead was the mustache which always flourished. With a mustache like that he might just as well not grow one at all, and so his marriage to his present wife five years ago had been a good excuse to shave it off.

However, like all officials, bandits, professional gamblers, and speculators, Wang believed in fate. Astrologers all said he was “wood-fated” and “wood-shaped.”2 Hair and mustache are like the branches and leaves of a tree. When they are missing, it means the tree has withered. People over forty are of course half bald anyway, so they must depend entirely on these few strands of mustache to show that the old tree is still in blossom and hasn’t lost its lease on life. But for his twenty-five-year-old bride, he could not be so stingy as to begrudge a single hair, so he shaved off both ends, leaving only a pinch in the middle. Then, because this pinch wasn’t thick enough, he had trimmed it into a single line, movie-star style. This may have ruined the geomantic layout of his face, for after that misfortunes happened to him one after another. His new wife fell ill as soon as she became his, and he himself was impeached and forced out of office. Fortunately, when officials take a tumble, like cats which always land on all fours, they never end up in any great distress. He consoled himself with the thought that to begin with he had never relied on his salary.

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