The conversation then turned to Jintong’s experiences on the farm over the preceding year, and he told Mother everything, including sex with Long Qingping, the death of Qiudi and Lu Liren, and how Pandi had changed her name.
Mother sat silently until the moon crept from the eastern sky and cast its light into the yard and through the window. “You didn’t do anything wrong, son,” she said at last. “That young woman Long’s soul found peace, and we will count her as a member of the family. Wait until the times get better, and we will bring her and your seventh sister’s remains home.”
Mother picked up Parrot, who was rocking back and forth from sleep, and carried him to the bed. “There was a time when there were so many Shangguans we were like a herd of sheep. Now there are few of us left.”
Jintong forced himself to ask, “What about Eighth Sister?” With a sigh, she gave him an embarrassed look, as if begging for forgiveness.
Even at the age of twenty, Yunuwas still like a little girl, a frightened, timid little girl. She’d always been like a chrysalis, spending her life in a cocoon, never wanting to cause the family any trouble. During the gloomy, rainy months of summer, she listened sorrowfully to the sound of Mother out in the yard throwing up. Thunder rolled off in the distance, the wind rustled leaves on the trees, the burnt odor of crackling lightning was in the air, but the sounds weren’t loud enough to cover up the retching noise outside, and none of the smells masked the stench of her vomit. The sound of the beans falling into the water went straight to the girl’s heart. How she wished it would stop, but at the same time she wanted it to continue forever. She was disgusted by the smell of Mother’s stomach juices and blood, but at the same time grateful for it. When Mother crushed the beans in the mortar, she felt as if it were her heart being mashed. And when Mother handed her the bowl of beans, with their raw, cold, sticky odor, hot tears rolled out of her sightless eyes and her lovely mouth twitched with each spoonful of the gooey mix. The enormous sense of gratitude in her heart went unspoken.
The previous year, on the morning of the seventh day of the seventh month, as Mother was leaving for the mill, Yunü had blurted out, “What do you look like, Mother?” Reaching out with her fair hands, she’d said, “Let me feel your face — please.”
With a sigh, Mother said, “Foolish little girl, bad as the times are, is that all you want?”
Mother brought her face up to Eighth Sister’s hands and let her stroke it with her soft fingers, which had a damp, cold odor. “Go wash your hands, Yunü. There’s water in the basin.”
After Mother left, Eighth Sister climbed down off the bed. She heard Parrot singing happily in his cradle, mixed with the chirps of birds, the sound of snails dragging slime across the bark of trees, and swallows making a nest in the eaves. Sniffing the air, she followed the smell of clear water over to the basin, where she bent down. Her lovely face was reflected in the water, just as Natasha’s image had once found Jintong’s eyes, but she couldn’t see it. Not many people had seen the face of this Shangguan girl. She had a high nose, fair skin, soft, yellow hair, and a long, thin neck, like that of a swan. When she felt the cold water on the tip of her nose, and then her lips, she buried her face in it. The rush of water up her nose made her choke, bringing her back to reality, and she jerked her head up out of the water. There was a buzzing in her ears, her nose ached and felt swollen. As soon as she smacked her ears with her hands to clear out the water, she heard the chirping of parrots in the tree and the cries of Parrot Han for his eighth aunt. She walked over to the tree, where she reached up and rubbed his drippy nose. Then, without a word, she groped her way out the gate.
Mother reached up and wiped away the tears with the back of her hand. “Your eighth sister left because she thought she was a burden,” she said softly. “Your eighth sister was sent to us by her father, the Dragon King. But her time was up, and now she has returned to the Eastern Ocean to continue her life as the Dragon Princess …”
Jintong wanted to console Mother, but could not find the words. He merely coughed to mask the pain in his heart.
Just then there was a knock at the door. Mother trembled briefly, before hiding the mortar and saying to Jintong, “Open the door. See who it is.”
Jintong opened the door. It was the woman from the ferry boat. She was standing timidly at the door holding her lute. “Are you Jintong?” she asked in a tiny, mosquito-like voice.
Shangguan Xiangdi had come home.
8
Five years later, on a winter morning, as Xiangdi lay waiting to die, she suddenly climbed out of bed. Her nose had rotted away, leaving behind only a black hole, and she was blind in both eyes. Nearly all her hair had fallen out, and all that remained were a few rust-colored wisps here and there on her shriveled scalp. After groping her way over to the standing cabinet, she climbed onto a stool and took down her lute, the box of which had been smashed. She then groped her way outside. Sunlight warmed the body of this woman whose rotting flesh smelled like mildew. She looked up at the sun, without seeing it. Mother, who was in the yard weaving rush mats for the production team, stood up. “Xiangdi,” she said anxiously, “my poor daughter, what are you doing out here?”
Xiangdi sat huddled at the base of the wall, her scaly legs sticking out straight. Her belly was exposed, but modesty had long since played no role in her life, and she was no longer bothered by the cold. Mother ran inside for a blanket, which she draped over Xiangdi’s legs. “My precious daughter, all your life, you …” She wiped her eyes dry of the few tears that may have been there, and went back to weaving mats.
The shouts of grade-school children sounded nearby: “Attack attack attack all class enemies! Garry out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!” Their hoarse slogans traveled up and down the streets and lanes. Childlike drawings and badly written but intense slogans in colored chalk adorned all the walls in the neighborhood.
Xiangdi said in a muffled voice, “Mother, I've slept with ten thousand men and earned a great deal of money. With it I bought gold and jewels, enough to keep food on your table for the rest of your lives.” She rubbed her hand across the box of her lute, which the commune official had smashed, and said, “It was all in here, Mother. Look at this night-luminescent pearl. It was a gift from a Japanese client. If you sew it into a cap and wear it at night, it lights the way like a lantern … I traded ten rings and a small ruby for this cat’s eye … this pair of gold bracelets was a gift from Old Master Xiong, who took my maidenhead.” One by one she removed the precious memorabilia that had been inside the lute. “There’s no need to worry, Mother, not with all this. This emerald alone is enough to buy a thousand catties of flour, and this necklace is at least worth a donkey … Mother, on the day I entered the fire pit of prostitution, I vowed that I would give my sisters a good life, since sleeping with one man is no different than sleeping with a thousand of them. This is what I traded my body for. I carried this lute with me everywhere I went. I had this longevity locket made especially for Jintong. Make sure he wears it… Mother, put these things where thieves cannot find them, and don’t let the Poor Peasants Association take them from you … what you have here is your daughter’s blood and sweat… are you hiding them?”
Mother’s face was now awash in tears. She wrapped her arms around Xiangdi’s syphilitic body and sobbed, “My precious daughter, you’ve shredded my heart… all that we’ve been through, no one had it worse than my Xiangdi…”
Jintong had just returned from having his head split open by a gang of Red Guards while he was out sweeping the streets. Now he stood beneath the parasol tree, all bloody, listening to Fourth Sister’s heartbreaking tale. Red Guards had nailed a row of placards to the gate of their compound, with notices such as: Traitor’s Family, Landlord Restitution Corps Nest, and Whore’s House. But as he listened to his dying sister, he had the urge to change the word “Whore’s” to “Filial Daughter’s” or “Martyr’s.” Up till now he had kept his distance from his sister because of her sickness; ho
w he wished he hadn’t done that. He walked up to her, took her cold hand in his, and said, “Fourth Sister, thank you for the locket… Fm wearing it now.”
The glow of happiness shone in Fourth Sister’s blind eyes. “Really? It doesn’t give you a bad feeling? Don’t tell your wife where you got it… let me touch it… see if it fits.”
During Xiangdi’s final moments on earth, all the fleas on her body left her, sensing, I guess, that there would be no more blood from her.
A smile, an ugly smile, rose on her lips and she said, her voice faltering, “My lute … let me play something … for you …”
She strummed the strings a time or two before her hand fell away and her head slumped to the side.
Mother wept for a moment only; then she stood up and said, “My precious daughter, your suffering has come to an end.”
Two days after we buried Xiangdi, just as things were calming down, a team of eight rightists from the Flood Dragon River Farm brought the body of Shangguan Pandi up to our gate. A man with a red armband, their leader, pounded on the gate. “You, Shangguans, come claim your body!”
“She’s not my daughter,” Mother told the leader.
The leader, a member of the tractor unit, knew Jintong, so he handed him a slip of paper. “This is your sister’s letter. In the spirit of revolutionary humanism, we’ve brought her home to you. You can’t imagine how heavy she is — carrying her body has just about worn out these rightists.”
Jintong nodded apologetically to the rightists before unfolding the slip of paper. On it were the words: I am Shangguan Pandi, not Ma Ruilian. After participating in the revolution for over twenty years, this is how I’ve ended up. When I die, I beg the revolutionary masses to take my body back to Dalan and turn it over to my mother, Shangguan Lu.
Jintong walked up to the door leaf on which the body lay, bent over, and removed the white paper covering her face. Pandi’s eyeballs bulged and her tongue stuck halfway out. Quickly covering her face again, he threw himself at the feet of the eight rightists and said, “I beg you, please, carry her over to the graveyard. There’s no one here who can do it.”
Mother began to wail loudly.
After burying his fifth sister, Jintong walked into the lane, dragging a shovel behind him, where he was stopped by a gang of Red Guards. They placed a paper dunce cap on his head. He shook his head, and the cap fell to the ground; he saw that his name had been written on it, with a red X through it. The black and red ink had run together, like blood. Beneath his name were the words “Necrophiliac and Murderer.” When the Red Guards began beating him on the buttocks with a club, he set up a howl, even though his padded pants kept the blows from hurting much. One of the Red Guards picked up the cap, ordered him to squat down like the comic opera character Wu Dalang, and put the cap back on his head, then pounded it down so it would stay. “Hold it on!” a fierce-looking Red Guard demanded. “The next time it falls off, we’ll break your legs!”
Holding the cap on with both hands, Jintong stumbled down the lane. At the gate of the People’s Commune, he saw a line of people, all wearing dunce caps. There were Sima Ting, his belly bloated, the taut skin nearly transparent; the grade-school principal; the middle-school political instructor, plus five or six commune officials minus their usual swagger, and a bunch of people who had once been forced by Lu Liren to kneel on the earthen platform in front of all the people. Then Jintong saw his mother. Next to her was little Parrot Han, and next to him was Old Jin, the woman with one breast. The words “Mother Scorpion, Shangguan Lu” were written on Mother’s cap. Parrot Han wasn’t wearing a cap, but Old Jin was, along with an old shoe that hung around her neck, as a sign of wantonness. With drums and gongs shattering the stillness, the Red Guards began the public parading of the “Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits.” It was the last market day before New Year’s, and the streets were packed with shoppers. People squatted on both sides of the street with piles of straw sandals, cabbages, and yam leaves, salable agricultural by-products. Everyone wore black padded jackets, shiny with a winter of snivel and greasy smoke. Many of the older men cinched up their pants with belts of hemp, and the general appearance of the people wasn’t much different from the Snow Festival fifteen years earlier. Half the people who had attended the Snow Festival had died during the three years of famine, and the survivors were now old men and women. A scant fewr of them could still recall how graceful and elegant the Snow Prince, Shangguan Jintong, had looked at that last Snow Festival. At the time, none of them could have imagined that he would one day become a “Necrophiliac and Murderer.”
The Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits walked on woodenly as Red Guards smacked them in the buttocks with clubs, more symbolic than real. The clanging of gongs and the beating of drums rocked the earth, the shouted slogans made eardrums throb. Crowds of people pointed fingers and engaged in animated discussions. As they walked, Jintong felt someone step on his right foot, but he let that pass. When it happened a second time, he looked up and saw that Old Jin’s eyes were on him, though her head was bowed and strands of yellow hair covered her reddened ears. “Goddamned ‘Snow Prince,’” he heard her say. “With all the living girls waiting for you, you had to do it to a corpse!” Pretending he hadn’t heard her, he kept his eyes fixed on the heels of the person ahead of him. “Come see me when this is over,” he heard her say, throwing him into confusion. Her inappropriate teasing disgusted him.
Sima Ting, who was hobbling along, tripped over a brick and fell to the ground. The Red Guards kicked him, but got no reaction. So one of the smaller ones stepped on his back and jumped up and down. We all heard a dull sound like a balloon popping and saw rivulets of yellow liquid ooze from his mouth. Mother knelt down and turned his head to face her. “What’s the matter, uncle?” His eyes opened just enough to show white, and with one last look at Mother, those eyes closed for the last time. The Red Guards dragged his body over to the ditch by the road. The procession continued.
Jintong spotted a graceful figure in the crowd, and recognized her at once. She was wearing a black corduroy overcoat, a brown scarf, and a blindingly white mask over her mouth and nose, so that all that showed were her dark eyes and lashes. Sha Zaohua! He nearly shouted out her name. She’d gone away right after First Sister was shot; during the seven years that had passed since then, he’d heard a rumor about a female thief who’d stolen Princess Sihanouk’s earring, and he knew it had to be Zaohua. From her appearance alone, she looked to have grown into a mature young woman. Among the black-clad citizens in the marketplace, those wearing scarves and face masks were the first group of urban youngsters to be sent down to the countryside, and Zaohua had the most urban airs of any of them. She was standing in the doorway of the co-op restaurant looking in his direction. The sun’s rays fell on her face, and he saw that her eyes shone like a pair of glittering marbles. Her hands were in the pockets of her overcoat; she was wearing a pair of blue corduroy pants, cut in the fashionable style of the day, which Jintong caught a glimpse of when she moved over to the doorway of the general store. A shirtless old man came running out of the restaurant and straight into the procession of Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits, with two men, who were not locals, in hot pursuit. The old man was so cold his skin was nearly black; his coarse white padded pants were hitched up all the way to his chest. As he weaved in and out among the people in dunce caps he crammed a flatcake into his mouth, nearly choking on it. The two men caught him, and he burst into tears, covering what was left of the food with snot and saliva. “I was hungry!” he sobbed. “Hungry!” The two men frowned in disgust at the sight of the wet, dirty remnant of the cake on the ground. One of them picked it up with two fingers and studied it disgustedly, but appeared to think it would be a pity to throw it away. “Don’t eat it, young fellow,” someone in the crowd urged him. “Take pity on him.” The man flung the cake down at the old man’s feet and snarled, “Go ahead, eat it, you old bastard, and I hope you choke on it!” He took out a handkerchief to wipe his fingers and walked of
f with his companion. The old man picked up the wet, sticky cake and carried it over to a nearby wall, where he rested on his haunches and slowly finished it off.
Sha Zaohua was moving in and out of the crowd. A uniformed petroleum worker in a dogskin cap made his way conspicuously toward them. His eyes were scarred, and a cigarette hung from his lips as he edged sideways through the crowd. Everyone eyed him with envy, and the greater his sense of self-importance, the brighter his eyes became. Jintong recognized him and was moved by the sight. Clothes make the man; saddles make the horse. A worker’s uniform and a dogskin cap had turned the village bully Fang Shixian into a new man. Few people in the crowd had ever seen one of those coarse blue uniforms, thick with padding, the cotton bulging between stitches, and obviously very warm. A youngster who looked like a dark monkey, in lined pants with a torn crotch from which cotton batting had migrated outside, like the tail of a sheep, and a padded jacket whose buttons had long since departed, leaving his belly exposed, followed on Fang Shixian’s heels, his hair looking like a rat’s nest. The people in the procession pushed and shoved to keep warm, when the youngster suddenly jumped into the air, swept the dogskin cap off of Fang’s head, clapped it onto his own, and scampered through the crowd like a cunning dog. Shouts erupted as the pushing and shoving increased. Fang Shixian reached up and felt his head; it took him a moment to realize what had happened, before he too began to shout and took off in pursuit of the youngster, who wasn’t running particularly fast, as if waiting for his pursuer. Fang followed him, cursing the whole time, his eyes fixed not on the road ahead, but on the sunlight glinting off the dog hairs of his cap; he crashed into people, who pushed back and spun him around. The unfolding drama captured the attention of everyone on the street, even the Red Guard little generals, who temporarily put aside class struggle, abandoning their Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits in order to push through the crowd and enjoy the spectacle. The youngster ran up to the gate in front of the People’s Commune steel mill, where some girls were selling roasted peanuts, something that was not permitted; always on the alert, they were ready to flee at any time. Even though it was the middle of winter, steam rose from the surface of the nearby pond owing to all the red liquid waste the mill dumped into it. The youngster took off the cap and flung it into the pond. Momentarily stunned, the people quickly regained their voices, shouting their gloating approval of what he’d done. The cap floated in the water, refusing to sink below the surface, and all Fang Shixian could do was stand at the edge of the pond and curse, “You little bastard, just wait till I get my hands on you!” But by then the little bastard was long gone, and Fang just paced back and forth, gazing out at his cap and blinking furiously, tears sliding down his cheeks. “Say, young man, go home and get a bamboo pole. That’ll do it,” someone shouted. “Ten dogskin caps would have sunk by the time you got back,” someone else said. As if to prove him right, the cap had already begun to slip beneath the surface. “Strip and go fetch it,” someone said. “Whoever gets it owns it!” Suddenly panicked, Fang tore off his uniform, until he was standing there dressed only in a pair of shorts; he stepped tentatively into the water, which quickly submerged him up to the shoulders. Finally, however, he managed to retrieve his cap. But while he was in the water, and everyone’s attention was focused on him, Jintong saw the youngster appear out of nowhere, scoop up Fang’s uniform, and disappear down a lane, where a slender figure flicked out of sight. By the time Fang climbed out of the pond, cap in hand, all that greeted him at the water’s edge were a pair of shoes and socks with holes in them. “Where are my clothes?” he shouted, the shouts quickly turning to agonizing wails. By the time he realized that his clothes had been stolen and that the theft of his dogskin cap had been a ruse, that he’d been tricked by a pro, he shouted, “My god, my life is over!” Still holding his cap, he jumped into the pond. Shouts of “Save him!” erupted all around, but no one was willing to strip down and jump in after him. What with the freezing wind and the ice on the ground, even though the water itself was heated, going in would be easier than getting out. So while Fang Shixian thrashed around in the water, the people merely commented on the thief’s scheme: “Brilliant!” they said. “Just brilliant”