The Explosion Chronicles (34 page)

As the soldiers, urbanites, and peasants were saying good-bye to the Americans under the setting sun, they raised their fists and shouted, “We’ve achieved victory; we’ve kicked the Americans out! … We’ve destroyed your president; you should go back to where you came from!” Afterward, the villa complex fell silent. Apart from the plants and flowers that had been trampled underfoot, the assorted scarves and shoes that the residents of Explosion had left behind hanging from trees, and the tissues that were scattered over the villa roofs, together with the leftover bones from the First Family, the secretary of state, and the Speaker of the House, which were scattered on the ground where the crematorium had previously been—everything else was calm and clean. The stream coming from the villa complex and the pond they had built there both contained water that was clean and blue, and the air was full of mist. Meanwhile, overhead there were flocks of wild geese flying home, together with a flock of pigeons that stopped flying north and instead settled down in Explosion. The grasshoppers and wasps in the grass all became naptis and eye butterflies, and the world began to improve. Holding their urns, the Americans stood in the middle of the garden. They didn’t know whether to send the urns back to the United States or deposit them somewhere else. At the end of the day, the urns merely contained bone ash. As the Americans were discussing how to proceed, Kong Mingliang returned from the city,
and before his car had even come to a stop, he jumped out and went up to the American investors.

“If I don’t use the law to restrain these disruptive people, then I’ll have to resign as county mayor!

“… You can believe that Explosion has hooligans, but you can’t doubt the fact that Explosion would offer you the very best investment environment.

“… Give me these urns full of bone ash. I need to deal with these disruptive hooligans, as well as also investigate those residents of Explosion who are selling people’s corpses to the hooligans.

“… Can you believe what I’m telling you? If you don’t, I can arrange for all of the residents of Explosion to kneel down before you to apologize and offer self-criticism.”

From the garden on the former site of the crematorium to the American investors’ villa complex, and from the villa complex to the conference room in the villa’s guildhall, every time Kong Mingliang said something, a different flower would wilt. As he apologized to the Americans, the leaves of the bamboo plants on the side of the road dried up. There were a pair of potted pines in the entranceway to the guildhall, but under the sound of his cursing the pots cracked and the soil and plants spilled onto the ground. This continued until he and the Americans were all seated on couches in the guildhall, and attendants brought them coffee, beer, and red wine. The Americans accepted and drank the coffee, beer, and wine, and with a sigh of relief they told him that their investments spanned the entire globe. They had personally investigated more than a quarter of the world’s countries, but there was not a single country or a single people capable of doing something as amusing as what the people of Explosion had just done. They said that they had gone to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hainan, but none of these places was able to rival Explosion’s democracy and freedom, permitting people to
assemble and demonstrate in this way, and permitting them to burn the entire First Family in effigy. The Americans added that the fact they had come to Explosion to invest was not only a result of their wisdom and good fortune, but also a gift from God. They claimed that not only had they come to Explosion to invest and do business, they also wanted to mobilize their fellow countries in Europe and around the world to come to Explosion as well.

When the Americans finished saying this, the twelve funeral urns that had been placed on the table in the conference room began broadcasting, as though they were loudspeakers, a deafening sound of applause.

When US and Japanese automobile manufacturers decided to relocate to Explosion in the Balou Mountains, they were joined by Singaporean construction companies and South Korean electronics and handicrafts factories, together with Australian mining companies; French clothing and service sector companies; German road, rail, and bridge transportation companies; Italian clothing and briefcase factories; Spanish sports equipment factories; and companies specializing in carved black wooden statues from Kenya and grilled meat, coffee, and olive oil from Brazil. The city was divided into an east side, a west side, an old city district, and a new development zone. A highway linking this city to others was built overnight. Whereas previously a train would pass by every half hour, now one would come rumbling through every three minutes. The train station located more the twenty
li
outside the city was expanded so that it could accommodate up to eighteen
trains at once, making it a hub station capable of receiving the tens of thousands of passengers surging into Explosion. In a valley about fifty kilometers to the south, the railroad company constructed a station for freight trains traveling north to south. Meanwhile, following official orders, sewage and toxic materials from the factories and manufacturing plants were dumped into wells up to a thousand meters deep, from which they would flow into underground rivers leading who knows where.

Explosion continued to expand day by day, and it was as if there were countless zippers on the ground that could be repeatedly opened and closed, lifted up and buried, permitting the city to undergo an unprecedented open heart surgery. In the city’s central zone, there was a street reserved for foreign businessmen engaging in sightseeing, negotiating, flirting, and bullshitting. In imitation of small European towns, the citizens built coffeehouses, beer halls, food stalls, and souvenir shops. There were also foot-washing stalls, massage halls, hair salons, and back-massage booths reserved for foreigners. Exotic enterprises ranged from Thai transsexuals to Arab teahouses and China’s very first Indian roti shop—no one even knew when they all arrived and set up shop in Explosion. Every day, all sorts of foreign music could be heard in the streets, which were also filled with the sound of English, German, French, and all sorts of strange languages, not to mention Chinese and the local Balou dialect.

The foreigners always had more money than they could spend. It was as if they lived in order to drink coffee and beer, listen to music, and flirt with women. They would sign contracts, transfer funds into bank accounts around the world, and then return to their riverside villas outside Explosion for the night, and the next day they would return to this same street. The people of Explosion didn’t know what exactly had happened, but they felt that all of a sudden the city had been dramatically transformed. Buildings that had been constructed
only a few years earlier were demolished to make room for even newer ones, and the public square where people had just been singing and dancing was now roped off, since the brick-and-cement pavement had to be removed and replaced with granite imported from Australia. The city’s orderly chaos resembled a spinning flywheel, as the people gradually came to feel that the Explosion they had known no longer existed and that it now belonged to others—to foreigners. It reached the point where the government specified that the county’s development should serve as a model for the entire country, and when high-level officials came from Beijing to observe Explosion they each personally toasted the county mayor three times in a row, saying that they wanted to have Explosion quickly promoted from a county to a city, and to have Kong Mingliang promoted from county mayor to city mayor. The Kong family and the people of Explosion were no longer amazed by this news, and instead treated it as an eventuality they had long expected.

Meanwhile, on the street that had been dubbed Kong Street, which had been set aside for foreigners to drink coffee and beer, listen to music, flirt, and conduct business negotiations—when they heard that Explosion was going to be promoted to a city, all the foreigners and foreign-owned businesses hung red lanterns in their doorways and when the foreigners went outside they each carried a little red flag. The walls on both sides of the street, the sidewalks, the street itself, and even the sewers were decorated with roses, camellias, and all sorts of red, yellow, and purple flowers from China and abroad. The result was that the entire world was filled with the sound of laughter and toasts extolling these extraordinary blossoms.

In this way, the city of Explosion was established, as though in a dream. The day it was announced that Explosion was being redesignated from a county to a city, the city hosted an extravagant celebration, and Zhu Ying locked herself in her room to drink and
smoke away her sorrows. She was first surprised and then infuriated by the fact that her husband, Kong Mingliang—in the space of three years and without her assistance or knowledge—had transformed the county into a city and managed to be promoted from county mayor to city mayor. As a result, she locked herself away at home and, after night fell and everyone grew quiet, she cried up to the heavens,

“Kong Mingliang, you’ll regret this!

“… Kong Mingliang, I’ll make you regret this!”

She had never expected that Explosion would be promoted so quickly from a county to a city. It was as easy as a car rolling downhill, which needed only a tap on the gas pedal to take off.

That night, she drank alone until she was half drunk. Then she went to look at her son, who was sound asleep in his bed. She lightly slapped his cheek, and cursed, “It’s all your fault, you little beast. It’s because of you that your father never returned to this household and stopped talking to me!” She waited until her son woke up, stretched, and started bawling, then took him out to the courtyard. She sat there with him until the moon set and the stars faded, and after he fell back asleep she finally was able to calm down. It was at that point that she began muttering to herself, “I’ll make you regret this! I’ll make you regret this!” She took her son inside, and after putting him to bed, she headed to the women’s vocational school she had established a year earlier. She wanted to convene an urgent meeting to recruit and train some specialized girls, in preparation for another battle with the men.

1. REALISTIC CULTURE HISTORY

Mingyao didn’t know how he ended up as the director of the town’s civil administration bureau, nor how he ended up as the leader of the county’s civil affairs section, or even how he ended up as the director of the city’s development bureau. The day he was appointed bureau director, thousands of Balou residents all wanted to have their peasant household registrations reassigned as urban ones, resulting in a line that stretched from the development bureau downtown all the way to the outskirts of the city. They brought their original household registration booklets, which identified them as peasants, and they also brought a variety of local specialties to serve as gifts, including peanuts, walnuts, and mushrooms and other edible fungi. They were smiling appreciatively as they waited for the office workers to collect their peasant household registration booklets and issue
them new urban ones as well as ID cards with their photographs printed on them.

“With this, do we now become urbanites?” They walked out of the civil administration bureau carrying their new household registration booklets. They looked at the new booklets with their dark red covers and said to each other, “From now on, we’re no longer fucking peasants.” They laughed and lifted these booklets into the air to show those who were still waiting in line to receive theirs, then they stepped into a restaurant to eat and drink.

To celebrate, they all got drunk.

There was even someone who, upon becoming reassigned as an urbanite, suddenly had a heart attack and died before even making it to the hospital. After the county was redesignated as a city, the civil affairs bureau spent half a month replacing thousands of peasant household registration booklets with urban ones. An ambulance from the hospital was even parked in the bureau’s courtyard to treat people suffering heart attacks and strokes as a result of the excitement, and even though seventeen people still ended up dying, the medical workers were nevertheless able to save a hundred and twenty-eight others. After changing their household registration they thereby became urbanites. They placed the gifts they had brought next to the desk of the department official responsible for reassigning their residence permits, or else handed them directly to the workers responsible for filling out, approving, and stamping the forms.

“How can you not accept our gifts?” the peasants asked. “We have now become urbanites, and this is an enormous accomplishment.

“Will you accept them?” they asked. “If you don’t accept our presents, we’ll simply smash them on the ground.”

So the bureau workers had no choice but to accept the gifts.

These presents piled up everywhere—on tables, behind doors, inside rooms, and out in the courtyard. Several professional moving
companies worked continuously to transfer all of the cigarettes and wine from the civil affairs bureau’s main office to its warehouse. Some people had even added cash to those packages of cigarettes and wine, wanting to take advantage of this opportunity to register the children they had over the official one-child limit. Others, who wanted to help their relatives in the distant mountains transfer their residency permits to the city, stuffed rings, necklaces, and pendants directly into the pockets of the people in charge of residency permits, while saying things like
Here’s a peanut!
or
Here are some sunflower seeds you can shell after you return home.

Minghui’s office was located in the middle of the development bureau’s courtyard, since applicants needed his signature before they could begin the process of requesting forms, completing them, getting approval, and paying the requisite fees, and then they would need his signature again in order to receive their new residency permit and ID. As a result, Minghui’s room was filled from floor to ceiling with gifts, to the point that the gifts forced him and everyone else out of the room and into the courtyard. In the end even the office wasn’t big enough to hold them all, and the gifts were deposited in the development bureau’s courtyard, where the cigarette cartons were piled so high that they reached the branches of an elm tree in the courtyard and the cigarette smoke stained the tree leaves yellow, so that the old elm became addicted to nicotine. For years afterward, someone would need to periodically open a packet of cigarettes and place it under the tree. Without cigarette smoke, the tree leaves would curl up and die. Across from the elm tree, there was a persimmon tree, under which there were boxes and boxes of wine and alcohol. Because that happened to be the season when the persimmons bloomed, all of the persimmons that year reeked of alcohol and anyone who consumed three or more of them would fall over drunk. When there was no more room under the elm tree for cigarettes, and no more room under the
persimmon tree for red wine or
baijiu
liquor, Minghui simply stood in the middle of the courtyard of the development bureau and personally tried to prevent those gift-bearing visitors from entering. He stood on a stool and saw that the line of people who had come to change their residency permits was several kilometers long. The line wove through the square and ended beyond the city limits.

In order to stop these people from bringing gifts, Minghui went to his brother Mingyao’s place and recruited eight young soldiers to stand guard in the entranceway, instructing them to stop anyone bearing gifts from entering the development bureau’s courtyard. The problem eventually began to subside, until finally there was no longer anyone attempting to bring gifts into the courtyard. As the city revised the residency permit of one household after another, the population of Explosion City began to snowball. Within a month, virtually all those whom the directive had indicated should have their residency permits reassigned to the city had done so. At this point, a rumor began circulating that the mayor’s younger brother, Kong Minghui, had developed a psychosis such that if anyone gave him a present he would immediately throw it out the door, and if people stuffed money into his hand he would throw it back at them.

Everyone was dumbfounded.

Everyone knew that Minghui had developed this mental illness.

One person, though, tried to determine whether Minghui was really sick or merely faking it, and one morning he waited at the entrance to the development bureau office, and when he saw Minghui approaching he shouted, “Bureau Director Kong!”

Kong Minghui was bureau director, but he didn’t allow anyone to address him using the honorific title Bureau Director Kong and instead asked everyone to call him by his actual name: Kong Minghui. With this, everyone knew that he really was ill, and furthermore that the illness was quite serious. However, people had no choice but to
nod to him and smile, then quickly walk away. When it was time to finish work, the associate directors of the development bureau all watched as Minghui slowly left for the day, and it was only then that they dared come out of their offices and get into their company cars to return home. If they happened to catch up to Minghui on the road, they would have the cars turn around to avoid him. They would also try to avoid those people who would wait on the side of the road every day for Minghui to walk by—as the sight of the mayor’s younger brother walking to work had become a local spectacle. Every morning at seven thirty and every afternoon at five thirty—half an hour before work started at eight and before it ended at six—the city’s residents would crowd around the bureau entrance, standing on both sides of the road, to watch the bureau director who refused to ride in his own car and instead insisted on walking to and from work.

One day, when the crowd of people watching Minghui was unusually large and there was a traffic jam in the square, the mayor happened to drive by. “What’s going on?” Mingliang asked. His driver stuck his head out the window to look around, then reported, “Everyone is here to watch Director Minghui, who has a car but insists on walking to work.” The driver then laughed and added, “Mayor, more people come here every day to watch the bureau director walk to work than go to the square to watch the flag being raised.” Mingliang remembered the time when the four brothers had gotten up in the middle of the night, and how that night he had found an official seal that foretold his current political position. That night, Mingyao had encountered a military truck hauling a cannon, which similarly foretold his current power. His youngest brother Minghui, meanwhile, had encountered a gentle cat, which anticipated his current weakness. Looking though the car window into the distance, Mingliang didn’t say anything else. He watched as Minghui walked over from the other side of the intersection. Minghui appeared thin and frail, and was carrying one of
the black briefcases that had been issued to all of the city’s cadres. As everyone watched, he proceeded forward, like a sick cat scurrying out from under people’s feet. He took short steps and didn’t say a word, as he walked away from that crowd of people watching him from a distance. The observers, meanwhile, said regretfully,

“He really is ill.

“… He really is mentally ill.”

As the car passed the crowd standing by the roadside, the mayor gazed at his brother and sighed.

That evening, when it was time to get off work, the sun shone down feebly on Explosion. Because the elm and persimmon trees and the grapevines in the development bureau courtyard were addicted to nicotine, alcohol, and sugar, if they were not supplied with cigarettes, wine, and candy their leaves would promptly shrivel up and fall off. After the cadres and workers at the development bureau got off work and Minghui was left alone, he opened a pack of cigarettes under the elm tree and tossed some wine and candy onto the ground beneath the persimmon tree and the grapevines. The director of the city’s mental asylum walked over, wearing a white coat, and he looked around and then stood in front of Minghui for a long time without speaking. His hands were clasped in front of his chest, and he seemed as if he wanted to ask Minghui if he could borrow something, but didn’t say a word.

“Do you want something?” Minghui buried several pieces of candy under the grapevines and then patted down the earth with his foot.

“The mayor asked me to take you to stay in the hospital for a few days, so that we could give you a complete exam.”

Minghui stood there speechless, still holding a fistful of candy wrappers. He scrunched the wrappers into a ball, then permitted the director to lead him back to the hospital for an exam.

2. A HISTORY OF CULTURAL DISLOCATIONS

I.

After Minghui’s mother fell ill, Minghui stayed home from work for three days to take care of her. Initially, this did not even appear to be a terribly serious illness, as she was simply running a high fever and talking in her sleep, saying, “I’m going over there, I’m going over there… . Over there is better than over here, over there is better than over here!” After the fever began to subside, she emerged from her room and looked markedly thinner. The house was still the same as before, as was the courtyard. In the courtyard there were the same elm and paulownia trees as before, which would bud in the spring, flourish in the summer, and turn yellow in autumn. Even the ants and other bugs crawling up and down the trees were the same as before. They would pant as they crawled up and would skip happily on their way back down. The spider in the web behind the door was still the same old spider that had been there when the family suffered a setback many years earlier.

“You definitely must not move,” Mingliang had said coldly. “Even if I am appointed emperor, you definitely must not move, so that people from around the country can come here and observe my family’s holiness.”

So his mother didn’t move.

She continued living there.

After Explosion was redesignated as a city, their house was preserved as a cultural relic. The trees that originally lined the streets of Explosion had all been labeled with plaques noting their species and their identification number. A millstone that had previously lain abandoned and forgotten in one of the village alleys had now been rediscovered and excavated, and was written into the city’s cultural chronicles, and a glass enclosure was built around it for protection.
The graves originally located in the village square were all relocated to an empty field in the mountain ridge behind Explosion, and it was there that you could find the tombs of the martyrs who gave their lives so that the city could be established. The grave of the mayor’s father, Kong Dongde, was transferred to the center of that new cemetery, and in front of the grave there was a tombstone that read:
A PIONEER IN ESTABLISHING THIS CITY
. Zhu Ying’s father, Zhu Qingfang, who had that bitter rivalry with Kong Dongde, was now lying—together with his immediate relatives—in this martyrs’ cemetery, and the tombstone at his feet was inscribed with the phrase
TOMB OF A PIONEER
.

it is said that the mayors of the town and county to which Explosion had belonged when it was still merely a village have now been appointed as city mayor and deputy provincial governor of another province, but they nevertheless each specified that after their death they wanted to be buried in the Explosion cemetery. On their tombstones, they wanted the phrase “This city’s pioneers!” Mayor Kong, however, asked Yang Baoqing—who at the time was the director of Explosion Village’s news production factory, but who by this point was the director of the city’s propaganda bureau—to personally write the former county mayor a letter, saying that when the mayor eventually passes away Yang would erect a statue in this city’s public square, on which he would inscribe the phrase
Father of the City.
He also wrote the former town mayor—and current city mayor—Hu Dajun, the following brief message:

By this point, Explosion was definitely one of the nation’s great cities.

The entirety of Explosion’s past consisted of reality, history, and people’s memories.