Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

54

The Face of the Sun

Dear reader, this would seem to be the logical place to wrap up this novel, but there are characters whose fates have not yet been revealed, something most readers want to see. So let’s give our narrators, Lan Jiefang and Big-head, a rest and let me – their friend Mo Yan – pick up the threads and pin a tail on this lumbering animal of a story.

After Lan Jiefang and Pang Chunmiao buried his father and the dog, they entertained the thought of living out their days working Father’s plot of land in Ximen Village; unfortunately, a highly respected guest arrived at the Ximen family compound. It was a man named Sha Wujing, who had attended the provincial Party school with Jiefang and was now Party secretary of the Gaomi County Party Committee. Deeply moved by Jiefang’s life experience and the decrepit condition of the once illustrious Ximen family compound, he said generously to Jiefang:

“You’ll never regain your position as deputy county chief, my friend, and restoring your membership in the Party is unlikely. But I think we can find you a government job to keep you going.”

“I’m grateful for the thoughtful consideration of our leaders, but there’s no need for that,” Jiefang replied. “I’m the son of a Ximen Village peasant, and this is where I want to live out my days.”

“Remember the old Party secretary Jin Bian?” Sha asked. “Well, here’s what he had in mind. He and your father-in-law Pang Hu are good friends, and if you two were to move into town, you could look after your father-in-law. The Standing Committee has approved your assignment as assistant director of the Cultural Exhibition Center. As for Comrade Chunmiao, she can return to the New China Bookstore if she’s willing. If not, we can find something else for her.”

Dear reader, returning to town was not something Jiefang and Chunmiao ought to have considered; but the opportunity to be working for the government and to look after her aging father was too good to pass up. Keep in mind that those two friends of mine were ordinary people not blessed with the ability to look into the future. They returned to town without delay. Since it was ordained by Fate, they could not have done otherwise.

At first they moved into Pang Hu’s house. Although he had once publicly, even heroically, disowned Chunmiao, he was, after all, a loving father, an old and ailing man, like a candle guttering in the wind, so he grew teary and his heart softened, especially after learning how difficult life had been for his daughter and the man who was now her legal husband. He put the ill will of the past aside, threw open his door, and welcomed them into his house.

Early each morning Jiefang rode his bicycle to the Cultural Exhibition Center. Given the cheerless, shabby layout of the center, assistant director was a title, not a job. There was nothing for him to “direct,” and all he did all day long was sit at his three-drawer desk, drinking weak tea, smoking cheap cigarettes, and reading the newspaper.

Chunmiao decided to return to the children’s section of the New China Bookstore, where she dealt with a new generation of boys and girls. By then the clerks she’d worked with before had retired, their places taken by young women in their twenties. Chunmiao also rode a bicycle to work; in the afternoon she’d swing by Theater Street to buy chicken gizzards or sheep’s head meat to take home for her father to enjoy with the little bit of liquor he and Jiefang, neither of whom could handle much alcohol, drank before dinner. They’d talk about little things, like brothers.

Chunmiao discovered she was pregnant around lunar New Year’s. Jiefang, who was in his fifties, was overjoyed. The news also brought tears to the eyes of Pang Hu, who was approaching eighty. Both men envisioned the joy of life with three generations living under one roof. But that image would quickly fade in the face of a looming disaster.

Chunmiao had bought some stewed donkey meat on Theater Street and was on her way home, singing happily to herself as she turned into Liquan Boulevard, where a Red Flag sedan coming from the opposite direction ran into her. The bicycle was turned into junk, the meat splattered on the ground, and she flew over to the side of the road, where she hit her head on the curb. She died before Jiefang arrived on the scene. The car that had hit her belonged to Du Luwen, onetime secretary of the Lüdian Township Party Committee, now deputy head of the county People’s Congress; it was driven by the son of one of Ximen Jinlong’s youthful pals, Young Tiger Sun.

I simply do not know how to describe what Jiefang felt when he saw her lying there; great novelists have set too high a standard in dealing with such traumatic moments.

Jiefang buried Chunmiao’s ashes in his father’s notorious plot of land, near Hezuo’s grave site; no marker was placed at the head of either grave. After weeds grew around Chunmiao’s grave, you could not tell them apart. Pang Hu died not long after his daughter was buried. Jiefang took the urns containing both his and Wang Leyun’s ashes back to Ximen Village and buried them next to his father, Lan Lian.

A few days later, Pang Kangmei, who was serving a prison term, went slightly mad and stabbed herself in the heart with a sharpened toothbrush. Chang Tianhong retrieved her ashes and went to see Lan Jiefang. “She was, after all, a member of your family,” he said, and Jiefang understood what he was trying to say. He took the ashes back to Ximen Village and buried them behind the graves of her parents.

55

Lovemaking Positions

Lan Kaifang rode his father, my friend Jiefang, over to the house on Tianhua Lane on his motorcycle. The sidecar was filled with his daily necessities. This time, instead of holding on to the metal bar, Jiefang wrapped his arms around his son’s waist. Kaifang was still very thin, but straight and strong as an unbending tree branch. My friend wept all the way from the Pang house to 1 Tianhua Lane; his tears wetted the back of his son’s police uniform.

He was understandably emotional as he stepped in through the gate for the first time since the day he’d left it supported by Chunmiao. The limbs of the parasol tree in the yard had reached the wall, with branches reaching over to the other side. As the old saying goes, “If trees can change, why can’t people?” But my friend had no time to ponder such thoughts, for he’d no sooner stepped into the yard than he saw through the gauzy covering of an open window in the east-side room, which had once been his study, a familiar figure. It was Huzhu, sitting there making paper cutouts, oblivious to all around her.

No question about it, this had been Kaifang’s doing, and my friend realized how lucky he was to have such a kind and considerate son. Not only did he bring his aunt and his father together, he also took Chang Tianhong, who had fallen into a depression, back to Ximen Village on his motorcycle to meet Baofeng, who’d been a widow for many years. He had once, long ago, been the man of her dreams, and he’d always had feelings for her. Her son, Gaige, was not a man with great ambitions; rather he was an honest, upright, hardworking peasant. He was happy to approve the marriage of his mother to Chang Tianhong, so they could live out their lives as a contented couple.

My friend Jiefang’s first love had been Huang Huzhu – to be fair, it was her hair he’d fallen in love with, and now, after lives marked by sadness and pain, the two of them were able to walk through life together. Kaifang spent most of his nights in a dormitory room and seldom came home to the house on Tianhua Lane, not even on weekends, owing to the demands of his job. That left only Jiefang and Huzhu in the house; they slept in their own rooms but ate their meals together. Huzhu, who’d never had much to say, spoke even less now, and when Jiefang asked her something, she replied only with a weak smile. For six months or so that is how things went, and then everything changed.

After dinner one spring evening, as a light rain fell outside, their hands touched while they were clearing the table. Something happened to their mood; their eyes met. Huzhu sighed. My friend did too. In a soft voice, Huzhu said:

“Why don’t you come in and comb my hair…”

He followed her into her room, where she handed him her comb and carefully removed her heavy hairnet. Her miraculous hair fell like waves all the way to the floor. For the first time in his life my friend was able to touch hair that he had admired from afar since his youth. A delicate citronella fragrance filled his nostrils and reached deep down into his soul.

Huzhu took several steps forward in order to let her hair out all the way, and when her knees touched the bed, my friend scooped up her hair in one arm and with great care and great tenderness began to comb. In fact, her hair did not need to be combed; thick and heavy and slippery, it never had split ends; it would be accurate to say that he was stroking it, fondling it, sensing it. His tears fell on her hair like drops of water splashing on the feathers of Mandarin ducks, and rolled off onto the floor.

With an emotional sigh, Huzhu began taking off her clothes, while my friend stood back several feet, holding her hair like a child carrying the train of a bride as she enters the church and staring wide-eyed at the scene before him.

“I guess we ought to give your son what he wants, don’t you think…”

As his tears flowed freely, he parted the hair he was holding, like a man walking through the hanging branches of a weeping willow, not stopping until he’d reached his destination. Huzhu knelt on the bed to await his arrival.

The scene was replayed several dozen times, until my friend said he would like to make love facing her. She replied in a voice devoid of feeling:

“No, this is how dogs do it.”

56

Monkey Show in the Square

Shortly after the first day of 2000, two humans and one monkey appeared in the square in front of the Gaomi train station. I’m sure, dear reader, that you have already guessed that the monkey was the latest reincarnation of Ximen Nao, following the donkey, the ox, the pig, and the dog. Naturally, it was a male monkey, and not one of those cute little things we’re so used to seeing. It was a large rhesus monkey, whose coat was a dull green-gray, sort of like dry moss. His eyes, far apart and sunk deep into their sockets, gave off a frightful glare. His ears lay flat against his head like fungi, his nostrils flared upward, and his open mouth, seemingly without an upper lip, showed nothing but teeth; that alone was enough to frighten anyone off. He was dressed in a red sleeveless jacket, turning a savage monkey into a comical one. Truth is, there’s no reason to call him either savage or comical, since a monkey in human clothes is just that and nothing more.

A chain around the monkey’s neck was attached to the wrist of a young woman. I don’t need to tell you, dear reader, that the young woman in question is our long-lost Pang Fenghuang, and that the young man with her was the long-lost Ximen Huan. Both were wearing filthy down coats over tattered blue jeans and dirty knockoff sneakers. Fenghuang had dyed her hair a golden yellow and plucked her eyebrows, leaving only thin arcs. She wore a gold ring in her right nostril. Ximen Huan had dyed his hair red and had a silver ring above his right eye.

Gaomi had come a long way by then, though it still didn’t compare favorably with the big cities. There’s a saying that goes: “The bigger the woods, the more diverse the bird population; the smaller the woods, the fewer the birds.” These two strange birds and their ferocious monkey attracted an immediate crowd of curious gawkers, as well as at least one busybody who ran to the local police station to report what was going on.

The crowd instinctively formed a circle around Ximen Huan and Pang Fenghuang, which is what they wanted. He pulled a bronze gong out of his backpack and struck it – bong bong- which attracted even more people and tightened the circle. One sharp-eyed person in the crowd recognized the youngsters, but all the others were staring wide-eyed at the monkey and couldn’t have cared less who his handlers were.

While Ximen Huan rhythmically beat the gong, Fenghuang took the chain off her wrist to give the monkey more room to maneuver, and then removed a straw hat, a tiny carrying pole, two tiny baskets, and a tobacco pipe from her backpack, laying them on the ground beside her. Then, to the rhythm of Ximen Huan’s gong, she began to sing in a raspy but melodious voice. The monkey took that as his cue to stroll around the square. It was a stumbling gait, since his legs were bowed; his tail dragged on the ground behind him as he glanced all around.

The bronze gong rings out bong bong bong

I tell monkey to do nothing wrong

He received the Tao on Mount Emei

And returned home as king of his trade, truly strong

He’ll perform for our countrymen

Who will pay for my song

“Move back! Clear the way!” Newly assigned deputy station chief Lan Kaifang elbowed his way through the crowd. He was born to be a cop. In two years on the force he had acquitted himself so well that at the unprecedented young age of twenty he’d been picked as deputy chief of the train station police substation, one of the most crime-ridden areas in town. It was a ringing affirmation of his talent and dedication.

Be an old man with a straw hat and pipe

Stroll round the square, hands in back, walking along

As she sang, Fenghuang tossed the straw hat to the monkey, who nimbly put it on his head. Next she tossed him the pipe; he jumped up and put it in his mouth. That done, he clasped his hands behind his back, bent at the waist, and bowed his legs; with his head rocking from side to side and his eyes darting, he looked like an old man out for a stroll, and was rewarded with laughter and applause.

“Move back! Clear the way!” Lan Kaifang squeezed up to the front. His heart had begun to sink when he received the busybody’s report, for rumors had reached his ears that Ximen Huan and Pang Fenghuang had been kidnapped and sent to Southeast Asia, where one was forced to perform manual labor, the other was sold into life as a prostitute; another version had it that they had both died of drug overdoses somewhere in the south. But deep down, he believed they were alive and well, especially Fenghuang. You, dear reader, would not have forgotten how he cut his own finger so Ximen Huan could test the restorative powers of Huang Huzhu’s hair. Well, that cut showed how he felt. So when he received the report, he knew who they were and knew they were back. He dropped what he was doing and ran to the square, the image of Fenghuang floating before his eyes the whole way. He hadn’t seen her since his grandmother’s funeral, when she’d been wearing a white down jacket and a white knit cap; her tiny face, red from the biting cold, had made her seem to be a pure and chaste fairy-tale princess. When he heard her raspy singing, Kaifang, who treated criminals with the callousness they deserved, felt his eyes glaze over.

Let’s see Erlang carry a mountain and chase the moon

Then a phoenix spreading her wings to pursue the sun

Pang Fenghuang picked up the little carrying pole and its two tiny baskets with her foot and flipped it into the air with such skill that it landed on the monkey’s back. First he rested it on his right shoulder, with one basket in front, the other in back; Erlang carrying a mountain and chasing the moon. Then he rested it on his back, with one basket to the left, the other to his right; a phoenix spreading her wings to pursue the sun.

I perform all my tricks at least once

So please pay up for my song

The monkey threw down the carrying pole, picked up a red plastic platter Fenghuang had thrown down for him, and began passing it around.

Good uncle, good aunt

Grandpa and Grandma

Brothers, sisters, fellow countrymen

I’ll take even a dime if that’s all you have

But give a hundred, and you’re the Guanyin Bodhisattva come to earth

While Fenghuang sang, the people tossed money into the platter held high over the monkey’s head. One-jiao, two-jiao, and three-jiao coins, plus one-, five-, and ten-yuan bills, fell into his pan with hardly a sound.

When the monkey was face-to-face with Lan Kaifang, the policeman put in a thick envelope containing a month’s wages and overtime pay. With a screech, the monkey fell to all fours and, with the platter in his mouth, scampered over to Pang Fenghuang.

Bong bong bong – Ximen Huan struck his gong three times and bowed deeply to Kaifang, like a circus clown. Then he straightened up and said:

“Many thanks, Uncle Policeman!”

Fenghuang took the money out of the envelope and, holding it in her right hand, slapped it rhythmically against the palm of her left hand to show off to the audience as she imitated a pop song:

All of us, we’re Gaomi folk

Every one of us a living Lei Feng

You gave us a wad of RMB

A good deed without even leaving your name

Kaifang pulled the brim of his hat down low, turned on his heel, and pushed his way through the crowd without saying a word.

57

A Painful Cut

Dear reader, as a policeman, Lan Kaifang had the authority to drive Ximen Huan, Pang Fenghuang, and their monkey out of the train station square, but he didn’t.

Since his father, Jiefang, and I were like brothers, he might be considered my nephew, while in truth I barely knew him; he and I had exchanged no more than a few words. I suspected that he was prejudiced against me, since I’d been the one who’d introduced his father to Pang Chunmiao, and that had led to a number of disastrous consequences. I tell you, Nephew Kaifang, if not Pang Chunmiao, some other woman would have come into your father’s life. That was something I’d wanted to say to you for the longest time, but the opportunity never presented itself, and now never would.

Since I lacked any real contact with Kaifang, anything I say about what was on his mind is pure conjecture.

I imagine that when he pulled the brim of his hat down and pushed his way through the crowd, he was beset by powerful mixed emotions. Not long before that, Pang Fenghuang had been Gaomi County’s supreme princess and Ximen Huan the supreme prince. The mother of one had been the most powerful official in the county, the father of the other the richest. They were carefree and willful, spending money as if they had it to burn, and enjoying a large circle of acquaintances. The golden boy and jade girl were the envy of a great many people, but it did not take long for both powerful figures to pass from the scene, their glory and riches turned to foul dirt, and their favored offspring were reduced to making a living through the antics of a trained monkey.

I imagine that Lan Kaifang’s love for Fenghuang had not faded. Given the disparity between a onetime princess who had fallen to the role of street entertainer and the deputy commander of a police substation, he could not suppress his feelings of inadequacy. And even though he’d charitably placed a month’s salary plus overtime in the monkey’s platter, the sarcasm with which they had accepted the gift showed that they still felt superior, that this ugly policeman was beneath their dignity. It also served to erase any thoughts he may have had of stealing Fenghuang away from Ximen Huan and removed what remained of the belief and courage that he could rescue her from her demeaned circumstances. He lowered his brim to cover his face as he fled the scene; it was all he could do.

Word that the daughter of Pang Kangmei and the son of Ximen Jinlong were working with a trained monkey in front of the train station quickly spread throughout the city and into neighboring villages. People converged on the square for reasons that would have been clear if they’d been able to identify them. Neither of the local darlings, Fenghuang and Ximen Huan, felt the least bit of shame; they seemed to have cut themselves off from their past. For them the train station square might as well have been a foreign country, where they were among crowds of strangers. They worked hard and collected their rewards earnestly. Some of the people watching the monkey’s antics shouted out the couple’s names, and others screamed epithets at their parents, all of which they ignored and none of which had any effect on their radiant smiles. But, should anyone speak immodestly or act inappropriately toward Fenghuang, the monkey would be all over the offender, biting and scratching.

One of the notorious Four Little Hoods waved a pair of two-hundred-yuan notes in Fenghuang’s direction and shouted, “Hey, girl, I see you’ve got a ring in your nose. What about down below? Drop your pants and let me see for myself, and these are yours.” His buddies whooped and hollered, but she ignored the raunchy comment and, chain in one hand and whip in the other, sent the monkey out for donations.

All you kind people

It doesn’t matter if you have money or you don’t

If you’ve got it, part with a little

If you haven’t a few shouts will help

Bong bong bong!

Ximen Huan was smiling too as he beat a rhythmic tattoo on his gong. “Ximen Huan, you little bastard, what happened to the intimidating fellow we used to know? Go on, tell your girlfriend to drop her pants. If you don’t-” The monkey hobbled up to the man and – some people said they saw Fenghuang tug on the chain, others said she did nothing of the sort – tossed his platter behind him, leaped up onto the man’s shoulder, and began biting and scratching wildly. The monkey’s screeches and the man’s screams merged as the crowd fled, with the little hood’s buddies out in front. Fenghuang pulled the monkey back and continued her little song:

Riches are not ordained by heaven

People all get their comeuppance sooner or later -

The bully, his face a mass of blood, was rolling on the ground and screaming in pain, which attracted a squad of policemen, who wanted to arrest Ximen Huan and Fenghuang. When the monkey bared his fangs and screeched, one of them drew his gun; Fenghuang cradled him in her arms like a mother with a baby boy. The crowd formed around them again to voice their support for Fenghuang, Ximen Huan, and their monkey. They pointed to the screaming man on the ground. “He’s the one you should arrest!” Dear reader, mob psychology is mind-numbingly strange! When Pang Kangmei and Ximen Jinlong held sway in the county, Fenghuang and Ximen Huan were objects of the people’s loathing, and their downfall was both predicted and longed for. But when that actually happened, they became underdogs, and everyone was now in their corner. The police knew all about these two and were aware of the special relationship they had with their deputy commander. So in the face of the crowd’s militancy they simply shrugged their shoulders and said nothing. One of them grabbed the bully by the neck. “Let’s go,” he said angrily. “You can knock off the phony victim act!”

The incident alarmed members of the county Party Committee. Out of kindness, Party Secretary Sha Wujing sent his office manager and a clerk to the basement of the train station hotel to talk to Fenghuang and Ximen Huan. The monkey bared his teeth at the two men when they passed on the Party secretary’s request, which was to send the monkey over to the new Phoenix Zoo in the western suburbs, after which he would find jobs for the two of them. For most of us, that would have been exciting news. But Fenghuang held the monkey in her arms and said with an angry glare, “Anyone who so much as touches my monkey will have to answer to me!” Ximen Huan merely smiled mischievously and said, “Thank Secretary Sha for his thoughtfulness, but we’re doing fine, and his time would be better spent taking care of government workers who have lost their jobs.”

From here my story takes a cruel and unhappy turn. Don’t think I’m happy about that, dear reader. The characters’ fates have made it inevitable.

The story continues that Pang Fenghuang, Ximen Huan, and their monkey were sitting at a food stall on the southern edge of the train station square eating dinner when the bully they’d dealt with that day, his face covered with gauze, crept up. The monkey screeched and sprang at him, but wound up doing a somersault, thanks to the chain around his neck. Ximen Huan jumped to his feet, turned around, and was immediately face-to-face with the sinister bully. Before he could say a word, the man stabbed him in the chest. Quite possibly, the killer may have wanted to kill Fenghuang while he was at it, but the screeching, jumping monkey frightened him off before he could even pull the knife out of Ximen Huan’s chest. Fenghuang threw herself on Ximen Huan and wailed. The monkey stayed put, glowering at anyone who tried to come close. When Kaifang and several of his men ran up, they were stopped by the monkey’s fearful screeches and threatening gestures. One of them drew his gun and pointed it at the monkey; Kaifang grabbed him by the wrist.

“Fenghuang, grab your monkey so we can send Ximen Huan to the hospital.” He spun around. “Get an ambulance!” he shouted.

Fenghuang wrapped one arm around the monkey and covered his eyes with the other hand. He lay docilely in her embrace.

Lan Kaifang removed the knife from Ximen Huan’s chest and pressed his hand over the wound to stop the bleeding. “Huanhuan!” he shouted. “Huanhuan!” Ximen Huan’s eyes opened slowly. “Kaifang,” he said as blood seeped from his mouth. “You’re my brother… I’ve… gone as far as I can go…”

“Hold on, Huanhuan, the ambulance will be here in a minute!” Kaifang put his arm under Huanhuan’s neck; blood flowed between his fingers.

“Fenghuang… Fenghuang…” Ximen Huan was beginning to slur his words.

Siren whining, the ambulance drove up and the EMTs jumped out with their medical equipment and a gurney. But Ximen Huan lay in Kaifang’s arms, eyes closed.

Twenty minutes later Lan Kaifang had his hands, covered in the blood of Ximen Huan, clamped around the killer’s throat.

Dear reader, the death of Ximen Huan hurts me deeply, but in purely objective terms, it swept away the barriers keeping Lan Kaifang from pursuing Pang Fenghuang. That said, the curtain was raised on another, even greater, tragedy.

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout – nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be initiated and controlled by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I’ll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

But enough about that. We need to look at Lan Kaifang. He took charge of Ximen Huan’s funeral arrangements and, after gaining approval from his father and his aunt, buried Huanhuan’s ashes behind Ximen Jinlong’s grave. Now, instead of dwelling on the older folks’ mood, we return to Lan Kaifang, who showed up every night in the train station hotel basement room rented by Pang Fenghuang. And whenever he wasn’t tied up during the day he went to the square and fell in behind Fenghuang and her monkey, wordlessly following them like a bodyguard. When grumbling among his men at the station reached the ear of the old commander, he sent for Kaifang.

“Kaifang, my young friend, there’s no lack of nice girls in town, but a girl with a trained monkey… the way she is… how do you think it looks.”

“You can remove me from my post, Commander, and if you think I’m not even qualified to be an ordinary policeman, then I’ll quit.”

This stopped the talk immediately, and as time passed, the grumbling members at the station changed the way they viewed him. Sure, Pang Fenghuang smoked and drank, dyed her hair blond, had a nose ring, and spent her time roaming the square, the antithesis of a good girl. But how bad could she be? Eventually, the cops started making friends with her, and liked to tease when they ran into her on their beats:

“Say, Golden Hair, take it easy on our deputy commander. He’s wasting away to nothing.”

“That’s right, you’re going to have to ease up sooner or later.”

Fenghuang never paid any attention to their well-intentioned taunts. The monkey snarled at them.

At first, Kaifang tried to get her to move to 1 Tianhua Lane or into the family compound, but after receiving one refusal after another, even he began to realize that if she stopped spending her nights in the train station hotel basement and roaming the square, he’d probably lose interest in working at that substation. It did not take long for the town’s hooligans and troublemakers to realize that the pretty “golden-haired, nose-pierced, monkey-trainer girl” was the favorite of the blue-faced, hard-nosed deputy commander of the train station, and they abandoned any thoughts of moving in on her. Who’d be foolish enough to try to take a drumstick out of a tiger’s mouth?

Let’s try to imagine the scene of Kaifang’s nightly visits to Fenghuang in her basement room. Originally a guesthouse, the place had been bought and turned into a hotel, and if regulations had been strictly enforced, it would have been a prime candidate for being shut down. That was why the fat face of the proprietress crinkled into an oily smile, honey dripping from her reddened lips, when Kaifang showed up

Fenghuang refused to open the door the first few nights, no matter how hard he pounded. So he’d stand there like a post and listen to her weep – sometimes laugh hysterically – inside. He also heard the monkey screech and, sometimes, scratch at the door. Sometimes he smelled cigarette smoke, sometimes liquor. But he never smelled anything illegal, at which he was secretly overjoyed. If she’d taken up drugs, she’d have been a lost cause. Would he still have loved her if that were the case? The answer was yes. Nothing could have changed that, not even if her insides had rotted away.

He never failed to bring a bouquet of flowers or a basket of fruit, and when she refused to open the door, he stood there until he had to go, leaving the flowers or fruit outside her door. With a decided absence of tact, the proprietress once said to him:

“Young man, I can get you a handful of girls. All you have to do is choose the one you want…”

The icy glower in his eyes and the cracking of knuckles as he clenched his fist nearly made her wet herself. She never said anything like that again.

Then one day Fenghuang opened the door. The room was dark and dank. The paint on the walls was peeling and blistery; a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling provided little light in a room heavy with the smell of mold. It was furnished with a pair of twin beds and a couple of chairs that looked as if they’d been scavenged from the local dump. Being in one was like sitting on cement. That was when he first tried to get her to move. One of the beds was for her, the other was for the monkey, who slept among some of Ximen Huan’s old clothes. There were, in addition, two vacuum bottles for hot water and a fourteen-inch black-and-white TV set, also picked up at the local dump. In those shabby, uninviting surroundings, Kaifang finally said what he’d kept bottled up for more than ten years:

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you from the first time I saw you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she sneered. “The first time you saw me was on your granny’s kang in Ximen Village. That was before you could even crawl!”

“I fell in love with you before I knew how to crawl!”

“No more of that, please.” She lit a cigarette. “For you to fall for a woman like me is like tossing a pearl down a latrine, don’t you think?”

“Don’t run yourself down,” he said. “I understand you.”

“You understand shit!” she sneered again. “I’ve been a whore, I’ve slept with thousands of men! I’ve even slept with the monkey! You, in love with me? Get out of my sight, Kaifang. Go find yourself a good woman and stay clear of the foul airs I give off.”

“Liar!” Kaifang said, covering his face with his hands and starting to sob. “You’re lying. Tell me you haven’t done any of those things.”

“What if I have? And what if I haven’t? What business is it of yours?” She sneered. “Am I your wife? Your lover? My folks have washed their hands of me, so what makes you different?”

“I love you, that’s what!” he was screaming.

“Don’t use that disgusting word with me! Get out of here, poor little Kaifang.” She waved the monkey over and said, “Dear little monkey, let’s you and me go to bed.”

The monkey sprang onto her bed.

Kaifang drew his pistol and pointed it at the monkey.

Fenghuang wrapped her arms around her monkey and said angrily:

“Shoot me first, Lan Kaifang!”

Kaifang’s passions were running high by then. He’d heard rumors that she’d been a prostitute, and he wasn’t sure if he believed them or not. But when she maliciously told him to his face that she’d slept not only with thousands of men but with her monkey, it was as if a volley of arrows had pierced his heart.

Shocked and hurt, he stumbled out of the room and ran up the stairs, out of the hotel, and onto the square, his churning mind and heart erasing all threads of thought. As he passed a bar lit up by neon signs, two heavily made-up women dragged him inside. Seated on a high bar stool, he slugged down three shots of brandy and then laid his head down on the bar as a woman with blond hair, dark circles under her eyes, bright red lips, and lots of skin, front and back, drifted up to him – he never went to see Fenghuang in uniform – to reach out and touch his blue birthmark. As a recently arrived butterfly from the countryside, she didn’t realize that he was a policeman. Almost as a conditioned reflex, he grabbed her by the wrist, drawing a shriek from her. He smiled apologetically and let go. She rubbed up against him and said flirtatiously, “Elder Brother has quite a grip!”

Kaifang waved her away, but she pressed her hot bosom up to him and sent blasts of air reeking of cigarette smoke and liquor into his face.

“Why are you so sad, Elder Brother? Did some little vixen break your heart? Women are all the same. But your little sister here can make you feel better…”

As pangs of loathing swept through his heart, Kaifang was thinking: I’ll get even with you, you whore!

He tumbled off the bar stool, and “little sister” led him by the hand down a dark corridor and into a will-o’-the-wisp room, where, without a word, she stripped and lay out on the bed. She still had a nice figure, with full breasts, a flat tummy, and long legs. Since this was the first time our good Kaifang had laid eyes on a naked woman’s body, it had its desired effect, although he was more nervous than anything. She, on the other hand, quickly tired of his faltering. Time, after all, is money in her profession. She sat up.

“Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for? You can knock off the little-boy act!”

Unfortunately for her, as she sat up her blond wig slipped off and revealed a flattened head with sparse hair, which bowled Kaifang over. Pang Fenghuang’s lovely face beneath a full head of blond hair floated before his eyes. He took a hundred-yuan note out of his pocket, tossed it to the woman, and turned to leave, but not before she jumped to her feet and wrapped herself around him like an octopus.

“You no-account prick!” she cursed. “You’re not getting away that easy, not for a measly hundred yuan!”

She reached down and felt around in his pants while she was cursing, looking for money, of course, but what her hand bumped into was a hard, cold handgun. Knowing he couldn’t let her pull her hand back, he grabbed her wrist for the second time. The beginnings of a scream leaked out of her mouth before she could swallow the rest of it as Kaifang gave her a shove and sent her stumbling back onto the bed.

Kaifang emerged onto the square, where he was hit by a blast of cold air. The alcohol he’d consumed came rushing up into his throat and out onto the ground. The emptying of his stomach served to clear his head, but did nothing to ease the pain in his heart. His mood swung between teeth-clenching anger and heartwarming affection. He hated Fenghuang, and he loved her. When the hatred rose in him, it was swamped by love; when the love ascended, it was beaten back by hatred. During the two days and nights he struggled with these competing feelings, he turned his pistol on himself and contemplated pulling the trigger more than once. Don’t do it, boy! It’s not worth it! Finally, reason won out over emotion.

“She may be a whore,” he said softly to himself, “but I still want her.”

Having made up his mind, once and for all, he returned to the hotel, where he knocked on her door.

“What, you back again?” she said, sounding thoroughly fed up. But he had obviously changed over the past two days. His birthmark was darker, his face thinner, and his brows looked like a pair of caterpillars squirming above his eyes, which were blacker and brighter than before; his glare, so intense it felt as if it were scorching her, and not just her, but her monkey as well, drove the monkey into a corner, where he cowered. “Well, since you’re here,” she said, her tone softer, “you might as well sit down. We can be friends if you’d like, but don’t let me hear any more talk about love.”

“I not only want to talk about love, I want you to be my wife.” With a hard edge to his voice, he continued, “I don’t care if you’ve slept with ten thousand men, or with a monkey, or, for that matter, a tiger or an alligator, I want to marry you.”

That was met with silence. Then, with a laugh, she said:

“Calm down, little Blue Face. You can’t throw a word like love around, and that goes double for marriage.”

“I’m not throwing them around,” he said. “Over the past two days I’ve thought things out carefully. I’m going to give it up, deputy chief, my career as a policeman, everything. I’ll be your gong-beater and become a street performer with you.”

“Enough of that crazy talk. You can’t throw away your future over a woman like me.” Feeling a need to dampen his enthusiasm and lighten the atmosphere, she said, “Tell you what, I’ll marry you if you can turn your blue face white.”

As they say, “Casual words have powerful effects.” Making jokes to a man as deeply in love as he was dangerous business.

Lan Kaifang took sick leave, not caring if his superiors approved or not, and went to Qingdao, where he underwent painful skin graft surgery. When he next showed up at the hotel basement, his face swathed in bandages, Fenghuang was stunned. So was her monkey, possibly recalling the swathed face of Ximen Huan’s killer. He snarled and attacked Kaifang, who knocked him out with a single punch. Then he turned to Fenghuang and, like a man possessed, said:

“I’ve had a skin graft.”

She stood there looking at him as tears welled up in her eyes. He got down on his knees, wrapped his arms around her legs, and laid his head against her belly. She stroked his hair.

“How foolish you are,” she said, nearly sobbing. “How can you be so foolish?”

They embraced, and she gently kissed the side of his face where there was no pain. He picked her up and carried her over to the bed, where they made love.

Blood covered the sheet.

“You’re a virgin!” he said in surprised delight, his tears soaking the bandages covering half his face. “You’re a virgin, my Fenghuang, my love. Why did you say all those things?”

“Who says I’m a virgin?” she said with a pout. “Eight hundred yuan is all it costs to repair a maidenhead.”

“You’re lying again, you little whore, my Fenghuang…” Mindless of the pain, he planted kisses on the body of the prettiest girl in Gaomi County – the whole world, in his eyes.

Fenghuang stroked his body, hard yet pliable, as if put together with branches of a tree, and said, sounding utterly forlorn:

“My god, there’s no way I can get away from you…”

Dear reader, I’d rather not continue with my story, but since I’ve given you a beginning, I need to give you an ending. So here it comes in all its cruelty.

Kaifang returned to 1 Tianhua Lane, his face still swathed in bandages, which threw a scare into Lan Jiefang and Huang Huzhu, who had had all the surprises they could take. Kaifang ignored their questions about his face and said passionately, in obvious high spirits:

“Papa, Aunty, I’m going to marry Fenghuang!”

With a pained furrowing of his brow, my friend Jiefang said decisively:

“No, you’re not!”

“Why?”

“Because I say so!”

“You don’t believe all those scurrilous rumors, do you? You have my word, she’s absolutely chaste… a virgin…”

“My god!” my friend exclaimed plaintively. “You can’t do it, son…”

“Where love and marriage are concerned, Papa,” Kaifang said, his anger rising, “it’s my life and you have nothing to say about it.”

“Maybe I don’t, son, but listen to what your aunt has to say” Jiefang went into his room and shut the door.

“Kaifang, poor Kaifang,” Huang Huzhu said to him tearfully. “Fenghuang is your uncle’s daughter. You and she have the same grandmother.”

At that point Kaifang reached up and ripped the bandages off of his face, taking the new skin off with it and leaving a bloody wound. He ran out of the house and jumped on his motorcycle, speeding away in such a hurry that his wheel banged against the door of a beauty salon, scaring the wits out of the people inside. He lifted the front wheel and sped like a crazed horse straight to the train station square. He never heard the words of the beautician whose shop was next door to the house:

“Everyone in that family is mad!”

Kaifang staggered down the steps of the hotel and crashed through the door. Fenghuang was in bed waiting for him. The monkey attacked him, but this time he forgot all about police procedures, forgot just about everything. He drew his pistol and shot the monkey dead, bringing an end to the reincarnation cycle for a soul that had spun on the wheel of life for half a century.

Fenghuang was struck dumb by what he’d done. He raised his pistol and pointed it at her. Don’t do it, my young friend – he gazed at Fenghuang’s beautiful face, like a precious jade carving – the prettiest face in the world – the pistol drooped of its own weight. He raised it again and ran out the door to the steps leading upstairs – like a ladder leading from hell up to heaven – our young friend’s legs turned rubbery and he fell to his knees. Then he pressed the muzzle of his pistol up against a heart that was already broken – Don’t do it, don’t be foolish – he pulled the trigger. A muffled explosion sent our Kaifang sprawling on the steps, dead.

58

Millennium Boy

Dear reader, our tale is drawing to a close. Bear with me a while longer, that’s all, just a while longer.

Lan Jiefang and Huang Huzhu took Kaifang’s ashes back to the plot of land that was now dotted with graves and buried them alongside Huang Hezuo. While they were cremating and burying their son, Fenghuang followed them, carrying the body of her monkey and weeping uncontrollably She was so haggard everyone who saw her took pity on her. As sensible people, now that Kaifang was dead, Jiefang and Huzhu spoke no more of what had brought them to that point. Since the monkey was beginning to smell, Fenghuang took their advice to let him go, but asked that he be buried along with the people there. My friend unhesitatingly said yes. And so, now there was a monkey lying alongside a donkey, an ox, a pig, and a dog. Stuck for how to console Fenghuang, my friend brought together the surviving members of the two families. Chang Tianhong had nothing to offer, nor did Huang Huzhu. In the end it was Baofeng:

“Gaige, ask her to come here and we’ll see what she plans to do. She started life here on our kang, and we have a duty to give her what she wants, whatever it takes.”

Gaige returned with news that she was gone.

Like a river, time flows on and on. We are now in the waning days of the year 2000. Gaomi County was celebrating the dawning of the new millennium with lights and streamers in front of every house in the city. Towering count-down clocks had been erected in the train station square and Tianhua Square, where pyrotechnic specialists waited to have their fireworks light up the sky at the stroke of midnight.

As evening settled in, snow began to fall, with flakes dancing amid the bright lights and turning the night into a thing of beauty. Just about everyone in the city walked outside, some heading toward Tianhua Square, others for the train station square, and some just strolling up and down People’s Avenue.

My friend and Huang Huzhu were among the few people who stayed inside. Here permit me to add a comment: They never did register as husband and wife. It didn’t seem to make any difference to either of them. Well, after making some pork-filled dumplings they hung a pair of red lanterns outside their door and stuck some of Huzhu’s paper cutouts in the window. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and everyone else has to keep on living, whether they do so by crying or laughing. That is what my friend often said to his partner. They ate the dumplings that night, watched a bit of TV, and, as was their habit, memorialized the dead by making love. But only after brushing Huzhu’s hair, as we’ve already seen. What I want to say here is, in the midst of their mixed sorrow and joy, Huzhu abruptly rolled over in bed, wrapped her arms around my friend, and said:

“Starting tonight, we can be human again…”

Their tears wetted one another’s face.

At eleven o’clock they were jolted out of their sleep by the ringing of their telephone. It was the train station hotel. A woman on the other end told them that their daughter-in-law, who was in Room 101, had gone into labor, news that first puzzled them. Finally, it dawned on them that the woman about to give birth was Pang Fenghuang, who had been missing all these months.

Knowing there was no one they could call for assistance, and not really wanting to call anyone in the first place, they made their way to the square as fast as their frail legs would take them. Breathlessly, they ran and walked, walked and ran, making their way through crowded streets. There were people everywhere, on wide avenues and in narrow lanes. At first the crowds were heading south, but once my friend and his woman crossed People’s Avenue, the crowds were heading north. Their anxieties quickened, their pace did not, as snow fell on their heads and blew into their faces. The swirling snowflakes were like falling apricot petals. The old apricot tree in the Ximen family compound had shed its flowers, so had the apricot trees at the Ximen Village pig farm, and all of them were being blown into town; all the falling apricot petals in China were blowing into Gaomi County, into the city.

Like a pair of lost children, they elbowed their way into the square, where young men and women were dancing and singing atop a tower that had been thrown up on the eastern edge. Apricot petals were dancing in the air. A thousand heads were bobbing on the square. The people, in new clothes, were singing and jumping and clapping and stomping their feet along with the music coming from the tower. Apricot petals were swirling among the dancers, who were dancing amid the swirling apricot petals. The digital clock was counting down, second by second. The climactic moment was approaching. The music and the singing stopped; the square was silent. My friend and his woman took the stairs down to the hotel basement. She hadn’t had time to put her hair up; it trailed behind her like a tail. They opened the door of Room 101 and saw the face of Fenghuang, as pure as an apricot blossom. They also saw that the lower half of her body was covered in blood, in the center of which lay a chubby little baby boy. At that moment, fireworks lit up the sky of Gaomi County’s new century, the first of a new millennium. The baby was a millennium boy; he’d come into the world via a normal birth. Two other babies had arrived as millennium babies in Gaomi’s hospital, but they’d been delivered by caesarean section.

My friend and his woman picked up the baby, their grandchild, who bawled in Huzhu’s arms. As his tears fell, Jiefang draped a dirty sheet over Fenghuang. She was virtually transparent, since all the blood had flowed out of her body. Her ashes, of course, were buried in the now famous family cemetery, next to Lan Kaifang.

My friend and his woman raised the big-headed baby with great care. He’d been born with a strange bleeding disease that the doctors called hemophilia, for which there was no cure. He would die, sooner rather than later. But when he bled, Huang Huzhu pulled a hair from her head, turned it to ashes under a flame, and put some of it in his milk and sprinkled the rest over the injury. While this was not a cure, it worked as an emergency treatment when needed. And so this child’s life was tied inextricably to the hair of my friend’s woman. As long as the hair held out, the boy would live; when it was gone, he would die. In this case, the heavens took pity, for the more hair she pulled out, the more hair grew in. So we needn’t worry that the boy will die young.

He differed from other children right from birth. Small in body, he had a remarkably big head, in which near total recall and a extraordinary gift for language existed. Although his grandparents could not help thinking about his unusual entrance into the world, after talking it over, they decided he deserved to be given the family name Lan. And since he’d been born as the clock rang in the new millennium, they called him Qiansui, or “Thousand-Year.” On the day of his fifth birthday, he summoned my friend, his grandfather, spread his arms like a storyteller, and embarked upon the narration of a long tale:

“My story begins on January 1, 1950…”