I was not cut out to be a student. It was sheer agony to sit on a stool for forty-five minutes and behave myself. And not just once a day, but seven times, four in the morning and three in the afternoon. I began to feel dizzy at about the ten-minute mark and wanted nothing more than to lie down and go to sleep. I could hear neither my teacher's murmurs nor my classmates’ recitations. The teacher's face faded from view and was replaced by what looked like a cinema screen across which danced images of people, cows and dogs.
My homeroom teacher, Ms Cai, a woman with a moon face, a head of hair like a rat's nest, a short neck and a big arse—she waddled like a duck—hated me from the beginning but chose to ignore me. She taught maths, which invariably put me to sleep. ‘Luo Xiaotong!’ she shouted once, grabbing me by the ear.
Eyes open but brain not yet in gear, I asked: ‘What's wrong? Someone die at your house?’
If she interpreted that as a curse that augured a death in her family, she was wrong. I'd been dreaming of doctors in white smocks running down the street shouting: ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry, someone's died at the teacher's house.’ But, of course, she couldn't know that, which is why she interpreted my shout as a curse on her. If I'd said that to one of the less civilized teachers at the school, my ears would have been ringing from a resounding slap. But she was a cultured woman; she merely returned to the front of the room, her cheeks flushed, and sniffled like an ill-treated girl. Biting her lip, as if to pluck up courage, she said: ‘Luo Xiaotong, there are eight pears and four children. How do you divide them up?’
‘Divide them up? You fight over them! This is an age of “primitive accumulation”. The bold stuff their bellies, the timid starve to death and the biggest fist wins the fight!’
My answer got a laugh out of my dimwitted classmates, who could not possibly have understood me. They just liked my attitude, and when one laughed the others followed, filling the room with laughter. The boy next to me, whom everyone called Mung Bean, laughed so hard that snot spurted from his nose. Under the guidance of a dimwitted teacher, that pack of dimwits was growing even more dimwitted. I stared at the teacher with a triumphant look but all she could do was bang the table with her pointer.
‘Stand up!’ she demanded angrily, her face turning deep red.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why should I stand when everyone else stays in their seat?’
‘Because you're answering a question,’ she said.
‘I'm supposed to stand when I answer a question?’ My voice dripped with sarcasm and arrogance. ‘Don't you have a TV at home? If you don't, does that mean you've never watched TV? Have you never seen a pig walk just because you've never eaten pork? If you've watched TV, have you ever seen a press conference? The officials don't stand up to answer questions—the reporters stand up to ask the questions.’
That drew another laugh from my dimwitted classmates, who, once again, could not possibly have understood me. Not a clue! They might watch TV but cartoons only—never serious programmes, like I did. And never, not in a million years, would they be able to understand world affairs like I did. Wise Monk, even before that year's Lantern Festival, we had a Japanese 21-inch colour TV with a rectangular screen and a remote. A TV like that these days would be considered an antique, but then it was ultra-modern; and not onlu in our village but even in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Lao Lan had sent it over with Huang Bao and, when he took it out of the box, all black and shiny, we were absolutely amazed. ‘It's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous,’ was Mother's comment. Even Father, never one to beam with happiness, said: ‘Would you look at that! How in the world did they make something like that!’ Even the Styrofoam packing elicited whoops of surprise from him—he found it incredible that something useful could be so light and airy. It was nothing to me, of course—we'd seen plenty of it on our scavenging route, but we never gave it a second thought because none of the recycling centres would take it. Besides the TV set, Huang Bao brought along a herringbone antenna and a seamless 15-metre metal pole coated with anti-rust material. When we stood it up in the yard it made our house look like a crane amid chickens, towering over the neighbourhood. If I could have climbed to the top of the pole, I'd have had a bird's-eye view of the whole village. Our eyes lit up when the first gorgeous images flashed across the TV screen. That TV raised the standing of our family to a new level. And I grew a lot smarter. Enrolling me in school—in the first grade, no less—was little more than a joke of international proportions. Slaughterhouse Village could boast two individuals who were knowledgeable and well informed: Lao Lan and me. Written words were a stranger to me, but I was no stranger to them, at least that's how it felt to me. There are lots of things in this world that do not need to be studied, at least not in a school, in order to be learnt. Don't tell me you have to go to school to be able to know how to divide eight pears among four children!
My response rendered the teacher speechless. I saw something glitter in her eyes and knew that when they finally spilt they'd be tears. I was proud of myself but I was also frightened. I knew that a student who made his homeroom teacher cry would be seen as a bad seed, although, paradoxically, people would know he had a bright future with endless possibilities. If his development went in the right direction, a child like that was virtually guaranteed an official position; if not, we're talking big-time criminal. But one way or other, he'd be special. Sad to say, but thank goodness, those glittering objects in the teacher's eyes did not spill.
‘Leave the room,’ she said, softly at first, and then shrilly: ‘Roll that fanny of yours out of here!’
‘A ball's the only thing that can roll out of here, Teacher, except a hedgehog, when it rolls itself into a ball. I'm not a ball, and I'm not a hedgehog, I'm human, so I can walk out of here or run out of here or, of course, crawl out of here.’
‘Then crawl out of here.’
‘But I can't do that either,’ I said. ‘If I hadn't learnt how to walk yet, then I'd have to crawl. But I'm a big boy now, and if I start crawling it'll mean I've done something wrong, but since I've done nothing wrong I can't crawl out of here.’
‘Just get out of here, get out…’ She was almost hoarse from shouting. ‘Luo Xiaotong, you make me so angry I could burst…you and that perverse logic of yours…’
In the end, those glittering objects did spill from of her eyes and onto her cheeks and became tears, creating such an abruptly solemn feeling in me that my eyes grew moist too. Under no circumstances was I going to allow the wetness in my eyes to spill out onto my cheeks and turn into tears, not if I wanted to retain my dignity in front of my dimwitted classmates and not lose every last shred of significance in my verbal battle with the teacher. So I stood up and walked out of class.
I went through the gate and out onto Hanlin Bridge, where I leaned over the railing to watch the green water flowing below. There I saw little black fish not much bigger than mosquito larvae swimming along, their numbers greatly diminished when a much larger fish surged through with its mouth open. A comment I'd once heard popped into my head: Big fish eat little fish, little fish eat shrimps, shrimps eat silt. The only way to keep from being eaten is to be bigger than others. I sensed that I was already one of the big ones, though not big enough. I had to grow, and grow quickly. My eye caught a cluster of tadpoles, a tight, black, quivering mass rushing through the water, like a black cloud. Why had the big fish dined on little fish but not the tadpoles? Why, I wondered, do people, cats, kingfishers, with their long beaks and short tails, and lots of other creatures eat little fish but not tadpoles? Basically, I figured, because they don't taste good. But how would we know they don't taste good if we never tried them? Once again, basically, because of their appearance. Ugly creatures don't taste good. On the other hand, snakes, scorpions and locusts are ugly things and yet people fight over them. No one ate scorpions till the 1980s, when people began to treat them as gourmet food and they appeared on all the finest tables. My first taste came at one of Lao Lan's banquets. I want everyone to take note that,
in the wake of our New Year's visit to Lao Lan, I became a regular guest at his home, spending lots of leisure time there, alone or with my sister. His wolfhounds treated us almost as family: now, when we walked in, we were greeted with wagging tails instead of menacing barks. But back to my original question: Why don't people eat tadpoles? Could it be because they're slimy, snotty-looking things? But so are snails, and people love them. Or is it because tadpoles come from toads, and toads are poisonous? But tadpoles come from frogs, too, and many consider frogs a delicacy. And not just people—there's a cow in our village that loves frogs. So why don't people eat the young creatures that will grow into frogs? I couldn't make sense of it, and couldn't help thinking that the world was a very puzzling place. But if there's one thing I knew, it was that only well-informed youngsters like me contemplated these complex issues. I was faced with a great many questions, not because I lacked knowledge but because I possessed it. I didn't think much of my homeroom teacher, but was grateful to be the target of that last comment of hers—perverse logic. I felt that her evaluation of me was quite fair. What sounded like a curse was, in truth, lavish praise. My classmates knew the meaning only of one part—perverse—with no chance of grasping the whole idea—perverse logic. To take it a step further: How many people in the village knew the meaning of perverse logic? I did, and without recourse to a teacher. In essence, perverse logic is a perverse way of thinking about things.
In accordance with my perverse logic associated with tadpoles, I began thinking about swallows. Actually, the thought about swallows didn't come out of nowhere. Some were flying low over the river at the moment, and they were so beautiful in flight. They skimmed the surface, raising tiny waves with their bellies and sending ripples to the banks. Others stood on the banks and dug their beaks into the mud. This was the season for building nests—apricot trees were in bloom, and buds on peach trees were waiting their turn to flower. There were new leaves on riverside weeping willows, and cries of cuckoos came on the air from afar. Everyone knew it was time for planting, but no one in Slaughterhouse Village worked the fields any more—it was a tiring, sweaty way to make a meagre living. Who but a moron would do that? There definitely were no morons in Slaughterhouse Village, where the fields were left fallow. When he returned home, my father planned to take up the plough, but that never happened. Lao Lan had given him the responsibility of managing the United Meatpacking Plant, while he himself was chairman and general manager of its parent company, the newly created Huachang Corporation.
Father's plant was half a li east of the school, within sight of the bridge. Originally housing a number of canvas-production workshops, the buildings had been restructured for animal slaughter. Every creature that entered one of the buildings, except for the humans, went in alive and came out dead. I was much more interested in the plant than I was in school, but Father would not let me near it. Nor would Mother. He was the plant manager, she its bookkeeper and many of the village's independent butchers its workforce.
I sauntered towards the plant. After being thrown out of class, I experienced a sense of unease over what I considered to be a smallish mistake—at first, that is. But that feeling left me as I strolled along on that glorious spring day. How incredibly foolish to sit cooped up inside a room listening to a teacher chatter away during that wonderful season. No less foolish than going out to tend a field day after day, knowing it only put you deeper in debt. Why should I have to go to school? The teachers didn't know any more than I did, perhaps even less. And while I knew practical, useful things, everything they knew was useless. Lao Lan had been right about everything except when he told my parents to send me to school. It was also a mistake to have them enrol my sister in preschool. I was tempted to rescue her from her ordeal and explore the secrets of nature with her. We could fish in the river with our bare hands, we could climb trees and trap birds, we could pick wildflowers in open fields. There was no limit to the things we could do, and every one of them was better than being in school.
From my hiding place behind a riverside willow tree, I surveyed Father's plant, a large compound surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. It looked more like a prison—rows of high-ceiling factory buildings inside the wall, with a row of squat buildings in the southwest corner in front of a massive smokestack belching out thick smoke. That, I knew, was the plant's kitchen, the source of the meaty aroma that frequently assailed my nostrils, even when I was in class. When that happened, my teacher and my classmates ceased to exist and my mind filled with beautiful images of meat that expelled bursts of heated fragrance as it lined up and hopped along a road paved with garlic paste and coriander and other spices, heading straight for me. I could smell it now. I had no trouble picking out the smell of beef, of lamb, of pork and of dog, and beautiful visions swam in my head. Yes, in my head, where meat always has form and is imbued with language; meat is a richly evocative living thing with which I enjoy a close relationship. These meats call out to me: ‘Come eat me! Come eat me, Xiaotong, and hurry.’
The gate was shut, even though it was midday. Unlike the school gate, which was made of finger-thin steel bars with gaps wide enough to allow a young calf through, this was a sturdy double-panelled gate made of two iron plates that would require a pair of strong young men to push it open and pull it shut, two extremely creaky operations. Later, when I watched it being opened and shut, it was just as I'd assumed.
The smell of meat drew me down off the riverbank and across the broad paved road, where I waved to a black dog out for a stroll. It looked up and gazed at me with the eyes of an old man living out his sad days, then made its way over to a roadside building, turned and lay down in the doorway, where a wooden sign, painted white with writing in red, hung on a brick wall. I didn't know those words but they knew me. The place, I knew, was the plant's new inspection station. All the meat from Father's plant passed through here. Once it received the blue stamp of approval, it was on its way to wholesalers throughout the county, the province and beyond. No matter where it went, that stamp was all it needed to be sold on the open market.
I barely paused in front of this building, since it wasn't occupied. Looking through one of the dirty windows, I spotted a pair of desks and a disorderly array of chairs. All brand new, they had yet to be cleaned of factory dust. A disagreeable paint smell seeped through gaps in the window and set me off on a sneezing fit.
But the main reason I chose not to dally was the captivating aroma of meat in the air. Admittedly, after the Spring Festival passed, meat dishes had stopped being a rarity at our table, but the devilish attraction of meat created an insatiable appetite, the sort of effect women have on men. You can eat your fill today and still hanker for more tomorrow. If one meaty meal somehow satisfied people's appetites for all time, Father's meatpacking plant would have had to shut down. No, the world is the way it is because people are in the habit of eating meat, and their nature is to return to it meal after meal.
POW! 28
Four barbecue stands have been set up in front of the temple. Four ruddy-faced cooks in tall chef's hats are standing under white umbrellas. More stands have been set up in the field on the north side of the highway, where the line of white umbrellas reminds me of the beach. By all appearances, today promises to be bigger than yesterday, with greater numbers of people who want to eat meat, who have the capacity for it and who can afford it. Despite the daily media blitz against a meat diet and the call to replace it with vegetarian fare, how many people will willingly give up eating meat? Look, Wise Monk, here comes Lan Laoda. I count him among my acquaintances, even though we're yet to have a chance to talk. But that day will come, I'm sure of that, and we'll become fast friends. In the words of his nephew, Lao Lan: ‘The friendship between our two families goes back generations.’ If not for my father's grandfather, who braved chilling dangers to take him and his siblings through a blockade and deliver them to the Nationalist area by horse cart, there'd be no glories for his descendants. Lan Laoda wields enormous power
, but I, Luo Xiaotong, am a man of unique experience. Just look at the Meat God standing there. That's me in my youth. The youthful me has been transformed into a god. Lan Laoda is being carried in a simple sedan chair patterned after those Sichuan litters, its passage marked by a series of languid creaks. A fat child who's fast asleep, snoring loudly and drooling copiously, occupies another sedan chair behind him. Bodyguards are arrayed, front and back; there's also a pair of loyal, dependable middle-aged nannies. Lan Laoda's chair is set down and he steps out. He's put on weight since I last saw him, and he has bags under his eyes. He's also not as energetic as before. The second chair touches the ground, but the boy sleeps on. When the nannies move to awaken him, Lan Laoda stops them with a wave of his hand; he then tiptoes up to the sleeping boy, takes a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wipes away the spittle. The boy wakes up and gazes at him with a blank look before opening his mouth and bawling. ‘Don't cry,’ Lan Laoda says soothingly, ‘that's a good boy.’ But he cries on, so one of the nannies twirls a little red rattle-drum in front of him. The boy takes it from her, twirls it a time or two and throws it away. More tears. The other nanny says to Lan Laoda: ‘The young master must be hungry, sir.’ ‘Then get him some meat!’ he says. At the prospect of business, the four cooks bang their utensils and begin to yell: