{"id":421,"date":"2012-06-12T09:18:37","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T09:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/?p=421"},"modified":"2012-06-24T12:17:46","modified_gmt":"2012-06-24T12:17:46","slug":"like-father-like-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/2012\/06\/like-father-like-son\/","title":{"rendered":"Like Father, Like Son"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar<\/em><\/p>\n

It was nothing like it is now:
\n Beijing was always the place where collapse began,
\n when dynasties died, unlike now, where the South
\n reaches up to shake the lagging North.<\/p>\n

It had been a kind of ritual, this flight
\n to the South; thus went the Ming,
\n at the end of their rule, and someday,
\n thus, in like fashion, would fall the Qing.<\/p>\n

But the Young Monarch flees into the night:
\n a hundred faithful accompany the boy,
\n among them the Shield King, Hong Rengan\u2014
\n all moving not like fire and nothing like a flood,
\n perhaps more than anything like fugitive
\n clouds unable to make rain, or cover the sun.<\/p>\n

Round Lake Tai they hurry, toward Huzhou,
\n where English songs fill the streets at night
\n for Chinese Gordon\u2019s defectors are there already,
\n joined\u00a0to Hong Rengan, the Shield King.
\n An isolated\u00a0Taiping garrison: waiting.<\/p>\n

Waiting never lasts long enough,
\n and soon the Qing come down with terrible fire.
\n The British by then are gone, the Ever-Victorious
\n Army disbanded, but the French fight on. They, too,
\n sing tunes from home, to keep their spirits up,
\n and by their sides, though not singing, are more
\n defectors: this time, Taiping runaways.<\/p>\n

Rengan and the Young King must flee again.
\n South from the city; by pulses, ever south,
\n back down to Guangdong, with the Qing dogs
\n panting behind them: Rengan is taken
\n in October, and makes his testament to Hong,
\n and is slain in Jiangxi, at Nanchang, in November.<\/p>\n

But young Tiangui Fu, the Young Monarch, makes good
\n his escape from the camp where the Qing had taken
\n the Shield King; with a dizane followers, he buries
\n himself in a marl-pit.
\n                                 Heavy the clay, hard and cold
\n up to his throat. It is as if all life was
\n the state of being buried in the soil
\n of a forgotten country you\u2019ve never seen.
\n The worms, pernicious seeds that stick to him,
\n and the slick of soil that becomes his skin;
\n he settles down into it, remembering
\n the oil-thick snake of his mother\u2019s hair
\n moving across her back as she spoke of kingship.<\/p>\n

Four days of hunger scrape against his will;
\n four days of sorrow pin him to the earth:
\n he wishes he could spread his arms, and spring
\n up into Heaven, to be with his father. But
\n wracked from nightmares eventually by hunger,
\n he wanders, lonely as a thunderless cloud.<\/p>\n

In the worst of it, where his hunger is transformed
\n to longing for his own death \u2014 in vision, or fact,
\n nobody can tell \u2014 a man comes. Tall, slender,
\n dressed in white, with winter-white flesh, takes hold
\n of him, and puts into his hands a roundel of
\n flatbread. In devouring, Tiangui loses track of the man,
\n who vanishes into irresistible obscurity.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the will to live is strong:
\n he shaves away his tresses, and becomes
\n a laborer named Zhang, a Chinese John Smith,
\n and slaves through someone\u2019s harvest, till it is done.<\/p>\n

Then on the road, a road gone much worse by now —
\n his father Hong, when robbed, was left a set of clothes —
\n Tiangui Fu is robbed of everything; the bandits
\n rape him until he bleeds, and leave. A man
\n finds him, drags him out of the Guangdong gutter
\n and straps loads of bamboo to the boy\u2019s back:
\n impromptu slavery, until he can run away.<\/p>\n

Then a Qing patrol finds him, this heir
\n of Hong Xiuquan,\u00a0starving, skin broken in
\n a hundred places,\u00a0teeth snapped, wandering
\n by a country road\u00a0in the coruscating belly
\n of a cold and brutal October afternoon.<\/p>\n

A strange hope courses through him even then:
\n the doors of his father\u2019s craziness once thrown
\n ope to release him from the madness, finally.
\n He decries his father\u2019s bloodlust, war-madness,
\n showed them his scholar\u2019s soul with open palms,
\n confesses to them with tones plaintive and sweet
\n that of Heavenly Empires he wants nothing at all,
\n but only to be a scholar, study the Analects,
\n and write the examinations at Canton someday,
\n to attain the lowest degree of licentiate,
\n for the last shall be first, and the first likewise be last.<\/p>\n

Irony is not a quality of the world, itself,
\n but exists only in our minds, an act of reading:
\n nobody smirks when his head drops down
\n into the heavy dirt of Guangdong.
\n                                                          And likewise
\n No sound out of Shangdi; the heavens do not weep,
\n temples are silent, and peasants wait still for nothing.
\n Hong makes no word, Yushu is silent, no Majestic
\n Celestial-Dragon plunges from the sky, scales flashing,
\n shimmering claws, screaming its voice wider than rivers,
\n and deeper; no regulatory unicorns of death; even
\n Guan Yin lodges no complaint with the Son of Heaven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar It was nothing like it is now: Beijing was always the place where collapse began, when dynasties died, unlike now, where the South reaches up to shake the lagging North. It had been a kind of ritual, this flight to the South; thus went the Ming, at the end of their rule, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems-from-taiping"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xIep-6N","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}