Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

12

Big-head Reveals the Secret of Transmigration

Ximen Ox Takes Up Residence in Lan Lian’s Home

“Unless I’m mistaken,” I ventured under the wild, piercing gaze of the big-headed child, Lan Qiansui, “you were a donkey that was hit over the head by a starving villager. You crashed to the ground, where your body was cut up and eaten by a gang of starving villagers. I witnessed it with my own eyes. My guess is, your spirit hovered about the scene in the Ximen estate compound for a while before heading back to the underworld, where, after many twists and turns, you were born into the world once more, this time as an ox.”

“Exactly right.” I detected a slightly melancholy tone in his voice. “By describing for you my life as a donkey, I have related about half of what happened later. During my years as an ox, I stuck to you like a shadow, and you are well versed in the things that happened to me, so there’s no point in my repeating them, is there?”

I studied his head, which was so much larger than either his age or his body seemed to warrant; studied his enormous mouth, with which he talked on and on; studied all his myriad expressions, appearing one minute and vanishing the next – a donkey’s natural, unrestrained dissipation, an ox’s innocence and strength, a pig’s gluttony and violence, a dog’s loyalty and fawning nature, a monkey’s alertness and mischievous qualities – and studied the world-weary and disconsolate composite expression, which incorporated all of the above. My memories involving the ox came thick and fast, like waves crashing on the shore; or moths drawn to a flame; or iron filings sucked toward a magnet; or odors surging toward your nostrils; or colors seeping outward on fine paper; or my longing for that woman born with the world’s loveliest face, interminable, eternally present…

Father took me to market to buy an ox. It was the first day of October, 1964. The sky was clear, the air fresh, the sunlight radiant; birds were flying in the sky, locusts were sticking their soft abdomens into the hard earth to lay their eggs. I picked them up off the ground and strung them on a blade of grass so I could take them home to roast and eat.

The marketplace was bustling, now that the hard times were behind us. The harvests that autumn were unusually large, which accounted for all the happy faces. Taking me by the hand, Father led me over to the livestock market. Lan Lian was my father; they called me Lan Lian Junior. When people saw the two of us together, they often sighed: father and son, both branded with birthmarks on their faces, seemingly afraid that people wouldn’t know they were related.

Mules, horses, and donkeys were available at the livestock market. On that day there were only two donkeys, one a gray female with floppy ears and a downcast, disheartened look. Her eyes were dull, with gummy yellow mucus in the corners. We didn’t have to look in her mouth to know that she was an old mare. The other donkey, a black gelded male that was almost as big as a mule, had an off-putting white face. White face: no offspring. Like a villain on the Peking opera stage, he had a venomous look about him. Who’d want an animal like that? That one needed to be sent to the knackers without delay. “Dragon meat in heaven, donkey meat on earth.” The commune’s Party cadres were ardent fans of cooked donkey, especially the newly arrived Party secretary, who had previously served as County Chief Chen’s secretary. His name was Fan Tong, which sounded just like the words for “rice bucket.” He had an astonishing capacity for food.

County Chief Chen had deep emotional ties with donkeys; Secretary Fan was in love with donkey meat. When Father saw the two old and ugly animals, his face darkened and tears wetted his eyes. I knew he was thinking about the black donkey we’d owned, the “snow stander” that had been written up in the newspaper, the one that had accomplished something no other donkey in the world could match. He wasn’t alone in missing that donkey; I missed him too. When I thought back to my elementary school days, I recalled how much pride that donkey brought us three children. And not just us: even Huang Huzhu and Huang Hezuo, the twin girls, got their share as well. Though Father and Huang Tong, and Mother and Qiuxiang, barely spoke and seldom even greeted one another, I always felt a special closeness to the Huang twins. If you want to know the truth, I felt closer to them than I did to my half sister Lan Baofeng.

The two donkey traders apparently knew Lan Lian, since they nodded and smiled meaningfully. Father immediately dragged me over to the oxen market, almost as if he was running away from something, or he’d received a sign from heaven. We could never buy a donkey, since no donkey in the world could compare with the one we’d once owned.

The donkey market had been nearly deserted; the oxen market was just the opposite, with all sizes, shapes, and colors of animals available. How come there are so many oxen, Dad? I thought they’d been killed off during the three years of famine we just got through. It looks like these animals popped up through cracks in the earth or something. There were Southern Shandong oxen, Shaanxi oxen, Mongol oxen, Western Henan oxen, and a bunch of mixed breeds. We entered and, without a second glance, headed straight for a young bull that had just recently been haltered. Looking to be about a year old, it had a chestnut-colored coat, a satiny hide, and big, bright eyes that signaled both intelligence and a mischievous nature. We could tell he was fast and powerful by looking at his strong legs. Young as he was, he already had the frame of a fully grown adult ox, like a young man with fuzz above his lip. His mother, a long-bodied Mongol, had a tail that dragged along the ground and forward-jutting horns. These oxen take great strides, are impatient by nature, can withstand extreme cold and rough treatment, survive easily in the wild, are excellent in front of a plow, and are well suited to pulling a cart. The animal’s owner was a middle-aged man with a sallow complexion and thin lips that did not cover his teeth; a pen was hooked in the pocket of his black uniform, which had missing buttons. He looked like an accountant or storekeeper. A cross-eyed boy with shaggy hair stood behind the owner; he was about my age and, like me, a school dropout. We sized each other up; there was a spark of recognition.

“In the market for an ox?” the boy called out to me. He added conspiratorially, “This one’s a half-breed. Sire’s a Swiss Simmental, mother’s a Mongol. They mated on the farm. Artificial insemination. The Simmental bull weighed in at eight hundred kilos, like a small mountain. If you’re in the market, this is the one you want to buy. Stay away from the female.”

“Shut up, you little brat!” the sallow-faced man scolded. “If I hear another word out of you I’ll sew your mouth shut!”

With a giggle, the boy stuck out his tongue and ran over behind the man. Then he secretly pointed to the mother with the crooked tail, to make sure I noticed.

Father bent down and reached out to the young ox, like a member of the gentry class inviting a bejeweled, well-dressed young lady to dance in a brightly lit dancehall. Many years later, I saw that very gesture in foreign movies, and invariably thought of my father and that young ox. Father’s eyes flashed, a radiance I think you only see in the eyes of a loved one from whom you’ve been cruelly separated for so long. What really amazed me was that the ox actually walked up, wagged his tail, and licked Father’s hand, once, then a second time. Father stroked his neck.

“I’ll take this one.”

“You can’t buy just the one,” the trader said in a tone that ruled out any bargaining. “I can’t take him from his mother.”

“I only have a hundred yuan,” Father insisted, “and I only want that young one.” He took the money out of an inner pocket and held it out to the ox trader.

“You can have them both for five hundred,” the man replied. “I’m not going to repeat myself. Either buy them or be on your way. I don’t have time to argue.”

“I said I only have a hundred.” Father laid the money at the trader’s feet. “I want that young one.”

“Pick your money up!”

Father was on his haunches in front of the young ox, intense emotion suffusing his face. He stroked the animal. Obviously, he hadn’t heard the trader’s remark.

“Go on, Uncle, sell it to him…,” the boy said.

“Keep your opinions to yourself!” the man said as he handed the mother ox’s tether to the boy. “Take her!” He walked up and pushed Father away from the young ox so he could lead it over to its mother. “I’ve never seen anybody like you,” he said. “Don’t get any ideas about taking it without my approval.”

Father was sitting on the ground, looking dazed.

“I don’t care,” he said, as if possessed. “This is the ox I want.”

Now, of course, I understand why he was so insistent on buying that particular animal, but at the time I didn’t know that the ox was the latest incarnation of Ximen Nao – Ximen Donkey. What I thought was, Father was under such pressure owing to his perverse insistence on remaining an independent farmer that he wasn’t himself mentally or emotionally. Now I’m convinced there was a spiritual bond between him and that ox.

In the end we bought the ox. It was inevitable, all previously arranged in the underworld. When nothing had yet been settled between Father and the ox trader, the Party branch secretary of the Ximen Village Production Brigade, Hong Taiyue, the brigade commander, Huang Tong, and some other people entered the market. They saw the mother ox and, of course, the young animal. Hong deftly opened the mother’s mouth.

“The teeth are all worn down. This one belongs at the knackers.”

“Elder brother,” the ox trader said with a sneer, “nobody says you have to buy my animals, but you can’t talk about them like that. How can you call these teeth worn down? I tell you, if the brigade wasn’t so short of money, I wouldn’t sell her for any amount. I’d take her home to mate and have another calf next spring.”

Hong stretched his hand out of his wide sleeve to negotiate price in the tried and tested tradition of livestock markets. But the man waved him off.

“None of that. Here’s the deal. Both for five hundred, the one and only price.”

Father wrapped his arms around the young ox and said angrily:

“This is the ox I want, I’ll pay a hundred yuan.”

“Lan Lian,” Hong Taiyue mocked him. “Save yourself the trouble. Go home, get your wife and kids, and join the commune. If you’re so fond of animals, we’ll assign you the job of tending them.” Hong cast a glance at Brigade Commander Huang. “What do you say to that, Huang Tong?”

“Lan Lian,” Huang Tong said, “your stubbornness has won us over. Now it’s time for you to join the commune, both for the sake of your family and to enhance the reputation of the Ximen Village Production Brigade. Every time there’s a meeting, the question invariably arises: Is that Ximen Village farmer still working as an independent?”

Father ignored them. Starving members of the People’s Commune had killed our black donkey and eaten him, and they’d stolen all the grain we’d stored up. I might be able to understand that sort of abominable behavior, but the wounds on Father’s heart would not be easily healed. He often said that he and that donkey were not linked by the traditional master-livestock relationship but were almost like brothers, joined at the heart. Despite the fact that he could not possibly have known that the black donkey was the reincarnation of the man for whom he had worked, he unquestionably sensed that he and the donkey were fated to be together. To him the comments of Hong Taiyue and the others were nothing but platitudes. Father couldn’t even muster the interest to respond. He just held on to the ox’s neck and said:

“This is the ox I want.”

“So you’re the independent farmer,” the surprised ox trader said to Lan Lian. “Brother, you’re something special” He studied Father’s face, then mine. “Lan Lian, blue face. He really does have a blue face,” he blurted out. “It’s a deal. A hundred yuan. The young ox is yours!” He bent down, picked the money up off the ground, counted it, and stuffed it in his pocket. “Since you’re from the same village,” he said to Hong Taiyue, “you can benefit from your association with this blue-faced brother. I’ll sell you this female for three hundred eighty, a discount of twenty yuan.”

Father untied the rope around his waist and put it around the ox’s neck. Hong Taiyue and his entourage put a new halter on the female and returned the old one to the trader. Livestock deals never include the halters.

“Better come with us, Lan Lian,” Hong Taiyue said to Father. “I doubt you’ll be able to drag your young ox away from its mother.”

Father shook his head and walked off, the young ox obediently falling in behind him. There was no struggle, even though the mother ox bellowed her grief, and even though her son did look back and call out to her. At the time I thought he’d probably reached the age where he didn’t need her as much as he once had. Now I realize that you, Ximen Ox, were Ximen Donkey, and before that, a man, one whose fate was still tied to my father. That’s why there was instant recognition between them and notable emotion, and why separation was not an option.

I was about to walk off with Father when the trader’s boy ran up and said furtively:

“You should know that that female is a ‘hot turtle.’”

“Hot turtles” were what we called animals that slobbered and began panting as soon as they started working in the summer. I didn’t know what the term meant at the time, but I could tell from the way the boy said it that a “hot turtle” was not a good ox. To this day I don’t know why he thought it was important that I know that, nor do I know what it was about him that made me feel I knew him somehow.

Father said nothing on the road home. I felt like saying something a few times, but one glance at his face, caught up in his own mysterious thoughts, and I decided not to intrude. No matter how you look at it, buying that ox, one I liked at first sight, was a good thing. It made Father happy, it made me happy too.

Father stopped on the outskirts of the village to smoke his pipe and get a good look at you. Without warning, he burst out laughing.

Father did not laugh often, and I’d never heard him laugh like that. It kind of scared me. Hoping he wasn’t suddenly possessed, I asked him:

“What are you laughing at, Father?”

“Jiefang,” he said, staring not at me, but at the ox’s eyes, “look at this animal’s eyes. Who do they remind you of?”

That was not what I expected to hear, and I assumed that something was wrong with him. But I did as I was told. The young ox’s moist, limpid eyes were blue-black and so clear I could see my reflection in them. He seemed to be looking at me as he chewed his cud; his pale blue mouth moved slowly as he chewed, then swallowed a clump of grass that skittered all the way down to his other stomach like a mouse. A new clump then rose to take its place.

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“You can’t see it?” he said. “His eyes are an exact replica of our donkey’s eyes.”

With Father’s help, I tried conjuring up a picture of our donkey, but all I could manage were the sheen of his coat, his mouth, which was normally open in front of big white teeth, and the way he stretched out his neck when he brayed. But try as I might, I couldn’t recall what his eyes looked like.

Instead of pushing me to try harder, Father told me some tales involving the wheel of transmigration. He told me about a man who dreamed that his deceased father said to him, Son, I’m coming back as an ox. I’ll be reborn tomorrow. The next day, as promised, the family ox delivered a male calf. Well, the man took special care of that young ox, his “father.” He didn’t put a nose ring or halter on him. “Let’s go, Father,” he’d say when they went out into the field. After working hard, he’d say, “Time to rest, Father.” So the ox rested. At that point in his tale, Father stopped, to my chagrin. So what happened? After hesitating for a moment, Father said, I’m not sure this is the sort of thing I should be telling a child, but I’ll go ahead. That ox did a pecker pull – later on I learned that “pecker pull” meant masturbation – and was seen by the woman of the house. “Father,” she said, “How could you do something like that? You should be ashamed of yourself.” The ox turned and rammed its head into the wall and died on the spot. Ahhh – Father released a long sigh.

13

A Stream of Guests Urge Participation in the Commune

Independent Farming Gains a Distinguished Advocate

“Qiansui, I can’t let you keep calling me ‘Grandpa.’” Timidly, I patted him on the shoulder. “Just because I’m in my fifties and you’re a five-year-old boy, if we go back forty years, that is, the year 1965, during that turbulent spring, our relationship was one of a fifteen-year-old youth and a young ox.” He nodded solemnly. “It’s as if it was yesterday.” I gazed into the ox’s eyes and saw a look of mischief, of naivete, and of unruliness…

I’m sure you remember the intense pressure our family was under that spring. Eliminating the last remaining independent farmer was one of the most important tasks confronting the Ximen Village Production Brigade as well as the Milky Way People’s Commune. Hong Taiyue enlisted the help of villagers who enjoyed high prestige and commanded universal respect – Great Uncle Mao Shunshan, Old Uncle Qu Shuiyuan, and Fourth Elder Qin Buting; persuasive women – Aunty Yang Guixiang, Third Sister-in-Law Su Erman, Sister Chang Suhua, and Great Aunt Wu Qiuxiang; and clever, glib students – Mo Yan, Li Jinzhu, and Niu Shunwa. These ten people were the only ones I could recall; there were, in fact, many more, and they all made it to our door, like eager matchmakers or people wanting to display their wisdom and eloquence. The men surrounded my father, the women my mother; the students went after my brother and my sister, but did not spare me either. Smoke from the men’s pipes nearly suffocated the geckoes on our walls; the women’s hindquarters wore out the mats on our sleeping platform, the kang, and the students tore our clothes in the chase. Join the commune, please join the commune, wake up, don’t be foolish. If not for yourselves, do it for your children. I think that during those days just about everything your ox eyes saw and your ox ears heard had to do with joining the commune. When my father was cleaning out your pen, those old-timers barricaded the gate like a troop of loyal soldiers and said:

“Old Lan, good nephew, join up. If you don’t, your family will be unhappy, and so will your animals.”

Unhappy? I was anything but. How could they know that I was in reality Ximen Nao, that I was Ximen Donkey, an executed landlord, a dismembered donkey, so why would I want to throw in my lot with my personal enemies? Why was I so reluctant to be away from your father? Because I knew that was the only way I could be engaged in independent farming.

Women sat cross-legged on our sleeping platform like nosy relatives from some distant village. With slobber building up in the corners of their mouths, they were like the tape recorders in roadside shops that play the same damned stuff over and over. Finally, my anger won out:

“Big-tits Yang and Fat-ass Su, get the hell out of our house. You make me sick!”

Angry? Not a bit. With silly grins, they said:

“Join the commune and we’ll be on our way. Refuse, and our rear ends will take root here on your kang. Our bodies will sprout, grow leaves, and flower; we’ll become trees and knock the roof right off your house!”

Of all the women, the one I hated most was Wu Qiuxiang. Maybe because she had once shared a man with my mother, she treated her with special enmity:

“Yingchun, there’s a difference between you and me. I was a maidservant who was raped by Ximen Nao, but you were his precious concubine who gave him two children. Not labeling you a member of the landlord class and sending you out to be reformed through labor is better than you deserve. That’s my doing, since you treated me decently. I had to beg Huang Tong to let you off the hook! But you must keep in mind the difference between dying embers and a blazing fire.”

The school ruffians, with Mo Yan leading the way, loved to hear themselves talk and had an overabundance of energy, so with village support and encouragement from school, they took full advantage of this opportunity to raise hell. They were as excited as drunken monkeys, and just as sprightly. Some climbed our tree, some jumped up onto the wall and shouted through megaphones, as if our house was a counterrevolutionary bastion and they were signaling the charge.

Stubborn old Lan Lian is not our friend; independent farming is a true dead end. A single mouse dropping ruins a vat of vinegar. Jinlong, Baofeng, Lan Jiefang, put your hands over your hearts and think hard. Stay with your dad and you’re as good as dead; you’ll keep falling behind and can’t get ahead. Mo Yan made up all those limericks; it was a talent he’d had since early childhood. Oh, was I angry! I hated that damned Mo Yan! He was my mother’s “dry” son, my “dry” brother. Every New Year’s Eve Mother had me take a bowl of dumplings to you! “Dry” son! “Dry” brother! Shit! The word family means nothing to you. So I decided to fight fire with fire. I hid in the corner, took out my slingshot, and fired a pellet at the shiny head of Mo Yan, who was sitting in the crotch of the tree in the yard shouting through his tin megaphone. With a loud shriek, Mo Yan fell out of the tree. But damned if he wasn’t back up there in the time it takes to smoke a pipe, a blood blister on his forehead. He recommenced the shouting:

Lan Jiefang, you little toad, follow your dad down a crooked road.

If you dare come after me again, I’ll haul you down to the station house! I raised my slingshot and took aim at his head again. This time he threw down his megaphone and shinnied down the tree.

Jinlong and Baofeng had no stomach for it. They tried to talk Father around.

“Why don’t we go ahead and join, Dad?” Jinlong said. “They treat us like dirt at school.”

“When we’re out walking,” Baofeng said, “people behind us yell, Look there, it’s the independent farmer’s kids.”

“Dad,” Jinlong continued, “I see the production brigade people out working, and they’re always laughing and having a good time, like they’re real happy. Then look at you and Mom, how much alone you are. What good are a few hundred extra catties of grain, anyway? Rich or poor, everyone shares equally.”

Dad said nothing, but Mom, who normally went along with whatever Dad said, took the bold step of making her opinion known:

“The children are making sense,” she said. “Maybe we ought to join.”

Dad was smoking his pipe. He looked up and said, “I might consider it if they weren’t applying so much pressure. But the way they’re stewing me like I was a bird of prey, I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.” He looked at Jinlong and Baofeng. “You two will soon be graduating from middle school, and under ordinary circumstances, I should be paying your way to high school and college, and then study abroad. But I don’t have the money. The little bit I put aside over the years, well, they stole it all. And even if I found the means to pay your way, they wouldn’t let you go, and not just because I’m an independent farmer. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Jinlong nodded.

“We understand, Dad. We never spent a day as landlord brats, and we can’t tell you if Ximen Nao was black or white, but his blood runs through our veins and he hovers over us like a demonic shadow. We are youth born in the era of Mao Zedong, and though we had no choice in who we were born as, we do have a choice in which path to take. We don’t want to be independent farmers with you, we want to join the commune. Whether you and Mom join or not, Baofeng and I are going to.”

“Thank you, Dad, for seventeen years of nurturing,” Baofeng said with a bow. “Please forgive us for our disobedience. With a biological father like that, if we don’t pursue progressive trends, we’ll never make anything of ourselves.”

“Well spoken, both of you,” Dad said. “I’ve been thinking hard about this lately, and I know I can’t have you following me down the dark path. You-” He pointed to us all. “You join the commune. I’ll farm on my own. I vowed to stick to independent farming, and I can’t turn around and slap my own face now.”

“If any of us join,” Mom said, with tears in her eyes, “then let’s do it as a family. What’s the point in working alone?”

“I’ve said it before. The only way I’ll join the commune is if Mao Zedong orders me to. But here’s what he said: ‘Joining a commune is voluntary, leaving a commune is a matter of individual choice.’ What right do they have to bully me into joining? Do our local officials have more say than Mao Zedong? I refuse to give in to them. I’m going to test the credibility of Mao Zedong’s own words by my actions.”

“Dad,” Jinlong said, a trace of sarcasm slipping into his voice, “please don’t keep referring to him as Mao Zedong. That’s not a name we should use. To us he’s Chairman Mao!”

“You’re right,” Dad said. “I should refer to him as Chairman Mao. As an independent farmer, I am still one of Chairman Mao’s subjects. This land and this house were given to us by the Communist Party, led by Chairman Mao. A couple of days ago, Hong Taiyue sent someone to tell me that if I didn’t join the commune, they’d have to resort to force. If a cow won’t drink, do you force its head into the water? No. I’ll appeal. I’ll take my case to the county, to the province, even to Beijing, if necessary.” He turned to Mother. “After I leave, you and the children join the commune. We have eight acres of land and five people. One point six acres per person. You take six point four acres with you and leave the rest for me. We have a plow that we were given during land reform. You take that with you. But the young ox stays. There’s no way we can divide up this three-room house. The children are grown, and this place is too small for them. After you join the commune, ask the production brigade for a plot of land to build a house. When it’s ready, you can move in and I’ll stay here. As long as the place is standing, this is where you’ll find me. If it collapses one day, I’ll throw up a tent, but I won’t go anywhere.”

“Why do you have to do this, Dad?” Jinlong said. “By going against the tide of socialism, aren’t you just looking in a mirror to see how ugly you are? I may be young, but I have the feeling there’s a class war coming. For people like us, with no red roots to fall back on, going with the tide may be the only way to avoid disaster. Going against the tide is like throwing an egg at a rock!”

“That’s why I want you to join the commune. I’m a hired hand, what do I have to be afraid of? I’m forty years old, a man who never did much of anything. So what happens? I make a name for myself by being an independent farmer. Ha ha, ha ha ha ha.” He laughed so hard, tears ran down his blue face. He turned to Mother. “Put some dry rations together for me,” he said. “I’m going to appeal my case.”

By this time, Mother was crying. “I’ve stayed with you all these years,” she said. “I can’t leave you now. Let the children join the commune. I’ll stay and work with you.”

“No,” he said. “With your bad background, joining the commune is your only protection. If you stay with me, they have all the reason they’ll need to dredge up your background, and that’ll just mean more trouble for me.”

“Dad,” I blurted out, “I want to farm with you!” “Nonsense! You’re a child, what do you know?” “I know, I know a lot. I hate Hong Taiyue, Huang Tong, and that bunch as much as you do. And Wu Qiuxiang disgusts me. Who does she think she is, with her bitchy dog’s eyes and a mouth that looks like an asshole? What gives her the right to come to our house and pretend she’s some kind of progressive?” Mother glared at me. “What kind of talk is that from a child?” “I’m going to farm with you, Dad,” I said. “When you take out the fertilizer, I’ll drive the oxcart. With its wooden wheels, it lets everyone know it’s coming – creak creak – I love the sound. We’ll be independents, individual heroes. I envy you, Dad, and I’m going to stay with you. I don’t need to go to school. I never was much of a student. As soon as class starts, I doze off. Dad, half your face is blue, and I’m half a blue face. Two blue faces, how can you separate that? People laugh at me because of my birthmark. Well, let them laugh, they can laugh themselves to death, for all I care. Two blue-faced independent farmers, the only ones in the county, the only ones in the province. That makes me proud. Dad, you have to say okay!”

He did. I wanted to go with him to appeal his case, but he told me to stay home and take care of the young ox. Mother took some pieces of jewelry out of a hole in the wall and gave them to me. Obviously, there were gaps in the land reform campaign, and she had managed to hold on to some valuables. Dad sold the jewelry for traveling money, then he went to see County Chief Chen, the man who had indirectly destroyed our donkey, and asked for the right to remain an independent farmer. Father argued his case forcefully. In terms of policy, Chen said, you’re free to farm independently. But I hope you choose not to. County Chief, Dad said, in the name of that black donkey of ours, I’d like you to issue me a guarantee that gives me the authority to farm on my own. Once I post that on my wall, no one will dare attack me. Ah, that black donkey… a good animal, the chief remarked emotionally. I owe you for what happened. I can’t give you the kind of pass you want, but I can give you a letter that explains your situation to the Farming Village Labor Bureau of the Provincial Party Committee. So Dad took the letter to the provincial capital, where he was received by the Labor Bureau head, who also tried to convince him to join the commune. Father refused. If Chairman Mao issues an order outlawing independent farming, I’ll join. If not, I won’t. Moved by Father’s intransigence, the Labor Bureau head wrote two lines at the bottom of the county chief’s letter: While it is our wish that all farmers join the People’s Communes and walk the path of collectivization, anyone who refuses to join is within his right to do so. Low-level organizations may not use coercive measures, especially illegal means, to force anyone to join a commune.

Father placed this letter, which was like an imperial edict, in a glass frame and hung it on his wall. He had returned from the provincial capital in high spirits. Now that Mother and Jinlong and Baofeng had joined the commune, only three-point-two acres of the original eight, which were completely surrounded by land belonging to the collective, remained for us to farm, a narrow strip of land like a levee trying to hold back an ocean. In accord with his wish to be independent, Father built a new room, walled it off from the other three, and opened a new door. He added a stove and a kang, and that’s where he and I lived. Beyond this room and the ox shed against the southern wall, we owned three-point-two acres of land, a young ox, a cart with wooden wheels, a wooden plow, a hoe, an iron shovel, two scythes, a little spade, a pitchfork with two tines, a wok, four rice bowls, two ceramic plates, a chamber pot, a cleaver, a spatula, a kerosene lamp, and a flint.

Admittedly, there were many things we lacked, but we’d slowly add whatever we needed. Dad patted me on the head.

“Son, why in the world do you want to farm with me like this?”

Without a second thought, I replied:

“Looks like fun!”

14

Ximen Ox Angrily Confronts Wu Qiuxiang

Hong Taiyue Happily Praises Lan Jinlong

During the months of April and May 1965, while my father was making an appeal in the provincial capital, Jinlong and Baofeng joined the People’s Commune with my mother. On that day, a solemn ceremony was held in the Ximen estate compound. Hong Taiyue spoke from the steps of the main house. The chests of my mother, Jinlong, and Baofeng were decorated with large red paper flowers; a red cloth was tied to our iron plow. My brother, Jinlong, delivered an impassioned speech expressing his determination to hew to the path of socialism. He was normally not much of a talker, so everyone was taken by surprise. To be honest, it turned me off. I hid out in the ox shed, with my arms around your neck out of a fear that they’d come and take you away with them. Before setting out, Father had said to me: Son, be sure to take good care of our ox. We needn’t worry as long as we have him, because then we’ll be able to hold out as independent farmers. I gave him my word, you heard me. Remember? I said, Dad, go now and come back as soon as you can. If I’m here, the ox will be here. He rubbed the horns that had just started growing on your head and said: Ox, you do as he says. We won’t be able to harvest the wheat for another six weeks, so there won’t be enough for you to eat. Let him take you out where there’s wild grass, which will tide you over till we bring in the wheat. I saw tears in Mother’s eyes as she glanced our way from time to time. This wasn’t the path she’d wanted to take, but she had no choice. As for Jinlong, though he was only seventeen, he already had definite views of things, and the force of his words seemed to frighten Mother, at least a little. I could tell that her feelings for Father weren’t as strong as those she’d held for Ximen Nao. She married him because she had to. And her feelings for me weren’t as strong as those she held for Jinlong and Baofeng. Two different men’s seed. But I was still her son, and she worried about me, even if she didn’t want to. Mo Yan led a bunch of schoolboys in shouting slogans outside the ox shed:

A headstrong man, a headstrong boy, choosing to farm apart. Pulling an ox the size of an insect, pushing a wood-wheeled cart. Sooner or later you’ll have to join, and sooner is better than later to start…

Faced with that sort of harassment, my courage began to falter, but not my excitement. The scene before me was like a play in which I was cast as the number-two character. Yes, a negative character, but more important than the positive characters out there. I felt it was time to make an appearance. I needed to go onstage, for the sake of my father’s character and self-respect, but also to bear witness to my courage and, of course, for the sake of your ox-glory. So I led you out of the shed in plain view of everyone. I thought you might have stage fright, but you surprised me by your total absence of fear. Your halter was actually nothing more than a thin rope tied loosely around your neck. One tug, and you could have snapped it. If you hadn’t wanted to follow me, I couldn’t have done a thing about it. But you did, willingly, even happily All eyes were on us, so I raised my head and stuck out my chest to make myself look like someone they’d have to deal with. I couldn’t see what I looked like, but their laughter told me what a comical figure I must have cut, a little clown. Then you picked the wrong time to act up and bellow, the antic and the soft sound proving you were still a youngster. Then you got it into your head to charge the village leaders lined up in the doorway of the main house.

Who was there? Well, Hong Taiyue was there; so were Huang Tong and Yang Qi. Wu Qiuxiang was there too. She’d replaced Yang Guixiang as head of the Women’s Association. I pulled on the rope to keep you from charging. All I’d wanted to do was take you into the yard to show you off, to let them see how handsome and spirited an independent farmer’s ox can be. I wanted them to see that before long, you’d be the best-looking ox in Ximen Village. But you chose that moment to show how perverse you can be and, with hardly any effort, dragged me behind you like a monkey on a string. When you pulled a little harder, the rope parted. Standing there holding half a length of rope in my hand, I watched as you headed straight for the leading figures. I thought Hong Taiyue would be your primary target, either him or Huang Tong, so I was surprised to see you heading straight for Wu Qiuxiang. At the time that made no sense to me, but I understand now. She was wearing a purple jacket and blue pants; her hair was oiled, with a plastic hair clasp, a sort of come-hither butterfly effect. The crowd looked on slack-jawed as this startling scenario began to play out, and by the time anyone reacted, you’d already butted Wu Qiuxiang to the ground; not content with that, you kept butting her, wrenching shrieks of horror from her as she rolled on the ground. She clambered to her feet to get away, but you made sure that didn’t happen by ramming your head into her large hip as she waddled along, tilting from side to side; with a loud croak, she tumbled forward and landed at the feet of Huang Tong, who turned and ran, with you in hot pursuit. Jinlong sprang into action. He jumped onto your back – that’s how long his legs were – wrapped his arms around your neck, and held on for all he was worth. You kicked, you reared, you twisted, but you couldn’t throw him off. So then you ran madly around the yard, sending people fleeing for their lives, their panicky screams hanging in the air. Jinlong grabbed your ears and pinched your nose till he brought you under control. Then people rushed up and pinned you to the ground.

“Put a ring in his nose,” someone shouted, “then geld him, and hurry!”

I hit out with the rope in my hand, not caring who it landed on.

“Let my ox go!” I screamed. “You thugs, let him go!”

My brother Jinlong – brother, my eye!-was still on you, his face ashen, a dazed look in his eyes, his fingers stuck up your nostrils. I laid into him with my rope.

“You traitor!” I roared. “Take your hand away, take it away!”

My sister Baofeng ran up to stop me from beating her brother. Her face was bright red, and she was sobbing. I couldn’t tell whose side she was on.

My mother stood there like a block of wood and muttered:

“My sons, ah… stop it, you two, what do you think you’re doing?”

Hong Taiyue’s voice was heard over the crowd:

“Go get me a rope, and hurry!”

Huang Tong’s daughter, Huzhu, ran home and came back dragging a rope behind her. She flung it down in front of the ox, turned, and ran off. Her sister, Hezuo, was crouching under the big apricot tree rubbing Qiuxiang’s chest and weeping:

“Mom, oh, Mom, are you okay…”

Hong Taiyue tied the ox’s front legs together, then reached up and lifted Jinlong off the animal’s back. My brother’s legs were shaking; he couldn’t straighten them out. His face was nearly bloodless, and his arms were stiff. The crowd quickly moved away, leaving me alone there with the young ox, my ox, my brave independent ox, who might have been killed by a traitorous member of the independent farming family! I patted his rump and sang a dirge for it. Ximen Jinlong, if you’ve killed my ox, this world isn’t big enough for the two of us. I was shouting and, without a second’s hesitation, had called Lan Jinlong Ximen Jinlong. It was not a casual mistake. First of all, it drew a line between me – Lan Jiefang – and him. Second, it was a reminder to people not to overlook his origins, the son of a landlord, a boy in whose veins flowed the blood of Ximen Nao, the person with whom the Communist Party stood in mortal enmity.

I saw Ximen Jinlong’s face turned as white as paper, and he began to rock, as if hit with a club. At the same time, the young ox suddenly struggled to stand. At the time, of course, I didn’t know you were the reincarnation of Ximen Nao, and was clueless about the complexity of feelings you were experiencing in the presence of Yingchun, Qiuxiang, Jinlong, and Baofeng. A tangled mess, I suppose. When Jinlong hit you, it was a son striking his father, wasn’t it? And when I yelled at him, I was cursing your son, isn’t that so? Your heart must be full of conflicting emotions. A mess, a real mess, your mind all twisted out of shape, and only you can make any sense of it.

– I sure can’t!

You tried standing, obviously still lightheaded, your legs sore. You still felt like acting up, but not with your legs tied. You wobbled a bit, nearly fell down, but finally you were on your feet. Your red eyes signaled the rage inside you, the labored breathing indicated the depth of your anger. Dark blood oozed from your pastel blue nostrils. From one of your ears as well, bright red, where a chunk was missing, probably bitten off by Jinlong. I looked around, but couldn’t find the missing chunk; maybe Jinlong had swallowed it. King Wen of the Zhou was forced to eat the flesh of his own son. He spit out several lumps of meat, which turned into rabbits that ran away. By swallowing a piece of your ear, Jinlong was eating his own father’s flesh, but he’ll never spit it out, and it will turn into waste that he’ll expel. What will it become after that?

You stood in the middle of the yard, or should I say, we stood in the middle of the yard, not sure if we were victors or victims, which meant I couldn’t say if we suffered from humiliation or reveled in glory.

Hong Taiyue patted Jinlong on the shoulder.

“Good going, young man. Your first day as a commune member, and you’ve already rendered outstanding service. You’re a quick-witted, brave boy who isn’t afraid to look danger in the face. Just the sort of fresh blood the commune needs!”

Jinlong’s cheeks reddened; Hong Taiyue’s praise obviously excited him. My mother walked up to rub his shoulder and squeeze his arm. The look on her face showed the depth of her concern for him, but it went unnoticed by Jinlong, who avoided her and edged up close to Hong Taiyue.

I wiped your bloody nose and announced to the crowd:

“You bunch of thugs, look what you did to my ox! You have to pay!”

“Jiefang,” Hong Taiyue said sternly. “Your father isn’t here, so what I have to say I’ll say to you. Your ox knocked down Wu Qiuxiang, and her medical expenses are your responsibility As soon as your father returns, you tell him he has to fit the ox with a nose ring, and if he injures another member of the commune, he’ll be killed.”

“Who are you trying to scare?” I said. “I’ve gotten this big by eating grains, not by being scared by anybody. Do you think I don’t know national policy? An ox is a big livestock, a tool of production. Killing one is against the law.”

“Jiefang!” Mother cried out sternly. “How dare you talk to Uncle that way!”

“Ha ha, ha ha.” Hong Taiyue laughed out loud. “Will you listen to that, everybody? He sure talks big. He actually knows that an ox is a tool of production. Well, you listen to me. The commune oxen are tools of production, but an ox belonging to an independent farmer is a tool of reactionary production. You’re right, if an ox belonging to the People’s Commune butted someone, we wouldn’t dare kill it, but if an ox belonging to an independent farmer butts someone, I’ll pronounce the death sentence without delay!”

Hong struck a pose like holding a sword, with which he could cut my ox in half. I was, after all, still young, and Father wasn’t around. I was over my head and spouting nonsense. I was totally deflated, and a horrifying scene popped into my head: Hong Taiyue raises a blue sword and cuts my ox in two, but another head comes out of its chest. Each decapitation produces another head. Hong throws away the sword and flees, and I laugh, Ha ha…

“That kid must have lost his mind!” The people were buzzing, wondering why I was laughing at a time like that.

“See the father and damned if you won’t know the son!” Huang Tong said

Now that she’d gotten her breath back, Wu Qiuxiang railed at her husband: “You damned turtle, always tucking your head back in. You coward, instead of coming to my rescue when the ox butted me, you pushed me right into it. If not for Jinlong, I’d have been dead meat on that animal’s horns…”

Once again, all eyes were on my brother. Brother? What kind of brother was he? But, after all, he and I had the same mother, and that isn’t a relationship you can forget about. Wu Qiuxiang’s gaze at my brother was different from the others. And that of her daughter, Huang Huzhu, simply dripped with emotion. Now, of course, I realize that my brother’s manner had already begun to take on the outline of Ximen Nao, and Qiuxiang could see her first man in him. She insisted that she’d been taken into the household as a maidservant, and then raped by the master, leading to a life of bitterness and taste for vengeance. But that’s not what happened. Men like Ximen Nao are masters at taming women, and I knew that in Qiuxiang’s heart, her second man, Huang Tong, was little more than a reeking pile of dog shit. And the emotion Huzhu felt for my brother? It was the budding flower of love.

Look here, Lan Qiansui – calling you by that name isn’t easy for me – you’ve used Ximen Nao’s cock to complicate what should be a very simple world.

15

Ox-herding Brothers Fight on a Sandbar

Unbroken Lines of Fate Make an Awkward Dilemma

In the same way the donkey wreaked havoc in the village government office and drew the widespread notice of the villagers, you, the bastard offspring of a Simmental ox and a Mongol ox, gained fame by disrupting the commune’s welcoming ceremony for Mother, Jinlong, and Baofeng. Someone else gained face that day – my half brother, Jinlong. People saw how his fearless heroics subdued you. According to Huang Hezuo, who later became my wife, her sister, Huzhu, fell in love with him when he jumped on your back.

Father still hadn’t returned from the provincial capital, and there was no more feed for you, so, recalling what he had said to me before he left, I took you out to the sandbar on the Grain Barge River to graze. Since it was one of your old haunts when you were a donkey, you knew the place well. Spring came late that year, so ice on the river hadn’t melted, even though it was already April. The brittle reeds on the sandbar rustled in the wind when wild geese perched on them, which was often, and which usually frightened fat rabbits hidden among them. I occasionally saw a lustrous fox when it appeared suddenly among the reeds.

We were not alone in suffering a shortage of animal feed: the production brigade also had to take its twenty-four oxen, four donkeys, and two horses out into the wild to graze, tended by the herder Hu Bin and Jinlong. My half sister, Baofeng, had been sent to train at the county health department; she would return as our first formally educated midwife. Both she and her brother were given important tasks as soon as they joined the commune. Now you might assume that midwifery was an important task, while tending livestock was not. But Jinlong was given the added responsibility of recording work points. Every evening he went to a small office, where he calculated the daily work activities of each commune member in a ledger. If that isn’t an important task, I don’t know what is. Seeing her children given such important tasks kept a smile on Mother’s face, but when she saw me take my ox out to graze all by myself, she heaved a long sigh. I was, after all, her son too.

Well, that’s enough meaningless chatter for now. Let’s talk about Hu Bin, a small man with an accent that marked him as an outsider. Onetime head of the commune’s post office, he’d been engaged in an illicit relationship with the fiancee of a soldier and was sentenced to a period of hard labor. When his sentence was up, he settled in our village. His wife, Bai Lian, a village switchboard operator with a big, round, plump face, red lips, nice white teeth, and a cheerful voice, had a cozy relationship with many of the commune cadres. Eighteen telephone wires on a China fir pole all fed into the window of her home and were connected to a unit that resembled a dressing table. When I was in elementary school, I could hear her singsong voice drift into the classroom: Hello. What number please? Please hold – Zheng Village on the line. We kids used to sprawl outside her window and look through tears in the window paper to watch as she nursed her baby with one arm and, with her free hand, effortlessly plugged the pegs into or pulled them out of the switchboard. To us, this was both a mystery and a wonder, and not a day passed that we didn’t hang around there, until a village cadre shooed us away. But we’d be right back as soon as he left. We not only watched Bai Lian at work, but were also treated to plenty of scenes that were unsuitable for children. We saw her and the village’s commune representative carry on flirtatiously, even get physical, and we saw Bai Lian scold Hu Bin in that singsong voice of hers. And we learned why none of Bai Lian’s children looked alike. Eventually, the paper in her window was replaced by glass and a curtain, and there were no more shows. All we could do was listen to what went on inside. Even later, the wires were buried underground after being electrified. Mo Yan got zapped by a hot wire outside her window one day and peed his pants as he screamed pathetically. When I tried to pull him away, I got zapped too, but I didn’t pee my pants. After this episode, we stopped hanging around outside her window.

Sending Hu Bin, who wore a felt cap with earflaps, miner’s goggles, a tattered uniform under a grimy army greatcoat, with a pocket watch in one pocket and a code book in the other, to tend livestock was an insult. But someone should have told him to keep his pants zipped. My brother told him to round up the strays, but he’d just sit on the riverbank in the sunlight to flip through his code book and read aloud, until tears fell and he’d begin to sob. Then he’d raise his voice to the heavens:

“What did I do to deserve this? One time, that’s all, not even three minutes, and now I have nothing to look forward to!”

The brigade’s oxen spread out across the riverbank, all so underfed you could count their ribs. Even though their coats were peeling, this taste of freedom injected life into their eyes; they looked pleased with their lot. I held on to your halter so you wouldn’t mix with the others and tried to lead you over to where the grass was more nutritious and tastier. But you balked and dragged me back to the riverbank, where the reeds had grown tall the year before, with white-tipped leaves like knives, a spot where the brigade oxen walked in and out of view. You were so strong, I was helpless in trying to lead you, even with the halter. You just dragged me wherever you wanted to go. By then, you were a fully grown ox, horns sprouting from your forehead like new bamboo, glossy as fine jade. The childish innocence in your eyes had been replaced by a shifty, somewhat gloomy, look. You dragged me over to the reeds, getting closer and closer to the brigade oxen, which were pushing the reeds back and forth as they nibbled on dead leaves. They raised their heads to chew, crunching so loud it sounded like chewing on iron, giving them the appearance not of oxen but of giraffes. I saw the Mongol ox, with her twisted tail, your mother. Your eyes met. She called out to you, but you didn’t reply; you just stared at her as if she were a stranger or, even worse, a bitter foe. My brother snapped his whip to vent his frustration. We hadn’t spoken since he joined the commune, and I wasn’t about to start now; if he tried to start a conversation, I’d ignore him. The fountain pen in his pocket sparkled, and I experienced a feeling that was hard to describe. Staying with my father as an independent farmer had not been a choice I’d made after careful consideration. It was actually something I’d decided in the heat of the moment, sort of like watching a play in which one of the roles is missing and deciding to go up onstage as a stand-in. A performance requires a stage and an audience; I had neither. I was lonely. I stole a look at my brother, who had his back to me as he sent the tips of reeds flying every which way with his whip, like a sword. The ice on the river had begun to melt, cracks revealing the blue water below and reflecting blinding rays of light. The land on the other side of the river belonged to the state-run farm. Rows of modern buildings with red roofs created a stark contrast with the rammed-earth, thatch-roofed farmhouses in the village. A deafening roar came our way from across the river, and I knew that the spring plowing was about to get under way; the farm equipment teams were testing and repairing the machinery. I could even see the ruins of primitive ovens they’d used to smelt steel some years earlier; they looked like un-tended graves. My brother stopped snapping reed tips with his whip, stood up straight, and said coldly:

“You shouldn’t be doing his dirty work!”

“You shouldn’t be so proud of yourself!” I had to give him tit for tat.

“Starting today, I’m going to hit you every day until you bring your ox into the commune.” He still had his back to me.

“Hit me?” He was so much bigger and stronger than me that I had to hide my fear with bluster. “Hah, try it! I’ll beat you so badly there won’t be enough of you left to bury.”

He turned and faced me.

“Fine,” he said with a laugh. “Now’s your chance.”

He reached out with the butt of his whip, picked my hat off my head, and laid it gently on a clump of weeds.

“I don’t want to make Mother angry by dirtying your hat.”

Then he rapped me on the head with the butt.

It didn’t hurt much; in school, I banged my head on the door frame a lot and the other kids frequently hit me with chips of brick and tile, and all that hurt much more. But nothing made me as mad. Explosions of thunder in my head merged with the roar of machines on the far side of the river, and I saw stars. Without a second thought, I threw down the halter and rushed him. He jumped out of the way and kicked me in the pants on my way by. I wound up spread-eagled in the weeds, where a snakeskin almost wound up in my mouth.

Snakeskin, also known as snake slough, has medicinal properties. One year, a boil the size of a small saucer on his leg had Jinlong screeching in pain. Mother was told to fry some snake slough with eggs, so she sent me out to look for some. When I couldn’t find any, Mother said I was worse than useless. So Father took me back out, where we found a six-foot-long black snake with a fresh layer of skin, which meant it had recently molted. The snake’s black forked tongue licked out at us from very close. Mother fried the slough with seven eggs, a golden plateful that smelled wonderful and made me salivate. I tried to keep from looking at it, but my eyes slanted that way on their own. What a good brother you were then. Come on, you said, let’s share. I said, No, none for me, you need this to get better. I saw tears in your eyes… now you’re beating me. I picked the skin up with my teeth and imagined myself to be a poisonous snake as I rushed him again.

This time he didn’t manage to get out of the way; I wrapped my arms around him and stuck my head up under his chin to push him over. But he adroitly slipped his leg between mine, grabbed me by the shoulders, and hopped on one leg to keep from falling. My eyes accidentally fell on you, the bastard offspring of a Simmental ox and Mongol ox, standing off to the side, just standing there quietly, looking despondent and sort of helpless, and I have to admit I was disappointed in you. I was fighting someone who’d bit off part of your ear and bloodied your nose; why didn’t you come help me? To knock him over, all you had to do was give him a gentle nudge in the small of his back. Put a little more into it, and he’d sail through the air, and when he landed, I’d pin him to the ground. I win, he loses. But you didn’t move. Now, of course, I understand why – he was your son, while I was your best friend. I brushed your coat, I chased away the gadflies, I cried for you. It was hard for you to choose one over the other, and I believe that what you wanted was for us both to stop, separate, shake hands, and go back to being loving brothers. His legs kept getting tangled up in the weeds, nearly causing him to fall, but as long as he could hop he could keep his balance. My strength was ebbing fast and I was panting like an ox; the pressure on my chest was becoming unbearable. All of a sudden, sharp pains struck both my ears; he’d taken his hands from my shoulders and was pulling on my ears. Hu Bin’s shrill voice rose beside us:

“Good! Great! Fight! Fight!”

He was clapping his hands. With the pain killing me, Hu Bin’s shouts distracting me, and your refusal to come to my aid disappointing me, I felt his leg wrap around mine; he flipped me onto my back and piled on, digging his knee into my belly. That hurt so much I think I peed my pants. Still holding my ears, he pressed my head into the ground. I saw white clouds and a bright sun in the blue sky above, and then I saw Ximen Jinlong’s long, skinny, angular face, with a downy mustache above his hard, thin lips, a high nose bridge, and eyes that held a menacing glow. There’s no way he had pure Han Chinese blood; maybe, like my ox, he had a mixed racial background, and by looking at his face I could imagine his likeness to Ximen Nao, a man I’d never met, but whose appearance had become the stuff of legend. I felt like cursing, but he was pulling my ears tightly, stretching the skin around my cheeks and mouth so taut that even I couldn’t make sense of what came out of my mouth. He lifted up my head and slammed it into the ground, once for each word:

“Are – you – going – to – join – or – aren’t – you?”

“No… never join…” My words emerged bathed in spittle.

“As I said, starting today, I’m going to beat you every day until you agree to join the commune. Not only that, each day will be worse than the one before!”

“I’ll tell Mother!”

“She’s the one who told me to do this!”

“I’ll see what Dad says,” I said in a more accommodating tone.

“No, you have to join before he returns. And not only you, the ox comes with you.”

“He was always good to you. Is this how you repay him?”

“I’m bringing you into the commune to repay him.”

Hu Bin was circling us the whole time. In near ecstasy, he was pulling at his own ears, rubbing his cheeks, clapping his hands, and chattering nonstop. Hovering around us, the black-hearted cuckold in his green hat who thought so highly of himself, and loathed everyone, though he didn’t dare actually oppose anyone, took great pleasure in seeing two brothers fight; in fact, he took pleasure from anyone else’s misery and pain. And at this point, you showed what you were made of.

The ox lowered his head and drove it into Hu Bin’s backside, sending him sailing through the air like a cast-off coat, six feet off the ground, before gravity worked its magic and drove him into the reeds at a fateful slant, where he announced his landing with a screech that was as crooked as the tail of the Mongol ox. Clambering to his feet, Hu Bin careened off tall reeds that bent low with a loud rustle. The ox charged again, and Hu Bin was once again in flight.

Ximen Jinlong immediately let go of me, jumped up, raised his whip, and brought it down on the ox. I got to my feet, wrapped my arms around him, and flipped him to the ground, landing on top of him. How dare you hit my ox! You’re a landlord’s kid with no sense of friendship, someone who repays kindness with hatred. A dog has eaten your conscience! The landlord’s kid arched upward and flung me off his back. Then he got to his feet, hit me with his whip, and ran over to rescue the whining Hu Bin, who was flailing and stumbling as he tried to escape from his reedy surroundings, like a beaten dog. It was a sight to behold! The evil man had gotten what he deserved, at last; justice had been served. It would have been perfect if you’d punished Ximen Jinlong before dishing out retribution to Hu Bin. But of course now I realize that you were being true to the notion that a mighty tiger will not eat one of its own, so that was understandable. Your son Ximen Jinlong went in pursuit with his whip. Hu Bin was running away – no, I shouldn’t say running. Buttons on his tattered army greatcoat, the emblem of his glorious history, were popping off as his coat flapped in the wind like the broken wings of a dead bird. His hat had fallen off and was trampled into the mud by the ox’s hooves. Help…! Save me…! Actually, that wasn’t what I heard, but I knew that the sounds that emerged from his mouth contained a plea for someone to come to his rescue. My ox, brave, embodying human traits, was in hot pursuit. He kept his head low as he ran; red rays spurting from his eyes and penetrating the span of history appeared before me. His hooves kicked up white alkaline soil that sliced into the reeds like shrapnel, that peppered my and Ximen Jinlong’s bodies, and, farther off, that pelted the liberated water in the river like hailstones. The smell of clean water filled my nostrils, that and the odor of melting ice and the aroma of once frozen mud, plus the stink of female ox piss. The smell of an animal in heat signaled the arrival of spring, the rebirth of countless beings; the season for mating was nearly upon us. Snakes and frogs and toads and all manner of insects that had slept through the long winter were awakening. Infinite varieties of grasses and edible greens were jolted out of their slumber; vapors imprisoned in the soil were released into the air. Spring was coming. That day the ox chased after Hu Bin, Ximen Jinlong chased after the ox, and I chased after Ximen Jinlong. We were bringing with us the spring of 1965.

Hu Bin thudded to the ground like a dog going after a pile of turds. The ox butted him over and over, calling to mind the scene of a blacksmith hammering on his anvil. Each butt produced a weak complaint from Hu Bin, whose body seemed thinner and longer and wider, like a cow patty. Ximen Jinlong arrived on the scene and cracked his whip on your rump, over and over, each snap leaving a red mark. But you didn’t turn on him, you offered no resistance, though at the time I wished that you’d turned and butted him all the way into the river, where he’d crack through the ice and be half drowned or half frozen to death – two half deaths would have meant one complete one – though I didn’t really want him to die, since that would have crushed Mother, who, I knew, cherished him more than she cherished me. So I broke off some thick reeds, and while he was lashing you on the rump, I lashed him on the head and neck. Perturbed by my lashing, he turned and used his whip on me. Ow! Dear Mother! That not only hurt, it tore open my padded coat. Blood trickled from a cut on my cheek. Then you turned around.

Oh, how I wanted you to butt him. But you didn’t. Still, he warily backed off. You made a low, grumbling sound. Your eyes were so sad. The sound you made was, after all, a call to your son, something he didn’t understand. You came toward him; what you wanted was to stroke him, but he didn’t understand that either. He thought you were coming after him, so he raised his whip and brought it down on you. It was a brutal hit, and right on target – it hit you in the eye. Your knees buckled into a kneel; tears gushed from your eyes and dripped noisily to the ground.

“Ximen Jinlong,” I screamed, horrified, “you thug, you’ve blinded my ox!”

He hit you again on the head, even harder, opening a gash on your face; this time it was blood that dripped to the ground. My ox! I ran up and covered your head. My tears dripped onto your juvenile horns. I protected you with my slender body. Go ahead, Ximen Jinlong, use your whip, rip my coat to shreds, slice my flesh like mud and spread it over the dead grass, but I won’t let you hit my ox anymore. I felt your head throbbing against my chest; I scooped up some of the alkaline soil and rubbed it into your wounds, and I tore padding from my coat to dry your tears. I was heartsick that he might have blinded you. But as the saying goes, You cannot cripple a dog and you cannot blind an ox: your eyesight was spared.

Over the month that followed, the same scene played out every day: Ximen Jinlong pressuring me into joining the commune before Father returned. I said no, he beat me, and my ox took it out on Hu Bin. And each time Hu Bin was the target, he hid behind my brother. The two of them – my brother and my ox – squared off against one another, neither giving ground for several minutes, until they both backed off and the day passed without further incident. At first, a fight to the death seemed inevitable, but as time passed, it turned into a game. What made me proud in all this was the fear my ox instilled in Hu Bin, and how that cruel, evil mouth of his lost its insolence. The minute the jabbering began, my ox would lower his head and bellow, his eyes would turn red, and he’d tense before charging. All the panicky Hu Bin could do was hide behind my half brother, who never again raised his whip against my ox. Maybe he had an inkling of something. You two were, after all, father and son, and there must have been some sort of connection. As for his beatings of me, they too became more symbolic than real. That was in reaction to the bayonet I wore in my belt and the helmet I had begun wearing after that first violent struggle. I’d stolen the two additions from a scrap pile during the steel smelting campaign years before. After keeping them hidden in the ox shed for so long, it was time to put them to use.

16

A Young Woman’s Heart Is Moved as

She Dreams of Spring

Ximen Ox Displays His Might as He Plows a Field

Ah, Ximen Ox! The spring planting season were happy days for us. The letter Dad brought back from the provincial capital served its purpose well. You’d grown into an adult ox by then, and had pretty much grown out of the cramped quarters our tiny ox shed provided. The young oxen belonging to the production brigade had already been castrated, and people were urging my dad to put a nose ring on you for purposes of work, but he ignored them all. I agreed, since our relationship had gone beyond that of farmer and farm animal; not only were we kindred spirits, intimate friends, we were also comrades-inarms walking hand in hand, standing shoulder to shoulder, united in our commitment to independent farming and our firm opposition to collectivization.

Our three-point-two acres of farmland were surrounded by land belonging to the commune. Given the proximity to the Grain Barge River, our thick, rich topsoil was ideal for plowing. With these three-point-two acres and a strong ox, my son, you and I can look forward to eating well, Dad said. He’d returned from the provincial capital with a severe case of insomnia, and I often awoke from a deep sleep to find him sitting fully dressed on the edge of the kang, leaning against the wall and puffing on his pipe. To me, the thick tobacco smoke was slightly nauseating.

“Why aren’t you sleeping, Dad?” I’d ask.

“I will,” he’d say, “soon. You go back to sleep. I’ll go give the ox a bit more hay.”

I’d get up to pee – you should know all about my bed-wetting. When you went out to graze as a donkey, I’m sure you spotted my bedding drying in the sun. Whenever Wu Qiuxiang saw my mother taking it out to dry, she’d call out for her daughters: Hey, Huzhu, Hezuo, come out here and take a look at the world map Jiefang drew on his bedding. The girls would come running with a stick to point at the stains on my bedding. This is Asia, this is Africa, here’s Latin America, this is the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean… humiliation made me want to crawl into a hole and never come out, and it sparked a desire to set fire to that bedding. If Hong Taiyue had witnessed that, he’d have said, Master Jiefang, you could throw that bedding over your head and charge an enemy pillbox. No bullet could penetrate it and a hand grenade would bounce right off it! – But what was the use in dredging past humiliations? The good news was, once I’d joined Dad as an independent farmer, my bed-wetting problem cured itself, and that was one of the more important reasons I stood up for independent farming and in opposition to collectivization. The moonlight, limpid as water, turned our little room silvery; even mice scrounging for scraps of food became silver rodents. I heard Mother’s sighs on the other side of the wall, and I knew she too suffered from sleeplessness. She couldn’t stop worrying about me, and she wished Dad would take me into the commune, so we could be a happy family again. But he was too stubborn to do that just because she wanted him to. The beauty of the moonlight drove away all thoughts of sleep, and I wanted to see how the ox spent his nights in the shed. Did he stay awake all night or did he sleep, just like people? Did he sleep lying down or standing up? Eyes open or eyes shut? I threw my coat over my shoulders and slipped out into the yard. The ground was cold against my bare feet, but I didn’t feel a chill. The moonlight was even denser out in the yard, turning the apricot tree into a silvery tower that cast a dark arboreal shadow on the ground. Dad was out there tossing feed in a sifter, seeming bigger than he was in the daylight, as a broad moonbeam lit up the sifter and his two large hands. The sound – shush shush – emerged rhythmically from the sifter, which seemed to hang in the air; Dad’s hands looked like appendages to it. The feed was dumped into the trough, after which came the slurping sound of a bovine tongue licking it up. I saw the ox’s shining eyes, I smelled its hot bovine odor. Blackie, I heard Dad say, tomorrow we start the plowing, so eat up. You’ll need your strength. We’ll do ourselves proud, Blackie, and give those socialists an eyeful. Lan Lian is the world’s greatest farmer, and Lan Lian’s ox is the world’s greatest ox! The ox shook his large head in response. They want me to put a nose ring on you, Dad continued. Bullshit! My ox is like my son, more human than animal. I treat you like a man, not an ox. Do people put nose rings on men? And they want me to geld you. Double bullshit! I told them to go home and geld their sons! What do you think of that, Blackie? Before you came, Blackie, I had a donkey, the best donkey in the world. A hard worker, like you, more human than animal, and prone to violence. He’d still be alive today if they hadn’t killed him during the steel-smelting campaign. But on second thought, if that donkey hadn’t passed on, I wouldn’t have you. I knew you were the one I wanted the minute I laid eyes on you at the livestock market.

Blackie, I can’t help feeling that you’re the reincarnation of that donkey, that fate has brought us together!

I couldn’t see my dad’s face in the shadows, only his hands resting on the feed trough, but I could see the ox’s aquamarine eyes. The ox’s coat, chestnut colored when we first brought him home, had darkened until it was nearly black, which is why Dad called him Blackie. I sneezed, startling Dad. Flustered, he slinked out of the shed.

“Oh, it’s you, son. What are you doing standing here? Go back inside and get some sleep.”

“How about you, Dad?”

He looked up at the stars.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”

As I lay there half asleep, I could sense Dad crawling quietly out of bed, and I wondered why So as soon as he was out the door, I got up, and once I was out in the yard, the moonlight seemed brighter, almost like undulating sheets of silk above me – immaculately white, glossy, and so cool I felt I could tear them out of the sky and fold them around me or roll them into balls and put them in my mouth. I looked over at the ox shed, which had grown bigger and brighter, obliterating all the darkness; the ox dung looked like white steamed buns. But, to my amazement, neither Dad nor the ox was in the shed. I knew I’d been right behind him and had watched him enter the shed, so how could he have simply vanished? And not only him, but the ox as well. They couldn’t have been transmuted into moonbeams, could they? I walked over to the gate and looked around. Then I understood. Dad and the ox had gone out. But what were they doing out there in the middle of the night?

There were no sounds on the street. The trees, the walls, the ground, all silver; even the propaganda slogans on the walls were dazzling white: “Ferret Out Those in Power within the Party Who Are Taking the Capitalist Road,” “Pursue the Four Clean-ups Campaign to its Conclusion!” Ximen Jinlong had written that one. What a genius! I’d never before seen him write a slogan, but he’d walked up that day carrying a bucket filled with black ink and an ink-saturated brush made of twisted hemp fibers, and written that one on our wall. Every stroke was vigorous, every line straight and even, every hook powerful. At least as big as a pregnant goat, each character drew gasps of admiration from anyone who saw them. My brother was the best-educated and most highly respected youngster in the village. Even the college students who made up the Four Clean-ups Brigade and other brigade workers not only liked him, they were his friends. He was already a member of the Communist Youth League and, or so I heard, had submitted his application to join the Party. An active participant in Party activities, he drew as close as possible to Party members in order to help his case. Chang Tianhong, a talented member of the Four Clean-ups Brigade, and a former voice student at the provincial art academy, taught my brother elements of Western styles of singing. There were days during that winter when the two of them sang revolutionary songs, dragging the notes out longer than a braying donkey; their duets became a standard opening before meetings of the brigade members. My brother’s friend, whom we called Little Chang, was often seen entering and leaving our compound. He had naturally curly hair, a small, pale face with big bright eyes, a wide mouth, stubble that looked blue, and a prominent Adam’s apple. A big young man, and tall, he stood out from all the other young villagers. Many of the envious young fellows gave him a nickname: “Braying Jackass,” and since my brother studied singing with him, his nickname was “Junior Jackass.” The two “jackasses” were like brothers, so close their only regret was that they couldn’t both fit into the same pair of pants.

The village Four Clean-ups campaign created torment in the lives of every cadre: Huang Tong, the militia company commander and brigade commander, was removed from his positions over the misappropriation of money; Hong Taiyue, the village Party secretary, was removed from his position for roasting and eating a black goat that was being raised in the brigade goat nursery. But they were back at their posts in short order; not so fortunate was the brigade accountant, who stole horse feed from the production brigade. His dismissal was permanent. Political campaigns, like stage plays, are spectacles, events incorporating clamorous gongs and drums, wind-blown banners, slogans on walls, with commune members working during the day and attending meetings at night. I was a minor independent farmer, but noise and excitement appealed to me too. Those were days when I desperately wanted to join the commune, so I could follow behind the “two jackasses” and see the sights. The cultured behavior of the “two jackasses” did not go unnoticed by the young women; love was in the air. Watching with cool detachment, I could see that my sister, Ximen Baofeng, had fallen for Little Chang, while the twins, Huang Huzhu and Huang Hezuo, had fallen for my brother. No one fell for me. Maybe in their eyes I was just a dumb little boy. How could they know that love burned in my heart? I was secretly in love with Huang Tong’s elder daughter, Huzhu.

Well, enough of that. So I went out into the street, and still found no trace of my dad and the black ox. Gould they have flown to the moon! I conjured up an image of Dad on the back of the ox, hooves pounding the clouds, tail moving back and forth like a rudder as they levitate, higher and higher. It had to be an illusion, because Dad wouldn’t fly to the moon and leave me behind. So I knew I had to keep my feet planted on earth and look for them in the same realm. I stood still, concentrating all my energy. First, I sniffed the air, nostrils wide open. It worked. They hadn’t gone far; they were southeast of where I was standing, in the vicinity of the decrepit village wall, at one of the dead-infant sites, a spot where villagers used to discard children who had died in infancy. Later on, fresh dirt was brought in to level the ground and turn it into the brigade threshing floor. Perfectly flat, it was surrounded by a waist-high wall, alongside which some stone rollers and stone mills had been left. It was a favorite place for children to play. They chased each other around, dressed only in red stomachers, their bare bottoms fully exposed. I knew they were actually the ghosts of dead children who came out to play when the moon was full. So cute, those spirit-children, as they lined up and jumped from the stone rollers to the stone mills and from the stone mills back to the stone rollers. Their leader was a little boy with a vertical pigtail who had a shiny whistle in his mouth, which he blew rhythmically. The other children echoed his whistle each time they jumped, in perfect cadence, a treat for the eyes. I was so mesmerized I nearly felt like joining their number. When they tired of jumping from the stone rollers to the stone mills, they climbed the wall and sat in a straight line, legs hanging down as they pounded the wall with their heels and sang a ditty that moved me so much I stuck my hand in my pocket and took out a handful of fried black beans. When they reached out, I placed five beans in each hand, on which I saw fine yellow hairs. They were captivating children, with bright eyes and lovely white teeth. From the top of the wall rose the crunching of beans and an alluring scorched aroma. Dad and the ox were performing drills out on the threshing floor as more red children than I could count appeared on the top of the wall. I put my hand over my pocket. What would I do if they all wanted black beans? Dad was wearing skin-tight clothes with a green lotus-shaped piece of cloth on each shoulder and a tall horn-shaped piece of tin plate on his head. He had painted the right side of his face with red grease paint, creating a stunning contrast with the blue birthmark on the left side. He was barking unintelligible commands as he drilled; to me they sounded like curses, but I was sure the red children on the wall understood every word, because they clapped rhythmically and thumped their heels against the wall and whistled; a few even took little horns out from under their stomachers and tooted along, while others brought drums up from the other side of the wall, placed them between their knees, and pounded away. At the same time, our family ox, sporting red satin cloth on his horns and a big red satin flower on his forehead, which made him look like a jubilant bridegroom, was running around the outer edge of the threshing floor. His body glistened, his eyes were bright as crystal, his hooves like lit lanterns that carried him in a graceful, smooth, and easy gait. Each time he passed by the red children, they pounded their drums and shouted their approval, producing waves of cheers. In all, he circled the floor ten times or more before joining Dad in the center, where Dad rewarded him with a chunk of bean cake. Then Dad rubbed his head and patted him on the rump.

“Watch the miracle!” he sang out in a more resonant voice even than Braying Jackass.

Big-head Lan Qiansui gave me a puzzled look, and I knew he was having trouble believing my narration. You’ve forgotten after all these years; or, maybe what I saw that night was a fanciful dream. But dream or no dream, you played a role; or maybe I should say that, without you, there’d have been no such dream.

As Dad’s shout died out, he cracked his whip on the ground, producing a crisp little explosion that sounded as if he’d hit a plate of glass. The ox reared up until he was nearly vertical, supported solely by his hind legs. That is not a difficult maneuver for an ox, since it replicates the mating posture of a bull. What was not so easy was how he kept his front legs and body up straight with nothing to help him keep his balance but his hind legs; then he began to walk, one awkward step at a time, but remarkable enough to cause stupefied gapes from anyone who saw him. That a massive ox could actually stand up and walk on his hind legs, and not just four or five steps, or even nine or ten steps, but all the way around the outer edge of the threshing floor, was something I’d never imagined, let alone seen with my own eyes. He dragged his tail along the ground, his front legs curled in front of his chest, like a pair of stunted arms. His belly was completely exposed, his papaya-sized gonads swung back and forth, and it was almost as if the sole function of the spectacle was to show off his maleness. The red children on the wall, normally eager to make noise, were silent. They forgot to toot their horns and beat their drums, they just sat there slack-jawed, looks of disbelief on their little faces. Not until the ox had made a complete revolution and once again had all four hooves on the ground did the red children regain their composure and once again hoot and holler, clap their hands, beat their drums, blow their horns, and whistle.

What followed was even more miraculous. The ox lowered his head until it was touching the ground, then, straining hard, he lifted his hind legs off the ground, very much like a human headstand, but infinitely harder to manage. It didn’t seem possible that an animal weighing 800 or more catties could support all that weight on his neck alone. But our family ox did just that. – Allow me to once again describe those papaya-sized gonads: stuck up all alone against the skin of his belly, they appeared somehow redundant…

You went out to work the next morning for the first time – plowing the field. Our plow was made of wood, its blades, which had been forged by a blacksmith in Anhui, shiny as a mirror. Wooden plows like ours were no longer being used by the production brigade; they had been replaced by Great Harvest brand steel plows. Deciding to stick to tradition, we shunned those industrial tools, which reeked of paint. Since we had chosen to remain independent, Dad said, it was important to keep a distance from the collective in every respect. And since Great Harvest brand plows were tools of the collective, they weren’t for us. Our clothes were made of local fabric, we made our own tools, and we used kerosene lamps and flints for fire. That morning, the production brigade sent nine plows out, to compete with us, it seemed. On the east bank of the river, the state-run farm’s tractors were also out in the fields, their bright red paint making them look like a pair of red devils. Blue smoke billowed from their smokestacks as they set up a deafening roar. Each of the production brigade’s nine plows was pulled by a pair of oxen working in a flying geese formation. They were being driven by highly experienced plowmen, all driving their teams with hard-set faces, as if participating in a solemn ceremony, not plowing fields for crops.

Hong Taiyue, in a brand-new black uniform, arrived at the edge of the field, looking much older, his hair turned gray, his cheek muscles slack, the corners of his mouth sagging. Jinlong followed behind him, carrying a clipboard in his left hand and a fountain pen in his right, sort of like a reporter. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what he was going to record – not every word uttered by Hong Taiyue, I hoped. After all, even with his revolutionary history, Hong was merely the Party secretary of a small village, and since grassroots cadres of those days were all the same, he shouldn’t have postured so much. Besides, he’d cooked and eaten a goat belonging to the collective and had nearly been cashiered during the Four Clean-ups campaign, which meant that his political consciousness was less than ideal.

With unhurried efficiency, Dad lined up the plow and checked the harness on the ox, leaving nothing for me to do but look on excitedly, and what stuck in my mind were the stunts I’d watched him and his ox perform on the threshing floor the night before. The sight of the powerful figure of our ox reminded me what a difficult maneuver it had been. I didn’t ask Dad about it, wanting it to be something that had actually happened and not something I’d dreamed.

Hong Taiyue, hands on his hips, was giving instructions to his subordinates, citing everything from Quemoy and Matsu to the Korean War, from land reform to class struggle. Then he said that agricultural production was the first battle to be fought against imperialism, capitalism, and independent farmers taking the capitalist road. He brought the experience he’d cultivated during his days of beating his ox hip bone into play, and even though his speech was peppered with mistakes, his voice was strong, his words hung together, and the plowmen were so intimidated they stood frozen in place. So did the oxen. I saw our ox’s mother among them – the Mongol – immediately identifiable by her long, crooked tail. She seemed to be casting glances our way, and I knew she was looking at her son. Hey, at this point I can’t help but feel embarrassed for you. Last spring, when I was fighting with my brother on the sandbar after I’d taken you out to graze, I saw you try to mount her. That’s incest, a crime. Naturally, that doesn’t count for much with oxen, but you’re no ordinary ox – you were a man in your previous life! There is, of course, the possibility that in her previous life she was your lover, but she’s the one who gave birth to you – the more I ponder the mysteries of this wheel of life, the more confused I get.

“Put those thoughts out of your mind, right now!” Big-head said impatiently.

All right, they’re out. I thought back to when my brother Jinlong was down on one knee with his clipboard on his other knee writing at a frantic pace. Then Hong Taiyue gave the order: Start plowing! The plowmen took their whips off their shoulders, snapped them in the air, and shouted as one: “Ha lei-lei-lei-” It was a command readily understood by the oxen. The production brigade plows moved forward, creating waves of mud to both sides. With mounting anxiety, I said softly: Dad, let’s get started. He smiled and said to the ox:

“All right, Blackie, let’s get to work!”

Without recourse to a whip, Dad spoke softly to our ox, who lurched forward. The plow dug deep and jerked him back.

“Not so hard,” Dad said. “Pull slowly.”

But the overeager ox was set on taking big strides. His muscles bulged, the plow shuddered, and great wedges of mud, shimmering in the sunlight, arced to the sides. Dad adjusted the plow as they went along to keep it from getting stuck. As a onetime farmhand, he knew what he was doing. What surprised me was that our ox, tilling a field for the first time, moved in a straight line, even though his movements were somewhat awkward and his breathing was, from time to time, irregular. Dad didn’t have to guide or control him. Our plow was being pulled by a single ox, the production brigade’s plows by teams of two, yet we quickly overtook their lead plow. I was so proud I couldn’t contain my excitement. As I ran back and forth, our ox and plow created the image of a sailing vessel turning the mud into whitecaps. I saw the production-brigade plowmen look over at us. Hong Taiyue and my brother walked up, stood off to one side, and watched with hostility in their eyes. After our plow had reached the end of our land and turned back, Hong walked up in front of our ox and shouted:

“Stop right there, Lan Lian!”

With fire in its eyes, the ox kept coming, forcing Hong to jump out of the way in fright. He knew our animal’s temper as well as anybody. He had no choice but to fall in behind our plow and say to Dad:

“I’m warning you, Lan Lian, don’t you dare so much as touch land belonging to the collective with your plow.”

Dad replied, neither haughtily nor humbly:

“As long as your oxen don’t step on my land, mine won’t step on yours.”

I knew that Hong was trying to make things difficult, because our three-point-two acres were a wedge in the production brigade’s land. Since our plot was a hundred yards long and only twenty-one yards wide, it was hard not to touch theirs when the plow reached the end or went along the edges. But when they plowed the edges of their land, it was just as hard to avoid touching ours. Dad had nothing to fear.

“We’d rather sacrifice a few feet of plowed land than step foot on your three-point-two acres!” Hong said.

Hong could make that boastful statement since the production brigade had so much land. But what about us? With the few acres we worked, we couldn’t sacrifice any. But Dad had a plan. “I’m not going to sacrifice even an inch of my land,” he said. “And you still won’t find a single one of our hoofprints on collective soil!”

“Those are your words, remember them,” Hong said.

“That’s right, those are my words.”

“I want you to keep an eye on them, Jinlong,” Hong said. “If that ox of theirs so much as steps on our land-” He paused. “Lan Lian, if your ox steps on our land, what should your punishment be?”

“You can chop off my ox’s leg,” Dad said defiantly.

What a shock that gave me! There was no clear boundary between our land and that belonging to the collective, nothing but a rock in the ground every fifty yards, and keeping a straight line by walking was no sure thing, let alone an ox pulling a plow.

Since Dad was employing the cleft method of plowing – starting from the middle and working his way outward – the risk of stepping on their land was minimal for a while. So Hong Taiyue said to my brother:

“Jinlong, go back to the village and prepare the bulletin board. You can come back and keep watch on them this afternoon.”

When we went home for lunch, a crowd had gathered around the bulletin board on our wall. Two yards wide and three yards long, it served as the village’s center for public opinion. In the space of a few hours my talented brother had made it a feast for the eyes with red, yellow, and green chalk. On the edges he had drawn tractors, sunflowers and greenery, commune members behind steel plows, their faces beaming, and oxen pulling the plows, their faces beaming as well. Then in the lower right-hand corner, in blue and white he’d drawn a skinny ox and two skinny people, one adult and one child – obviously, me, my dad, and our ox. In the middle he’d written in ancient block letters: spring plowing: people are happy, oxen are lowing. Below that in regular script he’d added: “A clear-cut comparison between the bustling activity of the People’s Commune and State-Run Farm as, bursting with energy, they engage in spring plowing, and the village’s obstinate independent farmer Lan Lian and his family, who tills his land with a single ox and plow, the ox with its head lowered, the farmer looking crestfallen, a solitary figure looking like a plucked chicken, his ox like a stray dog, miserable and anxious, having come to a dead end.”

“Dad,” I said, “look at the way he’s made us look!”

With our plow over his shoulder and leading the ox behind him, he wore a smile as cold and brilliant as ice.

“He can write what he wants,” he said. “That boy has talent. Whatever he draws looks real.”

The onlookers’ gazes snapped around and fell on us, followed by knowing smiles. Facts spoke louder than words. We had a mighty ox and our blue faces glowed, for, thanks to a good morning’s work, we were in high spirits and very proud of ourselves.

Jinlong was standing off a ways observing his masterpiece and its spectators. Huang Huzhu was leaning against her door frame holding the tip of her braid in her mouth, her eyes fixed on Jinlong, the dazed look in her eyes proof that the stirrings of love had grown strong. My half sister, Baofeng, came up the street toward us from the west, a leather medical satchel with a red cross painted on it slung over her back. Now that she had learned midwife skills and how to give injections, she was the village health worker. Huang Hezuo rode up unsteadily from the east, apparently having just learned how to ride a bike, and finding it hard to steer. When she spotted Jinlong leaning against the wall, she shouted, Oh, no, watch out! as she careened toward Jinlong, who stepped out of the way and grabbed the wheel with one hand and the handlebars with the other; Huang Hezuo nearly landed in his lap.

I looked over at Huang Huzhu, who jerked her head around so hard her braid flew; red in the face, she spun on her heel and stormed into the house. I was sick at heart, feeling nothing but sympathy for Huzhu and loathing for Hezuo, who had cut her hair short and combed it with a boy’s part, a style that was a current fad among middle-school students in the commune. The barber Ma Liangcai, an expert Ping-Pong player who was also pretty good on the harmonica, was responsible for all those haircuts. He went around dressed in a blue uniform that had been laundered nearly white, had a thick head of hair, deep black eyes, and a case of acne, and always smelled like hand soap. He had a thing for my sister. He often brought his air gun into our village to shoot birds, and was always successful. At first sight of him and his air gun, the village sparrows flew to spots unknown. The village health clinic was located in a room just east of the Ximen estate main house. What that means is, any time that fellow showed up at the local clinic, reeking of hand soap, he was lucky if he could escape the gazes of members of our family, and if he somehow managed that, he’d fall under the scrutiny of members of the Huang family. The fellow never passed up a chance to get close to my sister, who would frown and try not to make her feelings of disgust obvious as she reluctantly chatted with him. I knew that my sister was in love with Braying Jackass, but he had left with the Four Clean-ups team and vanished like a weasel in the woods. Since my mother could see that this marriage was anything but assured, outside of sighing in frustration, all she could do was try to reason with my sister.

“Baofeng, I know what you’re feeling, but are you being realistic? He grew up in the provincial capital, where he went to college. He’s talented and good looking, and has a bright future. How could someone like that fall for you? Listen to your mother and give up such thoughts. Lower your sights a bit. Little Ma is a teacher on the public payroll. He’s not bad looking, he’s literate, he plays the harmonica, and he’s a crack shot. He’s one in a hundred, if you ask me, and since he has his eye on you, why the hesitation? Go on, say yes to him. Take a good look at the eyes of the Huang sisters. The meat is right in front of you, and if you don’t eat it, someone else will…”

Everything Mother said made sense. To me, Ma Liangcai and my sister were well suited for one another. Sure, he couldn’t sing like Braying Jackass, but he could make his harmonica sound like birds singing and could rid the village of its sparrows with his air gun, both virtues Braying Jackass lacked. But my sister had a stubborn streak, just like her father; Mother could talk till her lips were cracked, and her reply was always:

“Mother, I’ll decide whom I marry!”

We returned to the field that afternoon. Jinlong, a metal hoe over his shoulder, followed us step for step. The glinting blade of his tool was so sharp he could sever an ox’s hoof with one swing if he felt like it. His attitude of forsaking friends and family disgusted me, and I took every opportunity to let him know how I felt. I called him Hong Taiyue’s running dog and an ungrateful swine. He ignored me, but each time I blocked his way, he threw dirt in my face. When I tried to retaliate, Dad stopped me with an angry curse. He seemed to have eyes in the back of his head and invariably knew what I was up to. I reached down and picked up a dirt clod.

“Jiefang, what do you think you’re doing?” he roared.

“I want to teach this swine a lesson!” I said angrily.

“Shut up!” he railed. “If you don’t, I’ll tan your hide. He’s your older brother and he’s acting in an official capacity, so don’t get in his way.”

After two rounds of tilling, the production brigade oxen were panting from exhaustion, especially the female Mongol. Even from far away, we could hear what sounded like a confused hen trying to imitate a crowing rooster emerge from deep down in her throat, and I recalled what the youngster had whispered to me back when we were buying the young ox. He had called its mother a “hot turtle” that was ill equipped for hard work and useless during the hot summer months. Now I knew he was telling the truth. Not only was she gasping for breath, she was foaming at the mouth; it was not a pretty sight. Eventually, she collapsed and lay on the ground, her eyes rolling back into her head, like a dead cow. All the other oxen stopped working, and the plowmen ran up to her. Opinions flew back and forth. The term “hot turtle” had been the brainchild of an old farmer. One of the men recommended going for the veterinarian, but that suggestion was met with cold disdain. The comment, She’s beyond help, was heard.

When Dad reached the end of our plot, he stopped and said to my brother:

“Jinlong, there’s no need for you to follow behind me. I said we won’t leave a single hoofprint on public land, so you’re just tiring yourself out for nothing.”

Jinlong responded with a snort, and that’s all.

“My ox will not step on public land,” he repeated. “But the agreement was that your oxen and people would not step on my land either. By following me, you’re walking on my land. You’re standing on it right now, as a matter of fact.”

That stopped Jinlong in his tracks. Like a frightened kangaroo, he jumped off our land all the way to the riverbank road.

“I ought to lop off those hooves of yours!” I shouted.

His face bright red, he was too embarrassed to say a word.

“Jinlong,” Dad said, “how about you and me, father and son, tolerating each other’s position? Your heart is set on being progressive, and I’m not going to stand in your way. In fact, you have my full support. Your biological father was a landlord, but he was also my benefactor. Criticizing and attacking him was what the situation demanded, something I did for the benefit of others. But I’ll always be grateful to him. As for you, well, I’ve always treated you like my own flesh and blood, and I won’t try to stop you from going your own way My only hope is that there’ll always be a spot of warmth in your heart and that you won’t let it become cold and hard like a chunk of iron.”

“I stepped on your land, that I can’t deny,” Jinlong said grimly, “and you have every right to chop off my leg!” He flung his hoe toward us; it stuck in the ground between Dad and me. “If you don’t want to do it, that’s your problem. But if your ox, or either one of you, so much as steps foot on commune land, whether you mean to or not, don’t expect any favors from me!”

The expression on his face and the green flames that seemed to be shooting from his eyes sent chills down my spine and raised goose-flesh on my arms. My half brother was no ordinary young man; if he said he’d do something, he’d do it. If one of our feet or our ox’s hooves crossed that line, he’d come at us with his hoe without blinking an eye. What a shame for a man like him to be born during peacetime. If he’d been born only a few decades earlier, he’d have worn the mantle of hero, no matter whom he fought for, and if banditry had been his calling, he’d have been a king of slaughter. But this was, after all, peacetime, and there was little call for such ruthlessness, such daring and tenacity, and such incorruptibility.

Dad, too, seemed shaken by what he heard. He quickly looked away and fixed his gaze on the hoe stuck in the ground at his feet.

“Jinlong,” he said, “forget what I said. I’ll ease your concerns and, at the same time, carry out my pledge by tilling my land right next to yours. You can watch, and if you think it’s necessary to put your hoe to use, then go ahead. That way I won’t waste any more of your time.”

He walked up to our ox, rubbed its ears, and patted it on the forehead.

“Ox,” he whispered in its ear, “ah, my ox! It’s all been said. Keep your eye on the boundary marker and walk straight ahead. Don’t veer an inch!”

After adjusting the plow and sizing up the boundary, he gave a low command, and the ox started walking. My brother picked up his hoe and stared with bulging eyes at the ox’s hooves. The animal appeared unconcerned about the danger lurking behind him; he walked at a normal pace, his body limber, his back so smooth and steady he could have carried a full bowl of water without spilling a drop. Dad walked behind, stepping squarely in the new furrow. The work was totally reliant on the ox; given that his eyes were on either side of his head, how he managed to move in a perfectly straight line was beyond me. I simply watched as the new furrow neatly separated our land from theirs, with the boundary markers standing between the two. The ox slowed down each time he neared one of the stone markers to let Dad lift the plow over it. Every one of his hoof prints remained on our side, all the way to the end; there was nothing Jinlong could do. Dad exhaled loudly and said to Jinlong:

“You can head back home now, worry free, can’t you?”

So Jinlong left us, but not before casting one last reluctant glance at the ox’s perfect, bright hooves, and I knew how disappointed he was at not being able to chop one off. The hoe, slung over his shoulder as he walked off, glinted silvery in the sunlight, and that sight was burned into my memory.

17

Wild Geese Fall, People Die, an Ox Goes Berserk

Ravings and Wild Talk Turn Into an Essay

As for what happened next, should I continuing telling or do you want to take over? I asked Big-head. He squinted, as if he were looking at me, But I knew that his thoughts were elsewhere. He took a cigarette out of my pack, held it up to his nose to smell it, and curled his lip without saying anything, as if contemplating something very important. That’s a bad habit somebody your age should avoid. If you started smoking at the age of five, you’d have to smoke gunpowder when you reach the age of fifty, right? He ignored me and cocked his head; his outer ear twitched, as if he were straining to listen to something. I won’t say any more, I said. There isn’t much to say, anyway, since it’s all things we experienced. No, he said, you started, so you ought to finish. I said I didn’t know where to begin. He rolled his eyes.

Begin with the marketplace, focus on the fun part.

I saw plenty of people paraded through the marketplace, something that never failed to excite me, excite and delight.

I saw County Chief Chen, the man who had been friendly to Dad, paraded publicly through the marketplace. His head was shaved, the skin showing black – afterward, in his memoirs, he said he’d shaved his head so the Red Guards couldn’t pull him by the hair – and a papier-mâché donkey had been tied around his waist. As the air filled with drumbeats and the clang of gongs, he ran around to the beat, dancing with a goofy smile on his face. He looked like one of the local entertainers at New Year’s. Because he’d ridden our family’s donkey on inspection trips during the iron and steel-smelting campaign, people had saddled him with the nickname Donkey Chief. Then when the Cultural Revolution broke out, the Red Guards wanted to enhance the pleasure, the visual appeal, and the ability to draw a crowd when they were parading capitalist-roaders, so they made him wear that papier-mâché donkey. Plenty of cadres later wrote their memoirs, and when they related what had occurred during the Cultural Revolution, it was a tale of blood and tears, describing the period as hell on earth, more terrifying than Hitler’s concentration camps. But this official wrote about his experiences in the early days of the Cultural Revolution in a lively, humorous style. He wrote that he rode his paper donkey through eighteen marketplace parades, and in the process grew strong and healthy. No more high blood pressure and no more insomnia. He said the sound of drums and gongs energized him; his legs quaked, and, like a donkey spotting its mother, he stamped his feet and snorted through his nose. When I linked his memoirs and my recollection of him wearing the papier-mâché donkey, I understood why that goofy smile had adorned his face. He said that when he followed the beat of the drums and gongs and started dancing in his papier-mâché donkey, he felt himself slowly changing into a donkey, specifically the black donkey that belonged to the independent farmer Lan Lian, and his mind began to wander, free and relaxed, as if he were living somewhere between the real world and a wonderful illusion. To him it felt as if his legs had become a set of four hooves, that he had grown a tail, and that he and the papier-mâché donkey around his waist had fused into one body, much like the centaur of Greek mythology. As a result, he gained a firsthand perception of what it felt like to be a donkey, the joys and the suffering. Marketplaces offered few items for sale during the Cultural Revolution, and most of the hustle and bustle derived from people who had gathered to witness a variety of spectacles. Winter had recently arrived, so the people were bundled up, except for youngsters who preferred the look of thin clothing. Everyone wore red armbands, which were especially prominent on the arms of youngsters in thin khaki or blue military jackets. On the older residents’ black, tattered padded coats, shiny with grime, the armbands were incongruous adornments. An old chicken peddler stood in the entrance to the Supply and Marketing Cooperative holding a chicken in her hand; she too wore a red armband. Have you joined the Red Guards too, Aunty? someone asked her. She pursed her lips and said, Red is all the rage, so why wouldn’t I join? Which unit? Jinggang Mountain or Golden Monkey? Go to hell, she said, and don’t waste my time with that nonsense. If you’re here to buy a chicken, then buy one. If not, get the fuck off!

The propaganda team drove up in a Soviet truck left over from the Korean War. Its original green paint had faded after years of being buffeted by the elements, and a frame with four high-powered loudspeakers had been welded to the top of the cab. A gas-driven generator was mounted in the truck bed, the two sides of which were lined with Red Guards in imitation army uniforms, each gripping the side with one hand and holding up a Little Red Book in the other. Their faces were crimson, either from the cold or from revolutionary passion. One of them, a slightly cross-eyed girl, was grinning from ear to ear. The loudspeakers blared so loud a farmer’s wife had a miscarriage, a pig ran headlong into a wall and knocked itself out, a whole roost of laying hens took to the air, and local dogs barked themselves hoarse. The first sounds after the playing of “The East Is Red” were the roar of the generator and static from the loudspeaker. They were followed by a melodious woman’s voice. I climbed a tree so I could see inside the bed of the truck, where there were two chairs and a table on which rested some sort of machine and a microphone wrapped in red cloth. One of the chairs was occupied by a girl with little braids, the other by a boy who wore a part in his hair. I’d never seen her before, but he was Little Chang, who’d come to our village during the Four Clean-ups campaign, the one they called Braying Jackass. I later learned that he had been assigned to the county opera troupe and, as a rebel, the commander of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction. I shouted down to him from my perch up in the tree: Little Chang! Little Chang! Jackass! But my shouts were swallowed up by the loudspeaker.

The girl shouted into the microphone, and the loudspeaker carried her voice like thunderclaps. Here is what everyone in Northeast Gaomi Township heard: Capitalist-roader Chen Guangdi, a donkey trader who wormed his way into the Party, opposed the Great Leap Forward, opposed the Three Red Banners, is a sworn brother to Lan Lian, Northeast Gaomi Township’s independent farmer who stubbornly hews to the Capitalist Road, and acts as the independent farmer’s protective umbrella. Chen Guangdi is not only an ideological reactionary, he is also immoral. He had sexual relations with a donkey and made her pregnant. She gave birth to a monster: a donkey with a human head!

Yes! The crowd roared its approval. The Red Guards on the truck followed Jackass’s lead in shouting slogans: Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey rapist Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey molester Chen Guangdi! Jackass’s voice, magnified by the loudspeaker, became a vocal calamity, as a flock of wild geese flying overhead dropped out of the sky like stones. Now, the meat of these birds is a delicacy, and nutritious to boot, a rarity for the people below. For them to fall out of the sky at a time when the people’s nutritional lives were so impoverished seemed to be a blessing from heaven, when in fact it was anything but. The people went crazy, pushing and shoving and shouting and screeching, worse than a pack of starving dogs. The first person to get his hands on a fallen bird must have been wild with joy, until, that is, everyone around him tried to snatch it away. Feathers fluttered to the ground, fine down floated in the air; it was like tearing apart a down pillow. The bird’s wings were torn off, its legs wound up in someone else’s hands, its head and neck were torn from its body and held high in the air, dripping blood. People in the rear pushed down on the heads and shoulders of those in front to leap like hunting dogs. People were knocked to the ground, squashed where they stood, trampled where they lay. Shrill cries of Mother!… Mother!… Help, save me… emerged from dozens of black knots of humanity that seethed and churned. Screams and shouts – Ow, my poor head!-merged with the howl of the loudspeaker. Chaos turned to tangled fighting and from there to violent battles. The final tally: seventeen people were trampled to death, an unknown number suffered injury.

Some of the dead were taken away by kin, others were dragged to the doorway of the Butcher Section to await identification and removal. Some of the injured were taken to the clinic or taken home by relatives, some walked or crawled away on their own; some limped away to wherever they wanted to go, some just lay on the ground and wept or wailed. These were Northeast Gaomi Township’s first reported deaths in the Cultural Revolution. In the months to follow, while there were pitched battles, with bricks and tiles flying in the air and an assortment of weapons, from knives to guns to clubs, the number of casualties paled in comparison with this incident.

I was perfectly safe up in the tree, where I saw the whole incident unfold in all its detail. I saw the birds fall from the sky and watched as they were torn apart by people. I saw the whole range of expressions – greed, madness, astonishment, suffering, ferocity – during the incident; I heard everything from cries of torment to those of wild joy; I smelled blood and other noxious odors; and I felt both chilled currents and overheated waves in the air. All this reminded me of tales of wartime, and even though the county annals of the Cultural Revolution recorded the wild geese incident as a case of bird flu, I believed then, and I believe now, that they were knocked out of the sky by the high-volume shrillness of the loudspeaker.

After things quieted down, the parades started up again, although the incident had a cautionary effect on the observing crowds. A gray path opened up in the market where heads once bobbed; it was now dotted with bloodstains and squashed bird carcasses. Breezes carrying a heavy stink blew feathers here and there. The woman who had been selling chickens was hobbling up and down the street, wiping her nose and drying her eyes with her red armband and moaning: My chickens, oh, my chickens… give me back my chickens you bastards, you ought to be shot…

The truck was parked between the livestock and lumber markets. By now most of the Red Guards had climbed off the truck and were sitting lethargically on a log that smelled of pine tar. Chef Song, the pockmarked cook from the commune kitchen, came out with two buckets of mung-bean soup to welcome the Red Guard little generals from the county seat; fragrant steam wafted from the full buckets.

Pockmarked Song carried a bowl of the soup over to the truck, where he offered it up with both hands to Braying Jackass and the female Red Guard who was in charge of broadcasting. Ignoring the offering, the commander shouted into the microphone: Drag out the ox-demons and snake-spirits!

At that signal, the ox-demons and snake-spirits, led by County Chief Donkey Chen Guangdi, charged out of the compound with boundless joy. As we have already seen, Donkey Chief Chen’s body had fused with the papier-mâché donkey, and as he came on the scene now, he had a human head. But that changed with a scant few motions. In one of those scenes you see in the movies or on TV, his ears got longer and stood straight up, like fat leaves growing out of a tropical stem or large gray butterflies emerging from cocoons, looking like satin glistening with an elegant gray luster, covered by a layer of long downy hairs, without doubt soft to the touch. Then his face elongated; his eyes grew bigger and moved to the sides of his widening nose, white in color and covered with short, downy hairs, without doubt soft to the touch. His mouth sagged and split into a pair of thick fleshy lips, also without doubt soft to the touch. Two rows of big white teeth were covered at first by donkey lips, but the moment he laid eyes on the female Red Guard, with her red armband, his lips flared back and the big teeth made an appearance. We’d owned a donkey before, so I was well acquainted with donkey ways, and I knew that when one of them flares back his lips, sexual excitement is on its way, and he will display his enormous organ, up till then safely sheathed. Happily, County Chief Chen retained enough of his human instincts that the donkey transformation remained incomplete, and though he flared his lips, he kept his organ hidden from view. Fan Tong, former commune Party secretary, was next to appear – that’s right, County Chief Chen’s onetime secretary, the one who absolutely loved donkey meat, especially the male organ – so the Red Guards fashioned one for him out of a big white turnip, Northeast Gaomi Township’s most abundant crop. Actually, there wasn’t much fashioning involved: a few swipes with a knife on the head and some black ink was all it took. There are few things richer than the people’s imagination. No one needed to be told what the black-dyed turnip represented. This Fan fellow, his face twisted in a frown, moved slowly owing to the fat he carried on his body; he could not keep up with the rhythm of the drums and gongs, and that threw the entire column of ox-demons and snake-spirits into mass confusion. A Red Guard tried to remedy the situation by smacking him on the rump, which only succeeded in making him jump and cry out in pain. The smacks then moved to his head, which he tried to ward off with the fake donkey dick in his hand. But it snapped in two, exposing its true nature as a turnip: white, crunchy, high water content. The crowd laughed uproariously, including even the Red Guards. Fan Tong was handed over to two female Red Guards, who forced him to eat the two halves of the fake donkey dick in front of everyone. The black dye, he said, was toxic, and he refused to eat. The female Red Guards’ faces reddened, as if they’d been humiliated. You hoodlum, you stinking hoodlum! A beating is too good for you, what you need is to be kicked! They stepped back and began kicking Fan Tong, who rolled around on the ground, crying piteously, Little generals, little generals, don’t kick me, I’ll eat it, I’ll eat… He scooped up the turnip and bit off a chunk. Faster, eat faster! He bit off another chunk. His cheeks bulged so much he couldn’t even chew, so he tried to force it down his throat and ended up choking himself until his eyes rolled back in his head. A dozen or more ox-demons and snake-spirits followed County Chief Donkey out, each with a unique trick and display, an entertainment extravaganza for the lookers-on. The drums, gongs, and cymbals were handled with high professional standards, since the musicians were members of the county opera percussion division. Their repertoire consisted of dozens of cadences, and the local musicians were not in their league. In comparison with them, our Ximen Village percussion team was like a bunch of kids banging on pieces of scrap metal trying to scare off sparrows.

The Ximen Village parade made its way up from east of the marketplace. Sun Long – Dragon Sun – carried a drum on his back; Sun Hu – Tiger Sun – beat it from behind. The gong was struck by Sun Bao, Panther Sun; the cymbals clanged by Sun Biao, Tiger Cub Sun. The four Sun brothers were from a poor peasant family, and it made sense for the loud percussion instruments to be in their hands. They were preceded by the village ox-demons and snake-spirits, and the capitalist-roaders. Hong Taiyue had managed to slip by during the Four Clean-ups, but not the Cultural Revolution. A paper dunce cap rested on his head; a big-character poster in forceful ancient script was pasted on his back. One look told me it was more of Ximen Jinlong’s handiwork. Hong was carrying the hip bone of an ox with brass rings on the edges, a reminder of his glorious history. The ill-fitting dunce cap kept tipping to the side, forcing him to reach up and hold it steady with his hand. If he was slow in doing so, a bushy-browed young man behind him kicked him in the rear. Who was he? None other than my half brother, Ximen Jinlong. Publicly he was known as Lan Jinlong. He was smart enough to know not to change his surname, because that would make him the offspring of a tyrannical landlord, a subhuman. My dad was an independent farmer, but his status as a farmhand did not change. The farmhand designation was like gold that glittered brightly during those times. It was priceless.

My brother was wearing a real army tunic, which he’d gotten from his friend Little Chang. Beneath the tunic, he was wearing blue flannel trousers and plastic white-soled khaki shoes. A wide leather belt with a brass buckle circled his waist; it was the type worn by Eighth Route or New Fourth Army soldiers. Now he was wearing one. He had rolled up his sleeves; the Red Guard armband hung loosely from his upper arm. All the villagers’ red armbands had been stitched together with red fabric, the words added in yellow with a stencil. My brother’s was made of silk, the words embroidered in gold-colored thread. Throughout the county there were only ten of those, all embroidered overnight by the finest seamstress in the county handicraft factory; she spit up blood and died when she was halfway through the tenth one, which, owing to the bloodstains, spoke of the tragedy. That was the one my brother wore; embroidered only with the word Red, and stained with the maker’s blood. My sister, Ximen Baofeng, had embroidered the word Guard fot him. He came into possession of this treasured item when he went to the headquarters of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction to call on his friend Braying Jackass. The two “jackasses,” excited to see one another again after so long, shook hands, embraced, and shared a revolutionary salute, after which they exchanged news of what had happened since they were last together and talked about the revolutionary situation in the village. Now I wasn’t there at the time, but I’m positive that Braying Jackass asked after my sister, since she was surely on his mind.

My brother had gone to the county seat to “fetch scriptures.” Trouble was brewing in the village when the Cultural Revolution broke out, but no one knew just how to nip it in the bud. He had a knack for getting to the root of a problem, so all Braying Jackass had to say was: Struggle against the Party cadres the same way we did against the tyrannical landlord! Obviously, no quarter was to be given to the landlords, rich peasants, and counterrevolutionaries already beaten down by the Communist Party either.

My brother understood exactly what to do as hot blood raced through his veins. As he was leaving, Braying Jackass handed him the unfinished red armband and a spool of gold-colored silk thread. Your sister is a clever girl, he said, she can finish it for you. My brother reached into his knapsack and took out a gift for him from my sister: a pair of insoles embroidered in multicolored threads. For girls from our area to give anyone insoles was a virtual pledge to marry. The pattern was of a pair of mandarin ducks frolicking in the water. The reds and greens, the exquisitely fine stitches, and the poignant pattern all bespoke deep affection. The two “jackasses” blushed. As he accepted the gift, Braying Jackass said: Please tell Comrade Lan Baofeng that mandarin ducks and butterflies all represent sentiments belonging to the landlords and capitalist-roaders. Proletarian aesthetics are found in green pine trees, the red sun, the vast oceans, high mountains, torches, scythes, and axes. If she wants to do embroidery, she should concentrate on those. My brother nodded solemnly, promising to pass on the comment. The commander then took off his army tunic and said in a somber tone: An instructor friend of mine in the army gave this to me. See, four pockets, an authentic officer’s tunic. The guy who runs the county hardware company brought in a brand-new Golden Stag bicycle, and I wouldn’t swap this with him!

As soon as he returned to the village, my brother organized a Ximen Village branch of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction. When the flag was raised, the village rose up in response. Most of the young villagers held my brother in awe, and now they had their opportunity to get behind him. They occupied the brigade headquarters, sold off a donkey and two oxen for 1,500 yuan, and bought red material, with which they made armbands, red flags, and red tassels for spears, plus a loudspeaker and ten buckets of red paint, which they used to paint the headquarters doors, windows, and walls. They even painted the apricot tree in the yard bright red. When my dad showed his disapproval, Tiger Sun slapped red paint on Dad’s face, making it half red and half blue. Jinlong stood off to the side watching with cold detachment when my dad cursed the youngsters. Throwing caution to the wind, he confronted Jinlong. Has there been another dynastic change, young master? he asked. Jinlong just stood there with his hands on his hips, chest out, and said curtly: That’s right, there has been. Does that mean that Mao Zedong is no longer chairman? Dad asked politely. Caught unprepared, Jinlong paused before responding angrily: Paint the blue half of his face red! The Sun brothers – Dragon, Tiger, Panther, and Tiger Cub – rushed up; two held Dad’s arms, one grabbed him by the hair, and the last one picked up the brush and covered his face with a thick coat of red paint. When Dad reacted by cursing angrily, the paint ran into his mouth and coated his teeth red. He was a fright, with two black eye holes into which paint from his eyebrows could drip at any moment. Mother ran out of the house, crying and screaming: Jinlong, he’s your dad. How can you treat him like that? Jinlong replied icily: The whole nation is red, leaving no spot untouched. The Cultural Revolution is going to seal the doom of the capitalist-roaders, landlords, rich peasants, and counterrevolutionaries. No independent farmer is going to slip through the cracks. If he refuses to abandon his independent activities and continues down the path of capitalism, we’ll drown him in a bucket of red paint! Dad wiped the red paint from his face to keep it from running into his eyes, that was his greatest fear, but all he managed to do, the poor man, was to rub it into his eyes. Blinded by the sting of the paint, he jumped around in agony and screamed pitifully. Soon exhausted by all that jumping, he rolled around on the ground, where he was soiled from head to toe with chicken droppings. Mom’s and Wu Qiuxiang’s chickens, thrown into a panic by all the red paint and the red-faced man, were afraid to stay in their roosts; they flew up onto the wall, onto branches of the apricot tree, even up onto the eaves of the house, and everywhere they landed they left red imprints of their claws. Jiefang, my son, Mother cried out in great sorrow, go get your sister, bring her back to save your dad from going blind! Armed with a red-tasseled spear I ripped out of a Red Guard’s hand, and boiling with anger, I was determined to poke holes in Jinlong and see what flowed out of the body of this brother who had turned his back on his own family. My feelings were, his blood must be black. Mother’s anguished cries and Dad’s agonizing wails made it necessary for me to hold off on my desire to poke holes in Jinlong, at least for the moment. Saving my dad’s eyesight took priority over everything. I ran out onto the street, dragging my spear behind me. Have you seen my sister? I asked a white-haired old woman. She shook her head as she dried her tears; I’m not sure she even understood me. Have you seen my sister? I asked a bald, stoop-shouldered old man. He smiled foolishly and pointed to his ear. Ah, he’s deaf, he can’t hear me. Have you seen my sister? I asked a fellow pushing a cart, grabbing him by the shoulder. His cart tipped over, spilling a load of shiny stones, which clicked against one another as they rolled along the street. He shook his head, a sad smile on his face. He had every right to be angry, but he wasn’t. He was Wu Yuan, one of our rich peasants, a man who could tease the saddest notes out of a flute, which he played with refined elegance. He belonged to the ancients, a man who, as you say, had befriended the tyrannical landlord Ximen Nao. I ran off, leaving Wu Yuan to load the stones back onto his cart. They were to be delivered to the Ximen compound on orders from the Ximen Village branch of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction commander, Ximen Jinlong. I ran smack into Huang Huzhu. Most of the village girls had cut their hair short, with a part, like the boys, exposing the skin on their scalp and neck. She alone stubbornly clung to her braid, which she tied off at the end with a red ribbon: feudal, conservative, diehard, an attitude that easily rivaled that of my dad, who stubbornly refused to abandon independent farming. Before long, however, that braid served her well, for when the revolutionary model opera Red Lantern was staged, she was a natural for the role of Li Tiemei, who wore a braid just like that. Even actresses in the county opera troupe who were assigned the role of Li Tiemei had to wear fake braids. Our Li Tiemei had the real thing, every strand of hair firmly attached to her scalp. I later learned why Huang Huzhu was so dead set on keeping her braid. That was because of all the fine capillaries in her hair; if she’d cut her hair they’d have oozed blood. Her hair was thick and lush, a quality rarely seen. Hu Zhu, I said when I bumped into her, have you seen my sister? She opened her mouth, as if she wanted to say something, but immediately shut it again. She was cold, scornful, absolutely off-putting. I couldn’t let her expression bother me. I asked you, I said in a very loud voice, have you seen my sister? Pretending she didn’t know, she asked me: And just who is your sister? You fucking Huang Huzhu, are you telling me you don’t know who my sister is? If you don’t know that, then you must not even know who your own mother is. My sister, Lan Baofeng, health worker, a barefoot doctor. Oh, her, she said with a slight and very contemptuous twist of her mouth. Outwardly proper, but dripping with jealousy, she said. She’s at school, entangled with Ma Liangcai. Go now, or you’ll miss it, two dogs, a mutt and a bitch, one more aroused than the other, they’ll be coupled any minute! That threw me. I never expected coarse language like that from someone as old-fashioned as Huzhu -

Another accomplishment of the Great Cultural Revolution! Big-head Lan Qiansui said coldly. His fingers were bleeding profusely. I handed him the medicine I’d prepared beforehand. He rubbed it on his fingers, stopping the bleeding at once.

– Her face reddened and her chest swelled, and I knew exactly what that was all about. While she may not have been secretly in love with Ma Liangcai, seeing him cozy up to my sister upset her. I’m not going to worry about you now, I said. I’ll take care of you later, you tramp. Falling for my brother – No, he’s no longer my brother, hasn’t been for a long time, he’s just Ximen Nao’s bad seed. So’s your sister, she said. That stopped me. My throat felt like it was clogged by a hot sticky pastry. They’re different, I said finally. She’s decent and gentle, good-hearted, red-blooded, humane. She’s my sister. – She has almost no humanity left. She smells like a dog. She’s the bastard offspring of Ximen Nao and a mongrel bitch, and you can smell it on her every time it rains, Huzhu said, clenching her teeth. I turned my spear around. During the revolutionary period, the people had the power to execute individuals. The Jia Mountain People’s Commune passed the execution authority down to the village level, and Mawan Village had killed thirty-three people in a single day, the oldest eighty-eight, the youngest thirteen. Some were clubbed to death, and some were sliced in half with hay cutters. I aimed my spear at her chest. She threw out her chest to meet the tip. Go ahead, kill me if you’ve got the guts! I’ve lived long enough already. Tears sprang from her lovely eyes. Something strange there, something I couldn’t figure out. Huzhu and I had grown up together. We’d played together on the riverbank, naked as the day we were born, and she developed such a special interest in my little pecker that she ran home in tears, telling her mother, Wu Qiuxiang, that she wanted one. How come Jiefang has one and I don’t? Wu Qiuxiang stood under the apricot tree and really chewed me out: Jiefang, you little thug, if you take ever advantage of Huzhu again, I’ll cut your pecker off when you’re not looking. It seemed like only yesterday, but now, suddenly, Huzhu had become as enigmatic as a river turtle. I turned and ran. A woman’s tears always rattle me. As soon as a woman starts to cry, I get nose-aching sad. I get lightheaded. I’ve suffered over that sign of weakness my whole life. Ximen Jinlong dumped red paint in my dad’s eyes, I shouted back, and I have to find my sister to save his eyesight… Serves him right. Your family, dog eat dog… Her hateful comment chased me down. I guess you could say I’d broken free from Huzhu at that moment, though my growing hatred for her was tempered by the same amount of lingering fondness. I knew she had no feelings for me, but at least she’d told me where my sister was.

The elementary school was located at the west end, near the village wall. It had a large yard encircled by a wall made of bricks from gravesites, which ensured that there would always be spirits of the dead hanging around, coming out at night to wander. A large grove of pine trees beyond the wall was home to owls whose chilling screeches struck fear into anyone who heard them. It was a miracle those trees hadn’t been cut down as fuel during the iron- and steel-smelting campaign, something that can be attributed to a single old cypress tree that actually bled when they tried to chop it down. Who’d ever seen blood from a tree before? It was like Huzhu’s hair, which bled if it was cut. By all appearances, the only things that were preserved were the unusual ones.

I found my sister in the school office. There was no romanticizing with Ma Liangcai; she was treating a wound on him. Someone had hit him, opening a gash in his head, and my sister was wrapping a bandage around it, leaving exposed only one eye so he could see where he was going, his nostrils so he could breathe, and his mouth so he could eat and drink. To me he resembled the Nationalist soldiers we’d seen in movies after they’d been beaten bloody by Communist forces. She looked like a nurse, but totally devoid of expression, as if carved out of cold, polished marble. All the windows had been smashed, and all the shards of broken glass had been scooped up by children who had taken them home to their mothers, mostly for use in peeling potatoes. People had put the larger pieces in papered-up window frames so they could see outside and get some sunlight. Late August evening winds blew in from the pine grove, carrying the smell of pine tar, blowing papers off the office desktop onto the floor. My sister took a little vial from her reddish brown leather medical satchel, poured out a few tablets, and wrapped them in a piece of paper she picked up off the floor. Two at a time, three times a day, she told him. After meals. He forced a smile. Don’t waste them, he said. There’s no before or after meals, I’m not going to eat. I’m going on a hunger strike as a show of resistance against the savagery of those Fascists. I come from three generations of poor peasants, red to our roots, so why did they beat me? My sister gave him a sympathetic look and said softly: Teacher Ma, don’t get upset, it’ll make your injury worse… He thrust out his hands and grabbed hold of my sister’s hand. Baofeng, he said almost hysterically, Baofeng, I want you to like me, I want you to be mine… All these years, I think of you when I’m eating, when I’m sleeping, when I’m out walking, I don’t know what to do with myself, I’m in a daze. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked into a wall or a tree, and people assume I’m thinking about my studies, but I’m really thinking about you… I found all that lovesick claptrap emerging from a little hole in the bandages preposterous; his eyes were strangely bright, like wet lumps of coal. My sister struggled to free her hands; she drew her head back and shook it from side to side to get away from the hole in the bandages that was his mouth. Don’t fight me, he said, do it my way… Ma Liangcai was beginning to rant. The guy was unscrupulous. Sister! I shouted as I kicked open the door and ran into the room armed with my spear. Ma Liangcai abruptly let go of my sister’s hands and stumbled backward, knocking over the basin stand and spilling water all over the brick floor. Kill! I shouted as I jammed my spear into the wall. Ma Liangcai lost his balance and sat down hard on the pulpy wet newspaper, obviously scared witless. I pulled the tip of the spear out of the wall and said to Lan Baofeng, Sister, Jinlong had people brush red paint into Dad’s eyes. When I left he was rolling on the floor in agony. Mother sent me to get you. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Gome with me and keep Dad from going blind. She picked up her medical satchel, cast a fleeting glance at Ma Liangcai shaking in a corner, and ran out with me, so fast I couldn’t keep up. Her satchel swung back and forth, banging noisily against her backside as she ran. The stars were out; in the western sky Venus shone brightly alongside a crescent moon.

My dad was still rolling around in the yard, and no one could hold him down. He kept rubbing his eyes and crying out in pain, sending cold shivers down people’s spines. All my brother’s toadies had slipped away, leaving only him and his protectors, the four Sun brothers. My mother and Huang Tong were each holding one of my dad’s arms to try to keep him from rubbing his eyes. But he was too strong for them, and his arms kept slipping out of their grasp, like slippery catfish. My mother, gasping from exertion, kept cursing: Jinlong, you unconscionable beast, he may not be your biological father, but he raised you from childhood. How could you be so savage?

My sister charged into the compound like a savior from the heavens. Lan Lian, Mother said, stop struggling, Baofeng’s here. Baofeng, help your father, don’t let him go blind. He may be stubborn, but he’s a good man, and he was especially good to you and your brother… Night had not fallen completely, but the red throughout the compound and on Dad’s face had turned dark green. The smell of paint hung in the air. Bring me some water, and hurry! My sister was still out of breath. Mother ran into the house and came out with a dipper full of water. That’s not enough! I need lots of water, the more the better! She took the dipper, took aim at Dad’s face, and said: Close your eyes, Dad! Actually, they’d been closed all along, since he couldn’t open them. She splashed the dipper full of water into his face. Water! she screamed hoarsely. Water! Water! I was shocked to hear a sound like that from my gentle sister. Mother came out of the house with a bucket of water, stumbling toward us. Astonishingly, Huang Tong’s wife, Wu Qiuxiang, a woman whose only fear was that things would go smoothly, who wished terrible afflictions on absolutely everyone, came out of her house also carrying a bucket of water. Darkness had fallen. From the shadows my sister cried out: Throw it all into his face! One dipper full of water after another splashed into Dad’s face, creating the sound of crashing waves. Bring me a lantern! she demanded. My mother ran into the house and came back with a small kerosene lantern, walking cautiously and shielding the flickering flame with her hand. A breeze blew by and put it out. Mother lost her footing and lay sprawled on the ground. The lantern must have sailed a long way away; I detected the smell of kerosene wafting from a distant corner of the wall. I heard Jinlong say to one of his toadies in a low voice: Go light the gas lamp.

Outside of the sun, the brightest source of light in Ximen Village at the time was a gas lamp. Though only seventeen, Tiger Cub Sun was the village expert on that lamp. He could light it off in ten minutes, whereas it took others half an hour. They invariably broke the wicker filament; he never did. He’d stare at the filament, so white it hurt the eyes, and listen to the hiss of the gas, mesmerized. The compound was black as ink, but a light was beginning to glow inside the house, as if a fire were spreading. Surprised looks appeared on people’s faces as Tiger Cub Sun emerged from the Ximen Village Red Guard headquarters with a gas lamp on a pole, like bringing out the sun to invest the red wall and red tree with radiance, fiery, blindingly red. Every face in the crowd was immediately visible: Huang Huzhu, standing in the doorway of her house, fingering the tip of her braid like the spoiled daughter of a feudal family; Huang Hezuo, standing under the apricot tree, casting looks all over the place, her boyish haircut starting to grow out, bubbles oozing from between her teeth; Wu Qiuxiang running around, as if there were so many things she wanted to say, but no one to talk to; Ximen Jinlong, hands on his hips in the middle of the yard, a somber look in his eyes, his brows furrowed as if he were pondering weighty questions; three of the Sun brothers fanned out around Ximen Jinlong like a pack of running dogs; and finally, Huang Tong, who was busy splashing water into my dad’s face. The water: some of it splashed back into the radiant light and some of it dripped down my father’s face; by then he was sitting up, hands on his stretched-out legs, his face raised to receive the water bath. He was calm: no more violent thrashing, no more cries of anguish; most likely my sister’s arrival had eased his mind. My mother was crawling on the ground and mumbling, My lantern, where’s my lantern? Covered in mud, she looked terrible, especially in the glaring light of the gas lamp, which showed her hair to be silvery white. She looked much older than her age of not quite fifty, and my heart ached for her. It appeared as if the paint on Dad’s face had thinned out a bit, but it was still bright red, and beads of water rolled off it like raindrops from a lotus leaf. Gawkers had gathered outside the compound, until the gateway was black with people. My sister stood there as calmly as a battlefield general. Bring the lamp over, she said. Tiger Cub Sun carried it up, taking very small steps. The second Sun brother – Tiger – came flying out of the headquarters with a bench, probably acting on orders from my brother, and set it down a couple of yards from my dad so his brother would have something to set the lantern on. My sister opened her satchel and removed some cotton and a pair of tweezers. Picking up a piece of cotton with the tweezers, she soaked it in water and cleaned the area around Dad’s eyes; after that, she cleaned his eyelids. She worked with great care and speed. When that was done, she filled a syringe with water and told my dad to open his eyes. He couldn’t do it. Who’ll come over and pry his eyes open? my sister asked. Mother crawled up, bringing all that mud with her. Jiefang, my sister said, come pry Dad’s eyes open. I shrank back. Dad’s red face was terrifying to me. Hurry up! she said. So I stuck my spear in the ground and went up to her, tiptoeing like a chicken in the snow. I looked at her, looked at the syringe in her hand, and tried to pry one of Dad’s eyes open. His agonizing shriek cut into me like a knife, and I jumped way back from sheer fright. What is it with you? my sister asked angrily. It’s okay with you if your dad goes blind, is that it? Huang Huzhu, who had been standing in her doorway, walked nimbly up to us. She was wearing a red-checked coat over a gaily patterned blouse, with both collars turned up. Her braid rolled back and forth along her spine. I can still see it after all these years. The distance from her doorway to our ox shed was about thirty paces. In the bright light of the gas lamp, those thirty paces were a wonderful show of their own, projecting shadows of a beautiful woman. All eyes were on her, but none more intensely than mine. After all the terrible things she had said about my sister, here she was, boldly walking up to be her assistant. I’ll do it! she said in a loud voice that arrived on the air like a robin redbreast. The mud didn’t deter her; so what if her pretty white-soled shoes were badly soiled? Everyone knew what a clever, deft young woman she was. The insoles my sister embroidered were lovely, but not as lovely as Huzhu’s. When the apricot tree was in bloom, she’d stand under it, eyes on the flowers, fingers flying as she transferred the flowers to the insole, making them more beautiful and fragile than those on the tree. She kept those insoles in little piles under her pillow, and I wondered who she was going to give them to. Braying Jackass? Ma Liangcai? Jinlong? How about me?

Her eyes shone in the extraordinary glare of the gas lamp, as did her teeth. She was, undeniably, a beauty, with a nicely rounded bottom and pert bosom, and I, in my single-minded dedication to follow my dad in independent farming, had completely overlooked the beauty right beside me. In that brief moment, the time it took to walk from her doorway to our ox shed, I fell hopelessly in love with her. She bent over, extended her long delicate fingers, and pried open one of my dad’s eyes. He cried out in agony, but I heard a little popping sound when the eyelid was unstuck, like bubbles released by fish from the bottom. The eye socket looked like an open wound from which bloody fluids flowed. My sister took aim with her syringe and squirted a slow silvery stream of water, controlling the force so the irrigation would be effective without damaging the eye. Once in the eye, the water turned to blood and then streamed down his face. Dad groaned in agony With the same degree of accuracy and the same speed, my sister and Huzhu, mortal enemies who had reached a silent agreement to work together, irrigated my dad’s other eye. They then washed them clean – left, right, left, right – over and over. Finally, my sister put eye drops in both eyes and covered them with a bandage. Jiefang, she said, take Dad in the house. I ran over and lifted him up by his armpits. Getting him to stand was like pulling a turnip out of muddy ground.

At that moment a strange sound – somewhere between a cry, a laugh, and a sigh – emerged from the ox shed. It was our ox. Tell me, were you crying or laughing or sighing? Go on with your story, Big-head Lan Qiansui said icily. Don’t ask me that.

– The startled crowd of gawkers turned to look at the shed, suffused with light. The ox’s eyes were like lamps giving off a blue light; golden emanations radiated from his body. Dad struggled to go into the shed. Ox! he cried. My ox! You’re all I have, my whole family! The note of despair in those cries chilled the heart of everyone who heard them. Jinlong may have betrayed you, but my sister, Mother, and I love you. How can you say that the ox is your whole family? His body may have been an ox, but his heart and soul were Ximen Nao, so all those people in the yard – his son, his daughter, his first and second concubines, as well as his farmhand and me, his farmhand’s son – produced feelings in him that were all jumbled up: love, hate, enmity, and gratitude -

It may not have been as involved as you make it out to be, Big-head Lan Qiansui said. Maybe I made that strange sound because I had a clump of grass caught in my throat. But you’ve taken a simple matter and turned it inside out, deliberately complicating it in your jumbled narration.

– It was a jumbled world back then, which makes it hard to speak with clarity. But let me pick up where I left off: The Ximen Village parade came over from the eastern head of the marketplace, accompanied by gongs and drums and red banners snapping in the wind. Brigade Commander Huang Tong was being paraded through the streets by Jinlong and his Red Guards, in addition to the former Party secretary Hong Taiyue, along with the onetime security head, Yu Wufu, the rich peasant Wu Yuan, Zhang Dazhuang the traitor, and Ximen Bai, wife of the landlord Ximen Nao, all old-line bad elements. My dad, Lan Lian, was also under escort. Hong Taiyue was clenching his teeth and staring straight ahead. Zhang Dazhuang wore a worried frown. Wu Yuan was weeping. Ximen Bai was slovenly and dirty. The paint hadn’t been cleaned off my dad’s face; his eyes were blood red and tear-filled. The tears resulted from damaged corneas, not any sort of internal weakness. On the cardboard sign around Dad’s neck Jinlong himself had written: “Stinking, Obstinate Independent Farmer.” Dad was carrying our plow over his shoulder, the one they’d given him during land reform. He had a hempen rope around his waist, which was tied to a set of reins, which in turn were tied to a bull ox. It was a reincarnation of the tyrannical landlord Ximen Nao; in other words, you. Feel free to interrupt me anytime and pick up where I leave off. You can relate what happened after that. I see the world through human eyes, but yours is an animal universe, so you can probably tell a more interesting story. No? All right, I’ll continue. You were a mighty ox, with horns like steel, broad shoulders, powerful muscles, and incandescent eyes that radiated malevolence. A pair of tattered shoes had been hooked on your horns. That was the brainchild of the Sun brother who was such an expert in the use of gas lamps. He meant only to make you look bad, not imply that you dallied with loose females, as such things symbolize. That son of a bitch Jinlong was going to include me in the public exposure parade, but I threatened him with my red-tasseled spear. I’ll stick this into anyone who tries to parade me like that, I said. That gave him a shock, but he chose discretion in the face of my intransigence. I couldn’t help thinking that if Dad had stood up like I did by taking down the hay cutter and brandishing it in front of the shed, threatening to use it, my brother would have backed down. But my dad was the one who backed down, letting them lead him away and hang a cardboard sign around his neck. If our ox had displayed its bullish temper, no one could have gotten away with hanging a pair of tattered shoes on its horns and parading it in the street, but it had also gone along with it obediently.

Commander of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction, Little Chang, the Braying Jackass, and commander of the Ximen Village branch of the Golden Monkey faction, Jinlong, Junior Jackass, linked up in the middle of the marketplace, that is, the square in front of the Supply and Marketing Cooperative Restaurant, where they held hands and exchanged revolutionary greetings, red glints seeming to emanate from their eyes, their hearts bursting with revolutionary fervor; they may have been thinking about how the combined forces of China’s peasants, workers, and soldiers at Jinggangshan had vowed to plant red flags all over Asia, Africa, and Latin America and free all oppressed members of the proletariat from the abyss of suffering. The two Red Guard units linked up, county and village; the two groups of capitalist-roaders linked up, with Donkey County Chief Chen Guangdi, Donkey-dick Secretary Fan Tong, an alien class enemy, Hong Taiyue, a capitalist-roader who beat his ox hip bone, and Hong’s running dog, Huang Tong, who had married the concubine of a landlord. They cast furtive glances all around, letting their facial expressions convey their reactionary thoughts. Lower your heads. Lower. Lower! The Red Guards kept pushing their heads down, lower and lower, until their hindquarters were as high in the air as they’d ever get; one more push, and they’d be on their knees. Instead, their assailants pulled them back by their hair and their collars. My dad refused to lower his head, and owing to his special relationship with Ximen Jinlong, the other Red Guards let him get away with it. Braying Jackass was the first to speak. He stood on a table that had been moved out from the dining hall; with his left hand on his hip, he waved his right in a variety of gestures: a sword slice, a bayonet stab, a fist pound, and a judo chop, each gesture matched by the oration, the tone, and the cadence. Saliva gathered in the corners of his mouth, his words bristled with ferocity, but with no substance, like red condoms blown up in the shape of wax gourds to fly around, crashing noisily into one another until they exploded with loud pops. One of the more interesting episodes in the history of Northeast Gaomi Township involved a nurse who had once blown up a condom until it burst and injured her eyes. Braying Jackass was a master speechmaker. He modeled himself after Lenin and Mao Zedong, especially the way he thrust out his right arm at a right angle, tossed his head back, chin out, and gazed far into the distance. When he shouted: “Attack, attack, and again attack the class enemies!” he sounded like Lenin reborn. The Lenin of Lenin in 1918 had arrived in Northeast Gaomi Township. Silence fell over the crowd, as if the people’s throats were squeezed shut, but only for a moment, and then shouts arose – Hooray! by the uncultured, Long Life! by their opposite numbers. The Hoorays and Long Life shouts were not intended for Braying Jackass, but, like a blown-up condom, he was so carried away he was virtually floating. There were even grumblings down below, such as: We can’t treat that bastard lightly! uttered by an old-timer who had studied in a private school, could read just about everything, and who hung around the barbershop, where he said to men getting haircuts, Ask me how to write any character you want, and if I can’t do it, I’ll pay for your haircut. A couple of middle-school teachers asked him how to write several obscure characters they’d found in dictionaries, and even they couldn’t stump him. One teacher decided to trick him by making up a character, a simple circle with a dot in the middle. The man sneered. Think you can stump me, do you? This one is pronounced peng, and is the sound of a stone tossed into a well. I got you this time, the teacher said. I made it up. In the beginning, the man said, all characters were made up. The teacher was at a loss for words; the self-satisfied man beamed. Junior Jackass followed Braying Jackass onto the bench, but his speech was a pale imitation of the one by his predecessor.

Now, Ximen Ox, I should relate what you were doing on that market day. At first, you meekly followed behind my dad, matching him step for step. But your glorious image and your obedient behavior seemed odd to people, especially to me. You were a spirited animal that had displayed extraordinary behaviors in prior months and years. If, at the time, I’d been aware that the arrogant soul of Ximen Nao and the memory of a renowned donkey were hidden deep inside you, I’d have been disappointed in your behavior. You should have fought back, should have raised havoc in the marketplace, should have played the major role in that carnivalesque episode, like one of those bulls in a Spanish corrida. But you didn’t. You held your head low, tattered shoes hanging from your horns, a symbol of shame, unhurriedly chewing your cud, as people could tell from the rumblings down in your stomachs. And so it went, from early morning till noon, from chilled air to warm, till the ground baked in the sun, till the fragrance of braised buns emerged from the Supply and Marketing Cooperative dining hall. A one-eyed young man with a badly worn coat thrown over his shoulders came limping out of the marketplace, dragging an impressive yellow dog behind him. He was an infamous dog-killer. Born into a poor family, and quickly orphaned, he was sent to school by the government free of charge. But, hating school with a passion, he ruined what could have been a glorious future. Preferring a life of complete freedom over one involving books and study, he made no attempt to better himself, and the Party could do nothing about it. Killing dogs and selling them for their meat, he enjoyed life to the fullest. Now at the time, private butchering was illegal, whether it was pigs or dogs. The government held a monopoly in the trade. But they left one side of the net open for this particular dog-killer. Any government, whatever its makeup, would treat someone like him with leniency. He was a dog’s natural enemy. Neither very tall nor very big, he wasn’t particularly quick on his feet and had poor eyesight. A dog wouldn’t have trouble tearing him limb from limb. But any dog, from mild-mannered to vicious, tucked its tail between its legs, shrank in on itself, and, with naked fear in its eyes, whimpered imploringly when it saw him, accepting its fate as it let him put a rope around its neck and hang it from a tree. He’d then drag the strangled animal back to the hole beneath a stone bridge where he lived and worked to skin and clean the dog with river water, then chop it up and toss the meat into a pot. After he fired up his stove with kindling, the water would come to a boil and release dense steam from under the bridge; as it followed the currents, the fragrance of dog meat would suffuse the river all around.

An evil wind rose up, snapping the banners so ferociously that one of the poles snapped in two, sending that banner circling into the air to dance for a moment before landing on the ox’s head. That’s when you went wild, exactly what I’d been waiting for, me and many of the gawkers in the marketplace. This farce could only end riotously.

You began by shaking your head in an attempt to flick off the banner. I know what it’s like to look at the sun by covering my head with a red flag; bright red, like a vast ocean, as if the sun were immersed in an ocean of blood, and I was struck by a feeling that the end of the world was upon me. Since I’m not an ox, I don’t know how you felt with a red banner covering your head, but the violence of your movements led me to assume that you were terror-stricken. The tips of your steely horns were those of a fighting bull. If a pair of knives had been attached to them, you could have decimated the crowd and routed the survivors. Even after many shakes of your head and sweeps of your tail, the red banner stayed put, and panic set in; you ran. Now, your reins were tied to my dad’s waist, so when you, a four-year-old bull weighing nearly five hundred catties, without an ounce of unwanted fat, an animal filled with the vigor of youth and unimaginable strength, took off running, you dragged him behind you as if he were a mouse on the tail of a cat. You ran straight into the crowd, drawing fearful howls and screams. My brother could have been giving the best speech ever heard at that moment, and no one would have been listening. Truth is, they all came to watch the show, and couldn’t care less if you were revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. Take that red banner off his head! someone yelled. But who was willing or brave enough to do that? Taking it off would have ended a good show. In running for cover, the people subconsciously formed tight clusters. Old women were crying, children were bawling. Goddamn it, you’re crushing my eggs! You’re trampling on my children! You broke my bowl, you bastards! A while before, when the wild geese were falling out of the air, the people had surged to the middle of the yard; now, with the running of the ox, the people were sprinting right and left to get out of its way. Piling up on each other, some ran to the wall, where they were flattened like thin cakes; others ran into the butcher’s rack, where they crashed to the ground along with the expensive raw pork, some winding up in their mouths. Before goring anyone in the ribs, the ox squashed a little piglet. The peddler, a butcher named Zhu Jiujie who was so outrageously rude he might as well have been a member of the imperial family, picked up his butcher knife and swung it at the ox’s head. With a loud clang, it struck one of the horns and flew off into the air, while the severed half of the horn wound up on the ground. The red banner jumped at that opportunity to detach itself from the ox’s head. The animal stopped dead in its tracks, panting loudly, belly heaving, foam gathering around its mouth, eyes bloodshot, as a liquid, flecked with blood, oozed from the stump of the severed horn. This liquid was the ox’s essence, what’s known as “ox-horn essence,” reputed to be an exceptional aid for male virility, as much as ten times more powerful than the palm tree extract found on Hainan Island. A particularly corrupt authority figure, a former member of the provincial Party Committee who was exposed by the Red Guards, had taken a girl in her twenties as his wife when he was already turning gray Too old to perform in bed, he asked around for something to restore his virility, and this ox-horn essence is what the people recommended. He sent some of his thugs out to force all the farmers in the county and those belonging to the province to send their uncastrated and unmated young bulls to a secret location, where their horns were cut off and the liquid extracted; then the bones were crushed and delivered to their boss, the senior official. Sure enough, his gray hair was black again, his wrinkles disappeared, and his organ stood up like a machine gun with a crooked barrel, to mow down a phalanx of women like rolling up a mat.

I need to talk about my dad here. His injury was not yet healed. At first, everything he saw was veiled in red. Then this happened, and he had no idea where he was. All he could do was stumble along after the ox, but he quickly gave that up, wrapped his arms around his head, and was dragged behind the ox like an embroidered ball. Fortunately, he was wearing a padded coat that absorbed most of the bumps and he sustained no major injuries. When the ox lost its horn and stopped running, Dad wasted no time in standing up and untying the rope around his waist. If the ox started running again, this time he wouldn’t be dragged along. But then he looked down and saw the severed half of the ox’s horn on the ground, and cried out in horror, nearly passing out from the shock. My dad had said that the ox was his family, his whole family, so how could he not be anxious, be pained, be enraged, when his family suffered an injury? His gaze moved to the fat, oily face of the pig butcher, Zhu Jiujie. At a time in history when no Chinese had enough oil in their diet, the officials and pig butchers like him not only ate the fattest, oiliest food, but did so with smug self-satisfaction, proudly enjoying the good life that Communism offered. As an independent farmer, my dad had no interest in the affairs of the commune. But now this People’s Commune pig butcher had lopped off our ox’s horn, and my dad cried out in horror, My ox! before fainting dead away. I knew that if he hadn’t fainted at that moment, he’d have picked up the butcher knife and gone for the pig butcher’s big, fat head. I hate to think what that would have led to. I was glad he fainted. But the ox was very much awake, and you can imagine how losing that horn hurt. With a loud bellow, he lowered his head and charged the fat butcher. What caught my attention at that instant was the cluster of long hairs sticking out from the ox’s navel, like a fine, wolf-hair writing bush. It too was on the move, rising and falling, as if composing a line of seal characters. I looked away from this mystical writing brush just in time to see the ox twist his head to one side and bury his good horn in Zhu Jiujie’s plump belly. His head kept moving, so the horn didn’t sink in to the hilt. Then he jerked his head upward like an erupting mountain of flesh, and out from the hole in Zhu Jinjie’s belly poured big yellow clumps of fat.

My dad came to after everyone else had run away, and the first thing he did was pick up the butcher knife to stand guard in front of his one-horned ox. Although he said nothing, the determined look in his eyes made an unmistakable statement to the Red Guards who were encircling him: You’ll have to kill me to get to this ox. Zhu Jiujie’s spilled fat reminded the Red Guards of the man’s tyrannical disposition and disgusting conduct, and they could not have been happier. Holding the butcher knife in one hand and the tether in the other, Dad walked off with his ox like a man who has raided an execution ground to rescue the condemned, all the way home. The blazing sun had long since vanished and gray clouds had gathered in the sky. Light snowflakes danced in the light breezes before settling onto Northeast Gaomi Township’s land.

18

A Deft Hand Mends Clothes, Huzhu

Declares Her Love

Heavy Snows Seal a Village, Jinlong Takes Command

During that long winter, when every third day saw a light snowfall and every fifth day a heavy one, the telephone lines connecting Ximen Village to the commune and the county town were downed by snow. At the time, all broadcasts from the county traveled on telephone wires, so when the wires went down, the broadcasting stations went mute. And when the roads were blocked by snowbanks, there was no newspaper delivery. Ximen Village was cut off from the outside world.

You ought to recall that winter’s snows. Every morning my dad took you outside the village. If it was a nice day, the red sunbeams would drench the snow and ice with brilliance. My dad would hold your reins with his right hand and carry the knife he’d taken from the pig butcher in his left. You both exhaled pink steam from your mouths and nostrils. The hair around your mouth and my dad’s beard and eyebrows were coated with frost. You headed out into the wild, into the sun, crunching the snow under your feet.

Armed with revolutionary fervor, my half brother Ximen Jinlong called upon his imagination in leading the four Sun brothers – his four warrior protectors – and a pack of bored kids – his shrimp soldiers and crab generals – as well, it goes without saying, as a bunch of adults who dearly loved a show, in taking the Great Cultural Revolution into its second year, when spring arrived on the land.

They built a platform under the apricot tree with a wooden plank, then hung hundreds of red cloth streamers from the branches of the tree to represent flowers in bloom. Every night, the fourth Sun brother – Tiger Cub – climbed up onto the platform and, puffing out his cheeks, blew his bugle to call the masses to gather round. It was a lovely little bronze bugle, adorned with a red tassel. When it first fell into his hands, Tiger Cub puffed his cheeks out and practiced on it every day, making sounds like a lowing cow. But he mastered the instrument in the days leading up to spring, and was able to produce sweet music, mostly from popular folk tunes. He was a talented youngster, a quick study, no matter what he put his hand to. My brother had people mount a rusty old cannon on top of the platform and scoop several dozen holes out of the compound wall for gun ports, then had them stack cobblestones alongside each hole. Though there were no firearms to hand out, village youngsters with red-tasseled spears stood sentry beside the holes. Every few hours, Jinlong would climb onto the platform and survey the surroundings with a pair of homemade binoculars, creating the impression of a general observing enemy activities. The air was so cold his fingers were like carrots that had been washed in ice water; his cheeks, fittingly, were as red as late-autumn apples. Dressed only in his military tunic and unlined pants, in order to preserve the desired image, he kept his sleeves rolled up high and wore only a brown imitation army cap. Pus and blood oozed from chilblains on his ears; his nose ran continuously. Physically, he was a mess, but he was bursting with energy. The fires of passion burned in his eyes.

Seeing him out there like that, my mother worked through the night to make a padded coat for him; to preserve the image of a commanding officer, Huzhu helped to give the coat a military look. They even sewed a floral pattern into the collar with white thread. My brother refused to wear it. Mother, he said somberly, don’t fuss like an old woman. The enemy could attack at any minute, and my men are manning their stations in the snow and ice. Should I be the only person wearing a padded coat? My mother glanced all around and discovered that my brother’s “four warrior attendants” and his running dogs were similarly dressed in imitation military uniforms they’d dyed brown, and that they too suffered from running noses, the frozen tips of which looked like hawthorn fruit. And yet, a look of sacred dignity was frozen on each little face.

My brother mounted his platform every morning, a bullhorn fashioned out of sheet metal in his hand as he held forth to his running dogs below, to villagers who came to be entertained, and to the entire snowbound village, adopting the tone of a great man, which he had learned at the feet of Braying Jackass, exhorting his little revolutionary generals and poor and lower-middle peasants to wipe the scales from their eyes and sharpen their vigilance, to hold their ground to the very last, to wait patiently for spring to arrive with its warmth and new flowers, when they would link up with the main forces under the command of Commander in Chief Chang. His oration was frequently interrupted by a spell of hacking coughs; wheezing sounds like clucking chickens emerged from his chest, hacking sounds emerged from his throat, and we knew that signified the presence of phlegm. But clearing his throat and spitting out the phlegm as he stood on the platform would not become a military commander, so he swallowed the offensive material, to the disgust of all My brother’s hacking coughs were not the only cause of interruption; shouted slogans from the foot of the platform frequently broke into his oration. The second Sun brother – Tiger Sun – took the lead in shouting slogans. He had a booming voice, was somewhat educated, and knew just when to shout to incite the crowd into reaching the apex of revolutionary fervor.

During a particularly heavy snowstorm one day, as if the sky had opened up and sent ten thousand eiderdown pillows to earth, my brother mounted the platform, raised his megaphone, and was about to harangue his audience when he rocked back and forth, dropped his megaphone, and tumbled to the ground, landing with a thud. Stunned by what they’d just seen, people screamed and ran up to him, all talking at once: What’s wrong, Commander? Commander, what’s wrong? My mother ran crying out of the house, with only a tattered goatskin coat thrown over her shoulders to ward off the cold, and which made her appear unusually big.

That goatskin coat had been one of a lot of tattered coats our village’s former public security chief Yang Qi had bought from Inner Mongolia on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Emitting a rank odor, it was stained by cow dung and dried sheep’s milk. When he tried to peddle those coats, Yang Qi was accused of profiteering and brought under escort to the commune by Hong Taiyue, who threw him in jail. The coats were locked in the storeroom awaiting final disposition by the commune. Then the Cultural Revolution was launched, and Yang Qi was released and sent home, where he joined Jinlong’s rebel faction and was the strongest voice of the people when Hong Taiyue was held up to public criticism. Yang worked hard to curry favor with my brother, desperate to be appointed deputy commander of the Ximen Village Red Guard detachment. My brother refused his request. The Ximen Village Red Guard detachment, he said decisively, is under unified leadership. There are no deputies. Deep down, he was contemptuous of Yang Qi, a repulsively ugly man with shifty eyes. Considered one of the proletarian thugs, he possessed a belly full of wicked thoughts and was exceedingly destructive. He could be used, but not in a position of authority. I personally overheard my brother say that to his trusted followers in the command headquarters. In a foul mood over having failed in his attempt to gain favor, Yang Qi then conspired with the locksmith Han Liu to break into the storeroom and retrieve the coats that had been taken from him, which he decided to sell out on the street. With winds whistling and snow falling, icicles hanging like sawtooth fangs from the eaves, this was ideal weather for goatskin coats. Villagers crowded round, turning the coats – stained and dirty, patchy, covered with mouse droppings, and nauseatingly foul smelling – over in their hands. Smooth-tongued Yang Qi spoke of his tattered, rotting goods as if they’d once been part of the imperial wardrobe. He picked up a short, black coat, slapped the greasy, worn-out fur -pow pow. Listen to that. Take a look. Feel it, try it on. Listen, it’s like a brass gong. Look, it’s like silk and satin. Look again, the fur is black as paint, and you’ll start to sweat when you slip it on. With one of these coats over your shoulders, you can crawl on ice and lie in the snow without feeling the least bit cold! A nearly new black goatskin coat for only nineteen yuan, about the same as finding one lying in the street. Go ahead, Great-Uncle Zhang, try it on. Oh, oh, my dear uncle. That coat fits like the Mongolian tailor made it just for you. One inch more and it’s too long, one inch less and it’s too short. So, what do you think, hot enough for you? It’s not? Touch your forehead, you’re sweating, and you say it’s not hot? Eight yuan? If not for the neighborhood connection, I wouldn’t sell it for fifteen. You won’t go higher than eight? Old Uncle, what can I say? Last autumn, I smoked a couple of your pipes, so I owe you for that. A man can’t rest till he pays off a debt. All right, then, nine yuan, and I lose money on this sale. Nine yuan and it’s yours. Take it home with you, but first get a rag and wipe the sweat from your forehead. You don’t want to catch cold. Eight, you say? How about eight-fifty? I’ll lower it a bit and you raise it a bit. After all, you’re a generation older than me. If it was anybody else I’d smack him in the ear so hard he’d roll all the way down to the river. Eight yuan, it’s like I’m giving you a transfusion of my own blood, type O, the same as Dr. Bethune. All right, eight yuan, but Old Zhang, now you’re the one who owes me a favor. He counted the sticky bills: five, six, seven, eight, all right, the coat is yours. Now take it home and show the missus. Sit around in it for half an hour, and I guarantee the snow on your roof will melt. The heat you give off, even from a distance, will turn the snow in your yard into little rivers and the icicles hanging from your eaves will clatter to the ground…

With my brother valiantly leading the way, his “four warrior attendants” arrayed spiritedly around him, the Red Guard forces came raucously up the street. A weapon was tucked into my brother’s belt, a starter’s pistol he’d taken from the elementary school PE instructor. Light glinted off the chrome barrel, which was shaped like a dog’s dick. The “four warrior attendants” were also sporting belts, made from the hide of a Production Brigade cow that had recently starved to death. Not completely dry and not yet tanned, the belts stank something awful. Each of them had a revolver tucked into his belt, the ones used by the village opera troupe, all beautifully carved out of elm by the skilled carpenter Du Luban, and then painted black. They were so real-looking that if they fell into the hands of bandits, they could be used in robberies. The back part of the one in Dragon Sun’s belt had been hollowed out to make room for a spring, a firing pin, and a detonating cap. When fired, it produced a louder crack than a real pistol. My brother’s pistol used caps, and when he pulled the trigger, it popped twice. The underlings behind the “four warrior attendants” were all carrying red-tasseled spears over their shoulders, the metal tips polished to a shine with sandpaper and razor sharp. If you buried one in a tree, it was hard work pulling it out. My brother led his troops at a fast clip. The eye-catching red tassels against the virgin snow created a spectacular tableau. When they were about fifty yards from the spot where Yang Qi was selling his rank goods, my brother drew his pistol and fired it into the air: Pow! Pow! Two puffs of smoke quickly dissipated above him. Comrades! he shouted. Charge! Holding their spears as weapons, the words Kill Kill Kill thundered overhead as they sloshed through the snow, turning it to mud with loud crunches. As soon as they reached the spot, my brother gave them a signal, and they surrounded Yang Qi and a dozen or so of his potential goatskin coat customers.

Jinlong glared at me, and I glared right back. Truth be told, I was feeling lonesome and would have loved to join his Red Guard unit. Their mysterious yet solemn movements excited me. The pistols in the four warrior attendants’ belts excited me even more. They were impressive, even if they were fake, and I was itching to have one just like them. So I asked my sister to tell Jinlong that I wanted to join his Red Guard unit. He told her: Independent farming is a target of revolution, and he does not qualify to be a Red Guard. The minute he takes his ox into the commune I’ll accept him and even appoint him as a team leader. He raised his voice so I could hear every word without having my sister repeat it. But joining the commune, especially the ox, was not my decision to make. Dad hadn’t uttered a word since the incident in the marketplace. He just stared straight ahead, a vacant look on his face, holding the butcher knife in his hand as a threat. After losing half a horn, the ox had the same vacant look. It looked at people out of the corner of its half-closed eyes, its abdomen rising and falling as it emitted a low growl, as if ready to bury its good horn in someone’s belly. No one dared to go near the ox shed, where Dad and his ox were staying. My brother led his Red Guards into the compound every day to stir things up, with gongs and drums, attempts to fire the cannon, attacking bad elements and shouting slogans. My dad and his ox seemed not to hear any of it. But I knew that if any of them got up the nerve to enter the ox shed, blood would be spilled. Under those circumstances, if I tried to lead the ox into the commune, even if Dad said okay, the ox would never do it. So going out to watch Yang Qi peddle his goatskin coats was just an attempt to kill some time.

My brother raised his arm and aimed his starter’s pistol at Yang Qi’s chest. Trembling, he commanded: Arrest the profiteer! The four warrior attendants ran up and pointed their fake revolvers at Yang Qi’s head from four directions. Put your hands up! they shouted in unison. All Yang Qi did was sneer. Boys, he said, who do you think you’re going to scare with knots from an elm tree? Go ahead, shoot, if you’ve got the balls. I’m prepared to die a hero’s death, to die for a cause. Dragon Sun pulled the trigger. A loud crack, a puff of yellow smoke, a broken gun barrel, and blood spilling from between his thumb and forefinger; the smell of gunpowder hung over them all. Yang Qi, frightened by the noise, paled; a moment later, his teeth were chattering. He looked down at the hole burned in the breast of his coat. Brothers, he said, you really did it! To which my brother responded, Revolution is not a dinner party. I’m a Red Guard, too, Yang Qi said. My brother said that they were Chairman Mao’s Red Guards, while he was just a ragtag Red Guard faction. Since Yang Qi was in a mood to argue, my brother told the Sun brothers to take him to the command headquarters to be criticized and denounced. Then he told the Red Guard troops to confiscate the goatskin coats Yang Qi had laid in the grass beside the road.

The public meeting to criticize and denounce Yang Qi went on all night. A bonfire was lit in the compound using wood from furniture the bad elements had been forced to break apart and bring over. That included several pieces of valuable sandalwood and rosewood furniture – all burned. Bonfires and public criticism meetings were nightly affairs. The fires melted the snow on the rooftops; black gooey mud was the runoff. My brother knew there was only so much furniture they could use as firewood, but he had an idea. Feng Jun, a pockmarked villager who had been to Northeast China, once told him that, because of the sap, even green pine trees will burn. So my brother told his Red Guards to take the bad elements out behind the elementary school and have them cut down pine trees. One after another, the downed trees were dragged over to the street outside the command headquarters by the village’s pair of scrawny horses.

The denouncement of Yang Qi centered on his capitalist activities, his verbal abuse of the little generals, and his failed plan to set up a counterrevolutionary organization. After beating and kicking him mercilessly, they ran him out of the compound. The goatskin coats were passed out to Red Guards on night duty. From the time the revolutionary tide began to sweep through the land, my brother slept only in the original brigade office, now command headquarters, in his clothes, and always in the company of his four warrior attendants and a dozen or more underlings. They laid straw and blankets out on the floor and were kept warm by the addition of the newly acquired coats.

But let’s return to what we were talking about earlier: My mother rushed out of the house with the goatskin coat over her shoulders, which made her appear unusually big. The coat had been allocated to my sister by my brother, since she was the Red Guard doctor first, then the village doctor. True to her filial nature, she gave the coat to my mother to ward off the cold. She ran up to where my brother lay, knelt down beside him, and lifted up his head. What’s wrong, son? My brother’s face was purple, his lips dry and cracked, and his ears oozed pus and blood; he looked like he’d become a martyr. Your sister, where’s your sister? She went to Chen Dafu’s to deliver his baby. Jiefang, my mother wailed, be a good boy and go get her. I looked down at Jinlong, then over at the now leaderless Red Guards, and my heart ached. We had the same mother, after all. Sure, he liked to throw his weight around, and that made me a little jealous. But I admired him. He was a rare talent, I knew that, and I didn’t want him to die. So I raced out of the compound and down the street, headed west for a couple of hundred yards, then turned north into a lane, where Chen Dafu and his family lived in three rooms with a thatched roof and a rammed-earth wall, the nearest compound to the river about a hundred yards down the lane.

Chen’s scrawny dog greeted me with ferocious barking. So I picked up a brick and threw it at him, hitting him in the leg. With a series of pained yelps, he ran into the yard on three legs, just as Chen Dafu emerged from inside carrying a very big and very intimidating club. Who hit my dog? I did! I replied with an angry glare. Seeing it was me, the towering dark man softened; his features relaxed as he flashed an ambiguous smile. Why be afraid of me? Because I had something on him. I’d seen what he and Huang Tong’s wife, Wu Qiuxiang, were doing in the willow grove one day. Embarrassed to be caught in the act, she ran off, bent at the waist, abandoning her laundry basin and mallet. A checkered article of clothing floated down the river. As he was buttoning up his pants, Chen Dafu threatened me: If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you! If Huang Tong doesn’t kill you first, I replied. His tone softened and he tried to soft-soap me instead, saying he’d get his wife’s niece to marry me. The image of a sandy-haired girl with tiny ears and snot on her lip floated into my mind. Hell! I said. Who wants that yellow-haired niece of yours? I’d rather go through life as a bachelor than marry anyone as ugly as that! Ah, my boy, you’re raising your sights too high. I tell you, I’m going to see that you and that ugly girl are married one day! Then I guess you’d better get a rock and beat me to death, I said. Kid, he replied, let’s you and me make a gentleman’s agreement. You don’t tell anyone what you saw here, and I won’t try to fix you up with my wife’s niece. If you break your promise, I’ll have my wife take her niece to your place and set her down on your bed, then have her tell people you raped her. How would you like that? I thought for a moment. Having that ugly, stupid girl sit on my bed and then telling people I raped her would spell big trouble. Despite the saying, “An upright person does not fear a slanted shadow, and dried excrement does not stick to walls,” I thought this might be more than I could handle. So we reached an agreement. But over time, based upon the way he treated me, I realized that he was more afraid of me than I was of him. That’s why I didn’t have to worry, even if I crippled his dog, and why I could talk back to him like that. Where’s my sister? I said. I need to find her. She’s with my wife, delivering a baby. I gazed at the five snot-nosed children in his yard, each slightly taller than the one before, and mocked him: That’s quite a wife you’ve got there, popping them out like a bitch, one litter after the other. He bared his teeth. Don’t talk like that. You’re too young to say hurtful things like that. You’ll see why when you grow up. I haven’t got time to argue with you, I said. I’m here to get my sister. I turned and faced his window. Sis! I shouted. Mother sent me here to get you. Jinlong’s dying! The shrill cry of a newborn baby erupted inside the house, drawing Chen Dafu to the window as if his pants were on fire. What is it? he shouted. The woman inside responded weakly, It’s got that thing between its legs. Chen covered his face with his hands and walked in tight circles in the snow beneath the window. Wu! he uttered at the end of each circle. Wu! The old man in the sky has opened his eyes, finally, and Chen Dafu now has an heir – My sister tore out of the house and asked me what was wrong. Jinlong’s dying, I said. He fell off the platform and hit the ground. He won’t last long.

My sister elbowed her way through the crowd and knelt at Jinlong’s side. First she put her finger under his nose, then she rubbed his hand, and finally felt his forehead. Take him inside, she commanded, and hurry! The four warrior attendants picked him up and headed for the office, but my sister stopped them. Take him home and put him on the kang! They turned and carried him into my mother’s house, where there was a heated kang. My sister made sideward glances to the Huang sisters, Huzhu and Hezuo, who were looking on, teary-eyed. The fair skin of their faces was dotted with chilblains like ripe cherries.

First my sister relieved my brother of the leather belt he wore day and night and tossed it, along with the starter’s pistol, into a corner, where it landed on top of a curious mouse, which squeaked once and died, blood seeping from its nose. Then she pulled down my brother’s pants to expose his discolored, louse-covered buttocks. With a frown, she opened an ampoule with a pair of tweezers, drew some liquid into a syringe, and jammed it haphazardly into him. In all she gave him two injections and hooked him up to an IV drip. She deftly found a vein on her first attempt, just as Wu Qiuxiang entered with a bowl of ginger tea, which she planned to spoon-feed my brother. With her eyes, my mother anxiously sought the opinion of my sister, who simply nodded noncommittally. Wu Qiuxiang began spooning the ginger tea into my brother’s mouth, her own mouth opening and closing in concert with his, so typical of mothers, something that cannot be faked. Wu Qiuxiang saw herself as my brother’s true mother. I knew that her feelings toward my brother and sister were complex, since relations between our two families were messy, to say the least. Her mouth was moving in concert with his not because of any special ties between our families, but because she knew what was in her daughters’ hearts and had witnessed my brother’s exceptional talents during the revolution. She was determined that one of her daughters would marry him, the ideal prospective son-in-law. The thought seared my mind, driving out my concern for my brother’s survival. I’d never cared much for Wu Qiuxiang, but seeing her run out of the willow grove, bent at the waist, that day had actually brought us closer together. That was because every time we met, her face reddened and she did her best to avoid eye contact. I began to take notice of her: thin waist and pale ears with a red mole on one lobe. There was magnetism in her laugh, which was deep and low. I was in the shed one night, helping Dad feed the ox, when she slipped in quietly and handed me two warm chicken eggs. She put her arm around me and held my head up against her breast. You’re a good boy, she said softly. You didn’t see anything, did you? In the darkness, I heard the ox ram his good horn into a post; his eyes were like burning torches. Given a fright, she pushed me away and slipped back outside. I followed her, a shifting silhouette in the starlight, experiencing feelings I couldn’t describe.

I’ll be honest with you. When she pressed my head up against her breast, my little pecker stiffened. That seemed terribly wrong, and it bothered me for the longest time afterward. I was enchanted by Huang Huzhu’s long braid, and from that became enchanted by her. I drifted into a fantasy world, wishing that Wu Qiuxiang would marry Hezuo, the daughter with the boyish haircut, to Jinlong, and let me marry Huzhu. But it was far more likely that she’d marry Huzhu to my brother. She was no more than ten minutes older than her sister, but even one minute still made her the elder sister, and elder sisters were always expected to marry first. I was in love with Huzhu, but given the ambiguous relationship between me and her mother, who had pressed my head against her breast in the ox shed and caused my pecker to stiffen, there was no chance she’d be allowed to marry me. I hurt, I was anxious, I had guilt feelings. And if that weren’t enough, I’d been exposed to all sorts of misinformation about sex by Hu Bin when we were grazing animals together. Things like: “Ten drops of sweat equal one drop of blood, and ten drops of blood equal one drop of semen.” Or: “After the first ejaculation, a boy stops growing.” These cockeyed concepts had me in their grip, and the future looked bleak. Looking at Jinlong’s finely developed body, then at my own scrawny frame, and finally at Huzhu’s voluptuous figure, all I could feel was despair. I even contemplated suicide. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be an empty-headed bull? I thought. Now, of course, I know you were anything but empty-headed, that in fact there were all kinds of thoughts running through your mind, and not limited to affairs of the mortal world, but included concerns of the netherworld, past, present, and future.

My brother was on the mend. He was pale as a ghost, but he struggled out to lead the revolution. While he lay unconscious for several days, my mother had thrown his clothes into boiling water, drowning all the fleas, but his handsome Dacron military tunic came out so badly wrinkled it looked like something a cow had chewed and spit out. His imitation army cap came out faded and wrinkled, resembling nothing so much as the scrotum of a castrated bull. The sight of his badly transformed tunic and cap put him in panic mode. He flew into a rage; dark blood spewed from his nostrils. Mother, he said, why didn’t you just kill me? Stung by feelings of remorse, she didn’t know what to say. As my brother’s anger subsided, sadness welled up inside him and tears streamed down his face. He climbed up onto the kang, covered his head with the quilt, and for the next two days wouldn’t eat or drink a thing and responded to nothing anyone said. Poor Mother came into the room and went back out, over and over, the cold sores at the corners of her mouth, a sign of her anxiety. Ai, how stupid could I be? she muttered. What a stupid old woman! Finally, my sister could stand it no longer. She pulled the bedding back to reveal a haggard, stubbly young man with sunken eyes. It’s just an old tunic! she said, clearly rankled. Is that worth nearly driving Mother to suicide? He sat up, his eyes glazed, and sighed. His tears began to flow even before he spoke. You don’t know what that tunic meant to me. You know the saying, “Humans need nice clothes, horses require a fine saddle.” It was that tunic that made it possible for me to issue commands and intimidate the bad elements. Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, my sister said. Do you expect your tunic to recapture its original shape because you lie in bed like a dead man? My brother thought that over. All right, I’ll get up. I’m hungry. Those last two words sent Mother scurrying into the kitchen, where she set to work preparing noodles and frying some eggs, the fragrance quickly saturating the compound.

Huang Huzhu walked into the house bashfully while my brother was wolfing down the food. Well, young lady, my mother commented with notable interest. We all share a single compound, but this is the first time you’ve been in our house in a decade. Mother looked her over with unmistakable affection. Huzhu didn’t look at my brother, she didn’t look at my sister, and she didn’t look at my mother. She just stared at the wrinkled bundle that was my brother’s tunic. Aunty, she said, you made a mess of Jinlong’s tunic when you washed it, but I know something about fabric, and I know how to sew. Would you be willing to let me work on it? Like they say, “treating a dead horse as if it were alive”? Maybe I can restore it to its original shape. Young lady, my mother said, eyes bright as she took Huzhu’s hands in hers, you really are quite the young lady. If you can restore Brother Jinlong’s tunic to its original shape, I’ll get down on my knees and kowtow three times to you!

Huzhu took only the tunic with her. She kicked the imitation army cap into the corner where the mouse hole was. Huzhu left, and hope was on its way. Mother wanted to see what sort of magic Huzhu would use on the tunic, but she got no farther than the apricot tree before her courage left her. Huang Tong was standing in his doorway chopping up elm roots with an ax. Wood chips flew like bullets. Scarier still was the enigmatic look on his tiny little face. As a class-two capitalist-roader, he had been attacked by my brother in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, and stripped of his powers and functions. He had to have a belly full of loathing for my brother, just waiting for the chance to retaliate. Still, I knew his thoughts weren’t all that clear-cut. Decades of living in our society had taught him the importance of observing things carefully. He’d never have missed noting the feelings his two precious daughters had for my brother. So Mother asked my sister to go see what was happening, but she just snorted contemptuously. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew from the hostile words Huzhu had said to my sister that the enmity between them was deep. So then Mother asked me to go. You’re too young to be worried about losing face. In her eyes I was still a child, the sad story of my life. But since I was curious to see how Huzhu was going to restore my brother’s tunic, I slinked up near her house. My legs turned wobbly when I saw Huang Tong chopping up those elm roots.

The next morning, Huzhu came over with a bundle under her arm. My brother hopped excitedly out of bed. My mother’s lips trembled, but she said nothing. Huzhu looked calm, but the corners of her mouth and the tips of her eyebrows gave her sense of pride away. She laid the bundle down on the bed and opened it. There, folded neatly, lay a restored tunic and, atop it, a brand-new army cap. Though it too was made of white material dyed yellow, it was so beautifully done it could pass for authentic. The centerpiece, however, was a red star she’d embroidered on the front with knitting wool. She handed it to my brother, then shook out the tunic for him. The wrinkles were still visible, but just barely. She lowered her eyes and blushed. Aunty, you boiled it too long, she said apologetically. This is the best I could do. Oh, my, her modesty was like a hammer striking my mother and brother’s hearts. Tears virtually sprayed from Mother’s eyes, while my brother could not stop himself from reaching out and taking Huzhu’s hands. Rather than pull them back right away, she let them fall away slowly before sitting down on the edge of the kang. My mother opened the cupboard and took out a chunk of hard candy, which she smashed into smaller pieces and handed to Huzhu. She chose not to eat them, so Mother literally put a piece into her mouth. As she sucked on the candy, she stared at the wall and said, Try them on, see if they fit. I can alter them if they don’t. My brother took off his padded coat and put on the tunic and cap, tied his leather belt around his waist, and hung the starter’s pistol from it. The commander was once again the figure of absolute authority, maybe even more so than before. She was like a true seamstress, and like a true wife as she walked around, examining my brother, straightening the hem here and tugging on the collar there. Then she stood in front of him and adjusted the cap with both hands. It seems a bit tight, she said with a sense of regret. But it’s the only piece of fabric I had, so it’ll have to do. In the spring I’ll go into town and buy a few yards of better fabric and make you a new cap.

It was clear – I didn’t stand a chance.

19

Jinlong Stages a Play to Welcome Spring

Lan Lian Would Die Before Giving Up His Vow

My brother’s recalcitrance softened considerably after he and Huzhu got together. Revolutions reform societies, women remold men. Within the space of a month or so, he not only held no criticism sessions where the targets were kicked and beaten, but he actually organized ten or more Peking operas in the modern revolutionary style. Huzhu, once bashful and timid, was transformed into a bold, forceful woman with unrestrained passion. That she had a fine voice and knew the music from so many revolutionary operas took everyone by surprise – I had to admit that my fantasies surrounding Huzhu were nothing but a toad hungering over the flesh of a swan. Years later, even Mo Yan himself revealed to me that he too had entertained illusions about Huzhu. So, to my surprise, big toads and little ones both hunger over the flesh of swans – The Ximen compound came alive with strains of music from flutes and bowed instruments, with men and women joining their voices in song. The center of revolutionary activities metamorphosed into a culture salon. Daily beatings and criticisms, with howls and wails, had been exciting at first, but they grew disturbing as time passed. By abruptly changing the shape of the revolutionary format, creating new sights and sounds, Jinyang brought smiles to the people’s faces

The rich peasant Wu Yuan, who played the two-stringed huqin, was brought into the troupe of musicians. So was Hong Taiyue, with his rich musical background as a singer. He served as conductor by banging on his glorious ox bone. Even the bad elements, whose duty was to sweep the streets clean of snow, hummed to the music emerging from the compound as they worked.

On New Year’s Eve, my brother and Huzhu braved snow to travel to the county town. They left the village as roosters were greeting the dawn; they returned at dusk the following day. They went by foot but returned on an East Is Red caterpillar tractor made in the city of Luoyang. Given its high horsepower, it was intended for farm work – plowing and harvesting – but had been appropriated by Red Guards for transportation. Now nothing could stop them from traveling where they wanted to go, not storms and not muddy roads. The tractor crossed the frozen river into the village rather than try to negotiate the unstable stone bridge, then drove down the main road to our compound. It traveled worry-free in high gear and, gas pedal pushed to the floor, nearly flew down the road, its caterpillar tracks sending snow and mud flying and leaving two deep ruts in the ground. Great puffs of green smoke were expelled from its overhead exhaust pipe like brass cymbals that circled and made loud, echo-producing crashes, drawing terrified shrieks from sparrows and crows that flew off to points unknown. People watched as my brother and Huzhu jumped down out of the cab. They were followed by a young man with a thin face and melancholy look. His hair was cut short, he wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses, his cheeks twitched, and his ears were red from the bitter cold. He had on a once-blue uniform turned nearly white from many washings; displayed prominently on the breast was a large Chairman Mao badge, while low down on his sleeve hung a Red Guard armband. One look told you he was an old-line, battle-scarred Red Guard.

My brother told Tiger Cub Sun to summon everyone with his bugle. Blow the general assembly call. Actually, there was no need for the bugle, since every villager who could walk was already there and had surrounded the tractor. Just seeing this powerful giant was not enough; the chatter was coming fast and furious. One self-designated expert pointed out: Weld a turret on top of that thing and add a cannon, and you’ve got a tank! The sky was darkening; a sunset blazed in the west, an array of pink clouds that promised snow for tomorrow. My brother issued an emergency command to light the gas lamp and build a bonfire. He would be making an announcement regarding a happy event. Now that he’d issued his orders, he leaned over to converse with the old-line Red Guard. Huang Huzhu ran into her house to have her mother fry some eggs, one for the man talking to my brother, the other for the driver, who was still sitting in the tractor. Both men politely declined the invitation to be guests in their house and refused to go into the office to warm up. So Wu Qiuxiang, who should have known better, came out carrying bowls with steaming eggs, Huang Hezuo in tow. She glided like one of those vamps you see in movies. The Red Guard refused the offer, a look of disgust on his face. Jinlong snarled under his breath: What do you think you’re doing? Take that back inside!

Something was wrong with the gas lamp, which was spewing yellow flames and black smoke, but the bonfire blazed, the sap on the green pine limbs crackling and spreading a sylvan fragrance over the compound. My brother climbed onto the platform amid the flickering firelight, excited as a panther that has pounced on a golden pheasant. He began to speak: When we reported on the village revolutionary situation, we were warmly received by Comrade Chang Tianhong, vice chairman of the County Revolutionary Committee. He was satisfied with our revolutionary work and sent the assistant director of the County Revolutionary Political Work Section, Comrade Luo Jingtao, to direct our village revolutionary activities and announce the names of the Ximen Village Revolutionary Committee members. Comrades, my brother said loudly, the Milky Way Commune has not yet set up a revolutionary committee, but we in Ximen Village have! This pioneering effort by Vice Chairman Chang has brought great glory to our village. Now I’ll turn the meeting over to Director Luo, who will announce the names.

My brother hopped down from the platform to give Assistant Director Luo a boost up. But Luo declined the use of the platform and stood some five yards away from the bonfire, where half his face glowed and the other half was in shadows; he took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, shook it open, and began to read in a low, husky voice:

I hereby declare that Lan Jinlong is chairman of the Gaomi County Milky Way Commune Ximen Village Production Brigade Revolutionary Committee, with Huang Tong and Ma Liangcai as deputy vice chairmen…

A cloud of thick smoke was blown into Assistant Director Luo’s face, forcing him to move out of the way. Without reading any more, he handed the paper to my brother, said good-bye and shook hands, then turned on his heel and walked off. His actions had my brother at a momentary loss. His lips parted as he watched the man climb into the cab of the tractor, which started up, turned around, and headed back the way it had come, leaving a large indentation in the ground. We saw the tractor headlights light up the street like a bright alley, while the red taillights peered out like the eyes of a fox…

On the third evening following the establishment of the revolutionary committee, the loudspeaker mounted in the branches of the apricot tree came to life, blaring “The East Is Red.” When the anthem ended, a woman’s voice broadcast news of the county The lead item was an enthusiastic message of congratulations to the first village-level revolutionary committee in the county. The Gaomi County Milky Way Commune Ximen Village Production Brigade Revolutionary Committee was established, she announced, adding that the leading group of the Ximen Village Production Brigade Revolutionary Committee, including Lan Jinlong, Huang Tong, and Ma Liangcai, embodied the “Three-in-One” revolutionary organizational principle. The masses looked up at the source of the announcement and made no comment, although they were inwardly showering my brother with admiration: so young to be a chairman, and if that wasn’t enough, he was being assisted by his future father-in-law, Huang Tong, and Ma Liangcai, who was so tight with my sister.

The next day a youngster in a green uniform came puffing his way into our compound with a stack of newspapers and letters on his back. He was the new postman, an innocent-looking fellow whose eyes shimmered with curiosity. After laying down the newspapers and letters, he took a little wooden box out of his bag and handed it, along with a notebook and pen, to my brother to sign. This is from Vice Chairman Chang, he said to Huzhu after reading the inscription. I knew he was talking about Braying Jackass, Little Chang, an exemplary rebel who, in his role as vice chairman of the County Revolutionary Committee, was in charge of propaganda and the arts, as I overheard him tell my sister, who reacted to the news with what appeared to be mixed emotions. I knew she had strong feelings for Little Chang, but his meteoric rise in stature created an obstacle. It was certainly possible for love to develop between a talented student in an arts academy and a pretty girl with a peasant background, but there was no chance that a leading county-level cadre in his twenties would ever actually marry a peasant girl, no matter how pretty or fetching she might be. Of course my brother was aware of her feelings, and I heard him urge her to lower her sights a bit. Ma Liangcai was a royalist at first. Why then was he named vice chairman? Can you really not see what he had in mind? Was he the one who appointed him? my sister asked stubbornly My brother nodded. Does he want me to marry Ma Liangcai? Isn’t it obvious? Did he tell you that in so many words? Did he have to? Is an important person supposed to put all his intentions into words? You have to figure things out for yourself. No, my sister insisted. I want to hear it from him. If he tells me to marry Ma Liangcai, I’ll come home and marry him! By this time in their conversation, my sister’s eyes were brimming with tears.

My brother opened the box with rusty scissors and took out some old newspaper print, two sheets of white window paper, and a layer of crumpled yellow crepe paper. Beneath it all was a piece of red satin. He unfolded it to reveal a ceramic Chairman Mao badge as big as the mouth of a teacup. He held it in the palm of his hand as tears slid down his cheeks, although he wasn’t sure if he was moved more deeply by Chairman Mao’s smiling countenance or by Little Chang’s expression of friendship. He held it out for all to see. A sacred and solemn atmosphere prevailed. After he’d shown it all around, my sister-in-law to be, Huzhu, carefully pinned the badge onto my brother’s breast. The heft alone made his tunic sag a bit.

In order to celebrate the new year, my brother and his friends decided to stage a performance of The Red Lantern. Huzhu, with her long braid, was a natural for Tiemei; my brother was all set to play the leading role of Li Yuhe, until he lost his voice, and Ma Liangcai was given the part. Speaking from the heart, I’d have chosen Ma over my brother anyway. Volunteers quickly claimed the remaining roles in the revolutionary model opera, and the entire village got caught up in the excitement that winter. Held in the Revolutionary Committee office in the light of the gas lamp, the rehearsals drew a crowd every night, filling the room, rafters included. Those who didn’t make it into the room crowded up against the windows and the door to watch, pushing and shoving to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside. Hezuo also landed a part, that of Tiemei’s neighbor, while Mo Yan pestered my brother for one of the other parts, until Jinlong told him to get lost. But Commander, Mo Yan said, blinking in disappointment, I’ve got unique talents. He turned and did a somersault. Honest, my brother said, there are no parts left. You can add one, Mo Yan insisted. So my brother thought for a moment. All right, he said, you can be an enemy agent. Granny Li was one of the major roles, with plenty of singing and talking, too much for the local uneducated girls to master, so in the end the role was offered to my sister, who coldly turned it down. As the year’s end approached, still no one had come forward to play Granny Li, and the performance was scheduled for New Year’s day. Then Vice Chairman Chang phoned to say he might come by to direct the performance and enhance our prospects of becoming a model village for popularizing model revolutionary operas. The news both excited and worried my brother, whose mouth was quickly covered with cold sores, and whose voice was hoarser than ever. When he told my sister that Vice Chairman Chang might come to take over the direction, she broke into tears and sobbed: I’ll take the role.

Soon after the Cultural Revolution was launched, I’d felt left out in the cold, thanks to my status of independent farmer. All the other villagers, including the crippled and the blind, had joined the Red Guards, but not me. Heat from their revolutionary fervor rose to the heavens, but I could only watch on with eyes hot with envy. I was sixteen that year, an age when I should have been flying high and burrowing low, roiling the waters with my youth. But no, I was forced into other frames of mind: self-loathing, shame, anxiety, jealousy, longing, fantasy, all coming together within me. I once screwed up the courage and the nerve to plead my case with Ximen Jinlong, who saw me as a mortal enemy. I bowed my head in a desire to participate in the torrent of revolutionary activities. He said no.

So I went to see my dad in the ox shed, which had become his refuge, his place of safety. Ever since the marketplace parade that occupied such a notorious page in the history of Northeast Gaomi Township, Dad had become a virtual mute. Still only in his forties, he was completely gray. Stiff to begin with, his hair, now that it was nearly white, stood up like porcupine quills. The ox stood behind the feeding trough, head bowed, its stature notably diminished by the loss of half a horn. Sunbeams framed its head and lit up its eyes like two pieces of sorrow-laden amethyst, deep purple and heartbreakingly moist. Our fierce bull ox was completely transformed. I knew such things happened when oxen were castrated, but I never imagined that the loss of a horn could have the same effect. Then it saw me enter the shed and, after a brief glance, lowered its eyes, as if that was all it needed to see what was on my mind. Dad was sitting on a pile of hay beside the feed trough, leaning up against straw-filled sacks, his hands hidden in the sleeves of his coat. He was resting with his eyes shut, sunbeams lighting up his head and face and turning his gray hair slightly red. Bits of straw in his hair made it appear that he had just crawled out of a haystack. Only a few traces of red paint remained here and there on his face. The birthmark had reappeared, now darker than ever, almost indigo blue. I reached up and touched my own birthmark; it felt like leather. My mark of ugliness. When I was young, people called me “Junior Blue Face,” which brought me pride, not shame. But as I grew older, anyone who called me “Blue Face” was in for a hard time. I’d heard people say that we were independent farmers because of our blue faces, and there were even comments that my dad and I kept ourselves hidden during daylight, and only came out to work the land at night. I don’t deny that there were nights we worked by moonlight, but not because of our blue birthmarks. Tying our independent streak to a biological defect was bullshit. We chose independence out of a conviction that we had the right to stand alone. I’d gone along with Dad because I’d thought it would be fun. But now I was drawn to something a lot more fun than that. Especially grating was the fact that I was an independent farmer and had a blue face. I’d begun to regret my decision to follow Dad, was beginning to hate him and his independent farming. I looked at his blue face with a measure of disgust; I hated him for passing that defect on to me. A man like you, Dad, should have stayed a bachelor, but if that was impossible, you should never have had a child!

“Dad!” I shouted. “Dad!”

He opened his eyes slowly and stared at me.

“Dad, I want to join the commune!”

Obviously, this came as no surprise. The look on his face didn’t change. He took out his pipe, filled it, stuck it in his mouth, struck his flint to send a spark onto some sorghum stalks, then blew on the tiny flame until he could use it to light his pipe. He sucked in deeply and exhaled two streams of smoke though his nose.

“I want to join the commune. Let’s take the ox and join up, all three of us… Dad, I can’t take it anymore-”

His eyes snapped fully open. “You little traitor!” he said, drawing out each word. “You go ahead if you want to, but not me, and not the ox!”

“Why?” I was feeling both abused and angry. “Here’s where things stand. When the campaign was just getting under way, an independent farmer in Pingnan County was strung up from a tree and beaten to death by the revolutionary masses. My brother said that by parading you through the streets, he was covertly protecting you. He said that after they take care of the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and capitalist-roaders, they’ll come after the independent farmers. Dad, Jinlong said the two thick limbs on the apricot tree were just waiting for you and me. Dad, are you listening?”

He knocked the bowl of the pipe against the sole of his shoe, stood up, and started preparing food for the ox. The sight of his bent back and sunburned neck reminded me of my childhood, when he’d carry me on his shoulders to market to buy persimmons for me. The thought saddened me.

“Dad,” I said, starting to get worked up, “society is changing. County Chief Chen has been overthrown, and I’ll bet the bureau head who gave you safe passage has too by now. It doesn’t make sense for us to keep farming independently. If we join the commune while Jinlong is chairman, it’ll make him and us look good…”

Dad stayed bent over low as he worked the sieve, completely ignoring me. I was starting to get steamed.

“Dad,” I said, “no wonder people say you’re like a rock in the crapper, hard and stinky! Sorry to say it, Dad, but I can’t follow you down this dead end into darkness. If you won’t look out for me, I’ll have to look out for myself. I’m not a child any longer. I want to join the commune, find a wife, and walk down a bright, shiny road. You can do what you want.”

Dad dumped the straw into the feed trough and stroked the ox’s deformed horn. Then he turned to face me, not a hint of anger on his face. “Jiefang,” he said gently, “you’re my son, and I want only the best for you. I know perfectly well how things stand these days. That Jinlong has a heart as hard as a rock, and the blood that flows through his veins is more lethal than a scorpion’s tail. He’ll do absolutely anything in the name of ‘revolution.’ “He looked up, squinting in the bright sunlight. “How,” he wondered, “could the landlord, a good and decent man, sire an evil son like that?” Tears glistened in his eyes. “We’ve got three-point-two acres of land. You can take half of that with you into the commune. The wooden plow was given to us as one of the ‘fruits of victory’ during land reform. You can take that too, and you can have the one-room house. Take what you can with you, and after you join, if you want to throw in your lot with your mother and them, go ahead. If not, then go it alone. I don’t want anything, nothing but this ox and this shed.”

“Why, Dad? Tell me why.” I was nearly crying. “What purpose is served by you hanging on to your independence?”

“None at all,” he said calmly. “I just want to live a quiet life and be my own master. I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do.”

I went looking for Jinlong.

“Brother,” I said, “I talked it over with Dad, and I want to join the commune.”

Excited by the news, he doubled up his fists and banged them together in front of his chest.

“Wonderful,” he said, “that’s just wonderful, one more great achievement of the Cultural Revolution! The last independent farmer in the county is finally taking the socialist road. This is wonderful news. Let’s go inform the County Revolutionary Committee!”

“But Dad isn’t joining,” I said. “Just me, with half our land, our wooden plow, and a seeder.”

“What do you mean?” His face darkened. “What the hell is he trying to do?”

“He says he isn’t trying to do anything. He’s just gotten used to a quiet life and doesn’t want to answer to anyone.”

“That old son of a bitch!” He banged his fist on the table beside him, so hard an ink bottle nearly bounced off onto the floor.

“Don’t get too excited, Jinlong,” Huang Huzhu said.

“And how do I do that?” he said in a low growl. “I’d planned to present two gifts to Vice Chairman Chang and the County Revolutionary Committee at New Year’s. One was the village production of the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern; the other was that we’d eliminated the last independent farmer, not only in the county or in the province, but in the whole country. I was going to do what Hong Taiyue failed to do. That would cement my authority up and down the line. Your joining without him means there’s still one independent farmer. I won’t have it. I’m going to talk to him. You come with me!”

Jinlong stormed angrily into the ox shed, the first time he’d stepped foot inside in years.

“Dad,” he said. “I shouldn’t be calling you Dad, but I will this time.”

Dad waved him off. “Don’t,” he said. “I’m not worthy.”

“Lan Lian,” Jinlong continued, “I have but one thing to say to you. For the sake of Jiefang, and for yourself, it’s time to join the commune. I’m in charge now, and you have my word you won’t have to perform heavy labor. And if you don’t even want light jobs, then you can just rest up. You’re getting on in years, and you deserve to take life easy.”

“That’s more than I deserve,” Dad said icily.

“Climb up onto the platform and look around,” Jinlong said. “Take a look at Gaomi County, or at Shandong Province, or at all of China’s nineteen provinces (not counting Taiwan), its metropolitan areas, and its autonomous regions. The whole country, awash in red, with only a single black dot, here in Ximen Village, and that black dot is you!”

“I’m fucking honored, the one black dot in all of China!”

“We are going to erase that black dot!” Jinlong said.

Dad stuck his hand under the feed trough and took out a rope covered in ox dung. He threw it at Jinlong’s feet.

“Do you plan to hang me from the apricot tree? Well, be my guest!”

Jinlong leaped backward, as if the rope were a snake. Baring his teeth and clenching and unclenching his fists, he jammed his hands into his pants pockets and then took them out again. He took a cigarette out of his tunic pocket – he’d taken up smoking after being appointed chairman – and lit it with a gold-colored lighter. His forehead creased, obviously in deep thought. But after a moment he flipped away his cigarette, stomped it out, and turned to me.

“Go outside, Jiefang,” he said.

I looked first at the rope on the ground, then at Jinlong and Dad, one scrawny, the other brawny, pondering who would win and who would lose if a fight broke out, as well as whether I’d stand by and watch or jump in and, if the latter, whose side I’d be on.

“Say what you want to say,” Dad said. “Let’s see what you’re made of. Stay where you are, Jiefang. Keep your eyes and ears open.”

“Fine with me,” Jinlong said. “Do you think I won’t hang you from the apricot tree?”

“Oh, you’ll do it, all right, you’ll do anything.”

“Don’t interrupt me. I’m only letting you off for the sake of Mother. I’m not going to beg you to join the commune, since the Communist Party has never begged anything from capitalist-roaders. Tomorrow we’ll hold a public meeting to welcome Jiefang into the commune, along with his land, his plow, and his seeder. The ox too. We’ll present him with a red flower, and do the same for the ox. At that moment, you’ll be all alone in this ox shed. It will be heartbreaking for you when the clash of cymbals, the pounding of drums, and the resounding cracks of firecrackers enter this empty shed. You’ll be cut off from the masses, living apart from your wife, and separated from your children, and even the ox that would not betray you will be forcibly taken from you. What will your life mean then? If I were you,” Jinlong said as he kicked the rope and looked up at the overhead beam, “if I were you, I’d loop that rope over the beam and hang myself!”

He turned and walked out.

“Evil bastard-” Dad jumped up and cursed Jinlong’s back before dejectedly hunkering down on the straw.

I was devastated, shocked by Jinlong’s behavior. I felt so sorry for Dad at that moment, and ashamed of wanting to abandon him. I’d been helping the enemy in his evil ways. I threw myself down at Dad’s feet, grabbed his hands, and said through my tears:

“I won’t join, Dad. I’m going to stay with you and be an independent farmer even if it means I have to live the rest of my life as a bachelor-”

He wrapped his arms around my head and sobbed for a moment. Then he pushed me away, dried his eyes, and straightened up. “You’re a man already, Jiefang, so you must stand by what you say. Go ahead, join the commune, take the plow and the seeder with you. As for the ox-” He looked over at the ox; the ox returned the look. “You can take it too!”

“Dad!” I shouted in alarm. “Are you really going to take the road he points out?”

“Don’t worry, son,” he said as he jumped to his feet. “I don’t take roads anybody points out for me. I take my own road.”

“Don’t you dare hang yourself, Dad!”

“Why would I do that? Jinlong still has a bit of conscience left. He’d have no problem getting people to kill me the same way the people in Pingnan County killed their independent farmer. But his heart isn’t in it. He’s hoping I’ll die on my own. If I do, the last black spot in the county, in the province, in all of China, will erase itself. But I’m not about to die. If they want to kill me, there’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s wishful thinking to expect me to die on my own. I’m going to live, and live well. China’s going to have to get used to this black spot!”

20

Lan Jiefang Betrays Father and Joins the Commune

Ximen Ox Kills a Man and Dies a Righteous Death

I took my one-point-six acres of land, a wooden plow, a seeder, and the ox into the commune. When I led you out of the shed, firecrackers exploded, cymbals and drums filled the air with their noise. A group of half-grown kids wearing gray imitation army caps ran in amid the smoke and confetti to grab up all the firecrackers with their fuses intact. Mo Yan mistakenly picked up one without a fuse and, bang, his lips parted as it tore a hole in his hand. Serves you right! A firecracker nearly blew off my finger as a kid, and the memory of Dad treating it with paste flashed in my mind. I turned and looked back at Dad, and it was almost more than I could bear. He was sitting on a pile of cut straw, staring at the coiled rope in front of him.

“Dad,” I called out anxiously “Don’t you dare think of…”

He looked over and, appearing disheartened, waved a couple of times. I walked into the sun and left Dad in the dark. Huzhu pinned a big red paper flower on my chest and smiled at me. I could smell the Sunflower brand lotion on her face. Hezuo hung a paper flower the same size on the ox’s deformed horn. The ox shook his head and sent the flower to the ground.

“The ox tried to gore me!” Hezuo shrieked, exaggerating the movement.

She turned and bolted into the arms of my brother, who pushed her away with an icy look and walked up to the ox. He patted it on the head, then rubbed its horns, first the whole one, then the deformed one.

“Ox,” he said, “you’ve set out on a bright, sunny road, and we welcome you.”

I saw lights flash in the ox’s eyes, but it was only tears. My dad’s ox was like a tiger whose whiskers had been pulled off, no longer awesome, gentle as a kitten.

My dream had come true: I was admitted into my brother’s Red Guard organization. Not only that, I was given the role of Wang Lianju in the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern. Every time Li Yuhe called me a traitor, I was reminded of how Dad had used the same word on me. The feeling that I had in fact betrayed Dad by joining the commune grew stronger as time passed, and I couldn’t shake the worry that one day he’d take his own life. But he didn’t; he neither hanged himself from a rafter nor jumped into the river. Instead, he moved out of the room and began sleeping in the ox shed, where he set up a stove in a corner and used a steel helmet as a wok. In the long days that followed, since he had no plow, he worked his land with a hoe, and since he couldn’t manage a wheelbarrow by himself, he carried fertilizer into the field in baskets over his shoulder and used a gourd as a seeder. From 1967 to 1981, his one-point-six acres were a thorn in the side of the authorities, a tiny plot of land smack in the middle of the People’s Commune. His existence was both absurd and sobering; it aroused pity and commanded respect. In the 1970s, Hong Taiyue, back in his role as Party secretary, came up with a variety of schemes to eliminate the last independent farmer, but my dad thwarted all of them. Each time he’d throw the length of rope at Hong’s feet and say:

“Go ahead, hang me from the apricot tree!”

Jinlong had been counting on my surrender to the commune and the successful performance of a revolutionary opera to make Ximen Village a model for the county, and when that happened, as a village leader, he’d enjoy a meteoric rise through the ranks. But things did not turn out as he had hoped. First of all, despite the waiting, day and night, by him and by my sister, Little Chang never did come back on the tractor to direct the opera, and then one day word reached them that he had been removed from his post for his unsavory dealings with women. With him gone, my brother’s backing crumbled.

Then, as the days grew warmer, my brother’s situation worsened, since the masses rejected his plans to stage more revolutionary operas. Some old-timers from redder-than-red poor peasant backgrounds said to him one day while he was smoking a cigarette up in the apricot tree:

“Commander Jinlong, shouldn’t you be organizing some farm work? Neglecting the land for even a short time can cost a whole year. When workers make revolution, the state pays their wages, but the only way we peasants survive is by planting crops!”

While they were speaking their piece, they saw my dad walk out the gate with two baskets of manure. The smell of fresh dung in that early spring air energized them.

“Crops are to be planted in revolutionary land. Production is fine, but only when it’s an integral part of the revolutionary line!” My brother spat out the butt and jumped down out of the tree, landing awkwardly and falling in a heap. The old peasants tried to help him up, but he shoved them away with a snarl. “I’m on my way to see the Commune Revolutionary Committee. You wait here, and don’t do anything foolish.”

After changing into high-topped galoshes, he went over to the makeshift toilet to relieve himself before heading out on the muddy road to the commune. There he met Yang Qi. They had become enemies over the affair with the goatskin coats, but that was hidden below the surface.

“Commander Ximen,” Yang said with an irritating grin, “where are you off to? You look more like a Japanese MP than a Red Guard.”

Shaking his penis, Jinlong snorted to show his contempt for Yang Qi, who continued to grin and said:

“You’ve lost your backing, buddy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you were next. If you’re smart, you’ll give up your position and hand it to someone who knows something about farming. Singing opera doesn’t put food on the table.”

With a sneer, my brother said, “The County Revolutionary Committee made me chairman, and they’re the only ones who can take it away from me. The Commune Revolutionary Committee does not have that authority.”

Trouble was sure to come, and when my brother spoke so angrily to Yang Qi, the big ceramic Chairman Mao badge fell off his tunic, right into the latrine pit. My brother was stunned. Yang Qi was stunned. When my brother had gotten his bearings back and was about to jump into the latrine to retrieve the badge, Yang Qi also got his bearings back. He grabbed my brother by the lapels and shouted:

“Counterrevolutionary, I’ve caught a counterrevolutionary!”

My brother, along with the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and capitalist-roader Hong Taiyue, was assigned to supervised labor. As for me, I was sent to the brigade feeding tent to feed the livestock, working for Old Fang Liu and Hu Bin, who had been released after serving out his sentence.

By moving my bedding to the sleeping platform in the feeding tent, I was finally able to leave the compound I loved and hated in equal measure. My departure also freed up a bit of space for Dad, who had begun sleeping in the ox shed when I told him I was joining the commune. For all its virtues, the shed was still a lean-to made to house an ox; in spite of its shortcomings, it was still a roof over his head. I urged him to move back into the room I vacated and told him not to worry, that I’d keep looking after our ox.

Although it was Yang Qi who had denounced my brother, costing him his position as chairman and pinning on him the label of active counterrevolutionary, he was not chosen to be the new chairman; the Commune Revolutionary Committee chose Huang Tong as chairman of our village committee, since he had performed well over the years as director of the Production Brigade. He would stand in the middle of the threshing ground like a commander deploying his forces when he passed out work assignments. Those from good families were given light work; those with bad backgrounds were sent out into the fields to man the plows. My brother stood with Yu Wufu, the onetime security chief, Zhang Dazhuang the turncoat, Wu Yuan, the rich peasant, Tian Gui, who had run the distillery, and Hong Taiyue, the capitalist-roader. A look of anger was stamped on my brother’s face; Hong Taiyue wore a sneer. Bad elements who had been undergoing labor reform for years showed no expression. By now used to spring plowing, they already knew which ox and which plow they were assigned. So they walked into the storeroom, brought out their plows and harnesses, and went over to the oxen that were waiting for them. Those animals have rested all winter and aren’t in shape, Fang Liu said, so go easy on them the first day. Let them lead. Then he picked out a black, gelded Bohai ox and a Western Shandong for Hong Taiyue, who deftly harnessed them; though he’d spent years as Party secretary, he was born a farmer and knew what he was doing. After watching the others, my brother lined up his plow, laid out the harness, and, curling his lip to show his unhappiness, said to Fang Liu:

“Which two animals do I get?”

Fang looked my brother over and said under his breath, but loud enough for my brother to hear, It’s good for a young man to temper himself. He untied a female Mongol ox from the tethering pole, one my brother was very familiar with. Early one spring years before, when we were tending oxen by the river, my brother’s figure had been reflected in her eyes. She stood obediently beside him chewing her cud, and a large chunk of chewed grass slid noisily down her throat. He tossed the halter over his shoulder, getting no resistance from her. Fang Liu’s gaze swept over the tethering pole and fell on our ox as if he’d just that moment discovered what a good animal it was, for his eyes lit up and he made a clicking noise with his mouth.

“Jiefang,” he said, “you can take the one you brought us and let it team up with its mother.”

Jinlong took the reins and commanded the ox to walk over to where he could be harnessed. But the ox kept his head low, leisurely chewing his cud. So Jinlong tugged at the reins to get the animal to move; that didn’t work either. Our ox had never had a ring placed through his nose, so his head was immovable. It was, as it turned out, his strength that brought about the punishment of a nose ring. Ox, that didn’t have to happen, and wouldn’t have if you’d displayed the same human understanding that was so evident when you were with Dad. Your obedience could well have established you as the only ox in the history of Northeast Gaomi Township to never have a nose ring. But you chose to ignore the attempts to get you to move.

“How does anyone get an ox to do what it’s told without a nose ring?” Fang Liu asked. “Does Lan Lian use magic incantations to get it to do what he wants?”

Ximen Ox, my friend, they hogtied you and stuck a hot poker through the septum of your nose. Who did it? My brother Jinlong. I didn’t know then that you were a reincarnation of Ximen Nao, so I couldn’t appreciate what you were feeling at that moment. The person who fitted a brass ring through the burned hole in your nose was your own son. How did that make you feel?

Once the nose ring was in place, they led you out into the field, where springtime, the season of rebirth, was making itself felt everywhere. But as soon as you reached the plot of land to be plowed, you lay down on the ground. All the farmers, veterans of many spring plowings, had watched you pull a plow by yourself, seemingly with ease, spreading waves of soil as you created one straight row after the other. They were curious, even mystified, by your behavior. What’s this all about? My dad was out on his narrow strip of land that day, a handheld hoe a substitute for an ox and a plow. Bent at the waist, eyes fixed on the ground at his feet, he moved slowly, one swipe of his hoe at a time. “This ox,” a farmer said, “wishes it could be working with him, the way it used to.”

Jinlong stepped backward, took his whip off his shoulder, and brought it down on the ox’s back. It left a white welt on your hide. You were in the prime of your life then, so your hide was tough and resilient. Jinlong’s lashing did no serious damage. If you’d been old and weak or young and underdeveloped, it would have split your hide.

There’s no denying that Jinlong was a very talented young man. Whatever he put his hand to, he did better than anyone. There weren’t more than a handful of men in the village who could handle one of those four-yard-long whips with accuracy, and he was one of them. The dull sound of the whip on your hide dispersed in the air around you, and I know Dad must have heard it. But he didn’t look up or pause in his work. I knew the depth of his feelings toward you, so the punishment you were taking must have hurt him a great deal. But rather than run over to protect you, he kept working. My dad was suffering as much from the lashing as you were!

Jinlong gave you twenty lashes and only stopped from exhaustion; he was gasping for breath, his forehead was bathed in sweat. But you lay there, head on the ground, hot tears squeezed out of your tightly shut eyes and darkening your face. You didn’t move and you didn’t make a sound, but the spastic ripples on your hide proved that you were still alive. If not for that, no one witnessing the scene would have doubted that they were now looking at a dead ox. With a steady stream of curses on his lips, my brother walked up and kicked you in the face.

“Get up, damn you,” he snarled. “Get up!”

You stayed where you were, eyes still shut. Enraged by your defiance, he kicked you in the head and the face and the belly, over and over and over, and from a distance he looked like a shaman in a dance of exorcism. You put up with the assault without moving, while the Mongol ox beside you, your mother, trembled as she watched what was happening to you; her crooked tail went stiff, like a petrified snake. Out in the field, my father sped up the pace of work, digging deeply into the earth.

The other farmers, having finished their plowing, returned, surprised to see that Jinlong’s ox was still lying on the ground. As they gathered round, the good-hearted rich peasant Wu Yuan said:

“Is he sick?”

Tian Gui, who consistently played the role of a progressive, said, “Look how plump he is, how glossy his coat is. Last year he pulled Lan Lian’s plow, this year he’s lying on the ground pretending he’s dead. This ox opposes the People’s Commune!”

Hong Taiyue glanced over at my dad, who still hadn’t looked up from his labors. “The kind of master you have determines the kind of ox you get,” he said coldly. “Like master, like ox.”

“Let’s beat him!” the traitor Zhang Dazhuang said. “I don’t believe he’ll keep lying there if we really beat him.” The others agreed.

And so, seven or eight plowmen formed a circle around the ox, took their whips off their shoulders, held the handles, and let the lashes hang down behind them. They were getting ready to start the beating when the Mongol ox crumpled to the ground like a toppled wall. But she immediately began pawing at the ground and got back to her feet. She quaked from head to tail, her eyes were glazed over, her tail was tucked between her legs. The men laughed.

“Would you look at that!” one of them said. “She’s paralyzed with fear before we even begin.”

My brother untied the Mongol ox and led her off to the side, where she stood as if she’d been spared from something horrible. She was still quaking, but a look of calm was in her eyes.

And still you lay there, Ximen Ox, like a sandbar, as the plowmen stood back and, one after the other, as if it were a competition, expertly swirled their whips in the air and brought them down on your hide, filling the air with a tattoo of loud cracks. The ox’s back was crisscrossed with lash marks. Before long, there were traces of blood, and now that the tips of the whips were bloodied, the cracks were louder and crisper. Harder and harder they came, until your back and your belly looked like cutting boards covered with chunks of bloody flesh.

My tears started to flow as soon as they began beating you. I wailed, I begged, I wanted to throw myself on top of you to share your suffering, but my arms were pinned to my sides by the mob that had gathered to watch the spectacle. I kicked and I bit, but the pain I caused had no effect on the people, who refused to let go. How could such decent villagers, young and old, get any enjoyment out of such a bloody tragedy, as if their hearts had turned to stone?

Eventually, they tired. Rubbing their sore arms, they walked up to see if you were dead. You weren’t. But your eyes were tightly shut; there were open wounds on the side of your face, staining the ground around your head with blood. You were gasping for breath, and there were violent spasms in your belly, like a female in labor.

The men who had used their whips on you were sighing over a stubborn streak the likes of which they’d never seen before. The looks on their faces were awkward, almost remorseful. They’d have felt better if you’d been a defiant animal, but you weren’t, you submitted meekly to their cruelty, and that they found perplexing. So many ancient ethical standards and supernatural legends stirred in their hearts and minds. Is this an ox or some sort of god? Maybe it’s a Buddha who has borne all this suffering to lead people who have gone astray to enlightenment. People are not to tyrannize other people, or oxen; they must not force other people, or oxen, to do things they do not want to do.

As feelings of compassion rose up in the whip-wielding men, they urged Jinlong to bring things to a halt. But he refused. The traits he shared with that ox burned in him like sinister flames, turning his eyes red and changing the features on his face: his twisted mouth reeked, his whole frame trembled, and he seemed to be walking on air, like a common drunk. By then he had lost his grip on reality and was under the control of a demonic being. In the same way that the ox displayed its iron will and preserved its dignity by refusing to stand up, even in the face of death, my brother Jinlong was prepared to do whatever it took, at whatever cost, to make the animal stand in order to display his iron will and preserve his dignity. There could be no better example of a meeting of mortals, a clash of unyielding personalities. My brother led the female Mongol ox up to Ximen Ox, where he tied the rope affixed to your nose ring to the shaft. My god, he’s going to pull Ximen Ox by the nose with the strength of his mother. Everyone there knew that the nose is an ox’s most vulnerable spot, and that it is the nose ring that ensures an ox’s obedience. The mightiest ox is turned submissive as soon as its nose is controlled by humans. Stand up, Ximen Ox. You’ve already taken more punishment than any ox could be expected to take, and your reputation won’t be tarnished if you stand now. But you did not stand – I knew you wouldn’t. If you had, you wouldn’t have been Ximen Ox.

My brother smacked the rump of the Mongol ox hard, and she lurched forward, still quaking. The rope grew taut, pulling the nose ring with it. Oh, no, Ximen Ox! Jinlong, you monster, let my ox go! I fought to break free, but the people holding me seemed to have turned to stone. Ximen Ox’s nose was pulled out of shape, like a piece of rubber. But the Mongol Ox, the heartless beast, charged ahead with all her strength every time my brother hit her, jerking Ximen Ox’s head up off the ground. Yet the rest of him stayed put. It seemed to me that his front legs bent inward, but I was just seeing things. You had no intention of getting to your feet. Sounds like a bawling infant emerged from your nostrils. It was heartbreaking. Oh, Ximen Ox, a crisp sound, a pop, marked the splitting of your nose, followed by the thud of your raised head hitting the ground again. The female ox’s front legs gave out on her, but she immediately stood up again.

Ximen Jinlong, now you can stop. But he didn’t. He was a madman. Howling like an injured wolf, he ran over to a furrow, scooped up a handful of cornstalks, and piled them behind you. Was that evil bastard planning to set the ox on fire? Yes, that’s exactly what he had in mind. He lit the stalks, and white smoke carrying a subtle fragrance rose into the air, the unique smell of cornstalks. Everyone held their breath and stared wide-eyed, but not one of them tried to put an end to my brother’s brutal behavior. Oh, no, Ximen Ox, oh, no, Ximen Ox, who would rather die than stand up and pull a plow for the People’s Commune. I saw my dad throw down his hoe and sprawl on the ground, facedown, as he dug his hands deep into the soil. He was quaking like a malaria sufferer, and I knew that he was sharing the ox’s agonies.

The ox’s hide was burning, giving off a foul, nauseating odor. No one threw up, but everyone felt like it. Ximen Ox, your face was burrowing into the ground, your back was like a trapped snake, writhing and popping from the heat. The leather halter caught fire. Belonging to the collective, it mustn’t be lost. Someone ran up, released the catch, and flung it to the ground, then stomped out the flames that were consuming the rope, releasing a stench that even drove away birds in the sky. Oh, no, Ximen Ox, the charred rear half of your body was too horrible to look at.

“Burn, damn you…,” Jinlong was screaming. He ran over to a pile of cornstalks, and no one made a move to stop him. They wanted to see how perversely evil he could be. Even Hong Taiyue, whose job it was to teach people to cherish property belonging to the collective, looked on dispassionately.

Jinlong came back with an armload of cornstalks, stumbling as he walked. My half brother was out of his mind. Jinlong, how would you have felt if you’d known that the ox was actually the reincarnation of your real father? And you, Ximen Ox, how did you feel knowing that it was your son who punished you so savagely? Countless forms of gratitude and resentment, of love and enmity, exist among people all over the world, but something occurred at that moment that stupefied everyone who witnessed it. Ximen Ox, you stood up on shaky legs, minus your harness, your nose ring, and your tether, a free ox, totally liberated from all human control. You began to walk, how hard that must have been, weak in the legs, swaying uncontrollably from side to side; dark blood dripped from your torn nose, slid down to your belly, and from there dripped to the ground like tar. The people gaped silently, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Step by agonizing step, you walked toward my dad, leaving the land belonging to the People’s Commune and entering the one-point-six acres of land belonging to the last independent farmer in the nation, Lan Lian; once there, you collapsed in a heap.

Ximen Ox died on my dad’s land. What he did went a long way toward clearing the minds of people who had become confused and disoriented during the Cultural Revolution. Ah, Ximen Ox, you became the stuff of legend, a mythical being. After your death, there were those who wanted to butcher and eat you, but when they ran up with their knives and saw the bloody tears mixed with mud on my dad’s face, they turned and went away quietly.

Dad buried you in the middle of his land, under a prominent grave mound, known today as Righteous Ox Tomb, one of Northeast Gaomi Township’s noted sights.

As an ox, you will likely gain immortality.