The Five Brothers' Dream

This small town named Qianzhou was encircled by mountains, yet in that era its folk customs were not entirely gentle either. It had none of the misty rains, painted bridges, and waterways of Jiangnan, nor the prosperity of silk factories and tea firms. Their only fortune was this: they had obtained a plot of land where they could stand and build a life.
The times moved forward slowly. With the knowledge he had accumulated in the past, Ma Cunhui helped local people with tea, trade, and business dealings, and in spare hours taught children characters and arithmetic. Zhao Youlan spun thread and wove cloth, managed the household, and brought with her to Lingnan the pastries and needlework skills of Jiangnan. Later, movements came again, and even this small vitality was stripped from them. They were left only to cultivate their few mu of poor fields and pass the days.
They rarely mentioned their former prosperity again.
Only sometimes, late at night when all was still, Zhao Youlan would open her dowry chest and see the Suzhou-embroidered handkerchief already yellowed with age; or Ma Cunhui would lightly stroke the old abacus left by his grandfather. Then the two would only look at each other with bitter faces and silently put the things away again.
Gradually they understood that what could truly be passed on to their children was not how much land, property, shopfronts, or wealth they had once possessed. It was the family tradition of reading and understanding principle, the character of treating others with honesty and trust, and a heart that, whether in prosperity or adversity, did not lose kindness and dignity.
A family that accumulates goodness must have blessings left over.
Many years later, the Ma family not only established itself in western Guangdong, but its descendants continued to flourish. Five sons were born in succession, beginning with Ma Rende and ending with Ma Xinde, bearing the virtues “Ren, Yi, Li, Zhi, Xin (benevolence, righteousness, ritual, wisdom, and faith).” And the character “de” means good virtues. By then, the local people no longer bullied the Ma family.
The Ma children grew up one after another. People in the mountain village said that the Ma house was old and its meals were plain, yet these five sons were like five trees on the hillside, each with a different nature, each growing in his own shape, each strange in his own way.
The eldest, Rende, was the most honest and kind from childhood.
He was handsome and delicate in appearance, with gentle brows and eyes. He spoke slowly and did not hurry to walk ahead of others. When other children fought over sweets or snatched bamboo horses from one another, he always stepped back. Someone asked him, “Aren’t you afraid of losing out?”
He lowered his head and smiled. “Eating a little less is nothing.”
Beside the thumb of Rende’s left hand, he had been born with an extra piece of bone, slightly protruding. From a distance, it looked almost like half an extra finger. Village children were the quickest at giving nicknames. Seeing that he read quickly and had a good memory, they called him “the Six-Fingered Prodigy.” A group of children would crowd around him and shout, “Prodigy, prodigy, calculate whether it will rain tomorrow!”
Rende never grew angry. He would merely look at the sky and say, “The clouds are coming from the west. I fear it will rain.”
The next day, rain indeed fell, and the children thought him even more magical.
In truth, Rende was not magical. He was simply attentive. He watched ants moving house, chickens returning early to their coops, his father coughing at night, and the cracks on his mother’s hands. Every detail he kept in his heart. When others fought, he went to mediate. When others cried, he went to support them. If someone bullied a smaller child, he would step forward and say, “Stop hitting him. He is already afraid.”
The second son, Yide, was entirely different in nature.
From childhood, Yide was tall and strong, with broad shoulders and hard arms. He also ate heartily. After swallowing a bowl of sweet-potato porridge, he could still scrape the bottom of the pot clean. He was hot-tempered and could hide nothing on his face. If anyone cursed the Ma family, his eyes immediately widened. If anyone shoved one of his younger brothers, he at once rolled up his sleeves.
The village children all knew that the Ma family’s second son was not to be provoked.
When he fought, he had a raw force, fearing neither pain nor dirt. Hillsides, threshing grounds, stony streambanks—wherever children quarreled, one could hear Yide’s voice: “Who started it? Come out and explain!” But before things could be explained clearly, fists often flew first.
Most amusingly, there was usually a string of smaller children following behind him, like a little general leading troops. Some carried bamboo poles. Some picked up stones. Some could only shout, but shouted the loudest of all. When Yide turned back and asked, “Are you afraid?” the children behind him answered in unison, “Not afraid!” In truth, every one of their legs was trembling.
Once, several older boys from a neighboring village stopped the Ma family’s youngest brother and demanded food from him. When Yide heard of it, he led a band of children rushing over. The others laughed at him. “You’re just an outsider’s son. You dare interfere?”
Yide thrust out his chest. “So what if I am an outsider? Bullying people is not allowed.”
That fight raised dust all over the ground. Yide’s nose bled, but his eyes shone even brighter. From then on, fewer people in the village dared to bully the Ma family casually.
The third brother, Lide, was somewhat like Yide in temperament, but cleverer.
When he was young, he was not the tallest, but his gaze was hard. He followed behind his second brother like a little attendant, yet also like a little strategist. When his second brother charged forward, he watched from the side to see who might ambush him. When his second brother was surrounded, he would slip in from behind to help him break free. The children laughed at him. “Lide, are you your second brother’s hired fighter?”
He did not deny it. He merely said, “My second brother fights the front, I fight the back. That works perfectly.”
During one group fight, someone pushed Lide from behind, and his forehead struck a stone. Blood at once covered half his face. Everyone was terrified, thinking he would cry. Unexpectedly, he sat up, wiped away a handful of blood, clenched his teeth, and said, “I haven’t lost yet.”
Later, when the wound healed, a shallow scar remained on his forehead. Its shape was strange, like a tiny five-pointed star. The village children then gave him a nickname: “Five-Star General.” Hearing it, Yide burst into laughter and patted his shoulder. “Good! From now on, you are my general.”
Lide did not say anything aloud, but in his heart he was pleased for quite a while.
From childhood, he possessed a stubbornness that refused to admit defeat. When others insulted the Ma family, he remembered clearly. When others helped the Ma family, he remembered that clearly too. At the time, no one could have imagined that this child with a scar on his forehead, who followed his second brother into fights, would one day enter officialdom and learn deeper endurance and measure. Only that five-pointed-star scar, like a seal stamped early upon his fate, reminded him that many truths of the human world are first learned through pain.
The fourth brother, Zhide, seemed like a person of another kind altogether.
He was timid, disliked fighting, and did not care to show strength before a crowd. When Yide led people to the threshing ground to “go to war,” Zhide often crouched in a corner of the house, lowering his head as he fiddled with small wooden blocks, bits of iron, and broken copper wire. Others shouted, “Zhide, come on! Let’s go fight together!”
He shook his head. “I’m not going. My boat isn’t finished yet.”
The children laughed at him for being cowardly, saying he was like a turtle pulling in its head. He did not argue. He only held the small knife steadily and shaved the wood little by little. He could make a little boat from half a bamboo tube, wheels from broken iron wire, and a “horse gun” from scrap wood. Of course the gun could not fire, but he could carve into the wood a trigger, a front sight, and a stock, then say solemnly, “In the future I will make a real one.”
Yide picked it up and tried it, then laughed. “Your gun can’t hit anyone. What use is it?”
Zhide lifted his head and said, “It cannot now. Later it will.”
He said this softly, but with great seriousness.
Sometimes on rainy days, while the other children made noise inside the house, Zhide lay on the ground dismantling a broken alarm clock. Gears, tiny screws, and springs spread all over the floor. Zhao Youlan feared he would cut his hands and scolded, “Why are you always messing with these broken things?”
Zhide said, “I want to see why it can move.”
He feared conflict between people, yet did not fear the tiny and complicated world inside machines. That world was quiet. It obeyed reason. It did not curse people, nor did it bully them.
The youngest, Xinde, was the most handsome and refined.
His brows and eyes were long and delicate, his skin fair. He spoke softly, and when he smiled, there was a tenderness almost like that of a girl. When the elders in the village saw him, they often said, “This fifth boy does not look like a mountain child. He looks like a scholar from the opera stage.”
Xinde did not like fighting, nor did he like making wooden guns. He loved all things strange, divine, ghostly, and mysterious. Whenever wandering performers came to the village—monkey trainers, Daoist ballad singers, talisman painters, spirit-writing mediums, fortune-tellers—he could follow behind them and watch for half a day. When people chased him away, saying, “Children should not watch this!” he hid behind a tree, showing only half his face, his eyes shining strangely bright.
Once, no one knew where he had learned the manner of a spirit medium. He took a chopstick and drew randomly in the sand, muttering words under his breath. When Yide saw him, he laughed so hard he could barely straighten his back. “Little Fifth, which immortal are you inviting?”
Xinde answered with great seriousness, “Don’t make noise. He is almost here.”
Lide leaned over to look and saw that the sand was covered with crooked lines no one could understand. He asked, “Has he come?”
Xinde lifted his head to look at the sky and said in a low voice, “The clouds moved.”
Hearing this, everyone felt a chill rise along their backs.
He also liked to run alone at midnight to the threshing ground behind the village to look at the stars. The threshing ground was lively by day, but empty at night, with only insects and the shadows of mountains on all sides. Xinde would lie on his back upon the stone slabs, watching the Milky Way cross the night sky as though looking at a letter no one knew how to read.
Sometimes Ma Cunhui, searching for him in the middle of the night, would find him lying there alone and call softly, “Little Fifth, come home.”
But Xinde would ask, “Father, after people die, do they go up to the stars too?”
Ma Cunhui was startled for a moment, then said, “Do not let your thoughts wander. The night is deep and the dew is heavy. Come back to sleep.”
Xinde followed his father home. Suddenly he said again, “I feel there are people in the sky watching us.”
Ma Cunhui did not answer, but only held his hand a little more tightly.
And so the five brothers grew up in the mountain winds of western Guangdong.
Rende was loyal and kind, like a lamp burning steadily. Yide was fierce and unyielding, like a sword that gave off a sound before it had even been drawn. Lide was clever and stubborn, with a “five-star” scar on his forehead that concealed the hot blood of youth. Zhide was timid and quiet, yet could see the future within broken copper and scrap iron. Xinde was handsome and strange, his heart often drifting among the stars, spirits, ghosts, and the unknowable.
At that time, the village children only knew how to shout their nicknames:
“Six-Fingered Prodigy!”
“Second Brother General!”
“Five-Star General!”
“Wooden Craftsman!”
“Little Immortal!”
Although the five Ma brothers grew up in a small town of western Guangdong, and inevitably took on some of the rough habits of children from a wild mountain region, they had recited the classics and practiced characters from childhood, learning ritual and principle. Though every table and chair in the family home had become plain and simple, the household still preserved the rules of a scholarly Jiangnan family.
The affairs of the world were full of change, rising and falling like tides.
Some people lost their ancestral property. Some left their native land.
But those things truly woven into blood and bone—benevolence, righteousness, trustworthiness, diligence in learning, and generosity of spirit—did not scatter with the years. Instead, like a seed buried deep beneath the soil, they waited quietly in the mountain winds and misty rains of Lingnan for a new season of growth.