Big Breasts & Wide Hips

1

On the day of Shangguan Jintong’s eighteenth birthday, Shangguan Pandi took Lu Shengli away with her. Jintong sat on the dike gazing unhappily at swallows soaring above the river. Sha Zaohua came out of the woods and handed him his birthday present – a little mirror. The dark-skinned girl already had nicely developed breasts; her dark, slightly crossed eyes looked like pebbles on the river bottom and were filled with the glow of passion. “Why don’t you keep it for Sima Liang when he gets back?” Jintong said. She reached into her pocket and took out a larger mirror. “This one’s for him.” “Where’d you get so many mirrors?” Jintong asked, obviously surprised. “I stole them from the co-op,” she said in a soft voice. “I met a thief wizard at the Wopu Market who took me on as her apprentice. After I finish my apprenticeship, if there’s anything you need, just tell me, and I’ll steal it for you. My teacher stole a watch off the wrist of a Soviet adviser and a gold tooth right out of his mouth.” “But that’s against the law.” “She said minor thievery is against the law, but not big-time stealing.” Taking Jintong’s fingers in her hand, she said, “You’ve got soft, slender fingers. You’d make a good thief.” “No, not me. I don’t have the nerve. But Sima Liang does, he’s got guts and he’s always vigilant. He’s your man. You can teach him when he gets back.” As Zaohua put away the big mirror, she said “Liangzi, Liangzi, when will you be coming back?” sounding like a grown-up woman.

Sima Liang had disappeared five years earlier. We buried Sima Ku the day after he was shot, and Sima Liang took off that night. A cold, dank wind from the northeast made the chipped pots and jugs on the wall sing out gloomily. We sat dully in front of a solitary lantern, and when the wind blew out the flame, we sat in the darkness. No one spoke; we were all caught up in the scene surrounding Sima Ku’s burial. Lacking a coffin, we had to wrap his body in a straw mat, like a leek in a flat-cake, good and tight, and truss it up with rope. A dozen or so people carried his body over to the public cemetery, where we dug a hole. Then we stood at the head of the grave, where Sima Liang fell to his knees and kowtowed once. There were no tears on his finely wrinkled face. I wanted to say something to make this dear friend of mine feel better, but couldn’t think of a thing. On the road home, he whispered, “I’m going to take off, Little Uncle.” “Where to?” I asked him. “I don’t know.” At the moment the wind blew out the lantern flame, I thought I saw a dark, hazy image slip out the door, and I was pretty sure that Sima Liang had left, though there wasn’t a sound. Just like that, he was gone. With a bamboo pole, Mother probed the bottom of every dry well and deep pond in the area, but I knew she was wasting her time, since Sima Liang was not the type to kill himself. Mother then sent people into neighboring villages to look for him, but all she got were conflicting reports. One person said he’d spotted him in a traveling circus, while someone else said he’d seen the body of a little boy by the side of a lake, his face pecked clean by vultures; a group of conscripts back from the Northeast said they’d seen him near a bridge over the Yalu River. The Korean War was heating up then, and U.S. warplanes came on daily bombing runs.

I looked into the little mirror Zaohua had given me, getting my first good view of my features. At eighteen, I had a shock of yellow hair, pale, fleshy ears, brows the color of ripe wheat, and sallow lashes that cast a shadow over deep blue eyes. A high nose, pink lips, skin covered with fine hairs. To tell the truth, I’d already gotten an idea of what I looked like by looking at Eighth Sister. With a sense of sadness, I was forced to admit that Shangguan Shouxi was definitely not our father, and that whoever he was, he looked like the man people sometimes talked about in hushed conversations. We were, I realized, the illegitimate offspring of the Swedish man of the cloth, Pastor Malory, a couple of bastards. Frightful inferiority feelings gnawed at my heart. I dyed my hair black and darkened my face, but there was nothing I could do about the color of my eyes, which I’d have liked to gouge out altogether. I recalled stories I’d heard about people who committed suicide by swallowing gold, so I rummaged around in Laidi’s jewelry box until I found a gold ring dating back to Sha Yueliang’s days. I stretched out my neck and swallowed the thing, then lay down on the kang to await death, while Eighth Sister sat on the edge of the kang spinning thread. When Mother returned from work at the co-op and saw me lying there, she caught her breath in surprise. I expected her to feel a sense of shame, but what I saw instead was a look of terrifying anger. She grabbed me by the hair and jerked me into a sitting position, then began slapping me, over and over, until my gums bled, my ears rang, and I saw stars.

“That’s right, Pastor Malory was your father, so what? Wash that stuff off your face and out of your hair, then go out in the street with your head held high, and announce: My father was the Swedish Pastor Malory, which makes me an heir to royalty, and a damned sight better than the likes of you turtles!” All the while she was slapping me, Eighth Sister sat quietly spinning her threads, as if none of this had anything to do with her.

I sobbed the whole time I was squatting in front of the basin washing my face, turning the water black. Mother stood behind me, cursing under her breath, but I knew I was no longer the target of those curses. When I was finished, she ladled out some clean water and poured it over my head as she began to cry. The water ran down my nose and chin and into the basin on the floor, slowly turning the water clear again. While she dried my hair, Mother said: “Back then there was nothing I could do, son. You are what you are, so stand up straight and act like a man. You’re eighteen years old, no longer a child. Sima Ku had his faults, plenty of them, but he lived his life like a man, and that’s worth emulating.”

I nodded obediently, but suddenly remembered the gold ring. Just as I was about to tell her what I’d done, Laidi ran breathlessly into the house. She’d begun working at the district match factory, and was wearing a white apron stenciled with the words: Dalan Starlight Match Factory.

“He’s back, Mother!” she announced nervously. “Who?” Mother asked.

“The mute,” First Sister said.

Mother dried her hands and looked into First Sister’s haggard face. “I’m afraid it’s your fate, Daughter.”

The mute, Speechless Sun, “walked” into our front yard. He had aged since the last time we’d seen him; flecks of gray poked out from under his army cap. His rheumy eyes were more clouded than ever, and his jaw looked like a rusty plow. He was dressed in a new yellow uniform with a high-collar tunic, buttoned at the throat, a row of glittering medals on his chest. His long, powerful arms ended in a pair of gleaming white gloves, his hands resting on squat, leather-trimmed stools. He was sitting on a red Naugahyde pad that was attached to him. His wide trouser legs were tied together at his waist, below which were two stumps. That was the image the mute, whom we had not seen for years, presented to us now. Stretching the squat stools out in front with his powerful arms, he heaved his body forward and moved closer, the pad strapped to his hips glistening red in the light.

With five lurching movements, he brought himself up to within about ten feet of us, far enough that he didn’t have to strain to look up at us. Dirty water splashed as I rinsed my hair and flowed to the ground in front of him. Putting his hands behind him, he lurched backward, and at that moment it dawned on me that a person’s height depends mainly on his legs. The upper half of Speechless Sun’s body looked thicker, bulkier, and more menacing than ever. Even though he’d been reduced to a torso, he retained an awesome fearfulness. He looked us in the eye, a welter of mixed emotions showing on his dark face. His jaw quivered, much as it had years ago, as he grunted over and over the same word: “Strip, strip, strip…” Two lines of diamondlike tears slipped down his cheeks from gold-tinged eyes.

Raising his hands in the air, he made a series of gestures to the accompaniment of “Strip strip strip,” and I realized we hadn’t seen him since he’d traveled to the Northeast to inquire into the whereabouts of his sons, Big and Little Mute. Covering her face with a towel, Mother ran tearfully into the house. Understanding her meaning at once, the mute let his head sag down on his chest.

She returned with two bloodstained caps, which she handed to me and signaled me to give him. Forgetting all about the gold ring I’d swallowed, I walked up to him. Gazing up at my rail-thin body as I stood before him, he just shook his head sadly. I bent over, but quickly changed my mind and squatted down in front of him, handed him the caps, and pointed to the northeast. Images of that sad journey rushed into my head, with the mute carrying the wounded soldier on his back away from the front lines and, far worse, the horrifying sight of the two little mutes lying dead and abandoned in the artillery shell crater. He took one of the caps from me, raised it to his face, and smelled deeply, the way a hunting dog might sniff out the odors of a killer on the run or a corpse. He placed the cap between his stumps and grabbed the other one out of my hand, smelling it the same way before tucking it away with its mate. Then, without bothering to see if it was all right, he lurched into the house and examined every corner of every room, from the living spaces to the milling room and the storeroom. He then went back outside to look over the outhouse in the southeast corner of the compound. He even stuck his head inside the chicken coop. I followed him everywhere he went, captivated by how nimbly and uniquely he moved from place to place. In the room where First Sister and Sha Zaohua slept, he sat on the floor beside the kang, gripping the edge with both hands, a sight that saddened me. But what happened next proved how wrong I was to feel sorry for him. Still gripping the edge of the kang, he pushed himself up until he was hovering above the ground, displaying the kind of strength I'd only seen in sideshow performances. As his head rose above the edge, his arms flexed noisily, and he flung himself up onto the kang, landing awkwardly, although it took only a moment for him to seat himself properly.

Now seated on First Sister’s bed, he looked like the head of the family, or a true leader, and as I stood at the head of the bed, I felt like an uninvited visitor in someone else’s room.

First Sister was in Mother’s room, and I could hear her crying. “Get him out of there, Mother,” she said through her tears. ^UI didn’t want him when he had legs. Now that he’s only half a man, I want him even less.”

“It’s easy to invite a deity into one’s life, child, but hard to get one to leave.”

“Who invited him in?”

“I was wrong to do that,” Mother said. “I gave you to him sixteen years ago, and now our nemesis is here to stay.”

Mother handed a bowl of hot water to the mute, who showed a bit of emotion as he took it and gulped it down.

“I was sure you were dead,” Mother said. “I’m surprised to see you’re still alive. I failed in my attempt to look after the children, and my grief is greater than yours because of it. You were their parents, but I was their guardian. It looks like you served the government well, and I hope you’re being well taken care of. Sixteen years ago, I followed our feudal customs in arranging your marriage. That is no longer how people get married in the new society. You are an enlightened representative of the government, while we are a family of widows and orphans, and you should leave us to live as best we can. Besides, Laidi didn’t really marry you. That was my third daughter’s doing. I beg you, leave us alone. Go let the government take care of you the way you deserve.”

Ignoring Mother completely, the mute poked his finger through the paper window and looked into the yard through the hole. Meanwhile, First Sister had found a pair of tongs dating back to her grandmother’s days and burst into the room holding them in two hands. “You mute bastard!” she growled. “You stump of a man, get the hell out of our house!” She went after him with her tongs, but he merely reached out and grabbed them in the air. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get them out of his grasp, and in the midst of this desperately unequal contest of strength, a smug grin spread across the mute’s face. Weakly, First Sister let go of the tongs and covered her face with her hands. “Mute,” she said tearfully, “whatever it is you’re thinking, forget it. I’d marry a pig before I’d marry you.”

A crashing of cymbals erupted out in the lane, followed by the shouts of a mob, led by the district chief, as they walked through our gate. He was followed by a dozen or more party cadres and a bunch of schoolchildren carrying bouquets of flowers. The district chief walked into the house, bent at the waist, and loudly congratulated Mother.

“For what?” Mother asked coldly.

“For heaven’s blessings, aunty,” he said. “Let me explain.”

Out in the yard, the children waved their flowers in the air and shouted, “Congratulations! Great honor and hearty congratulations!”

“Aunty,” the district chief said, “we have reviewed land reform material and have concluded that you were wrongly categorized as upper middle peasants. The decline in your family situation in the wake of all your troubles makes you poor peasants, and so we have reclassified you. That is the first piece of joyful news. We have also studied documents from the 1939 Japanese massacre, and have concluded that your mother-in-law and your husband had a record of resisting the Japanese invaders, and should be honored with the title of martyrs. They deserve to recoup their original status, and your family deserves to enjoy the benefits of revolutionary descendants. That is the second piece of joyful news. In line with these redressings and rehabilitations, the local middle school has decided to accept Shangguan Jintong as a student. In order to make up for the time he lost, he will be assigned a tutor, and your granddaughter, Sha Zaohua, will also be given the opportunity for an education. The county theatrical company is now taking students, and we will do everything within our power to see that she is among them. That is the third piece of joyful news. The fourth piece of joyful news, of course, is that the first-class hero of the volunteer resistance movement, your son-in-law, Speechless Sun, has returned home covered in glory. The fifth piece of joyful news is that the veteran’s convalescent hospital has taken the unprecedented step of recruiting your daughter, Shangguan Laidi, as a top-ranked nurse. She will be given a monthly salary but will not have to actually show up at the hospital. The sixth piece of joyful news is truly joyful. And that is a celebration of the reunion of the resistance hero and the wife from whom he was separated. The district government will arrange the ceremony. Aunty, as a revolutionary grandmother, you are about to be rewarded with six joyful events!”

Mother stood there, wide-eyed and mouth agape, as if she’d been struck by lightning. The bowl in her hand crashed to the floor.

Meanwhile, the district chief signaled one of the officials, who separated himself from the crowd of schoolchildren and walked up, followed by a young woman carrying a bouquet of flowers. The official handed the district chief a white envelope. “The martyr’s descendant certificate,” he whispered. The district chief took it from him and presented it to Mother with both hands. “Aunty, this is the martyr’s certificate.” Mother’s hands shook as she took it from him. The young woman stepped forward and laid her bouquet of white flowers in the crook of Mother’s arm. Then the cadre handed the district chief a red envelope. “Certificate of employment,” he said. The district chief took the envelope and handed it to First Sister. “This is your certificate of employment,” he said. First Sister stood there with her sooty hands clasped behind her back, so the district chief reached out, took one of her arms, and placed the red envelope in her hand. “You deserve this,” he said. The young woman placed a bouquet of purple flowers under First Sister’s arm. The official then handed the district chief a yellow envelope. “School enrollment notice,” he said. The district chief handed me the envelope. “Little brother,” he said, “your future looks bright, so study hard.” As the young woman handed me a bouquet of yellow flowers, her eyes were filled with extraordinary affection. The gentle fragrance of the golden flowers reminded me of the gold ring that still rested in my stomach. I wouldn’t have swallowed the damned thing if I’d known all this was going to happen! The official handed a purple envelope to the district chief. “The theatrical company.” The district chief held out the purple envelope and looked around for Sha Zaohua, who popped out from behind the door and took it from him. He shook her hand. “Study hard, girl,” he said, “and become a great actress.” The young woman handed Zaohua a bouquet of purple flowers. As she took the flowers, a shiny medal fell to the floor. The district chief bent down to pick it up. After reading what was written on it, he handed it to the mute, who was seated on the kang. I felt a surge of happy excitement as the mute pinned it to his own chest. Obviously, our family could now boast a master thief. Finally, the district chief took the last envelope – a blue one – from the official and said, “Comrade Speechless Sun, this is a wedding certificate for you and Shangguan Laidi. The district has already taken care of the details. All you two have to do is put your fingerprints on it sometime in the next few days.” The young woman reached out and placed a bouquet of blue flowers in the mute’s hand.

“Aunty,” the district chief said, “do you have anything to say? Don’t be shy. We’re all one big, happy family!”

Mother cast a troubled look at First Sister, who stood there holding her bouquet of red flowers, the side of her mouth twitching all the way over to her right ear. A few glistening tears leaped from the corners of her eyes and landed on her flowers, like dew covering their petals.

“In the new society,” Mother said tentatively, “we should listen to our children…”

“Shangguan Laidi,” the district chief, “do you have anything to say?”

First Sister looked at us and sighed. “It’s my fate, I guess.”

“Wonderful!” the district chief said. “I’ll send some people over to put the house in order so we can hold the ceremony tomorrow!”

The night before Shangguan Laidi was formally married to the mute, I passed the gold ring.

The dozen or so doctors at the county hospital were organized into a medical group that, under the direction of a specialist from the Soviet Union, finally weaned me from my milk diet and aversion to regular food using the theories of Pavlov. Freed of that burdensome yoke, I entered school. My studies took off, and before much time had passed, I'd become the top first-year student at Dalan Middle School. Those were the most glorious days of my life. I belonged to the most revolutionary family around, I was smarter than anyone, I had an enviable physique and a face that made all the girls lower their eyes in shyness, and I had a voracious appetite. In the school cafeteria, I’d gobble down a huge piece of cornbread impaled on a chopstick and a thick green onion in my other hand while I was talking and laughing with the other kids. By the sixth month at school I’d jumped two grades and become the third-year class representative in my Russian class. I was admitted into the Youth League without having to apply and was quickly selected as a member of the branch propaganda committee, whose major function was to sing Russian folk songs in Russian. I had a strong voice, rich as milk and bold as a thick green onion, and I invariably drowned out all the voices around me. In short, I was the brightest star at Dalan Middle School during the latter half of the 1950s, and the favorite of Teacher Huo, a pretty woman who had once served as interpreter for visiting Russian experts. She often sang my praises in front of the other students, saying I had a gift for languages. In order to raise my proficiency in Russian, she arranged for a pen pal, a ninth-grade girl in a Soviet city, the daughter of a Soviet expert who had worked in China. Her name was Natasha. We exchanged photos. She gazed out at me with a slight look of surprise in her staring eyes, and lush, curling lashes.

2

Shangguan Jintong felt his heart race and the blood rush to his head; the hand holding the photo trembled uncontrollably. Natasha’s full lips turned up slightly to reveal almost blindingly white teeth, and the warm, gentle fragrance of orchids seemed to rise up into his eyes, as a sweet sensation made his nose ache. He gazed at the flaxen hair that spread out over her silky shoulders. A low-cut scoop-collared dress that belonged either to her mother or to an elder sister hung loosely from her pert little breasts. Her long neck and décolletage left nothing to the imagination. For some mysterious reason, tears glistened in his eyes, producing a glazed effect. As he took in the nearly unobstructed view of her breasts, the sweet smell of milk permeated his soul, and he imagined he heard a call from the distant north – grassy steppes as far as the eye could see, a dense forest of melancholy birch, a little cabin deep in the woods, fir trees blanketed with snow and ice… lovely scenes moved past his eyes like a sequence of still images. And in the middle of each image stood the young Natasha, a bouquet of purple flowers cradled in her arms. Jintong covered his eyes with his hands and wept with joy, the tears coursing down through his fingers.

All that night, Jintong hovered between sleep and wakefulness, as Natasha paced back and forth before him, the hem of her dress sweeping across the floor. In fluent Russian, he poured out his heart to her, but her expression went from happiness to anger, which took him from the heights of arousal to the depths of despair. And yet a single tantalizing smile pulled him right back up again.

At daybreak, the boy in the lower bunk, a fellow by the name of Zhao Fengnian, who was the father of two boys, complained, “Shangguan Jintong, I know you speak wonderful Russian, but you’ve got to let others get some sleep.”

Suffering from a splitting headache, after letting go of Natasha’s captivating image, Jintong apologized caustically to Zhao Fengnian, who noticed his ashen face and blistered lips. “Are you sick?”

In agony, he shook his head, suddenly feeling as if his thoughts were like a car negotiating a slippery mountain slope, when it suddenly loses control and tumbles down the mountainside. At the grassy base of the mountain, where purple blossoms bloom all around, the beautiful Natasha scoops up the hem of her dress and runs silently toward him…

He grabbed the bunk bed post and banged his head against it over and over.

Zhao Fengnian summoned the political instructor, Xiao Jingang, the onetime member of an armed working brigade, a man with a true proletarian background. He’d once sworn that he’d put Teacher Huo before a firing squad for wearing short skirts, which he considered morally degenerate. His shadowy eyes, set in a face like hardened steel, threw an instant chill into Jintong’s roiling brain, and he felt as if he was being pulled up out of quicksand.

“What’s going on with you, Shangguan Jintong?” Xiao Jingang asked sternly.

“Xiao Jingang, you flat-faced oaf, mind your own business!” In order to allow the man’s sternness help him break free from Natasha’s grip, all he could think of was to make the man good and angry.

Xiao smacked him on the side of the head. “You little fuckhead!” he swore. “Who the hell are you to talk to me like that? I won’t let some snot-nose darling of Huo Lina get away with that!”

At breakfast, as he sat looking down at his bowl of corn porridge, Jintong’s stomach lurched, and he knew that his frightful aversion to all food except mother’s milk had taken hold again. So he picked up the bowl and, calling up the remnants of clear thought in his murky brain, forced himself to start drinking the porridge; but the moment the liquid came into view, a pair of living breasts seemed to rise out of the bowl, which fell from his hands and shattered on the floor, the hot porridge splashing on his legs. He didn’t feel a thing.

His frightened classmates immediately dragged him over to the clinic, where the school nurse cleaned his legs and rubbed ointment on the burns, then told his classmates to take him back to the dormitory.

There he ripped up Natasha’s photograph and tossed the pieces into the river behind the school; he watched as Natasha, now in shreds, flowed downstream into a swirling eddy, where she came together again and, like a naked mermaid, floated on the surface, the wet locks of her hair draping over her hips.

His classmates, who had followed him down to the river, watched as he spread his arms and dove into the water, after shouting something. Some of them ran down to the river’s edge, while others ran back to school for help. As he sank below the surface, Jintong saw Natasha swimming like a fish amid the waterweeds. He tried to call to her, but water rushed into his mouth and stifled his shout.

The next time Jintong opened his eyes, he was lying on Mother’s kang. He tried to sit up, but Mother held him down and stuffed the nipple of a bottle of goat’s milk into his mouth. Dimly, he recalled that the old goat was long dead, so where had the milk come from? Since he couldn’t get his stubborn brain working, he wearily closed his eyes. Mother and First Sister were talking about exorcism, but the thin sound of their voices seemed to come from a bottle far away. “He must be possessed,” Mother said. “Possessed?” First Sister asked. “By what?” “I think it’s an evil fox spirit.” “Could it be that widow?” First

Sister asked. “She worshipped a fox fairy when she was alive.” “You’re right,” Mother replied. “She shouldn’t be coming for Jintong… we barely had a chance to enjoy a few good days…” “Mother,” First Sister said, “these so-called good days have been torture for me. That half-man of mine is crushing me to death… he’s like a dog, but a useless one. Mother, don’t blame me if I do something.” “Why would I blame you?” Mother said.

Jintong lay in bed for two days, as his mind slowly cleared. Natasha’s image kept floating before his eyes. When he washed up, her weeping face appeared in the basin. When he looked in the mirror, she smiled back at him. Every time he closed his eyes, he heard the sound of her breathing; he could even feel her soft hair brush up against his face and her warm fingers move over his body. His mother, frightened by her son’s erratic behavior, followed him everywhere, wringing her hands and whimpering like a little girl. His gaunt face stared back at him from the water in their vat. “She’s in there!” “Who is?” his mother asked. “She is?” “Who is she?” “Natasha! And she’s unhappy.” She watched as her son thrust his hand into the vat. Nothing there except water, but her excited son muttered words she couldn’t understand. So she dragged him away and covered the vat. But Jintong fell to his knees in front of a basin and began speaking in tongues to the spirit of the water inside. As soon as his mother dumped the water out of the basin, Jintong pressed his lips up against the window, as if to kiss his own reflection.

Tears glistened on his mother’s face. Jintong saw Natasha dancing in those tears, jumping from one to the next. “There she is!” he said, a moronic look on his face, pointing at his mother’s face. “Don’t go, Natasha.”

“Where is she?”

“In your tears.”

Mother hurriedly dried her tears. “Now she’s jumped into your eyes!” Jintong shouted.

Finally, his mother understood. Natasha appeared anywhere there was a reflection. So she covered everything that held water, buried the mirrors, covered the windows with black paper, and would not let her son look into her eyes.

But Jintong saw Natasha take shape in the darkness. He had moved from the stage of trying everything possible to avoid Natasha to a frenzied pursuit of her; she, meanwhile, had moved from the stage of being everywhere to hiding from place to place. Calling out, “Listen to me, Natasha,” he ran headlong into a dark corner. She crawled into a mouse hole under a cabinet; he stuck his face up to the hole and tried to crawl in after her. In his mind, he actually made it, and followed her down a winding path, calling out, “Don’t run away from me, Natasha. Why are you doing this?” Natasha crawled out through another hole and disappeared. He looked everywhere for her, finally spotting her stuck to the wall, after stretching herself out thin as a sheet of paper. He ran up and began stroking the wall with both hands, as if he were caressing her face. Bending at the waist, Natasha slipped under his arms and crawled up the stove chimney, her face quickly covered with soot. Kneeling at the foot of the stove, he reached out to wipe the soot from her face, but it wouldn’t come off. Instead, his own face was streaked with soot.

Not knowing what else to do, Mother fell to her knees, kowtowed, and summoned the great exorcist Fairy Ma, who had not practiced his craft for many years.

The man of spirits came in a long black robe, his hair hanging loose around his shoulders. He was barefoot, both feet stained bright red. Holding a peachwood sword in one hand, he murmured things no one could understand. The moment he saw him, Jintong was reminded of all the strange tales he’d heard about the man and, as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of vinegar, felt his head shudder; a crack opened up in his confused mind, and Natasha’s image vanished, for the moment at least. The fairy had a dark purplish face with bulging eyes that gave him a feral look. He coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it out like the wet stool of a chicken. Waving his wooden sword in the air, he performed a strange dance. Soon tiring, he stood beside the water basin and, uttering a spell, spat into the basin; then, holding the sword in both hands, he began stirring the water, which slowly turned red. That was followed by another dance. Growing tired again, he went back to stirring the water, until it was the color of fresh blood. Throwing down his sword, he sat on the floor, breathing heavily. He dragged Jintong up beside him and said, “Look into the basin and tell me what you see.” Jintong detected a sweet-smelling herbal odor as he stared at the mirrorlike surface of the water, stunned by the face that looked back at him. How had Jintong, so full of life, turned into a haggard, wrinkled, and very ugly young man? “What do you see?” the fairy pressed him. Natasha’s bloody face rose slowly out of the basin and merged with his. She slipped out of her dress and pointed to the bloody wound on her breast. “Shangguan Jintong,” she cursed, “how could you be so heartless?” “Natasha!” Jintong shrieked as he buried his face in the water. He heard the fairy say to Mother and Laidi, “He’s fine now. You can carry him back to his room.”

Leaping to his feet, Jintong threw himself on the mountain fairy. It was the first time in his life he had actually attacked someone. What courage it took to attack someone who dealt with ghosts and demons! All for the sake of Natasha. With his left hand he grabbed the fairy’s gray goatee and pulled with all his might, stretching the man’s mouth until it was a black oval. Vile-smelling saliva slithered down his hand. Cupping her injured breast in one hand, Natasha sat on the fairy’s tongue and looked admiringly at Jintong. Spurred on by the look, he tugged harder on the goatee, this time using both hands. The fairy’s body bent over painfully, until he looked like the picture of the Sphinx in their geography text. Moving awkwardly, he struck Jintong on the leg with his wooden sword. But Jintong felt no pain, thanks to Natasha, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have let go, because Natasha was in the man’s mouth. The thought of what would happen if he let go made him shudder: The fairy would chew Natasha to pulp and swallow her into his digestive tract. The fairy’s intestines were filthy things! Hurry, Natasha, get away from there! he shouted anxiously. But she remained seated on the fairy’s tongue, as if she were deaf. The man’s goatee was getting more slippery by the minute, for the blood from Natasha’s breast had seeped into his whiskers. He kept tugging, hand over hand, her blood staining Jintong’s fingers. The fairy tossed his sword away, reached out with both hands, grabbed Jintong’s ears, and pulled with all his might. Jintong’s lips parted and he heard shrieks from Mother and First Sister. But nothing was going to make him let loose of the fairy’s goatee. The two combatants circled the yard, round and round, followed closely by Mother and First Sister. Something on the ground tripped Jintong, who stopped his hand-overhand motion just long enough for the fairy to bite down on one of them. His ears felt as if they were about to be wrenched off the sides of his head; the back of his hand had been bitten to the bone. He screamed in pain, but that was nothing compared to the pain in his heart. Everything was a blur. Frantic, he thought of Natasha. The fairy had swallowed her, and she was now in his stomach, crumbling in his digestive juices; the prickly walls of his stomach were kneading her mercilessly. The blurred vista before him darkened until it was black as the belly of a cuttlefish.

Speechless Sun, who had gone out to buy a bottle, came into the yard. With the keen eye and rich experience of a soldier, he immediately figured out what was going on. Calmly as can be, he set the bottle down at the base of the side room wall. “Jintong’s in trouble!” Mother shouted. “Save him!” Speechless Sun effortlessly maneuvered himself up behind the fairy, lifted both little stools into the air, and brought them down together into the man’s calves; he dropped like a stone. Speechless Sun’s stools swirled in the air a second time and came down on the fallen man’s arms; Jintong’s ears were set free. Sun’s stools came crashing into the fairy’s ears; he spat out Jintong’s hand and began rolling in agony on the ground. He reached out to pick up his sword and clenched his teeth. Speechless Sun roared; the man shuddered. By then, Jintong was wailing and struggling to charge the fairy again, determined to rip open the man’s belly and rescue Natasha. But Mother and First Sister had their arms wrapped around him and were holding him back. The fairy took off, giving the crouching tiger, Speechless Sun, a wide berth.

Very gradually, Jintong recovered his equilibrium, but not his appetite. So Mother went to see the district chief, who immediately sent someone out to buy goat’s milk. Jintong spent most of the time lying in bed, only occasionally getting up to stretch his legs. His eyes were as lifeless as ever. Every time he thought of poor Natasha and her bleeding breast, tears sluiced down his cheeks. Lacking the will to speak, he broke his silence infrequently by muttering to himself; but the minute anyone approached him, he shut up.

One hazy morning, as he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, his tears over Natasha’s injured breast barely dry, he felt his nose stop up and his brain begin to turn mushy; a need to go back to sleep swept over him. All of a sudden, a shrill, hair-raising scream tore from Laidi and the mute’s room, driving away all thoughts of sleep. Cocking his ear to hear what it was all about, the only thing he heard was a buzzing in his ears. He was about to close his eyes when another shrill scream, this one longer and more horrifying, came on the air. His heart raced and his scalp tightened. Driven by curiosity, he crawled out of bed and tiptoed over to the door to the eastern room, where he peeked in through a crack. Speechless Sun, stripped naked, was a big, black spider, wrapped around Laidi’s soft, thin waist. Slobber covered his protruding lips as he sucked first on one of Laidi’s nipples, then the other. Her neck stretched out long over the edge of the bed, her upturned face white as the outer leaf of a cabbage. Her full breasts, the same ones Jintong had seen as she lay in the mule trough all those years before, were like yellowing steamed buns, lying spongily above her rib cage. There was blood on the tips of her nipples and bite marks on her chest and upper arms. Speechless Sun had turned Laidi’s body, once so fair and silky, into something that looked like a scaled fish. Her long legs lay bare on the bed.

When Jintong began to sob, Speechless Sun picked up a bottle at the head of the bed and flung it toward the door, sending Jintong running out into the yard, where he picked up a brick and threw it at the window. “Mute!” he shouted. “You’re going to die a horrible death!”

The words were barely out of his mouth when exhaustion overcame him. Natasha’s image floated before his eyes and quickly dissolved like a puff of smoke.

The mute’s powerful fist smashed through the window; Jintong backed off in terror, all the way to the parasol tree, where he watched the fist draw back inside the room and a stream of yellow piss emerge through the hole and drip into a bucket beneath the window, placed there for that very purpose. Grinding his teeth in anger, Jintong walked over to the side room, where a strange figure came up to him. The person walked at a crouch, dragging his long arms behind him. Beneath his shaved head and bushy gray eyebrows, the large black eyes were circled by fine wrinkles and were so forbidding it was hard to look into them. Purple welts – some large, some small – covered his face, and his ears were scarred and ragged, burned in places and bitten by frostbite in others, looking like the shriveled ears of a monkey. He was wearing a gray, high-collared, ill-fitting tunic that reeked of mothballs. A pair of bony hands with chipped and cracked nails hung at his sides and shook uncontrollably. “Who are you looking for?” Jintong asked in a loathsome voice, assuming it was one of the mute’s comrades-in-arms. The man bowed deferentially and replied, his tongue stiff, his mouth forming the words awkwardly:

“Home… Shangguan Lingdi… I’m… Birdman… Han…”

3

Birdman Han gave me a terrible shock on the day he walked back into our house. I dimly recalled something involving a bird fairy in my past, but that was all about some romantic dealings with the mute, that and the incident where the fairy had jumped off a cliff. But I had no memory of this strange brother-in-law. I glided off to one side to let him out into the yard, just as Laidi, a white sheet around her waist, and naked from there up, ran out into the yard. The mute’s fist tore through the paper window covering, followed by the upper half of his body. “Strip!” he said. “Strip!” Laidi, in tears, stumbled and fell. Her sheet had been stained red by blood from down below. And that is how she appeared in front of Birdman Han – tormented and half-naked, blood dripping down her legs.

Mother returned, with Eighth Sister in tow and driving a goat ahead of them. She didn’t seem overly surprised by First Sister’s unsightly appearance, but the minute she spotted Birdman Han, she crumpled to the ground. It wasn’t until much later that Mother told me she realized at once that he had returned to demand his due, and that we would have to come up with the principal and interest for the birds we’d eaten fifteen years before, before he’d been taken forcibly to Japan, where he’d escaped and led a primitive existence.

The arrival of Birdman Han would bring to an end the wealth and rank we had obtained by sacrificing Mother’s eldest daughter. But that did not stop her from preparing a sumptuous welcoming meal. This strange bird that had dropped from the sky sat trancelike in our yard as he watched Mother and Laidi busy themselves at the stove. Moved by Birdman’s unusual tale of fifteen years hiding out in Japan, Laidi temporarily forgot her suffering at the hands of the mute, who maneuvered himself out into the yard and looked Birdman over provocatively.

At the table, Birdman handled his chopsticks so awkwardly he couldn’t pick up a single piece of meat. So Mother took them from him and urged him to eat with his hands. He raised his head. “She… my… wife?” Mother cast a hateful glance at the mute, who was gnawing on a chicken head. “She,” Mother said, “has gone far away.”

Mother’s kind nature would not allow her to refuse Birdman’s request to live with us, not to mention the urgings of the district chief and the head of the Civil Administration: “He has no place else to go, and it’s up to us to satisfy the needs of someone who has returned to us from Hell. Not only that…” “You don’t need to say any more,” Mother interrupted. “Just send over some people to help us put the side room in order for him.”

And with that, Birdman Han moved into the two rooms in which the Bird Fairy had once lived. Mother reached up into the dusty rafters and took down the insect-scarred drawing of the Bird Fairy and hung it on the northern wall. When Birdman saw the drawing, he said, “I know who killed my wife, and one of these days Fll get my revenge.”

The extraordinary love affair between First Sister and Birdman Han was like a marshland opium poppy – toxic yet wildly beautiful. That afternoon, the mute went off to the co-op to buy some liquor. While First Sister washed a pair of underwear beneath the peach tree, Mother sat on the kang making a duster out of the feathers of a rooster. She heard a noise at the door and saw Birdman Han, who was once again hunting birds, walk lightly into the yard, a beautiful little bird perched on one of his fingers. He went up to the peach tree and stared down at Laidi’s neck. The bird chirped fetchingly, making its feathers tremble. The swirling chirps incited the fine hairs of her passion. Deep-seated feelings of remorse settled in Mother’s heart. That bird was nothing less than the incarnation of Birdman Han’s pain and suffering. She watched as Laidi raised her head and gazed at the bird’s beautiful blood-red chest and black, heartbreaking eyes, no bigger than sesame seeds. Mother saw Laidi’s cheeks redden and her eyes grow wet, and she knew that the bird’s passionate cries were raising the curtain on the one thing she’d worried about. But she was powerless to stop it from happening, for she knew that when the emotions of a Shangguan girl were stirred, not even a herd of horses could alter the course of events. In the grip of despair, she squeezed her eyes shut.

Laidi, her heart moved to its core, her hands still soapy, slowly rose to her feet, amazed that such a tiny bird, no bigger than a walnut, could be the source of such captivating chirps. Even more important, she felt that it was sending her a mysterious message, an exciting yet fearful temptation the likes of a purple water lily floating on a pond in the moonlight. She struggled to resist the temptation, standing up so she could go inside; but her feet felt as if they’d taken root and her hands moved toward the bird as if they had a mind of their own. A flick of Birdman’s wrist sent the tiny bird into the air; it perched on Laidi’s head. She felt its delicate claws dig into her scalp and its chirps bore into her head. Gazing into the kindly, anxious, fatherly, and beautiful eyes of Birdman Han, she was swallowed up by a powerful sense of being wronged. He nodded to her, turned, and headed back to his rooms. The tiny bird flew off her head to follow him inside.

Standing there dazed, she heard Mother call from the kang. But rather than turn around, she burst into tears and, with no sense of shame, ran into the side room, where Birdman Han awaited her with open arms. Her tears wetted his chest. He let her pound him with her fists, even stroking her arms and the ridge down her back while she was hitting him. Meanwhile, the tiny bird perched on the altar table in front of the drawing, where it chirped excitedly. Little stars like drops of blood seemed to emerge from its tiny beak.

Laidi calmly removed her clothes and pointed to the scars from the mute’s abuse. “Look at that, Birdman Han,” she complained, “just look at that. He killed my sister, and now he’s trying to do the same to me. And he’ll make it. He’s worn me out.” Bursting into tears again, she threw herself down onto his bed.

This was Birdman Han’s first real look at a woman’s body. Surprise showed on his face as he thought about women, the supernatural objects his dismal experience had kept from him all his life, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He was moved to tears by her long legs, her rounded hips, her breasts, which were flattened against the bedding, her slender waist, and the fair, glossy, jadelike skin all over her body – fairer even than her face, in spite of the scars. After being suppressed for fifteen torturous years, while he avoided falling into the hands of his captors again, his youthful desires ignited slowly. Growing weak at the knees, he knelt alongside Laidi and covered the soles of her feet with hot, tremulous kisses.

Laidi felt blue sparks sizzle up from her feet and quickly cover her body. Her skin grew taut as a drum, and then went slack. She rolled over, spread her legs, arched her body, and wrapped her arms around Birdman Han’s neck. Her experienced mouth drew the virginal Birdman to her. She broke off her passionate kiss to say breathlessly, “I want that mute bastard, that demonic stump of a man to die, I want him to rot, I want birds to peck out his eyes!”

In order to block out their cries of passion, Mother slammed shut the door and began beating a badly worn pot out in the yard. At the time, schoolchildren were searching up and down the lanes for all sorts of used metal objects to take to the smelting ovens – pots, spatulas, cleavers, door latches, thimbles, even nose rings from oxen. But our family, enjoying the prestige of the martial hero Speechless Sun and the legendary Birdman Han, was spared from having to give up our utensils. Mother waited impatiently for Birdman and Laidi to finish their lovemaking. Owing to her feelings of sympathy and remorse over the abuse Laidi had received at the hands of the mute, and to feelings of sympathy over the agonies Birdman Han had suffered in a foreign land, as well as her gratitude for the delicious birds he had supplied fifteen years before, not to mention the cherished memory of and respect for Lingdi, she assumed the role of protector in the illicit relationship between the two lovers without even being aware of it. Although she anticipated the tragic consequences that were bound to follow, she was determined to do what she could to guard their secret and, at the very least, delay the inevitable. But the inescapable truth was that once a man like Birdman Han was exposed to the passions and affections of a woman, no power on earth could restrain him. He was a man who had survived fifteen years in the woods, like a wild animal; he was a man who had existed on the swings between life and death every day for fifteen years, and in his eyes a stump of a man like the mute had no more value than a wooden stake. For Laidi, a woman who had known Sha Yueliang, Sima Ku, and Speechless Sun, three totally different men, a woman who had experienced the heat of battle, wealth, and fame, and known the mad apex of joy with Sima Ku and the demeaning nadir of physical abuse at the hands of Speechless Sun, Birdman Han offered total satisfaction. His deeply grateful touch brought her the gratification of a father’s love; his clumsy innocence in bed brought her the gratification of a sexual mentor; and his greedy consumption of forbidden fruit and unbridled passion brought her sexual gratification and the gratification of vengeance against the mute. And so, every coupling was accompanied by hot tears and sobs, with no hint of lewdness, filled with human dignity and tragedy. When they made love, their hearts overflowed with unspoken words.

The mute, a liquor bottle hanging around his neck, lurched down the crowded street. Dust flew as one gang of laborers pushed carts filled with iron ore from east to west, while another gang pushed carts of the same color from west to east. Mixed with the two crowds, the mute was leaping forward, a great leap forward. All the laborers gazed respectfully at the glittering medal pinned to his chest and stopped to let him pass, something he found enormously gratifying. Although he only came up to the other men’s thighs, he was the most spirited individual among them. From that moment on, he spent most of his daylight hours out on the street. He would leap from the eastern end of the street all the way to the western end, take a few refreshing drinks from his bottle, and then leap all the way back. And while he was engaged in his great leap forward, Laidi and Birdman Han would be performing their own great leap forward on the ground or in bed. Dust and grime covered the mute’s body; his stools had been worn down an inch or more, and a hole had opened up in the rubber mat attached to his backside. Every tree in the village had been cut down to stoke the backyard furnaces; a layer of smoke hung over the fields. Jintong had fallen in with the sparrow eradication corps, marching under bamboo poles with red strips of cloth and accompanied by the clang of gongs, as they stalked the sparrows in Northeast Gaomi Township from one village to the next, keeping them from finding food or a spot to perch, until they dropped to the streets from exhaustion and hunger. A range of stimuli had cured him of his lovesickness, and he had gotten over his obsession with mother’s milk and revulsion of food. But his prestige had plummeted. His Russian teacher, Huo Lina, to whom he was devoted, had been declared a rightist and sent to the Flood Dragon River labor reform farm, two miles from Dalan. He saw the mute out on the street, and the mute saw him, but they merely acknowledged one another with a wave before moving on.

The raucous season of rejoicing, with flames lighting up the sky, came quickly to an end, replaced in Northeast Gaomi Township by a new and dreary age. One drizzly autumn morning, twelve trucks with artillery pieces rumbled down the narrow road from the southeast into Dalan. When they entered the village, the mute was lurching around on the wet ground, all alone. He had exhausted himself during the recent days of leaping, and had turned listless. His eyes were lifeless, and because of all the liquor he’d consumed, his legless torso had grown bloated. The arrival of the artillery company reinvigorated him. Inappropriately, apparently, he moved out into the middle of the road to block the convoy. The soldiers stood there blinking in the rain and looking at the strange half-man in the middle of the road. An officer, wearing a pistol on his hip, jumped out of the cab of his truck and cursed angrily, “Tired of living, you stupid bastard?” Incredibly, since the road was slick, he was truncated, and the truck tires were tall, the mute had leaped out into the road, well out of sight of the driver, who had seen a brown streak in front of the truck and slammed on the brakes, not quite in time to keep his bumper from touching the mute’s broad forehead. Although it didn’t break the skin, it raised a large purple welt. The officer wasn’t finished cursing when he saw the hawkish glare in the mute’s eyes and felt his heart clench; at that moment, his eye was drawn to the medal pinned to the mute’s tattered uniform. Drawing his feet together, he bowed deeply and shouted, “My apologies, sir. Please forgive me!”

This gratifying reaction put the mute in high spirits. He moved to the side of the road to let the convoy pass. The soldiers saluted as the trucks passed by slowly, which he returned by touching the beak of his soft cap with the tips of his fingers. The trucks left a chewed-up road behind them. A northwest wind blew, rain slanted down, and the road was veiled by an icy mist. A few surviving sparrows slipped through the gaps in the rain, while some water-soaked dogs standing under a roadside propaganda tent were captivated by the sight of the mute’s movements.

The passage of the artillery company signaled the end of the season of rejoicing. The mute slinked home in dejection. As before, he banged on the door with one of his stools; it opened on its own, creaking loudly. He had lived in a world of silence so long that Birdman Han and Laidi had been able to keep their adultery hidden from him. For months, he had spent most of his daylight hours out on the street near the smelting ovens, and then dragged himself home to sleep like a dead dog. Come morning, he’d be out the gate again, with no time for Laidi.

The restoration of the mute’s hearing may well be attributed to his encounter with the truck bumper. The touch on his forehead must have loosened whatever was stopping up his ears. The creaking of the door stunned him; then he heard the patter of rain on leaves and the snores of his mother-in-law as she slept. She had forgotten to latch the door. But what utterly shocked him were the moans of pain and pleasure from Laidi’s room.

Sniffing the air like a bloodhound, he detected the clammy odor of her body and lurched over to the eastern side room. The rain had leaked through his rubber cushion, soaking his backside, and he felt stabbing pains around his anus.

Recklessly, the door had been left open, and a candle burned inside. In the drawing, the Bird Fairy’s eyes shone coldly. One look, and he spotted Birdman Han’s long, hairy, and enviably sturdy legs. Birdman’s buttocks were pumping up and down; beneath him, Laidi’s buttocks arched upward. Her breasts sagged and jiggled; her tousled black hair shifted on Birdman Han’s pillow, and she was clutching the bed sheet. The intense moans that had so aroused him were coming from the mass of black hair. The scene was lit up as if by an explosive green flame. He howled like a wounded animal and flung one of his stools; it glided off Birdman’s shoulder, bounced off the wall, and landed next to Laidi’s face. He threw the other stool; this one hit Birdman in the rump. He turned and glared at the drenched mute, who was shivering from the cold, and grinned smugly. Laidi’s body flattened out and she lay there panting as she reached down to cover herself with the blanket. “You’ve seen us, you mute bastard, so what?” She sat up and cursed the mute, who propped himself up on both hands, froglike. He bounded across the threshold, and from there to the feet of Birdman Han, where he lunged forward with his head. Birdman’s hands flew to his groin to protect the organ that just moments ago had been such a masterful performer; with a shriek he doubled over and yellow beads of perspiration dotted his face. The mute charged again, harder this time, scissoring Birdman’s shoulders with his powerful arms, like the tentacles of an octopus; at the same time, he wrapped his cal-lused hands, the steel traps in which his strength was concentrated, around Birdman’s throat. Birdman crumpled to the floor; his mouth opened in a fearful grimace, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

Laidi snapped out of her state of panic, picked up the stool lying next to her pillow, and jumped out of bed, naked. As soon as her feet touched the floor, she attacked the mute’s arms with the stool, but with no more effect than if she were hitting the trunk of a tree. So she then swung at his head, creating a thump like hitting a ripe melon, before dropping the stool and picking up the heavy door bolt, which she swung in the air and brought down on the mute’s head. He groaned, but his body remained upright. After the second hit, the mute let loose of Birdman’s throat, wobbled for a moment, then crashed headlong to the floor. Birdman slumped over on top of him.

The clamor in the side room woke Mother, who shuffled up to the door; it was over by then, and the outcome was sorrowfully obvious. She saw Laidi, naked, leaning weakly against the door, then watched as she dropped the bloody door bolt and walked out into the downpour, as if in a trance. The rain skittered off her body, her ugly feet sloshing through muddy puddles on the ground. She squatted down in front of the water basin and washed her hands.

Mother went over and dragged Birdman off of the mute and, with her shoulder under his arm, helped him over to the bed. With a sense of disgust, she covered him with the blanket. She heard him moan, which meant that this legendary hero was in no danger of dying. Walking back over to the mute and lifting him up like a sack of rice, she noticed two streams of black liquid running from his nostrils. After placing her finger under his nose to detect any sign of life, she let her hand drop; the mute’s still warm corpse was sitting up straight, no longer ready to topple over.

After wiping her bloody finger on the wall, Mother walked back to her room, her mind a fog, and lay down in her clothes. Episodes from the mute’s life drifted in and out of her mind, and when she recalled how the young mute and his brothers had straddled the wall, pretending they were the kings of the world, she laughed out loud. Out in the yard, Laidi scrubbed her hands over and over, the soapy lather covering the ground around her. That afternoon, Birdman walked outside, one hand around his throat, the other cupped around his crotch. He picked Laidi up off the ground, her body icy cold; she wrapped her arms around his neck and giggled idiotically.

Somewhat later, a young military officer with pink lips and sparkling white teeth, in the company of the district chief’s secretary, walked into the yard carrying a basin covered with red paper. They called out, and when no one answered, went straight to Mother’s room.

“Aunty,” the secretary said to her, “this is Commander Song of the heavy artillery company. He’s here to pay a courtesy call on Comrade Speechless Sun.”

“My apologies, aunty,” Commander Song said bashfully. “One of our trucks nearly ran Comrade Sun over, and raised a lump on his forehead.”

Mother sat up in bed with a start. “What did you say?”

“The road was slick,” Commander Song said, “and the bumper of one of our trucks hit him in the head.

“After he returned home,” Mother said tearfully, “he groaned awhile and then died.”

The young company commander paled. He was nearly in tears when he said, “Aunty, we slammed on the brakes, but the road was slick…”

When the medical expert came over to examine the body, Laidi, neatly dressed and carrying a small bundle, said, “I’m leaving, Mother.

I’ll take things as they come, but I cannot let those soldiers take the blame.”

“Go tell the authorities,” Mother said. “It’s always been the rule that a pregnant woman has to give birth before…”

“I understand. In fact, I’ve never in my life understood anything as clearly as this.”

“I’ll raise your child for you.”

“I have no more worries, Mother.”

She walked over to the side room, where she reported, “There’s no need for an investigation. I hit him with a stool and then killed him with the bolt of a door. He was choking Birdman Han when I did it.”

Birdman walked into the yard carrying a string of dead birds. “What’s going on?” he asked. “The world now has one less half-man piece of garbage, and I’m the one who killed him.”

The police handcuffed Laidi and Birdman Han and placed them under arrest.

Five months later, a policewoman brought a baby boy to Mother, scrawny as a sick cat, and reported that Laidi was to be shot the next day. The family was free to retrieve the body, but if they chose not to, it would be sent to the hospital to be dissected. The policewoman also told Mother that Birdman Han had been sentenced to life imprisonment and that he would soon begin serving his sentence at Tarim Basin, in the Uighur Autonomous Region, far from Northeast Gaomi. The family would be permitted a last visit.

By then Jintong had been expelled from school for destroying trees on campus, while Zaohua had been expelled from the drama troupe for stealing.

“We’re going to retrieve the body,” Mother said.

“I don’t see why,” Zaohua said.

“She committed a capital crime, and deserves a bullet. But it wasn’t a heinous crime.”

More than ten thousand people turned out for Shangguan Laidi’s execution. A truck brought the condemned prisoner to the execution ground at the Bridge of Sorrows. Birdman Han was in the truck with her. In order to avoid any last-minute vocal outbursts, the execution team had sealed both their mouths.

Not long after Laidi’s execution, the family received word of Birdman Han’s death. On his way to prison, he had managed to break free and died under the wheels of the train.

4

In order to reclaim tens of thousands of acres of Northeast Gaomi Township’s wasteland, all of Dalan’s able-bodied young men and women were mobilized into teams at the state-run Flood Dragon River Farm. On the day the work assignments were handed out, the director asked me, “What are you good at?” At the time, I was so hungry my ears were buzzing, and I didn’t hear him clearly. His lips parted, exposing a stainless steel tooth right in the middle, as he asked me again, louder this time, “What are you good at?” I’d just spotted my teacher, Huo Lina, on the road carrying a load of manure, and I recalled her saying that I had a natural talent for the Russian language. So I said, “I speak Russian well.” “Russian?” he said with a sneer, his stainless steel tooth glinting in the sunlight. “How well?” he asked derisively. “Good enough to be an interpreter for Khrushchev and Mikoyan? Can you handle a Sino-Soviet communiqué? Listen to me, young man. People who have studied in the Soviet Union tote manure around here. Do you think your Russian is better than theirs?” All the young laborers awaiting assignments had a good laugh over that. “I’m asking you what you do at home, what you do best.” “At home I tended a goat, that’s what I did best.” “Right,” the director said with a sneer. “Now, that’s what you’re good at. Russian and French, or English and Italian, none of those are worth a thing.” He scribbled something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Report to the animal brigade. Tell Commander Ma to assign you.”

On my way over, an old laborer told me that Commander Ma Ruilian was the wife of the farm director, Li Du, in other words, the “first lady.” When I reported for duty, knapsack and bedding over my back, she was out at the breeding farm giving a demonstration on crossbreeding. Tied up in the yard were several ovulating female animals: a cow, a donkey, a ewe, a sow, and a domestic rabbit. Five breeding assistants – two men and three women – in white gowns, masks over their mouths and noses, and rubber gloves, were holding insemination utensils, standing like attack troops ready for battle. Ma Ruilian had a boyish haircut; her hair was as coarse as a horse’s mane. She had a round, swarthy face; long, narrow eyes; a red nose; fleshy lips; a short neck; a thick chest; and full, heavy breasts like a pair of grave mounds. Shit! Jintong cursed to himself. Ma Ruilian my ass! That’s Pandi! She must have changed her name because of the rotten reputation the name Shangguan had earned. That being the case, Li Du had to be Lu Liren, who was once called Jiang Liren, and maybe before that something else Liren. The fact that this name-changing couple had been sent here must have meant they were out of favor. She was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt of Russian design and a pair of wrinkled black trousers over high-topped sneakers. She was holding a Great Leap cigarette in her hand, the greenish smoke curling around her fingers, which looked like carrots. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Is the farm journalist here?” A sallow-faced middle-aged man wearing reading glasses ran out from behind the horse-tethering rack, bent at the waist. ‘Tm here,” he said. “Here I am.” He was holding a fountain pen poised over an open notebook, ready to write. Commander Ma laughed loudly and patted the man on his shoulder with her puffy hand. “I see the chief editor himself has come.” “Commander Ma’s unit is where the news is,” he said. “I wouldn’t trust anyone else to come.” “Old Yu here is a real zealot!” Ma Ruilian complimented him as she patted him on the shoulder a second time. The editor paled and tucked his neck down between his shoulders, as if afraid of the cold. Later on, I learned that this fellow, Yu Zheng, who edited the local newsletter, had been the publisher and editor of the provincial Party Committee newspaper until he was labeled a rightist. “Today I’m going to give you a headline story,” Ma Ruilian said, giving the urbane Yu Zheng a meaningful look and taking a deep drag on the stub of her cigarette, nearly burning her lips. Then she spat it out, tearing the paper and sending the few remaining shreds of tobacco floating in the air – this little trick of hers was enough to frustrate anyone scavenging cigarette butts on the ground. As she exhaled the last of the smoke, she asked her assistants, “Ready?” They responded by raising their insemination utensils. The blood rushed to her face as she wrung her hands and clapped uneasily. She then took out a handkerchief to dry her sweaty palms. “Horse sperm, who has the horse sperm?” she asked loudly. The assistant holding the horse sperm stepped forward and said, “Me, I’ve got it,” the words muffled by the mask over his mouth. Ma Ruilian pointed to the cow. “Give it to her,” she said, “inseminate her with the horse sperm.” The man hesitated, looking first at Ma Ruilian and then at his fellow assistants, lined up behind him, as if he wanted to say something. “Don’t just stand there,” Ma Ruilian said. “Strike while the iron’s hot if you want to get things done!” With a mischievous look, the assistant said, “Yes, ma’am,” and carried the horse sperm over behind the tethered cow. As her assistant inserted the insemination utensil into the cow, Ma Ruilian’s lips were parted and she was breathing heavily, as if the instrument were being inserted in her and not in the cow. But immediately afterward, she issued a stream of rapid commands: She ordered that the bull’s sperm envelop the sheep’s egg and that the ram’s sperm merge with the rabbit’s egg. Under her direction, the donkey’s sperm was inserted into the sow and the boar’s seed injected into the donkey’s womb.

The editor of the farm newsletter’s face was lusterless, his mouth hung slack, and it was impossible to tell if he was about to burst into tears or burst out laughing. One of the assistants – the one holding the ram’s sperm – a woman with curled lashes above small but bright, jet black eyes with very little white showing – refused to carry out Ma Ruilian’s order. She tossed her insemination utensil into a porcelain tray and removed her gloves and mask, revealing the fine hairs on her upper lip, a fair nose, and a nicely curved chin. “This is a farce!” she said angrily.

“How dare you!” Ma Ruilian snarled as she smacked her palms together, her eyes sweeping across the woman’s face. “Unless I’m mistaken,” she said darkly, “you have been capped.” She reached up as if taking a hat off her head. “Not a cap you can remove at will. No, you’re an ultra-rightist, and that will be with you forever, a rightist who will always wear the cap. Am I right?” The woman’s head slumped weakly to her chest, as if her neck were a frost-laden blade of grass. “You’re right,” she said, “I am a lifelong ultra-rightist. But, as I see it, these are unrelated issues, one scientific and one political. Politics are fickle, always shifting, where black is white and white is black. But science is constant.” “Shut your mouth!” Ma Ruilian jerked and sputtered like an out-of-control steam engine. “I am not going to let you spread your poison in my breeding farm! Who are you to be talking about politics? Do you know the name of politics? Do you know what it eats? Politics are at the heart of all labor! Science divorced of politics is not true science. There is no science that transcends politics in the proletariat dictionary. The bourgeoisie has its bourgeois science, and the proletariat has its proletarian science.” “If proletarian science,” the woman responded, risking it all, “insists on crossbreeding sheep and rabbits in the hope of producing a new species of animal, then as far as I’m concerned, that so-called proletarian science is nothing more than a pile of dog shit!”

“Qiao Qisha, how can you be so arrogant?” Ma Ruilian’s teeth were chattering from anger. “Take a look at the sky and then look down at the ground. You should understand the complexity of things. Calling proletarian science dog shit makes you an out-and-out reactionary! That comment alone is enough for us to throw you in jail, even put you in front of a firing squad! But seeing how young and beautiful you are…” Shangguan Pandi, now Ma Ruilian, softened her tone. “I’m willing to let it go this time, but I demand that you carry out your breeding mission! If you refuse, I wouldn’t care if you were the flower of the medical college or the grass of the agricultural college. I can break that horse with the gigantic hooves, so don’t think I can’t do the same with you!”

The well-meaning newsletter editor spoke up: “Little Qiao, do as Commander Ma says. This is, after all, a scientific experiment. Over in Tianjin District, they successfully grafted cotton onto a parasol tree, and rice onto reeds. I read that in The People’s Daily. This is an age of breaking down superstitions and liberating thought, an age of creating human miracles. If you can produce a mule by mating a donkey with a horse, who can say you won’t produce a new species of animal by mating a sheep with a rabbit? So go ahead, do as she says.”

The flower of the medical college and ultra-rightist, Qiao Qisha, felt her face turn beet red, and indignant tears swam in her eyes. “No,” she said obstinately, “I won’t do it. It flies in the face of common sense!”

“You’re being foolish, little Qiao,” the editor said.

“Of course she’s foolish. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be an ultra-rightist!” Ma Ruilian shot back, offended by the editor’s concern for Qiao Qisha.

The editor lowered his head and held his tongue.

One of the other assistants walked up. “I’ll do it, Commander Ma. Sheep sperm into a rabbit is nothing. I don’t care if you want me to inject Director Li Du’s sperm into the sow’s womb.”

The other assistants broke up laughing, while the newsletter director managed to cover up his laughter by pretending to cough. “Deng Jiarong, you bastard!” Ma Ruilian cursed, enraged. “This time you’ve gone too far!”

Deng removed his mask, exposing his insolent horselike face. With a reckless sneer, he said, “Commander Ma, I don’t have a cap, permanent or not. I come from three generations of miners, as red and upright as they come, so don’t try to intimidate me the way you did with little Qiao.” He turned and walked off, leaving Ma Ruilian to vent her anger on Qiao Qisha. “Are you going to do it, or aren’t you? If you don’t, I’ll take back your grain coupons for the rest of the month.”

Qiao Qisha held back, and held back, until she could hold back no longer. Tears coursed down her cheeks and she cried openly. She picked up the insemination utensil in her gloveless hand, stumbled over to the rabbit – it was a black animal tethered by a piece of red rope – and held it down to keep it from struggling free.

At that moment, Pandi, now Ma Ruilian, spotted me. “What are you doing here?” she asked coldly. I handed her the note from the farm management director. She read it. “Go to the chicken farm,” she said. “They’re short one laborer.” Then she turned her back on me and said to the newsletter editor, “Old Yu, go turn in your story. You can leave out the unnecessary parts.” He bowed. “I’ll bring the galleys over for you to check,” he said. Then she turned to Qiao Qisha. “In accordance with your wishes, Qiao Qisha, your transfer out of the breeding station is approved. Get your things and report to the chicken farm.” Finally, she turned back to me. “What are you waiting for?” “I don’t know where the chicken farm is,” I said. She looked at her watch. “That’s where I’m headed now, so come with me.”

She stopped when the whitewashed wall of the chicken farm came into view. We were on the muddy path leading to the chicken farm, which ran past the munitions scrapyard; the little ditch alongside the road ran red with rust, and the fenced-in yard was overrun by weeds that covered the caterpillar tracks of crumbling tanks, their rusting cannons pointing into the blue sky. Tender green morning glory vines were wrapped around the remaining half of a heavy artillery piece. A dragonfly rested on the muzzle of an antiaircraft gun. Rats scampered in and out of the gun turret. Sparrows had made a nest in one of the cannons to raise their fledglings, feeding them emerald-colored insects. A little girl with a red ribbon in her hair sat dully on the blackened tire of a gun carriage, watching a couple of little boys bang rocks against the controls of one of the tanks. Ma Ruilian, who had been staring at the scrapyard desolation, turned to me. No longer the commander who was ordering people around at the breeding station, she said, “How’s everyone at home?”

I turned away and stared at the antiaircraft gun, the morning glories appearing like little butterflies, in an attempt to hide my anger. What kind of question was that, coming from someone who’d gone and changed her name?

“There was a time when your future couldn’t have been brighter,” she said. “We were happy for you. But Laidi ruined everything. Of course, it wasn’t all her fault. Mother’s foolishness also…”

“If you have nothing more for me,” I said, “I’ll report to the chicken farm.”

“Well, I see you’ve developed a temper since I last saw you!” she said. “That’s encouraging. Now that our Jintong is twenty, it’s time to sew up the crotch of his pants and throw away the nipple.”

I swung my bedding over my shoulder and headed off to the chicken farm.

“Stop right there! There’s something you need to understand. Things have not gone well for us these past few years. Every time we open our mouths, people accuse us of rightist leanings. We’ve had no choice.” She took the slip of paper out of her pocket and reached into a little bag hanging around her neck for a pen. After scribbling something, she handed the slip to me and said, “Ask for Director Long and give him this.” I took it from her. “Is there anything else? If so, let’s hear it.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Do you have any idea how hard it’s been for old Lu and me to get to where we are today? Please don’t cause us any trouble. I’ll do what I can for you in private, but in public…”

“Don’t say it. When you decided to change your name, you ended your relationship with the Shangguan family. You’re no sister of mine, so don’t give me any of that Til do what I can for you in private.’“

“Terrific! Next time you see Mother, tell her that Lu Shengli is doing fine.”

Paying her no more attention, I started walking, following the rusty, symbolic fence that had gaps big enough to allow a cow in to graze among the relics of war, heading for the white wall of the chicken farm and feeling quite pleased with how I’d handled myself. I felt as if I’d won a decisive battle. Go to hell, Ma Ruilian and Li Du, and go to hell all you rusty gun barrels, like a bunch of turtles sticking your heads out of your shells. All you mortar chassis, all you artillery gun shields, all you bomber wings – you can all go to hell. I rounded some towering plants and found myself at the edge of a field covered with a sort of fishnet between two rows of red-roofed buildings. Inside, thousands of white chickens were in constant, lazy movement. A single large rooster with a bright red comb was perched high up, a king surveying his harem, crowing loudly. The clucking of the hens was enough to drive a person crazy.

I handed the slip given to me by Ma Ruilian to a one-armed woman, Director Long. One look at her cold face told me that this was no ordinary woman. “You’ve come at the right time, youngster,” she said after reading the note. “Here are your duties. Every morning you will rake up the chicken droppings and deliver them to the pig farm. Then you’ll go to the feed processing plant and bring the coarse chicken feed we’ll need back with you. In the afternoons, you and Qiao Qisha, who will be here soon, will deliver the day’s output of eggs to the farm management office, and from there you’ll go to the grain storehouse and bring back enough fine chicken feed for the next day. Got it?” “Got it,” I replied as I stared at her empty sleeve. She sneered when she saw where I was looking. “There are only two rules around here. One, no lying down on the job, and two, no sneaking food.”

The moon lit up the sky that night as I lay on some flattened cardboard boxes in the storage room of the chicken farm dorm, finding it hard to sleep amid the soft murmuring of hens. I was next to the women’s dorm, which held a dozen or so chicken tenders. Their snores came though the thin wall, along with the sound of someone talking in her sleep. Cheerless moonlight streamed in through the window and the gaps in the door, illuminating the words on the boxes:

AVIAN FLU VACCINE

KEEP DRY AND OUT OF SUNLIGHT

FRAGILE, DO NOT STACK

THIS SIDE UP

Slowly, the moonlight slipped across the floor, and I heard the roar of East Is Red tractors out in the early summer fields, driven by members of the night-shift tractor detail cultivating virgin land. The day before, Mother had walked me to the head of the village, holding in her arms the baby left behind by Birdman Han and Laidi. “Jintong,” she said, “remember that the tougher the job, the harder you have to work at living. Pastor Malory used to say that he’d read the Bible from cover to cover, and that’s what it all came to. Don’t worry about me. Your mother is like an earthworm – I can live wherever there’s dirt.” I said, “Mother, I’m going to watch what I eat so I can send you the surplus.” “I don’t want you to do that,” she said. “As long as my children eat their fill, that’s enough for me.” When we reached the bank of the Flood Dragon River, I said, “Mother, Zaohua has become an expert at…” “Jintong,” Mother said in frustration, “During all these years, not a single girl in the Shangguan family has taken advice from anyone.”

Sometime in the middle of the night, a commotion broke out in the chicken house. I jumped to my feet and stuck my face up against the window, where I saw chickens seething under the tattered net like foam-capped waves. A green fox was leaping amid them in the watery moonlight, an undulating ribbon of green satin. Raising the alarm, the women next door rushed outside half dressed, one-armed Commander Long in the lead, armed with a black pistol. The fox had a fat hen in its mouth and was scampering along the base of the wall, the hen’s foot scraping the ground. Commander Long fired; flames shot from the muzzle of her pistol. The fox stopped in its tracks and dropped the hen. “You hit it!” one of the women shouted. But the glossy eyes of the fox swept the women’s faces. Its long face was haloed in moonlight; it wore a sneer. The women were stunned by that mocking grin, and Commander Long’s arm fell weakly to her side. But then she steeled herself and fired another round. It didn’t come close, did, in fact, raise a puff of dirt in the vicinity of the women. With no more concerns, the fox picked up the hen and slipped nonchalantly through the metal ribs of the enclosure, the women watching its exit as if in a trance. Like a puff of green smoke, the fox disappeared among the war relics in the scrapyard, where the grass grew tall and will-o’-the-wisps dotted the landscape – a fox paradise.

The following morning, my eyelids felt weighted down as I pulled a full cartload of chicken droppings over to the pig farm. When I turned the corner of the scrapyard, I heard a shout behind me. I turned and saw the rightist Qiao Qisha running briskly toward me. “The director sent me to help you,” she said indifferently. “You push from behind,” I said, “and I’ll pull.”

The two wheels of the heavy cart kept getting stuck in the soft earth of the narrow road, and each time that happened, I had to turn and tug with all my might, my arched back nearly touching the ground. At the same time, she pushed with everything she had. Once the wheels were free, she’d look over at me before I turned around. The sight of her jet black eyes, the fine hairs on her upper lip, her fair nose and nicely curved chin, as well as her expression, which was filled with hidden meaning, reminded me of the fox in the chicken coop. That look lit up a dark place in my brain.

The pig farm was about a mile from the chicken farm, and the road passed by a fertilizer pit for the vegetable garden unit. My teacher, Huo Lina, walked past us carrying a load of manure, her slim waist compressed by the weight of her load until she seemed about to snap in two. At the pig farm, we delivered our chicken droppings to the woman in charge, Ji Qiongzhi, my former music teacher, who dumped the slimy, stinking mess into the pig troughs.

One of the members of the food processing team was an athletic fellow who could high-jump nearly two meters using the latest flop method. Naturally, he was a rightist. He displayed a great deal of concern for Qiao Qisha, and was extremely friendly to me, one of those cheerful rightists, unlike the ones who went around scowling the day long. Wearing a towel draped around his neck and a pair of goggles, he worked happily on the pulverizer, which filled the air with dust. The leader of his team was another special case, an illiterate man named Guo Wenhao who created clapper-talk lyrics that were sung all over the farm. On our very first trip with coarse fodder made of yams, he entertained us with one of his lyrics:

“There’s this animal farm leader, Ma Ruilian, who has a new vocation. She carries out experiments at the breeding station, mating a sheep and rabbit with high elation. She angered her assistant, Qiao Qisha, and hit her in the belly, ha ha ha. A horse and a donkey produce a mule, but a rabbit sheep would be a new creation. If a sheep can marry a rabbit, a boar can take Ma Ruilian for gestation. With anger in her breast, she told Li Du with detestation. Tolerant Director Li counseled hesitation. These rightists, he said, don’t understand cessation. Little Qiao went to medical school, Yu Zheng uses a newsletter for his narration. Ma Ming studied in the American nation, Zhang Jie’s dictionary is a clarification. Even rightist Wang Meizan, whose head knows no sensation, is a great athlete, cause for celebration…”

“You there, rightist!” Guo Wenhao shouted. Wang Meizan brought his legs together. “Yo!” he responded. “Load the Qiao girl up with fodder.” Wang replied, “Will do, Leader Guo.”

Wang Meizan loaded our cart with fodder, as Guo Wenhao asked me over the roar of the pulverizer, “Are you a Shangguan?” “Yes,” I said, “I’m the little Shangguan bastard. “A bastard can become a great man. You Shangguans are an incredible family. Sha Yueliang, Sima Ku, Birdman Han, Speechless Sun, Babbitt. You’re really something…”

On our way back to the chicken farm with the feed, Qiao Qisha blurted out, “What’s your name?”

“Shangguan Jintong. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she said. “We work together, so we might as well know each other’s name. How many sisters do you have?” “Eight. No, seven.” “What about the eighth?”

“She turned traitor,” I replied with annoyance. “That’s all you need to know.”

Every night the same fox came to harass the chickens, and every other night it stole off with one of the hens. On off nights, it didn’t steal a hen not because it couldn’t, but because it didn’t want to. Its nightly activities fell into two categories: nights when it was hungry, and nights when it merely wanted to cause a disturbance. This drove the women chicken tenders to distraction, and cost them lots of sleep. Commander Long fired at least twenty bullets at the fox, but never harmed a hair of its fur. “That fox is a demon for sure,” one of the women said. “It can recite a charm to ward off bullets.”

“Nonsense!” a tall woman nicknamed “Wild Mule” disagreed sharply. “No mangy fox can turn into a demon.”

“If that’s true, how come Commander Long, who was a sharpshooter in the militia, keeps missing?” asked the other woman.

“I think it’s intentional. The fox is a male, after all,” Wild Mule said salaciously. “Maybe a handsome green visitor comes to her bed late at night, when everything’s quiet.”

Commander Long stood under the tattered netting silently listening to the women’s talk, fiddling with her pistol, apparently lost in thought. The wanton laughter roused her from her ruminations; tapping her gray cap with the muzzle of the pistol, she strode into the chicken coop, skirting the laying pens, and planted herself in front of Wild Mule, who was gathering eggs. “What did you say just now?” she demanded angrily. “I didn’t say anything,” Wild Mule replied calmly, a brown egg in the palm of her hand. “I heard you!” Commander Long raged as she tapped the wire with her pistol. “Exactly what did you hear?” Wild Mule asked provocatively. Commander Long’s face turned the color of the egg Wild Mule was holding. “I’ll never forgive you for that!” she sputtered as she turned and walked away, enraged. Wild Mule looked at her back and said, “If your heart is pure, not even the devil can scare you! Don’t be fooled by her serious appearance, fox. She’s lusting, all right. The other night, you think I didn’t see with my own eyes?” “Wild Mule,” one of the more prudent women counseled, “that’s enough. Where do you find all this energy on the six ounces of noodles you’re given to eat?” “Six ounces of noodles? Fuck her and her six ounces of noodles!” She pulled a pin out of her hair, poked a hole in each end of the egg she was holding, and quickly sucked it dry. Then she put the outwardly whole egg with the others. “Anyone who wants to report me, go ahead. My dad’s found me a husband in the Northeast, and Fm leaving next month. There are enough potatoes up there to form mountains. How about you, planning on reporting me?” she asked Jintong, who was shoveling chicken droppings by the window. “You’re the most likely one, a fragrant baby rooster, just the type favored by our armless leader. An old cow like her, with bad teeth, has to graze on tender grass!” Jintong was totally befuddled by the verbal assault. Holding his shovel out in front of him, he said, “Want some of this chicken shit?”

That afternoon, when they reached the vegetable unit’s fertilizer pit with their load of four crates of eggs, Qiao Qisha asked Jintong to stop. He slowed down and lowered the cart handles to the ground. “Have you seen them?” Qiao Qisha asked when he turned around. “They all steal eggs, even Commander Long. You’ve seen the one called Wild Mule, what good shape she’s in? Those women get more nutrition than they need.” “But these eggs have been weighed,” Jintong said. “Are we supposed to go hungry, even when we’re delivering a load of eggs? Fm about to drop from hunger.” Picking up two of the eggs, she darted into the fenced-off enclosure and disappeared behind two tanks. A few moments later, she reappeared with what looked like two whole eggs and put them back into the load. “Qiao Qisha,” Jintong said worriedly, “that’s like a cat covering up its own shit. When they weigh this load at the farm, they’ll know what’s happened.” She laughed. “Do you think Fm stupid?” she said as she picked up two more eggs and motioned to him. “Come with me,” she said.

Jintong followed her into the enclosure, where white pollen floated above tall artemesia stalks, filling the air with a dizzying fragrance. She squatted down beside a tank and removed something wrapped in oilpaper from a gap between the tractor tread and a wheel. Her crime kit. It included a tiny drill bit, a hypodermic needle, a piece of rubberized fabric dyed the color of an eggshell, and a little pair of scissors. After drilling a tiny hole in one of the eggs, she inserted the hypodermic needle and slowly drew out the contents. “Open your mouth,” she said, and emptied the contents down Jintong’s throat, making him her accomplice. Once that was done, she drew water out of an upturned steel helmet lying next to the tank and inserted it into the shell. Finally, she cut out a small piece of fabric to cover the hole. All this with practiced efficiency. “Is this what they taught you at the medical school?” Jintong asked. “That’s right,” she said with a smile. “Egg theft!”

When the eggs were weighed, they had actually gained an ounce or so.

The egg-stealing drama was brought to a ruthless end in a couple of weeks. Midsummer rains signaled the hens’ molting season, and egg production dropped precipitously. One day they stopped at the same spot with their load of a crate and a half of eggs, and entered the enclosure through the wet fence; the artemesia buds were filled with seeds, and a watery mist hung over the military relics. The rusting hulks gave off a thick, bloodlike odor. A frog was resting on one of the tank wheels, its sticky green skin creating a sense of unease in Jintong. When Qiao Qisha squirted the egg into his mouth, he suddenly felt nauseous; with his hand around his throat, he said, “This egg tastes rotten, and it’s cold.” In a couple of days, you’ll be lucky to get cold, rotten eggs. The curtain is about to drop on our little drama.” “That’s right,” Jintong said, “the hens are about to molt.” “You’re a silly kid,” she said. “I wonder if you have some sort of intuition about me.” “You?” Jintong shook his head. “What kind of intuition would that be?” “Forget I said anything. There’s enough going on with your family already, and I’d only complicate things more.” “I don’t get what you’re talking about,” Jintong said. “I’m confused.” “Why haven’t you asked anything about my background?” she said. “I’m not planning on marrying you, so why should I?” She froze for a moment, then smiled. “Spoken like a true Shangguan. Always a hidden meaning. Who says you have to marry me to ask about my background?” “My teacher, Huo Lina, said that asking a girl about her background is rude.” “Are you talking about that manure carrier?” “She speaks beautiful Russian,” Jintong said. With a sneer, Qisha said, “I hear you were her prize student.” “I guess so.” In a display of grandstanding, Qisha responded by reciting a long monologue in perfect Russian, clearly more than Jintong could handle. “Did you get all that?” “I think it was a sad folktale about a little girl…” “Is that the best Huo Lina’s prize student can do? A three-legged cat, a paper tiger, a dim lantern, an empty pillowcase.” She picked up the four refilled eggs and headed back. “I studied with her less than six months,” Jintong defended himself. “You expect too much from me.” “I don’t have time to expect anything from you,” she replied. The wet artemesia plants had brushed up against her blouse, which stuck to her breasts, made full from the sixty-eight eggs she’d eaten, in stark contrast to her skinny frame. Feelings of tenderness and melancholy swept over Jintong, as a sensation of familiarity with this beautiful rightist worked its way into his head like an army of ants. Instinctively, he reached out to her, but she bent down and stepped nimbly through the wire fence. A moment later, the sound of Commander Long’s grim laughter came on the air from the other side of the fence.

Commander Long turned one of the refilled eggs over and over in her hand. Jintong, his knees knocking, stared at that hand. Qiao Qisha, on the other hand, was gazing haughtily at the gun barrels pointing into the overcast sky, as if launching silent screams. A fine rain formed translucent beads on her forehead and then slid down the sides of her nose. Jintong saw in her eyes the calmly contemptuous look so common among all the Shangguan girls when faced with a bad situation. At that moment, he had a pretty good sense of her background and, at the same time, understood why she’d asked so many questions about his family during the weeks and months they’d been working together.

“A genius!” Commander Long sneered. “A credit to your education.” Then, without warning, she flung the refilled egg at Qiao Qisha, hitting her squarely in the forehead. The shell broke, causing Qisha’s head to wobble, and drenching her face with dirty water. “Follow me to the farm headquarters,” Commander Long said. “There you’ll get the punishment you deserve.” “This has nothing to do with Shangguan Jintong,” Qisha said. “All he’s guilty of is not reporting me. The same as my not reporting the others, who not only steal and eat eggs, but the hens as well.”

Two days later, Qiao Qisha forfeited half a month’s grain rations and was reassigned to the vegetable unit as a manure carrier, to work alongside Huo Lina. There the two Russian speakers were often seen brandishing their manure spades in one another’s face and cursing in Russian. Jintong kept his job at the chicken farm, where less than half the laying hens had survived. The dozen or so women were reassigned as night-shift field workers, leaving Commander Long and Jintong to tend the surviving molting hens in the once-busy farm. As for the fox, it continued its incursions; battling the marauder became Commander Long and Jintong’s primary duty.

One summer night, when dark clouds swallowed up the moon, the fox returned and was heading out the gate with a featherless hen in its mouth and a swagger in its step. Commander Long got off her usual two shots, which had evolved into a sort of farewell ritual. Amid the intoxicating smell of gunpowder, the two of them stood facing each other. The croaking of frogs and cries of birds came on the wind from distant fields as the moon broke through the clouds and oiled the two combatants’ bodies in its light. Hearing a grunt from Commander Long, he saw that her face had grown long and scary; the glare of her teeth turned a terrifying white. And there was more: a bushy tail swelled the seat of her pants like an expanding balloon. Commander Long was a fox! A horrifying clarity burst in his head. She was a female fox, the mate of that other one, and that was why her shots always missed. The frequent green visitor that Wild Mule said entered the sleeping quarters in the hazy moonlight was that transformed fox. The noxious odor of fox filled the air, and he gaped as he watched her come toward him, the smoking pistol still in her hand. Flinging away his club, he ran screeching back to his quarters and put his shoulder to the door as soon as he was inside. He heard her go into the adjoining room; she was alone. Moonlight struck the wall, which was nailed together with old slats. She scraped the wall with her claws and murmured softly. All of a sudden, she knocked a gaping hole in the wall and entered his room, completely naked, once again in human form. Only a horrible scar, like the tightly closed opening of a burlap bag, remained where her arm had once been. Her breasts protruded hard and heavy, like the weights of a scale. She fell to her knees at Jintong’s feet and wrapped her arm around his legs. Muttering like a teary old woman, she said, “Shangguan Jintong, take pity on a wretched woman!”

Jintong fought to step out of her grip, but she reached up and grabbed his belt, tugging so hard she snapped it and pulled down his pants. When he bent down to pull them up, she wrapped her arm around his neck and her legs around his waist. In the grappling that ensued, she somehow managed to undress him. Once that was done, she tapped him on the temple; his eyes rolled back into his head and he lay flat on the floor like a beached fish. Commander Long nibbled every inch of Jintong’s body, but was unable to release him from his terror. Enraged by her failure, she ran back into the adjoining room, grabbed her pistol, tucked the barrel between her legs, and shoved two yellow bullets into the chamber. Then, pointing the weapon at a spot below his belly, she said, “There are two paths open to you. You can get it up, or I’ll shoot it off.” The glare in her eyes was all the proof he needed to know that she was serious. The iron-hard breasts were bouncing around on her chest. Once again Jintong watched as her face lengthened and a bushy tail emerged behind her, slowly, until it reached the floor.

Over the drizzly days that followed, Commander Long did everything possible, from encouragement to threats, day or night, to make a man out of Jintong. In the end, she failed, and by then she was spitting blood. In the final moments before she turned her gun on herself, she wiped the blood from her chin and said sadly, “Long Qingping, ah, Long Qingping, you’re still a virgin at the age of thirty-nine. Everyone knows what a hero you are, but no one realizes that you’re also a woman, and that your life has been wasted…” She coughed and hunched her shoulders; her dark face paled, and, with a loud cry, she spit out a mouthful of blood, driving the soul right out of Jintong, who stood with his back flattened up against the door. Tears ran down Long Qingping’s face as, with a look of resentment in her eyes, she crawled on her knees to him, raised her pistol, and put the muzzle against her temple. Not until that moment did Jintong finally comprehend the seductiveness of a woman’s body. Raising her elbow to reveal the fine hairs under her arm, she sat down on her heels, as a cloud of golden smoke burst in front of his eyes. The cold spot between his legs suddenly swelled with heated blood. The inconsolable Long Qingping pulled the trigger – if, at that moment, she had glanced back, the tragedy would have been averted – and Jintong saw a puff of burnt ocher smoke emerge from her temple hair as the dull crack of a pistol sounded. Her body rocked briefly before she crumpled onto the floor. Jintong rushed up and turned her over, exposing the black hole in her temple, circled by tiny blue particles of gunpowder; dark blood oozed from inside her ear and ran down his fingers. Her eyes were open, still showing traces of her grief. The skin of her chest was still twitching, like ripples on a pond.

Jintong held her in his arms, overcome by remorse, and granted her final wish as her life slipped away. Finally, he climbed off her, utterly spent; the sparks of light in her eyes died as her lids descended. A pall of gray settled in his head as he gazed at her now lifeless body. Outside, a torrential rain fell, a blinding gray that entered the room in waves and swallowed up both their bodies.

5

Shangguan Jintong was taken into the chicken coop for interrogation. His bare legs seeped in rainwater that cascaded in over the eaves, flooded the compound, and crashed against the roof. Ever since that moment between him and Long Qingping, the rain had been unending, letting up briefly, only to start up again harder than ever.

The water nearly reached his knees. Wrapped in a black raincoat, the security section chief was squatting on his chair. Two days and nights of questioning had produced no results. The man was a chain-smoker; the water around him was peppered with water-soaked cigarette butts and the air was suffocating with acrid smoke. Rubbing his bloodshot eyes, the section chief yawned from exhaustion, as did the official recorder. Then he picked up a notebook from the wet desktop and stared at the smudged writing. Reaching out and grabbing Jintong by the ear, he barked, “Did you rape her first and then kill her?” Jintong stood there weeping, but with no more tears to shed. “I didn’t kill her,” he repeated, “and I didn’t rape her…”

“You don’t have to tell me,” the section chief said, running out of patience. “But a medical expert from the county will be here soon, and he’s bringing attack dogs with him. Tell me now, and that will count as a voluntary confession.”

“I didn’t kill her,” he said one more time, sleepily, “and I didn’t rape her.”

The section chief took out a pack of cigarettes, crushed it, and tossed it into the water. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he said to the recorder, “Go to the farm headquarters building, Sun, and place a call to the County Security Bureau. Tell them to get over here as soon as possible.” He sniffed the air. “The body’s starting to stink, and if they don’t come soon, our investigation will be ruined.”

“Boss,” the man said, “are you crazy? I tried calling the day before yesterday and couldn’t get through. The rain has washed away telephone poles.”

“Shit!” the section chief cursed as he jumped down off of his chair, put on his rain cap, and waded over to the door, where he stuck out his head to look around. A roaring curtain of water drenched his shiny back as he ran over to the site of Jintong and Commander Long’s illicit liaison. Out in the yard, clean and dirty water merged, with dead chickens floating on the surface. The few surviving hens were perched atop the wall – heads tucked down, clucking piteously. Jintong had a splitting headache and his teeth were chattering. His mind was a blank, except for the movements of Commander Long’s nakedness. After impulsively entering her dying body, he had experienced terrible remorse, but now all he felt toward her was loathing and disgust. He struggled to break free of her likeness, but, as with Natasha years before, it stuck doggedly in his mind. The difference was that Natasha was a beautiful young image, while Commander Long was a repulsive, demonic one. At the moment he was dragged out to be interrogated, he made up his mind not to reveal the ugly details of what had happened. I didn’t rape her, and I didn’t kill her. She tried to force herself on me, and when I resisted, she killed herself. That’s all he would reveal under the pressures of the relentless questioning.

The security chief returned and shook the water off of his neck. “Damn!” he exclaimed. “She’s all bloated. Like a debristled hog. Disgusting.” He pinched his throat.

Off in the distance, the cafeteria’s red-brick chimney came crashing to the ground, still belching black smoke, and took the building itself – roof, windows, Venetian blinds, and all – with it, sending gray water towering into the air with a roar.

“The building’s down,” the security chief exclaimed. “Now what? Forget the fucking interrogation – now we won’t even be able to eat!”

The collapse of the cafeteria opened up an unobstructed view of the fields. It also created the terrifying sight of an ocean of water, all the way to the horizon. The dikes of the Flood Dragon River poked through the surface here and there, but the water within them rose above the level beyond. The rain fell unevenly to earth, as if dumped by a gigantic watering can moving rapidly across the sky. Directly below the watering can the downpour set up a roar, with torrents of water creating a mist over the land; everywhere else, sunlight lit up the gentle flow of floodwaters. Situated in the lowest spot of the Northeast Gaomi marshy lowland, the Flood Dragon River Farm was irrigated by water from three separate counties. Soon after the cafeteria collapsed, every farm structure, from those with rammed-earth walls to tile-roofed buildings, crumbled into the rushing water, except for the grain storage building, which had been planned and constructed by a rightist named Liang Badong. A few sections of the chicken coop, built with bricks from the graveyard, managed to remain upright, but the water had already reached the windows. Benches and stools floated on the water, which was up to Jintong’s navel as he too began to float in his chair.

Cries of distress sounded everywhere, as people struggled against the flood. “Head for the river dikes!” someone shouted.

The security section recorder kicked out the window and fled, followed by the curses of the section chief. He turned to Jintong. “Follow me,” he said.

So Jintong followed the squat section chief out into the yard, where the man had to move his arms back and forth in the water to keep standing. Jintong looked behind him and spotted a clutch of chickens perched on the roof, alongside the wicked fox. Long Qingping’s corpse floated out of the room and followed him. When he sped up, so did the corpse, and when he made a turn, the corpse followed suit. Long Qingping’s corpse nearly made him soil himself out of fright. Finally, her tangle of hair was caught in the wire fence around the war relics, and Jintong was free of her. The artillery barrels poked out of the muddy water; of the tanks, only the turrets and guns showed above the surface, like enormous turtles sticking their necks out of the water. When the two men drew up to the tractor unit, the chicken farm collapsed.

In the tractor unit garage, people had crowded onto a pair of red Russian combines, and more were trying to climb aboard; by doing so, they sent others sliding down into the water.

A surge of water washed away the security section chief, gaining for Jintong his freedom. He and several rightists headed, hand in hand, toward the Flood Dragon River under the leadership of the high-jumper Wang Meizan, with the civil engineer Liang Badong bringing up the rear. Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, Qiao Qisha, and others he didn’t know walked between the two men, joined by Jintong, who half walked and half swam into their midst. Qiao Qisha reached out to him. The women’s wet blouses stuck to their bodies, almost as if they were naked. By force of habit, however disgusting, he cast fleeting glances at the chests of Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, and Qiao Qisha. They carried Jintong back to the dreamland of his youth, and drove Long Qingping’s image out of his head. He felt himself turning into a butterfly crawling out of Long’s blackened corpse to dry his wings in the sun and flit among a garden of breasts that emitted a strange redolence.

Jintong found himself wishing he could trudge through this water forever, but the Flood Dragon River dike dashed his hopes. Farm workers huddled atop the dike were hugging their shoulders as the floodwaters flowed slowly down the trough and sent a soft mist into the air. There were no swallows, there were no gulls. Off to the southwest, Dalan was shrouded in the whiteness of rain; everywhere they looked they saw the chaos of water.

When the red-tiled grain storage shed finally fell, the Flood Dragon River Farm became nothing but a gigantic lake. Sounds of weeping rose from the dike – leftists were crying, and so were rightists. Director Li Du, a man they seldom saw, was shaking his gray head – Lu Liren’s head, that is – and shouting shrilly, “Don’t cry, comrades. Be strong. As long as we remain united, we can overcome any difficulty…” All of a sudden, he clutched his chest and began to crumple. The head of the management section tried to catch him, but he fell onto the muddy ground in a heap. “Is there a doctor here? Anyone with medical knowledge, come, quickly!” the man bellowed.

Qiao Qisha and a male rightist ran up. They checked the victim’s pulse and raised his lids to look at his eyes. Then they pinched the trough under his nose and the spot between his thumb and index finger, but that did no good. “He’s gone,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Heart attack.”

Ma Ruilian opened her mouth and released wails from Shangguan Pandi’s throat.

As night fell, the people huddled to stay warm. An airplane with flashing green lights appeared in the sky, rekindling hope below. But it flew past, like a comet, and never returned. At some time in the middle of the night, the rain stopped, and hordes of frogs croaked an earsplitting chorus. A few stars twinkled tentatively in the sky, looking as if they were about to fall to earth. During a brief respite from the croaking frogs, the wind whistled through tree branches floating past us. Out of nowhere, someone dove into the water and immediately turned belly-up, like a large fish. No one screamed for help; no one even seemed to notice. Before long, someone else jumped in, and this time, the reaction on the dike was, if anything, even more callous.

Starlight shone down on Qiao Qisha and Huo Lina as they walked up to Jintong. “I want to tell you about my background in a roundabout fashion,” Qiao Qisha said. She then turned to Huo Lina and spoke to her in Russian for several minutes. Huo Lina matter-of-factly interpreted for her. “When I was four, I was sold to a White Russian woman. No one could tell me why this woman wanted to buy a Chinese girl.” Qiao Qisha continued in Russian, with Huo Lina interpreting. “One day the Russian woman died of alcohol poisoning and I was left to roam the streets, until I was taken in by a railroad station manager. He and his family treated me like their own daughter. Since they were well-off, they paid for me to go to school. After Liberation, in 1949,1 was admitted to a medical school. But then, during the great airing of views, I said that there are bad poor people, just as there are good rich people, and I was labeled a rightist. I believe I am your seventh sister.”

Qisha shook Huo Lina’s hand to thank her. Then she took Jintong by the hand and led him to one side, where she said softly, “I’ve heard things about you. I studied medicine. Your teacher told me that you had sex with the woman before she killed herself. Is that right?” “It was after she did it,” Jintong said haltingly. “That’s despicable,” she said. “The security section chief was a fool. This flood saved your life. You know that, don’t you?” Jintong nodded. “I saw her corpse float away, and so they have no evidence against you,” the woman claiming to be my seventh sister said in a flat voice. “Be firm. Deny ever having sex with her – if we manage to survive the flood, that is.”

Qiao Qisha’s prediction came true. The flood had come to Jintong’s aid. By the time the chief investigator of the County Security Bureau and a medical examiner arrived in a rubber raft, half the people lay unconscious on the Flood Dragon River dike, while the remainder had survived by eating rotting grass they’d fished out of the river, like starving horses. The moment the men climbed out of the raft, they were surrounded by hungry, hopeful people. They responded by flashing their badges, unholstering their pistols, and announcing that they were there to investigate the rape and murder of a heroic woman. A chorus of angry curses erupted. The scowling investigator demanded to see the survivors’ leader, and was directed to Lu Liren, who lay on the muddy ground, his gray uniform torn apart by his bloated body. “That’s him.” Holding his nose, the investigator made a wide turn around the decaying, fly-specked body of Lu Liren, searching out the farm’s security section chief, who had reported the crime by telephone. He was told that the man had floated down the river on a plank three days earlier. The investigator stopped in front of Ji Qiongzhi; the chilled looks they exchanged revealed the complex emotions of a divorced couple. “The death of a person means about as much as the death of a dog these days, doesn’t it?” she said. “So what’s to investigate?” The investigator glanced out at the corpses floating in the murky water, some animal and others human, and said, “Those are two separate matters.” So they went looking for Shangguan Jintong and began to grill him, applying a range of psychological tactics. But Jintong held firm, refusing to divulge this final secret.

Several days later, after tramping through a sea of knee-high mud, the conscientious chief investigator and the medical examiner found Long Qingping’s body, which had been snagged by the wire fence. But as the examiner was photographing the body, it exploded like a time bomb, its rotting skin and sticky juices fouling the water over a wide area. All that remained snagged on the fence was a skeleton. The medical examiner retrieved the skull, with its bullet hole, and examined it from every angle. He arrived at two conclusions: the muzzle was up against the temple when the shot was fired, and while it looked like suicide, murder was a possibility.

They prepared to take Jintong back with them, but were quickly surrounded by rightists. “Take a good look at this boy,” Ji Qiongzhi said, taking advantage of her special relationship with the chief investigator. “Does he look like someone who’s capable of rape and murder? That woman was a terrifying demon. This boy, on the other hand, was my student.”

By that time, the chief investigator had himself nearly been driven to suicide by hunger and the pervasive stench. “The case is closed,” he said, fed up with the whole matter. “Long Qingping took her own life.” With that, he and the medical examiner climbed into their rubber raft to return to headquarters. But the raft no sooner left the bank than it spun around and was swept downriver.

6

In the spring of 1960, when the countryside was littered with the corpses of famine victims, members of the Flood Dragon River Farm rightist unit were transformed into a herd of ruminants, scouring the earth for vegetation to quell their hunger. Everyone was limited to an ounce and a half of grain daily, minus the amount skimmed off the top by the storekeeper, the manager of the dining hall, and other important individuals. What remained was enough for a bowl of porridge so thin they could see their reflection in it. But that didn’t release them from their duties of rebuilding the farm. Also, with the help of soldiers from the local artillery unit, they cultivated acres of muddy land with millet. Poison was added to the fertilizer to keep away the thieves. It was so potent that the ground was carpeted with dead crickets, worms, and assorted other insects unknown to the rightist Fang Huawen, who was a trained biologist. Birds that fed on insects flopped over stiff, and critters that came to feed on their corpses hopped into the air and were dead before they hit the ground.

In the spring, when the millet crop was knee high, all sorts of vegetables were ready to be picked, and the rightists out in the field crammed whatever they could find into their mouths as they worked. During rest periods, they sat in trenches, regurgitating the leafy mess in their stomachs to chew it up as finely as possible. Green saliva gathered at the corners of their mouths, on faces so bloated the skin was translucent.

No more than ten farm workers were spared from dropsy. The new director, called Little Old Du, was one of them; the granary storekeeper, Guo Zilan, was another, and everyone knew they were pilfering horse feed. Special Agent Wei Guoying did not suffer, since his wolfhound warranted a supply of meat. Another man, by the name of Zhou Tianbao, was also spared. As a child he’d blown off three of his fingers with a homemade bomb; years later, he’d lost an eye when his rifle blew up in his face. Put in charge of farm security, he slept during the day and prowled every corner of the farm at night, armed with a Czech rifle. He was housed in a tiny sheet-metal hut in a corner of the military hardware scrapyard, from which the fragrant odor of meat being cooked often emerged late at night. The smell made sleep all but impossible for people in the area. One night, Guo Wenhao crept over to the hut and was about to peek in the window when he felt the thud of a rifle butt. “Damn you,” Zhou Tianbao cursed, the light from his one good eye cutting through the darkness. “A counterrevolutionary! What are you doing, sneaking around like this?” The muzzle of Zhou’s rifle dug into Guo’s back. “What’s cooking in there, Tianbao?” Guo asked mischievously. “How about giving me a taste?” “I doubt that you have the guts,” Zhou grumbled softly. “The only thing with four legs I won’t eat is a table,” Guo said. “And the only two-legged thing I won’t eat is a person.” Zhou laughed. “That’s human meat I’m cooking.” Guo Wenhao turned and ran.

Word that Zhou Tianbao was eating human flesh quickly made the rounds, throwing everyone into a panic. People slept with one eye open, terrified that Zhou would come get them for his next meal. In order to quell the rumor, Little Old Du called a meeting to announce that he had looked into the matter, and that Zhou Tianbao was cooking and eating rats he found in abandoned tanks. He told everyone, especially the rightists, to quit acting like stinking intellectuals and learn how to open up new sources of food, like Zhou Tianbao, in order to save up grain during lean years and make it possible to support people throughout the world who are worse off than us. Wang Siyuan, a graduate of an agricultural college, suggested growing mushrooms on rotting wood; Little Old Du gave him the go-ahead. Two weeks later, the mushroom plan led to the poisoning of more than a hundred people; some suffered no more than a bout of vomiting and diarrhea, but others were temporarily deranged, as if they were speaking in tongues. The security section thought it was an act of sabotage, but the health department attributed it to food poisoning. As a result, Little Old Du was censured, and the rightist Wang Siyuan was reclassified as an ultra-rightist. Most of the victims were treated in time and were soon out of danger. Huo Lina, on the other hand, could not be saved. In the aftermath of her death, a rumor spread that she had been involved with a dining hall worker everyone called Pockface Zhang, and that she always got larger helpings of food than the others. Someone said that on a Sunday night, during the movie, the two of them were seen slipping out in the dark into some tall grass.

Huo Lina’s death hit Jintong especially hard, and he refused to believe that someone from a good family who had gone to school in Russia would give herself to anyone as ugly and as coarse as Pockface Zhang for a little extra soup. What happened later on to Qiao Qisha proved him wrong. For when a woman is so undernourished that her breasts lie flat on her chest and her periods stop coming, self-respect and chastity cease to exist. Poor Jintong was to witness the entire incident, from start to finish.

During the spring, some plow oxen were delivered to the farm. Before long, they discovered there weren’t enough females for mating purposes, so they castrated four of the bulls to fatten them up for food. Ma Ruilian was still in charge of the livestock unit, but with significantly less power, now that Li Du was dead. So when Deng Jiarong walked off with all eight of the detached testicles, all she could do was glare at his back. When she detected the salivating fragrance of the testicles on Deng Jiarong’s grill wafting out of the breeding station, she told Chen San to bring some back. Deng demanded a quantity of horse feed in return, to which Ma Ruilian reluctantly agreed, exchanging a catty of dried bean cakes for one of the testicles.

Jintong was given the job of walking the oxen at night to keep them from lying down and reopening the wounds. It was murky at dusk, and at the farm’s eastern irrigation ditch, he led the animals into a stand of willows, where he tied them to trees. Five nights in a row he had walked them, until his legs felt weighted down with lead. As he sat leaning against one of the trees, his eyelids grew heavy, and he was about to fall asleep when the soul-stirring, sweet and fresh aroma of freshly baked and still warm buns assailed his nose. His eyes snapped open. What he saw was the cook, Pockface Zhang, walking backward with a steamed bun on a skewer, waving it in the air like bait. And that’s exactly what it was. Some three or four feet away, Qiao Qisha, the flow^rer of the medical school, was following him, her eyes fixed greedily on the bun. Weak light from the setting sun haloed her puffy face, as if coating it with the blood of a dog. She walked with difficulty, gasping for breath and reaching out with her hand. More than once she nearly touched it, but Pockface Zhang pulled it back each time, grinning maliciously. She whimpered like an abused puppy. But whenever her frustration nearly forced her away, the fragrance of the bun brought her back, as if in a trance. Qiao Qisha, who, at a time when everyone was given six ounces of grain a day, could still refuse to inseminate a rabbit with sheep’s sperm, had lost her faith in politics and science, now that the ration had dwindled to one ounce a day; animal instinct drove her toward the steamed bun, and it didn’t matter who was holding it. She followed it deep into the stand of willows. That morning, Jintong had spent his rest period helping Chen San cut hay, for which he’d received three ounces of dry bean cakes. That had given him enough self-control to resist the temptation to join the bun parade. Evidence would later show that during the famine of 1960, Zhang traded food for sex with nearly every female rightist at the farm. Qiao Qisha was the last stronghold he breached. The youngest, most beautiful, and most obstinate woman among the rightists turned out to be no harder to conquer than any of the others. In the blood-red rays of the dying sun, Jintong watched the rape of his seventh sister.

What was a waterlogged catastrophe for the farm was a wonderful time for the willows. Red aerial roots sprouted on their black trunks, like the antennae of an ocean creature, which bled when they were broken off. The great canopies were like enraged madwomen, their hair flying. Tender, supple, watery leaves, normally a soft yellow, now pink in color, sprouted on all the limbs. Jintong had the feeling that both the branches and the leaves must be truly delectable, and while the episode ran its course in front of him, his mouth was stuffed with willow twigs and leaves.

Finally, Pockface Zhang tossed the bun to the ground. Qiao Qisha rushed up and grabbed it, stuffing it into her mouth before she even straightened up. Pockface Zhang moved behind her, lifted her skirt, pulled her filthy red panties down to her ankles, and skillfully lifted out one leg. After parting her legs, he took out his organ, unaffected by the famine of 1960, and stuck it in. Like a dog stealing food, she forced herself to tolerate the painful posterior attack as she gobbled down the food, continuing to swallow even when it was gone. The pain in her crotch was nothing compared to the pleasure the food brought. And so, while Pockface Zhang was madly pumping from behind, making her body rock, she never stopped attacking her food. Tears wet her eyes, a biological reaction from choking on the bun, totally devoid of emotion. Maybe, once she’d finished swallowing the food, she became aware of the pain in her backside, because when she straightened up, she turned to look behind her. The dry bun had gone down hard, stretching her throat, so she thrust out her neck like a duck. Pockface Zhang was still inside her, so he wrapped his arm around her waist and, with the other hand, took a flattened bun out of his pocket and tossed it on the ground in front of her. She stepped forward and bent down again, with him still attached, one hand on her hip, the other pushing down on her shoulder. This time, as she ate the bun, she allowed him unconditional freedom to proceed as he wished, with no interference.

Jintong chewed ferociously on the willow twigs and leaves, a delicacy that somehow had gone unnoticed. At first they were sweet, but when he ate them later, that sweetness was soon replaced by a puckery bitterness that made it impossible to swallow. There was a reason people didn’t eat them. He kept chewing as his eyes filled with tears. Through the haze of his tears he saw that the drama in front of him had played itself out and that Pockface Zhang had left the scene, leaving Qiao Qisha standing there looking around as if she didn’t know where she was. Then she too walked off, her head banging against low-hanging willow branches.

With his arms around one of the trees, Jintong rested his weary head against the bark.

The long spring season was nearly over; the millet was ripe, a sign that the days of hunger were coming to an end. In order to make sure the workers had the strength to bring in the millet harvest, the authorities sent a load of bean cakes to the farm, enough for everyone to get four ounces. But just as Huo Lina had died from eating mushrooms, Qiao Qisha’s system would not be able to handle all the extra food, and she too would die.

She stood in the line of people waiting for their ration, which was distributed by Pockface Zhang and one of the cooks. Holding a rice container, she was in line directly ahead of Jintong. He saw Pockface Zhang wink at her when he handed over her ration, but she was too captivated by the fragrance of the food to make much of it. Fights broke out over minor disparities in the distribution, and Jintong had the vague and painful feeling that Qisha would get more than she was entitled to. Orders had come down that four ounces were to last two days, but everyone took their ration home and consumed every last crumb immediately. That night there was a constant stream of people running over to the well for water. The food in their stomachs swelled, and Jintong enjoyed the all-but-forgotten pleasure of feeling full. He belched and farted constantly, the smell of bean cakes emerging from both ends. There was a line at the toilet the next morning; the bean cakes had wrought havoc on the systems of people who had gone hungry for too long.

No one knew just how much Qiao Qisha had eaten, no one but Pockface Zhang, who wasn’t talking. And Jintong had no desire to soil the reputation of his seventh sister. He’d noticed that her belly poked out like a water vat. Sooner or later, he was thinking, every one of them would die from starvation or overeating anyway, so why worry about it?

The cause of her death was clear, so no investigation was called for. And since the body would not keep long in the late-summer heat, the order came down to bury her at once. There was no coffin and, of course, no ceremony. A few of the female rightists planned to dress her in the nicest clothes she owned, but the sight of her grotesquely distended belly and the foul bubbly foam on her lips drove them back in disgust. So some of the male rightists scrounged up a tattered piece of canvas once used by the tractor unit, wrapped her up in it and fastened the ends with wire, then loaded her onto the back of a cart and carried her over to a grassy spot near the war relic scrapyard, where they dug a hole and buried her next to Huo Lina and in front of the skeleton of Long Qingping, all but the skull, which had been taken away by the medical examiner.

7

Night fell as Jintong walked into the house he hadn’t seen for a year. The son left behind by Laidi and Birdman Han was standing in a canopied cradle that hung from the parasol tree, holding on to the sides. Although he was dark and very thin, he was healthier than most children of the time. “Who are you?” Jintong asked as he put down his bedroll. The dark-eyed youngster blinked and gazed at Jintong curiously. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m your uncle.” “Gramma… yao yao…” The boy’s speech was muddled; slobber ran down his chin.

Jintong sat down in the doorway to wait for Mother to come out. This was his first trip home since being sent to the farm, and he was told he didn’t have to return there if he didn’t want to. The thought of all those thousands of acres of millet enraged him, because once the harvest was in, the farm workers were scheduled for a real meal. And that is when Jintong and several other young men had been cut from the workforce. A few days later, his rage lost its meaning, because just as the rightists were driving their red Russian combines out to the fields to begin the harvest, a hailstorm mercilessly pounded the ripe millet into the mud.

The little boy ignored him as he sat in the doorway. Parrots with emerald green feathers flew down from the parasol tree and circled the cradle. The bright-eyed little boy followed them as they flitted around totally unafraid. Some landed on the edge of the cradle, others perched on his shoulders and pecked him on the ears, while he mimicked their hoarse cries.

Jintong sat dully in the doorway, his eyelids drooping. He was thinking about the boat ride over, and the surprised look in the eyes of the ferryman, Huang Laowan. The Flood Dragon River Bridge had been washed away by the flood the year before, so the People’s Commune had begun operating a ferry. A talkative young soldier from somewhere down south had accompanied him on the ride across the river. The man waved a telegram under the nose of Huang Laowan and pressed him to get underway. “Let’s shove off, uncle. See here, I’m supposed to be back in my unit by noon today. At times like this, a military order can topple a mountain!” Huang Laowan’s reaction to the hurried soldier was stone-cold silence. With a shrug of the shoulders, he perched on the bow of the ferryboat like a cormorant, gazing out at the rushing river water. A while later, a pair of officials who were returning to the commune from town came aboard and sat on opposite sides of the ferry. “Say, old Huang, let’s get underway!” one of them urged. “We have to be back to pass on the essence of our meeting.” “In a minute,” Huang said in a muffled voice. “I’m waiting for her.”

She jumped aboard carrying a balloon lute and sat down across from Jintong. She was powdered and rouged, but not enough to conceal her sallow complexion. The officials eyed her wantonly. “What village are you from?” one of them asked in a superior tone.

Raising her head, she stared at the man. Her gloomy eyes, which had been downcast from the moment she boarded the ferry, suddenly emitted a wild glare of hostility, causing Jintong’s heart to shudder; the look in the eyes of this sallow-faced woman left him with the feeling that she could conquer any man she chose, and could never be conquered by any man. The skin on her face sagged and her neck was deeply wrinkled, but Jintong noticed her slender fingers and polished nails, a good indication that she wasn’t nearly as old as her face and neck made her appear. As she glared at the official, she hugged the lute to her chest, as if it were an infant.

Huang Laowan got up and walked to the stern, where he picked up a bamboo pole and pushed the ferry out of the shallows, then turned it around and headed out into the river, leaving whitecaps in its wake as it slid forward like a big fish. Swallows skimmed the surface; the chilled stench of water weeds rose all around them. The passengers sat there morosely. But the official who’d spoken to the woman could not abide the silence. “Aren’t you that Shangguan who…” Jintong responded with a look of indifference; he knew what the man had left unsaid, so he replied in the manner he’d gotten used to, “That’s right, I’m Shangguan Jintong, the bastard.” The straightforward response and self-belittling attitude created an awkward moment, as the arrogance so common to people on the public payroll came under attack. That put him off stride, and class struggle, with clear insinuations, was his way back. The official studiously avoided looking at Jintong, keeping his eyes instead on Huang Laowan’s bamboo pole. “They say those secret U.S./Chiang Kai-shek agents are all from Northeast Gaomi Township, men who once served Sima Ku. I tell you, those with the blood of the people on them were all trained by an American adviser. Huang Laowan, can you guess who that adviser was? No? Fm told you’ve seen him before. He’s none other than the tyrant who threw in his lot with Sima Ku in Northeast Gaomi County, the man who showed all the movies, Babbitt! And they say that his stinking old lady, Shangguan Niandi, even threw a banquet for secret agents and gave each of them a fancy embroidered slipper sole!”

The woman with the lute stole a glance at Jintong; he could feel her eyes on him and saw her fingers quivering on the instrument’s sound box.

The commune official was just getting started. “Young man,” he said, “now’s the chance for you soldiers to do something for your country. The day you catch one of those secret agents is the day you stand tall among your countrymen!”

The young soldier whipped out his telegram. “I knew something big was up,” he said, “which is why I put off my wedding and am rushing back to my unit.”

When the ferry drew up to the opposite bank, the young soldier was the first to jump off. The woman with the lute held back, as if she wanted to speak to Jintong. “Come with us to the commune,” the official said sternly.

“Why?” she said nervously. “Why should I?”

He ripped the lute out of her hands and shook it. Something rattled around inside. He turned red with excitement, his wormlike nose began to twitch. “A transmitter!” he bleated. “Either that or a gun!” The woman rushed up to grab it away from him, but he stepped to the side, and she grabbed only air. “Give it to me!” she demanded. “Give it to you?” He sneered. “What’s hidden inside?” “A woman’s personal item.” “A woman’s personal item? Why hide something like that in there? Come with me to the commune, madam citizen.” A fierce look appeared on the woman’s gaunt face. “I asked you nicely to give it to me, son. You can beat the mountain to frighten tigers all you want. I’ve seen this sort of daylight robbery plenty of times. People who live off of others are nothing new to me.” “What do you do?” the official asked, his confidence beginning to fade. “That’s none of your business. Now give me back my lute!” “I’m not authorized to do that,” he said. “I’d like you to come with me to the commune.” “You steal from people in broad daylight! You’re worse than the Japs!” The official turned and ran in the direction of the commune headquarters – the onetime compound belonging to the Sima family. “Thief!” the woman shouted as she ran after him. “You thug, you lousy bedbug!”

Feeling that this woman was somehow tied to the Shangguan family, Jintong ran down the fate of his sisters in his mind. Laidi was dead, and so were Zhaodi, Lingdi, and Qiudi. Though he hadn’t seen Niandi’s body, he knew she was dead too. Pandi had changed her name to Ma Ruilian, and even though she was still alive, she might as well be dead. That left only Xiangdi and Yunü. The woman’s teeth were yellow and her head looked bulky. The corners of her mouth sagged when she yelled at the official, and a green light emerged from her eyes, like a cat defending her young. It had to be Xiangdi, the one who had sold herself – Fourth Sister, who had sacrificed so much for the family. What then had she hidden inside her lute?

Jintong was pondering the mystery of the lute when Mother, by then little more than skin and bones, rushed into the house. When he heard the door being bolted, he looked up in time to see her rush in from the side room. He called out to her and burst into tears at the same moment, like an abused little boy. Seemingly surprised to see him, she managed to not say a word. Instead, with her hands over her mouth, she turned and ran outside, straight to the water-filled wooden basin beneath the apricot tree, where she fell to her knees, grabbed the rim with both hands, stretched out her neck, opened her mouth, and threw up. A bowlful of still dry beans gushed out, sending water splashing out of the basin. When she caught her breath, she raised her head to look at her son, her eyes filling with tears. She tried to say something before she bent over and threw up again. Jintong looked at the frightening sight of his mother with her neck thrust out and her shoulders hunched down, as her body reacted to the spasms deep down inside. Once the retching had stopped, she reached into the water and scooped up the dried beans, a satisfied look spreading across her face. Finally, she stood up, walked over to her tall yet weak son, and wrapped her arms around him. “Why didn’t you come home before this?” she asked in a slightly reproachful tone. “It’s only a couple of miles.” Before he could reply, she continued, “Shortly after you left, I found work operating the commune mill, the one at the Sima compound. They tore down the windmill, so now it’s turned by hand. Du Wendou got me the job. The pay is half a catty of dried yams a day. If not for this job, I wouldn’t be here to greet you this time. Nor would Parrot.”

That is when Jintong found out that Birdman Han’s son was called Parrot. He was still in his cradle, bawling loudly. “Go pick him up, and I’ll make lunch for the two of you.”

Mother rinsed off the dried beans she’d scooped out of the basin and put them into a large bowl, nearly filling it. Noting the look of surprise on his face, she said, “I do what has to be done, son. Don’t laugh at me. I’ve done many bad things in my life, but this is the first time I’ve ever stolen anything.”

He rested his head on his mother’s shoulder and said sadly, “Don’t say that, Mother. That’s not stealing. Even if it were, there are far worse things than stealing.”

Mother took a garlic mortar out from under the stove and crushed the beans in it, then added cold water to make it pasty. “Go ahead, son, eat it,” she said as she handed him the bowl. “I don’t dare light a fire, or they’ll come to see what I’m cooking, and I can’t let that happen.”

“What made you think of doing this?” Jintong asked sadly as he gazed at her gray, slightly tremulous head.

“At first I hid them in my socks, but they caught me and made me feel lower than a dog. Then everyone began eating beans. Once, I was milling beans and tossed some into my mouth; my stomach felt heavy on the road home and I could hardly walk. I knew they could kill me, and that frightened me. I stuck a chopstick down my throat and brought them back up in the yard when it was raining, and so I just let them be. In the morning, I saw they’d all turned white in the rain, and Parrot was on his hands and knees eating them, remarking how sweet they tasted and asking what they were. Big as he was, he’d never even seen beans. He stuffed some into my mouth, and they were sweet and sticky, delicious. When they were all gone, Parrot clamored for more, and that’s when I got the idea. At first I had to use a chopstick to make myself throw up… oh, the feeling… but now I’m used to it, and all I have to do is lower my head… your mother’s stomach has turned into a grain sack… but I’m afraid today was the last time. All the women I work with at the mill have been doing the same thing, and the man in charge has noticed how much food turns up missing each day. He’s threatened to muzzle us…”

The conversation then turned to Jintong’s experiences on the farm over the preceding year, and he told Mother everything, including sex with Long Qingping, the death of Qiudi and Lu Liren, and how Pandi had changed her name.

Mother sat silently until the moon crept from the eastern sky and cast its light into the yard and through the window. “You didn’t do anything wrong, son,” she said at last. “That young woman Long’s soul found peace, and we will count her as a member of the family. Wait until the times get better, and we will bring her and your seventh sister’s remains home.”

Mother picked up Parrot, who was rocking back and forth from sleep, and carried him to the bed. “There was a time when there were so many Shangguans we were like a herd of sheep. Now there are few of us left.”

Jintong forced himself to ask, “What about Eighth Sister?” With a sigh, she gave him an embarrassed look, as if begging for forgiveness.

Even at the age of twenty, Yunuwas still like a little girl, a frightened, timid little girl. She’d always been like a chrysalis, spending her life in a cocoon, never wanting to cause the family any trouble. During the gloomy, rainy months of summer, she listened sorrowfully to the sound of Mother out in the yard throwing up. Thunder rolled off in the distance, the wind rustled leaves on the trees, the burnt odor of crackling lightning was in the air, but the sounds weren’t loud enough to cover up the retching noise outside, and none of the smells masked the stench of her vomit. The sound of the beans falling into the water went straight to the girl’s heart. How she wished it would stop, but at the same time she wanted it to continue forever. She was disgusted by the smell of Mother’s stomach juices and blood, but at the same time grateful for it. When Mother crushed the beans in the mortar, she felt as if it were her heart being mashed. And when Mother handed her the bowl of beans, with their raw, cold, sticky odor, hot tears rolled out of her sightless eyes and her lovely mouth twitched with each spoonful of the gooey mix. The enormous sense of gratitude in her heart went unspoken.

The previous year, on the morning of the seventh day of the seventh month, as Mother was leaving for the mill, Yunü had blurted out, “What do you look like, Mother?” Reaching out with her fair hands, she’d said, “Let me feel your face – please.”

With a sigh, Mother said, “Foolish little girl, bad as the times are, is that all you want?”

Mother brought her face up to Eighth Sister’s hands and let her stroke it with her soft fingers, which had a damp, cold odor. “Go wash your hands, Yunü. There’s water in the basin.”

After Mother left, Eighth Sister climbed down off the bed. She heard Parrot singing happily in his cradle, mixed with the chirps of birds, the sound of snails dragging slime across the bark of trees, and swallows making a nest in the eaves. Sniffing the air, she followed the smell of clear water over to the basin, where she bent down. Her lovely face was reflected in the water, just as Natasha’s image had once found Jintong’s eyes, but she couldn’t see it. Not many people had seen the face of this Shangguan girl. She had a high nose, fair skin, soft, yellow hair, and a long, thin neck, like that of a swan. When she felt the cold water on the tip of her nose, and then her lips, she buried her face in it. The rush of water up her nose made her choke, bringing her back to reality, and she jerked her head up out of the water. There was a buzzing in her ears, her nose ached and felt swollen. As soon as she smacked her ears with her hands to clear out the water, she heard the chirping of parrots in the tree and the cries of Parrot Han for his eighth aunt. She walked over to the tree, where she reached up and rubbed his drippy nose. Then, without a word, she groped her way out the gate.

Mother reached up and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. “Your eighth sister left because she thought she was a burden,” she said softly. “Your eighth sister was sent to us by her father, the Dragon King. But her time was up, and now she has returned to the Eastern Ocean to continue her life as the Dragon Princess…”

Jintong wanted to console Mother, but could not find the words. He merely coughed to mask the pain in his heart.

Just then there was a knock at the door. Mother trembled briefly, before hiding the mortar and saying to Jintong, “Open the door. See who it is.”

Jintong opened the door. It was the woman from the ferry boat. She was standing timidly at the door holding her lute. “Are you Jintong?” she asked in a tiny, mosquito-like voice.

Shangguan Xiangdi had come home.

8

Five years later, on a winter morning, as Xiangdi lay waiting to die, she suddenly climbed out of bed. Her nose had rotted away, leaving behind only a black hole, and she was blind in both eyes. Nearly all her hair had fallen out, and all that remained were a few rust-colored wisps here and there on her shriveled scalp. After groping her way over to the standing cabinet, she climbed onto a stool and took down her lute, the box of which had been smashed. She then groped her way outside. Sunlight warmed the body of this woman whose rotting flesh smelled like mildew. She looked up at the sun, without seeing it. Mother, who was in the yard weaving rush mats for the production team, stood up. “Xiangdi,” she said anxiously, “my poor daughter, what are you doing out here?”

Xiangdi sat huddled at the base of the wall, her scaly legs sticking out straight. Her belly was exposed, but modesty had long since played no role in her life, and she was no longer bothered by the cold. Mother ran inside for a blanket, which she draped over Xiangdi’s legs. “My precious daughter, all your life, you…” She wiped her eyes dry of the few tears that may have been there, and went back to weaving mats.

The shouts of grade-school children sounded nearby: “Attack attack attack all class enemies! Garry out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!” Their hoarse slogans traveled up and down the streets and lanes. Childlike drawings and badly written but intense slogans in colored chalk adorned all the walls in the neighborhood.

Xiangdi said in a muffled voice, “Mother, I've slept with ten thousand men and earned a great deal of money. With it I bought gold and jewels, enough to keep food on your table for the rest of your lives.” She rubbed her hand across the box of her lute, which the commune official had smashed, and said, “It was all in here, Mother. Look at this night-luminescent pearl. It was a gift from a Japanese client. If you sew it into a cap and wear it at night, it lights the way like a lantern… I traded ten rings and a small ruby for this cat’s eye… this pair of gold bracelets was a gift from Old Master Xiong, who took my maidenhead.” One by one she removed the precious memorabilia that had been inside the lute. “There’s no need to worry, Mother, not with all this. This emerald alone is enough to buy a thousand catties of flour, and this necklace is at least worth a donkey… Mother, on the day I entered the fire pit of prostitution, I vowed that I would give my sisters a good life, since sleeping with one man is no different than sleeping with a thousand of them. This is what I traded my body for. I carried this lute with me everywhere I went. I had this longevity locket made especially for Jintong. Make sure he wears it… Mother, put these things where thieves cannot find them, and don’t let the Poor Peasants Association take them from you… what you have here is your daughter’s blood and sweat… are you hiding them?”

Mother’s face was now awash in tears. She wrapped her arms around Xiangdi’s syphilitic body and sobbed, “My precious daughter, you’ve shredded my heart… all that we’ve been through, no one had it worse than my Xiangdi…”

Jintong had just returned from having his head split open by a gang of Red Guards while he was out sweeping the streets. Now he stood beneath the parasol tree, all bloody, listening to Fourth Sister’s heartbreaking tale. Red Guards had nailed a row of placards to the gate of their compound, with notices such as: Traitor’s Family, Landlord Restitution Corps Nest, and Whore’s House. But as he listened to his dying sister, he had the urge to change the word “Whore’s” to “Filial Daughter’s” or “Martyr’s.” Up till now he had kept his distance from his sister because of her sickness; how he wished he hadn’t done that. He walked up to her, took her cold hand in his, and said, “Fourth Sister, thank you for the locket… Fm wearing it now.”

The glow of happiness shone in Fourth Sister’s blind eyes. “Really? It doesn’t give you a bad feeling? Don’t tell your wife where you got it… let me touch it… see if it fits.”

During Xiangdi’s final moments on earth, all the fleas on her body left her, sensing, I guess, that there would be no more blood from her.

A smile, an ugly smile, rose on her lips and she said, her voice faltering, “My lute… let me play something… for you…”

She strummed the strings a time or two before her hand fell away and her head slumped to the side.

Mother wept for a moment only; then she stood up and said, “My precious daughter, your suffering has come to an end.”

Two days after we buried Xiangdi, just as things were calming down, a team of eight rightists from the Flood Dragon River Farm brought the body of Shangguan Pandi up to our gate. A man with a red armband, their leader, pounded on the gate. “You, Shangguans, come claim your body!”

“She’s not my daughter,” Mother told the leader.

The leader, a member of the tractor unit, knew Jintong, so he handed him a slip of paper. “This is your sister’s letter. In the spirit of revolutionary humanism, we’ve brought her home to you. You can’t imagine how heavy she is – carrying her body has just about worn out these rightists.”

Jintong nodded apologetically to the rightists before unfolding the slip of paper. On it were the words: I am Shangguan Pandi, not Ma Ruilian. After participating in the revolution for over twenty years, this is how I’ve ended up. When I die, I beg the revolutionary masses to take my body back to Dalan and turn it over to my mother, Shangguan Lu.

Jintong walked up to the door leaf on which the body lay, bent over, and removed the white paper covering her face. Pandi’s eyeballs bulged and her tongue stuck halfway out. Quickly covering her face again, he threw himself at the feet of the eight rightists and said, “I beg you, please, carry her over to the graveyard. There’s no one here who can do it.”

Mother began to wail loudly.

After burying his fifth sister, Jintong walked into the lane, dragging a shovel behind him, where he was stopped by a gang of Red Guards. They placed a paper dunce cap on his head. He shook his head, and the cap fell to the ground; he saw that his name had been written on it, with a red X through it. The black and red ink had run together, like blood. Beneath his name were the words “Necrophiliac and Murderer.” When the Red Guards began beating him on the buttocks with a club, he set up a howl, even though his padded pants kept the blows from hurting much. One of the Red Guards picked up the cap, ordered him to squat down like the comic opera character Wu Dalang, and put the cap back on his head, then pounded it down so it would stay. “Hold it on!” a fierce-looking Red Guard demanded. “The next time it falls off, we’ll break your legs!”

Holding the cap on with both hands, Jintong stumbled down the lane. At the gate of the People’s Commune, he saw a line of people, all wearing dunce caps. There were Sima Ting, his belly bloated, the taut skin nearly transparent; the grade-school principal; the middle-school political instructor, plus five or six commune officials minus their usual swagger, and a bunch of people who had once been forced by Lu Liren to kneel on the earthen platform in front of all the people. Then Jintong saw his mother. Next to her was little Parrot Han, and next to him was Old Jin, the woman with one breast. The words “Mother Scorpion, Shangguan Lu” were written on Mother’s cap. Parrot Han wasn’t wearing a cap, but Old Jin was, along with an old shoe that hung around her neck, as a sign of wantonness. With drums and gongs shattering the stillness, the Red Guards began the public parading of the “Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits.” It was the last market day before New Year’s, and the streets were packed with shoppers. People squatted on both sides of the street with piles of straw sandals, cabbages, and yam leaves, salable agricultural by-products. Everyone wore black padded jackets, shiny with a winter of snivel and greasy smoke. Many of the older men cinched up their pants with belts of hemp, and the general appearance of the people wasn’t much different from the Snow Festival fifteen years earlier. Half the people who had attended the Snow Festival had died during the three years of famine, and the survivors were now old men and women. A scant few^r of them could still recall how graceful and elegant the Snow Prince, Shangguan Jintong, had looked at that last Snow Festival. At the time, none of them could have imagined that he would one day become a “Necrophiliac and Murderer.”

The Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits walked on woodenly as Red Guards smacked them in the buttocks with clubs, more symbolic than real. The clanging of gongs and the beating of drums rocked the earth, the shouted slogans made eardrums throb. Crowds of people pointed fingers and engaged in animated discussions. As they walked, Jintong felt someone step on his right foot, but he let that pass. When it happened a second time, he looked up and saw that Old Jin’s eyes were on him, though her head was bowed and strands of yellow hair covered her reddened ears. “Goddamned ‘Snow Prince,’” he heard her say. “With all the living girls waiting for you, you had to do it to a corpse!” Pretending he hadn’t heard her, he kept his eyes fixed on the heels of the person ahead of him. “Come see me when this is over,” he heard her say, throwing him into confusion. Her inappropriate teasing disgusted him.

Sima Ting, who was hobbling along, tripped over a brick and fell to the ground. The Red Guards kicked him, but got no reaction. So one of the smaller ones stepped on his back and jumped up and down. We all heard a dull sound like a balloon popping and saw rivulets of yellow liquid ooze from his mouth. Mother knelt down and turned his head to face her. “What’s the matter, uncle?” His eyes opened just enough to show white, and with one last look at Mother, those eyes closed for the last time. The Red Guards dragged his body over to the ditch by the road. The procession continued.

Jintong spotted a graceful figure in the crowd, and recognized her at once. She was wearing a black corduroy overcoat, a brown scarf, and a blindingly white mask over her mouth and nose, so that all that showed were her dark eyes and lashes. Sha Zaohua! He nearly shouted out her name. She’d gone away right after First Sister was shot; during the seven years that had passed since then, he’d heard a rumor about a female thief who’d stolen Princess Sihanouk’s earring, and he knew it had to be Zaohua. From her appearance alone, she looked to have grown into a mature young woman. Among the black-clad citizens in the marketplace, those wearing scarves and face masks were the first group of urban youngsters to be sent down to the countryside, and Zaohua had the most urban airs of any of them. She was standing in the doorway of the co-op restaurant looking in his direction. The sun’s rays fell on her face, and he saw that her eyes shone like a pair of glittering marbles. Her hands were in the pockets of her overcoat; she was wearing a pair of blue corduroy pants, cut in the fashionable style of the day, which Jintong caught a glimpse of when she moved over to the doorway of the general store. A shirtless old man came running out of the restaurant and straight into the procession of Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits, with two men, who were not locals, in hot pursuit. The old man was so cold his skin was nearly black; his coarse white padded pants were hitched up all the way to his chest. As he weaved in and out among the people in dunce caps he crammed a flatcake into his mouth, nearly choking on it. The two men caught him, and he burst into tears, covering what was left of the food with snot and saliva. “I was hungry!” he sobbed. “Hungry!” The two men frowned in disgust at the sight of the wet, dirty remnant of the cake on the ground. One of them picked it up with two fingers and studied it disgustedly, but appeared to think it would be a pity to throw it away. “Don’t eat it, young fellow,” someone in the crowd urged him. “Take pity on him.” The man flung the cake down at the old man’s feet and snarled, “Go ahead, eat it, you old bastard, and I hope you choke on it!” He took out a handkerchief to wipe his fingers and walked off with his companion. The old man picked up the wet, sticky cake and carried it over to a nearby wall, where he rested on his haunches and slowly finished it off.

Sha Zaohua was moving in and out of the crowd. A uniformed petroleum worker in a dogskin cap made his way conspicuously toward them. His eyes were scarred, and a cigarette hung from his lips as he edged sideways through the crowd. Everyone eyed him with envy, and the greater his sense of self-importance, the brighter his eyes became. Jintong recognized him and was moved by the sight. Clothes make the man; saddles make the horse. A worker’s uniform and a dogskin cap had turned the village bully Fang Shixian into a new man. Few people in the crowd had ever seen one of those coarse blue uniforms, thick with padding, the cotton bulging between stitches, and obviously very warm. A youngster who looked like a dark monkey, in lined pants with a torn crotch from which cotton batting had migrated outside, like the tail of a sheep, and a padded jacket whose buttons had long since departed, leaving his belly exposed, followed on Fang Shixian’s heels, his hair looking like a rat’s nest. The people in the procession pushed and shoved to keep warm, when the youngster suddenly jumped into the air, swept the dogskin cap off of Fang’s head, clapped it onto his own, and scampered through the crowd like a cunning dog. Shouts erupted as the pushing and shoving increased. Fang Shixian reached up and felt his head; it took him a moment to realize what had happened, before he too began to shout and took off in pursuit of the youngster, who wasn’t running particularly fast, as if waiting for his pursuer. Fang followed him, cursing the whole time, his eyes fixed not on the road ahead, but on the sunlight glinting off the dog hairs of his cap; he crashed into people, who pushed back and spun him around. The unfolding drama captured the attention of everyone on the street, even the Red Guard little generals, who temporarily put aside class struggle, abandoning their Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits in order to push through the crowd and enjoy the spectacle. The youngster ran up to the gate in front of the People’s Commune steel mill, where some girls were selling roasted peanuts, something that was not permitted; always on the alert, they were ready to flee at any time. Even though it was the middle of winter, steam rose from the surface of the nearby pond owing to all the red liquid waste the mill dumped into it. The youngster took off the cap and flung it into the pond. Momentarily stunned, the people quickly regained their voices, shouting their gloating approval of what he’d done. The cap floated in the water, refusing to sink below the surface, and all Fang Shixian could do was stand at the edge of the pond and curse, “You little bastard, just wait till I get my hands on you!” But by then the little bastard was long gone, and Fang just paced back and forth, gazing out at his cap and blinking furiously, tears sliding down his cheeks. “Say, young man, go home and get a bamboo pole. That’ll do it,” someone shouted. “Ten dogskin caps would have sunk by the time you got back,” someone else said. As if to prove him right, the cap had already begun to slip beneath the surface. “Strip and go fetch it,” someone said. “Whoever gets it owns it!” Suddenly panicked, Fang tore off his uniform, until he was standing there dressed only in a pair of shorts; he stepped tentatively into the water, which quickly submerged him up to the shoulders. Finally, however, he managed to retrieve his cap. But while he was in the water, and everyone’s attention was focused on him, Jintong saw the youngster appear out of nowhere, scoop up Fang’s uniform, and disappear down a lane, where a slender figure flicked out of sight. By the time Fang climbed out of the pond, cap in hand, all that greeted him at the water’s edge were a pair of shoes and socks with holes in them. “Where are my clothes?” he shouted, the shouts quickly turning to agonizing wails. By the time he realized that his clothes had been stolen and that the theft of his dogskin cap had been a ruse, that he’d been tricked by a pro, he shouted, “My god, my life is over!” Still holding his cap, he jumped into the pond. Shouts of “Save him!” erupted all around, but no one was willing to strip down and jump in after him. What with the freezing wind and the ice on the ground, even though the water itself was heated, going in would be easier than getting out. So while Fang Shixian thrashed around in the water, the people merely commented on the thief’s scheme: “Brilliant!” they said. “Just brilliant”

Had Mother forgotten that she was being paraded in public? Whatever the answer, this elderly woman who had raised a houseful of daughters and was mother-in-law to many renowned young men flung down her dunce cap and hobbled toward the pond on bound feet. “How can you people just stand there when a man’s drowning?” she castigated the crowd. She picked up a broom from a nearby peddler. At the pond’s edge she shouted, “You there, nephew Fang, have you gone mad? Quick, grab hold of the broom and ITI pull you out!”

The brackish water had apparently changed Fang’s mind about ending it all, so he grabbed hold of the broom and, like a plucked chicken, dragged himself up onto dry ground. His lips had turned purple, and his eyes barely moved in their sockets; he couldn’t speak. Taking off her jacket, Mother wrapped it around his shoulders, which immediately turned him into a comic figure. The people didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “Put your shoes on, young nephew,” Mother said, “then run home as fast as you can. Work up a good sweat, if you don’t want to die from the cold.” Unfortunately for him, his fingers were frozen stiff, and he couldn’t get his shoes on, so a few of the onlookers, moved by Mother’s kindness, managed to help him into his shoes. Then they picked him up and carried him off at a trot, his stiff legs dragging along behind.

Dressed only in a thin blouse, Mother hugged her shoulders to keep warm as she watched them drag Fang Shixian away. She was the recipient of admiring glances from many people. But Jintong was not one of them. It was Fang Shixian, after all, the man who the year before had been in charge of the farmers’ security unit. Every day, as the commune members headed home, he was the one who searched them and their baskets. On her way home one day, Mother had picked up a yam on the road and put it into her straw basket. Fang Shixian found it and accused her of theft. When Mother denied the accusation, the son of a bitch had slapped her, bloodying her nose; the blood had dripped onto the lapel of her shirt, the same white shirt she was wearing now. An idler like him, who strutted around just because he was categorized as a poor peasant, why not let him drown? His feelings for her at that moment bordered on loathing.

At the gate to the commune slaughterhouse Jintong spotted Zaohua standing in front of a red board with a slogan in yellow letters, and he was sure that she’d been involved in Fang Shixian’s misfortune. The youngster must have been her apprentice. If she was capable of stealing a diamond ring off the finger of Princess Monica under tight security at the Yellow Sea Restaurant, she certainly wasn’t interested in a worker’s uniform. No, that had been a payback for the bad man who had slapped her grandmother. Jintong’s view of Zaohua underwent an immediate change. As he saw it, thievery was a disgrace, and had been since time immemorial. But now he considered what Zaohua had done was right. There was no honor in being a common thief, of course, but someone like Zaohua, a thief for all ages, was worthy of high praise. In his eyes, the Shangguan family had raised yet another glorious banner to flap in the wind.

The little Red Guard leader, who was upset over what Mother had done, picked up a battery-powered bullhorn, a rarity those days, but well suited to and necessary for revolutionary activities, and, in the style of the leader of Northeast Gaomi Township’s land reform decades earlier, announced in a sickly, shaky voice, “Revolutionary – comrades – Red Guards – comrades-in-arms – low and middle poor peasants – do not be misled – by the phony kindness – of the old-line historical counterrevolutionary – Shangguan Lu – who is trying to divert the direction of our struggle -”

This Red Guard leader, Guo Pingen, was in fact the abused son of the eccentric Guo Jingcheng, a man who had broken his wife’s leg and then warned her not to cry. When people passed by their house, they often heard the sound of someone being beaten and a woman’s muffled moans. A good-hearted man by the name of Li Wannian once decided to try to put a stop to it, but had no sooner opened the door than he was struck by a rock that came flying out. Guo Pingen had inherited his father’s cruel, ruthless ways. As the Cultural Revolution progressed, he had already injured the kidney of a teacher by the name of Zhu Wen with a vicious kick.

His exhortation completed, he slung the bullhorn over his back, walked up to Mother, and aimed a well-placed kick into her knee. “Kneel!” he demanded. With a yelp of pain, Mother got down on her knees. He then grabbed her by the ear and demanded, “Get up!” She’d barely gotten to her feet when he sent her to the ground again with another kick and stepped on her back. All his beatings were administered to give concrete meaning to the popular revolutionary slogan: “Knock all class enemies to the ground, then step on them.”

The fires of rage burned in Jintong’s heart as he watched his mother being beaten; he ran up to Guo Pingen with balled fists, but was brought up short by Guo’s sinister glare. Two deep creases ran from mouth to chin on the face of this revolutionary leader, who was little more than a boy himself, which gave him the appearance of a prehistoric reptile. Jintong unclenched his fists, as if by instinct. His heart shuddered, and he was about to ask Guo what he thought he was doing when the young Red Guard raised his hand, and Jintong’s question emerged instead as a wail: “Mother…” He fell to his knees beside his mother, who raised her head with difficulty and glared at him. “Stand up, my useless son!”

Jintong got to his feet, while Guo Pingen signaled the Red Guards with their clubs, their gongs, and their drums to round up the Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits and recommence the parade through the marketplace. Resorting once again to his bullhorn to exhort the marketgoers to shout slogans along with him, the effect of his strangely altered voice was like feeding them poison. They frowned, but no one answered the call.

Meanwhile, Jintong stood there caught up in a fantasy: A sunlit day. Armed with the legendary Dragon Springs sword, he has Guo Pin-gen, Zhang Pingtuan, Mousy Fang, Dog Liu, Wu Yunyu, Wei Yangjiao, and Guo Qiusheng dragged up onto the stage, where he forces them to kneel and face the glinting tip of his sword.

“Get back there, you little bastard!” one of the little Red Guard generals growled as he drove his fist into Jintong’s belly. “Don’t you dare think of running away!”

Jintong’s fantasy had brought tears to his eyes, but the fist in the belly brought him back to reality, which seemed worse than ever. The road ahead was an impenetrable haze. But at that moment, a dispute broke out between Guoping’s faction and the “Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment,” under the leadership of Wu Yunyu. And what began as a battle of words soon led to pushing and shoving, and, finally, to war.

Wu Yunyu started it with a kick, which Guo answered with a punch. Then they tore into each other. Guo ripped off Wu’s cap, his prized possession, and scratched his scabby head bloody. Wu stuck his fingers into Guo’s mouth and pulled with all his might, opening a cut in one corner. As soon as the factions of Red Guards saw what was happening, they turned it into a gang war, and in no time clubs were cutting through the air, bricks were flying, leaving the participants bloody but determined to fight to the death. Wu Yunyu’s subordinate Wei Yangjiao stabbed two combatants in the gut with the steel tip of his red-tasseled spear; blood and some sticky gray oozed from the wounds. Guo Pingen and Wu Yunyu backed off to direct their troops in battle. At that moment, Jintong saw the veiled young woman he recognized as Zaohua pass in front of Guo Pingen, her hand seeming to brush his face as she passed; a moment later he set up a loud agonizing wail, a gash appearing on his cheek, almost as if he’d grown a second mouth. Blood gushed from the wound, a terrifying sight. He turned and ran in the direction of the commune clinic; nothing else mattered to him at that moment. Seeing that the battle had turned deadly and that blood might wind up on their hands, the peddlers packed up their goods and disappeared down a myriad of lanes.

One of the two combatants with belly wounds died on the way to the clinic, while the other needed a blood transfusion before he was out of danger. The blood came from the veins of the Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits. Upon his subsequent release from the clinic, none of the Red Guard units wanted anything to do with him, since his poor-peasant blood had lost its purity; now the blood of class enemies – landlords, rich peasants, and historical counterrevolutionaries – flowed in his veins. According to Wu Yunyu, Wang Jinzhi was now a class enemy himself, like a grafted fruit tree, possessor of the five evils. Poor Wang had been a member of the fighting propaganda unit of the Wind and Thunder Faction. Given the cold shoulder and incapable of dealing with loneliness, he formed his own faction, the “Unicorn Struggle Team,” complete with official seal, banner, and armbands; he even talked those in charge of the commune public address system into giving him five minutes of airtime, all the news items for which he personally selected. They ran the gamut from developments in the Unicorn faction to historical anecdotes relating to Dalan, interesting tidbits, sex scandals, items of general interest, and so on. The show ran three times a day – morning, noon, and night. Before the PA began to broadcast, representatives from all the various factions sat lined up on a bench to await their turn. Unicorn was given the last slot, so when his five minutes were up, “The Internationale” was played, and that ended the broadcasting day.

In an age when there were no radio dramas and no musical programs, the Unicorn five-minute program served as entertainment for the citizens of Northeast Gaomi Township. Whether tending their pigs, sitting down to eat, or lying in bed, the people would prick up their ears in anticipation. One night, the Unicorn announcer said, “Low and middle poor peasants, revolutionary comrades-in-arms, according to an authoritative source, the individual who attacked the onetime leader of the Wind and Thunder Faction, Guo Pingen, leaving a gash in his cheek, was the infamous thief Sha Zaohua. Thief Sha is the daughter of the traitor Sha Yueliang, who ran rampant for years in Northeast Gaomi Township, and Shangguan Laidi, who murdered a public servant and was herself executed for the crime. In her youth, thief Sha met a strange man at Southeast Lao Mountain, from whom she learned martial arts. She can fly over eaves and walk up walls, she is a master of sleight-of-hand who can pick a pocket or walk off with a purse right under your eyes, and you’ll never know it. According to my authoritative source, thief Sha sneaked back to Northeast Gaomi Township three months ago, and has already established secret contacts in every village and hamlet. Using intimidation and coercion, she has enlisted the services of underlings who report to her on everything and serve as a little army of spies. The youngster who stole the dogskin cap of poor peasant Fang Shixian at the Dalan marketplace was one of thief Sha’s accomplices. Thief Sha has plied her evil trade in large towns. She has many aliases, but the most commonly heard is Swallow Sha. Her purpose in sneaking back to Northeast Gaomi this time is to avenge the deaths of her father and mother, and the gash on Guo Pingen’s cheek signals the first stage of her class retaliation. Even cruder, even more terrifying incidents can be expected in the days to come. It has been reported that one of the tools of her trade is a bronze coin she placed on a railroad track to be run over by a passing train. It is thinner than paper and so sharp it can cut a hair in half by blowing on it. When it cuts skin it takes ten minutes for the wound to bleed and twenty for the victim to feel the pain. Thief Sha hides this weapon between her fingers, and with an unnoticeable flick can sever a man’s carotid artery, bringing instant death. Thief Sha’s skills are unmatched. When she was studying with her master, she tossed ten coins into a pot of boiling oil, then reached in with bare fingers and removed every single one without so much as singeing her skin. Her movements are so fast, and so precise, they are barely visible. Revolutionary comrades-in-arms, low and middle poor peasants, the enemies who use guns have been eliminated, but the ones who use coins remain among us, and they can be counted on to fight us with ten times the deceit and a hundred times the frenzy.” Time’s up, time’s up! That was what the listeners heard over the PA all of a sudden. “I’m almost done, almost done.” No, that’s it. The Unicorn can’t talk over ^uThe Internationale”! “Can’t we go on a little longer?” But the strains of “The Internationale” abruptly poured out of the PA.

The following morning, the PA broadcast the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment’s detailed renunciation of Unicorn’s Sha Zaohua myth, and then laid all the crimes at the feet of Unicorn. The mass organizations broadcast a joint declaration retracting Unicorn’s broadcast privileges and ordered the faction’s leaders to disband within forty-eight hours and to destroy the official seal and all propaganda materials.

Even though the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment denied the existence of a super-thief named Sha Zaohua, they nonetheless assigned secret agents and sentries to watch the Shangguan family. Not until the following spring, during the Qingming Festival, when a police van from the County Security Bureau came to take Jintong away, did Wu Yunyu, who by then had risen to the position of chairman of the Dalan Revolutionary Committee, relieve the agents and sentries, who were pretending to be wok menders, knife sharpeners, and shoe repairmen, of their duties.

When they were clearing out the Flood Dragon River Farm, a diary kept by Qiao Qisha was discovered. In it she recorded in detail the illicit relationship between Shangguan Jintong and Long Qingping. As a result, the County Security Bureau arrested Jintong on charges of murder and necrophilia and, even before the investigation began, sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, which he began to serve at a labor reform camp on the edge of the Yellow Sea.