Page 47 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
“Aiyah! And what will Teacher Ying do the next time they are plagued by a bothersome ghost?” Mami exclaimed, squashing a stray mosquito between her palms. “You will need to know some wards before you are grown.”
She sat at the kitchen table and jabbed a finger; you sat, too, not daring to contradict.
“Pass me that piece of paper. Yes, that one. Sit here, quickly please.” Mami dug out a pot of ink from one of the cupboards and a small fine-tipped brush. You’d seen both of those objects many times before, but not been allowed near them.
“This is temple ink, made by monks,” Mami said, matter-of-factly. “It is perfectly balanced, with blood and ash and blessings mixed in.”
“Can I use regular ink for fu talismans?”
“Yes, but it will be unreliable. Maybe the glyph will work, maybe not. Temple ink will always give you a good result.”
“I thought we don’t go to temples,” you said, forehead creasing in puzzlement. Unusually, your parents did not observe religious festivals; they were the only people you knew, other than Westerners, who refrained from doing so.
“I don’t owe monks or gods anything, especially not my time or money,” Mami said, with a venomous acidity. “But their ink is still useful, so we buy that.” She drew an unfamiliar word with a steady hand and confident strokes. “Do you see this?”
It looked like a Chinese character, but none that you could quite recognize. From the corner of your eye, the lines seemed fluid and erratic, shining a faint glow. Like a match on the verge of snuffing out. But every time your gaze focused on them directly, it looked normal and static.
“This is a glyph,” Mami said, pointing to the ink-wet words. “Put different glyphs together, and write them on paper or bottle gourds or metal with templeink, and you have made a fu talisman.” She tucked loose hair behind her ear. “Glyphs must be written very precisely. If you get them wrong, the fu talisman doesn’t work. If you are trying to make a ward, for example, and your fu talisman is written wrong, then the ghosts will not be scared.”
“How do you get them wrong? Or right?”
“When you write glyphs, you write the shape of a thought. Each word, each written character, tells a little story, but glyphs are more than words. They are the truth of a thing, the many layers of a thought.”
“Oh.” You poked one corner of one glyph; it left a dab of ink on the fingertip. “How many glyphs are there?”
“I don’t know. I suppose a wise man could write many of them. But I only know a few, and that is all you will need to learn.” Mami scribbled a series of symbols, showing them to you. “See these two? Put them together, and that will frighten ghosts away from an entrance.”
You studied it intently; this was indeed a symbol you recognized. Many of the neighbors hung such fu talismans above their flat doors. “Is this how exorcists trap spirits, Mami?”
“No. Binding is far beyond my skill, something that takes years of practice. I can only teach you to preserve bodies for funerals, or to ward doors and windows against unwelcome spirits.” Mami got up and fetched down another stack of paper sheafs. “Go on! Copy me. Copy the glyph I made. In your own hand.”
You couldn’t yet write your own name without getting the characters wrong, but did your best. The result was a blobby mess of wavering strokes, bearing no resemblance to her neat scripts.
“Looks like an ink spill,” Mami observed.
You flushed. She wasn’t wrong.
“Think more, think harder,” she said. “It’s not enough to just draw. Think of the ward, hanging above the door. Think of the ghosts who come to stand in front of it, then flinch at the sight, and drift away. Know what you want when you write. Know what you need. Understand?”
“No,” you grumbled, but squeezed your eyes shut anyway, thinking hard about the fu talisman hanging outside the flat; you’d seen it often enough.
Opening your eyes, you put brush to paper yet again, this time trying to keep the purpose held in your brain.
A strange thing happened. Soft warmth built in your palms, trickling to the fingertips. Your clumsy grasp became firmer, more confident. For a moment, joy buoyed you.
The lines began to writhe and shimmer, struggling away from your control.The image in your head grew hazy and your hands shook, unsure which line or stroke to draw next. The half-formed glyph devolved into a garbled, unusable thing.
You scowled at your work.
“Try again, it still is not right,” Mami said, sharp as a skewer. But she sat next to you, larger hand curling around your smaller one with a firm touch. “I will help. Think of the ward, of scaring away. Whatever looks at this glyph should want to turn around. Are you thinking like that? Now go!”
A third try. You held the essence of the ward in your mind with ferocious tenacity, moving your own hand while also allowing Mami’s experienced touch to guide and nudge the shaping.
Something in your head seemed to click. It was as if a weight had shifted, or a stone had been pushed into place. Suddenly, the writing flowed like rainwater down a polished gutter. The glyph crystallized, brush strokes glowing briefly, then darkening back to fast-drying ink.
And there on the page was a shaky but recognizable talisman, done in your own writing. More or less, anyway.
“I did it,” you exclaimed, proud and amazed. You were tired, too, and suddenly starving, as if you’d run too many laps or skipped at least three meals.
