Originally written by Shi Hong. Translated and published with respect for the original author.
The first time I met Master Mei was in the deep autumn of 1987. A memorial service for the late Master Liu Jingshao was being held in the courtyard of the Liu family's old house on Yong'an Road in Zhenjiang. Master Mei had come specially from Nanjing to pay his respects. It was raining lightly that day. He wore a simple jacket, and the two thick, dark eyebrows — those long, sweeping brows — left a deep impression on my memory.
In October of 1992, I returned to Zhenjiang to visit my first teacher, Master Liu Shanjiao, and happened to find Master Mei there on a visit. After dinner, my teacher asked Master Mei to guide me in my qin playing. Again it was in the small courtyard of that old house. For the first time, Master Mei demonstrated and explained Yiguren — "Remembering a Dear One" — to me in full and in detail. The moonlight lay like water across the courtyard, and yet the zhuang-tang and tang-yin ornaments particular to Master Mei's Yiguren seemed almost to set even that still moonlight trembling.
In the autumn of 1999, Master Mei traveled to Hukou to search for his roots, accompanied by a journalist from the Jiujiang Cable Television station. As the car entered Hukou county, rain began to fall. We were looking for a place called "Baihu Tang." Master Mei said he had heard this name mentioned by his family since childhood — if we could find it, we should be able to find his ancestral home, a place called Meijiawa. We asked passersby, we asked in shops along the street, we asked many people. Finally someone mentioned that there was a place called "Baihu Tang" further down — perhaps that was what we were looking for — but there was no road from the county town to Baihu Tang; one had to go by boat. Unfortunately, the rain grew heavier as the day went on, and the wind and waves made the crossing impossible. Our party could only climb Shizhong Mountain and gaze out over the rain-swept Poyang Lake, offering what small comfort we could to the old man's longing for the land of his birth.
In April of 2003, Master Mei — then living in Beijing — summoned me north again to accompany him on the xiao. Two days after arriving, the task was done, and I went to take my leave. The old master brought out some of his recent paintings and told me to choose one to take home. I chose an ink painting of plum blossoms — because in more than ten years, it was the first time I had ever seen Master Mei paint plum blossoms without color. Before we parted, he said again and again that he wanted to return to Hukou that autumn to search for his roots once more, and then we could all go together to spend some days at Sanqing Mountain.
Not long after I left Beijing, news came of the spreading SARS epidemic. Back home, I learned by telephone that the old master had also left the city and was staying at a temple in Changping. My heart was somewhat eased.
That summer, the heat in the south of the Yangtze was fierce. At the end of July, I was at home receiving a visiting xiao friend from out of town when my fellow student Yuxin called suddenly to say that the old master was critically ill in Yangzhou. I could not even wait to see my guest out — I set off at once. By the time I reached Nanjing, I had missed the last bus to Yangzhou, and then Yuxin called again to say the old master had been transferred to Nanjing. I went straight to the chest hospital.
When I arrived, the old master's eyes showed mostly white. He could no longer recognize faces. The doctor said he would not survive the night. My heart broke.
Around three in the morning, his mind began to clear. He was able to call my name. By four o'clock, he kept saying, over and over: "I am going to die." I quickly called his eldest son, Mei Shijun, and asked him to come so that final matters could be arranged. When Mei Shijun arrived, it was not my place to be present for family affairs. I walked out of the ward and stood beneath the open sky, staring at nothing.
I watched the treetops slowly, slowly release a little light. And somehow, as the sky brightened, my heart began to brighten with it. I told myself: the old master has made it through this night.
On the third of August by the Western calendar, our fellow student Tao organized a gathering at the bedside, and we celebrated Master Mei's birthday early — together marking his passage through this crisis. After I returned home, I received calls from time to time from my fellow students saying the old master was gradually recovering. One day, it was said, he had even written out a book title for someone from his hospital bed.
Before dawn on the twenty-ninth of August, I was woken by the telephone. Master Mei had passed away. It was the third day of the eighth lunar month — the very day of his seventy-fourth birthday.
During the National Day holiday of 2005, I returned to Zhenjiang for a school reunion. On the way, I made a point of passing through Yangzhou, and together with my fellow student Yuxin, went once more to look at the old house on Jiandao Lane. The neighbors on either side were just as they had always been. The tap and the small basin that Master Mei had once asked someone to install beneath his window outside still stood there, damp as ever. The rust-colored iron security grille cast its shadow in a lattice pattern on the wooden door behind it. Where the New Year's couplets had once been pasted, only the ghost of a ring of dried paste remained.
The old woman next door came out to collect her laundry. She saw us standing there, dazed, and called out with feeling:
"You've come again? Master Mei is gone now…"
Second draft completed February 2006 at Jiangyou Renjing Lu.
Four winters and summers had passed since the first draft was begun.
A note from William Xu:
This brings the Tasting Mei series to its close.
Western readers may not fully appreciate how deeply the plum blossom is woven into the heart of Chinese literati culture. In classical China, the scholar's four beloved plants were the plum, the orchid, the bamboo, and the chrysanthemum — just as the four arts of the scholar were the qin, chess, calligraphy, and painting. The plum blossom holds a special place among them: it blooms in the dead of winter, defying frost and cold wind, and so it became for generations of scholars and men of principle a symbol of the unbending spirit — one who will not yield.
And so the Chinese plant plum trees, admire them, paint them, write poems about them, and even praise them through the strings of the guqin.
Master Mei Yueqiang carried this symbolism in his very name. He painted plum blossoms. He spent a lifetime playing Meihua Sannong — the Three Variations on Plum Blossom. His art has come to be known as the Mei School. And I, as a student of his student, have spent years in study and in listening — always trying to taste what Mei tasted, always trying to hear what Mei heard.
That is what this series has been: a long act of listening.
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