Wu Jin Zang. Pang Bei

      

       Imprint

      WELTBUCH VERLAG GMBH

      Bahnhofpark 3, 7320 Sargans, Switzerland

      Homepage: www.weltbuch.com

      ISBN 978-3-906212-82-1, 1st english edition, E-Book, © 2021

      This e-book is based on the printed edition published in 2015 by

      Weltbuch Verlag GmbH under the ISBN 978-3-906212-23-4.

      eISBN 978-3-906212-81-4

      All rights reserved

       About the author

      Pang Bei, born in 1966, is a novelist, a playwright as well as a screenwriter. The Name of the Nun, a novel written by Pang Bei, is reputed as a novel which requires the talent of none but Jorge Luis Borges, yet one that Jorge Luis Borges found hard to write. It is also acclaimed as the Chinese version of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a novel considered to be the groundbreaking book of knowledge-based mystery novel in the West. The Name of the Nun has been listed as one of the annual global Top 10 Best Chinese Novels selected by Asian Newsweek. As a playwright, Pang Bei‘s stage play Life After Life, an internationally-expressed Chinese drama, has been well received in China. It will be performed in the 2016 Festival d’Avignon. And as a screenwriter, Pang Bei ‘s film script Lord of Shanghai is a winner of the Golden Horse Film Festival (Taiwan).

      Pang Bei shared the same career in his youth days with Mo Yan, the Nobel literature laureate of China, and Mai Jia, author of the worldwide bestsellers Decode. This special experience has given them a global vision and the ability to reach out to the world.

       Table of Contents

       An Editor’s Casual Notes

       Volume IA Taoist Hermit

       Volume IICrape Myrtle Official Zhu

       Volume IIIThe Housekeeper

       Volume IVDouble Monk

       Volume VGrand Minister

       Volume VIA Strange Bhikkhu

       Volume VIIThe Female Alchemist

       Volume VIIIThe Last Lord

       Volume IX(Lost)

       Postscript to an Ancient Printing

       An Editor’s Casual Notes

      Although it’s known that something is happening, we have no idea what has really happened. They said what was called the end of the world was totally an absurdity as the sun rises as well, and the earth rotates as usual, so go to hell the Maya peoples! It is deeply aware that there will be no myth in this world, and the prediction of the doomsday is hated. We are not young any longer so we care about nothing unless concerning ourselves, even the death of a classmate in the old days. At this moment, our faces turned red with wine, and we clinked glasses in the background of light music and flirted in the vagueness of speech. We struggled in the game of time till we achieve a sense of elite now.

      Spring eclipses her beauty as she is old nowadays,

      The traces of love everywhere she recalls.

      Seemingly familiar she is with these willow branches,

      The veiling branches touch the travelers’ heads.

      These lines came into my mind as I watched these men and women in decent garments in misty eyes by alcohol. It was a fan poem contributed to a palace girl by a last emperor but this moment they came into my mind only because of the death of that classmate.

      At the time, the waiter opened the last bottle of Sherry and slowly poured our glasses. This chartered room was immediately reduced to a subtle silence. The reunions of old classmates tend to be no more than such: after recalling all nice days in the past and showing off some achievements in numerous overtly or covertly ways, they often make the last moment marked with a special taste. Now we all silently enjoyed such taste, and such a silence needed someone to declare the gathering closed. Among us there are department or division directors, real estate executives, Ph.D. supervisors and celebrities (in this case, I have to arrange them in the conventional order of officials, businessmen and scholars) and in general we were regarded as a successor in this era. For the gathering, we rushed here and would depart in a hurry. At the gathering we have worries on our minds and inquired about each other. In addition, we also subtly avoided the topic of the death in this togetherness until the last moment. This is a gathering of successors, where we just casually talked about fatty liver and high blood sugar and certainly should avoid all disappointing things.

      At the moment I was not really in a position to speak, but after all I assumed the office of a division-level deputy president of the press. A few years ago I was successfully transferred to serve as an intellectual. Of course my classmates in the astrophysics class have all had their own changes. Now, although feeling a little drunken from drinking alcohol, I was not so foolish as to talk with them about the book publication, because there was the so-called ‘expert’ who has asserted that ninety-nine percent of the books published nowadays were just like rubbish, not worth reading.

      We got together at the luxury hotel called “ Millenarian Tower “, so we should avoid indecent topics associated with rubbish. And by and large I also agreed to her assertion. Now I strongly felt a need to say something and I had to stand up and speak it out.

      “Attention, please! I’m sorry! My professional knowledge has been long-abandoned, but I still have a little deep feeling for astrophysics. Just now everyone talked about the crash of a meteorite in Russia, injuring nearly a thousand people there. Of course it’s not the end of the world. We can laugh it away and pay no attention to the prophecy by Mr. Hawking on the exodus from the Earth. Hawking said no humans can survive on the Earth in one thousand years, but what I’d like to say is just the event happening a thousand years ago. I have no idea whether you still remember the supernova star ‘Star of Good Luck’ also known as ‘Zhoubao Star’, which is the earliest supernova star recorded by humans. Today we are still able to find the ‘dispersed smokes’ from its explosion, which are light and radio waves coming from a thousand years ago …… what I’d really like to say is that this star in fact is associated with all of you, which is not only due to our past specialty – the specialty of the professors present, but is also because of the connection of the star with one of our old classmates. Please remember our classmate Xiao Lin, we just lost this good brother. I have to say that his family has an ancient book kept for more than one thousand year, in which there are even some records of this Zhoubo star! What I desire to say is really not about the star, but our classmate Xiao Lin who died many years ago…… “

      They all stared at me, smiling with a strange look on their faces. They knitted their brows and shook their heads, and then they were all callous and silent. I didn’t intend to raise money for the survivors of the deceased classmate but just