Authors: Yan Lianke
“My father is ninety-seven. He is back home supporting us by raising cattle and plowing the land.”
The audience became increasingly animated, asking an additional series of questions. This Guess-the-Age-of-the-Old-Man routine was a sensation, and was rewarded with energetic cheers. In this way, the Second Shuanghuai County Special-Skills Performance Troupe got under way and began touring the region beyond the Balou mountains. To everyone’s surprise, this second troupe turned out to be as successful as the first. The second troupe consisted of forty-nine Liven villagers, all of whom had been selected by Grandma Mao Zhi. Of these forty-nine villagers, there were also, in addition to Mothlet, nine nins ranging from thirteen to seventeen years old. All nine of these nins were under four feet tall and weighed under fifty-seven pounds, and therefore the county had the three youngest nins dress up and put on makeup, so that from a distance they would all resemble each other. They were then given a single residency permit booklet, which claimed that they were an exceedingly rare set of nonuplets and that it took their mother a full three days to give birth to them.
The audience stared in amazement when they stood there without moving, and their performance came to be known as Nine Mothlets. This was the second troupe’s pièce de résistance. They used it as their opening act, and it tugged at the audience’s heartstrings. The performance then went on to a series of acts similar to those popularized by the first troupe, including Blind-Person-Listening, Deaf-Person-Setting-Off-Fireworks, and Cripple-Leaping. The audience gave off gasps of amazement, as their attention was riveted on the stage.
The troupe also added the Six-Fingered-Handprint, accompanied by a local Balou tune, followed by a Guess-the-Age-of-the-Old-Man routine that lifted the audience’s mood even further, like an autumn breeze of wheat fragrance that wafts over from distant fields. The second troupe, like the first, also performed Leaf-Embroidery and Foot-in-a-Bottle routines, although the new Leaf-Embroidery performer could not embroider a sparrow, as the one in the first troupe could. The act still consisted of a paralyzed woman embroidering a tree leaf, but the woman in the second troupe could embroider only peony and chrysanthemum blossoms. However, given a leaf from a wood-oil or poplar tree, she could embroider it with blossoms in less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette or eat a piece of candy. This was a very unusual ability. Although the boy responsible for the Foot-in-a-Bottle performance had a rather large foot and his polio-stricken leg was thicker than a cane, so that he could insert his foot only into a bottle that had an opening as big as a jar’s, he was nevertheless willing to turn somersaults on stage while wearing this bottle-shoe, and even if the bottle didn’t shatter when he landed the audience would still roar in appreciation. While these performances were not as good as those of the first troupe, at least the Nine Mothlets routine was an inimitable act that the first troupe couldn’t duplicate.
Nonuplets. Who had ever heard of someone giving birth to nonuplets? And for all of them to survive? The very fact that the girls were all nins made the claim that they were nonuplets seem all the more convincing.
Although the girls in the Nine Mothlets routine were all performing as nins, they were nevertheless still human beings. But who had ever heard of someone giving birth to nine infants at once? Before every Nine Mothlets performance, the announcer would say many moving things, and then would ask for anyone in the audience who had twins to stand up and come onto the stage. Over the course of ten performances, on only one or two occasions did anyone ever report having had twins—whereupon the red-faced mother would lead her twins onto the stage, and the audience would stare enviously at them. Then, the announcer would call out,
“Does anyone have triplets?”
The audience would look around expectantly, thinking that someone might in fact have triplets, but they would be disappointed.
The announcer would then call out,
“Does anyone have quadruplets?”
Some people would still turn and look around, but relatively few.
She would then call out, “Any quintuplets?”
No one turned around, as they were beginning to get tired of her questions. She, however, continued calling out,
“Any sextuplets?”
“Any septuplets?”
“Any octuplets?”
Finally, screaming at the top of her lungs, she would shout, “Any nonuplets?”
At this point, the nonuplets would run onto the stage holding hands, looking like a preschool class from the city. They were all the same height, weight, and body type, and after applying makeup they even had a child’s red cheeks. They were all wearing the sort of red cotton shirts and green silk pants that normally only preteen girls wear, and they all had their hair braided into two pigtails.
Most important, they were all dwarfs, which is to say nins.
These nine little nins stood together on stage like nine mothlets, as the audience stared in amazement. The entire theater fell silent, and when the spotlight shone on the face of someone in the audience, everyone could hear the sound of the light shining down, as though it were possible to hear a shadow passing over the person’s face.
At this point, the announcer began to introduce the girls one after the other. He said the first was called Mothlet, was fifteen years old, and weighed fifty-seven pounds. The second was called Second Mothlet, was fifteen years old, and weighed fifty-seven and a half pounds. The third was called Third Mothlet, was fifteen years old, and weighed fifty-seven and three-tenths pounds. And so on until the last one, who was called Little Mothlet and was also fifteen years old and also weighed fifty-seven and three-tenths pounds.
After the introductions were complete, the girls began their performance.
The nonuplets’ opening act was very different from those of the other disabled performers. Because they were so tiny, they began with a mothlet dance. How tiny were they? One crippled man wearing a performance costume climbed onto the stage and announced that his family’s chickens had gone missing. He started looking for the chickens on stage, and each time he found one he would stuff it into his bag. By the time he found the ninth one, he had filled two large bags. He then carried the bags around the stage. Eventually, one of the bags ripped open and a tiny mottled chick fell out of the hole, followed by two white ones and a black one. All together, nine black, white, and mottled chicks tumbled out of the bag and began dancing around the stage. They were all singing a Balou tune.
As might be expected, however, the little nins were in fact as tiny as chicks, and when they opened their mouths they could produce only a high-pitched squeal, like a knife being sharpened. The girls sang together, their voices as sharp as daggers flying toward the audience from the stage, making a noise that threw the entire auditorium into a commotion. The sound exploded through the windows and doors, shaking the lights back and forth and knocking the dust off the walls, and the audience covered their ears in terror.
But the more the audience members tried to cover their ears, the louder the nine little nins sang:
Brother, you left the Balou mountains.
At home, my sisters and I are waiting anxiously.
Leaving one village, and looking back at another,
I am waiting here anxiously.
Climbing a mountain and fording a river,
I’ve nearly gone insane searching for my brother.
Advance one step, and retreat one step,
We don’t know which family’s daughter has entangled our brother.
Advance two steps, and retreat two steps,
We don’t know which mother has led our brother away.
Advance three steps and retreat three steps,
We don’t know which family’s daughter has stolen our brother’s heart.
Advance seven steps, and retreat seven steps,
We don’t know if our hearts will be able to pull brother’s soul back.
The end of the song marked the conclusion of the routine and the show.
The city-dwellers watched this unexpectedly dazzling performance, and for days they couldn’t stop talking about the blind man who could hear a pin drop, the paralyzed woman who could embroider a leaf, the hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old man, and the nonuplets who were able to sing with such vigor that they nearly brought down the roof. Their stories grew and grew, and each time the troupe arrived at a new location newspapers and television stations would invariably give them a lot of free publicity. Therefore, at each new location, everyone would be certain to get tickets. As expected, the performances of the second troupe that Grandma Mao Zhi selected were as astonishing as those of the first, and at each new site they would need to put on at least three or five performances. The county arranged it so that one troupe would perform in the entire eastern part of the district and the other throughout the western part, and then they would switch. After they had performed in all of the cities throughout the province, one of the troupes would proceed to Hunan and Hubei, Guangdong and Guangxi, concentrating on the area along the railroad and the highway linking the respective provinces, while the other troupe would proceed to Shandong, Anhui, Zhejiang, and Shanghai.
The Southeast is one of the most prosperous regions in the world, and the area along the coast is particularly wealthy. Some families are so wealthy that when their kids take a shit, if they don’t happen to have any toilet paper on hand they’ll simply use a ten-yuan bill or two instead. When they heard that there was this sort of disabled performance troupe, they initially couldn’t believe their ears, but eventually they started flocking to the theater to watch the second troupe in amazement.
Sometimes, the troupe wouldn’t stop at one performance a day, but rather would give two or even three. The money from the ticket sales started pouring in, flowing along the banks’ channels and into the county coffers. Every day, the county-appointed accountant would rush to the bank, going as often as he did the restroom.
As the original troupe made its way from Hubei to Hunan, and on to Guangdong, it goes without saying that it too often performed two or three times a day, and the money from ticket sales piled up high enough to touch the sky. Some people claimed that as the troupe continued its tour, Huaihua kept growing taller until she could no longer be considered a nin. Even without high heels, she was taller than many wholers, and with heels she was one of the tallest girls around. Not only did she grow like crazy over the course of those several months, but her appearance changed dramatically. It was said that while Huaihua was touring, she would always sleep with the troupe director, during which time she began growing at an incredible pace and soon became an extraordinarily beautiful wholer. It was said that when Secretary Shi heard that Huaihua and the troupe director were sleeping together, he made a special trip to visit the troupe, bringing with him a letter from Chief Liu, and then beat the troupe director until he knelt down before Secretary Shi and begged for mercy.
Who knows whether any of this was true, but what was known was that Huaihua grew into a wholer. Afterward, her sisters Tonghua and Yuhua refused to speak to her. It was also said that when she stood at the front of the stage as the announcer, the audience would cry out upon seeing her beauty. Many people went to the troupe’s performances simply to see her, and as a result ticket prices kept rising and the county’s coffers became increasingly swollen with bills.
By autumn, the money in the county’s coffers had reached the ten-figure range—a sum so large that even a pair of abaci weren’t enough to calculate it, and instead five or six would be needed to figure out how much money the two troupes had succeeded in bringing in, and how much of a bonus each of the bank employees should receive.
In virtually no time they succeeded in raising essentially all the money they needed for the Lenin Fund.
It was already almost the end of the year, and while it was bitterly cold in the north there were some areas in the south where it remained nearly as hot as a northern summer. By this point, the first troupe had already reached Guangdong, while the second was in northern Jiangsu, in one of the leading cities in northern China, where the skyscrapers were so tall they disappeared into the clouds and the houses were clustered as thick as trees in a forest. It was said that some of the rich people there were capable of gambling an entire night and losing a hundred thousand—or even eight hundred thousand—yuan. Therefore, after the villagers selected by Grandma Mao Zhi had given several performances, they found that they simply couldn’t stop.
Everyone went crazy.
No one could believe there was a performance troupe consisting entirely of blind and deaf people, cripples and mutes, together with people who were missing a limb or had an extra finger, and little nins less than three feet tall. No one could believe that these disabled performers were all from the same village. No one could believe that in this village there was a mother who had given birth to nine girls at once. No one could believe that there was a child who was completely blind yet could hear a tree leaf or a sheet of paper fall to the ground. No one could believe there was a middle-aged deaf man who, because he was deaf, dared to hang a string of firecrackers around his neck, separated from his face by only a thick board, and proceed to ignite them. No one could believe that the nonuplet girls could sing their northern mountain songs so shrilly that if you threw a balloon into the air above them, their voices would cause it to pop.