Mother wept for a moment only; then she stood up and said, “My precious daughter, your suffering has come to an end.”
Two days after we buried Xiangdi, just as things were calming down, a team of eight rightists from the Flood Dragon River Farm brought the body of Shangguan Pandi up to our gate. A man with a red armband, their leader, pounded on the gate. “You, Shangguans, come claim your body!”
“She’s not my daughter,” Mother told the leader.
The leader, a member of the tractor unit, knew Jintong, so he handed him a slip of paper. “This is your sister’s letter. In the spirit of revolutionary humanism, we’ve brought her home to you. You can’t imagine how heavy she is – carrying her body has just about worn out these rightists.”
Jintong nodded apologetically to the rightists before unfolding the slip of paper. On it were the words: I am Shangguan Pandi, not Ma Ruilian. After participating in the revolution for over twenty years, this is how I’ve ended up. When I die, I beg the revolutionary masses to take my body back to Dalan and turn it over to my mother, Shangguan Lu.
Jintong walked up to the door leaf on which the body lay, bent over, and removed the white paper covering her face. Pandi’s eyeballs bulged and her tongue stuck halfway out. Quickly covering her face again, he threw himself at the feet of the eight rightists and said, “I beg you, please, carry her over to the graveyard. There’s no one here who can do it.”
Mother began to wail loudly.
After burying his fifth sister, Jintong walked into the lane, dragging a shovel behind him, where he was stopped by a gang of Red Guards. They placed a paper dunce cap on his head. He shook his head, and the cap fell to the ground; he saw that his name had been written on it, with a red X through it. The black and red ink had run together, like blood. Beneath his name were the words “Necrophiliac and Murderer.” When the Red Guards began beating him on the buttocks with a club, he set up a howl, even though his padded pants kept the blows from hurting much. One of the Red Guards picked up the cap, ordered him to squat down like the comic opera character Wu Dalang, and put the cap back on his head, then pounded it down so it would stay. “Hold it on!” a fierce-looking Red Guard demanded. “The next time it falls off, we’ll break your legs!”
Holding the cap on with both hands, Jintong stumbled down the lane. At the gate of the People’s Commune, he saw a line of people, all wearing dunce caps. There were Sima Ting, his belly bloated, the taut skin nearly transparent; the grade-school principal; the middle-school political instructor, plus five or six commune officials minus their usual swagger, and a bunch of people who had once been forced by Lu Liren to kneel on the earthen platform in front of all the people. Then Jintong saw his mother. Next to her was little Parrot Han, and next to him was Old Jin, the woman with one breast. The words “Mother Scorpion, Shangguan Lu” were written on Mother’s cap. Parrot Han wasn’t wearing a cap, but Old Jin was, along with an old shoe that hung around her neck, as a sign of wantonness. With drums and gongs shattering the stillness, the Red Guards began the public parading of the “Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits.” It was the last market day before New Year’s, and the streets were packed with shoppers. People squatted on both sides of the street with piles of straw sandals, cabbages, and yam leaves, salable agricultural by-products. Everyone wore black padded jackets, shiny with a winter of snivel and greasy smoke. Many of the older men cinched up their pants with belts of hemp, and the general appearance of the people wasn’t much different from the Snow Festival fifteen years earlier. Half the people who had attended the Snow Festival had died during the three years of famine, and the survivors were now old men and women. A scant fewr of them could still recall how graceful and elegant the Snow Prince, Shangguan Jintong, had looked at that last Snow Festival. At the time, none of them could have imagined that he would one day become a “Necrophiliac and Murderer.”
The Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits walked on woodenly as Red Guards smacked them in the buttocks with clubs, more symbolic than real. The clanging of gongs and the beating of drums rocked the earth, the shouted slogans made eardrums throb. Crowds of people pointed fingers and engaged in animated discussions. As they walked, Jintong felt someone step on his right foot, but he let that pass. When it happened a second time, he looked up and saw that Old Jin’s eyes were on him, though her head was bowed and strands of yellow hair covered her reddened ears. “Goddamned ‘Snow Prince,’” he heard her say. “With all the living girls waiting for you, you had to do it to a corpse!” Pretending he hadn’t heard her, he kept his eyes fixed on the heels of the person ahead of him. “Come see me when this is over,” he heard her say, throwing him into confusion. Her inappropriate teasing disgusted him.
Sima Ting, who was hobbling along, tripped over a brick and fell to the ground. The Red Guards kicked him, but got no reaction. So one of the smaller ones stepped on his back and jumped up and down. We all heard a dull sound like a balloon popping and saw rivulets of yellow liquid ooze from his mouth. Mother knelt down and turned his head to face her. “What’s the matter, uncle?” His eyes opened just enough to show white, and with one last look at Mother, those eyes closed for the last time. The Red Guards dragged his body over to the ditch by the road. The procession continued.
Jintong spotted a graceful figure in the crowd, and recognized her at once. She was wearing a black corduroy overcoat, a brown scarf, and a blindingly white mask over her mouth and nose, so that all that showed were her dark eyes and lashes. Sha Zaohua! He nearly shouted out her name. She’d gone away right after First Sister was shot; during the seven years that had passed since then, he’d heard a rumor about a female thief who’d stolen Princess Sihanouk’s earring, and he knew it had to be Zaohua. From her appearance alone, she looked to have grown into a mature young woman. Among the black-clad citizens in the marketplace, those wearing scarves and face masks were the first group of urban youngsters to be sent down to the countryside, and Zaohua had the most urban airs of any of them. She was standing in the doorway of the co-op restaurant looking in his direction. The sun’s rays fell on her face, and he saw that her eyes shone like a pair of glittering marbles. Her hands were in the pockets of her overcoat; she was wearing a pair of blue corduroy pants, cut in the fashionable style of the day, which Jintong caught a glimpse of when she moved over to the doorway of the general store. A shirtless old man came running out of the restaurant and straight into the procession of Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits, with two men, who were not locals, in hot pursuit. The old man was so cold his skin was nearly black; his coarse white padded pants were hitched up all the way to his chest. As he weaved in and out among the people in dunce caps he crammed a flatcake into his mouth, nearly choking on it. The two men caught him, and he burst into tears, covering what was left of the food with snot and saliva. “I was hungry!” he sobbed. “Hungry!” The two men frowned in disgust at the sight of the wet, dirty remnant of the cake on the ground. One of them picked it up with two fingers and studied it disgustedly, but appeared to think it would be a pity to throw it away. “Don’t eat it, young fellow,” someone in the crowd urged him. “Take pity on him.” The man flung the cake down at the old man’s feet and snarled, “Go ahead, eat it, you old bastard, and I hope you choke on it!” He took out a handkerchief to wipe his fingers and walked off with his companion. The old man picked up the wet, sticky cake and carried it over to a nearby wall, where he rested on his haunches and slowly finished it off.
Sha Zaohua was moving in and out of the crowd. A uniformed petroleum worker in a dogskin cap made his way conspicuously toward them. His eyes were scarred, and a cigarette hung from his lips as he edged sideways through the crowd. Everyone eyed him with envy, and the greater his sense of self-importance, the brighter his eyes became. Jintong recognized him and was moved by the sight. Clothes make the man; saddles make the horse. A worker’s uniform and a dogskin cap had turned the village bully Fang Shixian into a new man. Few people in the crowd had ever seen one of those coarse blue uniforms, thick with padding, the cotton bulging between stitches, and obviously very warm. A youngster who looked like a dark monkey, in lined pants with a torn crotch from which cotton batting had migrated outside, like the tail of a sheep, and a padded jacket whose buttons had long since departed, leaving his belly exposed, followed on Fang Shixian’s heels, his hair looking like a rat’s nest. The people in the procession pushed and shoved to keep warm, when the youngster suddenly jumped into the air, swept the dogskin cap off of Fang’s head, clapped it onto his own, and scampered through the crowd like a cunning dog. Shouts erupted as the pushing and shoving increased. Fang Shixian reached up and felt his head; it took him a moment to realize what had happened, before he too began to shout and took off in pursuit of the youngster, who wasn’t running particularly fast, as if waiting for his pursuer. Fang followed him, cursing the whole time, his eyes fixed not on the road ahead, but on the sunlight glinting off the dog hairs of his cap; he crashed into people, who pushed back and spun him around. The unfolding drama captured the attention of everyone on the street, even the Red Guard little generals, who temporarily put aside class struggle, abandoning their Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits in order to push through the crowd and enjoy the spectacle. The youngster ran up to the gate in front of the People’s Commune steel mill, where some girls were selling roasted peanuts, something that was not permitted;
