Brothers (15 page)

The middle-schoolers peered at one another and began to cackle. They continued cackling as they walked off. Blacksmith Tong looked first at them, then at Baldy Li and Song Gang on the ground, and sauntered away, proclaiming, "You are all the blossoms of our nation."

Baldy Li and Song Gang struggled to their feet. Bruised and battered, they looked at each other. Song Gang simply couldn't understand why he wasn't able to sweep long-haired Sun Wei to the ground. He asked Baldy Li what had gone wrong. Didn't he use the crucial move? Baldy Li huffed, "That move doesn't exist. Your father was bullshitting us."

Song Gang shook his swollen face. "He's our father. Fathers don't lie to sons."

Baldy Li hollered, "He's your dad, not mine."

The two of them stood there, shouting at each other. Finally Song Gang wiped the tears from his face and blew his nose. He said, "Let's go ask Papa."

Baldy Li and Song Gang came to the front entrance of the middle school. A struggle session was getting out. Song Fanping stood with his placard hanging from his neck, along with two others, as a group of students who had just walked out surrounded them and shouted slogans condemning them. A few people wearing red armbands were also saying something. The two boys didn't know that these people, after getting out of the big struggle session inside, were holding another small rally here. The boys squeezed through the crowd and went right up to Song Fanping. Song Gang tugged at his father's sleeve, asking, "Papa, you taught us the most important move in the sweeping leg kick, didn't you?"

Song Fanping stood bowed and motionless. Song Gang started crying pitifully. He pushed at his father. "Papa, tell Baldy Li you taught us…"

Song Fanping remained silent. Baldy Li started yelling, "You lied to us. You didn't teach us how to do the sweeping leg kick. You lied to us about the characters on the wooden placard. They mean landlord,’ but you told us they meant ‘Chairman Mao of the land.'"

At that moment Baldy Li had no way of knowing what a terrible fate his words would bring down on Song Fanping, and he was stunned by what followed. When the people heard Baldy Li's words, they were initially flabbergasted, then they proceeded to strike, kick, and pummel Song Fanping until he was barely breathing. They roared as they stomped and kicked him on the ground, demanding that he confess how he had wickedly attacked "our great leader, our great teacher, our great general, our great helmsman—Chairman Mao."

Baldy Li had never seen anyone pummeled like this before. Song Fanping's face was completely covered in blood, and even his hair was soaked red. He lay there as countless adults and children stomped on him, his body like a platform as countless people stepped over him. His face didn't flinch, but his eyes did—twitching to the side so that he could glimpse Baldy Li and Song Gang. When he looked at Baldy Li, it was as if he was saying something with his gaze, a gaze that terrified Baldy Li. After a while Baldy Li was squeezed out of the circle and could no longer see Song Fanping's eyes. He only saw Song Gang wailing as he tried to force his way back into the circle. There were more and more spectators, and Song Gang was pushed farther and farther away. Finally he opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He walked next to Baldy Li, his face full of tears and snot, his mouth opening and closing as if he was yelling at Baldy Li, but Baldy Li couldn't hear a thing. After Song Gang yelled silently for a while, he punched Baldy Li and Baldy Li punched him right back. The two boys took turns punching each other, as if taking turns dealing out a deck of cards. Altogether, they punched each more than thirty-six times.

CHAPTER 12

A
FTER SONG FANPING
had been beaten to a pulp, he was taken away and locked up in a room in a large warehouse. The following week, Song Gang and Baldy Li stopped speaking to each other. Song Gang, in any event, couldn't speak at all; he had yelled so hard that day and his throat had become so red and swollen that now, when he tried to speak, no sound came out. Baldy Li knew that it was his revelation that had sent Song Fanping to that prisonlike warehouse, and when he lay down to sleep at night, all he could think about was Song Fanping being kicked and stomped as Song Fanping's eyes anxiously sought out his and Song Gangs. Baldy Li trembled but refused to cede an inch. He mocked Song Gang for having a mouth that was good only for farting.

Baldy Li was now on his own. He roamed the streets alone, sat under trees alone, squatted by the river and drank alone, talked to himself as he stood on the street looking, waiting, hoping for another child his age to wander over. Covered in sweat and scorched by the sun, he saw around him only parading people and parading flags. Children his age were all led by their mothers’ hands as they were pulled past him one after another. No one spoke to him or even deigned to look at him. Only when some passerby accidentally bumped into him or spat on his foot, only then might someone realize he was there. Only the three middle-schoolers showed any interest in him, and each time they saw him they would wave eagerly and call out, "Hey, kid, come show us some of your sex drive."

They waved at him as they enthusiastically walked over. He knew that what they really wanted was to practice their sweeping leg kicks. They wanted to kick him until he shat in his pants and his face swelled up. Baldy Li therefore ran for his life, and the three middle-schoolers ran after him, laughing and saying, "Hey, kid, don't run. We won't kick you."

That summer, in order to get away from the middle-schoolers’ kicks, Baldy Li often ran until he collapsed. His eight-year-old legs sore and shaking, his eight-year-old lungs burning for oxygen, his eight-year-old
heart pounding wildly, his eight-year-old self ran until he almost died. Finally Baldy Li limped into the alley where Blacksmith Tong, Tailor Zhang, Scissors Guan, and Yanker Yu resided.

Now, of course, they were known as Revolutionary Blacksmith, Revolutionary Tailor, Revolutionary Scissors, and Revolutionary Tooth-Yanker. When a customer brought a bolt of fabric to Tailor Zhang's shop, Zhang would first grill him, asking him about his class background. If he was a poor peasant, Tailor Zhang would greet him with a smile; if he was a middle peasant, Zhang would reluctantly take the fabric; and if he was a landlord, Zhang would immediately raise his fist and shout revolutionary slogans until his ashen-faced landlord customer ran out of the shop with his fabric. Even as he disappeared down the alley, Tailor Zhang would stand at his shop door, declaiming to his departing landlord client, "I will make you the shabbiest funeral garb, no, just a sheet for wrapping your corpse."

The two Scissors Guan were even more revolutionarily enlightened than Tailor Zhang. They didn't take any money from their peasant customers, they took extra from the middle-peasant ones, while the landlord customers had no choice but to scamper away. As the landlords fled, the two Scissors Guan would raise their loudly snapping scissors and stand outside their shop yelling that they were going to snip off their landlord dicks. Scissors Guan yelled, "We're going to snip you into a cockless landlady."

Yanker Yu, meanwhile, was a revolutionary opportunist. He would ask about class background when a patient came to see him but just as often would wait until he had first opened the customer's mouth to get a clear look at his cavities. He worried that if he found he had a landlord on his hands, he would lose both the customer and the money; but if he didn't interrogate his prospective patients, he couldn't be considered a revolutionary dentist. He wanted both money and revolution, and therefore often only when he had his extractor firmly around a client's rotten tooth would he seize the moment to demand in a ringing voice, "Tell me! What's your class background?"

The customer, mouth stuffed with dental implements, would mumble unintelligibly. Yanker Yu would make a big show of bending over to listen, then loudly proclaim, "A poor peasant? Good! I will pull out your rotten tooth."

By the time he finished this declaration, Yu would be done extracting the tooth. He would then immediately thrust a cotton wad into his
patients mouth and tell him to clamp down tightly to stanch the bleeding. With his jaw clamped and his mouth stuffed, the customer, even if he had admitted to being a landlord, would be forcefully remade into a poor peasant. With a flourish, Yanker Yu would show his customer the rotten tooth. "See that? This is a poor peasants rotten tooth. If you had been a landlord, then it would have been a perfectly healthy tooth that I would have extracted."

Then Yanker Yu would display a firm stance of clear separation of boundaries between revolution and profit, saying, "Chairman Mao teaches us that a revolution is not a dinner party. Since I extracted one revolutionary tooth, I must therefore collect ten cents of revolutionary money."

Revolutionary Blacksmith Tong never inquired about his customers’ class backgrounds, convinced that he was so ideologically righteous that a class enemy would never dare to enter his shop. Tong thumped his chest and proclaimed, "Only hardworking, poor peasants would come to my shop to buy sickles and hammers; lazy landlords only know how to exploit others and wouldn't know the first thing about hammers and sickles."

The tides of revolution came roaring through town, and soon Blacksmith Tong, Tailor Zhang, and the two Scissors Guan engaged heartily and solely in revolutionary activity. With a revolutionary red armband around his bare arm, Blacksmith Tong no longer hammered out sickles and hoes but, rather, spearheads for red-tasseled spears. As soon as he finished hammering out a spearhead he would send it to the blade-sharpening shop across from his own. The two Scissors Guan now also wore revolutionary armbands on their bare arms, and they were no longer sharpening scissors but sat at their low stools sharpening spearheads, their legs apart and rivulets of sweat running down their backs. Once the two Scissors Guan sharpened the spearhead, they would send it to Tailor Zhang's store next door. Tailor Zhang was wearing an undershirt, but his arms were bare, and he too wore a revolutionary armband. He no longer made clothes; instead he now only made red flags, red armbands, and the silk tassels that hung from the spears. The Cultural Revolution was remaking Liu Town into a revolutionary battlefield, another Jing Gang Mountain—by now the town was already transformed into a scene from Chairman Mao's verse: "flags waving at the bottom of the mountain, with drums ringing from above."

Yanker Yu's arm was also adorned with a red revolutionary armband,
which Tailor Zhang had given him. Yanker Yu watched Tong, Guan, and Zhang working as if in a single production line, producing red-tasseled spears, while Yu was left out in the cold. Red-tasseled spears had no teeth, so he couldn't pull or fill them, and certainly couldn't fit them with dentures. All Yanker Yu could do was lie back in his rattan recliner and wait for the call of the revolution.

In Baldy Li's wanderings, he would watch Tong, Guan, and Zhang busy producing red-tasseled spears as if they were a munitions factory. When he tired of watching, he would wander over to Yanker Yu's oilcloth umbrella. Now that he no longer had Song Gang constantly by his side, Baldy Li was often lonely and bored. Wherever he went, he brought his yawns with him, and when Yanker Yu saw him, he would be infected by these yawns.

Alongside the row of extracted rotten teeth that Yanker Yu used to display on his table, he now very progressively displayed a dozen or so perfectly good teeth to demonstrate his class stand to everyone. He even wanted to demonstrate it to the eight-year-old Baldy Li, so he raised himself up from his rattan recliner and, pointing to the teeth, explained, "These are the healthy teeth that I've extracted from class enemies." He then pointed to the several dozen rotten teeth on the table and explained, "These are the rotten teeth that I've extracted from the mouths of my class brothers and sisters."

Baldy Li nodded without enthusiasm. He looked over the healthy teeth of class enemies and the rotten teeth of class brothers and sisters and didn't find any of them very interesting. He then sat down on Yanker Yu's stool next to the recliner and continued yawning. Yanker Yu had passed a listless morning on his recliner, and now that he finally had Baldy Li visiting, they matched each other yawn for yawn.

Yanker Yu sat up. Looking over at the electrical pole across the street, he patted Baldy Li's head and asked, "Aren't you going to go hump that pole?"

"I already did," Baldy Li replied.

"Go hump it again," Yanker Yu encouraged him.

"Nah," explained Baldy Li. "I've humped every pole in this town at least several times."

"Oh, my mother!" Yanker Yu exclaimed. "If this were ancient times, you'd be the emperor with your own harem, but now you're a serial rapist about to be jailed and executed."

When Baldy Li, who was midyawn, heard the phrase "jailed and executed,"
he was so startled that he swallowed the rest of the yawn and opened his eyes wide. "I'll be jailed and executed for humping electrical poles?"

"Of course." Yanker Yu pointed to the pole and asked Baldy Li, "Do you regard them as class enemies or as class sisters?"

Still wide-eyed, Baldy Li didn't understand. Yanker Yu enthusiastically continued, "If you think of the poles as class enemies, then humping them would be like criticizing them. But if you treat the poles as class sisters, you would need to register for a marriage license. If you don't register and get married, you're a rapist. Now that you've humped every pole in the town, it's as if you've molested every class sister in town. So why wouldn't they jail and execute you?"

After hearing Yanker Yu's explanation, Baldy Li was relieved of his worries over execution and imprisonment, and his wide-open eyes relaxed to narrow slits. Yanker Yu patted Baldy Li on the head and asked, "Now do you get it? Now do you understand what having a class stand is?"

"Yup." Baldy Li nodded.

"So tell me," Yanker Yu continued, "do you think of them as class enemies? Or class sisters?"

Baldy Li blinked a few times. "What if I think of them as class electrical poles?"