Kapok Kasaya

74 Shaoxing Road, Shanghai.

Two luxuriant camphor trees stood guard over the secluded, tranquil courtyard. Inside stood a small three-story building, with a sign hanging by the entrance: Story Club Magazine Editorial Office!

Early that morning, He Chengwei rode his bicycle to work. He had joined the editorial office in 1974 and was its youngest editor.

"Morning, chief editor!"

"Morning!"

He Chengwei went up to the second floor and sat down at his desk. There weren't many people at the magazine: editors, art designers, and circulation staff numbered only twenty in all.

As a bimonthly, the magazine ought to have had plenty of time to gather material, but he spent every day under tremendous pressure.

There were simply too few usable submissions.

Story Club had no regular columns at present. Each issue serialized five long stories: two were hand-copied manuscripts, two were old revolutionary stories, and only one was new.

When editors were pushed to the wall, they could only write stories themselves or hunt everywhere for material.

The day before, He Chengwei had gone to Chongming Island to visit a man who loved to brag. People who loved to brag were often good storytellers, too. He had emptied the fellow out, digging more than a dozen short stories from his belly and filling an entire notebook.

"Little He, take a look at this hand-copied manuscript. Can we publish it?"

"All right!"

The chief editor tossed him a battered notebook. It was thick, the handwriting was a mess, and some pages were damaged.

He Chengwei was used to it by now. Since the beginning of the year, he had read far too many hand-copied manuscripts, all of them "banned books" from the special period. There were The Second Handshake, mentioned earlier, as well as The Green Corpse, A Pair of Embroidered Shoes, Meihua Party, A Young Girl's Heart, and so on.

Just how passionate were people about hand-copied manuscripts back then?

It was said that one sent-down youth, having learned that someone had a copy of The Second Handshake, walked twenty li to borrow it. He made a crude oil lamp from an ink bottle and hid in a stifling livestock shed at night to read it in secret. There were so many mosquitoes in summer that he put on thick clothes and soaked his feet in a bucket of water. After five sleepless nights, he finally finished The Second Handshake.

A Young Girl's Heart was even more famous. It told the story of two young people falling in love and contained sexual descriptions.

The so-called sexual descriptions were actually quite comical.

No one knew what the earliest version had been like. In any case, as it passed from hand to hand, those restless men and women reached the passionate parts, lost control of themselves, and let their imaginations run wild, adding plenty of sexual descriptions of their own.

But they had little sexual experience, and what they wrote made them a laughingstock: nothing more than sucking tongues, touching boobs, and watching streams gurgle.

Just like certain webnovel authors today, who could produce virgin literature such as, "He rubbed his girlfriend's breasts bigger, from a C cup to a B cup"...

Back then, though, A Young Girl's Heart was spiritual nourishment no less fearsome than a monstrous flood or a savage beast. Countless people passed it around, and many were poisoned by it. It was said that a student in Shanghai read the book, began pursuing his own younger sister, and even copied scenes from the book to commit hooligan acts. He was sentenced to death.

He Chengwei flipped through the manuscript as fast as he could.

He only needed to determine roughly what kind of story it told and whether it could be published. As for any prohibited content, that would be scrutinized carefully later.

"We can use this story!"

"Good. You handle it."

By the time that was settled, it was already noon.

He Chengwei ate lunch and went outside for a short walk. When he returned, he saw the mail carrier.

"Your magazine's getting more and more mail. I read every issue of Story Club. Keep it up!"

"Thank you, comrade!"

He Chengwei carried the bundle upstairs and opened it. There were letters from readers, as well as submissions in brown paper envelopes.

He looked at the submissions first. The first was a new story by an amateur author in Jiangsu who said he was a worker. He had written a story about a factory security office, catching thieves, pursuing the factory belle, and so on.

"The standard's decent enough!"

He marked it for use, then looked at the second one.

"Sent from Mount Lu..."

One flip through the manuscript told He Chengwei it was about twenty thousand characters long. The handwriting wasn't very pretty but was barely legible. The title was written at the beginning:

Kapok Kasaya!

"What's this? What a strange name."

He read the first sentence.

"In the late Ming dynasty, the people could scarcely make a living, and treacherous ministers held sway. They cared nothing for the lives of the common people and continued to squeeze them with exorbitant taxes and levies. Righteous men everywhere raised the banner of Shaolin's true teachings to oppose them. The arch-traitor Wang Cheng hated them to the bone and summoned Qi Tianyuan, a renegade disciple of Wudang, ordering him to seize the Kapok Kasaya from Shaolin Temple..."

He Chengwei perked up.

This one knew how to tell a story!

Story Club was called a magazine, but what it published was really oral literature. It had to be easy to understand, fast-paced, and full of successive climaxes, much like today's webnovels.

In a story written for People's Literature, for instance, a woman might be described like this: "She was in her twenties, tall and fair, with features like a painting and limpid eyes that glanced sideways..."

But in Story Club, it would be: "A woman. She was very beautiful."

That was also why people looked down on Story Club, calling it reading material for migrant workers and the first choice of drifters. Even Sister Feng, far away in the United States, couldn't forget it; she was still reading Story Club after going abroad.

He Chengwei read on.

The rest maintained the same accessible, brisk style, with remarkably simple language. It actually told a martial-arts story.

It said that when Bodhidharma crossed eastward long ago, he brought a kapok kasaya with him. It had been handed down through generations at Shaolin Temple, and whoever possessed it could become abbot. Qi Tianyuan, a renegade disciple of Wudang, shaved his head and infiltrated Shaolin Temple, intending to seize the kasaya and become abbot.

Meanwhile, elsewhere.

Ding Mo, a lay disciple of Shaolin, was traveling from place to place when he met a horse trader named Lin Cangbo.

Lin Cangbo had four daughters, all of them exceptionally skilled, especially the eldest, Lin Ying, who was as beautiful as a flower and accomplished in both letters and martial arts. One day, Wang Cheng's men suddenly arrived, intending to seize their horses by force.

Lin Ying secretly incited the herders to stampede the horses.

Across the boundless grassland, ten thousand horses thundered away. Wang Cheng's men had no way to pursue them and could only give up in bitter resentment. Lin Ying and her three younger sisters rounded up the horses. Ding Mo happened upon them and lent a hand, and Lin Ying, seeing how extraordinary and heroic he was, secretly developed feelings for him.

Ding Mo was also quite taken with her, and the two exchanged tokens.

From Lin Cangbo, Ding Mo learned that Wang Cheng might move against Shaolin Temple, so he hurried away, heading south to Mount Song.

Meanwhile, Qi Tianyuan tried to force his way into the position of abbot and fought Master Yuanhui of Shaolin, but was no match for him. Wang Cheng arrived with troops and ordered an assault on Shaolin. Ding Mo arrived in time to save Master Yuanhui, and they fell back to the Scripture Repository.

Master Yuanhui entrusted the kasaya to Ding Mo and several other disciples, telling them to leave first.

Wang Cheng led his troops in taking Shaolin Temple, detained the disciples, and threatened their lives to force Master Yuanhui to hand over the kasaya. Master Yuanhui resolutely walked into the raging flames.

"Abbot!"

"Abbot!"

"I came with a clean body, and I leave with a clean body. Mountains of blades and seas of fire-what can they do to me?"

Amid his disciples' cries of grief, Master Yuanhui stepped into the sea of flames, choosing to enter nirvana through self-immolation.

Ding Mo escaped with his fellow disciples, with the imperial court's hounds in relentless pursuit. Ding Mo got hold of a fake kasaya and drew the pursuers away alone, but he was no match for Qi Tianyuan and was knocked off a cliff...

"Oh!"

The story flowed like moving clouds and running water. He Chengwei read it with delight and sorrow, sorrow and delight. When he saw Ding Mo fall off the cliff, his heart clenched, and he could hardly wait to see what happened next. But when he turned the page...

"That's it?"

"Heavens above!"

He Chengwei was as restless as a wild donkey in heat. Wasn't this torture? What happened after he fell off the cliff? It actually stopped there!

(End of chapter)