far from Northeast Gaomi. The family would be permitted a last visit.
By then Jintong had been expelled from school for destroying trees on campus, while Zaohua had been expelled from the drama troupe for stealing.
“We’re going to retrieve the body,” Mother said.
“I don’t see why,” Zaohua said.
“She committed a capital crime, and deserves a bullet. But it wasn’t a heinous crime.”
More than ten thousand people turned out for Shangguan Laidi’s execution. A truck brought the condemned prisoner to the execution ground at the Bridge of Sorrows. Birdman Han was in the truck with her. In order to avoid any last-minute vocal outbursts, the execution team had sealed both their mouths.
Not long after Laidi’s execution, the family received word of Birdman Han’s death. On his way to prison, he had managed to break free and died under the wheels of the train.
4
In order to reclaim tens of thousands of acres of Northeast Gaomi Township’s wasteland, all of Dalan’s able- bodied young men and women were mobilized into teams at the state-run Flood Dragon River Farm. On the day the work assignments were handed out, the director asked me, “What are you good at?” At the time, I was so hungry my ears were buzzing, and I didn’t hear him clearly. His lips parted, exposing a stainless steel tooth right in the middle, as he asked me again, louder this time, “What are you good at?” I’d just spotted my teacher, Huo Lina, on the road carrying a load of manure, and I recalled her saying that I had a natural talent for the Russian language. So I said, “I speak Russian well.” “Russian?” he said with a sneer, his stainless steel tooth glinting in the sunlight. “How well?” he asked derisively. “Good enough to be an interpreter for Khrushchev and Mikoyan? Can you handle a Sino-Soviet communique? Listen to me, young man. People who have studied in the Soviet Union tote manure around here. Do you think your Russian is better than theirs?” All the young laborers awaiting assignments had a good laugh over that. “I’m asking you what you do at home, what you do best.” “At home I tended a goat, that’s what I did best.” “Right,” the director said with a sneer. “Now, that’s what you’re good at. Russian and French, or English and Italian, none of those are worth a thing.” He scribbled something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Report to the animal brigade. Tell Commander Ma to assign you.”
On my way over, an old laborer told me that Commander Ma Ruilian was the wife of the farm director, Li Du, in other words, the “first lady.” When I reported for duty, knapsack and bedding over my back, she was out at the breeding farm giving a demonstration on crossbreeding. Tied up in the yard were several ovulating female animals: a cow, a donkey, a ewe, a sow, and a domestic rabbit. Five breeding assistants – two men and three women – in white gowns, masks over their mouths and noses, and rubber gloves, were holding insemination utensils, standing like attack troops ready for battle. Ma Ruilian had a boyish haircut; her hair was as coarse as a horse’s mane. She had a round, swarthy face; long, narrow eyes; a red nose; fleshy lips; a short neck; a thick chest; and full, heavy breasts like a pair of grave mounds. Shit! Jintong cursed to himself. Ma Ruilian my ass! That’s Pandi! She must have changed her name because of the rotten reputation the name Shangguan had earned. That being the case, Li Du had to be Lu Liren, who was once called Jiang Liren, and maybe before that something else Liren. The fact that this name-changing couple had been sent here must have meant they were out of favor. She was wearing a short- sleeved cotton shirt of Russian design and a pair of wrinkled black trousers over high-topped sneakers. She was holding a Great Leap cigarette in her hand, the greenish smoke curling around her fingers, which looked like carrots. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Is the farm journalist here?” A sallow-faced middle-aged man wearing reading glasses ran out from behind the horse-tethering rack, bent at the waist. ‘Tm here,” he said. “Here I am.” He was holding a fountain pen poised over an open notebook, ready to write. Commander Ma laughed loudly and patted the man on his shoulder with her puffy hand. “I see the chief editor himself has come.” “Commander Ma’s unit is where the news is,” he said. “I wouldn’t trust anyone else to come.” “Old Yu here is a real zealot!” Ma Ruilian complimented him as she patted him on the shoulder a second time. The editor paled and tucked his neck down between his shoulders, as if afraid of the cold. Later on, I learned that this fellow, Yu Zheng, who edited the local newsletter, had been the publisher and editor of the provincial Party Committee newspaper until he was labeled a rightist. “Today I’m going to give you a headline story,” Ma Ruilian said, giving the urbane Yu Zheng a meaningful look and taking a deep drag on the stub of her cigarette, nearly burning her lips. Then she spat it out, tearing the paper and sending the few remaining shreds of tobacco floating in the air – this little trick of hers was enough to frustrate anyone scavenging cigarette butts on the ground. As she exhaled the last of the smoke, she asked her assistants, “Ready?” They responded by raising their insemination utensils. The blood rushed to her face as she wrung her hands and clapped uneasily. She then took out a handkerchief to dry her sweaty palms. “Horse sperm, who has the horse sperm?” she asked loudly. The assistant holding the horse sperm stepped forward and said, “Me, I’ve got it,” the words muffled by the mask over his mouth. Ma Ruilian pointed to the cow. “Give it to her,” she said, “inseminate her with the horse sperm.” The man hesitated, looking first at Ma Ruilian and then at his fellow assistants, lined up behind him, as if he wanted to say something. “Don’t just stand there,” Ma Ruilian said. “Strike while the iron’s hot if you want to get things done!” With a mischievous look, the assistant said, “Yes, ma’am,” and carried the horse sperm over behind the tethered cow. As her assistant inserted the insemination utensil into the cow, Ma Ruilian’s lips were parted and she was breathing heavily, as if the instrument were being inserted in her and not in the cow. But immediately afterward, she issued a stream of rapid commands: She ordered that the bull’s sperm envelop the sheep’s egg and that the ram’s sperm merge with the rabbit’s egg. Under her direction, the donkey’s sperm was inserted into the sow and the boar’s seed injected into the donkey’s womb.
The editor of the farm newsletter’s face was lusterless, his mouth hung slack, and it was impossible to tell if he was about to burst into tears or burst out laughing. One of the assistants – the one holding the ram’s sperm – a woman with curled lashes above small but bright, jet black eyes with very little white showing – refused to carry out Ma Ruilian’s order. She tossed her insemination utensil into a porcelain tray and removed her gloves and mask, revealing the fine hairs on her upper lip, a fair nose, and a nicely curved chin. “This is a farce!” she said angrily.
“How dare you!” Ma Ruilian snarled as she smacked her palms together, her eyes sweeping across the woman’s face. “Unless I’m mistaken,” she said darkly, “you have been capped.” She reached up as if taking a hat off her head. “Not a cap you can remove at will. No, you’re an ultra-rightist, and that will be with you forever, a rightist who will always wear the cap. Am I right?” The woman’s head slumped weakly to her chest, as if her neck were a frost-laden blade of grass. “You’re right,” she said, “I am a lifelong ultra-rightist. But, as I see it, these are unrelated issues, one scientific and one political. Politics are fickle, always shifting, where black is white and white is black. But science is constant.” “Shut your mouth!” Ma Ruilian jerked and sputtered like an out-of-control steam engine. “I am not going to let you spread your poison in my breeding farm! Who are you to be talking about politics? Do you know the name of politics? Do you know what it eats? Politics are at the heart of all labor! Science divorced of politics is not true science. There is no science that transcends politics in the proletariat dictionary. The bourgeoisie has its bourgeois science, and the proletariat has its proletarian science.” “If proletarian science,” the woman responded, risking it all, “insists on crossbreeding sheep and rabbits in the hope of producing a new species of animal, then as far as I’m concerned, that so-called proletarian science is nothing more than a pile of dog shit!”
“Qiao Qisha, how can you be so arrogant?” Ma Ruilian’s teeth were chattering from anger. “Take a look at the sky and then look down at the ground. You should understand the complexity of things. Calling proletarian science dog shit makes you an out-and-out reactionary! That comment alone is enough for us to throw you in jail, even put you in front of a firing squad! But seeing how young and beautiful you are…” Shangguan Pandi, now Ma Ruilian, softened her tone. “I’m willing to let it go this time, but I demand that you carry out your breeding mission! If you refuse, I wouldn’t care if you were the flower of the medical college or the grass of the agricultural college. I can break that horse with the gigantic hooves, so don’t think I can’t do the same with you!”
The well-meaning newsletter editor spoke up: “Little Qiao, do as Commander Ma says. This is, after all, a scientific experiment. Over in Tianjin District, they successfully grafted cotton onto a parasol tree, and rice onto reeds. I read that in
