The Wolf-Signal Beacon Drama

In 1927, in Linjiang County, Sichuan, this little town made its living on opera. The docks rang with high-pitched singing all year long.

Fu Zhenhua was the troupe leader's apprentice. His father was convinced that opera would make him somebody. When Fu was seven, his father pinned him to the stage and lashed him seventeen times, forcing him to train his voice. His mother tried to stop him and was struck with a shoulder pole, breaking her right hand. The seven-year-old understood one thing: every line he sang well was as good as his father hitting his mother once. So he deliberately cracked his voice, sang off-key, and forgot his lines, hiding his talent up his sleeve for twenty years.

He was hopeless at singing, reciting, acting, and acrobatics. There was only one thing he was exceptionally good at: face-changing. He practiced in secret by himself at night, able to change through thirteen painted faces in a single breath. But he never let himself show even one extra face onstage.

Why? He wouldn't say.

In the twenty-sixth year of the Republic, his sworn brother, Liu Rong, the blacksmith's son, got caught up in a killing and fled in the night. The two of them split a copper coin in half against a rock and each kept a piece. Liu Rong said, "You sing opera, I fight. One of us is bound to make something of himself."

Later, the guns of Lugou Bridge echoed across the river. The opera house closed and the troupe disbanded. His mother died of illness, his younger sister went missing, and his father stood on the riverbank without waving goodbye. Seven or eight people, carrying a scorched gong dug out of the rubble, left the Three Gorges and headed east.

Leaving the Three Gorges was easy. Going back was hard.

At last, they settled in a mountain village in western Hubei called Huangxing Village. The villagers pooled their grain and asked the troupe to put on a wheat-harvest opera. In the middle of the night, as the performance went on, Fu Zhenhua glanced into the audience. At the very back stood a woman in a bamboo hat. She hadn't left once, from beginning to end.

He didn't know who she was.

He also didn't know that this village would one day reclaim, piece by piece, the "useless skill" he had hidden away.