Story of Magical Hair With Animation
By Sultan McGee
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Benton Crossing, California
In Benton Crossing, a farming town along the Sacramento River in the Central Valley of California, is a museum full of relics going back to the Gold Rush of 1849. It holds a hodge-podge of old and discarded things: a butter churn, a mustache cup, a hangman's noose, miners' tools, tintype photos, a 190l copy of the Stockton Record, license plates from the 1930s and '40s, a balance scale and a Winchester rifle. It features a circular felt-covered table set up for a version of pai kai, a Chinese gambling game, with seven stacks of cards, each divided into two hands of five and two cards each. Also a dice cup with three dice and a plate of cut ginger to be rubbed on fingers to keep away bad luck. In another room is a heavy pair of pliers and a sign EXTRACTIONS $10. TWO FOR $15. Also a Colt pistol that belonged to Joker Jack, a masked outlaw who left limericks at the scene of his robberies to tease the sheriff. One is framed under glass, in faded handwriting on brown paper.
Who knows if I'll ever go back? The museum offers something for everyone, even a two-pound nugget from the gold mines. But nothing on display evokes as many questions as a glass case containing a lock of long black hair. A sign on the base reads THE AMAZING HAIR OF MAI LIN ERICKSON, 1863-1948. What, you say, could possibly be amazing about a lock of hair? For answers, we must go far back in time to a village in China.
Dai Chek Hom 1865
The American Civil War was never discussed in the village of Dai Chek Hom, in the southern province of Guangdong. No one in the village had heard of the war. Or of Abraham Lincoln. Or Gettysburg. Instead, they talked of bandits, grass carp, sweet potato liquor, and a local farmer who had lost his millet crop gambling in a neighboring village. They talked of repainting the ancestral hall and repairing the outlet of the village fishpond. There was even some talk of a little girl with lush black hair. Like many babies, the child had been born with a head of hair, but hers did not fall out to be replaced by a new crop. Instead, it stayed and grew and grew until it looked like the luxurious tail of a prancing black horse. Her name was Mai Lin.
Her mother, Mei Zen, lived alone. She had no husband and never revealed, to anyone, the identity of Mai Lin's father. Villagers guessed it might be Shamo, an outlaw with hair like a lion's mane. He had once courted Mei Zen but now lived in the mountains, sought by provincial police and relentlessly pursued by a rich merchant seeking vengeance. The merchant, a greedy and violent man, had controlled the trade routes on the river and intimidated local farmers into selling their crops at ruinous prices. He made loans at high rates and then swindled them out of their land. The merchant picked the wrong victim, however, when he seized Shamo's ox. Shamo was so furious his hair stood on end. But he had to wait patiently for the right opportunity to strike back; the man was surrounded by servants and not easy to find alone.
Finally, one morning at dawn he surprised the merchant in his mill. There was a terrific fight -- they fought with staves and the merchant also had a knife - but Shamo, quicker and stronger, prevailed. He beat the man senseless, then dragged him in front of the ancestral hall and left him there with a plucked chicken in his lap. Shamo was forced to flee. Enraged at losing face in the village, the merchant sent men to hunt Shamo down. But village farmers had shown Shamo a secret cave deep in the mountains, where he would go whenever pursuers got close. Now an outlaw and a bandit, he often struck back, seizing the goods of cruel landlords and handing them out to the peasants. More than once he ambushed a foe and left a plucked chicken as his signature. Shamo gained the reputation of a ghost in the night.
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