Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

  “That’s why we all sing our mothers’ praises,” your son said in a fit of pique.

  “Did you hear that, Ximen Huan?” Fenghuang said with a laugh. “Neither you nor I could ever say something that profound. Only Old Lan here could.”

  “There’s no need to mock me,” your son said, embarrassed.

  “Nobody’s mocking you,” she said. “That was intended as a compliment!” She reached into her white handbag and took out a pack of Marlboros and a solid gold lighter with diamond chips. “With the old stick-in-the-muds out of the way, we can take it easy and enjoy ourselves.”

  A single cigarette popped up when she tapped the pack with a dainty finger tipped with a painted nail and wound up between painted lips. She flicked the lighter, which sent a blue flame into the air, then tossed it and the pack onto the table and took a deep drag on her cigarette. Leaning back until her neck was resting on the back of the chair, faceup, lips puckered, she gazed into the deep blue sky and blew the smoke out like an actress in a TV soap who doesn’t know how to smoke.

  Ximen Huan took a cigarette from the pack and tossed it to your son, who shook his head. A good boy, no doubt about it. But Fenghuang snorted and said derisively:

  “Don’t put on that good-little-boy act. Go ahead, smoke it! The younger you are when you start, the easier it is for your body to adapt to the nicotine. England’s prime minister Churchill started smoking his granddad’s pipe when he was eight, and he died in his nineties. So you see, starting late is worse than starting early.”

  Your son picked up the cigarette and hesitated; but in the end he put it in his mouth, and Ximen Huan lit it. His first cigarette. He couldn’t stop coughing, and his face turned black. But he’d become a chain smoker in no time.

  Ximen Huan turned Fenghuang’s gold cigarette lighter over in his hand.

  “Damn, this is top-of-the-line stuff!” he said.

  “Like it?” Fenghuang asked with disdainful indifference. “Keep it. It was a gift from one of those assholes who want to get an official position or a building contract.”

  “But your mother—”

  “My mother’s an asshole too!” she said, holding her cigarette daintily with three fingers. With her other hand she pointed to Ximen Huan. “Your dad’s an even bigger asshole! And your dad”—the finger was now pointed at your son—“is an asshole too!” She laughed. “Those assholes are all a bunch of phonies, always putting on an act, giving us so-called guidance and telling us not to do one thing or another. But what about them? They’re always doing one thing and another!”

  “So that’s what we’ll do!” Ximen Huan said enthusiastically.

  “Right,” Fenghuang agreed. “They want us to be good little boys and girls, not bad ones. Well, what makes someone a good kid and what makes someone a bad one? We’re good kids. The best, better than anyone!” She flipped her cigarette butt toward the parasol tree, but it landed on one of the eave tiles, where it smoldered.

  “Call my dad an asshole if you want,” your son said, “but he’s no phony and he doesn’t put on an act. He wouldn’t be in so much trouble if he had.”

  “Still protecting him, are you?” Fenghuang said. “He abandoned you and your mother and ran off to play around with another woman — oh, right, I forgot, that aunt of mine is an asshole too!”

  “I admire my second uncle,” Ximen Huan said. “It took guts to give up his job as deputy county chief, leave his wife and son, and go off with his lover on a romantic adventure. How cool!”

  “In the words of our county’s crafty writer Mo Yan, your dad is the world’s bravest guy, biggest asshole, hardest drinker, and best lover! Plug up your ears, both of you. I don’t want you to hear what I say next.” They did as she said. “Dog Four, have you heard that Lan Jiefang and my aunt make love ten times a day for an hour each time?”

  Ximen Huan snorted and giggled. Fenghuang kicked him in the leg.

  “You were listening, you punk,” she complained.

  Your son didn’t say a word, but his face had darkened.

  “The next time you two go back to Ximen Village, take me along. I hear your father has turned the place into a capitalist paradise.”

  “Nonsense,” Ximen Huan replied. “You can’t have a capitalist paradise in a socialist country. My dad’s a reformer, a hero of his time.”

  “Bullshit!” Fenghuang said. “He’s a bastard. The real heroes of their time are your uncle and my aunt.”

  “Don’t talk about my dad,” your son said.

  “When he stole off with my aunt, he nearly killed my grandma and made my grandpa sick, so why can’t I talk about him? One day I’ll get really mad and drag them back from Xi’an so they can be paraded in the street.”

  “Hey, why don’t we go pay them a visit?” Ximen Huan suggested.

  “Good idea,” Fenghuang said. “I’ll take another bucket of paint with me, and when I see my aunt, I’ll say, ‘Here, Aunty, I’ve come to paint you.’”

  That made Ximen Huan laugh. Your son lowered his head and said nothing.

  Fenghuang kicked him in the leg.

  “Lighten up, Old Lan. We’ll go together, what do you say?”

  “Not me.”

  “You’re no fun,” she said. “I’ve had enough of you two. I’m getting out of here.”

  “Don’t go yet,” Ximen Huan said. “The program hasn’t started.”

  “What program?”

  “Miraculous hair, my mother’s miraculous hair.”

  “Hell, I forgot all about that,” Fenghuang said. “What was it you said? You could cut off a dog’s head and sew it back on with a strand of your mom’s hair, and that dog could still eat and drink, is that it?”

  “We don’t need that complicated an experiment,” Ximen Huan said. “You can cut yourself, and then burn a strand of her hair and sprinkle the ashes on the cut. You’ll be good as new in ten minutes and no scar.”

  “They say you can’t cut her hair or it’ll bleed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everybody says she has such a kind heart that if one of the villagers is injured, she’ll pull out a strand of her hair for them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then how come she’s not bald?”

  “It keeps growing back.”

  “Then you’ll never go hungry,” Fenghuang said admiringly. “If your father loses his job one day and turns into a useless pauper, your mother can keep the family fed and housed just by selling her hair.”

  “I’d go out begging before I’d let her do that,” Ximen Huan said emphatically. “Although she’s not my real mother.”

  “What do you mean?” Fenghuang asked. “If she’s not your real mother, who is?”

  “They tell me it was a high school student.”

  “The bastard son of a high school student,” Pang said. “How cool is that!”

  “Then why don’t you go have a baby?” Ximen Huan said.

  “Because I’m a good girl.”

  “Does having a baby make you a bad kid?”

  “Good kid, bad kid. We’re all good kids!” she said. “Let’s perform the experiment. Shall we cut off Dog Four’s head?”

  I barked angrily. My meaning? Try it, you little bastard, and I’ll bite your head off!

  “Nobody touches my dog,” your son said.

  “So then what?” Fenghuang said. “You’re wasting my time with your phony tricks. I’m leaving.”

  “Wait,” your son said. “Don’t go.”

  He stood up and went into the kitchen.

  “What are you doing, Old Lan?” Fenghuang shouted after him.

  He walked out of the kitchen holding the middle finger of his left hand in his right hand. Blood seeped through his fingers.

  “Are you crazy, Old Lan?” Fenghuang cried out.

  “He’s my uncle’s son, all right,” Ximen Huan said. “You can count on him when the chips are down.”

  “Quit spouting nonsense, bastard son,” Fenghuang said a
nxiously. “Go inside and get some of your mom’s miraculous hair, and hurry!”

  Ximen Huan ran inside and quickly emerged with seven strands of thick hair. He laid them on the table and let them burn, quickly turning them to ashes.

  “Let’s see that finger, Old Lan,” Fenghuang said as she grabbed the hand with the bleeding finger.

  It was a deep cut. I saw Fenghuang go pale. Her mouth was open, her brow creased, as if she was the one in pain.

  Ximen Huan scooped up the ashes with a crisp new bill and sprinkled them over your son’s injured finger.

  “Does it hurt?” Fenghuang asked.

  “No.”

  “Let go of his wrist,” Ximen Huan said.

  “The blood will wash the ashes away,” Fenghuang said.

  “No problem, don’t worry.”

  “If that doesn’t stop the bleeding,” she said threateningly, “I’ll chop those dog paws of yours off!”

  “I said don’t worry.”

  Slowly Fenghuang loosened her grip on your son’s wrist.

  “Well?” Ximen Huan said proudly.

  “It worked!”

  52

  Jiefang and Chunmiao Turn the Fake into the Real

  Taiyue and Jinlong Depart this World Together

  Lan Jiefang, you gave up your future and your reputation all for love; abandoning your family was something upright people would not countenance, yet writers like Mo Yan sang your praises. But not returning for your mother’s funeral was such an unfilial act I’m afraid even Mo Yan, who has a reputation for twisting logic, would find it hard to come to your defense.

  I never received word of my mother’s death. I was living anonymously in Xi’an like a criminal in hiding. I knew that no court would grant me a divorce as long as Pang Kangmei was in a position of power. Denied a divorce but living with Chunmiao, my only option was to reside quietly far from home.

  At first we both worked in a factory established through foreign investment. They manufactured fuzzy dolls. The manager was a so-called overseas Chinese, a bald man with a big belly and yellow teeth, a lover of poetry who was friendly with Mo Yan. He was sympathetic to our plight, actually got a kick out of our experience, and was willing to find office work for me and take Chunmiao on as a bookkeeper in the workshop. The air there was pretty foul, and her nose was constantly being tickled by loose fuzz. Most of the factory workers were girls brought in from the countryside, some as young as thirteen or fourteen, by all appearances. Then one day the factory burned down, claiming many lives and leaving most of the survivors with horrible disfigurements. Chunmiao was spared only because she happened to be home sick that day. For the longest time after that, the tragic fate of those factory girls kept us awake at night. Eventually, Mo Yan found openings for us at his local newspaper.

  On many occasions I spotted familiar faces out on the streets of Xi’an and was tempted to call out to whoever it was. But instead I lowered my head and hid my face. Sometimes, when we were in our little apartment, thoughts of home and family had us both weeping miserably Our love was why we’d left our homes, and that love made it impossible to return. Time and again we picked up the telephone, only to put it right back down, and time and again we dropped letters into the mailbox, only to find an excuse to ask for them back when the postman came to collect outgoing mail. Whatever news of home we received came from Mo Yan, who passed on good news and withheld the bad. His greatest fear was not having something to talk about, and we figured he saw us as valuable material for his novels. And so, the crueler our fate, the more convoluted our story became, and the more dramatically our circumstances developed, the more it interested him. Although I was kept from going home for my mother’s funeral, during those days I actually played the role of filial son due to a combination of strange circumstances.

  One of Mo Yan’s classmates from his writers workshop days was directing a TV drama about the bandit annihilation campaign by the People’s Liberation Army. One of the characters was nicknamed Lan Lian, or Blue Face, a bandit who cut down humans as if they were blades of grass but was a devoted, filial son to his mother. Mo Yan introduced me to his friend as a means for me to earn a bit of extra money The director had a full beard, a pate as bald as Shakespeare’s, and a nose as crooked as Dante’s. As soon as he saw me, he slapped his thigh and said, I’ll be damned! We won’t have to worry about makeup!

  We were picked up by Ximen Jinlong’s Cadillac to be driven back to Ximen Village. The red-faced driver refused to let me get in, so your son scowled at him and said:

  “You think this is a dog, is that it? Well, he’s an apostle who loved my grandmother more than any member of the family!”

  We’d barely left the county town when snow began to fall, tiny flakes like salt crystals. The ground was blanketed with white by the time we reached the village, and we heard a distant relative who’d come to mourn Grandma’s passing shout tearfully:

  “Heaven and earth are weeping for you, Great-Aunt. Your goodness has moved the world!”

  Like a soloist in a choir, his wails were contagious; I could hear Ximen Baofeng’s hoarse crying, Ximen Jinlong’s majestic wailing, and Wu Qiuxiang’s melodic weeping.

  As soon as they stepped out of the car, Huzhu and Hezuo buried their faces in their hands and began to cry. Your son and Ximen Huan held their mothers up by their arms. In anguish I walked along behind them. My eldest dog brother had died by then, but doddering old Dog Two, who was lying at the base of the wall, greeted me with a low whimper; I was too upset to return the greeting. Streams of cold air seemed to crawl up my legs and into my body, where they turned my innards into ice, I was trembling, my limbs were stiff as boards, and my reactions were hopelessly dulled. I knew I’d gotten very old.

  Your mother was already in her coffin; the lid lay off to the side. Her purple funeral clothes were made of satin with dark gold longevity characters sewn in. Jinlong and Baofeng were kneeling at opposite ends of the coffin. Her hair was uncombed. His eyes were red and puffy; the front of his shirt was tear-stained. Huzhu and Hezuo threw themselves onto the coffin, pounded the sides, and cried bitterly.

  “Mother, oh, Mother, why did you have to leave before we came home? Mother, it was you who held us up, now we have nothing! How can any of us go on living?” Your wife’s lament.

  “Mother, oh, Mother, you suffered all your life, how could you leave just when you could finally enjoy life?” Huzhu’s lament.

  Their tears wetted your mother’s funeral clothes and the yellow paper covering her face. It almost seemed as if the paper had been wetted by tears from the dead.

  Your son and Ximen Huan knelt by their mothers’ sides; one’s face was dark as iron, the other’s white as snow.

  Xu Xuerong and his wife were in charge of the funeral arrangements. With a shriek of alarm, Mrs. Xu pulled Huzhu and Hezuo’s faces away from the coffin.

  “Oh, no, all you mourners, you mustn’t shed tears on her body. If she carries tears from the living, she may be stuck in a life and death cycle. ...”

  Master Xu took a look around.

  “Are all the close relatives here?”

  No response.

  “I ask you, are all the close relatives here?”

  The distant relatives exchanged glances, but no one responded.

  A distant cousin pointed to the west-side room and said softly:

  “Go ask the old gentleman.”

  I followed Master Xu over to the west-side room, where your father was sitting against the wall weaving a pot cover with dry sorghum stalks and hemp. A kerosene lamp hanging from the wall lit up that little section of the room. His face was a blur, except for his eyes, from which two bright lights shone. He was sitting on a stool, holding a nearly completed pot lid between his knees. A rustling sound emerged as he wove the hemp around the sorghum stalks.

  “Sir,” Master Xu said, “did you send a letter to Jiefang? If he can get here in the next little while, I think—”

  “Close the coffin!” your fat
her said. “Raising a dog is better than raising a son!”

  When she heard I was going to be in a TV show, Chunmiao said she wanted to be in it too. So we went to Mo Yan, who went to the director, who, when he saw Chunmiao, said she could play the part of Blue Face’s younger sister. The series was planned for thirty episodes, with ten stand-alone stories, each dealing with a bandit annihilation campaign. The director gave us a summary of what we’d be doing: After the gang led by the bandit Blue Face has been dispersed, he flees into the mountains alone. Knowing his reputation as a filial son, the PLA convinces his sister and mother to fake the mother’s death and sends his sister into the mountains to pass on the news. Blue Face comes down from the mountains in his mourning garments and goes straight to his mother’s bier, where PLA soldiers, who are staked out among the mourners, rush up and pin him to the floor. At that moment, his mother sits up in her coffin and says, Son, the PLA always treats its prisoners humanely, so please surrender to them. . . . “Got it?” the director asked us. “Got it,” we said.

  Before sealing the coffin, Mistress Xu lifted the yellow paper covering your mother’s face and said:

  “Filial mourners, take one last look. But please control yourselves and do not let tears fall on her face.”

  Your mother’s face was puffy and jaundiced-looking, almost as if a thin layer of gold powder had been applied. Her eyes were open a crack, enough to release a pair of cold gleams, as if to scold everyone who looked upon her dead face.

  “Mother, why have you left me to live as an orphan? . . .” Ximen Jinlong was wailing so bitterly a pair of cousins had to come up and pull him back from the coffin.

  “Mother, my dear mother, take me with you. . . .” Baofeng banged her head against the side of the coffin, producing dull thuds. People dragged her away. Ma Gaige, his hair prematurely gray, wrapped his arm around his mother to keep her from throwing herself on the coffin.

  Your wife gripped the edge of the coffin and wept, open-mouthed, until her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell backward. Several of the mourners rushed up and dragged her off to the side, where some of them rubbed the skin between her thumb and forefinger and others pinched the spot beneath her nose to revive her. Slowly she regained consciousness.