Frog

  TADPOLE: You needn’t worry, Gugu. Though we have no camel’s hump or bear’s paw, there is more than enough meat, fish, and fowl here for everyone.

  GUGU: (examines the table) Seven plates and eight bowls, that looks like plenty. But what about liquor? What’s there to drink?

  TADPOLE: (reaches under the table and takes out two bottles of Maotai) Maotai.

  GUGU: Real or fake?

  TADPOLE: I got it from Liu Guifang, manager of the municipal guesthouse. She guarantees it’s real.

  LI SHOU: She’s an old classmate.

  YUAN SAI: It’s the old classmates you have to watch out for.

  GUGU: Her, she’s the second daughter of Liu Baofu in Liu Family Village. Also one of mine.

  TADPOLE: I pointed out that relationship to her. With care and respect she took these bottles out of her safe.

  GUGU: She’d be embarrassed to give you fake Maotai for me.

  Tadpole opens the bottle and offers Gugu the first taste.

  GUGU: It’s excellent. The real thing, no doubt about it. Now, pour it for everyone.

  Tadpole pours glasses for everyone.

  GUGU: Since I’ve been given the seat of honour, I’ll start the ritual. For this first glass, we thank the leadership of our Communist Party, which has freed us all from poverty, led us to wealth, liberated our thoughts and brought us a good life, and that is what guarantees a fine future. What do you say, everyone, did I get it right?

  The crowd shouts its agreement.

  GUGU: Empty the first glass!

  Everyone drinks.

  GUGU: For the second glass we thank the Wan family ancestors for accumulating so many merits that their sons and grandsons live comfortable lives.

  Everyone drinks.

  GUGU: For this third drink we turn to the reason we are here, to celebrate the birth of a son late in life to Tadpole and his wife Little Lion.

  They all raise their glasses and shout congratulations.

  Liu Guifang and a pair of helpers enter with cardboard boxes, followed by TV journalists and cameramen.

  LIU GUIFANG: Congratulations!

  TADPOLE: My old classmate, what are you doing here?

  LIU: I came for a celebration drink. Am I not welcome? (She shakes hands with the people around the table and exchanges pleasantries, saving Gugu for last.) Gugu, you’ve recaptured your youth.

  GUGU: That makes me an old witch.

  TADPOLE: We couldn’t get you here with an invitation, but here you are. What is all this stuff? I don’t want you to go broke.

  LIU: I’m just a cook, what’s there to go broke? (points to the boxes) I cooked this myself for you. Fried yellow croaker, pork-skin jelly and large steamed buns. Tell me what you think of my cooking skills, everyone. Gugu, I’ve brought a bottle of fifty-year-old Maotai especially for you to show my respect.

  GUGU: It’s not every day you drink fifty-year-old Maotai. Last New Year’s, one of the high officials in Pingnan city had his daughter-in-law give me a bottle. When the cork was pulled, the room was suffused with its special aroma.

  TADPOLE: (uneasily) And who are these people, old classmate?

  LIU: (drags the female reporter up) I forgot to introduce everyone to Miss Gao, who works for the municipal TV station, hosting and producing the program Aspects of Society. Miss Gao, this is Uncle Tadpole, the playwright who has fathered a son late in life, a remarkable feat. And she (the woman in the role of reporter is dragged over to Gugu) is our Northeast Gaomi Township’s sainted Gugu, which is what we call her no matter how old or young we are. She has ushered everyone here, from one generation to the next, into the world.

  GUGU: (takes the reporter’s hand) What a charming girl you are. One look at you and I can picture what your father and mother are like. In the past, it was family status that determined whether or not a match was appropriate. Now I’m in favour of looking at genes before family status. Good genes are what guarantee the birth of intelligent, healthy babies. With bad genes nothing works.

  REPORTER: (signals the cameraman to film) Gugu is right in step with the times.

  GUGU: Hardly. But in my dealings with people in all fields I manage to pick up some modern terms and ideas.

  TADPOLE: (softly to Liu Guifang) This isn’t something we should broadcast, is it?

  LIU: (softly) Miss Gao is going to marry into my family soon. There is stiff competition among TV stations these days, fighting over information, material and ideas, and I need to help her.

  REPORTER: Gugu, why do you think Uncle Tadpole and his wife were able to have a child so late in life? Is it because of their good genes?

  GUGU: Most definitely. They both have good genes.

  REPORTER: Do you think that one of their genes might be a tad better than the others?

  GUGU: You need to have a better understanding of genes before you can ask that question.

  REPORTER: Do you think you can explain what genes are in terms that our viewers can easily understand?

  GUGU: Genes are life, genes are one’s fate.

  REPORTER: Fate?

  GUGU: Flies can’t get into an egg that isn’t cracked. Do you understand?

  REPORTER: Yes.

  GUGU: People with bad genes are like cracked eggs, and their offspring will be born with cracks. Understand?

  LIU: (to Gao) Why don’t you let Gugu take a moment to have a drink. You can ask Uncle Tadpole. This is Uncle Yuan Sai, and this is Uncle Li Shou. They were all classmates of mine, and they know everything there is to know about genes. You can interview each of them. (pours a glass for Gugu) Here’s to Gugu’s health and a long life, may you always look after our Northeast Township’s children!

  REPORTER: Uncle Tadpole, I know you were born in 1953, which makes you fifty-five this year. At that age, country folk are already grandparents, but you have just fathered a son. Can you tell us how you feel about that?

  TADPOLE: Last month, seventy-eight-year-old Professor Li of Qidong University celebrated the one-month anniversary of his son and visited his hundred-and-three-year-old father, elder Professor Li, in the hospital. Did you read that?

  REPORTER: Yes.

  TADPOLE: A man is at his prime in his fifties. The issue is with women.

  REPORTER: Would it be all right to interview your wife?

  TADPOLE: She’s resting. She’ll come out to toast our guests in a little while.

  REPORTER: (holding the microphone in front of Yuan Sai) Chairman Yuan, now that your friend Tadpole has become a father at his age, are you itching to do the same?

  YUAN: What an interesting phrase, itching to do the same. I may be itching, but not to do the same. I doubt that I have particularly good genes. I have two sons, and one’s as big a drain on me as the other. If I had another, I doubt that the results would be any better. Then there’s my wife, whose soil has seriously hardened. If I planted a sapling, in three days it would be a cane.

  LI SHOU: Why not let your mistress do it?

  YUAN SAI: How can you say things like that at your age, my friend? We’re upright, highly moral individuals who don’t get involved in ugly affairs like that.

  LI SHOU: Ugly affairs? It’s all the rage these days, a new wave, gene improvement, aiding the poor and lending a helping hand to the weak, fuelling domestic demand and furthering development.

  YUAN SAI: Stop right there. If that gets out, they’ll be coming after you.

  LI SHOU: Ask them if they dare broadcast that.

  REPORTER: (smiles without answering, turns to Gugu) Gugu, I hear that you have developed a ‘return to spring’ elixir that will restore a post-menopausal woman’s youth.

  GUGU: Many people say I have a potion that can change the sex of a foetus. Do you believe that?

  REPORTER: I’d rather believe it than not.

  GUGU: There’s a god if you believe there is, and if you don’t, it’s just an unpainted clay idol. That’s just how people are.

  TADPOLE: Miss Gao, you and your station colleagues are welcome to join us at t
he table. You can continue interviewing after you’ve had something to drink.

  REPORTER: No, you go ahead. Just pretend we’re not here.

  LI SHOU: How are we supposed to do that with you people walking around while we’re drinking?

  REPORTER: You can – pretend we’re not people, pretend we’re – whatever you want.

  YUAN SAI: Guifang, you were my idol during our school days, so I have to raise my glass to you.

  LIU: (clinks glasses with Yuan) Here’s to the success of your bullfrog breeding farm and the early arrival of your Jiaowa Skin Care product in the market.

  YUAN SAI: Don’t change the subject. I want to tell you how besotted I was with you back then.

  LIU: Stop being foolish with your false display of affection. Everybody knows there’s a harem of beautiful women in Chairman Yuan’s bullfrog farm.

  REPORTER: (takes advantage of the pause to speak into her microphone) Ladies and gentlemen, today’s Aspects on Society program focuses on a joyous event in Northeast Gaomi Township. On the fifteenth of last month, the famous playwright Tadpole, a recent retiree who has returned home to write, and his wife, Little Lion, both now in their fifties, were blessed with the birth of a healthy, lively, pudgy son . . .

  GUGU: Bring the baby out to show everyone.

  Tadpole runs off the stage.

  LIU: (glares at Yuan and says under her breath) Enough nonsense. You’ll make Gugu unhappy.

  Tadpole enters with Little Lion, a towel around her head, the swaddled baby in her arms.

  The cameraman films away.

  The guests applaud and shout their congratulations.

  TADPOLE: Let Gugu see him.

  Little Lion takes the baby up to Gugu, who pulls back the blanket to see him.

  GUGU: (with emotion) A fine boy. A truly fine boy, with excellent genes. So good-looking that if he’d been born during feudal times, he’d be the top scholar at the civil service examination.

  LI SHOU: Why stop there? He could be Emperor.

  GUGU: What is this, a bragging contest?

  REPORTER: (puts the microphone in front of Gugu) Did you deliver this baby, too, Gugu?

  GUGU: (tucks a red envelope into the swaddling clothes. Tadpole and Little Lion try to refuse the gift, but Gugu waves them off) This is the custom. Your aunt can afford it. (to the reporter) Fortunately, they trusted me. She was past the normal child-bearing age, and she’s under a lot of pressure. I told her to go to the hospital to ‘slice open the melon’, but she said no, and I supported her in her decision. Only a woman who delivers a baby through the birth canal knows what it means to be a woman and how to be a mother.

  While Gugu is being interviewed, Little Lion and Tadpole show the baby to all the guests, each of whom tucks a red envelope into the swaddling clothes.

  REPORTER: Will he be the last baby you deliver, Gugu?

  GUGU: What do you think?

  REPORTER: I hear that women in Northeast Gaomi Township aren’t the only ones who revere and trust you, that many pregnant women come to you from Pingdu and Jiaozhou counties.

  GUGU: I was born to work hard.

  REPORTER: I’ve heard that there’s a magic power in your hands, and that all you have to do is place them on a pregnant woman’s abdomen to greatly lessen their pain. Even their worries and their fears evaporate.

  GUGU: That is how myths are born.

  REPORTER: Gugu, please show us your hands. We’d like to get a couple of shots of them.

  GUGU: (sarcastically) The people need their myths. (turns to the guests) Know who said that?

  LI SHOU: A great person, by the sound of it.

  GUGU: I said it.

  YUAN SAI: Gugu just about qualifies as a great person.

  LIU: What do you mean, just about? Gugu is a great person.

  REPORTER: (sombrely) These two ordinary hands brought thousands of babies into the world.

  GUGU: It was also these two ordinary hands that sent thousands of babies straight to Hell. (empties her glass) Gugu’s hands are stained with two kinds of blood, one fragrant, the other fetid.

  LIU: Gugu, you are our Northeast Township’s Living Buddha. The closer we look the more the Goddess in the Fertility Temple looks like you. They made her in your image.

  GUGU: (drunkenly) The people need their myths.

  REPORTER: (holds the microphone in front of Little Lion) Can we hear some of your thoughts, madam?

  LITTLE LION: About what?

  REPORTER: Whatever you like. How you felt when you discovered you were pregnant, for instance. Or how it felt to be pregnant, or why you insisted that Gugu be there when it was time . . .

  LITTLE LION: Discovering I was pregnant was like a dream. How could a woman in her fifties, two years past menopause, suddenly become pregnant? As for my feelings during my pregnancy, it was roughly equal between joy and worry. The joy came from the knowledge that I was going to be a mother. I worked as an obstetrics doctor with Gugu for more than a decade, helping her bring many babies into the world, but never having one of my own. A childless woman is less than complete, someone who cannot look her husband in the eye. That has all been resolved now.

  REPORTER: What about the worry? What worried you?

  LITTLE LION: Mainly thoughts of my age, afraid I might give birth to an unhealthy baby. Next I was worried that I might need to have a surgical birth. Of course, when I went into labour, Gugu laid her hands on my abdomen, and my worries vanished. After that I had only to do what Gugu said to deliver my baby.

  GUGU: (drunkenly) Washing the fetid blood away with the fragrant blood . . .

  Chen Bi enters on crutches.

  CHEN BI: What kind of people do not invite a grandpa to his grandson’s one-month anniversary?

  The guests are astonished.

  TADPOLE: (thrown into a panic) I’m sorry, old friend, truly sorry. It completely slipped my mind . . .

  CHEN BI: (mad laughter) Did you just call me old friend? Ha ha. (points to the baby in Little Lion’s arms with a crutch) Normal courtesy demands that you get down on your hands and knees and kowtow to me three times and call me ‘Esteemed Father-in-law’, doesn’t it?

  YUAN SAI: (goes up to stop Chen Bi) Come with me, Chen, old fellow, I’ll buy you a good meal at the famous King of Abalone and Shark’s Fin restaurant.

  CHEN BI: Get out of my face, you shameless piece of shit. Do you really think you can shut me up with some stinking seafood? That’s not going to happen. Today is a big day in my grandson’s life, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here to have a celebratory drink. (sits down and spots Gugu) Gugu, your mind is like a spotless mirror. You took care of all our Northeast Gaomi Township babies. You knew whose seeds would not sprout and whose soil would not grow grass, so you borrowed seeds and soil, you replaced beams with rotten timbers, you used Chencang as a decoy, you deceived the heavens to cross the ocean, you sacrificed the plum to preserve the peach, you let someone get away in order to capture, you killed with a borrowed knife . . . you have used all the thirty-six stratagems from The Art of War.

  GUGU: You used only two – you made a sound in the east and attacked from the west, and you escaped like a cicada sloughing off its skin. I nearly fell for your tricks back then. Half the foetid blood on my hands (holds them to her nose to smell) you put there.

  LI SHOU: (pours a glass for Chen) Have a drink, old Chen. Drink up.

  CHEN BI: (tosses down the glassful) Young classmate, you’re a fair man. Come reason this out for us —

  LI SHOU: (doesn’t let Chen finish; refills his glass) Only the heavens know about fairness. Drink up. Here, use a bigger glass.

  CHEN BI: Are you trying to get me drunk? You’re wrong if you think liquor will shut me up.

  LI SHOU: Of course I’m wrong. No one can outdrink you. We’re drinking real Maotai today, and you don’t want to waste the opportunity, right? Down the hatch!

  CHEN BI: (tips his head and drains the glass, breathes heavily as tears begin to fall) Gugu, Tadpole, Little Lion
, Yuan Sai, Jin Xiu – I, Chen Bi, have fallen as low as a man can fall. Is there a single person among the fifty thousand residents of the eighteen villages in Northeast Gaomi Township as pitiful as me? I ask you, is there? No, there isn’t, no one is as pitiful as me. But you, all of you, have ganged up to bully me, a cripple. I guess that’s all right, since I’m not a good person and never have been. Bullying me is like heavenly retribution. But you shouldn’t take advantage of my daughter. Chen Mei, a girl you have all watched grow up, the prettiest girl in all of Northeast Gaomi Township, she and her sister, Chen Er, who together could have married into the imperial family as queens or royal consorts, but . . . it’s all my fault . . . retribution . . . my daughter carried your child (angrily points at Tadpole) to earn enough to pay off my debts. But you, my old classmates, all you uncles and elders, all you playwrights, all you big bosses, conspired to fabricate a story that her baby was stillborn. You cheated her out of her forty-thousand-yuan fee. The heavens are only three feet above your head. Why doesn’t God open his eyes to see how these terrible people are riding roughshod over us . . . turn on your camera, TV people, shine a light on us all – me, her, them – for all your viewers . . .

  LIU: Everyone says nobody holds his drink as well as you, old Chen. So why are you spouting all this nonsense after only two glasses?

  CHEN BI: You’re a shrewd woman, Liu Guifang. When the guesthouse went private, you became a big boss overnight. You’re now worth millions. I begged you to find a job for my daughter, even if it was tending a fire in your kitchen, but you chose not to be generous, saying you were in the process of downsizing and that the door to charity was hard to open. But . . .

  LIU: I was wrong, old friend, and I’ll take care of Chen Mei. It’s only one more mouth to feed, isn’t it? I’ll take her under my wing, how’s that?

  Yuan Sai, Jin Xiu, and others try to ‘escort’ Chen Bi out of the yard.

  CHEN BI: (struggles) I still haven’t seen my grandson. (takes out a red envelope) Grandson, your granddad may be poor, but ethical codes must be followed. I have prepared a red envelope for you . . .