One Man's Bible Read Online Free PDF

both the chair and his father were slowly hauled up. His father hung high, swaying in midair, drunk and with a smile on his face. This was his father’s great achievement, but he couldn’t tell whether it was fantasy or not. With a child, memory and imagination are hard to separate.
    For him, life before he was ten was like a dream. His childhood always seemed to be a dream world, even when his family was on the run as refugees. The truck was careering along a muddy mountain road in the rain and, all day long, he held a basket of oranges, which he ate under the tarpaulin covering. He once asked his mother if this had happened, and she said at the time oranges were cheap, and if you gave the villagers some money, they loaded them onto the truck next to the people. His father was working for a state-run bank, so armed guards, escorting the transport of banknotes, accompanied the family as it retreated with the bank.
    The old home, now frequently appearing in dreams, was not the foreign-style house with the round doorway and the flower garden in which his grandfather had lived, but the old house with a well, left by his maternal grandmother. This little old woman, also dead, was forever rummaging in a big suitcase. In the dream, he is looking down at the house, which doesn’t have a roof, at rooms divided by wooden walls. No one is there except for his grandmother who is frantically rummaging in the suitcase. He remembered that in the house there was an old-style leather suitcase that had been given a coat of paint and that in it, hidden under the clothes, was a parcel containing his grandmother’s deeds to houses and land. The properties had been used to pay off debts or sold a long time before the new government authorities would have confiscated them. When his grandmother and mother burned that parcel of yellow, disintegrating papers, they were in a panic, but he hadn’t reported them because no one came to investigate. However, had he in fact been questioned, he probably would have reported them, because his mother and grandmother were colluding to destroy criminal evidence, even if they did dearly love him.
    That dream was several decades later, after he had been in the West for some time, in a small inn in the city of Tours in Central France. He had just woken up but was still in a daze. Behind the gauze curtain, old louvered shutters with peeling paint half-blocked the gloomy gray sky between the leaves of a plane tree. In the dream he’d just had, he was in that old two-story house, standing on the upstairs balcony that hadn’t collapsed, leaning on a rickety wooden railing and looking down. Beyond the gate was a pumpkin patch where he used to catch crickets in the heaps of tiles and rubble among the vines. He clearly remembered that behind the wooden partition in the dream there were many rooms where guests used to stay. The guests had all disappeared just like his grandmother, just like his past life. In that life, memory and dream intermingle and the images transcend time and space.
    Since he was the eldest son and eldest grandson, everyone in the family—including his maternal grandmother—had great expectations of him. However, his frequent bouts of illness from early childhood were a worry, and they had his fortune told many times; the first time, he recalled, was in a temple, when his parents took him with them to Lushan to escape the heat. The Immortal Grotto was a famous attraction. Next to it was a big temple with a vegetarian hall as well as tea stalls catering to tourists. It was cool inside the temple and there were not many visitors. In those times, people were carried up the mountain in sedan chairs, and he sat on his mother’s lap tightly clutching the handrail in front of him, but couldn’t help looking down the deep crevasse at the side. Before leaving China, he revisited the place, which, of course, already could be reached by bus, but couldn’t find the temple. Even the ruins had vanished