Written by Sheng-mei Ma
Image credit: Taiwan at night, courtesy of ChinaTimes.com
PITCH:
Cao Zhi (曹植), a talented poet in the third century, is the younger brother of the king, Cao Pi (曹丕). Jealous of his gift and suspicious of his threat to the throne, Cao Pi commands his kid brother to extemporise, after taking but seven paces, a poem on the subject of brethren, both as keeper and, implicitly, killer, without ever mentioning brothers in the poem, lest he be punished by death. This encapsulates the tension across the Taiwan Strait, where the well-wrought prosperity of the island may be peeing and shitting his pants while pleading for peace with the big brother.
In Chapter 79 of Luo Guanzhong (羅貫中)’s fourteenth-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義), the famous story of Cao Zhi’s seven-step poem composed under duress unfolds. Jealous of his gift and suspicious of his threat to the throne, Cao Pi commands his kid brother to extemporise, after taking but seven paces, a poem on the subject of brethren, both as keeper and, implicitly, killer, without ever mentioning brothers in the poem, lest he be punished by death. Here is the poem, bilingually presented. Despite the metaphorical tour de force, I wonder if Cao Zhi is, pardon my Americanism, peeing and shitting his pants while pleading for peace and for his life:
煮豆燃豆萁
Cooking beans over a fire of bean stalks,
豆在釜中泣
Beans are crying in the pot.
本是同根生
Born of the same root,
相煎何太急
Why such haste to cook and eat me?
My translation errs in the last word “me,” whereas the original poem, in keeping with the quirk of largely subject-less Chinese language, makes no mention of any subjectivity or personhood. The human voice and sibling rivalry metamorphose into an analogue of de-personalised plants. The original last line can be rendered literally as “Why such haste in mutual frying/boiling?” The word “mutual” equalises the cook and the cooked, the eater and the eaten, a euphemism masking a game of life and death for the poet rather than for the listener. The power dynamics resemble a Darwinian zero-sum game, not the quotidian ritual of food consumption. By interjecting that personal voice in “me,” I deliberately echo Lewis Carroll’s “Drink Me” and “Eat Me” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) because of the compatible psychological distancing performed in the children’s story of fun and the “child play” of wit. Carroll secretes adult altered consciousness and paedophilic perversion in the girlish innocence of Alice; Cao Zhi dissociates cooking from human cruelty, and brotherly sharing from the big brother’s fratricide.
Although not to the extent of the first murder in Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-16), the Cao story belongs to the classical canon as well. An insular civilisation for thousands of years, China’s history is rife with civil war and violence against one’s own kind, be it family, clan, region, north-south, east-west, or us-them. “Born of the same root,” enquires Cao Zhi, “why such haste” in mutual cannibalising? Begging for mercy is recast as a dignified, impersonal query. In effect, the poet appeals to his brother-king’s empathy, hoping to be spared. Conceivably, Cao Pi could have read the poem quite differently and taken offence. If one’s parents and ancestors were roots, then the firstborn Cao Pi is the stalk, essential yet paling in comparison to the fruits in the pods, gifted with the magic of words. Hence, the weeping, or rather, rhapsodising beans symbolise the poet, and beanstalks the king. Beans are edible, nutritious, and filling, whereas stalks are useless except as fuel, to be incinerated into ashes, or as livestock feed. Not so much a plea for clemency, the poem circuitously trash-talks power and the ultimate futility of it. This reading could have been met with imperial wrath and summary execution. Truth be told, this reversal of master and slave has been validated throughout history; the tides of time never fail to turn against the conqueror, whose seeds of self-destruction have long been sown by the ravages it inflicts on others. Guns and swords win battles, and vanquish lands, yet the savagery of war is internalised forthwith, hardening the victor’s heart, and quickening the sclerosis of the soul.
Ironically, lyrical de-personalisation elevates the poet on death row to a higher position, as if aloft, transcending the crucible in which he is broiled. Not only is the reader’s first impression that of the beans and not of the beanstalks, but the latter is hardly ever mentioned again, as the poetic lens, so to speak, zooms in like a high angle shot on the woes of beans, not on the disappearing beanstalks. The source of the woes, namely, burning stalks, is pushed to the background, or underground, unobserved under the pot. What is not seen in the first place has no way of vanishing like the Cheshire Cat. Cao Zhi composes the poem, thus, from the top down, in the guise of Godly disinterestedness. By appealing to his brother’s noble instinct of compassion, Cao Zhi privileges the collective oneness of beans and bean stalks sprung from the same root. In reverse, however, Cao Pi could have elected a position from the bottom up. That Cao Pi is likened to the indigestible, invisible stems, good for burning only, would justify his rage over sacrilege against the throne. Contrary to Cao Zhi’s big picture from above, the big brother could have adopted a more anatomical than syncretic perspective by favouring one body part over the other. Cao Pi could opt for a low-angle shot on the stalks twisting in the flames and the ashes flitting about to legitimise the decapitation of the poet whose first line, subversively, decapitates the crown.
Given the People’s Liberation Army’s relentless military exercises of blockade and incursion swarming Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace, and given the historical lot of the “Orphan of Asia” that various colonial masters have used and abused over centuries, what would be next? Cao Zhi’s brotherly beans and bean stalks enlighten the Taiwan question and its “Final Solution.” If the world’s middle powers, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney phrases it in the Davos conference on January 20, 2026, are not at the table, then they are on the menu in global autocratic politics. Taiwan’s influence as a purveyor of computer chips and semiconductors is far less than that of a middle power like Canada or Japan. Indeed, Taiwan resembles the bean stalks that nurture the beans in life and cook them in death.
Notwithstanding the role reversal, Cao Zhi authors his well-wrought quatrain of four lines, five words each, rhyming with the long ē sound, simulating a long sigh. Hence, the end rhymes of ji (萁 beanstalks), qi (泣 weep), sheng (生 born), and ji (急 haste) form an AABA rhyme scheme and turn a crisis into an opportunity. The symmetry and balance of images and sounds manage to contain the tumultuous emotions of someone walking a tightrope. Eking out a living under the long shadow cast from the other side of the Taiwan Strait, the island’s postwar prosperity parallels Cao Zhi’s brilliant performance under the pain of death. The darker the fate, the more beautiful the poem, or the more exquisite the chips from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).
Yet another historical awakening accompanies the role reversal. The analogy of root, stalk, and bean would sequence, chronologically, Chineseness as the provenance, the Kuomintang, or Nationalists, as the stalk since its avatar rebelled against the Qing dynasty around the turn of the last century, and the Communists as the “latter-day” beans, courtesy of the shared roots and the Nationalists, the flawed custodian of China from 1911 to 1949. The Chinese Communist Party was founded, after all, in 1921, and the PRC in 1949. Cao Zhi’s imprecision of his own condition and my application to the Taiwan Strait are both acts of poetic licence. But the liberty, pun intended, I take in resurrecting the beans over fire is timely and imperative, given the boiling waters besetting Taiwan, upsetting twenty-three million Taiwanese, and turning the island’s stomach for fear of the Red Maws. While seemingly maintaining its daily rhythm like Cao Zhi’s choice rhyme, its ritual of business as usual, Taiwan may be secretly peeing and shitting its pants. The island’s obsession with ghost, horror, and disaster films manifests a deep sense of unease amongst its populace. Such existential angst is overcompensated by the generic opposite of melodramatic, tear-jerking, self-massaging love stories, endlessly cloning themselves onscreen. Both signal repetition compulsions of a traumatised mind, surviving on its ingenuity despite adversity, as troubled as it might be.
But such trouble is bound to contaminate any future ruler. As Cao Pi is remembered forevermore as an almost Cain, China the Conqueror, if it comes to pass, would be stained with the stench of blood and urine, “the smell of napalm.” Consider the Buddha Palm and the Monkey Pee by reading the Buddha’s Palmistry.
The Buddha palm in Chinese culture symbolises supremacy. The maxim of taobuchu shouzhanxin (逃不出手掌心 Cannot escape from the centre of the palm) tells of a condition from which one cannot extract oneself, alluding to the Buddha palm in Monkey. Wu Cheng’en (吳承恩)’s sixteenth-century classic chapter novel Xiyouji (西遊記 Journey to the West) plots the downfall of the Boy-God Monkey in the trope of God’s hand, or under God’s thumb, as Americanism goes. Arthur Waley’s early, abridged translation of Xiyouji as Monkey (1943) shows how Monkey pits himself against the divine by wagering that he could somersault his way beyond the centre of the Buddha’s palm. After turning numerous somersaults and reaching what Monkey believes to be the edge of the universe, he transforms (biàn 變) his body hair into an ink brush and autographs the self-designated grandiose moniker “The Great Sage, Equal of Heaven” (齊天大聖) on the highest peak and marks his territory with the animalistic pee (biàn便) at the base. Bian puns on magical metamorphoses and biological urges. The Buddha palm and absolute power would forever stink of simian and abject urine, which neutralises the division of high and low, metastasising the noumenon into something faintly smelly.
When the five peaks show themselves to be the Buddha’s five fingers, they clamp down and imprison Monkey for five hundred years. As Monkey squirms like a worm to attempt escape, it takes a seal inscribed the Buddhist’s mantra of “OM MANI PADME HUM” to lock Monkey in place. Monkey’s release also hinges on his master Tripitaka unsealing the inscription. Like a parchment, though, the Buddha palm forever bears the names of both the tamer and the tamed, whose total subjugation is called into question by the scent most unbecoming to God. In addition, to laypersons of the world of phenomena, the six-syllable mantra sounds downright nonsensical. Precisely because it makes no sense, it is projected to be the word of God beyond human understanding. Filmmakers and social media practitioners draw from this cultural palimpsest of the noumenal-nonsensical to produce a sense of awe in consumers identifying with the anthropomorphised Monkey, crushed yet forever playing with the Buddha palm, forever gaming how God’s children out of, not to mince words, Monkey’s loins read the encrypted palm lines.
The layer of Monkey’s “bilingual,” Sino-Simian code-switching is written over by the Buddha’s name on the self-same “rouhong zhu” (肉紅柱 or five “flesh-red pillars” [Xiyouji 65]). The five “flesh-red pillars” turn out to eat Monkey’s flesh, indicated by the word “flesh” or “meat” (rou 肉), where two humans (ren 人 or the humanoid Monkey) enter (or exit?) a horseshoe-like mouth or body. Even after Monkey is freed from Five Fingers or Five Elements Mountain, the Buddha continues to pinch Monkey’s skull by way of the fillet and the Fillet-Tightening Sutra passed down from the Buddha (the Father) to the Goddess of Mercy Guanyin (the Mother) to Tripitaka (the Son). Whenever Monkey exhibits any trace of disobedience, Tripitaka recites the Fillet-Tightening Sutra to squeeze Monkey into submission, a Sutra “sprouted from the heart of the Lord Buddha himself” (207) and never transcribed, a wordless chant, an inaudible curse, even more hidden than the Buddha’s six-syllable name, ringing in scriptures, temples, and devotees’ lips since time immemorial. But the eternal control exerted over Monkey is symptomatic of the Buddha’s subconscious fear of losing control, the elusive smell of animal pee emanating from the heel of his palm, from the back of the divine mind. Monkey’s pee has become the Buddha’s body odour.
So, my brother, Beijing, “can we all get along?” After having suffered police brutality, Rodney King’s plea during the 1992 Los Angeles riots is a big ask. But the momentous opportunity surely befits the broadmindedness and magnanimity of a big brother, one who desires peace as much as any victim and wrinkles the nose at whiffs of pee, or “Pi” as in Cao Pi, the Cain-like victimiser.
Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specialising in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Chinese Serial (2026); Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, including Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016), he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).