The shadow constitutes, in essence, the immaterial projection of an illuminated body, a kind of Yin of Yang, the cold and dark side which, if it sometimes feels like it, is blackness where ghosts live. Hence blindness is connoted with shadows, where everything will appear gray to those who physically see. However, the eye only sees the illusory visible, the world of images that today, in cascades, populates the minds of almost everyone.
Hui Ming Yao doesn't see it because he has seen too much. I met him sitting, staring at me in Largo de São Domingos. His gaze was not ashamed to fix itself on me. I only realized he was blind because, when I left his line of sight, his gaze remained fixed. It was the first lesson in humility that Hui gave me that day without us even meeting.
Hui Ming Yao was born in Nanjing, in 1925, shortly before his hometown was transformed into the capital at the will of the nationalists, who were losing control of the country across the board. Hui would later comment separately that Chiang and his were a bunch of pompous cowards who ran away from the Japanese most of the time, looking out for themselves and dragging with them everything they could. Little love for the country, a lot for life, a comment that history records, leaving the revelations that inevitably come to light to the interpretation of the future.
By mid-1937, from the two hundred and fifty thousand souls that inhabited the city ten years earlier, the population had increased to one million, most of them having fled since 1931, from the Japanese armies.
On November 11, 1937, after the occupation of Shanghai, Japanese troops advanced on Nanjing from different directions. On December 9th of that year, the Japanese launched a massive attack on the city, and on the 12th, nationalist Chinese troops decided to withdraw to the other bank of the Yangtze, leaving the then capital unprotected. The following day, terror began to settle among the inhabitants, with the entry of two divisions of the invading army, one through the Guang Hua gate and the other through the Tai Ping gate.
Hui Min Yao commented on what I already knew: that Japanese militarism had returned to its origins, to the caste of arrogant samurai 武士who mistreated their own people, engaged in wars, conspiracies and power games, while the peasant or the merchants were killed at the discretionary whim of these people.
In the afternoon of December 13, 1937, two flotillas, going up and down the Yangtze, completed the occupation of the city. Over the next six weeks, a barbaric procession would begin, which little Yao would attend. From shootings to all types of executions. His father had also been rounded up, suspected of being resistant. After the young man found out about his mother, who was raped to death, he witnessed his father's beheading. One last look of concern for his son, and the saber cuts the head from the body, which falls with a dull thud, the blood from the aortas gushing out, the soldiers with bayonets celebrating yet another feat of their leader. Many more would follow, some from children his age, but what he had seen was too much and, like a blessing from heaven, Yao's eyes stopped seeing, just like that without warning.
Suddenly, at the age of 13, Hui Ming Yao went blind without being touched, his brain refusing to see more horrors than those he had seen. The smell of blood invaded the square, until a friendly hand gently guided him out of the circle of forced spectators, and sneakily led him to an unknown place.
He tells me that his benefactor carried him on his lap or crawled on the floor, giving him what he had to eat. He was a man who appeared strong and whom he later called father. Perhaps he was a peasant or a manual laborer. They spoke in whispers. He remembers traveling in a cart under straw and among sacks of rice. He heard the swaying of the train and the sound of the sea, in a reed. He remembers finally arriving in Macau, where he never left again, and where he learned the profession of herbalist and masseur, while his rescuer and adoptive father worked as a tricycle driver, then in a firecrackers factory, and finally in a tea house. He spoke Cantonese fluently, although, here and there, a certain tone still betrayed his origin.
Hui Ming Yao's face, despite the Macau humidity, is heavily lined. Each wrinkle is a page, the face is a story. The look, vague outward, almost innocent, resembles the lid of a box made for storage, which others are made for showing off. He speaks softly, in a certain cadence, that the words know from the world to which his testimony had sent him, certainly populated by repeated ghosts, shadows of terrible images. He clearly remembers the hard times in Macau, the famine of the years when the invaders were close by.
He told me no, that he never saw anything again, that what he saw was neither black nor white, it just stopped having that meaning. He saw it another way: they were ideas, memories, marks that were read in another part of the brain. However, the profession he had embraced - massages without vision are like secrets without mouths - had allowed him to get to know men. Each contracted muscle had a reason, it was like a mouth speaking to your fingers. Sometimes he found nodules that told him different stories, and in the meantime, his fingers began to gain ears and everything was clear to him, Yao, whose eyes refused to see. Many times he had heard gossip from customers that his fingers contradicted, lies from a bedroom or boasting. After what he had seen before his blindness, nothing surprised him about the human condition. The collected voice, the ears and fingers listening to unequal stories, that the mouth can always lie, but only the mouth. He listened and remained silent like the box he had become, cleaning his hands of the clients' imperfections, after finishing the massage, wondering how he could bear to know so much and remain silent. But if his vision had been definitively closed to the world, he understood that it was up to him to give his mouth and ears the same fate. After all, he just watched, he didn't participate.
Fate had thrown him into violent orphanhood and given him a vision of the darkest part of humanity. He realized that in the face of such a life all that was left for him was acceptance of his destiny. At night he would light incense there in a whisper on Volong Street and on the modest canvas donkey where he slept, he would take his time reciting the amidhaba 阿弥陀佛, trying to ensure that nothing from his past remained attached to the present. The rest, the rest is just Yin.
