The Country Where Everyone Wore a Mask Over the Back of Their Head / 两面国：人人在后脑勺戴了张面具

A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 2

From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapter 25 · 第二十五回 · 两面国

By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

A coastal kingdom where every citizen wears a hood that covers the back of his head. The faces in front are warm, attentive, deferential. When one of the travelers lifts a hood from behind, he finds the second face — fanged, snake-eyed, grinning. The first face only smiles at people in silk. The second face is what's waiting for everyone else.

The Story

Our travelers have been at sea for months. Tang Ao (唐敖, a Tang dynasty scholar who failed at court and went looking for what was beyond the maps), his brother-in-law Lin Zhiyang (林之洋, a plain-spoken merchant who runs the boat and speaks Cantonese-accented Mandarin), and the old helmsman Duo Jiugong (多九公, a retired naval officer who has read every travel record ever published) have just escaped the Country of the Refined Scholars^{[1]The Country of the Refined Scholars (君子国 Jūnzǐ Guó) — the country visited in Chapters 11 and 12 of Flowers in the Mirror, where Tang Ao first encounters the satirical "imaginary country" form. Buyers in the Country of Refined Scholars insist on overpaying for every transaction, sellers insist on accepting less; the market grinds to a halt. The Liangmian Guo episode is the dark mirror to that earlier light-comic one.}. The next island on their chart is a place the sea-charts call simply Liǎngmiàn Guó (两面国) — "the Country of Two Faces."

Duo Jiugong's old leg injury is acting up. He waves the other two ashore and stays behind on the ship. Go on without me, he says. If it's a long walk to town, I'll only slow you down.

Tang Ao and Lin Zhiyang walk inland for two or three miles before they see any houses. When they do, they find the inhabitants strange but not — at first — alarming. Every man, woman, and child in the country wears a kind of long hood called a hàorán jīn (浩然巾) — a flowing cloth headcover that drapes from the crown of the head down over the back of the neck, leaving only the forward-facing portion of the head exposed. The face you can see is the only face there is, as far as Tang Ao can tell.

The people themselves are unusually gracious. Tang Ao approaches a man at random to ask about local customs. The man turns to face him with what Tang Ao later describes as warm color, attentive expression, the bearing of a host receiving an honored guest. He answers every question Tang Ao puts to him in elegant Mandarin. He is, in fact, the most courteous person Tang Ao has met since leaving home — unlike anyone in any other country we have visited, Tang Ao thinks.

Tang Ao is wearing a scholar's silk gown and the soft cap of an exam graduate.

Lin Zhiyang, watching this exchange, walks up to a different local and tries the same opener.

The local turns. He looks Lin Zhiyang up and down. The temperature of his face drops by what feels like several degrees. The smile gets folded up and put away somewhere. The deferential bow does not happen.

After a long pause — long enough to be insulting — the local answers Lin Zhiyang's question. Half a sentence, Lin Zhiyang would later complain. One sentence, half-spoken, half-mumbled, half-swallowed. By the time it got to my ears it was half a sentence.

Lin Zhiyang is wearing a sea-merchant's old cotton tunic. He had meant to change before going ashore, but the morning was rushed.

He walks back over to Tang Ao, scowling. Why is it, he asks under his breath, that every man we meet treats you like an ambassador and treats me like a beggar?

Tang Ao shrugs. He has noticed it too, but he is too polite to comment.

Let's switch coats, Lin Zhiyang says.

They duck behind a wall. Lin Zhiyang puts on Tang Ao's silk scholar's gown. Tang Ao puts on Lin Zhiyang's plain cotton merchant's tunic. They walk back out and approach two new locals.

This time it is Tang Ao who gets the half-sentence and the cold side-eye. Lin Zhiyang, in the silk gown, gets the warm color and the deferential bow and the please, sir, won't you sit down inside, we have tea.

Lin Zhiyang is enjoying himself enormously. Tang Ao is starting to feel sick.

While Lin Zhiyang chats up the well-dressed local in his borrowed silk, Tang Ao slips around behind the man. The local does not notice — he is busy admiring Lin Zhiyang's robes.

Tang Ao reaches up and very gently lifts the back edge of the man's hàorán jīn hood.

There is a second face under there.

It is not a different person's face. It is the same skull, the same scalp. But where the back of an ordinary human head would be — smooth scalp, hair, the curve of the occipital bone — there is a face. A complete, working face, with eyes and a nose and a mouth and a tongue.

The eyes are small and close-set, like a rat's. The nose is hooked, like a hawk's. The cheeks are thick with sagging muscle. The eyebrows lift up in a wedge at the inner corners like the bristles of a worn broom. The mouth opens, slowly, and inside the mouth Tang Ao sees fanged teeth — yáyá (獠牙), the curved tusks of a wild boar — set into red gums the color of an open wound.

A long tongue uncoils from between the fangs. It is a deep, blackened red, and as it extends Tang Ao smells the breath that comes with it — a sharp, sour vapor, the kind of smell that lingers in a closed room after a dead animal has been moved out.

The bristled eyebrows wedge together in a furious knot. The wide mouth pulls back into a snarl. The sky, Tang Ao thinks, has suddenly gone dark. Black mist rises off the ground. A cold wind comes up from nowhere.

Tang Ao screams.

Behind him, Lin Zhiyang — who has not seen the second face but has heard Tang Ao's scream and seen the local's first face contort with rage — falls to his knees and starts apologizing to anyone who will listen.

The travelers retreat to the boat.

Back aboard ship, Duo Jiugong has slept off his leg pain and is feeling much better. He looks up as the two come stumbling onto the deck. He sees that they have switched coats. He sees that Tang Ao is white-faced and shaking. He sees that Lin Zhiyang is muttering apologies under his breath at no one.

"This Country of Two Faces," Duo Jiugong says, "what kind of place was it? Why, brother-in-law, are you wearing the merchant's tunic? And why is Lin in the scholar's gown?"

Tang Ao explains. They were all wearing hoods over the back of the head. The face in front was warm and polite. Lin and I switched coats to see what would happen. They turned cold to me the moment I was in plain cotton, and warm to Lin the moment he was in silk.

"And then," he says, "I went behind one of them and lifted the hood."

He describes what he saw.

Duo Jiugong is quiet for a long time. Then he sighs and says: So that is what the old maps mean by "the Country of Two Faces." It is not that they have two faces by accident of nature. It is that they have one face for the silk gown, and another face for the cotton tunic. The first face — the warm one, the welcoming one — that one is the lie. The second face — the fanged one with the snake-tongue and the boar-tusks — that one is what they actually think of you. They keep the second face hidden under a hood so you will see only the first.

"And the first face," Duo Jiugong says, "only smiles at people who can do something for them. The second face is what is waiting for everyone else."

Lin Zhiyang is no longer enjoying himself.

Translator's Reflection

I want to talk about two things in this chapter — one historical and one personal.

The historical thing first. Flowers in the Mirror was published around 1818, near the end of the Qing dynasty's long decline. Li Ruzhen had spent thirty years writing it. He was a frustrated minor scholar from Hebei who had failed the higher civil-service exams, like most people who took them, and had watched his more successful peers turn into officials whose private behavior bore no relation to their public Confucian self-presentation. The Country of Two Faces is the most concentrated piece of social satire he wrote, and it is aimed squarely at the world he lived in.

The Chinese expression that grew out of this chapter — liǎngmiàn pài (两面派), "the Two-Faced Faction" — is still in active use today, two hundred years later. It describes anyone who maintains one face for superiors and another for subordinates, one face for the rich and another for the poor, one face for the people in the room and another for the people who just stepped out. It is the standard accusation in modern Chinese office politics. When a Chinese boss is described as 两面派, every coworker in the room nods at the same time.

What Li Ruzhen does, that I think is the clever part, is make the satire literal. He does not say some people are two-faced. He says imagine an entire country where literally everyone has two faces, kept distinct by a piece of cloth. And then he stages the experiment that proves the point: switch the coats. Watch what happens. The face that was kind to the silk turns cold to the cotton in the same five-second interval. The face that was cold to the cotton turns warm to the silk. The same person, the same individual, switches between the two registers without a flicker of self-awareness.

That brings me to the personal thing.

The first time I read this chapter — I was twenty-something, working my first office job — I thought it was funny. The boar-tusks, the snake-tongue, the rising black mist when Tang Ao screams: it all read like cheap horror, the way a teenager writes about adults. Two-faced people are bad, very bad, the author would like us to know.

The second time I read it, I was older, and I had spent enough time in offices to recognize the move. I had been on both sides of the coat-switch. I had been the silk gown, getting the warm smile and the deferential half-bow. I had been the cotton tunic, getting the half-sentence and the cold side-eye from the same person ninety minutes later. I had also, embarrassingly, done the move — given the warm smile to the senior person in the room and let it cool by a measurable amount when the junior person spoke up. And I had not noticed myself doing it until much later, when I tried to remember what the junior person had actually said and realized I had not really been listening.

What is bracing about Li Ruzhen's version is the location of the cruelty. The cruel face is not on the front. The cruel face is on the back. You only see it if you are behind the person — that is, if you have walked away, if you are no longer the person they need to perform for. The hood is on backwards from where we usually look for hypocrisy. The polite face is for the customer. The fanged face is for the customer who has already paid and turned to leave.

I think about that whenever I leave a restaurant in a city I am visiting, and I hear, distantly, what the waiters say about the foreign tourists after the tourists have gone out the door. I think about it whenever I read an email from a colleague who is about to be replaced. I think about it whenever I notice, in myself, the temperature dropping by half a degree the moment a conversation stops being useful to me.

The Country of Two Faces is not a country. It is a way of being in any country. Li Ruzhen knew that in 1818. The hood, unfortunately, is still on the shelf.

Next tale: The Country of Women — where the gender roles are flipped, the men do the embroidery, and a male visitor from Tang China gets fitted for foot-binding. → [Coming soon]