There was a man surnamed Yang from Fenyang. I no longer remember his given name. His home was in Yanwu Town, and his family was a wealthy one. The Yangs had long been at odds with the Dai family of the same town. The two households checked one another, now one rising, now the other, so that in the end neither could do anything decisive against the other. One year, when the coal-mine bosses of western Shanxi gathered in disorderly protest and smashed the town government offices, the Dai family took advantage of the chaos to send men to burn the Yang granary. They also wounded several of the Yang kinsmen with blades and killed one of them. Because Yang himself had taken part in the disturbances among the mine owners, he fled far away to avoid trouble. The Yang family, lacking evidence and not daring to report the matter to the authorities, could only swallow the bitterness in silence. From then on, the hatred between the two families deepened all the more.
Then one year, Yang suddenly returned to Yanwu Town and told his family that the chance for revenge had come. A few days later, an old blind couple appeared in Yanwu Town, earning their food by performing music and song. One held a xiao flute, the other a sanxian. Their melodies were ancient in mode and their lyrics deeply mournful, beautiful to hear, though the people of Shanxi could not understand a word of what they sang. Some locals who had once worked in southern Fujian cried out in surprise: “This is nanyin! It sounds like one branch of sanqu song.” Nanyin, also known as string-pipe music, draws on the strengths of Yuan opera, Yiyang melody, and Kun melody, and is one of the oldest surviving musical traditions in China. The old couple lingered in Yanwu Town and the fields beyond it for several months, and then later left. Gossips said that at night they stayed in the Yang household, but the Yang family neither confirmed nor denied it.
That autumn, the harvest in western Shanxi was poor. Every household had only enough grain for itself, while the Dai family in particular reaped not a single kernel. They invited agricultural experts to inspect the fields, but there were no insects, no blight, and no one knew the cause. A little more than a month later, an earthquake struck the Taihang Mountains. Yanwu Town suffered aftershocks but no great damage, and only the Dai family lost seven rooms, with one child crushed to death. Craftsmen were invited to examine the ruins and said that the earth-veins beneath the Dai residence had been broken by the quake, causing the beams to fail. At this point the Yang family sent the Dais fifteen dou each of rice and flour, together with a note saying that from now on the two houses owed one another nothing. The Dai family was thrown into panic, and never again dared to bully the villagers.
A friend of Yang’s once went into the inner quarters of the Yang household to drink with him, and after wine had gone to his head, Yang confessed that the old couple had been blind masters invited from Quanzhou. Yang’s original intention had been to exterminate the entire Dai family, but the elderly pair from southern Fujian had firmly refused and warned the Yangs that whenever matters overflow, something must be lost in return. Yang followed their advice. Having taken his revenge, he then voluntarily sent rice and flour to his enemies’ household. That too was conduct not unworthy of a true man.
Blind masters have existed since ancient times. In the northern tradition, blind masters were all blind musicians whose eyes had been pierced. In the southern tradition, especially around Quanzhou in southern Fujian, there were nanyin blind masters and ritual-method blind masters, and some practitioners were skilled in both. Nanyin musicians carried nothing more than pipa, xiao flute, sanxian, and erxian, while ritual-method blind masters bore instruments such as measuring rulers of heaven, killing-panels, and divination tubes. A few years ago in Harbor City I too once saw an old blind couple performing nanyin. Remembering this story, I wondered whether they might belong to the same lineage, or perhaps even be that very pair. The trembling sound of the sanxian was enough to shake one’s heart and spirit and fill one with grief.