Chapter Eighteen: Billie and the Shaman

This is a true story.

Not "based on a true story." Even the names have not been changed to protect the innocent. Everything happened exactly as described.*






* Well, except maybe the tall farmer.

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Xiaoyao Xingzhe, the self-styled carefree pilgrim, has lived and worked all over the world, having crossed the Gobi in a decrepit jeep, lived with a solitary monk in the mountains of Korea, dined with the family of the last emperor of China, and helped police with their enquiries in Amarillo, Texas.

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Transcript

 Billie and the Shaman 

 Jake danced away, laughing. “Almost had you that time, Xiao old son,” he said, crowing and cocky. JM stepped in. He was our teacher—young, tough and eagle-sharp eyes—in this southern Shaolin-style kungfu; .
“Tun-tu,” he said, looking back and forth at each of us. “Swallow and spit. First you swallow their attack, then you spit it out again, back at them, uprooting and ejecting.” 

He gestured Jake to punch and demonstrated the concept, drawing back a half-step to harmlessly absorb the force of the punch while wrapping it up in his arms, then immediately stepping forward again, catching Jake off-balance, lifting him, walking forward with him, Jake back-peddling furiously on his toes, until he was forced up against the wall at the other end of the room. The thin wall shook. Particles of dust filtered down from the ceiling. 
JM held him there just a tad longer than was necessary, looking at us.

The words of Laozi

“Dare to be the guest, do not dare to be the host,” JM said, “rather retreat a foot than advance an inch.[1] That’s what Laozi wrote. He even states that he is quoting a manual of war. You allow the enemy to attack first, because that way they open themselves to counterattack,” he said, finally letting Jake down. Jake shook himself, and bounced around for a moment on his toes, but looked humbled for once. JM gestured for Big Matt and Little Matt to practice sparring, and for us to watch carefully.

I had joined the Golden Eagle kungfu group a month before. We met in JM’s “office” in a small street close to Taiwan University. The place was also his home. The kitchen out back was only a lean-to, open to the air, behind the room where we practiced every morning for two hours.
“Party at my place this Saturday,” Big Matt said later, as we wiped ourselves down and dressed. “I’m going to Nepal for six weeks, it’s sort of a going away thing Billie wants to throw for me.”
I’d met Billie at a previous party. She was a pert and sassy local girl, bangs cut straight above her eyebrows, who’d moved in with Matt a few months before.
“Can’t make it, sorry,” I said. I was meeting Owen and Prof Ma. “But have a nice trip.”

Bloodlines of the spirits

At Professor Ma’s house, the three of us were sitting in her tatami-lined workroom. Owen had just asked Prof. Ma about ancestor worship. He wanted to know “its metaphysical basis” as he put it.
“It is not so much worship,” Professor Ma said “as making contact, re-establishing a feeling of identity, the essential identity of the family.” She took a sip of tea. “By performing the family ritual in the Confucian way, one affirms a current of connection that enlivens the family.” She got up and retrieved a book from the bookcase. “As to the rationale behind it,” she said, flipping pages, “here is what Zhuxi[2] says.”
She pointed to a line of characters, and recited: “Whether we are speaking of heaven and earth, it is all just one single qi. From the standpoint of an individual, in a similar way, my qi is actually my ancestor’s qi, all just one single qi. Therefore, when my mettle[3] is stimulated, there must be a response (才感必應).[4] Oh, and Zhuxi later talks about the conditions that must apply for it to work. As well as being sincere (chéng誠) and reverential (jìng敬), the people making the offerings have to be related, part of the family.” Prof. Ma skipped through a couple more pages, then read “When the sons and grandsons are in physical presence, the ancestral qi is also present—they are linked by a single blood-line. Hence the saying from the Zuo Zhuan: ‘the spirits do not enjoy the offerings of non-kin, the people only make offerings to their own ancestors’ – this is because the qi is not related.”[5]
“I thought Confucians did not believe in the supernatural” said Owen.
“None of us do,” said Professor Ma, smiling. “But you see, for us it is all natural. This whole idea of ‘natural’ and ‘super-natural’ is totally Western.” She sighed, and said “Look, the prime goal of the rituals is to try to bring the family into contact with the celestial energy that we presume the best of our ancestors were able to tune themselves to, and by bringing the family into contact, we hope to tune ourselves as well.”

The bad neighbor

A few weeks later after another talk with Owen and the professor, I had left her house and was sitting at the bus stop. I was enjoying the bucolic view of the rice paddies and distant hills, listening to the gurgling of the little river just down the hillside, when the tall farmer appeared. I had first met him, rather embarrassingly, when he emerged out of nowhere just after I had incautiously opened a “spirit jar” containing human bones and a skull. It had been placed at the bus stop due to the excellent fengshui, he had told me, after advising me to replace the lid carefully. 
Now, however, the farmer’s normally serene face was tight, and I asked him what was wrong.
“A new neighbor,” he said. “Moaning and complaining all the time.” He sighed. “It is disturbing the atmosphere of the area, ruining the fengshui.” He turned to me and said “You can help, you know.” 
“I can? How?” 
He was silent for a moment, then said “You should talk to the local shaman.”
That surprised me. “What would that do?” I asked.
“The local shaman can talk to my new neighbor, find out what is wrong.”
Ok, I thought. This probably has to do with some local custom, the shaman as go between or something.
Then I thought of something. “Why don’t YOU ask the local shaman?”
“Oh, we don’t have much to do with each other. I’m perfectly happy where I am, for the moment.”

And that enigmatic remark was all I could get out of him before I saw my bus coming. He did not get on; I guessed he was waiting for a bus going the other direction.

The next time Big Matt showed up at practice we all greeted him, the returned traveller. But he just looked at us, his long face puzzled and upset. “I came back from Nepal yesterday morning and can’t find Billie,” he said. “Her parents slam the door in my face. Her stuff is still at our apartment, so she hasn’t moved out.”
“She’s probably run off with some guy,” Jake said. Big Matt’s face twisted. He balled his fists and took a step forward. 
“Whoah, mate,” said Jake throwing his hands up palms forward and retreating a step. “Just joking. Don’t worry, she’ll be back. Why don’t you ask around some of her friends?”
This apparently was a new thought for Matt, as he spun on his heel and left. We all looked at each other. Jake had a cynical smile. I felt a strange foreboding.

“Was that Matt?” JM asked as we lined up for our practice. We told him the story and his eyes narrowed.

It was three days before I saw Big Matt again, sitting at the bar in The Jolly Swagman. I sat down beside him and asked how he was. He just shook his head. It was a long time before he spoke. When he did, the words chilled me.

“Billie’s dead, Xiaoyao.” 
A shudder went through me. Matt passed his hands over his eyes.
“That’s all her friends would tell me,” he said. “I don’t know how, why, or even when.” He downed his beer in four long gulps, setting the glass down with a heavy thump. “And I got no idea what to do next. Apparently she’s already been buried.” He turned an anguished face toward me. “I loved her, Xiaoyao. We were going to be married, I was gonna take her back to the States.” He looked down into his empty glass, then back up at me. “I need to know what happened.”
“Let’s ask JM,” I said.

JM came from central Taiwan, from a village known for its martial artists, He had regaled us with stories of his uncles, one of whom had been the local gallant, talented both with the ladies and in his kungfu. Once that uncle—wielding his long pipe as a weapon—had held off six aggrieved husbands and boyfriends who had cornered him in a doorway. “This style of kungfu is not pretty” JM said, “and has no fancy names for the moves. But it has proven itself in many a midnight ambush or brawl in the marketplace.” JM taught us how to sit on a chair with one leg cocked beneath us so that if our chair was kicked away from behind we could just stand up, instead of landing butt-first on the ground.
Every other martial arts teacher I had trained with had always said “Now that you know how to defend yourself, you do not need to fight; you can just walk away.” 
JM’s advice was totally different. “Walk away?! How do you know that what you have learned works? You need to try it out!” Knowing that this was the general attitude among the young men in Taiwan made us quite a bit keener in our practice.

But he also taught us other things. How to fight a wild dog. How to beat someone bigger and better than you. How to fight a ghost.

 
The alternative

Matt and I sat at the table in JM’s lean-to kitchen. We were drinking warm Shaoxing wine with a sour plum in the bottom of each small glass. The night was sultry, and JM was pacing, his thin body in its usual T-shirt and loose trousers. He stopped and turned to us.
“I have spoken to the parents,” he said. “There was a foreigner involved. That is why they would not speak to you, Matt.”
“Who? What foreigner?” Matt said. He started up from his chair, but I held him back. “Just listen,” I said.
“It is not clear. He has left the country. Billie drowned, up in that little river close by where you go all the time, Xiaoyao.” He looked at me. “Remember that typhoon we had last month? All the rivers were in flood.”

It was my turn to be puzzled. “But what was she doing there? It is so far out of Taipei!”
JM shook his head. “No one knows. Well, the police might, but with the foreigner gone they are treating it as a closed case. Even the parents cannot find out.”
“So it is hopeless, then.” Matt laid his head on his arms.

“There is another way,” JM said. “But you might not like it.”

Possession

My primary feeling was boredom. The night was hot. We had been in the small dark incense-filled temple for hours. The female tangki shaman had been muttering and drooling for what seemed like forever, her head swinging slowly back and forth over a brush-written paper containing Billie’s “eight characters,” the exact times of her birth, represented by four pairs of heavenly stems and earthly branches. An assistant wiped her head from time to time, fanned her with a feather fan, or re-lit three incense sticks and waved them over and around the altar at which the shaman sat.

Matt, though, was like a cat watching a mouse hole. JM and Billie’s parents stood off to one side, occasionally speaking to each other in Taiwanese.

Suddenly the tangki swung her head in a large arc, her eyes starting, and shrieked. Salvia scattered everywhere. Then she dropped her head and went rigid. A whining moan arose in her throat, keening pitifully “niiiaaan!” Billie’s mother rushed forward a step, JM and the father held her back. The tangki stood up, her eyes fixed on the mother, and a torrent of words poured forth. The assistant bent her head to hear, then translated rapidly in a high-pitched voice. Billie’s mother sobbed, her father looked horrified. Even the normally stoic JM was sweating. He and the father were now holding the mother up as she sagged between them.

Big Matt was frantic, looking back and forth between the two parties. “What are they saying?” he asked me. “Your Chinese is better.”
“It isn’t Mandarin,” I said. I was not sure it was even Taiwanese. At that moment the tangki collapsed. The assistant checked her, wiped her head. Then more words, soft, whining, moaning, rising to a crescendo and then dropping again. It went on and on. Finally, silence.

After a little while, the tangki stood up and walked off in a matter-of-fact fashion. JM left the parents and came over to us, holding up his hand as Matt began to speak. “I’ll tell you everything in a moment. Let’s get the parents out of here.” Matt went over and helped JM support the parents outside, where they caught a taxi. The mother sat in the back with her head in her hands.

JM took out a red envelope and slipped it into a donation box just inside the door of the little temple. 
“Let’s go home,” he said.

 
Back in the kitchen, he plunked a sour plum in our little glasses, then poured us some warmed wine.
“It was a Frenchman, Billie said.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How can you be sure it was Billie? The shaman could have just been faking.”
“That does happen, and often,” JM admitted. “But in this case there were things she said, certain phrases that only Billie would use, even certain facts …” He broke off, looking at Matt. “But let me tell the story the way Billie’s ghost did.”

He paused for a moment, then went on with a subdued voice. “She said a French foreign student invited her up to his place, up in the mountains.”
“But why should she go off with him?” Matt cried in anguish.
JM looked pityingly at him. “That is part of the reason her ghost has been hanging around,” he said. “Shame, fright, a feeling of betrayal, and, well, anger.”
“Betrayal? Does she think I betrayed her?”
“No, the Frenchman did. But let me tell the story. No more interruptions.” He took a sip of wine. “He was charming, she said. And rich. His rented house was full of expensive things. Then he invited her to go swimming. It was a hot day, and she agreed.”

“But she can’t swim!” Matt said. “I know she can’t. We went to a little lake one day, just to wade, and she pretended to go too deep, and called out to me to save her. I straightaway dove in and swam over, then she laughed and said she was just testing me, to see if I really loved her.”
JM looked grave. “The ghost told the same story about you,” he said, “and she did the same thing with the Frenchman. But she did not reckon on the little river current being swollen with the typhoon rains. She really did get into trouble. But the Frenchman stayed sitting on the rock, laughing at her, thinking she was joking, until she disappeared into a deep hole in the muddy water. That is what the ghost was so angry about. Betrayal.” JM looked again at Matt. “And, of course, that she had betrayed you, Matt. That was her shame. All these emotions have held her bound to this world.”

“What now?” I asked.
“Now that she has expressed all these feelings, she should be able to let go,” JM said. “But it will be hard for us to know for sure.”

JM then turned to me. “The shaman also had a message for you.”
“For me?” I was taken aback. The shaman had never even looked at me, as far as I knew. “What was it?”
“She said ‘tell your friend the new neighbor should be ok now,’ whatever that means.”

Anatomy of experience

“So what happened after that?” the fat monk asked with interest. I had left Taiwan and gone back to the Daoist monastery on the mainland.
“Nothing much,” I said. “Matt disappeared and I did not see him for a long time. Then I ran into him in Hong Kong. He said he had gone to Paris, to track the French guy down.”
“Did he find him?”
“Yes, it took Matt weeks, but finally he found him, living in his father’s huge flat in a rich part of town.” I took a sip of the tea the Daoist had made. “Seeing Matt there on his doorstep was a shock, Matt said. The guy broke down in tears. He let Matt in, and over several hours Matt got the story from his point of view.”
“Yes?”
“The facts were just as the shaman related them. What the shaman, or Billie I guess, could not know was how panicked and frightened the French student was when she disappeared in the muddy water. He dove in and tried to find her, to save her, but by then of course it was too late. The kid called his father, who called a friend, who had a friend with contacts in Taiwan, and the French kid was able to leave the country while the case got the little attention the police thought it was worth. It was closed and Billie was buried even before Matt got back from Nepal. No need to ruffle international feathers.”
“Just like old China,” the fat monk said. “Foreigners get a free pass.” This was not said with rancor, or with wounded patriotism. He seemed to just be stating an historical fact. “Anyway,” he said, looking at me, “what have you learned from this experience?”

I thought for a moment. “That there really are ghosts?”

“There is probably one less now, after Billie was able to vent the intense passions that bound her. But just remember, dead or alive, these types of emotions hold you in lower realms, realms you really do not want to hang about in. Let them go, free yourself.”

 The autumn breeze rattled the window. He got up to open it, and the scent of pine wafted in. He sat down and said “There are other things to learn, perhaps incidental, but one can glean much learning from a story like this. Look for example, at Matt’s relentless search for truth. Look how hard he worked, how far he went! Learn from that.” 

He frowned briefly. “Your kungfu teacher, what was his name? Wasn’t it Zheng Jia-Miao? But you called him … yes, JM. Well, you can learn from JM’s flexibility of technique, not being stuck with the usual ways to discover things.”

He scratched his head, then smiled and said “And fourth, your incredible obtuseness when it comes to your farmer friend at the bus stop.”

But he refused to say more.

The stream and the quagmire
I was silent for a while. “So is that all there is, then?” I asked. “Either get bound to the world as a hungry ghost, or—if we are lucky—just disperse into nothing?”
“Not into nothing,” said the fat monk. “You should say, rather, back into what we were. When you light one fire from another, and the first one goes out, is it a different fire?” He did not wait for an answer. “Yes … and no. What the fire thinks about the matter is less important than what the outside observer can plainly see: the essential identity is the same.”
The Daoist leant forward and rested his arms on his knees, looking at me.
“My teacher told me a story he said he had learned from an old rug seller in the Urumuqi market. A stream, the story goes, is flowing down a mountain and comes to a desert. It flows into the sands but finds it is only turning into a marsh. So the wind says to it ‘Let yourself go and come with me, and I will carry you over the desert to the mountains on the other side.’ But the stream says ‘No, no, I can’t! I’ll lose my identity!’ And the wind says ‘Well, look at the situation. You cannot stay the same. You have to decide where your true essence lies. Do you want to stay here and become a stagnant quagmire, or will you allow your best part to dissolve and become water vapor upon the wind?’ The stream thought for a long time, then finally yielded itself up to the wind which carried it across the desert and into the high mountains, where it fell again as rain, and became a river.”

The fat monk leaned back. “Notice,” he said “that the stream could do no more by its own efforts. Even if it flowed harder, all that would happen is the marsh would grow more quickly. It had to stop trying, to do wu wei, not doing, and let go of its precious sense of identity before it could move on to what was, in fact, its destiny all along: to let itself be lifted in the arms of the wind, and to fall elsewhere as rain.”
I nodded. 

The fat monk looked at me for a moment, and then went on:
“The rug seller said one more thing, my teacher told me. He said that this time, because of this experience, the stream could almost remember that this had happened before, and the next time was able to let go of this ‘self’ much more easily. And so we learn, time after time.”

 Notes:

[1] 吾不敢为主而为客；不敢进寸而退尺。Chapter 69 of Laozi.
[2] The most prominent Neo-Confucian of the Song dynasty.
[3] 才 caí. Its equivalence with 材 caí “timber” —“the material used to build with”— is noted very early in Chinese linguistics. Similarly, as Owen pointed out to me while we discussed the proper translation for this word, in Europe an almost identical idea is contained in the words ‘metal’ and ‘mettle’: i.e., the stuff of which we are made.
[4] 自天地言之，只是一箇氣。自一身言之，我之氣即祖先之氣，亦只是一箇氣，所以才感必應。
[5] 子孫這身在此，祖宗之氣便在此，他是有箇血脈貫通。所以『神不歆非類，民不祀非族』，只為這氣不相關。