Pow!

  Another bicycle went past.

  ‘Hey, Yang Yuzhen, where are you off to? Going to sell that pig's head?’

  I knew this one too. He was someone else who cooked braised pork; he too carried a tin on his bicycle and it too gave off a meaty aroma. He was Lao Lan's brother-in-law. He'd been called Su Zhou as a child; I forget his formal name. Perhaps that was because his nickname was so special—the name of that city down south. Su Zhou, Suzhou, what were his parents thinking when they gave him a name like that? He was one of the few men in our village who was not a butcher. Some people said he was a Buddhist, that he was opposed to killing, but he braised and sold the entrails of slaughtered animals. Grease on his lips and cheeks all day long, he reeked of meat from head to toe—you'd be hard pressed to consider him a Buddhist. I also knew that he added food colouring and formaldehyde to the meat, so his products were just like Shen Gang's—bright colour, strange smell. Doctored meat was supposed to be bad for your health, but I'd rather eat unhealthy meat than healthy turnips or cabbages. I still thought of him as a good man. As Lao Lan's brother-in-law, as his virtual lackey, he should have got on well with the older man. Surprisingly, he did not. Most people tried to get on the good side of our local despot but usually came away disappointed; this made Su Zhou an odd man in their eyes. Su Zhou said, ‘There are consequences to everything, good and evil.’ He said it to adults, he said it to children and when he was alone he probably said it to himself.

  Su Zhou looked back as he rode past. ‘Yang Yuzhen,’ he shouted, ‘if you're selling that pig's head, you don't need to go to town. Take it over to my place and I'll give you the same price. “There are consequences to everything, good and evil.”’

  Mother ignored him and ran on, dragging me behind her. Su Zhou was pedalling hard, trying to move against a headwind that had suddenly begun to blow. It bent the bare branches of the roadside poplars and set up a loud rustle, and the sky turned dark; the sun, at a height double that of the trees, trickled down thin red rays. Every once in a while we saw dried-up cow patties on the whitened, windswept road. The farming life of our village was dead and buried; the fields lay fallow and no one raised cows any longer. So those droppings had been left by the furtive cattle merchants from West County. The sight of those patties took me back to the glorious days when I'd accompanied Father as he priced cattle and reminded me of the enchanting fragrance of cooked meat. I swallowed a mouthful of saliva and looked up at Mother's face. Rivulets of sweat—possibly mixed with tears—dampened the collar of her sweater. Yang Yuzhen, I hate you and I pity you! My thoughts then turned inescapably to the pink oval face of Aunty Wild Mule. Dark eyebrows that met in the middle, above a pair of eyes with a little white showing, atop a long and lovely pointed nose that rose above a wide mouth. The look on her face always reminded me of an animal although I didn't know which one. Later, a man came to our village selling a fine breed of foxes. When I looked into their rabbit-hutch cages and saw the secretive looks on their faces, then I knew.

  Every time I went with Father to Aunty Wild Mule's house, she greeted me with a smile and handed me a steaming piece of beef or pork. ‘Eat,’ she'd say, ‘eat as much as you want. There's more where that came from.’ Her smile seemed to me tinged with something slightly devious, slightly evil, as if she were trying to lure me into doing something wrong simply because it would amuse her. I liked her anyway. She never actually got me to do anything wrong. Even if she had, I'd have gone along with it. Then I saw her and Father in each other's arms—and I tell you the truth, Wise Monk—I was moved to tears by the sight. I didn't know then about what went on between men and women, and I couldn't understand why Father pressed his lips against hers, or why they made all those slurping sounds, like they were trying to suck something out of each other's mouth (and they actually did suck out something sweet and delicious). Now I know that's called smooching, or, more refined, kissing. I, of course, had no idea what it felt like but the expressions on their faces and the way they moved struck me as something quite passionate; it may have also been agonizing because I saw tears in Aunty Wild Mule's eyes.

  Mother was almost worn out; by the time Su Zhou rode past, her pace had slowed considerably, as had mine. It was not because she was having second thoughts, no, not that. She still wanted to get to the train station and bring Father home. Take my word for it. She was my mother, and I understood her; I could tell what she was thinking just by looking at her face and listening to her breathe. The main reason she was slowing down was exhaustion. She'd risen before dawn, lit a fire, cooked breakfast, loaded the tractor; then, taking advantage of the freezing temperature, poured water on the paper to make it heavier. Then had followed the dramatic reunion with Father, and she'd run off to buy a pig's head, and, I suspect, a bath at the sulphur springs that had just opened in our village (I could smell the sulphur when I saw her at the door). Her face glowed, her spirits soared and her hair was wet, all evidence of a bath. She'd come home filled with hope and happiness only to have Father's second departure hit her like a bolt of lightning or a bucket of icy water, chilling her from head to toe. Any other woman suffering a blow like that would have gone mad or cried her eyes out; my mother stood there glass-eyed and slack-jawed, but only for a moment. She knew that falling to the ground and pretending to die was not in her best interest, nor, especially, was another round of tears. What she needed to do was get to the train station as fast as possible and, before the train left, stop that homeless man—who had somehow retained his integrity—from leaving. For a while after Father left the first time, Mother had been fond of a saying she'd picked up somewhere: ‘Moscow doesn't believe in tears!’ It became her mantra. That and Comrade Su Zhou's ‘There are consequences to everything, good and evil’ were a pair of couplets that spread through the village. Mother's fondness for this saying revealed her grasp of reality. Crying does not help in a crisis. Moscow didn't believe in tears, nor did Slaughterhouse Village. The only way to deal with a crisis was to take action.

  We stood at the door of the station's waiting room, trying to catch our breath. Ours was a tiny station on a feeder line, and only a few local freight trains that also carried passengers stopped there. A wall with posters, fragments of slogans still stuck to them, stood in the windswept plaza. Underground enemies had scrawled counterrevolutionary slogans in chalk, mostly insults hurled at leaders of the local Party and government organizations. A woman selling roasted peanuts had set up shop in front of the wall—she wore a dark red scarf and a white surgical mask that showed only her eyes and their furtive look. A man stood beside her, arms crossed, a cigarette dangling from his lips, bored stiff. An iron basin sat on the rear rack of the bicycle in front of him, and the smell of cooked meat wafted across from beneath a strip of gauze. It wasn't Shen Gang, and it wasn't Su Zhou. Where had they gone? Had all their beautiful, ambrosia-scented meat already wound up in someone else's stomach? How would I know? One sniff told me that the meat in that man's basin was beef and cow entrails, and that it had been injected with a large amount of food colouring and formaldehyde, which made it look fresh from the slaughterhouse and smell quite wonderful. My gaze sidled over to it, like a fishhook, aiming to snatch a piece. But my body was in the grip of my mother and being reluctantly dragged to the waiting-room door.

  It was one of those spring doors that had been out of fashion for more than a decade. You had to fight to get it open, which it did at last and with a loud clang. When you let go, it sprang shut and then bounced right back—if you hadn't moved away, it would slam into your backside and make you stumble if you were lucky and knock you to the floor if you weren't. I pulled the door open for Mother, then leapt in behind her; by the time the door slammed shut I was safely inside, ruining the crafty door's plan to send me flying.

  I immediately spotted Father and the pretty girl he and Aunty Wild Mule had created—my little sister. Thank God they hadn't left yet.

  Someone—I don't know who—flings a bloody, foul-smelling army uniform through the
door, and it lands between the Wise Monk and me. I stare at the ominous object, startled, and wonder what's going on. There's a coin-sized hole in the uniform, right where the rank smell is the strongest. I also detect the faint odour of gunpowder and cosmetics. Something white is tucked into one of the pockets. A silk scarf? Filled with curiosity, I reach out to touch it but just then a pile of mud and rotting reeds, loosened by shards of roof tile, falls from the sky and covers the bloody clothes, and there, between the Wise Monk and me, a tiny grave is created. I look into the rafters, where a sun-drenched skylight has broken through the blackness. I'm terrified that this temple, forgotten by the world, is about to come crashing down, and I begin to fidget. But the Wise Monk doesn't budge, having regulated his breathing so as to appear absolutely still. The haze outside has cleared and bright sunlight covers the ground, turning the dampness in the yard into steam. The leaves on the gingko tree have an oily sheen, radiating life. A tall man in an orange leather jacket, drab olive wool pants and bright red calfskin knee-length boots, his hair parted in the middle, wearing a pair of small, round sunglasses and gripping a cigar between his teeth, materializes in the courtyard.

  POW! 13

  The man stands straight and stiff; his dark skin, with its reddish glow, reminds me of one of those arrogant yet brave US army officers you see in war films. But he's not one of those—he's Chinese through and through. And the second he opens his mouth to speak I can tell he's a local. Despite his familiar accent, his clothes and the way he moves tell me there's something mysterious about his origins, that he's no ordinary man. He's been around. Compared to him, our resident VIP, Lao Lan, looks like a country bumpkin. (As I think this I can almost hear Lao Lan say: ‘I know those urban petty bourgeois look down on us, think we're a bunch of country bumpkins. Crap! Just who are they calling country bumpkins? My third uncle was a pilot in the Chinese Air Force, a drinking buddy of Chennault, the Flying Tigers leader. Back when most Chinese hadn't even heard about the US, my third uncle was making love to an American woman. How dare they call us bumpkins?’) The man walks up to the temple and smiles, a mischievous, childlike gleam in his eyes. I feel as if I know him, that we're close. He unzips his pants and aims a stream of piss at the temple door, and some of the drops splash onto my bare feet. The man's tool does not suffer in comparison with that of the Horse Spirit behind the Wise Monk. He must be trying to humiliate us, but the Wise Monk doesn't so much as twitch; in fact, a barely perceptible smile appears on his face. There's a direct line between his face and the man's tool, while I can only see it out of the corner of my eye. If he can look straight at it and not be upset, why should I let a sideways glance upset me? The man's bladder holds enough to drown a small tree. The urine bubbles, like the foam on a glass of beer, as it pools round the Wise Monk's tattered prayer mat. Finally finished, he shakes his tool contemptuously. Realizing that we're ignoring him, he turns his back, stretches his arms and throws out his chest and a muted roar emerges from his mouth. Sunlight shines through his right ear, turning it as pink as a peony. I catch sight of a crowd of women who look like 1930s dance-hall socialites, in form-fitting qipaos that show off their curvaceous, slim bodies, their hair permed in loose or tight curls, their bodies glittering with jewellery. The way they carry themselves, the way they frown and the way they smile—modern women would have trouble keeping up. Their bodies give off a stale but regal odour, and I find it deeply moving. I have a feeling that we are somehow related. The women are like brightly feathered birds, warbling orioles and trilling swallows—chirp-chirp, tweet-tweet—as they rush to surround the man in the leather jacket. Some of them tug at his sleeves, others grab his belt; some sneak a pinch on his thigh, others stuff slips of paper in his pockets; some even feed him sweets. One of them, of an indeterminate age, seems more daring than the others. She wears silver lipstick and a white silk qipao with a red rose embroidered on the breast that, at first glance, makes her look as if she's been struck by bullets but has survived. High breasts, like doves. She looks like a siren. She walks up to the man, jumps into the air, her stiletto heels leaving the muddy ground, and grabs hold of his large ear. ‘Xiao Lan, you're an ungrateful dog!’ she curses in a sweetly husky voice. The man called Xiao Lan responds with an exaggerated scream: ‘Ouch, Mamma, I might be ungrateful to others but not to you! ‘How dare you argue with me!’ she says, squeezing harder. The man cocks his head and pleads: ‘Mamma, dear Mamma, not so hard. I'll be good from now on. Why don't I make it up by taking you out for a late-night snack?’ The woman lets go: ‘I know your every move like the back of my hand,’ she says spitefully, ‘and if you think you can get frisky with me, I'll get someone to cut off your balls, you dog bastard!’ Cupping his crotch with his hands, the man shouts: ‘Spare me, Mamma, I need these little treasures to carry on my line! ‘You can carry on your old lady's thighs’ she curses. ‘But I'll give you a chance to redeem yourself for the sake of my sisters out there. Where will you take us?’ ‘How about Heaven on Earth?’ he asks. ‘No. They've hired a new bouncer, a foreign devil with terrible BO. Just a whiff's enough to make me ill,’ says a woman with big eyes, a pointy chin and a shrill voice. She's in a purple qipao with tiny flowers and has tied her hair with a purple silk band. Lightly made-up, she has a refined, cultured look, a sort of cornflower elegance. ‘Then let Miss Wang decide,’ says a woman so fat she's nearly bursting through the seams of her yellow silk qipao. ‘She's shared meals with Xiao Lan in every eatery in town, so she must know where to go! Miss Wang manages to keep smiling, though there is the trace of a sneer. ‘You can't beat the shark's fin soup at Imperial Garden. What do you think, Mrs Shen?’ she says, seeking the opinion of the woman who'd pinched Xiao Lan's ear a moment earlier. ‘If Miss Wang likes Imperial Garden, that's good enough for me,’ replies Mrs Shen with aristocratic nonchalance. ‘Then let's go!’ cries the man says with a wave of his arm as he sets off in the company of the women, his arms circling the nicely rounded buttocks of the two closest to him. They're gone before I know it but their fragrances remain, saturating the air in the compound and merging with the smell of the man's urine to produce a strange, irritating, ammonia-tainted odour. The sound of a car engine and they're off. As tranquillity returns to the temple and its compound, I cast a glance at the Wise Monk and know what's expected of me: to continue my story. ‘Since there's a beginning, there has to be an ending.’ So I say—

  There were only a few people waiting for trains, which made the waiting room seem bigger than it was. Father and his daughter were curled up on a slatted wooden bench near the central heater. Another dozen passengers sat here and there. Warm sunlight filtering in through the dirty windows lent a silvery sheen to Father's hair. He was smoking a cigarette; white wisps of smoke rose from both sides of his face and seemed to hang in the air round his head, as if they hadn't emerged from his mouth or nose but had oozed from his brain. His cigarette smelt terrible, like burnt rags or rotting leather. By then he'd fallen on such hard times that he was reduced to scrounging cigarette butts off the street, no better than a beggar. Worse, in fact. I knew of beggars who lived extravagant lives, who ate good food and drank good wine, who passed their days in the lap of luxury, smoking high-class cigarettes and drinking imported whisky. During the day they dressed in rags and walked the streets and used a number of tricks to get alms. At night they changed into Western suits and leather shoes and headed off to karaoke parlours to sing their hearts out, and then set off to find a girl. Yuan Seven in our village was one of those high-flying beggars. Traces of him could be found in every big city in the country. A man of the world, he'd seen it all and done it all; he could imitate a dozen or more domestic dialects, even a few phrases in Russian. The minute he opened his mouth you knew he was someone special, and even Lao Lan, the supreme authority in our village, treated him with a measure of respect and never dared to show him up. He had a good-looking wife at home and a son in middle school who always received good grades. He proudly admitted that he had families in ten or more big cit
ies, putting him in the enviable position of having a happy home to return to no matter where he was. Yuan Seven dined on sea cucumbers and abalone, drank Maotai and Wuliangye and smoked Yuxi and Da Zhonghua cigarettes from Yunnan. A beggar like that could turn down an offer to be county magistrate. If my father had been that kind of beggar, the Luo family would have been the envy of all. Unfortunately, he was in a sort of limbo between life and death, reduced to smoking cigarette butts off the street.

  The waiting room was warm and toasty and seemed to possess a dreamy atmosphere. Most of the travellers dozed as they waited, making the place look a bit like a henhouse. Their belongings, in bundles big and small, lay at their feet, alongside fake snakeskin bags that threatened to burst at the seams. The only ‘hens’ who looked out of place were two men with no luggage except for well-worn faux-leather satchels resting against their legs. They were lying on a bench, face to face, the space between them covered by a sheet of newspaper on which lay a pile of sliced, red-speckled pigs’ ears. Not what you'd call fresh but still good enough to eat. I knew they were from animals that had died—not slaughtered but sick pigs treated to look palatable. Where I come from, it doesn't matter what kills an animal—swine fever, erysipelas or hoof-and-mouth disease. We have ways to make any kind of meat look appetizing. There's no crime in being greedy but there is in being wasteful—that particular reactionary comment was enunciated by our very own Village Head Lan, and the old son of a bitch could have been shot for it. The men were feasting and getting drunk on what people call white lightning, local stuff but sort of famous, produced by Master Liu's family. Who was Master Liu? you ask. I couldn't say. Though no Liu family I knew ever made spirits, unscrupulous individuals distilled them under that family name. The smell alone was enough to kill you. Perhaps it was distilled methanol? Methanol, formaldehyde—China's become a nation of chemical wizards. Formaldehyde and methanol are like money in the bank. I swallowed a mouthful of saliva and watched them hand the green bottle back and forth, sipping and smacking their lips, stopping only to pick up a pig's ear—no chopsticks required, hands only—and stuff it into their mouths. The one with the long, skinny face even tipped back his head and dropped one into his mouth just to make my mouth water, the no-good arsehole, the cunning prick. By the look of him, he could have been a cigarette-peddler, even a cattle thief. He was no good, whatever line of work he was in, but he thought he was something special. So you're eating and drinking—big deal! If we wanted to eat at home, we'd do better than you. Our butchers can tell the difference between meat from a sick animal and meat from a slaughtered one, and they'd never be caught smacking their lips over meat from a sick pig. Sure, if there was no slaughtered pork they might eat a little from a sick pig. I once heard Lao Lan say that we Chinese are blessed with iron stomachs that can turn rotten stuff into nutrients. My mouth watered as I gaped at the pig's head in Mother's hand.