Red Sorghum

1

THE NINTH DAY of the eighth lunar month, 1939. My father, a bandit’s offspring who had passed his fifteenth birthday, was joining the forces of Commander Yu Zhan’ao, a man destined to become a legendary hero, to ambush a Japanese convoy on the Jiao-Ping highway. Grandma, a padded jacket over her shoulders, saw them to the edge of the village. ‘Stop here,’ Commander Yu ordered her. She stopped.

‘Douguan, mind your foster-dad,’ she told my father. The sight of her large frame and the warm fragrance of her lined jacket chilled him. He shivered. His stomach growled.

Commander Yu patted him on the head and said, ‘Let’s go, foster-son.’

Heaven and earth were in turmoil, the view was blurred. By then the soldiers’ muffled footsteps had moved far down the road. Father could still hear them, but a curtain of blue mist obscured the men themselves. Gripping tightly to Commander Yu’s coat, he nearly flew down the path on churning legs. Grandma receded like a distant shore as the approaching sea of mist grew more tempestuous; holding on to Commander Yu was like clinging to the railing of a boat.

That was how Father rushed towards the uncarved granite marker that would rise above his grave in the bright-red sorghum fields of his hometown. A bare-assed little boy once led a white billy goat up to the weed-covered grave, and as it grazed in unhurried contentment, the boy pissed furiously on the grave and sang out: ‘The sorghum is red — the Japanese are coming — compatriots, get ready — fire your rifles and cannons —’

Someone said that the little goatherd was me, but I don’t know. I had learned to love Northeast Gaomi Township with all my heart, and to hate it with unbridled fury. I didn’t realise until I’d grown up that Northeast Gaomi Township is easily the most beautiful and most repulsive, most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world. The people of my father’s generation who lived there ate sorghum out of preference, planting as much of it as they could. In late autumn, during the eighth lunar month, vast stretches of red sorghum shimmered like a sea of blood. Tall and dense, it reeked of glory; cold and graceful, it promised enchantment; passionate and loving, it was tumultuous.

The autumn winds are cold and bleak, the sun’s rays intense. White clouds, full and round, float in the tile-blue sky, casting full round purple shadows onto the sorghum fields below. Over decades that seem but a moment in time, lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry. They killed, they looted, and they defended their country in a valiant, stirring ballet that makes us unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale by comparison. Surrounded by progress, I feel a nagging sense of our species’ regression.

After leaving the village, the troops marched down a narrow dirt path, the tramping of their feet merging with the rustling of weeds. The heavy mist was strangely animated, kaleidoscopic. Tiny droplets of water pooled into large drops on Father’s face, clumps of hair stuck to his forehead. He was used to the delicate peppermint aroma and the slightly sweet yet pungent odour of ripe sorghum wafting over from the sides of the path — nothing new there. But as they marched through the heavy mist, his nose detected a new, sickly-sweet odour, neither yellow nor red, blending with the smells of peppermint and sorghum to call up memories hidden deep in his soul.

Six days later, the fifteenth day of the eighth month, the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. A bright round moon climbed slowly in the sky above the solemn, silent sorghum fields, bathing the tassels in its light until they shimmered like mercury. Among the chiselled flecks of moonlight Father caught a whiff of the same sickly odour, far stronger than anything you might smell today. Commander Yu was leading him by the hand through the sorghum, where three hundred fellow villagers, heads pillowed on their arms, were strewn across the ground, their fresh blood turning the black earth into a sticky muck that made walking slow and difficult. The smell took their breath away. A pack of corpse-eating dogs sat in the field staring at Father and Commander Yu with glinting eyes. Commander Yu drew his pistol and fired — a pair of eyes was extinguished. Another shot, another pair of eyes gone. The howling dogs scattered, then sat on their haunches once they were out of range, setting up a deafening chorus of angry barks as they gazed greedily, longingly at the corpses. The odour grew stronger.

‘Jap dogs!’ Commander Yu screamed. ‘Jap sons of bitches!’ He emptied his pistol, scattering the dogs without a trace. ‘Let’s go, son,’ he said. The two of them, one old and one young, threaded their way through the sorghum field, guided by the moon’s rays. The odour saturating the field drenched Father’s soul and would be his constant companion during the cruel months and years ahead.

Sorghum stems and leaves sizzled fiercely in the mist. The Black Water River, which flowed slowly through the swampy lowland, sang in the spreading mist, now loud, now soft, now far, now near. As they caught up with the troops, Father heard the tramping of feet and some coarse breathing fore and aft. The butt of a rifle noisily bumped someone else’s. A foot crushed what sounded like a human bone. The man in front of Father coughed loudly. It was a familiar cough, calling to mind large ears that turned red with excitement. Large transparent ears covered with tiny blood vessels were the trademark of Wang Wenyi, a small man whose enlarged head was tucked down between his shoulders.

Father strained and squinted until his gaze bored through the mist: there was Wang Wenyi’s head, jerking with each cough. Father thought back to when Wang was whipped on the parade ground, and how pitiful he had looked. He had just joined up with Commander Yu. Adjutant Ren ordered the recruits: Right face! Wang Wenyi stomped down joyfully, but where he intended to ‘face’ was anyone’s guess. Adjutant Ren smacked him across the backside with his whip, forcing a yelp from between his parted lips. Ouch, mother of my children! The expression on his face could have been a cry, or could have been a laugh. Some kids sprawled atop the wall hooted gleefully.

Now Commander Yu kicked Wang Wenyi in the backside.

‘Who said you could cough?’

‘Commander Yu…’ Wang Wenyi stifled a cough. ‘My throat itches….’

‘So what? If you give away our position, it’s your head!’

‘Yes, sir,’ Wang replied, as another coughing spell erupted.

Father sensed Commander Yu lurching forward to grab Wang Wenyi around the neck with both hands. Wang wheezed and gasped, but the coughing stopped.

Father also sensed Commander Yu’s hands release Wang’s neck; he even sensed the purple welts, like ripe grapes, left behind. Aggrieved gratitude filled Wang’s deep-blue, frightened eyes.

The troops turned quickly into the sorghum, and Father knew instinctively that they were heading southeast. The dirt path was the only direct link between the Black Water River and the village. During the day it had a pale cast; the original black earth, the colour of ebony, had been covered by the passage of countless animals: cloven hoofprints of oxen and goats, semicircular hoofprints of mules, horses, and donkeys; dried road apples left by horses, mules, and donkeys; wormy cow chips; and scattered goat pellets like little black beans. Father had taken this path so often that later on, as he suffered in the Japanese cinder pit, its image often flashed before his eyes. He never knew how many sexual comedies my grandma had performed on this dirt path, but I knew. And he never knew that her naked body, pure as glossy white jade, had lain on the black soil beneath the shadows of sorghum stalks, but I knew.

The surrounding mist grew more sluggish once they were in the sorghum field. The stalks screeched in secret resentment when the men and equipment bumped against them, sending large, mournful beads of water splashing to the ground. The water was ice-cold, clear and sparkling, and deliciously refreshing. Father looked up, and a large drop fell into his mouth. As the heavy curtain of mist parted gently, he watched the heads of sorghum stalks bend slowly down. The tough, pliable leaves, weighted down by the dew, sawed at his clothes and face. A breeze set the stalks above him rustling briefly; the gurgling of the Black Water River grew louder.

Father had gone swimming so often in the Black Water River that he seemed born to it. Grandma said that the sight of the river excited him more than the sight of his own mother. At the age of five, he could dive like a duckling, his little pink asshole bobbing above the surface, his feet sticking straight up. He knew that the muddy riverbed was black and shiny, and as spongy as soft tallow, and that the banks were covered with pale-green reeds and plantain the colour of goose-down; coiling vines and stiff bone grass hugged the muddy ground, which was crisscrossed with the tracks of skittering crabs.

Autumn winds brought cool air, and wild geese flew through the sky heading south, their formation changing from a straight line one minute to a V the next. When the sorghum turned red, hordes of crabs the size of horse hooves scrambled onto the bank at night to search for food — fresh cow dung and the rotting carcasses of dead animals — among the clumps of river grass.

The sound of the river reminded Father of an autumn night during his childhood, when the foreman of our family business, Arhat Liu, named after Buddhist saints, took him crabbing on the riverbank. On that grey-purple night a golden breeze followed the course of the river. The sapphire-blue sky was deep and boundless, green-tinted stars shone brightly in the sky: the ladle of Ursa Major (signifying death), the basket of Sagittarius (representing life); Octans, the glass well, missing one of its tiles; the anxious Herd Boy (Altair), about to hang himself; the mournful Weaving Girl (Vega), about to drown herself in the river…. Uncle Arhat had been overseeing the work of the family distillery for decades, and Father scrambled to keep up with him as he would his own grandfather.

The weak light of the kerosene lamp bored a five-yard hole in the darkness. When water flowed into the halo of light, it was the cordial yellow of an overripe apricot. But cordial for only a fleeting moment, before it flowed on. In the surrounding darkness the water reflected a starry sky. Father and Uncle Arhat, rain capes over their shoulders, sat around the shaded lamp listening to the low gurgling of the river. Every so often they heard the excited screech of a fox calling to its mate in the sorghum fields beside the river. Father and Uncle Arhat sat quietly, listening with rapt respect to the whispered secrets of the land, as the smell of stinking river mud drifted over on the wind. Hordes of crabs attracted by the light skittered towards the lamp, where they formed a shifting, restless cloister. Father was so eager he nearly sprang to his feet, but Uncle Arhat held him by the shoulders.

‘Take it easy! Greedy eaters never get the hot gruel.’ Holding his excitement in check, Father sat still. The crabs stopped as soon as they entered the ring of lamplight, and lined up head to tail, blotting out the ground. A greenish glint issued from their shells, as countless pairs of button eyes popped from deep sockets on little stems. Mouths hidden beneath sloping faces released frothy strings of brazenly colourful bubbles. The long fibres on Father’s straw rain cape stood up. ‘Now!’ Uncle Arhat shouted. Father sprang into action before the shout died out, snatching two corners of the tightly woven net they’d spread on the ground beforehand; they raised it in the air, scooping up a layer of crabs and revealing a clear spot of riverbank beneath them. Quickly tying the ends together and tossing the net to one side, they rushed back and lifted up another piece of netting with the same speed and skill. The heavy bundles seemed to hold hundreds, even thousands of crabs.

As Father followed the troops into the sorghum field, he moved sideways, crablike, overshooting the spaces between the stalks and bumping them hard, which caused them to sway and bend violently. Still gripping tightly to Commander Yu’s coat-tail, he was pulled along, his feet barely touching the ground. But he was getting sleepy. His neck felt stiff, his eyes were growing dull and listless, and his only thought was that as long as he could tag along behind Uncle Arhat to the Black Water River he’d never come back empty-handed.

Father ate crab until he was sick of it, and so did Grandma. But even though they lost their appetite for it, they couldn’t bear to throw the uneaten ones away. So Uncle Arhat minced the leftovers and ground them under the bean-curd millstone, then salted the crab paste, which they ate daily, until it finally went bad and became mulch for the poppies.

Apparently Grandma was an opium smoker, but wasn’t addicted, which was why she had the complexion of a peach, a sunny disposition, and a clear mind. The crab-nourished poppies grew huge and fleshy, a mixture of pinks, reds, and whites that assailed your nostrils with their fragrance. The black soil of my hometown, always fertile, was especially productive, and the people who tilled it were especially decent, strong-willed, and ambitious. The white eels of the Black Water River, like plump sausages with tapered ends, foolishly swallowed every hook in sight.

Uncle Arhat had died the year before on the Jiao-Ping highway. His corpse, after being hacked to pieces, had been scattered around the area. As the skin was being stripped from his body, his flesh jumped and quivered, as if he were a huge skinned frog. Images of that corpse sent shivers up Father’s spine. Then he thought back to a night some seven or eight years earlier, when Grandma, drunk at the time, had stood in the distillery yard beside a pile of sorghum leaves, her arms around Uncle Arhat’s shoulders. ‘Uncle… don’t leave,’ she pleaded. ‘If not for the sake of the monk, stay for the Buddha. If not for the sake of the fish, stay for the water. If not for my sake, stay for little Douguan. You can have me, if you want…. You’re like my own father….’ Father watched him push her away and swagger into the shed to mix fodder for the two large black mules who, when we opened our distillery, made us the richest family in the village. Uncle Arhat didn’t leave after all. Instead he became our foreman, right up to the day the Japanese confiscated our mules to work on the Jiao-Ping highway.

Now Father and the others could hear long-drawn-out brays from the mules they had left behind in the village. Wide-eyed with excitement, he could see nothing but the congealed yet nearly transparent mist that surrounded him. Erect stalks of sorghum formed dense barriers behind a wall of vapour. Each barrier led to another, seemingly endless. He had no idea how long they’d been in the field, for his mind was focused on the fertile river roaring in the distance, and on his memories. He wondered why they were in such a hurry to squeeze through this packed, dreamy ocean of sorghum. Suddenly he lost his bearings. He listened carefully for a sign from the river, and quickly determined that they were heading east-southeast, towards the river. Once he had a fix on their direction, he understood that they would be setting an ambush for the Japanese, that they would be killing people, just as they had killed the dogs. By heading east-southeast, they would soon reach the Jiao-Ping highway, which cut through the swampy lowland from north to south and linked the two counties of Jiao and Pingdu. Japanese and their running dogs, Chinese collaborators, had built the highway with the forced labour of local conscripts.

The sorghum was set in motion by the exhausted troops, whose heads and necks were soaked by the settling dew. Wang Wenyi was still coughing, even though he’d been the target of Commander Yu’s continuing angry outbursts. Father sensed that the highway was just up ahead, its pale-yellow outline swaying in front of him. Imperceptibly tiny openings began to appear in the thick curtain of mist, and one dew-soaked ear of sorghum after another stared sadly at Father, who returned their devout gaze. It dawned on him that they were living spirits: their roots buried in the dark earth, they soaked up the energy of the sun and the essence of the moon; moistened by the rain and dew, they understood the ways of the heavens and the logic of the earth. The colour of the sorghum suggested that the sun had already turned the obscured horizon a pathetic red.

Then something unexpected occurred. Father heard a shrill whistle, followed by a loud burst from up ahead.

‘Who fired his weapon?’ Commander Yu bellowed. ‘Who’s the prick who did it?’

Father heard the bullet pierce the thick mist and pass through sorghum leaves and stalks, lopping off one of the heads. Everyone held his breath as the bullet screamed through the air and thudded to the ground. The sweet smell of gunpowder dissipated in the mist. Wang Wenyi screamed pitifully, ‘Commander — my head’s gone — Commander — my head’s gone —’

Commander Yu froze momentarily, then kicked Wang Wenyi. ‘You dumb fuck!’ he growled. ‘How could you talk without a head?’

Commander Yu left my father standing there and went up to the head of the column. Wang Wenyi was still howling. Father pressed forward to catch a glimpse of the strange look on Wang’s face. A dark-blue substance was flowing on his cheek. Father reached out to touch it; hot and sticky, it smelled a lot like the mud of the Black Water River, but fresher. It overwhelmed the smell of peppermint and the pungent sweetness of sorghum and awakened in Father’s mind a memory that drew ever nearer: like beads, it strung together the mud of the Black Water River, the black earth beneath the sorghum, the eternally living past, and the unstoppable present. There are times when everything on earth spits out the stench of human blood.

‘Uncle,’ Father said, ‘you’re wounded.’

‘Douguan, is that you? Tell your old uncle if his head’s still on his neck.’

‘It’s there, Uncle, right where it’s supposed to be. Except your ear’s bleeding.’

Wang Wenyi reached up to touch his ear and pulled back a bloody hand, yelping in alarm. Then he froze as if paralysed. ‘Commander, I’m wounded! I’m wounded!’

Commander Yu came back to Wang, knelt down, and put his hands around Wang’s neck. ‘Stop screaming or I’ll throttle you!’

Wang Wenyi didn’t dare make a sound.

‘Where were you hit?’ Commander Yu asked him.

‘My ear…’ Wang was weeping.

Commander Yu took a piece of white cloth from his waistband and tore it in two, then handed it to him. ‘Hold this over it, and no more noise. Stay in rank. You can bandage it when we reach the highway.’

Commander Yu turned to Father. ‘Douguan,’ he barked. Father answered, and Commander Yu walked off holding him by the hand, followed by the whimpering Wang Wenyi.

The offending discharge had been the result of carelessness by the big fellow they called Mute, who was up front carrying a rake on his shoulder. The rifle slung over his back had gone off when he stumbled. Mute was one of Commander Yu’s old bandit friends, a greenwood hero who had eaten fistcakes in the sorghum fields. One of his legs was shorter than the other — a prenatal injury — and he limped when he walked, but that didn’t slow him down. Father was a little afraid of him.

At about dawn, the massive curtain of mist finally lifted, just as Commander Yu and his troops emerged onto the Jiao-Ping highway. In my hometown, August is the misty season, possibly because there’s so much swampy lowland. Once he stepped onto the highway, Father felt suddenly light and nimble; with extra spring in his step, he let go of Commander Yu’s coat. Wang Wenyi, on the other hand, wore a crestfallen look as he held the cloth to his injured ear. Commander Yu crudely wrapped it for him, covering up half his head. Wang gnashed his teeth in pain.

‘The heavens have smiled on you,’ Commander Yu said.

‘My blood’s all gone,’ Wang whimpered, ‘I can’t go on!’

‘Bullshit!’ Commander Yu exclaimed. ‘It’s no worse than a mosquito bite. You haven’t forgotten your three sons, have you?’

Wang hung his head and mumbled, ‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’

The butt of the long-barrelled fowling piece over his shoulder was the colour of blood. A flat metal gunpowder pouch rested against his hip.

Remnants of the dissipating mist were scattered throughout the sorghum field. There were neither animal nor human footprints in the gravel, and the dense walls of sorghum on the deserted highway made the men feel that something ominous was in the air. Father knew all along that Commander Yu’s troops numbered no more than forty — deaf, mute, and crippled included. But when they were quartered in the village, they had stirred things up so much, with chickens squawking and dogs yelping, that you’d have thought it was a garrison command.

Out on the highway, the soldiers huddled so closely together they looked like an inert snake. Their motley assortment of weapons included shotguns, fowling pieces, ageing Hanyang rifles, plus a cannon that fired scale weights and was carried by two brothers, Fang Six and Fang Seven. Mute was toting a rake with twenty-six metal tines, as were three other soldiers. Father still didn’t know what an ambush was, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have known why anyone would take four rakes to the event.

2

I RETURNED TO Northeast Gaomi Township to compile a family chronicle, focusing on the famous battle of the banks of the Black Water River that involved my father and ended with the death of a Jap general. An old woman of ninety-two sang to me, to the accompaniment of bamboo clappers: ‘Northeast Gaomi Township, so many men; at Black Water River the battle began; Commander Yu raised his hand, cannon fire to heaven; Jap souls scattered across the plain, ne’er to rise again; the beautiful champion of women, Dai Fenglian, ordered rakes for a barrier, the Jap attack broken…’ The wizened old woman was as bald as a clay pot; the protruding tendons on her chapped hands were like strips of melon rind. She had survived the Mid-Autumn Festival massacre in ’39 only because her ulcerated legs had made walking impossible, and her husband had hidden her in a yam cellar. The heavens had smiled on her. The Dai Fenglian in her clapper-song was my grandma. I listened with barely concealed excitement, for her tale proved that the strategy of stopping the Jap convoy with rakes had sprung from the mind of my own kin, a member of the weaker sex. No wonder my grandma is fêted as a trailblazer of the anti-Japanese resistance and a national hero.

At the mention of my grandma, the old woman grew expansive. Her narration was choppy and confused, like a shower of leaves at the mercy of the wind. She said that my grandma had the smallest feet of any woman in the village, and that no other distillery had the staying power of ours. The thread of her narrative evened out as she talked of the Jiao-Ping highway: ‘When the highway was extended this far… sorghum only waist-high…. Japs conscripted all able-bodied workers…. Working for the Japs, slacked off, sabotage… took your family’s two big black mules… built a stone bridge over the Black Water River…. Arhat, your family’s foreman… something fishy between him and your grandma, so everyone said… Aiyaya, when your grandma was young she sowed plenty of wild oats…. Your dad was a capable boy, killed his first man at fifteen, eight or nine out of every ten bastard kids turn out bad…. Arhat hamstrung the mule…. Japs caught him and skinned him alive…. Japs butchered people, shit in their pots, and pissed in their basins. I went for water once that year, guess what I found in my bucket, a human head with the pigtail still attached….’

Arhat Liu played a significant role in my family’s history, but there is no hard evidence that he had an affair with my grandma, and, to tell the truth, I don’t believe it. I understood the logic of what the old clay-pot was saying, but it still embarrassed me. Since Uncle Arhat treated my father like a grandson, that would make me sort of his great-grandson; and if my great-granddad had an affair with my grandma, that’s incest, isn’t it? But that’s hogwash, since my grandma was Uncle Arhat’s boss, not his daughter-in-law, and their relationship was sealed by wages, not by blood. He was a faithful old hand who embellished the history of our family and brought it greater glory than it would have had otherwise. Whether my grandma ever loved him or whether he ever lay down beside her on the kang has nothing to do with morality. What if she did love him? I believe she could have done anything she desired, for she was a hero of the resistance, a trailblazer for sexual liberation, a model of women’s independence.

In country records I discovered that in 1938, the twenty-seventh year of the Republic, four hundred thousand mandays were spent by local workers from Gaomi, Pingdu, and Jiao counties in the service of the Japanese army to build the Jiao-Ping highway. The agricultural loss was incalculable, and the villages bordering the highway were stripped clean of draught animals. It was then that Arhat Liu, a conscript himself, took a hoe to the legs of our captured mule. He was caught, and the next day the Japanese soldiers tied him to a tethering post, skinned him alive, and mutilated him in front of his compatriots. There was no fear in his eyes, and a stream of abuse poured from his mouth up until the moment he died.

3

SHE TOLD IT exactly like it was. When construction of the Jiao-Ping highway reached our place, the sorghum in the fields was only waist-high. Except for a handful of tiny villages, two crossing rivers, and a few dozen winding dirt paths, the marshy plain, which measured sixty by seventy-odd li — or about twenty by twenty-five miles — was covered with sorghum that waved like an ocean of green. From our village we had a clear view of White Horse Mountain, an enormous rock formation on the northern edge of the plain. Peasants tending the sorghum looked up to see White Horse and down to see black soil that soaked up their sweat and filled their hearts with contentment. When they heard that the Japanese were building a highway across the plain, they grew restive, awaiting the calamity they knew was coming.

The Japanese said they would come, and they were as good as their word.

My father was sleeping when the Japs and their puppet soldiers came to our village to conscript peasant labourers and confiscate their mules and horses. He was awakened by a disturbance near the distillery. Grandma dragged him over to the compound as fast as her bamboo-shoot feet would carry her. Back then there were a dozen or so huge vats in the compound, each brimming with top-quality white liquor, the aroma of which hung over the entire village. Two khaki-clad Japanese soldiers with fixed bayonets stood there as a couple of black-clad Chinese, rifles slung over their backs, untied our two big black mules from a catalpa tree. Uncle Arhat kept trying to get to the shorter puppet soldier, who was untying the tethers, but the taller comrade forced him back with the muzzle of his rifle. Since Uncle Arhat was wearing only a thin shirt in the early-summer heat, his exposed chest already showed a welter of circular bruises.

‘Brothers,’ he pleaded, ‘we can talk this over, we can talk it over.’

‘Get the hell out of here, you old bastard,’ the taller soldier barked.

‘Those animals belong to the owner,’ Uncle Arhat said. ‘You can’t take them.’

The puppet soldier growled menacingly, ‘If I hear another word out of you, I’ll shoot your little prick off!’

The Japanese soldiers stood like clay statues, holding their rifles in front of them.

As Grandma and my father entered the compound, Uncle Arhat wailed, ‘They’re taking our mules!’

‘Sir,’ Grandma said, ‘we’re good people.’

The Japanese squinted and grinned at her.

The shorter puppet soldier freed the mules and tried to lead them away; but they raised their heads stubbornly and refused to budge. His buddy walked up and prodded one of them in the rump with his rifle; the angered animal pawed the ground with its rear hooves, its metal shoes glinting in the mud that sprayed the soldier in the face.

The tall soldier pointed his rifle at Uncle Arhat and bellowed, ‘Come over here and take these mules to the construction site, you old bastard!’

Uncle Arhat squatted on the ground without making a sound, so one of the Japanese soldiers walked up and waved his rifle in front of Uncle Arhat’s face. ‘Minliwala, yalalimin!’ he grunted. With the shiny bayonet glinting in front of his eyes, Uncle Arhat sat down. The soldier thrust his bayonet forward, opening a tiny hole in Uncle Arhat’s shiny scalp.

Beginning to tremble, Grandma blurted out, ‘Do it, Uncle, take the mules for them.’

The other Jap soldier edged up close to Grandma, and Father noticed how young and handsome he was, and how his dark eyes sparkled. But when he smiled, his lip curled to reveal yellow buck teeth. Grandma staggered over to Uncle Arhat, whose wound was oozing blood that spread across his scalp and down his face. The grinning Japanese soldiers drew closer. Grandma laid her hands on Uncle Arhat’s scalp, then rubbed them on her face. Pulling her hair, she leaped to her feet like a madwoman, her mouth agape. She looked three parts human and seven parts demon. The startled Japanese soldiers froze.

‘Sir,’ the tall puppet soldier said, ‘that woman’s crazy.’

One of the Jap soldiers mumbled something as he fired a shot over Grandma’s head. She sat down hard and began to wail.

The tall puppet soldier used his rifle to prod Uncle Arhat, who got to his feet and took the tethers from the smaller soldier. The mules looked up; their legs trembled as they followed him out of the compound. The street was chaotic with mules, horses, oxen, and goats.

Grandma wasn’t crazy. The minute the Japs and the puppet soldiers left, she removed the wooden lid from one of the wine vats and looked at her frightful, bloody reflection in the mirrorlike surface. Father watched the tears on her cheeks turn red. She washed her face in the wine, turning it red.

Like the mules he was leading, Uncle Arhat was forced to work on the road that was taking shape in the sorghum field. The highway on the southern bank of the Black Water River was nearly completed, and cars and trucks were driving up on the newly laid roadway with loads of stone and yellow gravel, which they dumped on the riverbank. Since there was only a single wooden span across the river, the Japanese had decided to build a large stone bridge. Vast areas of sorghum on both sides of the highway had been levelled, until the ground seemed covered by an enormous green blanket. In the field north of the river, where black soil had been laid on either side of the road, dozens of horses and mules were pulling stone rollers to level two enormous squares in the sea of sorghum. Men led the animals back and forth through the field, trampling the tender stalks, which had been bent double by the shod hooves, then flattening them with stone rollers turned dark green by the plant juices. The pungent aroma of green sorghum hung heavily over the construction site.

Uncle Arhat, who was sent to the southern bank of the river to haul rocks to the other side, reluctantly handed the mules over to an old geezer with festering eyes. The little wooden bridge swayed so violently it seemed about to topple as he crossed to the southern bank, where a Chinese overseer tapped him on the head with a purplish rattan whip and said, ‘Start lugging rocks to the other side.’ Uncle Arhat rubbed his eyes — the blood from his scalp wound had soaked his eyebrows. He picked up an average-sized rock and carried it to the other side, where the old geezer stood with the mules. ‘Use them sparingly,’ he said. ‘They belong to the family I work for.’ The old geezer lowered his head numbly, then turned and led the mules over to where teams of animals were working on the connecting road. The shiny rumps of the black mules reflected specks of sunlight. His head still bleeding, Uncle Arhat hunkered down, scooped up some black dirt, and rubbed it on the wound. A dull, heavy pain travelled all the way down to his toes.

Armed Jap and puppet soldiers stood on the fringes of the construction site; the overseer, whip in hand, roamed the site like a spectre. The eyes of the frightened labourers rolled as they watched Uncle Arhat, his head a mass of blood and mud, pick up a rock and take a couple of steps. Suddenly he heard a crack behind him, followed by a drawn-out, stinging pain on his back. He dropped the rock and looked at the grinning overseer. ‘Your honour, if you have something to say, say it. Why hit me?’

Without a word, the grinning overseer flicked his whip in the air and wrapped it around Uncle Arhat’s waist, all but cutting him in half. Two streams of hot, stinging tears oozed out of the corners of Uncle Arhat’s eyes, and blood rushed to his head, which began to throb as though it might split open.

‘Your honour!’ Uncle Arhat protested.

His honour whipped him again.

‘Your honour,’ Uncle Arhat said, ‘why are you hitting me?’

His honour flicked the whip and grinned until his eyes were mere slits: ‘Just giving you a taste, you son of a bitch.’

Uncle Arhat choked off his sobs as his eyes pooled with tears. He bent over, picked up a large rock from the pile, and staggered with it towards the little bridge. The jagged edges dug deeply into his gut and his rib cage, but he didn’t feel the pain.

The overseer stood rooted to the spot, whip in hand, and Uncle Arhat trembled with fear as he lugged the rock past his gaze. With the whip cutting into his neck he fell forward, landed on his knees, and hugged the rock to his chest. It tore the skin on his hands and left a deep gash in his chin. Stunned, he began to blubber like a baby; a purple tongue of flame licked out in the emptiness inside his skull.

He strained to pull his hands out from under the rock, stood up, and arched his back like a threatened, skinny old tomcat. Just then a middle-aged man, grinning from ear to ear, walked up. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and held one up to the overseer, who parted his lips to accept the offering, then waited for the man to light it for him.

‘Revered one,’ the man said, ‘that stinking blockhead isn’t worth getting angry over.’

The overseer exhaled the smoke through his nose and said nothing. Uncle Arhat stared at the whip in his twitching yellowed fingers.

The middle-aged man stuffed the pack of cigarettes into the pocket of the overseer, who seemed not to notice; then, snorting lightly, he patted his pocket, turned, and walked away.

‘Are you new here, elder brother?’ the man asked.

Uncle Arhat said he was.

‘You didn’t give him anything to grease the skids?’

‘Those mad dogs dragged me here against my will.’

‘Give him a little money or a pack of cigarettes. He doesn’t hit the hard workers, and he doesn’t hit the slackers. The only ones he hits are those who have eyes but won’t see.’

All that morning, Uncle Arhat desperately lugged rocks, like a man without a soul. The scab on his scalp, baked by the sun, caused terrible pain as it dried and cracked. His hands were raw and bloody, and the stiffened gash on his chin made him drool. The purplish flame kept licking at the inside of his skull — sometimes strong, sometimes weak, but never dying out completely.

At noon a brown truck drove up the barely negotiable road. Dimly Uncle Arhat heard a shrill whistle and watched the labourers stumble up to the truck. He sat mindlessly on the ground, showing no interest in the truck. The middle-aged man walked over and pulled him to his feet. ‘Elder brother, come on, it’s mealtime. Try some Japanese rice.’

Uncle Arhat stood up and followed him.

Large buckets of snowy white rice were handed down from the truck, along with a basket of white ceramic bowls with blue floral patterns. A fat Chinese stood next to the baskets, handing bowls to the men as they filed past. A skinny Chinese stood beside the buckets, ladling rice. The labourers stood around the truck, wolfing down their food, bare hands serving as chopsticks.

The overseer walked up, whip in hand, the enigmatic grin still on his face. The flame in Uncle Arhat’s skull blazed, illuminating thoughts of the hard morning that he had tried to cast off. Armed Japanese and puppet sentries walked up and stood around a galvanised-iron bucket to eat their lunch. A guard dog with a long snout and trimmed ears sat behind the bucket, its tongue lolling as it watched the labourers.

Uncle Arhat counted the dozen or so Japs and the dozen or so puppet soldiers standing around the bucket eating their lunch; the word ‘escape’ flashed into his mind. Escape! If he could make it to the sorghum field, these fuckers wouldn’t be able to catch him. The soles of his feet were hot and sweaty; the moment the idea to flee entered his mind, he grew fidgety and anxious. Something was hidden behind the calm, cold grin on the face of the overseer. Whatever it was, it made Uncle Arhat’s thoughts grow muddled.

The fat Chinese took the bowls from the labourers before they were finished. They licked their lips and stared longingly at kernels of rice stuck to the sides of the buckets, but didn’t dare move. A mule on the northern bank of the river brayed shrilly. Uncle Arhat recognised the familiar sound. Tethered to rolling stones beside the newly ploughed roadbed, the listless mules nibbled stalks and leaves of sorghum that had been trampled into the earth.

That afternoon a man in his twenties darted into the sorghum field when he thought the overseer wasn’t looking. A bullet followed his path of retreat. He lay motionless on the fringe of the field.

The brown truck drove up again as the sun was sinking in the west. Uncle Arhat’s digestive system, used to sorghum, was intent on ridding itself of this mildewy white rice, but he forced the food past the knots in his throat. The thought of escape was stronger than ever; he longed to see his own compound, where the pungent odour of wine pervaded the air, in that village a dozen or so li away. The distillery hands had all fled with the arrival of the Japanese, and the wine cooker now stood cold. Even more he longed to see my grandma and my father. He hadn’t forgotten the warmth and contentment she had bestowed upon him alongside the pile of sorghum leaves.

After dinner the labourers were herded into an enclosure of fir stakes covered with tarpaulins. Wires the thickness of mung beans had been strung between the stakes, and the gate was made of thick metal rods. The Jap and puppet soldiers were billeted in separate tents several yards away; the guard dog was tethered to the flap of the Jap tent. Two lanterns hung from a tall post at the entrance of the enclosure, around which soldiers took turns at sentry duty. Mules and horses were tethered to posts in a razed section of the sorghum field west of the enclosure.

The stench inside the enclosure was suffocating. Some of the men snored loudly; others got up to piss in a tin pail, raising a noisy liquid tattoo, like pearls falling onto a jade plate. The lanterns cast a pale light, under which the sentries’ long shadows flickered.

As the night stretched on, the cold became unbearable, and Uncle Arhat couldn’t sleep. With his thoughts focused on escape, he lay there not daring to move; eventually he fell into a muddled sleep. In his dream his head felt as though it were being carved by a sharp knife, while his hand felt seared as if he clasped a branding iron. He awoke covered in sweat; his pants were soaked with piss. The shrill crow of a rooster floated over from the distant village. The mules and horses pawed the ground and snorted. Stars winked slyly through holes in the tattered tarpaulin above him.

The man who had come to his aid that day quietly sat up. Even in the relative darkness of the enclosure, Uncle Arhat could see his blazing eyes, and could tell that he was no ordinary man. He lay there, watching silently.

As the man knelt in the enclosure opening, he raised his arms slowly and deliberately. Uncle Arhat’s eyes were riveted on his back and his head, around which hung an aura of mystery. The man took a deep breath, cocked his head, and thrust out his hands, like arrows from a bow, to grab two metal rods. A green glare shot from his eyes, and seemed to crackle when it struck an object. The metal rods silently parted, admitting more light into the enclosure from the lanterns and overhead stars, and revealing the shoe of a sentry. Uncle Arhat saw a dark shadow dart out of the enclosure. The Jap sentry grunted, then, in the man’s vicelike grip, crumpled to the ground. The man picked up the Jap’s rifle and slipped silently into the darkness.

It took Uncle Arhat a moment to realise what had happened. The middle-aged man had shown him the way to escape! Cautiously, he crawled out through the opening. The dead Jap lay on the ground, face up, one leg still twitching.

After crawling into the sorghum field, Uncle Arhat straightened up and followed the furrows, taking care not to bump the stalks and get them rustling. He found his way to the bank of the Black Water River, where the three stars — Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Bellatrix — hung directly overhead. A heavy predawn darkness had fallen around him. Stars glistened in the water. As he stood briefly on the riverbank, he shivered from the cold, his teeth chattered, and the ache in his chin spread to his cheeks and ears, finally merging with the throbbing pain in his festering scalp. The crisp air of freedom, filtered through the juices of the sorghum plants, entered his nostrils, his lungs, and his intestines. The ghostly light of the two lanterns shone weakly through the mist; the dark outline of the fir-stake enclosure was like an immense graveyard. Astonished at having got away so easily, he strode onto the rickety wooden bridge, above splashing fish and rippling water, as a shooting star split the heavens. It was as though nothing had happened. He was free to return to his village to let his wounds mend and to go on living. But as he was crossing the bridge, he heard the plaintive braying of a mule on the southern bank. He turned back for Grandma’s mules. This decision would lead to a grand tragedy.

Horses and mules had been tied to a dozen or more tethering posts not far from the enclosure, in an area saturated with their foul-smelling urine. The horses were snorting and eating sorghum stalks; the mules were gnawing on the tethering posts and shitting loose stool. Uncle Arhat, stumbling three times for every step, stole in among them, where he smelled the welcome odour of our two big black mules and spotted their familiar shapes. Time to free his comrades in suffering. But the mules, strangers to the world of reason, greeted him with flying hooves.

‘Black mules,’ Uncle Arhat mumbled, ‘black mules, we can run away together!’ The irate mules pawed the earth to protect their territory from their master, who was unaware that the smell of his dried blood and new wounds had changed his identity to them. Confused and upset, he stepped forward, and was knocked down by a flying hoof. As he lay on the ground, his side started turning numb. The mule was still bucking and kicking, its steel-crescent shoes glinting like little moons. Uncle Arhat’s hip swelled up painfully. He clambered to his feet, but fell back. As soon as he hit the ground, he struggled back up. A thin-voiced rooster in the village crowed once more, as the darkness began to give way to a glimmer of stars that illuminated the mules’ rumps and eyeballs.

‘Damned beasts!’

With anger rising in his heart, he stumbled around the area looking for a weapon. At the construction site of an irrigation ditch he found a sharp metal hoe. Now armed, he walked and cursed loudly, forgetting all about the men and their dog no more than a hundred paces distant. He felt free — fear is all that stands in the way of freedom.

A red solar halo crumbled as the sun rose in the east, and in the predawn light the sorghum was so still it seemed ready to burst. Uncle Arhat walked up to the mules, the rosy colour of dawn in his eyes and bitter loathing in his heart. The mules stood calmly, motionlessly. Uncle Arhat raised his hoe, took aim on the hind leg of one of them, and swung with all his might. A cold shadow fell on the leg. The mule swayed sideways a couple of times, then straightened up, as a brutish, violent, stupefying, wrathful bray erupted from its head. The wounded animal then arched its rump, sending a shower of hot blood splashing down on Uncle Arhat’s face. Seeing an opening, he swung at the other hind leg. A sigh escaped from the black mule as its rump settled earthwards and it sat down hard, propped up by its forlegs, its neck jerked taut by the tether; it bleated to the blue-grey heavens through its gaping mouth. The hoe, pinned beneath its rump, jerked Uncle Arhat into a squatting position. Mustering all his strength, he managed to pull it free.

The second mule stood stupidly, eyeing its fallen comrade and braying piteously, as though pleading for its life. When Uncle Arhat approached, dragging his hoe behind him, the mule backed up until the tether seemed about to part and the post began to make cracking sounds. Dark-blue rays of light flowed from its fist-sized eyeballs.

‘Scared? You damned beast! Where’s your arrogance now? You evil, ungrateful, parasitic bastard! You ass-kissing, treacherous son of a bitch!’

As he spat out wrathful obscenities, he raised his hoe and swung at the animal’s long, rectangular face. It missed, striking the tethering post. By twisting the handle up and down, back and forth, he finally managed to free the head from the wood. The mule struggled so violently that its rear legs arched like bows, its scrawny tail was noisily sweeping the ground. Uncle Arhat took careful aim at the animal’s face — crack — the hoe landed smack on its broad forehead, emitting a resounding clang as metal struck bone, the reverberation passing through the wooden handle and stinging Uncle Arhat’s arms. Not a sound emerged from the black mule’s closed mouth. Its legs and hooves jerked and twitched furiously before it crashed to the ground like a capsized wall, snapping the tether in two, with one end hanging limply from the post and the other coiled beside the dead animal’s head. Uncle Arhat watched quietly, his arms at his sides. The shiny wooden handle buried in the mule’s head pointed to heaven at a jaunty angle.

A barking dog, human shouts, dawn. The curved outline of a blood-red sun rose above the sorghum field to the east, its rays shining down on the black hole of Uncle Arhat’s open mouth.

4

THE TROOPS EMERGED onto the riverbank in a column, with the red sun, which had just broken through the mist, shining down on them. Like everyone else’s, half of my father’s face was red, the other half green; and, like everyone else, he was watching the mist break up over the Black Water River. A fourteen-arch stone bridge connected the southern and northern sections of the highway. The original wooden bridge remained in place to the west, although three or four spans had fallen into the river, leaving only the brown posts, which obstructed the flow of the white foam on top of the water. The reds and greens of the river poking through the dissipating mist were horrifyingly sombre. From the dike, the view to the south was of an endless panorama of sorghum, level and smooth and still, a sea of deeply red, ripe faces. A collective body, united in a single magnanimous thought. Father was too young then to describe the sight in such flowery terms — that’s my doing.

Sorghum and men waited for time’s flower to bear fruit.

The highway stretched southward, a narrowing ribbon of road that was ultimately swallowed up by fields of sorghum. At its farthest point, where sorghum merged with the pale vault of heaven, the sunrise presented a bleak and solemn, yet stirring sight.

Gripped by curiosity, Father looked at the mesmerised guerrillas. Where were they from? Where were they going? Why were they setting an ambush? What would they do when it was over? In the deathly hush, the sound of water splashing over the bridge posts seemed louder and crisper than before. The mist, atomised by the sunlight, settled into the stream, turning the Black Water River from a deep red to a golden red, as though ablaze. A solitary, limp yellow water-plant floated by, its once fiery blooms hanging in withered pallor among the leafy grooves like silkworms. It’s crab-catching season again! Father was reminded. The autumn winds are up, the air is chilled, a flock of wild geese is flying south…. Uncle Arhat shouts, ‘Now, Douguan, now!’ The soft, spongy mud of the bank is covered with the elaborate patterns of skittering claws. Father could smell the delicate, fishy odour wafting over from the river.

‘Take cover behind the dike, all of you,’ Commander Yu said. ‘Mute, set up your rakes.’

Mute slipped some loops of wire off his shoulder and tied the four large rakes together, then grunted to his comrades to help him carry the chain of rakes over to the spot where the stone bridge and highway met.

‘Take cover, men,’ Commander Yu ordered. ‘Stay down till the Jap convoy is on the bridge and Detachment Leader Leng’s troops have cut off their line of retreat. Don’t fire till I give the order; then cut those Jap bastards to pieces and let them feed the eels and crabs.’

Commander Yu signalled to Mute, who nodded and led half the men into the sorghum field west of the highway to lie in ambush. Wang Wenyi followed Mute’s troops to the west, but was sent back. ‘I want you here with me,’ Commander Yu said. ‘Scared?’

‘No,’ Wang Wenyi said, even though he nodded spiritedly.

Commander Yu had the Fang brothers set up their cannon atop the dike, then turned to Bugler Liu. ‘Old Liu, as soon as we open fire, sound your horn for all you’re worth. That scares the hell out of the Japs. Do you hear me?’

Bugler Liu was another of Commander Yu’s longtime buddies, dating back from when he was a sedan bearer and Liu was a funeral musician. Now he held his horn like a rifle.

‘I’m warning you guys,’ Commander Yu said to his men. ‘I’ll shoot any one of you who turns chicken. We have to put on a good show for Leng and his men. Those bastards like to come on strong with their flags and bugles. Well, that’s not my style. He thinks he can get us to join them, but I’ll get him to join me instead.’

As the men sat among the sorghum plants, Fang Six took out his pipe and tobacco and his steel and flint. The steel was black, the flint the deep red of a boiled chicken liver. The flint crackled as it struck the steel, sending sparks flying, great big sparks, one of which landed on the sorghum wick he was holding. As he blew on it, a wisp of white smoke curled upward, turning the wick red. He lit his pipe and took a deep puff. Commander Yu exhaled loudly and crinkled his nose. ‘Put that out,’ he said. ‘Do you think the Japs will cross the bridge if they smell smoke?’ Fang Six took a couple of quick puffs before snuffing out his pipe and putting it away.

‘Okay, you guys, flatten out on the slope so we’ll be ready when the Japs come.’

Nervousness set in as the troops lay on the slope, weapons in hand, knowing they would soon face a formidable enemy. Father lay alongside Commander Yu, who asked him, ‘Scared?’

‘No!’

‘Good,’ Commander Yu said. ‘You’re your foster-dad’s boy, all right! You’ll be my dispatch orderly. Don’t leave my side once it starts. I’ll need you to convey orders.’

Father nodded. His eyes were fastened greedily on the pistols stuck in Commander Yu’s belt, one big, one small. The big one was a German automatic, the small one a French Browning. Each had an interesting history.

The word ‘Gun!’ escaped from his mouth.

‘You want a gun?’

Father nodded.

‘Do you know how to use one?’

‘Yes!’

Commander Yu took the Browning out of his belt and examined it carefully. It was well used, the enamel long gone. He pulled back the bolt, ejecting a copper-jacketed bullet, which he tossed in the air, caught, and shoved back into the chamber.

‘Here!’ he said, handing it over. ‘Use it the way I did.’

Father took the pistol from him, and as he held it he thought back to a couple of nights earlier, when Commander Yu had used it to shatter a wine cup.

A crescent moon had climbed into the sky and was pressing down on withered branches. Father carried a jug and a brass key out to the distillery to get some wine for Grandma. He opened the gate. The compound was absolutely still, the mule pen pitch-black, the distillery suffused with the stench of fermenting grain. When he took the lid off one of the vats in the moonlight, he saw the reflection of his gaunt face in the mirrorlike surface of wine. His eyebrows were short, his lips thin; he was surprised by his own ugliness. He dunked the jug into the vat of wine, which gurgled as it filled. After lifting it out, he changed his mind and poured the wine back, recalling the vat in which Grandma had washed her bloody face. Now she was inside, drinking with Commander Yu and Detachment Leader Leng, who was getting pretty drunk, no match for the other two.

Father walked up to a second vat, the lid of which was held in place by a millstone. After putting his jug on the ground, he strained to remove the millstone, which rolled away and crashed up against yet another vat, punching a hole in the bottom, through which wine began to seep. Ignoring the leaky vat, he removed the lid from the one in front of him, and immediately smelled the blood of Uncle Arhat. The two faces, of Uncle Arhat and Grandma, appeared and reappeared in the wine vat. Father dunked the jug into the vat, filled it with blood-darkened wine, and carried it inside.

Candles burned brightly on the table, around which Commander Yu and Detachment Leader Leng were glaring at each other and breathing heavily. Grandma stood between them, her left hand resting on Leng’s revolver, her right hand on Commander Yu’s Browning pistol.

Father heard Grandma say, ‘Even if you can’t agree, you mustn’t abandon justice and honour. This isn’t the time or place to fight. Take your fury out on the Japanese.’

Commander Yu spat out angrily, ‘You can’t scare me with the Wang regiment’s flags and bugles, you prick. I’m king here. I ate fistcakes for ten years, and I don’t give a damn about that fucking Big Claw Wang!’

Detachment Leader Leng sneered. ‘Elder Brother Zhan’ao, I’ve got your best interests at heart. So does Commander Wang. If you turn your cache of weapons over to us, we’ll make you a battalion commander, and he’ll provide rifles and pay. That’s better than being a bandit.’

‘Who’s a bandit? Who isn’t a bandit? Anyone who fights the Japanese is a national hero. Last year I knocked off three Japanese sentries and inherited three automatic rifles. You’re no bandit, but how many Japs have you killed? You haven’t taken a hair off a single Jap’s ass!’

Detachment Leader Leng sat down and lit a cigarette.

Father took advantage of the lull to hand the wine jug up to Grandma, whose face changed as she took it from him. Glaring at Father, she filled the three cups.

‘Uncle Arhat’s blood is in this wine,’ she said. ‘If you’re honourable men you’ll drink it, then go out and destroy the Jap convoy. After that, chickens can go their own way, dogs can go theirs. Well water and river water don’t mix.’

She picked up her cup and drank the wine down noisily.

Commander Yu held out his cup, threw back his head, and drained it.

Detachment Leader Leng followed suit, but put his cup down half full. ‘Commander Yu,’ he said, ‘I’ve had all I can handle. So long!’

With her hand still on his revolver, Grandma asked him, ‘Are you going to fight?’

‘Don’t beg!’ Commander Yu snarled. ‘I’ll fight, even if he doesn’t.’

‘I’ll fight,’ Detachment Leader Leng said.

Grandma let her hand drop, and Leng jammed his revolver back into its holster.

The pale skin around his nose was dotted with dozens of pockmarks. A heavy cartridge belt hung from his belt, which sagged when he holstered his revolver.

‘Zhan’ao,’ Grandma said, ‘I’m entrusting Douguan to your care. Take him along the day after tomorrow.’

Commander Yu looked at my father and smiled. ‘Have you got the balls, foster-son?’

Father stared scornfully at the hard yellow teeth showing between Commander Yu’s parted lips. He didn’t say a word.

Commander Yu picked up a wine cup and placed it on top of Father’s head, then told him to stand in the doorway. He whipped out his Browning pistol and walked over to the corner.

Father watched Commander Yu take three long strides to the corner — three slow, measured steps. Grandma’s face turned ashen. The corners of Detachment Leader Leng’s mouth were curled in a contemptuous smile.

When he reached the corner, Commander Yu whirled around. Father watched him raise his arm, as a dark-red cast came over his black eyes. The Browning spat out a puff of white smoke. An explosion erupted above Father’s head, and shards of shattered ceramic fell around him, one landing against his neck. He shrugged his shoulder, and it slid down into his pants. He didn’t utter a sound. The blood had drained from Grandma’s face. Detachment Leader Leng sat down hard on a stool. ‘Good shooting,’ he said after a moment.

‘Good boy!’ Commander Yu said proudly.

The Browning pistol in Father’s hand seemed to weigh a ton.

‘I don’t have to show you,’ Commander Yu said. ‘You know how to shoot. Have Mute get his men ready.’

Gripping his pistol tightly, Father darted through the sorghum field, crossed the highway, and ran up to Mute, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground, honing his sabre knife with a shiny green stone. Some of his men were seated, others lying down.

‘Get your men ready,’ Father said to him.

Mute looked at Father out of the corner of his eye, but kept honing his knife for another moment or so. Then he picked up a couple of sorghum leaves, wiped the stone residue from the blade, and plucked a stalk of grass to test its sharpness. It fell in two pieces the instant it touched the blade.

‘Get your men ready,’ Father repeated.

Mute sheathed his knife and laid it on the ground beside him, his face creased in a savage grin. With one of his mammoth hands he signalled Father to come closer.

‘Uh! Uh!’ he grunted.

Father shuffled forward and stopped a pace or so from Mute, who reached out, grabbed him by the sleeve, jerked him into his lap, and pinched his ear so hard that he grimaced. Father jammed his Browning pistol up into Mute’s rib cage. Mute grabbed Father’s nose and pinched it until tears came to his eyes. An eerie laugh burst from Mute’s mouth.

The seated men laughed raucously.

‘A lot like Commander Yu, isn’t he?’

‘Commander Yu’s seed.’

‘Douguan, I miss your mom.’

‘Douguan, I feel like nibbling those date-topped buns of hers.’

Father’s embarrassment quickly turned to rage. Raising his pistol, he aimed it at the man wishfully thinking of date-topped buns, and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked, but no bullet emerged.

The man, ashen-faced, jumped to his feet and wrenched the pistol away. Father, still enraged, threw himself on the man, clawing, kicking, biting.

Mute stood up, grabbed Father by the scruff of his neck, and flicked him away. He flew through the air and crashed into a thicket of sorghum stalks. A quick somersault and he was on his feet, railing and swearing as he charged Mute, who merely grunted a couple of times. The steely look in his eyes froze Father in his tracks. Mute picked up the pistol and pulled back the bolt; a bullet fell into his hand. Holding it in his fingers, he looked at the notch in the casing from the firing pin, and made some unintelligible hand signs to Father. Then he stuck the pistol into Father’s belt and patted him on the shoulder.

‘What were you doing over there?’ Commander Yu asked.

Father was embarrassed. ‘They… they said they wanted to sleep with Mom.’

‘What did you say?’ Commander Yu asked sternly.

Father wiped his eyes with his arm. ‘I shot him!’

‘You shot somebody?’

‘The gun misfired.’ Father handed Commander Yu the shiny dud.

Commander Yu took it from him, examined it, and gave it a casual flick. It described a beautiful arc before plopping into the river.

‘Good boy!’ Commander Yu said. ‘But use your gun on the Japanese first. After you’ve finished them off, anybody who says he wants to sleep with your mom, you shoot him in the gut. Not in the head, and not in the chest. Remember, in the gut.’

Father lay on his belly alongside Commander Yu; the Fang brothers were on his other side. The cannon had been set up on the dike, aimed at the stone bridge, its barrel stuffed with cotton rags, a fuse sticking out behind. Fang Seven had placed a bundle of sorghum tinder next to him, some of which was already smouldering. A gourd filled with gunpowder and a tin of iron pellets lay beside Fang Six.

Wang Wenyi was to Commander Yu’s left, curled up, holding his long-barrelled fowling piece in his hands. His wounded ear was stuck to the white bandage covering it.

The sun was stake-high, its white core girded by a pink halo. The flowing water glittered. A flock of wild ducks flew over from the sorghum field, circled three times, then dived down to a grassy sandbar. A few landed on the surface of the river and began floating downstream, their bodies settling heavily in the water, their heads turning and darting constantly. Father was feeling warm and tingly. His clothes, dampened by the dew, were now dry. He pressed himself to the ground, but felt a pain in his chest, as from a sharp stone. When he rose up to see what it was, his head and upper torso were exposed above the dike. ‘Get down,’ Commander Yu ordered. Reluctantly, he did as he was told. Fang Six began to snore. Commander Yu picked up a clod of earth and tossed it in his face. Fang Six woke up bleary-eyed and yawned so heroically that two fine tears appeared in the corners of his eyes.

‘Are the Japs here?’ he asked loudly.

‘Fuck you!’ Commander Yu snarled. ‘No sleeping.’

The riverbanks were absolutely still; the broad highway lay lifeless in its bed of sorghum. The stone bridge spanning the river was strikingly beautiful. A boundless expanse of sorghum greeted the reddening sun, which rose ever higher, grew ever brighter. Wild ducks floated in the shallow water by the banks, noisily searching for food with their flat bills. Father studied their beautiful feathers and alert, intelligent eyes. Aiming his heavy Browning pistol at one of their smooth backs, he was about to pull the trigger when Commander Yu forced his hand down. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you little turtle egg?’

Father was getting fidgety. The highway lay there like death itself. The sorghum had turned deep scarlet.

‘That bastard Leng wants to play games with me!’ Commander Yu spat out hatefully. The southern bank lay in silence; not a trace of the Leng detachment. Father knew it was Leng who had learned that the convoy would be passing his spot, and that he’d brought Commander Yu into the ambush only because he doubted his own ability to go it alone.

Father was tense for a while, but gradually he relaxed, and his attention wandered back to the wild ducks. He thought about duck-hunting with Uncle Arhat, who had a fowling piece with a deep-red stock and a leather strap; it was now in the hands of Wang Wenyi. Tears welled up in his eyes, but not enough to spill out. Just like that day the year before. Under the warm rays of the sun, he felt a chill spread through his body.

Uncle Arhat and the two mules had been taken away by the Japs, and Grandma had washed her bloody face in the wine vat until it reeked of alcohol and was beet-red. Her eyes were puffy; the front of her pale-blue cotton jacket was soaked in wine and blood. She stood stock-still beside the vat, staring down at her reflection. Father recalled how she had fallen to her knees and kowtowed three times to the vat, then stood up, scooped some wine with both hands, and drank it. The rosiness of her face was concentrated in her cheeks; all the colour had drained from her forehead and chin.

‘Kneel down!’ she ordered Father. ‘Kowtow.’

He fell to his knees and kowtowed.

‘Take a drink!’

He scooped up a handful of wine and drank it.

Trickles of blood, like threads, sank to the bottom of the vat, on the surface of which a tiny white cloud floated alongside the sombre faces of Grandma and Father. Piercing rays emanated from Grandma’s eyes; Father looked away, his heart pounding wildly. He reached out to scoop up some more wine, and as it dripped through his fingers it shattered one large face and one small one amid the blue sky and white cloud. He drank a mouthful, which left the sticky taste of blood on his tongue. The blood sank to the base of the vat, where it congealed into a turbid clot the size of a fist. Father and Grandma stared at it long and hard; then she pulled the lid over it and rolled the millstone back, straining to place it on top of the lid.

‘Don’t touch it!’ she said.

Looking at the accumulation of mud and grey-green sow-bugs squirming in the indentation of the millstone, he nodded, clearly disturbed by the sight.

That night he lay on his kang listening to Grandma pace the yard. The patter of her footsteps and the rustling sorghum in the fields formed Father’s confused dreams, in which he heard the brays of our two handsome black mules.

Father awoke once, at dawn, and ran naked into the yard to pee; there he saw Grandma staring transfixed into the sky. He called out, ‘Mom,’ but his shout fell on deaf ears. When he’d finished peeing, he took her by the hand and led her inside. She followed meekly. They’d barely stepped inside when they heard waves of commotion from the southeast, followed by the crack of rifle fire, like the pop of a tautly stretched piece of silk pierced by a sharp knife.

Shortly after he and Grandma heard the gunfire, they were herded over to the dike, along with a number of villagers — elderly, young, sick, and disabled — by Japanese soldiers. The polished white flagstones, boulders, and coarse yellow gravel on the dike looked like a line of grave mounds. Last year’s early-summer sorghum stood spellbound beyond the dike, sombre and melancholy. The outline of the highway shining through the trampled sorghum stretched due north. The stone bridge hadn’t been erected then, and the little wooden span stood utterly exhausted and horribly scarred by the passage of tens of thousands of tramping feet and the iron shoes of horses and mules. The smell of green shoots released by the crushed and broken sorghum, steeped in the night mist, rose pungent in the morning air. Sorghum everywhere was crying bitterly.

Father, Grandma, and the other villagers — assembled on the western edge of the highway, south of the river, atop the shattered remnants of sorghum plants — faced a mammoth enclosure that looked like an animal pen. A crowd of shabby labourers huddled beyond it. Two puppet soldiers herded the labourers over near Father and the others to form a second cluster. The two groups faced a square where animals were tethered, a spot that would later make people pale with fright. They stood impassively for some time before a thin-faced, white-gloved Japanese officer with red insignia on his shoulders and a long sword at his hip emerged from the tent, leading a guard dog, whose red tongue lolled from the side of its mouth. Behind the dog, two puppet soldiers carried the rigid corpse of a Japanese soldier. Two Japanese soldiers brought up the rear, escorting two puppet soldiers who were dragging a beaten and bloody Uncle Arhat. Father huddled close to Grandma; she wrapped her arms around him.

Fifty or so white birds, wings flapping noisily, sliced through the blue sky above the Black Water River, then turned and headed east, towards the golden sun. Father could see the draught animals, with scraggly hair and filthy faces, and our two black mules, which lay on the ground. One was dead, the hoe still stuck in its head. The blood-soaked tail of the other mule swept the ground; the skin over its belly twitched noisily; its nostrils whistled as they opened and closed. How Father loved those two black mules.

He remembers Grandma sitting proudly on the mule’s back, Father in her lap, the three of them flying down the narrow dirt path through the sorghum field, the mule rocking back and forth as it gallops along, giving Father and Grandma the ride of their lives. Spindly legs conquer the dust of the road as Father shouts excitedly. An occasional peasant amid the sorghum, hoe in hand, gazes at the powdery, fair face of the distillery owner, his heart filled with envy and loathing.

Now one of the mules was lying dead on the ground, its mouth open, a row of long white teeth chewing the earth. The other sat suffering more than its dead comrade. ‘Mom,’ Father said to Grandma, ‘our mules.’ She covered his mouth with her hand.

The body of the Japanese soldier was placed before the officer, who continued to hold the dog’s leash. The two puppet soldiers dragged the battered Uncle Arhat over to a wooden rack. Father didn’t recognise him right away; he seemed just a strange, bloody creature in human form. As he was dragged up to the rack, his head turned to the left, then to the right, the crusty scab on his scalp looking like the shiny mud on the riverbank, baked by the sun until it wrinkles and begins to crack. His useless feet traced patterns in the dirt. The crowd slowly recoiled. Father felt Grandma’s hands grip his shoulders tightly. The people seemed to shrink in size, their faces clay-coloured or black. Crows and sparrows suddenly silenced, the people could hear the panting of the guard dog. The officer holding its leash farted loudly. Before the puppet soldiers dragged the strange creature over to the rack, they dropped it to the ground, an inert slab of meat.

‘Uncle Arhat!’ Father cried out in alarm.

Grandma covered his mouth again.

Uncle Arhat began to writhe, arching his buttocks as he rose to his knees, propped himself on his hands, and raised his arms. His face was so puffy the skin shone; his eyes were slits through which thin greenish rays emerged. Father was sure Uncle Arhat could see him. His heart was pounding against the wall of his chest — thump thump thump — and he didn’t know if it was from fear or anger. He wanted to scream, but Grandma’s hand was clasped too tightly over his mouth.

The officer holding the leash shouted something to the crowd, and a crew-cut Chinese interpreted it for them. Father didn’t hear everything the interpreter said. Grandma’s hand was clasped so tightly over his mouth that he was having trouble breathing and his ears were ringing.

Two Chinese in black uniforms stripped Uncle Arhat naked and tied him to the rack. The Jap officer waved his arm, and two more black-clad men dragged and pushed Sun Five, the most accomplished hog-butcher in our village — or anywhere in Northeast Gaomi Township, for that matter — out of the enclosure. He was a short, bald man with a huge paunch, a red face, and tiny, close-set eyes buried alongside the bridge of his nose, held a butcher’s knife in his left hand and a pail of water in his right as he shuffled up to Uncle Arhat.

The interpreter spoke: ‘The commander says to skin him. If you don’t do a good job of it, he’ll have his dog tear your heart out.’

Sun Five mumbled an acknowledgement, his eyes blinking furiously. Holding the knife in his mouth, he picked up the pail and poured water over Uncle Arhat’s scalp. Uncle Arhat’s head jerked upward when the cold water hit him. Bloody water coursed down his face and neck, forming filthy puddles at his feet. One of the overseers brought another pail of water from the river. Sun Five soaked a rag in it and wiped Uncle Arhat’s face clean. When he was finished, his buttocks twitched briefly. ‘Elder brother…’

‘Brother,’ Uncle Arhat said, ‘finish me off quickly. I won’t forget your kindness down in the Yellow Springs.’

The Japanese officer roared something.

‘Get on with it!’ the interpreter said.

Sun Five’s face darkened as he reached up and held Uncle Arhat’s ear between his fingers. ‘Elder brother,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing I can do….’

Father saw Sun Five’s knife cut the skin above the ear with a sawing motion. Uncle Arhat screeched in agony as sprays of yellow piss shot out from between his legs. Father’s knees were knocking. A Japanese soldier walked up to Sun Five with a white ceramic platter, into which Sun put Uncle Arhat’s large, fleshy ear. He cut off the other ear and laid it on the platter alongside the first one. Father watched the ears twitch, making thumping sounds.

The soldier paraded slowly in front of the labourers and villagers, holding the platter out for them to see. Father looked at the ears, pale and beautiful.

The soldier then carried the ears up to the Japanese officer, who nodded to him. He laid the platter alongside the body of his dead comrade, after a moment of silence, he picked it up and put it on the ground under the dog’s nose.

The dog’s tongue slithered back into its mouth as it sniffed the ears with its pointy, wet, black nose; but it shook its head, with its tongue lolling again, and sat down.

‘Hey,’ the interpreter yelled at Sun Five. ‘Keep going.’

Sun Five was walking around in circles, mumbling to himself. Father looked at his sweaty, greasy face, and watched his eyelids blink like a bobbing head of a chicken.

A mere trickle of blood oozed from the holes where Uncle Arhat’s ears had been. Without them his head had become a neat, unmarred oval.

The Jap officer roared again.

‘Hurry up, get on with it!’ the interpreter ordered.

Sun Five bent over and sliced off Uncle Arhat’s genitals with a single stroke, then put them into the platter held by the Japanese soldier, who carried it at eye level as he paraded like a marionette in front of the crowd. Father felt Grandma’s icy fingers dig into his shoulders.

The Japanese soldier put the platter under the dog’s nose. It nibbled, then spat the stuff out.

Uncle Arhat was screaming in agony, his bony frame twitching violently on the rack.

Sun Five threw down his butcher knife, fell to his knees, and wailed bitterly.

The Japanese officer let go of the leash, and the guard dog bounded forward, burying its claws in Sun Five’s shoulders and baring its fangs in his face. He threw himself on the ground and covered his face with his hands.

The Japanese officer whistled, and the guard dog bounded back to him, dragging the leash behind it.

‘Skin him, and be quick about it!’ the interpreter demanded.

Sun Five struggled to his feet, picked up his butcher knife, and staggered up to Uncle Arhat.

Everyone’s head jerked upward as a torrent of abuse erupted from Uncle Arhat’s mouth.

Sun Five spoke to him: ‘Elder brother… elder brother… try to bear it a little longer….’

Uncle Arhat spat a gob of bloody phlegm into Sun’s face.

‘Start skinning,’ shouted the interpreter. ‘Fuck your ancestors! Skin him, I said!’

Sun Five started at the point on Uncle Arhat’s scalp where the scab had formed, zipping the knife blade down, once, twice… one meticulous cut after another. Uncle Arhat’s scalp fell away, revealing two greenish-purple eyes and several misshapen chunks of flesh….

Father told me once that, even after Uncle Arhat’s face had been peeled away, shouts and gurgles continued to emerge from his shapeless mouth, while endless rivulets of bright-red blood dripped from his pasty scalp. Sun Five no longer seemed human as his flawless knife-work produced a perfect pelt. After Uncle Arhat had been turned into a mass of meaty pulp, his innards churned and roiled, attracting swarms of dancing green flies. The women were on their knees, wailing piteously. That night a heavy rain fell, washing the tethering square clean of every drop of blood, and of Uncle Arhat’s corpse and the skin that had covered it. Word that his corpse had disappeared spread through the village, from one person to ten, to a hundred, from this generation to the next, until it became a beautiful legend.

‘If he thinks he can get away with playing games with me, I’ll rip his head off and use it for a pisspot!’

The sun seemed to shrink as it rose in the sky, sending down white-hot rays; a flock of wild ducks flew through the rapidly dissipating mist atop the sorghum field, then another flock. Detachment Leader Leng’s troops still hadn’t shown up, and only an occasional wild hare disturbed the peace of the highway. A while later, a wily red fox darted across the highway. ‘Hey!’ Commander Yu shouted after cursing Detachment Leader Leng. ‘Everybody up. It looks like we’ve been tricked by that son of a bitch Pocky Leng.’

That was just what the troops, tired of lying there, had been waiting to hear. They were on their way up before the sound of Commander Yu’s command had died out. Some sat on the dike to enjoy a smoke; others stood to take a long-postponed piss.

Father jumped up onto the dike, the head of the skinned Uncle Arhat floating in front of his eyes. Wild ducks startled into flight by the sudden emergence of men on the dike began landing in small clusters on a nearby sandbar, where they waddled back and forth, their emerald and yellow feathers glistening among the water weeds.

Mute walked up to Commander Yu, knife in one hand, his old Hanyang rifle in the other. Looking dejected, with lifeless eyes, he pointed to the sun in the southeastern sky and to the deserted highway. Finally, he pointed to his belly, grunted, and signalled in the direction of the village. Commander Yu thought for a moment, then called to the men on the western edge of the highway, ‘Come over here, all of you!’

The troops crossed the highway and formed up on the dike.

‘Brothers,’ Commander Yu said, ‘if Pocky Leng’s playing games with us, I’ll lop his damned head off! The sun isn’t directly overhead yet, so we’ll wait a little longer. If the convoy hasn’t come by noon, we’ll go to Tan Family Hollow and settle accounts with Leng. For now, go into the sorghum field and get some rest. I’ll send Douguan for food. Douguan!’

Father looked up at Commander Yu.

‘Go tell your mom to have the women make some fistcakes, and tell her I want lunch here by noon. Say I want her to bring it herself.’

Father nodded, hitched up his trousers, stuck the Browning pistol into his belt, and ran down the dike. After heading north down the highway for a short distance, he cut across the sorghum field, heading northwest, weaving in and out among the plants. In the sea of sorghum he bumped into some long mule bones. He kicked one, dislodging a couple of short-tailed, furry field voles that had been feasting on marrow. They looked up fearlessly, then burrowed back into the bone. The sight reminded Father of the family’s two black mules, reminded him of how, long after the highway had been completed, the pungent smell of death hung over the village every time a southeastern wind rose.

A year earlier, the bloated carcasses of dozens of mules had been found floating in the Black Water River, caught in the reeds and grass in the shallow water by the banks; their distended bellies, baked by the sun, split and popped, released their splendid innards, like gorgeous blooming flowers, as slowly spreading pools of dark-green liquid were caught up in the flow of water.

5

ON HER SIXTEENTH birthday, my grandma was betrothed by her father to Shan Bianlang, the son of Shan Tingxiu, one of Northeast Gaomi Township’s richest men. As distillery owners, the Shans used cheap sorghum to produce a strong, high-quality white wine that was famous throughout the area. Northeast Gaomi Township is largely swampy land that is flooded by autumn rains; but since the tall sorghum stalks resist waterlogging, it was planted everywhere and invariably produced a bumper crop. By using cheap grain to make wine, the Shan family made a very good living, and marrying my grandma off to them was a real feather in Great-Granddad’s cap. Many local families had dreamed of marrying into the Shan family, despite rumours that Shan Bianlang had leprosy. His father was a wizened little man who sported a scrawny queue on the back of his head, and even though his cupboards overflowed with gold and silver, he wore tattered, dirty clothes, often using a length of rope as a belt.

Grandma’s marriage into the Shan family was the will of heaven, implemented on a day when she and some of her playmates, with their tiny bound feet and long pigtails, were playing beside a set of swings. It was Qingming, the day set aside to attend ancestral graves; peach trees were in full red bloom, willows were green, a fine rain was falling, and the girls’ faces looked like peach blossoms. It was a day of freedom for them. That year Grandma was five feet four inches tall and weighed about 130 pounds. She was wearing a cotton print jacket over green satin trousers, with scarlet bands of silk tied around her ankles. Since it was drizzling, she had put on a pair of embroidered slippers soaked a dozen times in tong oil, which made a squishing sound when she walked. Her long shiny braids shone, and a heavy silver necklace hung around her neck — Great-Granddad was a silversmith. Great-Grandma, the daughter of a landlord who had fallen on hard times, knew the importance of bound feet to a girl, and had begun binding her daughter’s feet when she was six years old, tightening the bindings every day.

A yard in length, the cloth bindings were wound around all but the big toes until the bones cracked and the toes turned under. The pain was excruciating. My mother also had bound feet, and just seeing them saddened me so much that I felt compelled to shout: ‘Down with feudalism! Long live liberated feet!’ The results of Grandma’s suffering were two three-inch golden lotuses, and by the age of sixteen she had grown into a well-developed beauty. When she walked, swinging her arms freely, her body swayed like a willow in the wind.

Shan Tingxiu, the groom’s father, was walking around Great-Granddad’s village, dung basket in hand, when he spotted Grandma among the other local flowers. Three months later, a bridal sedan chair would come to carry her away.

After Shan Tingxiu had spotted Grandma, a stream of people came to congratulate Great-Granddad and Great-Grandma. Grandma pondered what it would be like to mount to the jingle of gold and dismount to the tinkle of silver, but what she truly longed for was a good husband, handsome and well educated, a man who would treat her gently. As a young maiden, she had embroidered a wedding trousseau and several exquisite pictures for the man who would someday become my granddad. Eager to marry, she heard innuendos from her girlfriends that the Shan boy was afflicted with leprosy, and her dreams began to evaporate. Yet, when she shared her anxieties with her parents, Great-Granddad hemmed and hawed, while Great-Grandma scolded the girlfriends, accusing them of sour grapes.

Later on, Great-Granddad told her that the well-educated Shan boy had the fair complexion of a young scholar from staying home all the time. Grandma was confused, not knowing if this was true or not. After all, she thought, her own parents wouldn’t lie to her. Maybe her girlfriends had made it all up. Once again she looked forward to her wedding day.

Grandma longed to lose her anxieties and loneliness in the arms of a strong and noble young man. Finally, to her relief, her wedding day arrived, and as she was placed inside the sedan chair, carried by four bearers, the horns and woodwinds fore and aft struck up a melancholy tune that brought tears to her eyes. Off they went, floating along as though riding the clouds or sailing through a mist.

Grandma was lightheaded and dizzy inside the stuffy sedan chair, her view blocked by a red curtain that gave off a pungent mildewy odour. She reached out to lift it a crack — Great-Granddad had told her not to remove her red veil. A heavy bracelet of twisted silver slid down to her wrist, and as she looked at the coiled-snake design her thoughts grew chaotic and disoriented. A warm wind rustled the emerald-green stalks of sorghum lining the narrow dirt path. Doves cooed in the fields. The delicate powder of petals floated above silvery new ears of waving sorghum. The curtain, embroidered on the inside with a dragon and a phoenix, had faded after years of use, and there was a large stain in the middle.

Summer was giving way to autumn, and the sunlight outside the sedan chair was brilliant. The bouncing movements of the bearers rocked the chair slowly from side to side; the leather lining of their poles groaned and creaked, the curtain fluttered gently, letting in an occasional ray of sunlight and, from time to time, a whisper of cool air. Grandma was sweating profusely and her heart was racing as she listened to the rhythmic footsteps and heavy breathing of the bearers. The inside of her skull felt cold one minute, as though filled with shiny pebbles, and hot the next, as though filled with coarse peppers.

Shortly after leaving the village, the lazy musicians stopped playing, while the bearers quickened their pace. The aroma of sorghum burrowed into her heart. Full-voiced strange and rare birds sang to her from the fields. A picture of what she imagined to be the bridegroom slowly took shape from the threads of sunlight filtering into the darkness of the sedan chair. Painful needle pricks jabbed her heart.

‘Old Man in heaven, protect me!’ Her silent prayer made her delicate lips tremble. A light down adorned her upper lip, and her fair skin was damp. Every soft word she uttered was swallowed up by the rough walls of the carriage and the heavy curtain before her. She ripped the tart-smelling veil away from her face and laid it on her knees. She was following local wedding customs, which dictated that a bride wear three layers of new clothes, top and bottom, no matter how hot the day. The inside of the sedan chair was badly worn and terribly dirty, like a coffin; it had already embraced countless other brides, now long dead. The walls were festooned with yellow silk so filthy it oozed grease, and of the five flies caught inside, three buzzed above her head while the other two rested on the curtain before her, rubbing their bright eyes with black stick-like legs. Succumbing to the oppressiveness in the carriage, Grandma eased one of her bamboo-shoot toes under the curtain and lifted it a crack to sneak a look outside.

She could make out the shapes of the bearers’ statuesque legs poking out from under loose black satin trousers and their big, fleshy feet encased in straw sandals. They raised clouds of dust as they tramped along. Impatiently trying to conjure up an image of their firm, muscular chests, Grandma raised the toe of her shoe and leaned forward. She could see the polished purple scholar-tree poles and the bearers’ broad shoulders beneath them. Barriers of sorghum stalks lining the path stood erect and solid in unbroken rows, tightly packed, together sizing one another up with the yet unopened clay-green eyes of grain ears, one indistinguishable from the next, as far as she could see, like a vast river. The path was so narrow in places it was barely passable, causing the wormy, sappy leaves to brush noisily against the sedan chair.

The men’s bodies emitted the sour smell of sweat. Infatuated by the masculine odour, Grandma breathed in deeply — this ancestor of mine must have been nearly bursting with passion. As the bearers carried their load down the path, their feet left a series of V imprints known as ‘tramples’ in the dirt, for which satisfied clients usually rewarded them, and which fortified the bearers’ pride of profession. It was unseemly to ‘trample’ with an uneven cadence or to grip the poles, and the best bearers kept their hands on their hips the whole time, rocking the sedan chair in perfect rhythm with the musicians’ haunting tunes, which reminded everyone within earshot of the hidden suffering in whatever pleasures lay ahead.

When the sedan chair reached the plains, the bearers began to get a little sloppy, both to make up time and to torment their passenger. Some brides were bounced around so violently they vomited from motion sickness, soiling their clothing and slippers; the retching sounds from inside the carriage pleased the bearers as though they were giving vent to their own miseries. The sacrifices these strong young men made to carry their cargo into bridal chambers must have embittered them, which was why it seemed so natural to torment the brides.

One of the four men bearing Grandma’s sedan chair that day would eventually become my granddad — it was Commander Yu Zhan’ao. At the time he was a beefy twenty-year-old, a pallbearer and sedan bearer at the peak of his trade. The young men of his generation were as sturdy as Northeast Gaomi sorghum, which is more than can be said about us weaklings who succeeded them. It was a custom back then for sedan bearers to tease the bride while trundling her along: like distillery workers, who drink the wine they make, since it is their due, these men torment all who ride in their sedan chairs — even the wife of the Lord of Heaven if she should be a passenger.

Sorghum leaves scraped the sedan chair mercilessly when, all of a sudden, the deadening monotony of the trip was broken by the plaintive sounds of weeping — remarkably like the musicians’ tunes — coming from deep in the field. As Grandma listened to the music, trying to picture the instruments in the musicians’ hands, she raised the curtain with her foot until she could see the sweat-soaked waist of one of the bearers. Her gaze was caught by her own red embroidered slippers, with their tapered slimness and cheerless beauty, ringed by halos of incoming sunlight until they looked like lotus blossoms, or, even more, like tiny goldfish that had settled to the bottom of a bowl. Two teardrops as transparently pink as immature grains of sorghum wetted Grandma’s eyelashes and slipped down her cheeks to the corners of her mouth.

As she was gripped by sadness, the image of a learned and refined husband, handsome in his high-topped hat and wide sash, like a player on the stage, blurred and finally vanished, replaced by the horrifying picture of Shan Bianlang’s face, his leprous mouth covered with rotting tumours. Her heart turned to ice. Were these tapered golden lotuses, a face as fresh as peaches and apricots, gentility of a thousand kinds, and ten thousand varieties of elegance all reserved for the pleasure of a leper? Better to die and be done with it.

The disconsolate weeping in the sorghum field was dotted with words, like knots in a piece of wood: A blue sky yo — a sapphire sky yo — a painted sky yo — a mighty cudgel yo — dear elder brother yo — death has claimed you — you have brought down little sister’s sky yo —.

I must tell you that the weeping of women from Northeast Gaomi Township makes beautiful music. During 1912, the first year of the Republic, professional mourners known as ‘wailers’ came from Qufu, the home of Confucius, to study local weeping techniques. Meeting up with a woman lamenting the death of her husband seemed to Grandma to be a stroke of bad luck on her wedding day, and she grew even more dejected.

Just then one of the bearers spoke up: ‘You there, little bride in the chair, say something! The long journey has bored us to tears.’

Grandma quickly snatched up her red veil and covered her face, gently drawing her foot back from beneath the curtain and returning the carriage to darkness.

‘Sing us a song while we bear you along!’

The musicians, as though snapping out of a trance, struck up their instruments. A trumpet blared from behind the chair:

‘Too-tah — too-tah —’

‘Poo-pah — poo-pah —’ One of the bearers up front imitated the trumpet sound, evoking coarse, raucous laughter all around.

Grandma was drenched with sweat. Back home, as she was being lifted into the sedan chair, Great-Grandma had exhorted her not to get drawn into any banter with the bearers. Sedan bearers and musicians are low-class rowdies capable of anything, no matter how depraved.

They began rocking the chair so violently that poor Grandma couldn’t keep her seat without holding on tight.

‘No answer? Okay, rock! If we can’t shake any words loose, we can at least shake the piss out of her!’

The sedan chair was like a dinghy tossed about by the waves, and Grandma held on to the wooden seat for dear life. The two eggs she’d eaten for breakfast churned in her stomach, the flies buzzed around her ears; her throat tightened, as the taste of eggs surged up into her mouth. She bit her lip. Don’t throw up, don’t let yourself throw up! she commanded herself. You mustn’t let yourself throw up, Fenglian. They say throwing up in the bridal chair means a lifetime of bad luck….

The bearers’ banter turned coarse. One of them reviled my great-granddad for being a money-grabber, another said something about a pretty flower stuck into a pile of cowshit, a third called Shan Bianlang a scruffy leper who oozed pus and excreted yellow fluids. He said the stench of rotten flesh drifted beyond the Shan compound, which swarmed with horseflies….

‘Little bride, if you let Shan Bianlang touch you, your skin will rot away!’

As the horns and woodwinds blared and tooted, the taste of eggs grew stronger, forcing Grandma to bite down hard on her lip. But to no avail. She opened her mouth and spewed a stream of filth, soiling the curtain, towards which the five flies dashed as though shot from a gun.

‘Puke-ah, puke-ah. Keep rocking!’ one of the bearers roared. ‘Keep rocking. Sooner or later she’ll have to say something.’

‘Elder brothers… spare me…’ Grandma pleaded desperately between agonising retches. Then she burst into tears. She felt humiliated; she could sense the perils of her future, knowing she’d spend the rest of her life drowning in a sea of bitterness. Oh, Father, oh, Mother. I have been destroyed by a miserly father and a heartless mother!

Grandma’s piteous wails made the sorghum quake. The bearers stopped rocking the chair and calmed the raging sea. The musicians lowered the instruments from their rousing lips, so that only Grandma’s sobs could be heard, alone with the mournful strains of a single woodwind, whose weeping sounds were more enchanting than any woman’s. Grandma stopped crying at the sound of the woodwind, as though commanded from on high. Her face, suddenly old and desiccated, was pearled with tears. She heard the sound of death in the gentle melancholy of the tune, and smelled its breath; she could see the angel of death, with lips as scarlet as sorghum and a smiling face the colour of golden corn.

The bearers fell silent and their footsteps grew heavy. The sacrificial choking sounds from inside the chair and the woodwind accompaniment had made them restless and uneasy, had set their souls adrift. No longer did it seem like a wedding procession as they negotiated the dirt road; it was more like a funeral procession. My grandfather, the bearer directly in front of Grandma’s foot, felt a strange premonition blazing inside him and illuminating the path his life would take. The sounds of Grandma’s weeping had awakened seeds of affection that had lain dormant deep in his heart.

It was time to rest, so the bearers lowered the sedan chair to the ground. Grandma, having cried herself into a daze, didn’t realise that one of her tiny feet was peeking out from beneath the curtain; the sight of that incomparably delicate, lovely thing nearly drove the souls out of the bearers’ bodies. Yu Zhan’ao walked up, leaned over, and gently — very gently — held Grandma’s foot in his hand, as though it were a fledgling whose feathers weren’t yet dry, then eased it back inside the carriage. She was so moved by the gentleness of the deed she could barely keep from throwing back the curtain to see what sort of man this bearer was, with his large, warm, youthful hand.

I’ve always believed that marriages are made in heaven and that people fated to be together are connected by an invisible thread. The act of grasping Grandma’s foot triggered a powerful drive in Yu Zhan’ao to forge a new life for himself, and constituted the turning point in his life — and the turning point in hers as well.

The sedan chair set out again as a trumpet blast rent the air, then drifted off into obscurity. The wind had risen — a northeaster — and clouds were gathering in the sky, blotting out the sun and throwing the carriage into darkness. Grandma could hear the shh-shh of rustling sorghum, one wave close upon another, carrying the sound off into the distance. Thunder rumbled off to the northeast. The bearers quickened their pace. She wondered how much farther it was to the Shan household; like a trussed lamb being led to slaughter, she grew calmer with each step. At home she had hidden a pair of scissors in her bodice, perhaps to use on Shan Bianlang, perhaps to use on herself.

The holdup of Grandma’s sedan chair by a highwayman at Toad Hollow occupies an important place in the saga of my family. Toad Hollow is a large marshy stretch in the vast flatland where the soil is especially fertile, the water especially plentiful, and the sorghum especially dense. A blood-red bolt of lightning streaked across the northeastern sky, and screaming fragments of apricot-yellow sunlight tore through the dense clouds above the dirt road, when Grandma’s sedan chair reached that point. The panting bearers were drenched with sweat as they entered Toad Hollow, over which the air hung heavily. Sorghum plants lining the road shone like ebony, dense and impenetrable; weeds and wildflowers grew in such profusion they seemed to block the road. Everywhere you looked, narrow stems of cornflowers were bosomed by clumps of rank weeds, their purple, blue, pink, and white flowers waving proudly. From deep in the sorghum came the melancholy croaks of toads, the dreary chirps of grasshoppers, and the plaintive howls of foxes. Grandma, still seated in the carriage, felt a sudden breath of cold air that raised tiny goosebumps on her skin. She didn’t know what was happening, even when she heard the shout up ahead:

‘Nobody passes without paying a toll!’

Grandma gasped. What was she feeling? Sadness? Joy? My God, she thought, it’s a man who eats fistcakes!

Northeast Gaomi Township was aswarm with bandits who operated in the sorghum fields like fish in water, forming gangs to rob, pillage, and kidnap, yet balancing their evil deeds with charitable ones. If they were hungry, they snatched two people, keeping one and sending the other into the village to demand flatbreads with eggs and green onions rolled inside. Since they stuffed the rolled flatbreads into their mouths with both fists, they were called ‘fistcakes’.

‘Nobody passes without paying a toll!’ the man bellowed. The bearers stopped in their tracks and stared dumbstruck at the highwayman of medium height who stood in the road, his legs akimbo. He had smeared his face black and was wearing a conical rain hat woven of sorghum stalks and a broad-shouldered rain cape open in front to reveal a black buttoned jacket and a wide leather belt, in which a protruding object was tucked, bundled in red satin. His hand rested on it.

The thought flashed through Grandma’s mind that there was nothing to be afraid of: if death couldn’t frighten her, nothing could. She raised the curtain to get a glimpse of the man who ate fistcakes.

‘Hand over the toll, or I’ll pop you all!’ He patted the red bundle.

The musicians reached into their belts, took out the strings of copper coins Great-Granddad had given them, and tossed these at the man’s feet. The bearers lowered the sedan chair to the ground, took out their copper coins, and did the same.

As he dragged the strings of coins into a pile with his foot, his eyes were fixed on Grandma.

‘Get behind the sedan chair, all of you. I’ll pop if you don’t!’ He thumped the object tucked into his belt.

The bearers moved slowly behind the sedan chair. Yu Zhan’ao, bringing up the rear, spun around and glared. A change came over the highwayman’s face, and he gripped the object at his belt tightly. ‘Eyes straight ahead if you want to keep breathing!’

With his hand resting on his belt, he shuffled up to the sedan chair, reached out, and pinched Grandma’s foot. A smile creased her face, and the man pulled his hand away as though it had been scalded.

‘Climb down and come with me!’ he ordered her.

Grandma sat without moving, the smile frozen on her face.

‘Climb down, I said!’

She rose from the seat, stepped grandly onto the pole, and alit in a tuft of cornflowers. Her gaze travelled from the man to the bearers and musicians.

‘Into the sorghum field!’ the highwayman said, his hand still resting on the red-bundled object at his belt.

Grandma stood confidently; lightning crackled in the clouds overhead and shattered her radiant smile into a million shifting shards. The highwayman began pushing her into the sorghum field, his hand never leaving the object at his belt. She stared at Yu Zhan’ao with a feverish look in her eyes.

Yu Zhan’ao approached the highwayman, his thin lips curled resolutely, up at one end and down at the other.

‘Hold it right there!’ the highwayman commanded feebly. ‘I’ll shoot if you take another step!’

Yu Zhan’ao walked calmly up to the man, who began backing up. Green flames seemed to shoot from his eyes, and crystalline beads of sweat scurried down his terrified face. When Yu Zhan’ao had drawn to within three paces of him, a shameful sound burst from his mouth, and he turned and ran. Yu Zhan’ao was on his tail in a flash, kicking him expertly in the rear. He sailed through the air over the cornflowers, thrashing his arms and legs like an innocent babe, until he landed in the sorghum field.

‘Spare me, gentlemen! I’ve got an eighty-year-old mother at home, and this is the only way I can make a living.’ The highwayman skilfully pleaded his case to Yu Zhan’ao, who grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, dragged him back to the sedan chair, threw him roughly to the ground, and kicked him in his noisy mouth. The man shrieked in pain; blood trickled from his nose.

Yu Zhan’ao reached down, took the thing from the man’s belt, and shook off the red cloth covering, to reveal the gnarled knot of a tree. The men all gasped in amazement.

The bandit crawled to his knees, knocking his head on the ground and pleading for his life. ‘Every highwayman says he’s got an eighty-year-old mother at home,’ Yu Zhan’ao said as he stepped aside and glanced at his comrades, like the leader of a pack sizing up the other dogs.

With a flurry of shouts, the bearers and musicians fell upon the highwayman, fists and feet flying. The initial onslaught was met by screams and shrill cries, which soon died out. Grandma stood beside the road listening to the dull cacophony of fists and feet on flesh; she glanced at Yu Zhan’ao, then looked up at the lightning-streaked sky, the radiant, golden, noble smile still frozen on her face.

One of the musicians raised his trumpet and brought it down hard on the highwayman’s skull, burying the curved edge so deeply he had to strain to free it. The highwayman’s stomach gurgled and his body, racked by spasms, grew deathly still; he lay spread-eagled on the ground, a mixture of white and yellow liquid seeping slowly out of the fissure in his skull.

‘Is he dead?’ asked the musician, who was examining the bent mouth of his trumpet.

‘He’s gone, the poor bastard. He didn’t put up much of a fight!’

The gloomy faces of the bearers and musicians revealed their anxieties.

Yu Zhan’ao looked wordlessly first at the dead, then at the living. With a handful of leaves from a sorghum stalk, he cleaned up Grandma’s mess in the carriage, then held up the tree knot, wrapped it in the piece of red cloth, and tossed the bundle as far as he could; the gnarled knot broke free in flight and separated from the piece of cloth, which fluttered to the ground in the field like a big red butterfly.

Yu Zhan’ao lifted Grandma into the sedan chair. ‘It’s starting to rain,’ he said, ‘so let’s get going.’

Grandma ripped the curtain from the front of the carriage and stuffed it behind the seat. As she breathed the free air she studied Yu Zhan’ao’s broad shoulders and narrow waist. He was so near she could have touched the pale, taut skin of his shaved head with her toe.

The winds were picking up, bending the sorghum stalks in ever deeper waves, those on the roadside stretching out to bow their respects to Grandma. The bearers streaked down the road, yet the sedan chair was as steady as a skiff skimming across whitecaps. Frogs and toads croaked in loud welcome to the oncoming summer rainstorm. The low curtain of heaven stared darkly at the silvery faces of sorghum, over which streaks of blood-red lightning crackled, releasing ear-splitting explosions of thunder. With growing excitement, Grandma stared fearlessly at the green waves raised by the black winds.

The first truculent raindrops made the plants shudder. The rain beat a loud tattoo on the sedan chair and fell on Grandma’s embroidered slippers; it fell on Yu Zhan’ao’s head, then slanted in on Grandma’s face.

The bearers ran like scared jackrabbits, but couldn’t escape the prenoon deluge. Sorghum crumpled under the wild rain. Toads took refuge under the stalks, their white pouches popping in and out noisily; foxes hid in their darkened dens to watch tiny drops of water splashing down from the sorghum plants. The rainwater washed Yu Zhan’ao’s head so clean and shiny it looked to Grandma like a new moon. Her clothes, too, were soaked. She could have covered herself with the curtain, but she didn’t; she didn’t want to, for the open front of the sedan chair afforded her a glimpse of the outside world in all its turbulence and beauty.

6

FATHER PARTED THE sorghum and threaded his way northwest, towards our village, as fast as his legs would carry him. Badgers with humanlike feet scattered clumsily across the ditches, but he ignored them. Once he was on the road, and didn’t have to worry about getting tangled up in the sorghum plants, he ran like the wind, his red cotton waistband sagging like a crescent moon under the weight of his Browning. Although the pistol banged painfully against his hip, the growing numbness made him feel like a real man — powerful, even invincible. He could see the village in the distance. The gloomy, faded gingko tree at the entrance, which had stood for nearly a century, waited in sombre greeting. As he ran, he took the pistol from his waistband and aimed at birds gliding gracefully in the sky above him.

The street was deserted, except for somebody’s lame, blind donkey, which was tethered to a crumbling wall; it stood motionless, its head drooping low. A solitary crow with wet dark-blue feathers was perched on a stone-roller. The villagers had gathered in the distillery compound, which had been paved with red gravel in the days when sorghum was purchased and stacked there, back when Grandma ambled unsteadily on her tiny feet, a white horsetail whisk in her hand and the glow of dawn in her cheeks, as she watched the drunken hands buy sorghum. Now the people faced southeast, awaiting the sound of gunfire. Children my father’s age were uncharacteristically well behaved, no matter how they itched to act up.

Father and Sun Five, who had skinned and butchered Uncle Arhat the year before, ran into the square from different directions. Sun Five hadn’t been the same since the skinning. Arms and legs thrashing, eyes staring straight ahead, cheeks twitching, a stream of gibberish pouring from his foaming mouth, he had fallen to his knees and shouted, ‘Elder brother elder brother elder brother, Commander made me do it, couldn’t help myself…. You exist in heaven, where you ride a white horse on a carved saddle, wear fine clothes, carry a golden whip….’ When the villagers saw him like this, their loathing abated. A few months after he went mad, his behaviour turned truly bizarre. He would begin shouting, and the corners of his eyes and mouth would turn up as snot and slobber dripped unchecked. No one could make any sense of the gibberish, and the villagers called it heavenly retribution.

Father ran up breathlessly, Browning in hand, his head covered with white sorghum powder and red dust. The ragged Sun Five, his belly a mass of wrinkles, stumbled into the square, his left leg rigid, his right leg rubbery. Everyone ignored him, for they were all too busy watching the impressive figure of my father.

Grandma walked up to him. Although still in her early thirties at the time, she wore her hair in a bun, neat bangs covering her shiny forehead like a beaded curtain. Her eyes were as moist as autumn rains; people blamed that on the wine fumes. More than fifteen years of romantic, soul-stirring adventures had turned her from a virginal teenager into a bold young woman.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

Still trying to catch his breath, Father stuck his Browning into his waistband.

‘Didn’t the Japs come?’

‘We won’t show that son of a bitch Detachment Leader Leng any mercy!’ Father exclaimed.

‘What happened?’

‘Make some fistcakes.’

‘We didn’t hear any fighting.’

‘Make some fistcakes,’ Father repeated. ‘And put in plenty of eggs and onions.’

‘Didn’t the Japs come?’ Grandma persisted.

‘Commander Yu said to make some fistcakes, and he wants you to deliver them!’

‘Fellow villagers,’ she said, ‘go home and make fistcakes.’

Father turned to go, but Grandma stopped him. ‘Tell me what happened with the Leng detachment, Douguan.’

He wrenched free of her grip and snarled, ‘They never showed up. Commander Yu isn’t going to let them get away with it!’ He ran off, leaving Grandma sighing as she watched the slight silhouette of his back. Sun Five was standing at a tilt in the spacious compound, staring stiffly at Grandma and gesticulating wildly, a stream of slobber running down his chin.

Ignoring Sun Five, Grandma walked up to a long-faced girl leaning against the wall, who smiled weakly, then fell to her knees, wrapped her arms tightly around Grandma’s waist, and began to cry hysterically. ‘Lingzi,’ Grandma consoled her, touching her face, ‘be a good girl. Don’t be afraid.’

The prettiest girl in the village, Lingzi was seventeen at the time. When Commander Yu was recruiting troops, he assembled fifty or so men, one of whom was a gaunt young man with a pale face and long black hair, dressed in black except for a pair of white shoes. Lingzi was rumoured to be in love with him. He spoke with a beautiful Beijing dialect, and never smiled; his brow was forever creased in a frown, with three vertical furrows above his nose. Everyone called him Adjutant Ren. Lingzi felt that beneath Adjutant Ren’s cold, hard exterior raged a fire, and it put her on edge.

Yu Zhan’ao’s troops drilled each morning on the square where we bought our sorghum. As soon as Liu Sishan, Commander Yu’s bugler, sounded reveille, Lingzi dashed out of the house and ran to the parade ground to lie on the wall and await the arrival of Adjutant Ren, his wide leather belt and Browning pistol.

Adjutant Ren strode up to the troops, his chest thrown out proudly, and called them to attention. Two columns of soldiers clicked their heels snappily.

Adjutant Ren commanded, ‘Atten-hut! Legs straight, stomachs in, chests out, eyes forward, like panthers about to pounce.

‘What the hell kind of way is that to stand?’ He kicked Wang Wenyi. ‘Your legs are spread like a mule taking a piss. I’d beat some discipline into you if I could.’

Lingzi liked seeing Adjutant Ren beat up on people and liked the way he chewed them out. His autocratic demeanour thoroughly intoxicated her. His favourite leisure activity was strolling around the parade ground with his hands clasped behind his back. Lingzi would hide behind the wall and drink in the sight.

‘What’s your name?’ Adjutant Ren asked.

‘Lingzi.’

‘Who were you watching from back there?’

‘You.’

‘Do you know how to read?’

‘No.’

‘Want to join the army?’

‘No.’

‘I see.’

Regretting her response, Lingzi told my father that the next time Adjutant Ren asked her if she wanted to join the army she’d say yes. But he never asked her again.

Lingzi and my father were sprawled atop the wall watching Adjutant Ren teach the men revolutionary songs. Father was so short at the time that he had to stand on a pile of rocks to see what was happening on the other side of the wall, while Lingzi rested her pretty chin on the wall and stared at Adjutant Ren, drenched in morning sunlight, as he taught them a song: ‘The sorghum is red, the sorghum is red, the Japs are coming, the Japs are coming. The nation is lost, our families scattered. Rise up, countrymen, take up arms to drive out the Japs and protect your homes….’

The men, with tin ears and stiff tongues, never did learn how to sing it right, but the kids on the other side of the wall soon had it down pat. My father never forgot this song as long as he lived.

Lingzi screwed up her courage one day and went to find Adjutant Ren, but accidentally stumbled into the room of the quartermaster, Big Tooth Yu, a hard-drinking, insatiably lecherous forty-year-old uncle of Commander Yu. He was pretty drunk that day, and when Lingzi burst into his room, it was like a moth drawn to a fire, or a lamb entering a tiger’s den.

Adjutant Ren ordered two soldiers to tie up the man who had deflowered the girl Lingzi. At the time, Commander Yu was staying at our house, and when Adjutant Ren came to make his report, he was asleep on Grandma’s kang. She had already washed up and brushed her hair, and was about to fry some willowfish to go with the wine when the fuming Adjutant Ren burst into the room, frightening the wits out of her.

‘Where’s the commander?’ Adjutant Ren asked her.

‘He’s on the kang, asleep.’

‘Wake him up.’

Grandma woke Commander Yu, who walked out of the bedroom, stretched, yawned, and asked. ‘What is it?’

‘Commander, if a Japanese raped my sister, should he be shot?’

‘Of course!’ Commander Yu replied.

‘If a Chinese raped my sister, should he be shot?’

‘Of course!’

‘That’s just what I wanted to hear,’ Adjutant Ren said. ‘Big Tooth Yu deflowered the local girl Cao Lingzi, and I’ve ordered the men to tie him up.’

‘Are you sure he did it?’

‘When will he be shot, Commander?’

Commander Yu sucked in his breath. ‘Since when is sleeping with a woman a serious offence?’

‘Commander, no one’s above the law, not even a prince.’

‘And what do you think the punishment should be?’ Commander Yu asked sombrely.

‘A firing squad!’ Adjutant Ren replied without hesitation.

Commander Yu sucked in his breath again and began to pace impatiently, anger building up inside him. Finally, he smiled and said, ‘Adjutant Ren, what do you say we give him fifty lashes in front of the men and compensate Lingzi’s family with twenty silver dollars?’

‘Because he’s your uncle?’ Adjutant Ren asked caustically.

‘Eighty lashes, then, and force him to marry Lingzi. I’ll even call her Auntie!’

Adjutant Ren undid his belt and tossed it, along with the Browning pistol, to Commander Yu. Holding his hands in a salute in front of him, he said, ‘This will make it easier for both of us.’ He turned and walked out into the yard.

Commander Yu, pistol in hand, stared at Adjutant Ren’s retreating back and growled through clenched teeth, ‘Go on, get the fuck out of here! No damned schoolboy is going to tell me what to do! In the ten years I ate fistcakes, nobody was that insolent to me.’

‘Zhan’ao,’ Grandma said, ‘you can’t let Adjutant Ren go. Soldiers are easy to recruit, but generals are worth their weight in gold.’

‘Women don’t understand these things!’ Commander Yu said in frustration.

‘I always thought you were tough, not spineless!’

Commander Yu aimed the pistol at her. ‘Have you lived long enough?’ he snarled.

She tore open her shirt, exposing two tender mounds of flesh, and challenged him. ‘Go ahead, shoot!’

With a shout of ‘Mom!’ Father rushed in and buried his head between her breasts.

As he looked at Father’s neat, round head and Grandma’s beautiful face, a torrent of memories flooded Granddad’s mind. With a sigh, he lowered the pistol. ‘Button up,’ he said as he walked outside. Riding crop in hand, he untied his sleek brown colt and rode bareback to the parade ground.

When the troops relaxing on the wall saw Commander Yu ride up, they jumped to attention and held their breath.

Big Tooth Yu, his arms bound behind him, was tied to a tree.

Commander Yu dismounted and walked up to him. ‘Did you really do it?’

‘Zhan’ao,’ he said, ‘untie me. I’ll leave.’

The soldiers stared wide-eyed at Commander Yu.

‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have you shot.’

‘You bastard!’ Big Tooth Yu bellowed. ‘You’d shoot your own uncle? Have you forgotten what I did for you? After your father died, I took care of you and your mother. If not for me, you’d have been dogfood long ago!’

Commander Yu smacked him across the face with his riding crop. ‘You no-good bastard!’ he railed before falling to his knees and saying, ‘Uncle, I, Yu Zhan’ao, will never forget your kindness in bringing me up. I will wear mourning clothes after your death and will memorialise you and tend your grave on all the holidays.’

With that he jumped to his feet, mounted his horse, whipped it on the flank, and galloped off in the direction Adjutant Ren had taken. The horses’s hooves shook the earth.

Father was there when they shot Big Tooth Yu. Mute and two other soldiers dragged him to the western edge of the village, choosing as the execution ground a spot beside a crescent-shaped inlet in a stream of black, stagnant, insect-laden water. A solitary willow tree, its leaves yellowed and dying, stood on the bank. The stillness of the bend was broken only by hopping toads; alongside a pile of damp hair clippings lay a single tattered woman’s slipper.

They dragged Big Tooth Yu up to the edge of the inlet and stood him there, then looked at Mute, who unslung his rifle and cocked it; a bullet snapped into the chamber.

Big Tooth Yu turned to face Mute and smiled. To Father’s eyes, it was a kindly, heartfelt smile, like the miserable dying rays of a setting sun.

‘Untie me, Mute. I shouldn’t die all trussed up!’

Mute thought for a moment before walking up, rifle in hand, taking his knife from his waistband, and deftly cutting the ropes. Big Tooth Yu massaged his arms, then made a quarter-turn and shouted, ‘Shoot, Mute. Aim for my temple. Don’t make me suffer!’

To Father’s mind, a man at the point of death suddenly commands the respect of all other men. Big Tooth Yu was, after all, the seed of Northeast Gaomi Township. He had committed a grave offence that even death would not expiate, yet, as he prepared to die, he displayed the airs of a true hero; Father was so moved at that moment that he felt like leaping in the air.

Big Tooth Yu gazed down at the stagnant water, where green lotus leaves and a sole white blossom floated; his gaze then took in the shimmering stalks of sorghum on the opposite bank. In a loud voice he broke into song: ‘The sorghum is red, the sorghum is red, the Japs are coming, the Japs are coming. The nation is lost, our families scattered….’

Mute raised his rifle, then lowered it, raised it and lowered it.

‘Mute,’ the soldiers pleaded, ‘talk to Commander Yu. Let him go!’

Gripping his rifle tightly, Mute listened to Big Tooth Yu butcher the song.

Big Tooth Yu turned back, his eyes wide with anger, and screamed, ‘Go ahead and shoot! You’re not going to make me do it myself, are you?’

Raising his rifle one last time, Mute took aim at Big Tooth Yu’s tilelike forehead and pulled the trigger.

Father saw Big Tooth Yu’s forehead explode into fragments even before the dull crack of rifle fire reached his ears. Mute stood with bowed head, the echo of the shot still hanging in the air, wisps of white smoke rising from the muzzle of his rifle. Big Tooth Yu’s body froze for a second before plummeting into the water below like a felled tree.

Mute walked off, dragging his rifle behind him, followed by the two soldiers.

Father and a bunch of other kids crept timidly over to the inlet, where they could look down at Big Tooth Yu, whose body lay face up in the mud. All that was left of his face was the perfectly formed mouth. The fluids of his brain had oozed into his ears from the shattered scalp, and one of his eyeballs hung from the socket like a huge grape on his cheek. The white lotus blossom, its stem broken and trailing several white threads, lay next to his hand. Father could smell its perfume.

Now that it was over, Adjutant Ren brought up a cypress coffin with a thick layer of varnish and a yellow satin lining, into which he placed the neatly dressed body; following a proper funeral ceremony, Big Tooth Yu was buried beneath the little willow tree. Adjutant Ren wore his dapper black uniform to the funeral and had his hair slicked down neatly. A strip of red silk was wrapped around his left arm. Commander Yu, in hempen mourning clothes, wailed loudly, and as the procession left the village, he smashed a brand-new ceramic bowl against a brick.

Grandma made a set of white mourning clothes for Father — she wore sackcloth. Father, fresh willow switch in hand as he walked behind Commander Yu and Grandma, witnessed the smashing of the ceramic bowl against the brick, and was reminded of Big Tooth Yu’s splintered forehead. He had a vague inkling that the two events were somehow linked. The collision of one event with another always produces a third inevitability.

Father looked on dispassionately, without shedding a tear, as the procession formed a ring around the willow tree, and sixteen robust young men slowly lowered the coffin into the yawning grave with eight thick ropes. Commander Yu scooped up a handful of dirt and flung it down on the glossy coffin lid. The thud resounded in everyone’s heart. The men began shovelling dirt into the grave, drawing angry rumbles from the coffin as it slowly disappeared into the black soil, which rose higher and higher, until it filled the grave, then formed a mound like a steamed bun. Commander Yu fired three shots into the air above the willow tree, the bullets tearing through the crown of the tree, one after another, to shear off yellow leaves like fine eyebrows, which fluttered in the air. Three shiny casings leaped into the putrid water of the inlet, and were immediately retrieved by a boy who jumped down, his feet squishing in the soft green mud. Adjutant Ren took out his Browning and pulled off three shots, which shrieked like roosters as they sped above the sorghum. Commander Yu and Adjutant Ren faced each other, smoking guns in their hands. Adjutant Ren nodded. ‘He did himself proud!’ He stuck his pistol into his belt and strode into the village.

Father watched Commander Yu slowly raise his weapon and aim it at Adjutant Ren’s retreating back. The funeral party was stunned, but no one made a sound. Adjutant Ren, unaware of what was happening, strode confidently into the village, the bright yellow gear-wheel in the sky shining in his face. Father saw the pistol jerk once, but the explosion was so weak and so distant he wasn’t sure he heard it. He watched the bullet’s low trajectory as it parted Adjutant Ren’s shiny black hair before moving on. Without so much as turning his head or breaking stride, Adjutant Ren continued on into the village.

The sound of whistling drifted towards Father’s ears. It was the familiar sound of ‘The sorghum is red, the sorghum is red!’ Hot tears filled his eyes. The receding figure of Adjutant Ren grew larger and larger. Commander Yu fired another shot; this time it was so loud it rocked the earth and startled the heavens. Father saw the bullet’s flight and heard the explosion at the same time. The bullet struck a sorghum plant, severing its head, which was shattered by a second bullet as it settled slowly to the ground. Father was vaguely aware that Adjutant Ren bent over and plucked the yellow blossom from a bitter-weed at the roadside, then held it up to his nose and savoured its fragrance for a long time.

Father told me that Adjutant Ren was a rarity, a true hero; unfortunately, heroes are fated to die young. Three months after he had walked so proudly away from the heroic gathering, his Browning pistol went off while he was cleaning it and killed him. The bullet entered his right eye and exited through his right ear, leaving half of his face covered with a metallic blue powder. A mere three or four drops of blood seeped out of his right ear, and by the time the people who heard the shot had rushed over, he was lying dead on the ground.

Wordlessly, Commander Yu picked up Adjutant Ren’s Browning pistol.

7

GRANDMA, CARRYING BASKETS of fistcakes on the pole over her shoulder, and Wang Wenyi’s wife, carrying two pails of mungbean soup, rushed towards the bridge across the Black Water River. Though they had planned at first to head southeast through the sorghum field, they found the going too hard. ‘Let’s take the road, Sister-in-Law,’ Grandma suggested. ‘The long way round is fastest.’

They were like high-flying birds making good headway through the open sky. Grandma had put on a scarlet jacket and oiled her hair until it glistened like ebony. Wang’s wife, a vigorous but diminutive woman, was nimble on her feet. Back when Commander Yu was recruiting troops, she had brought Wenyi over to the house and asked Grandma to speak to Commander Yu to sign him up as a guerrilla. Grandma had promised she would, and Commander Yu had taken him on for her sake.

‘Are you afraid of dying?’ Commander Yu had asked him.

‘Yes.’

‘When he says yes he means no, Commander,’ Wang’s wife had explained. ‘Japanese planes bombed our three sons into pulp.’

Wang Wenyi was not cut out to be a soldier. His reactions were slow, and he couldn’t tell his right from his left. During marching drills on the parade ground, he was hit by Adjutant Ren more times than you could count. His wife had an idea: he would carry a sorghum stem in his right hand, so when he heard a right-turn command he’d turn in that direction. Since he had no weapon, Grandma gave him our fowling piece.

When the women reached the bank of the twisting Black Water River they headed south, without stopping to enjoy the chrysanthemums on the bank or the dense thickets of blood-red sorghum beyond it. Wang Wenyi’s wife had lived a life of suffering, Grandma one of privilege. Grandma was drenched with sweat, Wang Wenyi’s wife was as dry as a bone.

Father had since returned to the bridgehead, where he reported to Commander Yu that the fistcakes would be there soon. Commander Yu patted him on the head for a job well done. Most of the soldiers lay around the sorghum field, soaking up the sun. Growing fidgety with impatience, Father strolled over to the field west of the road to see what Mute and his troops were up to. Mute was still honing his knife, so Father stopped in front of him, his hand resting on the Browning at his belt, a victor’s smile on his face. Mute looked up and grinned broadly.

Father presumed that the four linked rakes blocking the road, their teeth pointing skyward, must have reached the limits of their patience. The stone bridge spanning the river looked like an invalid just beginning his recovery. Father walked up to the dike and sat down, looking first east, then west, then to the river flowing beneath him, and finally to some wild ducks. The river was beautiful, owing to its profusion of living plants and tiny whitecaps, each filled with mystery. He spotted piles of white bones resting in thickets of reeds, and remembered our two big black mules.

In the spring, throngs of rabbits run wild in the fields. Grandma rides her mule, rifle in hand, as she hunts rabbits, with Father sitting behind her, his arms wrapped around her waist. Frightened by the mule, the rabbits fall easy prey to Grandma’s shots. She invariably returns home with a string of rabbits around the mule’s neck. A steel pellet once lodged between two of her back teeth when she was eating wild rabbit, and no amount of prying could dislodge it.

Father watched a column of dark red ants transport mud pebbles across the dike. When he laid a clod of earth in their way, they strained to climb over it instead of skirting it. He picked it up and heaved it into the river, where it broke the surface without a sound. Now that the sun was overhead, a fishy smell drifted over on the hot air. Bright glimmers of light flashed everywhere and made the area sizzle. It seemed to Father that the space between heaven and earth was filled with the red dust of sorghum and the fragrance of sorghum wine. He stretched out on the dike, face up, and in that moment his heart leaped into his throat; later on he realised that patience is always rewarded, and that the consequences of his waiting were perfectly common, ordinary, casual, and natural. For he had spotted four strange dark-green, beetlelike objects crawling noiselessly towards him on the highway that cut through the sorghum fields.

‘Trucks,’ he muttered ambiguously. He was ignored.

‘Jap trucks!’ He scrambled to his feet, panic-stricken, and stared at the trucks streaking towards him like meteors, trailing long dark tails and preceded by crackling, swaying incandescent rays of light.

‘Here come the trucks!’ His words were a sword that decapitated the men with a single stroke. A dull silence settled over the sorghum field.

‘Men,’ Commander Yu roared joyfully, ‘they’re here after all. Get ready. And don’t fire until I give the order.’

On the west side of the road Mute jumped to his feet and slapped himself on the hip. Dozens of guerrillas crouched on the slope, weapons ready. They could hear the roar of the engines. Father lay at Commander Yu’s side, gripping the heavy Browning so tightly that his wrist was soon hot and tingly, his palm sticky with sweat. The fleshy place between his thumb and forefinger twitched once, and was soon racked with spasms. In amazement, he watched the almond-sized spot jump rhythmically, like a chick trying to break out of its egg. He wanted to stop it, but was squeezing so tightly his arm began to tremble. Commander Yu laid his hand on Father’s back, and the twitch stopped. He switched the Browning to his left hand, but the muscles of his right hand were so cramped it seemed forever before he could straighten his fingers.

The fast-approaching trucks were getting larger and larger, the eyes in front, as large as horse hooves, sweeping the area with their white rays. Their revving engines sounded like the wind before a downpour. Having never actually seen a truck before, Father assumed that these strange creatures survived on grass or some sort of fodder, and that they drank water or blood. They moved faster than our two strong, spindly-legged mules; the moon-shaped tiers spun so fast they sent clouds of yellow dust soaring into the air. As they neared the stone bridge, the lead truck slowed down, allowing the clouds of dust to catch up and settle over the hood, obsuring the twenty or more khaki-clad men in the bed, shiny steel pots on their heads. Father subsequently learned that these pots were called ‘helmets’. (In 1958, during the backyard-furnace campaign of the Great Leap Forward, when our wok was confiscated, my elder brother swiped a helmet from a pile of metal and brought it home to use as a cookpot. Father watched in fascination as the helmet changed colour in the smoke and fire.)

The two trucks in the middle were stacked with small mountains of white sacks; the one bringing up the rear, like the one in front, was loaded with twenty or more Japanese soldiers.

They had nearly reached the dike, and their tyres, spinning more slowly now, appeared swollen and awkward. The square nose of the lead truck reminded Father of the head of an enormous locust. As the yellow dust began to settle, loud farts created a dark-blue mist at the rear.

Father scrunched his head down as a chill the likes of which he’d never known worked its way up from his feet to his belly. He shifted his buttocks back and forth to keep from wetting his pants. ‘Don’t move, you little shit!’ Commander Yu complained sternly.

Feeling as though his bladder were about to burst, Father got permission to crawl down and pee.

Once he had retreated into the sorghum field he released a mighty stream the colour of red sorghum, which stung the head of his pecker as it gushed forth. Enormously relieved when he had finished, he glanced casually at the guerrillas’ faces, whose expressions made them appear as malevolent and scary as temple icons. Wang Wenyi’s tongue poked out between his lips; his staring eyeballs seemed frozen, like a lizard’s.

The trucks, huge beasts on the prowl, held their breath as they crept forward. Something aromatic struck Father’s nostrils. Just then Grandma, in her sweat-stained red silk jacket, and the panting wife of Wang Wenyi appeared on the dike of the meandering Black Water River.

Grandma with her baskets of fistcakes and Wang Wenyi’s wife with her pails of mung-bean soup gazed at the miserable stone bridge across the Black Water River, feeling very much at ease. Grandma turned to Wang’s wife and said with relief, ‘We made it, Sister-in-Law.’ Ever since her marriage, Grandma had lived a life of ease and comfort and the carrying pole, with its heavy load of fistcakes, dug deeply into her delicate shoulder, leaving a dark-purple bruise that would accompany her as she departed this world and travelled to the kingdom of heaven. The bruise would be the glorious symbol of a heroic figure from the war of resistance.

Father was the first to see her. While the others were following the slow progress of the trucks with unblinking eyes, some secret force told him to look to the west, where he spotted her floating towards them like a gorgeous red butterfly. ‘Mom —’

His shout was like a command: a hail of bullets tore through the air from three machine guns mounted on the Japanese trucks. The sound was dull and muted, like the gloomy barking of dogs on a rainy night. Father watched as two shells opened holes in the breast of Grandma’s jacket. She cried out in ecstasy, then crumpled to the ground, her carrying pole falling across her back. One of the baskets of fistcakes rolled down the southern slope of the dike, the other down the northern slope. Snow-white cakes, green onions, and diced eggs were scattered in the grass on both sides of the dike.

After Grandma fell, a mixture of red and yellow fluid from the boxy skull of Wang Wenyi’s wife sprayed the area all the way to the sorghum stalks beside the dike. Father watched the diminutive woman stagger backward as the bullet hit her, then topple down the southern slope of the dike and roll into the water. The contents of one pail of mung-bean soup spilled onto the ground, followed by the second, like the blood of heroes. The first pail clanked down the dike into the Black Water River, then bobbed to the surface. It floated down past Mute, banged one or two times into a stanchion, then was picked up by the current and carried past Commander Yu, past my father, past Wang Wenyi, past Fang Six and Fang Seven.

‘Mom —’ Father screamed as though his guts were being ripped out as he leaped to the top of the dike. Commander Yu tried to grab him, but was too late. ‘Come back here!’ he bellowed. Father didn’t hear the command, he didn’t hear anything. His skinny little frame flew along the narrow ridge of the dike, shimmering in the sun’s rays. He threw down his Browning pistol, which landed amid the torn leaves of a golden bitterweed. He ran like the wind, his arms thrust out in front like wings, as he ran towards Grandma. The dike was still, but dust swirled noisily; the glimmering water stopped flowing. The sorghum beyond the dike remained dignified and solemn. Father was still running along the dike: Father was a giant, Father was magnificent, Father was gorgeous. He screamed at the top of his lungs: ‘Mom — Mom — Mom —’ A single word drenched with human blood and tears, with deep familial love, with the loftiest of causes. When he reached the end of the eastern dike, he jumped over the rake barrier and scrambled up the western bank. Beneath the dike, the stony face of Mute sped by.

Father threw himself down on Grandma and called out ‘Mom!’ one more time. She lay face down on the ground, pressed against the wild grass. The aroma of sorghum wine seeped from two exit wounds in her back. Father gripped her shoulders and rolled her over. There were no wounds on her face, which looked the same as always. Not a hair was out of place; her fringe neatly covered her forehead; her brows drooped slightly. Her eyes were half open; the lips on her pale face showed up bright-red. Father grasped her warm hand and called ‘Mom!’ yet another time. She opened her eyes wide as a smile of supreme innocence spread across her face. She reached out to him.

The idling engines of the Jap trucks, which had stopped at the bridgehead, revved intermittently.

A tall figure appeared briefly on the dike to drag Father and Grandma down off the top. It was Mute, to his everlasting credit. Before Father had a chance to get his bearings, another gale of bullets truncated and smashed countless stalks of sorghum.

The four trucks closed up ranks just beyond the bridge, then stopped. Eight machine guns mounted on the first and last trucks were spraying so many bullets they formed hard ribbons of crisscrossing light that spread like broken fans, sometimes to the east of the road, sometimes to the west. Sorghum stalks wailed in concert, their shattered, severed limbs drooping low or arching high into the air. Bullets raised puffs of yellow dust on the dike and produced a tattoo of muffled thuds.

The soldiers on the outer slopes flattened themselves against the wild grass and black dirt, keeping perfectly still. The machine guns strafed the area for about three minutes, then stopped as abruptly as they had begun. The ground around the trucks was littered with the golden flashes of spent casings.

‘Hold your fire,’ Commander Yu ordered softly.

The Japs were silent. Thin wisps of gunsmoke floated above the river, carried eastward by gentle air currents.

Father told me that in that moment of absolute quiet Wang Wenyi stumbled up onto the dike, where he stood stock-still, fowling piece in hand, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, the picture of great suffering. ‘Mother of my children!’ he shrieked. Before he could take another step, dozens of machine-gun shells ripped a nearly transparent crescent moon in his belly. Gut-stained bullets tore wetly through the air above Commander Yu’s head.

Wang Wenyi toppled off the dike and rolled into the water directly opposite the body of his wife. His heart was still beating, and there wasn’t a mark on his head or face; a sense of perfect understanding flooded his mind.

Father once told me that Wang Wenyi’s wife had fed her three sons so well they grew up chubby, lively, and flourishing. One day they went out to tend the sorghum, leaving their sons behind to play in the yard. A Japanese biplane streaked through the air above their house, making a strange growling sound as it laid a single egg, a direct hit on Wang Wenyi’s yard, blowing all three children to bits that flew up to the eaves, were draped on the branches of trees, stained the wall.

. . On the day Commander Yu raised the flag of resistance against the Japanese, Wang Wenyi was brought over by his wife.

Gnashing his teeth with rage, Commander Yu glared down at Wang Wenyi, half of whose head lay submerged in the river. ‘Don’t any of you move!’ he snarled in a low voice.

8

SCATTERED SORGHUM DANCES on Grandma’s face, one grain landing between her slightly parted lips to rest on flawless white teeth. As he gazes at her lips, which are gradually losing their colour, Father sobs ‘Mom,’ and his tears fall on her breast. She opens her eyes amid the pearly drops of sorghum. Rainbows of colour, as though reflected off the pearls, are embedded in her eyes. ‘Son,’ she says, ‘your dad…’

‘My dad, he’s fighting.’

‘He’s your real dad…’ Grandma says. Father nodds.

She struggles to sit up, but the movement of her body pumps streams of blood out of the two holes.

‘Mom, I’ll go and get him,’ Father says.

She waves her hand and sits up abruptly. ‘Douguan… my son… help your mom up…. Let’s go home, go home….’

Father falls to his knees, drapes her arms around his neck, then stands up with difficulty, lifting her off the ground. Fresh blood quickly soaks his neck and assails his nose with the aroma of sorghum wine. His legs tremble under the weight of her body; he staggers into the sorghum field as bullets whizz overhead. He parts the densely packed plants, stumbling forward, his sweat and his tears merging with Grandma’s fresh blood to turn his face into a demented mask. Grandma is getting heavier as the passing sorghum leaves lacerate him mercilessly. He falls, she falls on top of him. He strains to crawl out from under her, and after he lays her out on her back, she looks up, breathes a long sigh, and smiles weakly. Unfathomable mystery is embedded in that smile, an iron that burns a horseshoe brand into his memory.

Grandma lies on the ground, the warmth of her breast slowly dissipating. She is dimly aware that her son is undoing her jacket, that he is covering the wound over her breast with his hand, then the wound beneath her breast. Her blood stains his hand red, then green; her unsullied breast is stained green by her own blood, then red. Bullets have pierced her noble breast, exposing the pink honeycomb beneath it, and Father is in agony as he looks down at it. He cannot staunch the flow of blood, and as he watches it flow he can see her face pale. Her body grows so light it might float up into the air.

Grandma looks contentedly at Father’s exquisite face. She and Commander Yu had joined to create him in the shadows of the sorghum field; lively images of the irretrievable past streak past her eyes like racehorses.

It was raining as she sat in the bridal sedan chair, like a boat on the ocean, and was carried into Shan Tingxiu’s compound. The street was flooded with water, peppered by a layer of sorghum seeds. At the front door she was met by a wizened old man with a tiny queue in the shape of a kidney bean. The rain had stopped, but an occasional drop splashed onto the watery ground. Although the musicians had announced her arrival with their instruments, no one had emerged to watch the show; Grandma knew that was a bad sign. Two men came out to help her perform her obeisances, one in his fifties, the other in his forties. The fifty-year-old was none other than Uncle Arhat Liu, the other was one of the distillery hands.

The musicians and bearers stood in the puddles like drenched chickens, sombrely watching the two dried-up men lead my soft-limbed, rosy-cheeked grandma into the dark wedding-chamber. The men exuded a pungent aroma of wine, as if they had been soaked in the vats.

Grandma was taken up to a kang in the worship hall and told to sit on it. Since no one came up to remove her red veil, she took it off herself. A man with a facial tic sat curled up on a stool next to her. The bottom part of his flat, elongated face was red and festering. He stood up and stuck a clawlike hand out towards Grandma, who screamed in horror and reached into her bodice for the scissors; she glared intently at the man, who recoiled and curled up on the stool again. Grandma didn’t set down her scissors once that night, nor did the man climb down from his stool.

Early the next morning, before the man woke up, Grandma slipped down off the kang, burst through the front door, and opened the gate; just as she was about to flee the premises, a hand reached out and grabbed her. The old man with the kidney-bean queue had her by the wrist and was looking at her with hate-filled eyes.

Shan Tingxiu coughed dryly once or twice as his expression softened. ‘Child,’ he said, ‘now that you’re married, you’re like my own daughter. Bianlang doesn’t have what everybody says. Don’t listen to their talk. We’ve got a good business, and Bianlang’s a good boy. Now that you’re here, the home is your responsibility.’ Shan Tingxiu held out to her a ring of bronze keys, but she didn’t take them from him.

Grandma sat up all the next night, scissors in hand.

On the morning of the third day, my maternal great-granddad led a donkey up to the house to take Grandma home; it was a Northeast Gaomi Township custom for a bride to return to her parents’ home three days after her wedding. Great-Granddad spent the morning drinking with Shan Tingxiu, then set out for home shortly after noon.

Grandma sat sidesaddle on the donkey, swaying from side to side as the animal left the village. Even though it hadn’t rained for three days, the road was still wet, and steam rose from the sorghum in the fields, the green stalks shrouded in swirling whiteness, as though in the presence of immortals. Great-Granddad’s silver coins clinked and jingled in the saddlebags. He was so drunk he could barely walk, and his eyes were glassy. The donkey proceeded slowly, its long neck bobbing up and down, its tiny hooves leaving muddy imprints. Grandma had only ridden a short distance when she began to get lightheaded; her eyes were red and puffy, her hair mussed, and the sorghum in the fields, a full joint taller than it had been three days earlier, mocked her as she passed.

‘Dad,’ Grandma called out, ‘I don’t want to go back there any more. I’ll kill myself before I go back there again….’

‘Daughter,’ Great-Granddad replied, ‘you have no idea how lucky you are. Your father-in-law said he’s going to give me a big black mule. I’m going to sell this runty little thing….’

The donkey nibbled some mud-splattered grass that lined the road.

‘Dad,’ Grandma sobbed, ‘he’s got leprosy….’

‘Your father-in-law is going to give me a mule….’

Great-Granddad, drunk as a lord, kept vomiting into the weeds by the side of the road. The filth and bile set Grandma’s stomach churning, and she felt nothing but loathing for him.

As the donkey walked into Toad Hollow, they were met by an overpowering stench that caused its ears to droop. Grandma spotted the highwayman’s bloated corpse, which was covered by a layer of emerald-coloured flies. The donkey skirted the corpse, sending the flies swarming angrily into the air to form a green cloud. Great-Granddad followed the donkey, his body seemingly wider than the road itself: one moment he was stumbling into the sorghum to the left of the road, the next moment he was trampling on weeds to the right. And when he reached the corpse, he gasped ‘Oh!’ several times, and said through quaking lips, ‘Poor beggar… you poor beggar… you sleeping there?…’ Grandma never forgot the highwayman’s pumpkin face. In that instant when the flies swarmed into the air she was struck by the remarkable contrast between the graceful elegance of his dead face and the mean, cowardly expression he’d worn in life.

The distance between them lengthened, one li at a time, with the sun’s rays slanting down, the sky high and clear; the donkey quickly outpaced Great-Granddad. Since it knew the way home, it carried Grandma at a carefree saunter. Up ahead was a bend in the road, and as the donkey negotiated the turn, Grandma tipped backward, leaving the security of the animal’s back. A muscular arm swept her off and carried her into the sorghum field.

Grandma fought halfheartedly. She really didn’t feel like struggling. The three days she had just got through were nightmarish. Certain individuals become great leaders in an instant; Grandma unlocked the mysteries of life in three days. She even wrapped her arms around his neck to make it easier for him to carry her. Sorghum leaves rustled. Great-Granddad’s hoarse voice drifted over on the wind: ‘Daughter, where the hell are you?’

The long, sorrowful blast of a bugle near the bridge is immediately followed by the staccato rhythm of machine-gun fire. Grandma’s blood continues to flow in concert with her breathing. ‘Mom,’ Father pleads, ‘don’t let your blood run out. You’ll die when it’s all gone.’ He scoops up a handful of black dirt and smears it over her wound; blood quickly seeps out from under it. He scoops up another handful. Grandma smiles in gratitude, her eyes fixed on the azure sky, deep beyond imagining, and fixed on the warm, forgiving, motherly, nurturing sorghum around her. A glossy green path, bordered by tiny white flowers, appears in her mind.

Grandma rode the donkey down this path, leisurely and carefree, while from deep amid the sorghum the stalwart young man raised his voice in a serenade that skimmed the top of the field. She was drawn to the serenade, her feet barely touching the tips of the sorghum plants, as though riding a green cloud….

The man placed Grandma on the ground, where she lay as limp as a ribbon of dough, her eyes narrowed like those of a lamb. He ripped away the black mask, revealing his face to her. It’s him! A silent prayer to heaven. A powerful feeling of pure joy rocked her, filling her eyes with hot tears.

Yu Zhan’ao removed his rain cape and tramped out a clearing in the sorghum, then spread his cape over the sorghum corpses. He lifted Grandma onto the cape. Her soul fluttered as she gazed at his bare torso. A light mist rose from the tips of the sorghum, and all around she could hear the sounds of growth. No wind, no waving motion, just the white-hot rays of moist sunlight crisscrossing through the open cracks between plants. The passion in Grandma’s heart, built up over sixteen years, suddenly erupted. She squirmed and twisted on the cape. Yu Zhan’ao, getting smaller and smaller, fell loudly to his knees at her side. She was trembling from head to toe; a redolent yellow ball of fire crackled and sizzled before her eyes. Yu Zhan’ao roughly tore open her jacket, exposing the small white mounds of chilled, tense flesh to the sunlight. Answering his force, she cried out in a muted, hoarse voice, ‘My God…,’ and swooned.

Grandma and Granddad exchanged their love surrounded by the vitality of the sorghum field: two unbridled souls, refusing to knuckle under to worldly conventions, were fused together more closely than their ecstatic bodies. They ploughed the clouds and scattered rain in the field, adding a patina of lustrous red to the rich and varied history of Northeast Gaomi Township. My father was conceived with the essence of heaven and earth, the crystallisation of suffering and wild joy.

The braying donkey threaded its way into the sorghum field, and Grandma returned from the hazy kingdom of heaven to the cruel world of man. She sat up in a state of utter stupefaction, her face bathed in tears. ‘He really does have leprosy,’ she said. As Granddad knelt down, a sword appeared in his hand, as if by magic. He slipped it out of its scabbard; the two-foot blade was curved, like a leaf of chive. With a single swish, it sliced through two stalks of sorghum, the top halves thudding to the ground, leaving bubbles of dark-green liquid on the neat, slanted wounds.

‘Come back in three days, no matter what!’ Granddad said.

Grandma looked at him uncomprehendingly. He dressed while she tidied herself up, then put his sword away — where, she didn’t know. Granddad took her back to the roadside and vanished.

Three days later, the little donkey carried Grandma back, and when she entered the village she learned that the Shans, father and son, had been murdered and tossed into the inlet at the western edge of the village.

Grandma lies there soaking up the crisp warmth of the sorghum field. She is as light as a house swallow gracefully skimming the tips of the plants. The fleeting images begin slowing down: Shan Bianlang, Shan Tingxiu, Great-Granddad, Great-Grandma, Uncle Arhat… so many hostile, grateful, savage, sincere faces appear and disappear. She is writing the final page of her thirty-year history. Everything in her past is like a procession of sweet, fragrant fruit falling rapidly to the ground. As for her future, she can only dimly see a few holes of light, which are quickly extinguished. She is holding on to the fleeting present with all her might.

Grandma feels Father’s little paws stroking her. He calls out ‘Mom!’ timidly. All her hate and her love evaporate. She longs to raise her arm and stroke Father’s face, but it won’t do her bidding. Rising into the air, she sees a multicoloured ray of light streaming from above, and hears heaven’s solemn music, played by horns and woodwinds, large and small.

Grandma is exhausted: the handle of the present, the handle of the world of men, is slipping from her grasp. Is this death? Will I never again see this sky, this earth, this sorghum, this son, the lover who has led his troops into battle? The gunfire is so far away, beyond a thick curtain of mist. Douguan! Douguan! Come help your mom. Pull your mom back. Your mom doesn’t want to die. My heaven… you gave me a lover, you gave me a son, you gave me riches, you gave me thirty years of life as robust as red sorghum. Heaven, since you gave me all that, don’t take it back now. Forgive me, let me go! Have I sinned? Would it have been right to share my pillow with a leper and produce a misshapen, putrid monster to contaminate this beautiful world? What is chastity then? What is the correct path? What is goodness? What is evil? You never told me, so I had to decide on my own. I loved happiness, I loved strength, I loved beauty; it was my body, and I used it as I thought fitting. Sin doesn’t frighten me, nor does punishment. I’m not afraid of your eighteen levels of hell. I did what I had to do, I managed as I thought proper. I fear nothing. But I don’t want to die, I want to live. I want to see more of this world….

Grandma’s sincerity moves the heavens. Fresh drops of a crystalline moisture ooze from her dry eyes, which emit a strange light. Once again she sees Father’s golden face and two eyes that are so like Granddad’s. Her lips quiver, she calls Douguan’s name. ‘Mom,’ Father shouts excitedly, ‘you’re going to be okay! You’re not going to die. I’ve stopped the bleeding, it’s stopped! I’ll go get Dad, I’ll tell him to come. Mom, you can’t die, you have to wait for Dad!’

Father runs off, his retreating steps turning into a gentle monologue, then into the music from heaven that Grandma had heard a moment earlier. It is the music of the universe, and it emanates from the red sorghum. She gazes at the sorghum, and through the dimness of her vision the stalks turn crafty and surpassingly beautiful, grotesque, and bizarre. They begin to moan, to writhe, to shout, to entwine her; they are demonic one minute, intimate the next, and in her eyes they coil like snakes. But then they suddenly stretch out like spikes, and it is beyond her power to describe their brilliance. They are red and green, they are black and white, they are blue and green; they are laughing heartily, they are crying pitifully. Their tears are raindrops beating against the desolate sandbar of her heart.

The blue sky shines through the spaces between the sorghum stalks. It is so high, yet so low. Grandma feels as though heaven and earth, man, and the sorghum are intertwined, huddled beneath a gigantic canopy. White clouds dragging earthly shadows behind them brush leisurely against her face. A flock of white doves swoops down and perches on the stalks’ tips, where their cooing wakes Grandma, who quickly distinguishes their shapes. The doves’ red eyes, the size of sorghum seeds, are fixed on her. She smiles with genuine affection, and they return her smile. My darlings! she cries silently. I don’t want to leave you! The doves peck at the sorghum grains, their chests slowly expanding, their feathers fanning out like petals in the wind and rain.

A large flock of doves had once nested in the eaves of our home. In the fall, Grandma placed a large basin of clear water in the yard, and when the doves returned from the fields they perched neatly on the rim of the basin to spit the sorghum seeds from their crops into water in which their reflections shimmered. Then they swaggered around the yard. Doves! Driven from their nests by the storms of war, they grieve over Grandma’s imminent death.

Grandma’s eyes glaze over once again, as the doves take flight, soaring through the vast blue sky, filling it with the rhythmic flapping of their wings. She floats upward to join them, spreading her newly sprouted wings to glide weightlessly in the air above the black soil and sorghum stalks. She gazes longingly at the ruins of her village, at the meandering river, at the crisscrossing roads and paths, at the bullet holes in the sky, and at the doomed creatures beneath her. For the last time she smells the aroma of sorghum wine and the pungent odour of hot blood. A scene she never witnessed suddenly takes shape in her mind: caught in a hail of gunfire, hundreds of her fellow villagers, their clothes in rags, lie in the sorghum field, arms and legs writhing in a macabre dance….

The final thread linking her to mankind is about to part; all her melancholy and suffering, her anxieties and dejection settle onto the field below, striking the sorghum like hailstones and continuing down to the black soil to take root and give birth to bitter fruit for generations to come.

Grandma has completed her liberation. She flies off with the doves. Her shrinking thoughts, which might fit into a human fist, embrace only joy, contentment, warmth, comfort, and harmony. She is at peace. With genuine devotion she exclaims:

‘Heaven! My heaven…’

9

WHILE THE MACHINE guns continued to strafe the area, the trucks’ wheels began to creep up onto the stone bridge. Flying bullets kept Granddad and his troops pinned down. A few men stuck their heads above the dike, only to pay for their recklessness with their lives. Granddad’s chest swelled with rage. All the trucks were now on the bridge, raising the machine-gun-fire trajectory. ‘Men,’ he shouted, ‘attack!’ He pulled off three quick shots, downing two Japanese soldiers, whose bodies fell across the cab, their dark blood staining the hood. With the echo of his shots still in the air, a cacophonous burst of fire erupted from behind the dikes lining the road. Seven or eight more Japanese soldiers were cut down; two of them fell off the truck, arms and legs churning desperately as they burrowed into the black water on either side of the bridge. The Fang brothers’ cannon roared, spewing a torrent of flame from its muzzle. Steel pellets and balls tore into the second truck in line, with its load of sacks, sending plumes of smoke skyward. White rice streamed from countless holes.

Father crawled on his belly from the sorghum field back to the dike, anxious to talk to Granddad, who was urgently reloading his pistol. The lead Jap truck revved its engine to get across the bridge, but the front wheels ran over the rake barrier; loud hissing sighs escaped from the punctured tyres. The truck rumbled grotesquely as it dragged the linked rakes along, and to Father it looked like an enormous twisting snake that had swallowed a hedgehog it was trying to dislodge. The Japs on the lead truck jumped to the ground. ‘Old Liu,’ Granddad shouted, ‘sound the bugle!’ The sound of Bugler Liu’s horn chilled the air. ‘Charge!’ Granddad commanded, leading the charge and firing without aiming, cutting down one Japanese soldier after another.

The troops on the west side of the road joined the attack, engaging the Japs in hand-to-hand combat. Granddad watched as Mute leaped up onto the bed of the lead truck. The two remaining Japs on the truck lunged with their bayonets. He warded off one with his knife, then neatly separated the soldier from his helmeted head, which sailed through the air, trailing a long howl before landing heavily on the ground, the thud driving the remnants of the scream out of its mouth. Father, amazed by the sharpness of the knife, stared at the stunned expression on the Jap’s face. The cheeks were still quivering, the nostrils still twitching, as though it were about to sneeze.

Mute dispatched the other Jap, and when the man’s headless torso fell against the truck’s railing, the skin on his neck shrank inward around pulsating gushes of blood. The Japs in the rear truck lowered the barrel of their machine gun and fired a hail of bullets, mowing down Granddad’s soldiers like so many saplings, which toppled onto the Jap corpses. Mute sat down hard on the cab, blood seeping from a cluster of chest holes.

Father and Granddad threw themselves to the ground and crawled back to the sorghum field. When they cautiously peeked over the top of the dike, they saw the rear truck chugging in reverse. ‘Fang Six,’ Granddad shouted, ‘the cannon! Nail that son of a bitch!’ The Fang brothers turned their loaded cannon in the direction of the dike, but as Fang Six bent over to light the fuse he was hit in the belly. Green intestines slithered out of the hole. ‘Shit!’ he blurted as he grabbed his belly with both hands and rolled into the sorghum field. The trucks would soon be off the bridge. ‘Fire that cannon!’ Granddad screamed. Fang Seven picked up the smouldering tinder and touched it to the fuse with a shaky hand. It wouldn’t light, it simply wouldn’t light! Granddad rushed up, grabbed the tinder out of his hand, and blew on it. It flared up. He touched it to the fuse. It sizzled, smoked momentarily, then went out with a puff of white smoke. The cannon sat silently, as though dozing. Father just knew it wouldn’t fire.

The Jap truck had already reached the bridgehead, and the second and third trucks had started moving backward to join it. In the river below, several Jap corpses floated eastward, seeping blood that attracted frenzied schools of white eels. After a moment of silence, the cannon belched thunderously, and its iron body leaped high above the dike as a wide swath of fire immolated one of the rice trucks.

The Japs aboard the first truck jumped down onto the dike and set up their machine gun. They opened fire. A bullet slammed into Fang Seven’s face, shattering his nose and splattering Father with blood.

Two Japs in the cab of the blazing truck opened their doors and jumped out, straight into the river. The middle truck, unable to move either way, growled strangely, its wheels spinning. The rice rain continued to fall.

The Jap machine gun abruptly stopped firing, leaving only carbines to pop off an occasional shot. A dozen or so Japs ran at a crouch past the burning truck, heading north with their weapons. Granddad ordered his men to fire, but few responded. The dike was dotted top and bottom with the bodies of soldiers; wounded men were moaning and wailing in the sorghum field. Granddad fired, sending Japs flying off the bridge. Rifle fire from the western side of the road cut down more of them. Their comrades turned tail and ran. A bullet whizzing over from the southern bank of the river struck Granddad below the right shoulder; as his arm jerked, the pistol fell from his hand to hang by its strap from his neck. He backed into the sorghum field. ‘Douguan,’ he cried out, ‘help me.’ Ripping the sleeve of his shirt, he told Father to take a strip of white cloth from his waistband to bind the wound. That was when Father said, ‘Dad, Mom’s asking for you.’

‘Good boy!’ Granddad said. ‘Come help Dad kill every last one of those sons of bitches!’ He reached into his belt, removed the abandoned Browning pistol, and handed it to Father, just as Bugler Liu came crawling up the dike dragging a wounded leg. ‘Shall I blow the bugle, Commander?’

‘Blow it!’ Granddad said.

Kneeling on his good leg, Bugler Liu raised the horn to his lips and sounded it to the heavens; scarlet notes emerged.

‘Charge!’

Granddad’s command was met by shouts from the west side of the road. Holding his pistol in his left hand, he jumped to his feet; bullets whizzed past his cheeks. He hit the ground and rolled back into the sorghum field. A scream of agony rose from the west side of the road, and Father knew that another comrade had been hit.

Bugler Liu sounded his horn once more; the scarlet blast struck the sorghum tips and set them shaking.

Granddad grabbed Father’s hand. ‘Follow me, son.’

Smoke billowed from the trucks on the bridge. Gripping Father’s hand tightly, Granddad darted across the road to the west side; their progress was followed by a hail of bullets. Two soldiers with soot-streaked faces witnessed their approach. ‘Commander,’ they cried through cracked lips, ‘we’re done for!’

Granddad sat down dejectedly in the sorghum field, and a long time passed before he raised his head again. The Japs held their fire. The crackling of burning trucks was answered by periodic blasts from Bugler Liu’s horn.

His fear now gone, Father slipped off and moved west, carefully raising his head to peep through some dead weeds. He watched a Japanese soldier emerge from under the still-unburned canopy of the second truck, open the door, and drag out a skinny old Jap in white gloves and black leather riding boots, a sword on his hip. Hugging the side of the truck, they slipped off the bridge by shinnying down a stanchion. Father raised his Browning, but his hand shook like a leaf, and the old Jap’s ass kept hopping up and down in his sights. He clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, and fired. The Browning roared: the bullet went straight into the water, turning a white eel belly up. The Jap officer dived into the water. ‘Dad,’ Father yelled, ‘an officer!’

Another explosion went off behind his head, and the old Jap’s skull splintered, releasing a pool of blood on the surface of the water. The second soldier scrambled frantically to the far side of the stanchion.

Granddad pushed Father to the ground as another hail of Jap bullets swept over them and thudded crazily into the field. ‘Good boy,’ Granddad said. ‘You’re my son, all right!’

What Father and Granddad didn’t know was that the old Jap they’d just killed was none other than the famous general Nakaoka Jiko.

Bugler Liu’s horn didn’t let up. The sun, baked red and green by the flames from the trucks, seemed to shrivel.

‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘Mom’s asking for you. She wants to see you.’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘Yes.’

Father took Granddad by the hand and led him deep into the sorghum field, where Grandma lay, her face stamped with shadows of sorghum stalks and the noble smile she had prepared for Granddad; her face was fairer than ever. Her eyes were open.

For the first time in his life, Father noticed two trickles of tears slipping down Granddad’s hardened face. Granddad fell to his knees beside Grandma’s body and closed her eyes with his good hand.

In 1976, when my granddad died, Father closed his unseeing eyes with his left hand, from which two fingers were missing. Granddad had returned from the desolate Japanese mountains of Hokkaido scarcely able to speak, spitting out each word as though it were a heavy stone. The village held a grand welcoming ceremony in honour of his return, attended by the county head. I was barely two at the time, but I recall seeing eight tables beneath the gingko tree at the head of the village set with jugs of wine and dozens of white ceramic bowls. The county head picked up a jug and filled one of the bowls, which he handed to Granddad with both hands. ‘Here’s to you, our ageing hero,’ he said. ‘You’ve brought glory to our country!’ Granddad clumsily stood up, and his ashen eyeballs fluttered as he said, ‘Woo — woo — gun — gun.’ I watched him raise the bowl to his lips. His wrinkled neck twitched, and his Adam’s apple slid up and down as he drank. Most of the wine ran down his chin and onto his chest instead of sliding down his throat.

I recall our walks in the field; he held my hand and I led a little black dog with my other hand. His favourite spot was the bridgehead over the Black Water River, where he would stand supporting himself on one of the stone pillars for most of the morning or most of the afternoon, staring at the bullet holes on the bridge stones. When the sorghum was tall, he would take me into the field to a spot not far from the bridge. I suspected that was where Grandma had risen to heaven — an ordinary piece of black earth stained by her blood. That was before they tore down our old home.

One day Granddad picked up a hoe and began digging beneath a catalpa tree. He picked up some cicada larvae and handed them to me. I tossed them to the dog, who chewed them up without swallowing them. ‘What are you digging for, Dad?’ asked my mother, who was anxious to go to the dining hall. He looked up at her with a gaze that seemed to belong to another world. She walked off, and he returned to his digging. When he’d dug a pretty deep hole, he cut through a dozen or so roots of varying thicknesses and removed a flagstone, then took a misshapen tin box out of an old, dark brick kiln. It crumbled when it fell to the ground, revealing a long, rusty metal object taller than me, which was showing through the rotting cloth wrapping. I asked what it was. ‘Woo — woo — gun — gun,’ he said.

Granddad laid the rifle on the ground to soak up the sun, then sat down in front of it, his eyes open one minute and closed the next, over and over and over. Finally, he got to his feet, picked up an axe, and began chopping up the rifle. When it was no more than a pile of twisted metal, he took the pieces and scattered them wildly around the yard.

‘Dad, is Mom dead?’ Father asked.

Granddad nodded.

‘Dad!’ Father shrieked.

Granddad stroked Father’s head, then drew a small sword from his hip and chopped down enough sorghum to cover Grandma’s body.

A blast of gunfire erupted on the southern dike, followed by sanguinary shouts and the sound of exploding grenades. Granddad dragged Father over to the bridgehead.

At least a hundred soldiers in grey uniforms burst from the field south of the bridge, driving a dozen or so Jap soldiers onto the dike, where they were cut down by bullets or run through with bayonets. Father saw Detachment Leader Leng, a holstered revolver hanging from his wide leather belt, surrounded by several burly bodyguards. His troops were flanking the burning trucks and heading west. The sight drew a strange laugh from Granddad, who planted his feet at the bridgehead, pistol in hand, and just stood there.

Detachment Leader Leng swaggered up. ‘You fought a good fight, Commander Yu!’

‘You son of a bitch!’ Granddad spat out.

‘We almost made it in time, good brother!’

‘You son of a bitch!’

‘You’d be done for it if we hadn’t arrived!’

‘You son of a bitch!’

Granddad aimed his pistol at Detachment Leader Leng, who flashed a signal with his eyes. Two ferocious bodyguards quickly forced Granddad’s arm down. Father raised his Browning and fired into the ass of the man holding Granddad’s arm.

The other guard sent Father reeling with a kick, then stepped on his wrist, bent down, and picked up the Browning.

The bodyguards tied up Granddad and Father.

‘Pocky Leng, open your dog eyes and take a look at my men!’

The dikes on both sides of the road were strewn with the bodies of dead and wounded soldiers. Bugler Liu was still sounding his horn intermittently, but blood now flowed from the corners of his mouth and from his nose.

Detachment Leader Leng removed his cap and bowed towards the sorghum field east of the road. Then he bowed to the west.

‘Release Commander Yu and his son!’ he ordered.

The bodyguards let them go. Blood was seeping through the fingers of the man who was holding his hand over his wounded ass.

Detachment Leader Leng took the pistols from the bodyguards and returned them to Granddad and Father. His troops were rushing across the bridge, past the trucks and the Jap bodies, gathering up machine guns, carbines, bullets, cartridge clips, bayonets, scabbards, leather belts and boots, wallets, and razors. Some jumped into the river, where they captured the Jap hiding behind the stanchion and raised up the old Jap’s body.

‘This one’s a general, Detachment Leader!’ one of Leng’s officers shouted.

Detachment Leader Leng excitedly looked over the railing. ‘Strip off his uniform and pick up everything that was on him.’ He turned back and said, ‘We’ll meet again, Commander Yu!’

The bodyguards fell in around him as he headed to the southern edge of the bridge.

‘Stop right there, Leng!’ Granddad bellowed.

Detachment Leader Leng turned and said, ‘Commander Yu, you’re not planning on doing anything foolish, are you?’

‘You won’t get away with this!’ Granddad snarled.

‘Tiger Wang, leave Commander Yu a machine gun.’

A soldier walked up and laid a machine gun at Granddad’s feet.

‘You can have the trucks and the rice they’re carrying.’

Detachment Leader Leng’s troops crossed the bridge, formed up ranks on the dike, and marched east.

The trucks were nothing but charred frames by the time the sun was setting; the stench from the melted tyres was nearly suffocating. The bridge was blocked by the two undamaged trucks at either end. The river was filled with water as black as blood; the fields were covered with sorghum as red as blood.

Father picked up a nearly whole fistcake from the dike and handed it to Granddad. ‘Here, Dad, eat this. Mom made it.’

‘You eat it!’ Granddad said.

Father stuffed it into Granddad’s hand. ‘I’ll get another one,’ he said.

Father picked up another fistcake and savagely bit off a chunk.