Synopsis: “The Audible Annals of Abudan” (梗概：《凿空)

Synopsis:

The Audible Annals

of Abudan

(Based on the Chinese novel by Liu Liangcheng)

Within your lifetime,

many things will disappear before your eyes.

Only those you yearn for won’t arrive.

                                                       — Imam Ghupur

At high noon, a harsh burning sun hangs above Qiuci’s Old Town Bazaar in southern Xinjiang. On the congested bridge, a driver honks his horn furiously at an oncoming donkey cart. As if on cue, what seems like ten thousand donkeys commence braying in unison. The riverbed is instantly engulfed by deafening hee-haws.

Sirens blaring, the People’s Armed Police swoop down and order the cart owners to silence their beasts, or else. But as the chorus of furry vocalists converges in the sky and then plummets back to earth, no owner dares rein in his donkey.

What led to this ear-shattering mob action? Has the foreigner’s Mad Donkey Disease gone viral on Chinese soil? Could the donkeys have learned of their doomsday? Was it a toxic combination of the scorching sun, overcrowding and the piercing sirens? Or was it instigated by Elqem, the Donkey Master of Abudan?

The Party Secretary wants to get to the bottom of this “mass incident” — any leading cadre’s nightmare — and quick.

The investigators zero in on Abudan, where the Turkic villagers are accustomed to their hardscrabble lifestyle on the fringes of the vast Taklamakan Desert, once the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Qiuci before Islam arrived one thousand years ago.

After the founding of New China in 1949, even with the Household Responsibility System in the mid-1980s, life in this village still features donkey carts, adobe houses and ketmen — a traditional hoe-like farming implement — and Uyghur remains the local tongue. Almost every family is engaged in some sort of digging — cellars, wells, and much more, in the hope of chancing upon ancient relics that can be sold for much needed cash.

Yet, at the turn of the 21^st century, within half a year three earth-shaking events will radically alter the villagers’ slow-paced lives.

After petroleum is discovered nearby, the central government launches the national West-East Gas Pipeline project to transport natural gas across thousands of kilometers to Shanghai, which brings great hope to the dirt-poor locals. Everyone is keen to grasp this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and strike it rich, confident that their trusty ketmen is the perfect tool to dig the pipeline trench.

Under ketmen researcher Wang Jia’s watchful eyes, Turdi the Blacksmith hammers out ever-larger blades to meet skyrocketing demand, marking a historic change of shape for this timeless Central Asian implement.

But one morning the villagers are astonished to find hundreds of excavators lined up outside Abudan. With just a few dips of their giant buckets, these modern machines create a deep trench. Any lingering hope for local employment is dashed completely, for once the pipeline is in place, bulldozers cover it smoothly in dirt with equal efficiency.

Before the villagers have recovered from this shock, a crisis descends upon their beloved donkeys, whose crimson braying has propped up the village’s soundscape for eons.

In the belief that donkeys and their carts constitute an obstacle to modernization, Qiuci’s leading cadres aim at rendering the county “donkey-free” by encouraging locals to exchange three donkeys for a three-wheel motorcycle. The equids will be carted off to a factory where their skin is made into pricey ejiao — donkey-hide gelatin — a traditional Chinese medicine with myriad reputed health benefits.

Before officials can pin down the mysterious factors behind the Mass Braying Incident at the Old Town Bazaar, a tip-off about some “Bad Elements” demands urgent attention.

One November morning, the People’s Armed Police arrive at Abudan to conduct Operation Tunnel Bust. A hole they find at the bottom of the donkey trough in Yüsup’s courtyard leads to a maze of tunnels.

Acclaimed as the Ketmen Boss, Yüsup made his fortune in the late 1980s by leading residents to undertake mud-brick construction work outside Abudan. But since returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, Yüsup has focused on a secret, two-pronged subterranean project: excavating an ancient village under Abudan haunted by the eerie remains of blond-haired Caucasians, while following a mysterious inner voice to tunnel toward his safe haven, the village’s sacred mazar.

Underground, operating in total darkness, the police launch a breath-taking pursuit that ends with the tragic deaths of an officer, two villagers and one donkey. Yüsup’s tunnels are flooded, their exits destroyed by grenades.

Through it all, however, Abudan’s donkeys stand their ground. The sirens wrap around the heavens like barbed wire, cutting into the donkeys’ braying — thick as a poplar — and binding it layer upon layer, almost choking it. Bursts of choral hee-haws somehow break free of the bondage and hurtle straight for the sky, until their anxious owners beat the donkeys back into their pen, muzzled in silence.

As all this unfolds, Zhang Wangcai listens from his own secret subterranean passage. For twenty years, he has been tunneling from his riverside dwelling back to his old house in the village, his real home built painstakingly with the generous help of neighbors. The taciturn but kind-hearted fellow is ostracized by locals, although his wife and two children — the foursome being the sole Han family in the village — have adapted to life in Abudan.

The following spring, Wangcai’s son Zhang Jin returns from his job at a mine, now stone deaf. He finds Abudan in a somber mood. There is scarcely any donkey braying; the village’s last Imam is in heaven; the former ambitious Village Head Yasin in total disgrace; and the village’s most capable man, Yüsup, is rumored to be in exile in a place called Afghanistan.

In an effort to recover his hearing, the young man assiduously reconstructs the village’s former soundscape in his mind. Using the Uyghur script he learned as a schoolboy, he compiles a chronological list of the mechanized sounds that gradually came to dominate Abudan’s audible world: chunks of scrap metal colliding with one another (the first crawler tractor); tuk-tuk-tuk (four-wheel tractors); an “electric donkey” in heat (a shabby old Happiness 250cc motorcycle); and lastly, the disturbing rumble of the humongous oil tankers that rocked the village and eventually shattered Abudan’s rural sky — a sky once propped up by donkeys braying, roosters crowing, dogs barking, cows mooing and sheep baaing.

One day a proud Wangcai leads his son into his tunnel and back to their old house, but Zhang Jin is aghast, realizing that the habitual path back to the village — above ground — is no longer solid, and his hopes of marrying Nakazet, the local girl he adores, ever more remote.

This subterranean journey decides him. With the very foundations of Abudan hollowed out by rapacious oil drillers, relic hunters and clandestine tunnelers, it is time to set out on his own.

The above text is the synopsis of a Chinese novel,凿空, by Xinjiang-based Liu Liangcheng (刘亮程). The working title is The Audible Annals of Abudan. It is newly translated by Jun Liu and Bruce Humes. To request an excerpt, and for information about foreign language rights, contact Yilin Press’s Ms. Yvonne Wang (王玉强) at wangyuqiang@yilin.com

 

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