“If that doesn’t stop the bleeding,” she said threateningly, “I’ll chop those dog paws of yours off!”
“I said don’t worry.”
Slowly Fenghuang loosened her grip on your son’s wrist.
“Well?” Ximen Huan said proudly.
“It worked!”
52
Jiefang and Chunmiao Turn the Fake into the Real
Taiyue and Jinlong Depart this World Together
Lan Jiefang, you gave up your future and your reputation all for love; abandoning your family was something upright people would not countenance, yet writers like Mo Yan sang your praises. But not returning for your mother’s funeral was such an unfilial act I’m afraid even Mo Yan, who has a reputation for twisting logic, would find it hard to come to your defense.
I never received word of my mother’s death. I was living anonymously in Xi’an like a criminal in hiding. I knew that no court would grant me a divorce as long as Pang Kangmei was in a position of power. Denied a divorce but living with Chunmiao, my only option was to reside quietly far from home.
At first we both worked in a factory established through foreign investment. They manufactured fuzzy dolls. The manager was a so-called overseas Chinese, a bald man with a big belly and yellow teeth, a lover of poetry who was friendly with Mo Yan. He was sympathetic to our plight, actually got a kick out of our experience, and was willing to find office work for me and take Chunmiao on as a bookkeeper in the workshop. The air there was pretty foul, and her nose was constantly being tickled by loose fuzz. Most of the factory workers were girls brought in from the countryside, some as young as thirteen or fourteen, by all appearances. Then one day the factory burned down, claiming many lives and leaving most of the survivors with horrible disfigurements. Chunmiao was spared only because she happened to be home sick that day. For the longest time after that, the tragic fate of those factory girls kept us awake at night. Eventually, Mo Yan found openings for us at his local newspaper.
On many occasions I spotted familiar faces out on the streets of Xi’an and was tempted to call out to whoever it was. But instead I lowered my head and hid my face. Sometimes, when we were in our little apartment, thoughts of home and family had us both weeping miserably Our love was why we’d left our homes, and that love made it impossible to return. Time and again we picked up the telephone, only to put it right back down, and time and again we dropped letters into the mailbox, only to find an excuse to ask for them back when the postman came to collect outgoing mail. Whatever news of home we received came from Mo Yan, who passed on good news and withheld the bad. His greatest fear was not having something to talk about, and we figured he saw us as valuable material for his novels. And so, the crueler our fate, the more convoluted our story became, and the more dramatically our circumstances developed, the more it interested him. Although I was kept from going home for my mother’s funeral, during those days I actually played the role of filial son due to a combination of strange circumstances.
One of Mo Yan’s classmates from his writers workshop days was directing a TV drama about the bandit annihilation campaign by the People’s Liberation Army. One of the characters was nicknamed Lan Lian, or Blue Face, a bandit who cut down humans as if they were blades of grass but was a devoted, filial son to his mother. Mo Yan introduced me to his friend as a means for me to earn a bit of extra money The director had a full beard, a pate as bald as Shakespeare’s, and a nose as crooked as Dante’s. As soon as he saw me, he slapped his thigh and said, I’ll be damned! We won’t have to worry about makeup!
We were picked up by Ximen Jinlong’s Cadillac to be driven back to Ximen Village. The red-faced driver refused to let me get in, so your son scowled at him and said:
“You think this is a dog, is that it? Well, he’s an apostle who loved my grandmother more than any member of the family!”
We’d barely left the county town when snow began to fall, tiny flakes like salt crystals. The ground was blanketed with white by the time we reached the village, and we heard a distant relative who’d come to mourn Grandma’s passing shout tearfully:
“Heaven and earth are weeping for you, Great-Aunt. Your goodness has moved the world!”
Like a soloist in a choir, his wails were contagious; I could hear Ximen Baofeng’s hoarse crying, Ximen Jinlong’s majestic wailing, and Wu Qiuxiang’s melodic weeping.
As soon as they stepped out of the car, Huzhu and Hezuo buried their faces in their hands and began to cry. Your son and Ximen Huan held their mothers up by their arms. In anguish I walked along behind them. My eldest dog brother had died by then, but doddering old Dog Two, who was lying at the base of the wall, greeted me with a low whimper; I was too upset to return the greeting. Streams of cold air seemed to crawl up my legs and into my body, where they turned my innards into ice, I was trembling, my limbs were stiff as boards, and my reactions were hopelessly dulled. I knew I’d gotten very old.
Your mother was already in her coffin; the lid lay off to the side. Her purple funeral clothes were made of satin with dark gold longevity characters sewn in. Jinlong and Baofeng were kneeling at opposite ends of the coffin. Her hair was uncombed. His eyes were red and puffy; the front of his shirt was tear-stained. Huzhu and Hezuo threw themselves onto the coffin, pounded the sides, and cried bitterly.
“Mother, oh, Mother, why did you have to leave before we came home? Mother, it was you who held us up, now we have nothing! How can any of us go on living?” Your wife’s lament.
“Mother, oh, Mother, you suffered all your life, how could you leave just when you could finally enjoy life?” Huzhu’s lament.
Their tears wetted your mother’s funeral clothes and the yellow paper covering her face. It almost seemed as if the paper had been wetted by tears from the dead.
Your son and Ximen Huan knelt by their mothers’ sides; one’s face was dark as iron, the other’s white as snow.
Xu Xuerong and his wife were in charge of the funeral arrangements. With a shriek of alarm, Mrs. Xu pulled Huzhu and Hezuo’s faces away from the coffin.
“Oh, no, all you mourners, you mustn’t shed tears on her body. If she carries tears from the living, she may be stuck in a life and death cycle…”
Master Xu took a look around.
“Are all the close relatives here?”
No response.
“I ask you, are all the close relatives here?”
The distant relatives exchanged glances, but no one responded.
A distant cousin pointed to the west-side room and said softly:
“Go ask the old gentleman.”
I followed Master Xu over to the west-side room, where your father was sitting against the wall weaving a pot cover with dry sorghum stalks and hemp. A kerosene lamp hanging from the wall lit up that little section of the room. His face was a blur, except for his eyes, from which two bright lights shone. He was sitting on a stool, holding a nearly completed pot lid between his knees. A rustling sound emerged as he wove the hemp around the sorghum stalks.
“Sir,” Master Xu said, “did you send a letter to Jiefang? If he can get here in the next little while, I think-”
“Close the coffin!” your father said. “Raising a dog is better than raising a son!”
When she heard I was going to be in a TV show, Chunmiao said she wanted to be in it too. So we went to Mo Yan, who went to the director, who, when he saw Chunmiao, said she could play the part of Blue Face’s younger sister. The series was planned for thirty episodes, with ten stand-alone stories, each dealing with a bandit annihilation campaign. The director gave us a summary of what we’d be doing: After the gang led by the bandit Blue Face has been dispersed, he flees into the mountains alone. Knowing his reputation as a filial son, the PLA convinces his sister and mother to fake the mother’s death and sends his sister into the mountains to pass on the news. Blue Face comes down from the mountains in his mourning garments and goes straight to his mother’s bier, where PLA soldiers, who are staked out among the mourners, rush up and pin him to the floor. At that moment, his
