Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused – Fiction From Today (41 page)

Napoléon brandy from an overseas relative.

He gives me a knowing look and sits down. In a matter of moments, he proceeds to instruct me. Foreign liquor can't be ingested with Chinese cuisine because the oil will destroy the flavor.

Happily, I obey him; I was not overly enthusiastic about cooking something to begin with. Instead, I locate a box of chocolates, open a can of pineapple, and slice a few preserved eggs, a sort of East-West combination plate. We begin to drink.

I savor the pure flavor of the brandy; as promised, it is marvel-ously different from anything I have ever had before. I drink more than usual. Foreign liquor kicks in more slowly than Chinese, but inevitably our faces flush bright red. Old Wu's words are endless, from Napoleon to the French Revolution; he says that the European lords could have been united and the heroic Napoleon could have strangled the July Revolution, and then history would have been pushed back many years. Here I add, "But then we wouldn't be able to enjoy this fine liquor, a loss that cannot be overlooked."

He isn't in the mood for jokes, so completely absorbed is he in his historical musings, saying further that it was Napoleon who once said that China was a sleeping lion. "Sleeping lion,…" he murmurs groggily as if he is very sorrowful, then suddenly bursts into laughter.

"What's so funny?"

He reeks of brandy, his finger poking in my face. "I'm laughing at you! And me! At everybody in the world."

I see he is drunk and hurry to brew some oolong, not knowing if it will have any effect on foreign liquor, since the tea leaves and teapot are Chinese products.

Still queasy, he murmurs, "Past events and dream shadows… fog before my eyes."

I think he must still be nostalgic about the French emperor and hand him a cup of strong tea, which he knocks over with a contemptuous snort. "These are the names of two books; take a look at them if you don't want to be a fool…"

Morning and night, all I have been thinking about is my "schol-arization," so how can I accept being a fool? I go to fetch the volumes and find that there is indeed a
Record of Fog Before My Eyes
, written during the Yuan or Song, and a
Record of Past Events and Dream Shadows
, written during the Guangxu period of the Qing, both histories of old paintings. I pull them off the shelf and immerse myself for two entire nights, after which I unroll the silk painting and compare it. Then I understand. Paintings like this, in which the ink doesn't bleed through the vitriol paste onto the silk and which make use of starch and crude-patterned silk sprinkled with gold dust, are characteristic of Late Qing and Early Republican paintings. When you add this to the fact that the illegible characters in the square seal are of an oil-based paint and are blue and not red in color, the conclusive evidence is that this filial mourner's carelessly scrawled painting of a lion could not have been made earlier than the reign of the ill-fated Emperor Guangxu.

Never have I felt so strongly that this painting of a sleeping lion is an inferior work. The more I look at it, the uglier it seems. Waking up from an absurd ten-year dream, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Who would have thought that this thing was totally worthless? Although antique collecting is found among all peoples and is a very noble pastime indeed, certainly foreigners are the only ones who hang plows and wagon wheels upon their walls in an attempt to be sophisticated. Here in China, what are a mere hundred years? Back at my maternal grandmother's house, the broken dish she feeds the cat out of was made during Guangxu, and my father's father in the countryside has a flowerpot in his courtyard that is a Qing monochromatic Shiwan piece from 1851.

The poor brass lion lies tucked away somewhere in Leizhou, lost in dream.

My emotion spent, I still cannot internalize what has transpired. And what if the lion really had belonged to the Tang or the Song, or even to the Qin or the Han, what then? Everything might be different.

In my stupor, I peer at the silk again. Is that me in the picture?

I decide to hang it on the wall.

Translated By Susan Mcfadden

I have enormous respect for storytellers. I tried to teach myself how to do it once, but in the end I had to admit it was not to be. The story that follows, for instance, should be packed with entertainment value, but it isn't much of a story when I get through with it. Way back in 1990, I was all set to study the art of storytelling with Comrade New Day Tian when of all things, he was swept away in a windstorm of unprecedented ferocity. The additional costs of that windstorm to Fritter Hollow included seven old oxen, eight colts, and fifty-two goats (some say fifty-six); it also shattered the grammar school windows and sent snowy shards of glass swirling into the air. What that means, of course, is that I'll have to grope my way through the story, starting with the following opening:

In the heart of Fritter Hollow lies Fritter Village, home to a carpenter by the name of Tian, who had a son called Broad Bean. To ensure that Broad Bean would have a long life, the carpenter Tian gave him the name Broad Bean, and after a dizzying procession of springs and autumns, Broad Bean appeared as a grown man of thirty-one. Our story opens in 1992, at noon one summer day, when Broad Bean, lathered with sweat, came running breathlessly up to the village boss, Wheatie Liu, informing him that not a single person had dared enter the home of the murderer Talented Wu all morning. Since it was an abnormally hot day, Broad Bean fanned himself with his straw hat as he watched seven or eight average-sized drops of sweat line up on Wheatie Liu's forehead and drop neatly to the ground, followed by a second, virtually identical formation. But instead of looking at Broad Bean, Wheatie Liu gazed fixedly at the knife scars on his arms, which had been there for years: five on the left arm, seven on the right, red in color and very deep.

"Check it out again," Wheatie Liu said without looking up.

At twilight, two or three average-sized pale yet pretty stars appeared in the sky, sort of to the south and sort of to the west, as Broad Bean ran breathlessly into the village for the second time. "No one dared enter the home of the murderer Talented Wu all afternoon!" Broad Bean reported. This time he did not fan himself with his straw hat.

"Sit down, have a drink," Wheatie Liu said, patting the edge of the red-lacquered brick bed, his kang. Broad Bean saw a bottle and some snacks on little plates on the nearby red-lacquered table- only three plates, and what they held is not important. "You're drinking again?" Sitting cautiously on the edge of the kang, Broad Bean kept his eyes glued to Wheatie Liu.

"Why shouldn't I?" Liu said. "I'm happy!"

So Broad Bean joined him. He held out one of the little ceramic cups, which was filled noisily; they clinked cups and drained them. A noisy refill, more clinking and draining. "I'll drain his old lady!" Wheatie Liu said, opening his mouth wide. He turned thoughtful, refilled his cup, and drained it. "That murderer got off cheap!" Liu said, turning thoughtful again as he refilled his cup and drained it. This time, Broad Bean fumbled with his cup to catch up. He tossed down the wine, and the blood drained from his face. "No more for me!" he said as he leaned over the edge and heaved twice. "That murderer stinks to high heaven!" He jumped off the kang, hand over his mouth, and ran outside, where he emptied the contents of his stomach for the benefit of a black pig strolling through the yard:
urrp
-the stuff landed right on the pig's tail. A quick swish transferred it up to its snout, all but the little bit that soared over to the window-
splat
.

"So the murderer stinks that bad, does he?" Wheatie Liu asked tensely as he walked into the yard, undid his pants, and sent a stream of piss into the pigsty.

Time for some background:

Now I won't bore you with talk about what kind of mountains Fritter Hollow has or what its waters are like. Suffice it to say that Fritter Hollow has both mountains and waters, heavy on the former-a whole undulating range of them, like a string of cow patties-and you could probably walk for five or six days without reaching the end. Not much in the way of waters, however. In fact, one scrawny, twisting stream is about it.

The people here are not rice eaters-that should be obvious. The barren slopes of the mountains yield only stumpy buckwheat, stumpy oats, and stumpy millet-that and some long millet and huge quantities of mountain yams, with an occasional crop of mung beans. Naturally, you'll also find wild hemp, with its bright-blue flowers. Not much in the way of legumes and tubers: mostly yellow yams, purple yams, yellow radishes, and carrots. People are quick to admit that yellow-skinned radishes, those coarse, chunky things, are pretty awful, but they keep pushing out their red-skinned cousins, which can't gain a toehold no matter how hard they try. The other green you see sometimes is cabbage, which carefully forms itself into tight little circles, each layer of leaves wrapping itself around the treasure lying at the center, which, when the thing is sliced open, is revealed to be nothing more than a skimpy cabbage heart.

In truth, Fritter Hollow was once a bitterly barren place. Now while people often equate the word
bitter
with poverty, in 1992 no one was prepared to call Fritter Hollow impoverished. That is because our great and wise government decided to permit the locals to dig tunnels into the mountains, some deep and some shallow, from which black rock was extracted. Narrow, twisting asphalt roads were built, pale-faced folk from the south moved in, and that led to a surfeit of tales regarding loose behavior. Generally speaking, southerners call that black, flammable stuff coal, but in Fritter Hollow it's called charcoal; it stands to reason that the black tunnels are called charcoal pits. The discovery that the term
charcoal pits
was unacceptable is linked to Wheatie Liu, Fritter Hollow's village chief, which meant he had the responsibility of overseeing activities at the charcoal pits even though people could no longer call them that; when 1992 rolled around, Wheatie Liu was being called the mine boss. Which is also what people once called the murderer Talented Wu.

Who, then, is Talented Wu?

In order to tell this story reasonably well, it is necessary to introduce Talented Wu, the murderer. Strictly speaking, you'd be lucky to find a single person in Fritter Hollow with anything good to say about Talented Wu. The explanation is as apparent as the cobblestones in the road. Talented Wu, the murderer, led a bunch of men over to the mountain quarries west of the village, where they dug seyen or eight tunnels without extracting a single lump of coal; not only that, he wound up owing the village the grand sum of 140,000 yuan. That does not take into account the two hard-luck fellows who were crushed to death, both of whom were posthumously admitted into the Party: one was Small Stuff Wu, who had incredibly small genitals-about the size of lima beans-hence the name Small Stuff, and the other was Greater Principle Zhou, about whom more later (although the randy things I'll have to say about him should probably be kept from any women present).

People familiar with the history of Fritter Hollow do not have to be reminded of the following list of village chiefs:

Dog Killer Li 1948-1952 Nine Changes Li 1953-1959 Rich Furs Wu 1959-1965 Good Stuff Wu 1965-1967 Defend the

East Liu

1967-1976 Talented Wu 1976-1986 Wheatie Liu 1986-

And now the rest of you know that Talented Wu was village chief for an entire decade. People who emerged from their mother's womb in 1942 are, for the most part, considered to have been born in the year of the horse, but some who arrived on the scene a little late might well be considered a sheep. Talented Wu was born in the year of the horse, making his appearance in the twelfth month. He was a soldier for a time, serving in the western province of Qinghai, where there's a whole lot of salt; Talented Wu once said he had frequent nosebleeds. From there, he went to Sichuan to repair a cavernous pit that was dark as pitch and wet as an underground spring. After that, he came home, where his ability to use a gun got him elected head of the local militia, and his subsequent experience as militia head got him chosen village chief. That, more or less, is Talented Wu's story. But it is necessary to describe him physically, his good looks, as it were: of medium height, he had an oblong face with fair skin and dark, bushy brows. He was so good-looking that he managed to bring a sloe-eyed Sichuan girl home with him. There was talk that he had got her pregnant up on the Sichuan mountain where he was working, and sure enough, not long after she arrived in Fritter Hollow, she lay down one day, and out popped a baby boy.

Everybody called the girl the Sichuan dolt. If she had been from the northeast they would have called her the Northeast dolt; if from Hunan, they would have called her the Hunan dolt; and so forth. Easier that way.

Altogether, the Sichuan dolt presented Talented Wu with two sons: Golden Oil (the elder brother) and Silver Oil (his younger one). Both inherited their father's good looks. The older boy enjoyed his share of conquests in the corn patch, including one with the wife of Greater Principle Zhou. But now both boys are tasting the bitterness of prison life. How they keep themselves busy during the day is not documented, but at night they hunt for lice. As a rule, rather than pop lice between their thumbnails, people in prison set them free to find a new home elsewhere in the cell. While in prison, Golden Oil and Silver Oil exhaustively debate the question, Do lice eat grass?

People familiar with the topography of Fritter Hollow and its surrounding area would never overlook the Tatar Cemetery at the western end of town. A mound of earth where nothing grows, it looks like a big steamed bun, which is why it is also called Bun Hill. It's too flat to resemble a corn muffin, which is pointier; but if you travel west from Tatar Cemetery just a little ways, you'll come across a place actually called Muffin Hill.