Ma Yuan in the Castle
This article tells the story of Ma Yuan, a once prominent writer in China, who has gone to the borderland and built a gigantic castle after his writing skills and fame have diminished. He lives in the castle with his family who caters to his needs. He doesn’t believe in modern science or education, not allowing his child with a congenital disease to attend a regular school or seek medical help, which ultimately led to the child’s death at the age of 13.
The Master
The owner of the castle has grown old. Most of the time, the writer Ma Yuan can only lie down. As he half-lies in the living room and looks out the window, he cannot see the castle’s most eye-catching four-story red circular brick building that stands on a high hill in Hani minority settlement of Guniangzhai, Xishuangbana in Yunnan Province and looks like a headman’s watchtower in the old days.
In this castle that covers 2,000 square meters, Ma Yuan passes his days in an octagonal building. This building has three floors. The first floor has a large living room of 70 square meters with large, pointed windows like in a fairy tale. Outside, it is already quite warm in Xishuangbanna under the February sun, which leads one to think that this living room with its 7 windows and a 360-degree view must be bright and full of light. This was also Ma Yuan’s original intention.
It feels different when one actually enters the room. The depth of the room is so great that the light can only reach one third of the way in. For security reasons, the windows are fixed, and only a few small holes in the triangular top of the windows allow ventilation. A set of two long and two short dark wooden sofas are placed in the center, adding to the already dull and stagnant air in the room. These days, Ma Yuan often lies on the sofa.
When Ma Yuan stands up, he is taller than most. When he was younger, he was 184 cm tall. According to himself, he is about 2 centimeters shorter now, the result of his age. He is a big man and has a broad face. His light brown pupils often look out to the distance. The writer Yu Hua once described these eyes as “impassioned.”
Now, these eyes are a little dimmer. They have witnessed their owner’s rich past: Ma Yuan was born in Jinzhou, Liaoning Province, was sent to the countryside, worked as a welder, passed the college entrance examination after its reinstatement, had a degree in Chinese, and requested to be assigned a job in Tibet upon graduation. Ma Yuan went to Tibet at the age of 29 and returned at the age of 36. He spent 7 years there, leaving behind The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains, The Goddess of the Lhasa River and other novels that have been canonized in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. After his return, he made movies, worked with theatres, engaged in the real estate business, and was called the “trend-setter of the times.”
In 2008, Ma Yuan found out that he had an egg-sized (6cm) tumor in his lungs, which he called a “bad thing.” The biopsy result showed “no cancerous cells.” He was supposed to have another or two biopsy tests, followed by possible surgery and then chemotherapy if the tumor turned out to be malignant, but he decided to stop. “If cancerous cells were detected, it would mean that the countdown is on. By keeping it in suspense, I am at best a lung cancer suspect.”
Ma Yuan’s own solution was to “change the water.” He believed that water was the basis of life. The “bad thing” in his lungs was also brought out by the water. So, he left his job in Shanghai and moved to Hainan to “change the water.” “Once the water is good, perhaps it will take the ‘bad thing’ away.”
Luckily, his condition did not worsen. Three years later, Ma Yuan was invited by a friend to visit Nannuo Mountain in Xishuangbanna. Nannuo Mountain is about 30 kilometers from Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna that is famous for the Pu’er tea. Ma Yuan fell in love with the trees and the warm climate and decided to move there. He made 8 trips to Nannuo Mountain that same year, bought a piece of land, leveled it to the way he wanted in preparation for building houses. The following year, Ma Yuan, with his wife, Li Xiaohua, and 3-year-old son, Ma Ge, moved into the castle that was still under construction.
When the documentary filmmaker Wang Shengzhi first visited Ma Yuan in Nannuo Mountain, he felt it was like “one man’s dream.” 11 red-brick and red-tile houses were built in a circular or polyhedron shape with staggered heights. Large red flowers hung from the walls. The houses leaned against the green mountain. In the morning, clouds and fog sauntered their way into the garden. Two dogs and a dozen chickens were running around. Fresh spring water flowed into the fishpond.
After moving to Nannuo Mountain, Ma Yuan spent 5 or 6 years building his castle. Except the octagonal building where Ma Yuan’s family lives, there are wooden plaques on every door in the other buildings. Ma Yuan has named every room after his favorite writers and had their names written on the plaques: Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Selma Lagerlöf, etc. On the lawn in front of the front gate of the main building, there is a large stone, inscribed with the words “Wan Ge Hua Yuan” that contain the names of all the family members: Ma Dawan, Ma Yuan’s elder son from his ex-wife, Ma Ge, the younger son from his current wife, his current wife Li Xiaohua, and Ma Yuan himself.
Wang Shengzhi filmed this when Ma Yuan’s family and their visiting friends strolled in the mountain: Ma Ge saw a banana tree by the roadside and said he wanted to eat bananas. Li Xiaohua, a former athlete, climbed up the wall, bent the banana leaves, and chopped off a handful of green bananas. The visiting friends marveled that it looked like a painting from Gauguin.
Ma Yuan sees his move to Nannuo Mountain as another important turn in his life, following his illness. He was almost 60 years old when he went to the mountain. For him, it was already a lifetime before his move. “Now I am in the midst of living a second life. I am having a great time. In nature, I have found where I belong.”
It seems to be a perfect version of The Peach Blossom Spring by Tao Yuanming: the writer retreats to the mountain, builds his own castle, and lives a life close to nature and poetry. Ma Yuan recovered from his illness and was in the second productive period of his creative life. His wife kept him company. His child grew up in a beautiful environment. His castle had become a specimen of the ideal life for city dwellers and a statement of a writer known for his quirky and romantic style. The media came out in droves to report that the prominent writer Ma Yuan had returned to literature and to the public eye in the double aura of his struggles with cancer and hermetic way of life.
But in hindsight, there was some hidden unease behind the romantic and moving storyline, which was at the same time too smooth for its own good. On Children’s Day, June 1st, 2022, the 13-year-old Ma Ge unexpectedly passed away. A week later, Ma Yuan announced the sad news on his WeChat Moments with these words: “It was not an accident. Ma Ge didn’t experience any pain. It was the heaven that suddenly took him away.”
Eight months after that, Ma Yuan now lies on the long sofa in the center of the living room inside his castle. He has a look of weariness that has found its temporary relief. The day before yesterday, in order to welcome a friend who had traveled a long way to Xishuangbanna, he and Xiaohua went down the mountain and stayed in their villa on the outskirts of Jinghong. Today, after meeting his friend, he had Xiaohua drive him back to Nannuo Mountain. “This is home.”
Ma Yuan’s back is a little bent. His gray jacket makes him look cramped. He’s wearing a pair of Crocs shoes that beachgoers often wear. When he was in Hainan, he preferred sneakers. Since a year ago, he has been suffering from chronic heart failure. Earlier this year, he was infected with Covid. Because of his underlying health conditions, he had breathing difficulties and delirium, and had to go to the hospital to be rescued.
Now, his body is still prone to swelling, especially his legs. So, he tries to lie down more. He wears Crocs shoes out of convenience. He slowly moves himself to the sofa and sits down. He looks up and sees the altar table diagonally opposite from him. There is a picture of Ma Ge next to two bodhisattva statues that Xiaohua prays to.
“Look, our son, Ma Ge, is with the bodhisattvas.” Ma Yuan said.
Rebirth
At 8 a.m. Xiaohua is busy in the kitchen in her down jacket preparing the tomato egg noodles that Ma Yuan loves. Guniangzhai, Nannuo Mountain is 1,000 meters higher in altitude than Jinghong, and the temperature is about 6 degrees cooler. In the morning and evening in February, it is usually under 20 degrees Celsius. The kitchen and the dining room are integrated, which welcome winds from all sides like an open platform. Li Xiaohua comes from Hainan and doesn’t like the cold here.
Ma Yuan sits down at the table, pulls up his shirt, and gives himself an insulin injection. He has severe diabetes and needs to inject insulin before every meal, with an extra shot of a long-acting medication.
This scene reminds me of meeting Ma Yuan at a dinner party in Shanghai more than two years ago. A dozen or so men and women from the literary world gathered around a large table. When he arrived late, Ma Yuan just passed others who had already started eating to his seat of honor. Before picking up the chopsticks, he lifted his shirt to reveal his belly, took out an injection with one hand, and gave himself a shot, meanwhile he said jokingly, “It’s scary to think that there are 20 million bipedal animals living in the compartments of those skyscrapers in Beijing.”
For a long time, Ma Yuan took neither injections nor other medications and refused to measure his blood sugar. Six or seven years ago, an old friend traveled all the way from the northeast to Xishuangbanna to persuade Ma Yuan to take injections. Ma Yuan listened and got into the habit of doing it.
Xiaohua first brings a bowl of noodles to Ma Yuan, and then asks the guests to help themselves. Ma Yuan is getting weaker by the day and relies more and more on his wife’s care. At the table, the big bowl of soup is placed in front of him, but he still gives Xiaohua his empty bowl: “Honey, give me some soup.”
When she does house chores, Xiaohua looks agile and strong, showing her athlete’s background. She’s taller than 170cm and has a ponytail. There are dark spots on her cheeks, probably due to long years of sun exposure on the plateau.
Xiaohua grew up in the rural areas of Wanning. As a child, she probably would not have thought that she would become a writer’s wife. She was tall from a young age. When she lined up in her class at school, she was always at the end of the girls’ line. She was selected to go to a sports school and later joined the provincial team to practice track and field. Xiaohua disliked the trainings, “just too difficult.” All her senior schoolmates retired with injuries. She made her own decision to leave the provincial team and return to the sports school. After graduation, she went to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and sold cigarettes and alcohol in a shopping mall.
When she met Ma Yuan, the 25-year-old Xiaohua was working in the sales department of a real estate project in Haikou. Ma Yuan was looking for a piece of real estate, and she was the receptionist. As she was showing him around, she felt that the way this tall guest looked at her was different. In the middle of their conversation, Ma Yuan suddenly asked her, “How old is your child?” Xiaohua replied with some embarrassment that she was not married and had no children.
Later, Ma Yuan admitted that it was love at first sight. He found her “agreeable and attractive.” At the time, he was still a professor at Tongji University and had to leave Haikou and return to Shanghai shortly, so he asked a local female friend to talk to Xiaohua.
Xiaohua only knew that writers wrote books and had never heard of Ma Yuan but she found Ma Yuan pleasant and friendly. As for the fact that Ma Yuan’s 29 years her senior, she thought it wouldn’t matter as long as he’s younger than her parents. Everything went well. Xiaohua soon moved to Shanghai, and they spent every minute together. When Ma Yuan went to school to teach, Xiaohua followed him to the classroom and sat in the last row, listening to his lectures on classic novels and films. She read Ma Yuan’s novels and thought that everything in them was true. When she read the parts on love relationships, she asked Ma Yuan in disbelief: “Why are you like this?” She also took care of Ma Yuan’s day-to-day. Wu Yao, a student of Ma Yuan’s, noticed that Xiaohua would make sure that Ma Yuan wore socks. For a long time before that, no matter how cold the weather was, Ma Yuan was always barefoot.
After getting to know each other for half a year, watching the fireworks in the Shanghai night sky on New Year’s Eve, and having a snowball fight on the rooftop garden, Li Xiaohua and Ma Yuan tied the knot and got their marriage certificate.
Ma Yuan specially furnished a new apartment of more than 200 square meters to celebrate his second marriage.
Just half a month after the wedding, a large area of shingles appeared on Ma Yuan’s chest and back, which led to ulceration and pain. After a series of tests, the root cause was found to be a fist-sized tumor in his lungs. “You might as well go back to Haikou. If you do, you can go back as a girl who has not yet been married.” Ma Yuan said. However, Xiaohua asked rhetorically, “My mom has a heart condition. Should I break the mother-daughter relationship with her? Not only will I not leave, but I am also going to have children from you.” She was confident that as long as the two of them remained together, Ma Yuan would be fine.
Perhaps because of this, when Ma Yuan decided to stop any treatment, Xiaohua eventually chose to support him. For Ma Yuan, if he stayed in the hospital, his “prospect” would be clear: to have a tumor resection surgery and then chemotherapy, with “hair thinning, teeth loosening until spitted out one by one…all thanks to medical science (chemotherapy and radiotherapy).”
After moving to Haikou, where the air and the general environment were better, Ma Yuan strictly implemented his own “water change” program. He rode bikes for two hours a day under the shade of coconut trees and then bathed in the hot spring for an hour. He drank a certain brand of bottled local mineral water that he trusted, because it was a “state banquet drink.” Soon, the scabs of his shingles fell off. He was no longer in pain. He slept better and looked better. In the later stage of Xiaohua’s pregnancy, he also accompanied his wife on long walks every day. The shadow of illness gradually moved away.
This somewhat legendary experience brought the "former famous author,” who had not written any new work for 20 years, back to the public eye. He later mentioned this in his own book: “Facing death, I was rediscovered by the media. Several of my lectures as a professor came out one after another, making me one of the top ten elites of the year.”
Ma Yuan refused the painful medical treatment, moved close to nature with the blue sky and the open sea around him, lived in a good environment, and had good habits that helped him maintain good health. In some sense, this fit the imagination and expectations of many people, which led to many recognitions for Ma Yuan. Ma Yuan and the public seemed to have ignored, intentionally or not, what exactly his condition was at the time, and whether the tumor was malignant or benign.
In February 2009, a year after Ma Yuan’s marriage, his younger son Ma Ge was born.
Ma Ge had a round face and the same gentle and bright eyes as his mother. The birth of his son and his own “rebirth” gave Ma Yuan a lot of joy. The new mother, Xiaohua, was somewhat worried. At the time of his birth, the doctor said that Ma Ge’s heart was “underdeveloped.” Xiaohua had speculated whether it was due to her own inadequate nutritional intake during the pregnancy, but Ma Yuan said that was just “her speculations.” There seemed to be nothing abnormal about Ma Ge. He liked to play in the sand, and the family often took him to the beach.
For a long time, Ma Yuan had planned to live by the sea, but in 2011, he discovered Nannuo Mountain, which was even more to his liking. Perhaps compared with the quiet comfort by the sea, Nannuo Mountain on the plateau reminded him of his early years roaming on the Tibetan Plateau and his rise to fame. Xiaohua was originally reluctant to leave her hometown, but Ma Yuan was able to persuade her. So, she finally decided to follow her husband.
Compromise
"I regret going up Nannuo Mountain to live." Eleven years later, Li Xiaohua now says.
As she cleans the courtyard in the early morning, the shrill sound of the broom sweeping the ground is particularly distinctive in the empty courtyard. The two dogs, Ma Jia and Ma La, are just lying on their backs in front of the main house, seemingly not yet adjusted to the loss of their playmate, Ma Ge. When Ma Ge was still alive, he helped Xiaohua sweep the floor and wash dishes. Now, Xiaohua is left alone to run this castle, which covers 2,000 square meters.
“He was a very polite child.” Jiang Yan recalls that when someone added food to his bowl at the table, Ma Ge always said thank you.
Jiang Yan is the wife of the writer Hong Feng, who runs an online store in Quijing, Yunnan Province, about 1,000 kilometers from Xishuangbanna. Hong Feng and Ma Yuan are close friends. They visit each other from time to time. In 2018, Ma Yuan and Xiaohua sent the 9-year-old Ma Ge to Hong Feng’s place and asked Hong Feng, who specializes in traditional Chinese medicine, to treat their son.
After moving to Nannuo Mountain, Xiaohua found, from time to time, Ma Ge’s heartbeat to be very fast. “Standing next to him, I can hear his heartbeat.” When Ma Ge was in first grade, the school arranged a routine checkup for all the pupils. Ma Ge had a heart rate of over 130 bpm. Xiaohua wanted to take Ma Ge to the hospital, but Ma Yuan didn’t allow it.
When the media invited him to be interviewed by a friend, Ma Yuan talked about his attitude toward Ma Ge’s physical abnormality: “I think we can still use my way of ‘burying the head in the sand,’ ‘turning a blind eye,’ or ‘refusing to accept the truth’ to face illnesses.” He gave in to let Jiang Yan treat Ma Ge, because he didn’t want Xiaohua to worry too much. “Xiaohua felt that if she insisted a little longer, I might give in more, so she suggested that we should take Ma Ge to the hospital and find a doctor she knew to treat him. And I told her: ‘Don’t look back…The reason I chose not to be treated was because this could not be treated. Why bother all this nonsense when it cannot be treated?’”
“It cannot be treated.” That’s because Ma Yuan felt that the heart should not be operated on.
Five years later, their child was gone. “I couldn’t talk him out of it.” Xiaohua recalls her disagreement with her husband on Ma Ge’s treatment. From the very beginning, she’s never had a say in any matters. The Chinese medical treatment was their compromise.
After a few months of treatment with little effect, Ma Ge returned home in Nannuo Mountain. Soon after, Ma Ge went to visit Ma Dawan, who was shooting a film in Nanjing. Ma Dawan noticed something abnormal about his half-brother and took him to the hospital for a checkup. Ma Ge was diagnosed with mitral valve insufficiency, which required a minimally invasive surgery.
Perhaps the experience of treating his tumor gave Ma Yuan immediate confidence boost. Once again, he objected to taking Ma Ge to be further examined and operated on. Xiaohua and her friends took turns trying to persuade him, but Ma Yuan still stood his ground: “How can we operate on the heart? Besides the heart, there’s another thing that cannot be touched on, and that’s the brain.”
With this hidden health condition, Ma Ge grew up day by day in Nannuo Mountain. This was not Ma Yuan’s first time to be a father, but his first to accompany his child as he grew up. When Ma Dawan was a child, Ma Yuan was rarely home. Ma Dawan was brought up by his maternal and paternal grandparents. It was only in junior high school that Ma Dawan went to live with Ma Yuan. After graduating from junior high school, Ma Dawan learned a year of German and then went to study in Germany. Ma Yuan and Ma Dawan didn’t spend much time together. Now Ma Yuan had the opportunity to make up for his regrets with Ma Ge.
Ma Ge had a trampoline that his father had set up for him. Ma Yuan used to stand face-to-face with Ma Ge, and together they kicked the soccer ball back and forth.
When Xiaohua accused Ma Ge of not doing house chores properly, Ma Yuan held a special family meeting to bail him out.
After graduating from Tongji University, Wu Yao, Ma Yuan’s so-called “disciple,” remained close to the family. In fact, she was more like the eldest daughter of the family. Ma Dawan and Ma Ge called her “big sister.” Wu Yao remembers that Ma Ge was very close to his father and followed him around even when he was 6 or 7. Ma Yuan and Ma Ge often hugged each other and kissed each other on the cheek, which made Ma Dawan, who had never been so close to his father during his childhood, feel somewhat disappointed.
The second floor of the octagonal building is an open platform, where Ma Yuan and Ma Ge used to read. The father took the couch, and the son hung out in a hammock next to his father. There was a time when they spent an hour there alone every afternoon, and Ma Yuan read aloud to Ma Ge the fairy tales he had written for his son, "Wan Ge Hua Yuan" and "The Red Brick Roof.” Ma Ge is the protagonist of the fairy tales, and Ma Yuan has also brought into the tales the castle and the scenery of Nannuo Mountain. In these stories, Ma Ge makes friends with alpacas, flies on the back of spiders, and sticks out his tongue at the adults who spoil the fun: “Yuck, you adults!”
Ma Yuan loved to tell Ma Ge stories about "trees, grasses, bamboo rats, and toads," hoping that his son would love nature as much as he did. Once, Ma Yuan saw Ma Ge chasing a chicken with a stick at a neighbor’s, Ma Yuan punished him and forced him to stand still for a long time. Ma Yuan wanted him to be kind to animals.
With friends and relatives, Ma Ge liked to say, "My dad is the best. Dad is a professor and knows everything.” He even wrote a piece called "My Dad's Name is Ma Yuan" about how his dad always had an answer no matter what he asked. Ma Ge gave examples: when asked about the capital of Lithuania, his dad immediately had the right answer: Vilnius; when starting a fire, his dad lifted the leaves with a thin bamboo stick to let in the air so that the bamboo leaves could catch fire.
Ma Yuan had an unusual philosophy for Ma Ge's education. Initially, there was no school in Nannuo Mountain, and until fourth grade, Ma Ge attended school in downtown Jinghong. Xiaohua wanted him to attend a regular school, socialize with his peers, go to college in the future, and know how to choose the path he’d like to take. Ma Yuan believed that school was useless and that insights were more important. He was unwilling to leave his favorite Nannuo Mountain and move to the city for his son. Xiaohua had to ask her father to come all the way from Hainan and live in the city to take care of Ma Ge while she stayed in Nannuo Mountain to keep Ma Yuan company. “He is very self-centered.” Xiaohua wouldn’t argue with her husband.
In addition to their conflict about their son’s medical treatment, there was another major disagreement between Ma Yuan and Xiaohua, namely Ma Ge’s education. Due to the tensions between his parents, his own poor health, and occasional travels with his father, Ma Ge could hardly catch up at school. When Ma Ge was in fourth grade, a school was opened at the foot of Nannuo Mountain, only a ten-minute drive from the castle. Xiaohua transferred his son to the new school and drove him there every day. After Ma Ge attended the new school for six months, Ma Yuan had to go to Shanghai again for medical reasons. Ma Ge had to stop school again to be with his father.
“Ma Ge could be a tea farmer here. It would be great. Why does he need to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a reporter? I don’t think these careers are any good.” In the castle, Ma Yuan sips his tea and talks about his original plans for Ma Ge. “I had a hunch that Ma Ge would write like me, because he had a talent for language since childhood. Wouldn’t that be enough that he would write, grow teas, be able to support himself, and have an interesting life?”
However, Xiaohua remembers that Ma Ge didn’t want to be a tea farmer. Ma Yuan has been renting a forested area of more than 30 acres at the back of the mountain with thousands of tea trees. All the teas that the family drinks come from there. Picking tea leaves is not an easy job. One has to bend one’s back all the way and bear the scorching sun. Once, Ma Ge helped Xiaohua pick tea leaves. Afterwards, Ma Ge said to Xiaohua, “Mom, I don’t want to be a tea farmer. It is too hard.”
From “Something” to “Nothing”
For the most part, Ma Ge appeared to be a normal, healthy child. But people around him
noticed that as he grew older, he was experiencing symptoms more and more frequently.
Lao Li and Sister Ping, a couple who has also settled down in Guniangzhai, got to know Ma Yuan when all of them were still living in Shenyang. After moving to Xishuangbanna, they’ve become neighbors. Ma Yuan and Xiaohua see them almost every day. The couple recalls that in the last years of his life, when Ma Ge exercised a little bit, he quickly ran out of breath; his face turned blue; and the bulge on his chest seemed more obvious. These were all typical symptoms of a heart problem. However, Ma Yuan was stubborn, and no one dared to try to talk to him about it. Wu Yao, who was so close to the whole family, could only try to convince Ma Yuan to tell Ma Ge about his condition when he turned 18, so that he could choose himself whether to have the operation or not.
Ma Ge stopped going to school and only read books assigned by his father ——mostly fairy tales. His father also required him to write a 500-word essay every day. Ma Ge also helped his mother pull weeds and wash dishes. He chased after the geese and dogs. Once he caught them, he would let them go and chase after them again. When Xiaohua went into the forest, Ma Ge followed her to protect her. Like most children, he liked to play computer games, such as League of Legends and Werewolf.
It was so quiet at home. Whenever they had guests, Ma Ge was always quite happy. Wu Yao used to come to the castle and stay for a while. Ma Ge loved to talk with her. “Big sister, do you know how big the biggest whale is? More than 30 meters. It is called the blue whale.” Then, Ma Ge asked Wu Yao not to move while he walked 60 steps to see how long 30 meters were. He also liked to dance. When Wu Yao put on some music and said, “Come on,” Ma Ge jumped up and down, “his limbs moving wildly.”
When Ma Ge was 10, Wang Shengzhi went to the castle to shoot a documentary film. Ma Ge kept asking the staff what the cameraman did and how to use this and that. At night, they all sat around a campfire, and Ma Ge asked Wu Xiaohai, a painter and close friend of Ma Yuan’s, how he could take a clear picture of the stars when the night sky was so dark. Xiaohua was grilling Erkuai (a local rice cake) on the fire and asked Ma Ge to watch the fire. Ma Ge watched responsibly until the Erkuai were burnt. Xiaohua scolded Ma Ge, but he said, “You only asked me to watch the fire. You didn’t ask me to flip them.”
Wu Xiaohai’s son was the same age as Ma Ge. Wu Xiaohai felt that his son already had traces of socialization, had learned to observe social rules, and liked to talk about trendy topics. Meanwhile, Ma Ge seemed “naive and innocent” and looked younger than he was, “like a baby.”
This was probably the effect that Ma Yuan was aiming for. In front of Wang Shengzhi's camera, Ma Yuan said with a smile that the castle was built for Ma Ge in the first place. "For me, there is nothing more important than creating a home for him, which is the most ideal in my mind."
Perhaps for Ma Yuan, "the most ideal home" refers not only to the physical environment, but also to the practice of not allowing Ma Ge to follow the mainstream educational path. Ma Yuan once told Wu Yao that Ma Ge should grow up carefree. "Ma Ge listens to us when we talk and is exposed to books and art, can he not be good?"
Wang Shengzhi, however, noticed that Ma Ge was often daydreaming, "waiting for the sun to set" with nothing else to do. When his parents argued over his schooling, Ma Ge said to Xiaohua that he wanted to go to school and have playmates. Ma Yuan also remembers that Ma Ge often carried a basketball in front of the house, stopped a passing car, hitchhiked to the foot of the mountain to find classmates to play basketball.
Wu Yao repeatedly told Ma Yuan that the school might not be able to teach Ma Ge what he considered as valuable knowledge, but it could bring him playmates. For a while, Ma Yuan hesitated and considered sending Ma Ge to an international school when he got older. He even went to Hangzhou to check out a school and its facilities. Later, he changed his mind and insisted that he would never let Ma Ge go to school.
In the midst of this tug-of-war, Ma Yuan fell ill. In early 2021, Ma Yuan's whole body was swollen, but he didn't want to see a doctor, saying that he was "not looking for a disease." The swelling did not go away. Even his basic physiological functions seemed to fail. Finally, he was sent to the hospital and was diagnosed with severe heart failure.
This medical stay at the hospital made Ma Yuan realize how common a heart surgery was. He changed his mind again about Ma Ge’s congenital problem and no longer objected to Ma Ge receiving medical treatment.
Later that year, Xiaohua took Ma Ge to Shanghai for a checkup, who was diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome (a rare disease that can lead to cardiac lesions). Doctors from several hospitals had different recommendations for treatment, and Ma Ge’s surgery was temporarily put on hold.
In 2022, Ma Ge entered sixth grade. Although he hadn't been going to school for a long time, his teacher still advised him to take the final exam in June to keep his eligibility for junior high school. On the evening of May 31st, after reviewing his lessons, Ma Ge told his aunt and uncle, who were making zongzi (rice dumplings), that he wanted to eat two in the morning. “What if you can't finish them?” Ma Ge cheerfully said that his mother could finish them and that she always backed him up. The Dragon Boat Festival was fast approaching, and he was looking forward to a trip to the city in a couple of days to play pool and swim.
Early the next morning, Ma Ge got up, kissed his father on the cheek, went to the bathroom, and didn’t come out. Xiaohua went in to check and found her son on the floor.
Ma Ge was not able to wait until his final exam. He once asked his father what fiction was. Ma Yuan took an orange in one hand and said to Ma Ge, “Put the orange in the other hand. Now there’s an orange in the hand that was empty. To create something out of nothing, this is fiction.” That day, “something” became “nothing” again.
The Distilled Poetry
About three months after Ma Ge passed away, Wu Yao received a call from Ma Yuan, saying that he wanted to build a statue of Ma Ge in the castle. She hadn't been in contact with Ma Yuan for some time and was "very angry." Ma Ge was like a brother to her. Having lost him, Wu Yao needed some time to digest her grief and powerlessness.
It’s not that she didn’t understand Ma Yuan. When Ma Yuan told her he had a tumor and wasn't going to treat it, Wu Yao quickly accepted it. "He is unlike others and has his own set of self-consistent logic."
How that set of logic came into be is hard to pinpoint. What is certain is that it originated in Ma Yuan's teenage years.
Unlike most of his peers, although his father's generation had already moved into the city, and he was born and raised in the city, Ma Yuan was extraordinarily sensitive to nature. "Since I was a child, I have felt close to these things (nature) and would like to think about how the wind came to be. I have been thinking about wind, rain, clouds, and fog all my life." Ma Yuan was stunned by the vastness and the wonders of nature, which in turn led to a question that plagued him: was there a higher being?
After graduating from college, Ma Yuan wanted to go to the farthest place from his home, "to find an unfamiliar environment, an unfamiliar experience." He picked Tibet on the map. At that time, Tibet was far from being the holy place that was later marketed to cleanse the soul. Ma Yuan knew almost nothing about it except that it was far away. On the day he arrived in Tibet, he went to play basketball and realized that he couldn't catch his breath. Only then did he learn about “the plateau effect.”
Ma Yuan quickly integrated himself into this snowy environment. He made a group of literary friends who traveled in and out of Lhasa. They climbed Chakpori Hill next to the Potala Palace late at night and recited Ma Yuan's poem "Pastoral to Pastoral" aloud in the ruins of the temple--
Many listened to you
Bewildered and came
Calling it a plateau in the north
Almost flat for five thousand miles
Always at degree zero
The "you" in the poem is the painter Gauguin, who retired to Tahiti because he was tired of modern civilization. The legendary Gauguin was a totem for young men of letters during those days of "seeking roots.”
Ma Yuan and his friends used to go to the banks of the Lhasa River to play cockfighting: they held up one leg and jumped on one foot to knock down each other. When they were tired from the game, they watched the Tibetan girls wash their clothes. A thin layer of water in the shallows, Tibetan girls lifted the hems of their robes, stepped their feet on the clothes that were spread on the cobblestones, and their bodies swayed with a natural sense of dance rhythms. Forty years later, Ma Yuan still vividly remembers that: "3650 meters above sea level, the sun is so blazing in the sky. On the shimmering water, their bodies are so malleable. It is simply stunning.” As he looked back, the golden dome of the Potala Palace dovetailed into the deep blue sky.
In Tibet, Ma Yuan found the "poetic and literary life" that he had been looking for and wrote the novels The Goddess of the Lhasa River, The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains, Ballad of the Himalayas in that spirit, which shook the literary world. He, Yu Hua, Su Tong and two other writers, the so-called " five warriors of avant-garde literature" were invited to give lectures in packed university halls.
That was another way of understanding the world. The Tibetans believed in gods and the afterlife, spun the prayer wheels, and prostrated for a long time. Ma Yuan was shaken by their “magnificent” temples. “What is the power behind this? It is the power of gods.”
The primitive, magnificent, and majestic landscape of Tibet, perhaps coupled with the literary mystique it brought to Ma Yuan, allowed him to establish his own beliefs. "The abstract and grandiose themes I pondered as a teenager suddenly all materialized."
"I believe in gods. That nature is so organized must have to do with a higher intelligence.” He claims that the inspirations throughout his life have remained the same: the poetic, the sublime, and the metaphysical.
In 1989, Ma returned to Liaoning Province for family reasons. His writing skills left him along with Tibet. He forced a few pieces and found that writing, which usually came most naturally, became incredibly difficult. "I tried and failed a few rounds and tried and failed. I just couldn’t write." He likes to use the word "round" as if life were a confrontation. The last time he published a novel was in 1991, "I had a weightless feeling in my heart and didn’t know how to face it."
On the surface, Ma Yuan's way of facing this feeling of weightlessness was to completely turn his back on the past and devote himself to a very different kind of life. In 1993, on his 40th birthday, Ma Yuan got drank with a few friends in Shenyang and cried a lot. He said he wanted to leave and go to Hainan.
Once in Hainan, Ma Yuan plunged into the “sea” of making films, doing television shows, engaging in the real estate business, and earning enough money to buy properties. The writer Ma Yuan disappeared, replaced by an ordinary middle-aged man wandering on the streets of Hainan wearing clip-toe slippers and a jade bracelet. "I was just happy to wander around.”
However, Ma Yuan’s spiritual weightlessness perhaps could not be totally balanced out with the wealth and comfort. Besides, the public always reminded him that he was “a master.”
Perhaps in order to balance the weightlessness, Ma Yuan began to put more emphasis on his early inclinations——nature, poetry, divinity——and objected to science and logic. He recalls that when he was 40, he realized he “shouldn’t try to use logic to analyze, prove, or probe, it’s all futile and ridiculous,” instead, he wanted to “fight logic till the end of my life.”
In 2000, his elder son Ma Dawan was 13 years old and was ready for middle school. Ma Yuan's ex-wife who was living in Germany suggested that Ma Dawan shouldn’t always live with his grandparents and hoped that Ma Yuan would settle down and take his son to live with him. Ma Yuan agreed. Recommended by the writer Yu Qiuyu, Ma Yuan went to teach at Tongji University, lecturing on novels, films, and writing.
Like a lone wolf breaking into a porcelain store, Shanghai's sophisticated urban atmosphere was far from the ease and freedom that Ma Yuan was accustomed to. He was always asked why he wore a beard, and when he got tired of explaining it, he simply shaved off the beard he had worn for years.
As his closest student, Wu Yao often went to Ma Yuan's place. The window in the living room of Ma Yuan's apartment was in the corner, and Ma Yuan often sat in front of the window, looking at the grove of azaleas in the flower garden outside while complaining that the drying racks on the upper floors blocked the sunlight. Wu Yao sat down beside him, gave him a cigarette, and the two of them drank tea in silence.
"He doesn't like Shanghai and thinks it doesn't like him either." Wu Yao was well aware of his professor's loneliness. He had been divorced for nearly 10 years, and Ma Dawan boarded at the school during the week and came home only on weekends. There was no shortage of friends and visitors, but "I can't find a confidant." Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Liu Zhenyun, and Shi Tiesheng, these writers who used to play soccer with him in Shenyang, were still A-list writers, but Ma Yuan had long been far away from the literary world and the center of the times.
It is not until he arrived at Nannuo Mountain and constructed the castle that Ma Yuan feels he has built the world closest to his imagination. He now has everything he needs: the borderland’s landscape, nature, the local Hani tribes’ fascinating legends, and a gentle and thoughtful wife. In the castle, Ma Yuan has returned to the center of everything.
His happy life has brought Ma Yuan “back to the world of inspirations.” He has resumed writing and published several novels in a row, including one that involves the Hani tribes’ legends. Though his new novels are not so well-received, Ma Yuan still values very much his “return” as a novelist.
Ma Yuan has designed everything in the castle himself. Everything is perfect, and “there’s poetry everywhere.” There have been almost a hundred chickens in the castle. These free-range chickens have muscular legs and long, powerful tails and fly up into the trees to sleep. Xiaohua walks on the paths in the castle and feeds them every day, scattering food and greeting them with “bok, bok, bok.” The castle is on a slope. When the chickens hear her, some of them fly up, others fly down, and all of them flock to Xiaohua’s side. Ma Yuan thinks that’s “the most beautiful picture.” The eggs laid by the hens are often stolen by the squirrels. A friend who paints traditional Chinese paintings once put this scene into a poem when he visited: “Flowers in the garden look at birds while squirrels steal the eggs.” Ma Yuan loves to talk about it.
After Ma Ge stopped going to school, Ma Yuan focused on developing his insights by "telling him what I know about the world." For example, when looking at the stars, he told Ma Ge that the stars we saw were all fantasies, that the sun was not material, and that Mars did not exist.
In terms of the castle owner's theories, Wu Yao feels that "he can say that Mars doesn't exist, and other people can say that Mars exists, both have a set of self-consistent logic, and both have good stories," and "all I care about is whether or not it's a wonderful story." Most visitors from the outside world are more attached to the beauty of the castle and don’t know much about Ma Yuan’s theories, which they see as a kind of special romantic sentiment.
Wang Shengzhi felt somewhat odd after shooting the documentary film on Ma Yuan’s castle life, which he named In the Clouds. Though the film was well-received, Wang Shengzhi himself didn’t like it that much. Looking at it again, he found “that kind of purified poetry in the castle is just too innocent and too perfect.”
Wang Shengzhi said that if he were to go back and shoot again, he would touch on more practical issues. "I would have asked Ma Yuan how he earned the money to build the house, and whether he was helping or harming Ma Ge by not letting him go to school." But at the time, he was "hypnotized."
The Cracks
The thing that Xiaohua has always regretted is not insisting that Ma Ge live at the foot of the mountain.
Early last year, she suggested that they should take Ma Ge to live in downtown Jinghong, whose lower altitude might be better for his heart condition. At that time, Ma Yuan was busy building a wooden wall in the castle and did not agree.
Xiaohua feels that if Ma Ge lived in the city, the 120 ambulance service would be able to come faster and wouldn't take more than an hour to get there as it did when Ma Ge had the seizure. "It might have turned out differently."
On Ma Ge’s desk, the textbook he used for his homework the night before is still there. Xiaohua doesn’t let anyone move anything. Every morning, she goes to Ma Ge’s room and draws the curtains. In the evening, she draws them on again, as if her son were still there.
“I can’t imagine now what it would be like for Ma Ge to be at my age. Well, there’s no need to think about it.” After dinner, Ma Yuan returns to the living room and half-lies on the sofa again. His tone seems to have a calmness about it when he mentions Ma Ge. Then, he lowers his voice.
“I don’t even have to worry about what Ma Ge would be like at 14.” Ma Yuan repeats this sentence. His body slides down on the sofa. His position turns from half-lying to totally lying down. His eyes look up at the ceiling with a twinkle of light in them.
Of the 11 buildings in the castle, only the light in the octagonal building is on. There’s so much space that one chandelier is not enough. Everything looks dim. Outside the window, darkness falls on the forest, and the world becomes silent.
"His life was mom and dad, heaven and earth, the world here, all these beautiful places, delightful memories. There’s nothing better really. You can see the smile on my face as I tell you this because I'm talking about my son whom I loved dearly and whose life was splendid." Ma Yuan continues, his voice a bit erratic and distant. "He didn't even experience being tricked by girls, betrayed by friends, or bullied by others. He didn’t have the slightest bit of any of those things in his life. How wonderful his life was!"
During those first days when Ma Ge had just left, Xiaohua repeatedly listened to Ma Yuan say similar things to her. She couldn't let it go, "My son didn't live long enough."
Lao Li and Sister Ping remember that after just losing her child, Xiaohua would often say that Ma Ge hadn’t eaten this yet whenever she ate something. One evening, there was a braised fish dish prepared by a visiting friend. As she ate, Xiaohua suddenly said that her son loved the braise in soy sauce the most. When they still lived in the suburbs, she had to buy two portions of braised pork loin at the community cafeteria. “If my son were here, he would cry out in joy (upon seeing the braised fish).”
Sometimes Xiaohua wears Ma Ge’s clothes. Ma Ge was 185cm, so Xiaohua can wear his clothes. She originally planned to buy a new car but insists not buying it now. Perhaps she thinks, “I didn’t buy a new car when Ma Ge was still here. Now I can’t.”
Last August and September, Xiaohua accompanied Ma Yuan to Shanghai for a follow-up medical check, she asked around to see where she could become a nun. "I'm just an ordinary woman. Now my son is gone, I live like the walking dead."
Some friends told Xiaohua that it might not be so quiet and calm at the temple and suggested that she recite Buddhist scriptures. Xiaohua had been worshipping the Buddha for many years but hadn’t read much of the scriptures. So, she started reading The Earth Store Sutra and The Diamond Sutra, which she couldn’t understand at first but now gives a try every day. After reading the sutras, she puts them in front of Ma Ge’s picture on the altar table. At four or five o’clock in the afternoon, a beam of warm yellow sunlight shines on the sutras and the happy smile on Ma Ge’s face in the picture.
Xiaohua has slowly come to terms with the Buddhist ideas of destiny and disaster. “Everything is empty. Nothing is real.” Sometimes, she feels it’s just self-deception. But without it, she “cannot move on. It is too painful.”
From time to time, Ma Yuan remembers what it was like for him to spend time with his two sons. His elder son called him “Pa” while Ma Ge called him “Papa,” which was more intimate. Two years ago, he had to sit in a wheelchair when he went to see the doctor. Ma Ge was the one who pushed the wheelchair. Ma Ge wrote that for him, his father was an engineer who could design buildings. He also wrote that when he lied, his father punished him by asking him to stand still for a long time facing the wall.
Ma Yuan doesn’t look as sad as Xiaohua. Perhaps like what Wu Xiaohua said, “He’s a writer and has imagined life and death countless times. He can digest this.”
"Sometimes I shed tears when I see what Ma Ge left behind. He would no longer be able to be with me from now on. This is the only thing that makes me really sad. He’s gone to a world devoid of worries and miseries. He’s no longer with us in this world, which is full of misfortunes. I am not sad that he’s gone. I am sad that he can’t be with me anymore.”
I gingerly bring up the issue of Ma Ge’s heart problem. The sight of Ma Yuan’s eyes shifts from the distance to my face. He interrupts me, “It was not an accident. Ma Ge didn’t go to the hospital. He didn’t have any pain. He just suddenly passed away. Why does it have anything to do with any heart problem? I never think it that way. He reached the end of his life span, and it was time for him to go. Let’s not talk about it. There is no point.”
Silence falls in the living room. Ma Yuan looks up blankly to the ceiling again. It looks like a long period of self-persuasion has drained him. Cracks show in the walls of the solid castle that has become fragile and malleable.
Ma Yuan no longer objects to going to the hospital and even admits that “I have been saved three times by Western medicine.” When I talk to Xiaohua in the afternoon, he comes over and tells her that he’s been feeling dizzy these past two days. Xiaohua suggests measuring his blood pressure and blood sugar. Ma Yuan obediently agrees. This would be unimaginable before Ma Ge’s death.
"Mysticism sometimes brings aesthetic pleasure in creative works, but it must not become obstinacy." Upon learning of Ma Ge's passing, Wang Shengzhi lamented.
Ma Yuan’s obstinacy is gradually disintegrating. For the past two days, he has been discussing with a friend about renting out parts of the castle including the tall watchtower. Xiaohua has been running Airbnb intermittently. They use the other buildings mostly to host friends and have never really thought about running a serious business. “Now Ma Ge is gone, we have even less interest in making money.” So, they are considering renting them out.
The castle feels empty with their child gone. One seems to hear echoes when it is totally quiet. Dust gathers in the rooms of the castle except the octagonal building where they live. Xiaohua has no energy to clean them. The three parrots that Ma Ge loved to play with are also gone. They were bitten to death by the dog one by one. There is no more squawking in the courtyard. “All good. They’ve gone to be with Ma Ge.” Xiaohua turns her head away, as if she couldn’t bear the weight of her own words.
Unlike Ma Yuan, Xiaohua doesn’t want to live in this place anymore, where she has lost her child. In fact, she’s never liked living in the castle. During the first years up Nannuo Mountain, Ma Yuan had been busy building houses, writing, hosting friends after friends. When he got sick, Xiaohua had to take care of him on top of all the house chores. Behind the beautiful scene of chickens flocking for food, which Ma Yuan loves, there are chicken droppings all over the place that need her to clean up. So are the fallen leaves on the fishpond. She has to find helping hands to weed. She has to go up the mountain herself to pick tea leaves and makes the teas that Ma Yuan drinks daily. When there is a large number of friends who come to visit Ma Yuan, she has to drive a pickup truck to buy food and other daily necessities at the foot of the mountain.
“All the things he loves are the one that others make for him to enjoy. Beauty and pleasure come at a price.” Xiaohua feels exhausted, after paying the price for him for such a long time. She would like to go down to the city and live there. But Ma Yuan never allows that.
"I love this home too much and want this to be my final resting place." Ma Yuan says. In addition to the elaborate castle, the forest in the back of the mountain is also where his heart belongs. In the lush forest, there are at least 20 old trees that seem to embrace each other. Ma Yuan used to roam in the forest and enjoy the shade and “feel the wisdom of trees.” He plans to scatter his ashes in the forest. Although he cannot go up the mountain to the forest, Ma Yuan’s eyes, which Yu Hua described as “impassioned,” still light up again, whenever he mentions the forest.
After Ma Ge’s death, Ma Yuan has changed his mind. If Xiaohua insists on going down the mountain, he would be okay with it. “I don’t want her to be unhappy,” he says.
Ma Yuan has entrusted the mission of building a statue for Ma Ge to Wu Xiaohai. At first, Wu Xiaohai balked at it, because he didn’t feel like building a statue of a child whom he knew well and who died young. “A statue is a tangible gravestone that reminds us of death.” But in the end, he said yes but has kept pushing it off.
“I want to wait a couple more years until Ma Ge would have been 18 years old.” Wu Xiaohai said. “We let him grow up in our hearts.”
On this early morning of the Lantern Festival, Li Xiaohua drives Ma Yuan down the mountain. Ma Ge is buried in the cemetery at the foot of the mountain, and Li Xiaohua wants to spend the holiday with her son. Their car drives past the gate of the castle, and then the iron gate closes behind them. As they look back, the ochre-colored watchtower stands above the walls.
