Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (23 page)

“Baofeng, I know what you’re feeling, but are you being realistic? He grew up in the provincial capital, where he went to college. He’s talented and good looking, and has a bright future. How could someone like that fall for you? Listen to your mother and give up such thoughts. Lower your sights a bit. Little Ma is a teacher on the public payroll. He’s not bad looking, he’s literate, he plays the harmonica, and he’s a crack shot. He’s one in a hundred, if you ask me, and since he has his eye on you, why the hesitation? Go on, say yes to him. Take a good look at the eyes of the Huang sisters. The meat is right in front of you, and if you don’t eat it, someone else will. . . .”

Everything Mother said made sense. To me, Ma Liangcai and my sister were well suited for one another. Sure, he couldn’t sing like Braying Jackass, but he could make his harmonica sound like birds singing and could rid the village of its sparrows with his air gun, both virtues Braying Jackass lacked. But my sister had a stubborn streak, just like her father; Mother could talk till her lips were cracked, and her reply was always:

“Mother, I’ll decide whom I marry!”

We returned to the field that afternoon. Jinlong, a metal hoe over his shoulder, followed us step for step. The glinting blade of his tool was so sharp he could sever an ox’s hoof with one swing if he felt like it. His attitude of forsaking friends and family disgusted me, and I took every opportunity to let him know how I felt. I called him Hong Taiyue’s running dog and an ungrateful swine. He ignored me, but each time I blocked his way, he threw dirt in my face. When I tried to retaliate, Dad stopped me with an angry curse. He seemed to have eyes in the back of his head and invariably knew what I was up to. I reached down and picked up a dirt clod.

“Jiefang, what do you think you’re doing?” he roared.

“I want to teach this swine a lesson!” I said angrily.

“Shut up!” he railed. “If you don’t, I’ll tan your hide. He’s your older brother and he’s acting in an official capacity, so don’t get in his way.”

After two rounds of tilling, the production brigade oxen were panting from exhaustion, especially the female Mongol. Even from far away, we could hear what sounded like a confused hen trying to imitate a crowing rooster emerge from deep down in her throat, and I recalled what the youngster had whispered to me back when we were buying the young ox. He had called its mother a “hot turtle” that was ill equipped for hard work and useless during the hot summer months. Now I knew he was telling the truth. Not only was she gasping for breath, she was foaming at the mouth; it was not a pretty sight. Eventually, she collapsed and lay on the ground, her eyes rolling back into her head, like a dead cow. All the other oxen stopped working, and the plowmen ran up to her. Opinions flew back and forth. The term “hot turtle” had been the brainchild of an old farmer. One of the men recommended going for the veterinarian, but that suggestion was met with cold disdain. The comment, She’s beyond help, was heard.

When Dad reached the end of our plot, he stopped and said to my brother:

“Jinlong, there’s no need for you to follow behind me. I said we won’t leave a single hoofprint on public land, so you’re just tiring yourself out for nothing.”

Jinlong responded with a snort, and that’s all.

“My ox will not step on public land,” he repeated. “But the agreement was that your oxen and people would not step on my land either. By following me, you’re walking on my land. You’re standing on it right now, as a matter of fact.”

That stopped Jinlong in his tracks. Like a frightened kangaroo, he jumped off our land all the way to the riverbank road.

“I ought to lop off those hooves of yours!” I shouted.

His face bright red, he was too embarrassed to say a word.

“Jinlong,” Dad said, “how about you and me, father and son, tolerating each other’s position? Your heart is set on being progressive, and I’m not going to stand in your way. In fact, you have my full support. Your biological father was a landlord, but he was also my benefactor. Criticizing and attacking him was what the situation demanded, something I did for the benefit of others. But I’ll always be grateful to him. As for you, well, I’ve always treated you like my own flesh and blood, and I won’t try to stop you from going your own way My only hope is that there’ll always be a spot of warmth in your heart and that you won’t let it become cold and hard like a chunk of iron.”

“I stepped on your land, that I can’t deny,” Jinlong said grimly, “and you have every right to chop off my leg!” He flung his hoe toward us; it stuck in the ground between Dad and me. “If you don’t want to do it, that’s your problem. But if your ox, or either one of you, so much as steps foot on commune land, whether you mean to or not, don’t expect any favors from me!”

The expression on his face and the green flames that seemed to be shooting from his eyes sent chills down my spine and raised goose-flesh on my arms. My half brother was no ordinary young man; if he said he’d do something, he’d do it. If one of our feet or our ox’s hooves crossed that line, he’d come at us with his hoe without blinking an eye. What a shame for a man like him to be born during peacetime. If he’d been born only a few decades earlier, he’d have worn the mantle of hero, no matter whom he fought for, and if banditry had been his calling, he’d have been a king of slaughter. But this was, after all, peacetime, and there was little call for such ruthlessness, such daring and tenacity, and such incorruptibility.

Dad, too, seemed shaken by what he heard. He quickly looked away and fixed his gaze on the hoe stuck in the ground at his feet.

“Jinlong,” he said, “forget what I said. I’ll ease your concerns and, at the same time, carry out my pledge by tilling my land right next to yours. You can watch, and if you think it’s necessary to put your hoe to use, then go ahead. That way I won’t waste any more of your time.”

He walked up to our ox, rubbed its ears, and patted it on the forehead.

“Ox,” he whispered in its ear, “ah, my ox! It’s all been said. Keep your eye on the boundary marker and walk straight ahead. Don’t veer an inch!”

After adjusting the plow and sizing up the boundary, he gave a low command, and the ox started walking. My brother picked up his hoe and stared with bulging eyes at the ox’s hooves. The animal appeared unconcerned about the danger lurking behind him; he walked at a normal pace, his body limber, his back so smooth and steady he could have carried a full bowl of water without spilling a drop. Dad walked behind, stepping squarely in the new furrow. The work was totally reliant on the ox; given that his eyes were on either side of his head, how he managed to move in a perfectly straight line was beyond me. I simply watched as the new furrow neatly separated our land from theirs, with the boundary markers standing between the two. The ox slowed down each time he neared one of the stone markers to let Dad lift the plow over it. Every one of his hoof prints remained on our side, all the way to the end; there was nothing Jinlong could do. Dad exhaled loudly and said to Jinlong:

“You can head back home now, worry free, can’t you?”

So Jinlong left us, but not before casting one last reluctant glance at the ox’s perfect, bright hooves, and I knew how disappointed he was at not being able to chop one off. The hoe, slung over his shoulder as he walked off, glinted silvery in the sunlight, and that sight was burned into my memory.

As for what happened next, should I continuing telling or do you want to take over? I asked Big-head. He squinted, as if he were looking at me, But I knew that his thoughts were elsewhere. He took a cigarette out of my pack, held it up to his nose to smell it, and curled his lip without saying anything, as if contemplating something very important. That’s a bad habit somebody your age should avoid. If you started smoking at the age of five, you’d have to smoke gunpowder when you reach the age of fifty, right? He ignored me and cocked his head; his outer ear twitched, as if he were straining to listen to something. I won’t say any more, I said. There isn’t much to say, anyway, since it’s all things we experienced. No, he said, you started, so you ought to finish. I said I didn’t know where to begin. He rolled his eyes.

Begin with the marketplace, focus on the fun part.

I saw plenty of people paraded through the marketplace, something that never failed to excite me, excite and delight.

I saw County Chief Chen, the man who had been friendly to Dad, paraded publicly through the marketplace. His head was shaved, the skin showing black — afterward, in his memoirs, he said he’d shaved his head so the Red Guards couldn’t pull him by the hair — and a papier-mâché donkey had been tied around his waist. As the air filled with drumbeats and the clang of gongs, he ran around to the beat, dancing with a goofy smile on his face. He looked like one of the local entertainers at New Year’s. Because he’d ridden our family’s donkey on inspection trips during the iron and steel-smelting campaign, people had saddled him with the nickname Donkey Chief. Then when the Cultural Revolution broke out, the Red Guards wanted to enhance the pleasure, the visual appeal, and the ability to draw a crowd when they were parading capitalist-roaders, so they made him wear that papier-mâché donkey. Plenty of cadres later wrote their memoirs, and when they related what had occurred during the Cultural Revolution, it was a tale of blood and tears, describing the period as hell on earth, more terrifying than Hitler’s concentration camps. But this official wrote about his experiences in the early days of the Cultural Revolution in a lively, humorous style. He wrote that he rode his paper donkey through eighteen marketplace parades, and in the process grew strong and healthy. No more high blood pressure and no more insomnia. He said the sound of drums and gongs energized him; his legs quaked, and, like a donkey spotting its mother, he stamped his feet and snorted through his nose. When I linked his memoirs and my recollection of him wearing the papier-mâché donkey, I understood why that goofy smile had adorned his face. He said that when he followed the beat of the drums and gongs and started dancing in his papier-mâché donkey, he felt himself slowly changing into a donkey, specifically the black donkey that belonged to the independent farmer Lan Lian, and his mind began to wander, free and relaxed, as if he were living somewhere between the real world and a wonderful illusion. To him it felt as if his legs had become a set of four hooves, that he had grown a tail, and that he and the papier-mâché donkey around his waist had fused into one body, much like the centaur of Greek mythology. As a result, he gained a firsthand perception of what it felt like to be a donkey, the joys and the suffering. Marketplaces offered few items for sale during the Cultural Revolution, and most of the hustle and bustle derived from people who had gathered to witness a variety of spectacles. Winter had recently arrived, so the people were bundled up, except for youngsters who preferred the look of thin clothing. Everyone wore red armbands, which were especially prominent on the arms of youngsters in thin khaki or blue military jackets. On the older residents’ black, tattered padded coats, shiny with grime, the armbands were incongruous adornments. An old chicken peddler stood in the entrance to the Supply and Marketing Cooperative holding a chicken in her hand; she too wore a red armband. Have you joined the Red Guards too, Aunty? someone asked her. She pursed her lips and said, Red is all the rage, so why wouldn’t I join? Which unit? Jinggang Mountain or Golden Monkey? Go to hell, she said, and don’t waste my time with that nonsense. If you’re here to buy a chicken, then buy one. If not, get the fuck off!

The propaganda team drove up in a Soviet truck left over from the Korean War. Its original green paint had faded after years of being buffeted by the elements, and a frame with four high-powered loudspeakers had been welded to the top of the cab. A gas-driven generator was mounted in the truck bed, the two sides of which were lined with Red Guards in imitation army uniforms, each gripping the side with one hand and holding up a
Little Red Book
in the other. Their faces were crimson, either from the cold or from revolutionary passion. One of them, a slightly cross-eyed girl, was grinning from ear to ear. The loudspeakers blared so loud a farmer’s wife had a miscarriage, a pig ran headlong into a wall and knocked itself out, a whole roost of laying hens took to the air, and local dogs barked themselves hoarse. The first sounds after the playing of “The East Is Red” were the roar of the generator and static from the loudspeaker. They were followed by a melodious woman’s voice. I climbed a tree so I could see inside the bed of the truck, where there were two chairs and a table on which rested some sort of machine and a microphone wrapped in red cloth. One of the chairs was occupied by a girl with little braids, the other by a boy who wore a part in his hair. I’d never seen her before, but he was Little Chang, who’d come to our village during the Four Clean-ups campaign, the one they called Braying Jackass. I later learned that he had been assigned to the county opera troupe and, as a rebel, the commander of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction. I shouted down to him from my perch up in the tree: Little Chang! Little Chang! Jackass! But my shouts were swallowed up by the loudspeaker.

The girl shouted into the microphone, and the loudspeaker carried her voice like thunderclaps. Here is what everyone in Northeast Gaomi Township heard: Capitalist-roader Chen Guangdi, a donkey trader who wormed his way into the Party, opposed the Great Leap Forward, opposed the Three Red Banners, is a sworn brother to Lan Lian, Northeast Gaomi Township’s independent farmer who stubbornly hews to the Capitalist Road, and acts as the independent farmer’s protective umbrella. Chen Guangdi is not only an ideological reactionary, he is also immoral. He had sexual relations with a donkey and made her pregnant. She gave birth to a monster: a donkey with a human head!

Yes! The crowd roared its approval. The Red Guards on the truck followed Jackass’s lead in shouting slogans: Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey rapist Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey molester Chen Guangdi! Jackass’s voice, magnified by the loudspeaker, became a vocal calamity, as a flock of wild geese flying overhead dropped out of the sky like stones. Now, the meat of these birds is a delicacy, and nutritious to boot, a rarity for the people below. For them to fall out of the sky at a time when the people’s nutritional lives were so impoverished seemed to be a blessing from heaven, when in fact it was anything but. The people went crazy, pushing and shoving and shouting and screeching, worse than a pack of starving dogs. The first person to get his hands on a fallen bird must have been wild with joy, until, that is, everyone around him tried to snatch it away. Feathers fluttered to the ground, fine down floated in the air; it was like tearing apart a down pillow. The bird’s wings were torn off, its legs wound up in someone else’s hands, its head and neck were torn from its body and held high in the air, dripping blood. People in the rear pushed down on the heads and shoulders of those in front to leap like hunting dogs. People were knocked to the ground, squashed where they stood, trampled where they lay. Shrill cries of Mother! . . . Mother! . . . Help, save me . . . emerged from dozens of black knots of humanity that seethed and churned. Screams and shouts — Ow, my poor head!—merged with the howl of the loudspeaker. Chaos turned to tangled fighting and from there to violent battles. The final tally: seventeen people were trampled to death, an unknown number suffered injury.