My life..

My life..
What a life it has been.
What a life, remains to be.

The branches sway gently in the breeze, the ducks quack, the lizard
runs, yet I, sitting on the stone on which my fathers had sat, make no movement
whatsoever. Such is my grief.

The tales of my life begins in the summer, in my small, quiet village

in the woods. We are not a very famous people, or a warring populace, we are just
farmers in this small wood. We make for ourselves beds of straw, we sleep on the
ground when we are tired, we eat plain rice. Our elder is a wise man, he can
predict the future. He is wise to the ways of nature, and he meditates as often as
he can.
We were checking on the millet crop, and standing on the road, when we
spied a wagon coming from the outside of the village. We do not get too many
visitors, so this was a big surprise for us. My friend and I, standing on the side
of the road, took note and watched as his carriage got closer and closer, waving as
he drove by.

‘looks like he has money!’, exclaimed my best friend Renshu.

Renshu always had an eye for money. He was a tall, lanky man, about twenty-
nine years old, with sharp eyes that could smell out a heavy coinpurse from a mile
away.

‘what could we have that he could possibly want?’, I wiped my sweaty brow with my
forearm.

‘Let’s go see!’

The heat from the sun thrashing at our backs, we ran to the direction of our
elder’s house, who always received such visitors. We, along with some others,
peeked in through the doorway.
‘What would you possibly want from us, Mister Zhao? We grow rice and millet, we do
not deal in really anything else.’

‘I am looking for an amulet, a very old golden amulet that has been in my
family for generations. It is priceless.’

‘I’m afraid, sir, that we have nothing of the sort here. We do not have much
in the way of wealth, and if we did, we wouldn’t be living here!’

‘Well, our family used to live in this area. That’s why I’m here, elder.’

‘ Then would you like to see the village? Perhaps someone else in the village may
have seen it? You could even stay awhile!’

Our elder always took pleasure in giving guests a tour of the village.
He was proud of what we had built. Moreover, a tale of an ancient amulet being in
our little village, where nothing ever happened, intrigued him. Besides, in the
future he could boast, ‘such and such had found an ancient golden amulet in our
village’. I could see in his eyes the hopes of such boasting as I had never seen,
specifically to some of his rivals in the surrounding villages.

‘Fine. Let’s go and see.’

The merchant and our elder took a long walk through our village that evening, in
which this stranger would stop and question any person walking by, man or woman. He
stayed for several days, growing more and more frustrated until one night, after a
night of heavy drinking, he found out his purse had been snatched, and barged out
in a rage. Renshi and I shook our heads and turned around to go home, when I saw,
in his pocket, a bulge I had not seen before. I pointed it out and he, with a sly
grin on his face, told me the truth: it was the merchant’s gold. I scolded him. If
the elder found out, he could lose his head.
‘no need to worry’, he said, ‘I’ll be gone before he does.’
I was in disbelief, but what was to be done? He was my only friend, my childhood
friend, and how he was leaving me. So caught up in this conversation we were, so
embroiled in it were we, that we did not hear a carriage coming from the bushes, in
a gallop towards us. All of the sudden, as I turned, a horse going full-speed
knocked me down, knocking the wind out of me, and trampled me. But also my friend,
my childhood friend, my only friend, Renshu, got his neck broken from being knocked
down, and driven over by the wheel of the carriage. I turned my head to see him
struggle to breathe, then breathe his final breaths; after that I passed into
darkness.
I thought for sure I would meet my maker, but to my surprise, I awoke, a baby.
Wait, is that my mother, in labor? I did not know she was pregnant again. I tried
moving my arms; they would barely move. I tried moving my legs, I tried touching
the floor, but I couldn’t. I was in someone else’s hands? The hands removed me from
my mother’s womb and in my confusion I could not understand what was going on, so I
started trying to say something, but what came out were not words, but crying. Such
was my rebirth; over time I realized that. Did the ancestors send me back? Was I in
heaven, or hell, to pay for Renshu’s crime? I had no idea. One thing I did know for
sure, was that I always used to be a timid child, but I was determined that this
time around I would not be.
I was taught again how to walk, how to eat, how to say please and thank-you. And
eventually, at a certain age, I met Renshu again. When I saw him I had tears in my
eyes, and wanted to hug him, but I knew he would be confused. So I let the
friendship continue as it had before. I realized another thing: I could use my old
memories to my advantage. I took every opportunity to take my old memories and use
what I remembered, to bring about changes that would always put me on top. I began
to be more and more popular, I would marry a woman(something virtually unthinkable
before), I would have money, I became somebody in my village. The elder, however,
suspected something in me. I know he did. He would pull me to the side and ask me
strange questions like, ‘how did I know that he or she would react that way’, or
‘what was my motivation’. In fact, word spread in the village that I knew how to
walk, read, and talk, earlier than all the others. They wanted to send me to a
school in the city, and said that I could be a magistrate, or a general, or a great
man! Renshu, though, became jealous of me eventually, and would find opportunities
to attack me at night, or to try to steal from me or get me into trouble. He
himself grew to be a huge troublemaker in our village. We had arguments, we had
spats, but one thing he did, I could never forgive. My wife was bathing in the
river, and as she turned to get her clothes, someone had stolen them. I knew it was
him, because he had been joking about it weeks earlier. The shame of my wife was
immense, and so was mine. Eventually, I figured, he had to go.
Finally, the day came where the merchant visited our village again. I remembered
exactly where we were when the merchant left in a rage. At night, I crept into his
bedroom, and stole his coinpurse. Finally on that night, after the merchant stormed
out, I lured Renshu out onto the road by promising him a deal of coins in exchange
for him, leaving me alone forever. The carriage came around the corner and I
grabbed him, pushed him in the way of the carriage, and he was trampled.. again!
Finally. I was free of this fiend. I kept my money, and walked away.