feet, topped by army leggings. The only thing that kept him from total resemblance to an Eighth Route soldier was the absence of a repeater rifle slung over his back. He’d take a couple of steps, then a swig from his canteen, and finally utter a loud curse. By the time the canteen was empty, the moon would be low in the western sky and he’d be falling-down drunk. On some nights he made it back to his bed to sleep it off; on other nights he’d simply bed down by a haystack or on an abandoned millstone and sleep till sunrise. He was spotted sleeping by a haystack by early-morning market goers, his brows and beard coated with frost, his face nice and ruddy, with no sign of feeling the cold. He’d be snoring away so peacefully no one wanted to wake him from whatever he was dreaming. Sometimes he’d head out to the fields on a whim and start a conversation with Lan Lian, but not by stepping on Lan Lian’s plot of land. No, he’d stand on somebody else’s property and engage the independent farm in a verbal battle. But since Lan Lian was busy working, he had little time for idle chatter, so he just let the old man talk, which he was only too happy to do. When Lan Lian did open his mouth, though, a pointed comment as hard as a rock or as sharp as a knife emerged and shut the old man up on the spot, so enraging him he could hardly stand. During the “Contract Responsibility System” phase, for instance, Hong Taiyue said to Lan Lian:
“Isn’t this the same as bringing back capitalism? Wouldn’t you say it was a system of material incentives?”
In a low, muffled voice, Lan Lian replied: “The best is yet to come, just you wait and see!”
Then when that led to the phase of a system of “household responsibility for production,” Hong stood alongside Lan Lian’s plot of land and jumped up and down, cursing:
“Shit, are they really giving up on the People’s Commune, ownership at the three levels of commune, brigade, and production team levels, with the production team as the base, from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs, all that?”
“Sooner or later, we’ll all be independent farmers,” Lan Lian said coldly.
“Dream on,” Hong said.
“You just wait and see.”
Then when the subsistence system went into effect, Hong got roaring drunk and came up to Lan Lian’s land, wailing and cursing angrily, as if Lan Lian himself were the person responsible for all the earth-shaking reforms:
“Lan Lian, you motherfucker, it’s just like you said, you bastard. This subsistence system is nothing but independent farming, isn’t it? After thirty hard, demanding years, we’re right back to the days before Liberation. Well, not for me. I’m going to Beijing, right up to Tiananmen Square, and I’ll go to Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall and weep to his spirit. I’ll tell Chairman Mao I’m going to file a complaint against all of you. Our land, the land we fought for and turned red, and now they want a new color…”
Grief and anger drove Hong out of his mind, and as he rolled on the ground, he lost sight of boundaries. He rolled onto Lan Lian’s land just as Lan was cutting down beans. Hong Taiyue, rolling on the ground like a donkey, rolled into the bean lattice, crushing the pods and sending beans popping and flying all over the place. Lan pressed Hong to the ground with his sickle and said unsparingly:
“You’re on my land! We struck a deal many years ago, and now it is my right to sever your Achilles tendon. But I’m in a good mood today, so I’m going to let you off.”
Hong rolled right off of Lan Lian’s land and, by holding on to a scrawny mulberry tree, got to his feet.
“I refuse to accept it. Old Lan, after thirty years of struggle, you still wind up the victor, while those of us of unquestionable loyalty and hard, bitter work spend thirty years of blood and sweat, only to wind up the losers. You’re right and we’re wrong…”
“In the land distribution, you got yours, didn’t you?” Lan asked in a less confrontational tone. “I’ll bet you got every inch you had coming. They wouldn’t dare shortchange you. And you still receive your six-hundred-yuan cadre- level pension, don’t you? And will they take away your monthly army supplement of thirty yuan? Not hardly. You have nothing to complain about. The Communist Party is paying you for everything you did, good or bad, every month like clockwork.”
“These are two different matters,” Hong replied, “and what I won’t accept is that you, Lan Lian, are one of history’s obstacles, a man who was left behind, and here you are, part of the vanguard. You must be proud of yourself. All Northeast Gaomi Township, all Gaomi County, is praising you as a man of foresight!”
“I’m not the sage. That would be Mao Zedong, or Deng Xiaoping,” Lan Lian said, suddenly agitated. “A sage can change heaven and earth. What can I do? I just stick to one firm principle, and that is, even brothers will divide up a family’s wealth. So how will it work to throw a bunch of people with different names together? Well, as it turns out, to my surprise, my principle stood the test of time. Old Hong,” Lan Lian said tearfully, “you sank your teeth in me like a mad dog for half my life, but you can’t do that anymore. Like an old toad used to hold up a table, I struggled to bear the weight for thirty years, but now, at last, I can stand up straight. Give me that canteen of yours.”
“What, you’re going to take a drink?”
Lan Lian stepped over the boundary of his land, took the liquor-filled canteen out of Hong Taiyue’s hand, tipped his head back, and drank every last drop. Then he flung away the canteen, got down on his knees, and said with a mixture of sadness and joy:
“You can see, my friend, I held out long enough, and now I can work my land in the light of day…”
I didn’t personally see any of this, so it has to be considered hearsay. But since a novelist by the name of Mo Yan came from there, fact and fiction have gotten so jumbled up, figuring out what’s true and what’s not is just about impossible. I should be telling you only stuff from my personal experience or things I saw or heard, but, I’m sorry to say, Mo Yan’s fiction has a way of wriggling in through the cracks and taking my tale to places it shouldn’t go.
So, as I was saying, I hid in the shadows outside the gate of the Ximen family compound and watched as Yang Qi, who by then was pretty drunk, picked up his glass and, wobbling back and forth and swaying from side to side, made his way over to the table where the bad people from earlier days were sitting. Since they had gathered for a special occasion, everyone at the table was in an agitated mood as they recalled the wretched times they had survived, approaching a point where they could easily be intoxicated without the aid of alcohol. So they were shocked to see Yang Qi, the onetime head of public security, who, as representative of the dictatorship of the proletariat, had used a switch on them, shocked and angry, as he braced himself with a hand on the table and raised his glass with the other.
“Worthy brothers,” he said, his thick tongue blurring the words a bit, “gentlemen, I, Yang Qi, offended all of you in the past, and today I come to offer my apologies.”
He tipped his head back and poured the contents in the direction of his mouth, most making it only as far as his neck, where it soaked his necktie. He reached up to loosen his tie, but wound up making it tighter, and tighter, until his face began turning dark. It was almost as if the only way he could rid himself of the torment he was experiencing was to commit suicide this way and expatiate his guilt.
The onetime turncoat Zhang Dazhuang, at heart a good man, stood up to rescue Yang by removing his tie and hanging it from a branch of the tree. Yang’s neck was red, his eyes bulging.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “the West German chancellor got down on his knees in the snow before a memorial to the murdered Jews and asked forgiveness for the deeds of Hitler. Now I, Yang Qi, the onetime head of public security, kneel before you to ask your forgiveness.”
The bright light from the lantern lit up his face, which had grown pale, as he knelt on the ground beneath the necktie that hung over his head like a bloody sword. How symbolic. I was deeply moved by the scene, even if it was slightly comical. This coarse, disagreeable man, Yang Qi, not only knew that the West German chancellor had gone down on his knees to ask forgiveness, but his conscience had told him he had to apologize to men he had mistreated in the past. I couldn’t help looking at him with new eyes, giving him a bit of grudging respect. Vaguely I recalled hearing Mo Yan say something about the West German chancellor, another piece of information he’d gleaned from
The leader of this band of onetime bad characters, Wu Yuan, ran over to help Yang Qi to his feet, but Yang wrapped his arms around a table leg and refused to stand.
“I’m guilty of terrible things,” he wailed. “Lord Yama has sent his attendants to flay me with their lashes… ow… that hurts… it’s killing me…”
“Old Yang,” Wu Yuan said, “that’s all in the past. Why hold on to those memories when we’ve already forgotten? Besides, society forced you to do what you did, and if you hadn’t beaten us, somebody else would’ve. So
