“Number Nine.”
“No… not sick.” Gao Yang looked bashfully at his cellmates. “Have to pee… can’t hold it any longer-”
The middle-aged inmate shouted, intentionally drowning out Gao Yang’s complaint. “Open up, he’s at death’s door!”
The rattie of keys, the bolt thrown back-
Gao Yang bent over. “Comrade,” he said, “I have to pee… comrade
The guard, his face twisted in anger, kicked Gao Yang and forced him back into the cell. “Prick!” he cursed. “Who are you calling comrade?”
The door clanged shut.
Gao Yang banged his head against the door. “I didn’t mean ‘comrade,’” he wailed. “I meant ‘Officer,’ Officer Officer Officer-let me out, I can’t hold it back… can’t hold it back…”
“You’ve got a chamber pot in there, you prick!” the guard shouted from the other side of the door. “Use it.”
Still holding his belly, Gao Yang spun around and, to the delight of his cellmates, flitted from one end of the cell to the other, searching for the chamber pot.
“Uncle… Elder Brother… Younger Brother… where is the chamber pot? Where is it?” He wept as he looked under all three cots; drops of urine oozed out each time he bent over.
His cellmates looked on and laughed.
“I can’t hold it back,” he sobbed. “I really can’t.”
The valve opened, releasing a blast of warm urine. His mind went blank as his legs began to quake and all the muscles in his body went slack. His legs felt scalded as that thing of his shuddered; he experienced the greatest sense of relief he had ever known.
The urine puddled at his feet, forming lovely patterns on the floor. “Hey, you, get the chamber pot for him, and hurry,” the iniddle-aged inmate snapped. “There’s probably more where that little bit came from.”
The young man dashed over to the wall, opened a tiny gray door beneath the window, and fished out a black plastic chamber pot. A foul stench filled the cell. “Piss in that, and be quick about it,” he said, giving Gao Yang a shove.
Gao Yang took it out with fumbling fingers and aimed it at the chamber pot. Revulsed by what he saw inside, he let go and made loud splashes as the stream hit. It was music to his ears. With enormous relief he closed his eyes, wishing he could listen to that sound forever.
A slap on the neck brought him rudely out of his trance. He had emptied his bladder in the chamber pot, its top now foamy.
“Go on, put it back inside,” the middle-aged man commanded.
He did as he was told, depositing the chamber pot in the wall and closing the little wooden door behind it.
Now, with the cell smelling like an outhouse and his cellmates glaring at him, he nodded apologetically and meekly sat down on his cot. He felt absolutely drained. His urine-soaked pant legs stuck uncomfortably to his skin, and the injury on his urine-spattered ankle stung painfully, bringing back memories of what had happened earlier that day: as he was walking out of the house, he spotted a clay-colored rabbit streaking out of the acacia grove; it stopped and, it seemed, looked straight at him. Unnerved, he recalled an old man’s assertion that if you see a wild rabbit the first thing in the morning, you’re bound to have bad luck all day long. The police came for him later that day… These exhausting recollections seemed years old, not hours, and were covered by layers of dust.
The old man, licking his lips and blinking his eyes, came up and asked shrilly, “You don’t want to eat?”
Gao Yang shook his head.
That’s all the old man needed to fall to his knees and scoop up the last steamed bun, then crawl up against the wall, his shoulders and head quaking. He purred like a cat that had just caught a mouse.
With a sign from his middle-aged cellmate, the young inmate spun and leapt onto the old man’s back; his chance to avenge being hit by the ladle had arrived, and he pounded the old man’s ridiculous bald head with both fists. “You want something to eat?” he shouted from his perch on the old man’s back. “Here, I’ll give you something!”
The two men rolled around on the floor, slugging each other and yelping and growling. That brought the guards running. A square-faced guard appeared at the window, raking his rifle butt loudly across the bars. “Are you pricks tired of living?” he snarled. “Is this what we get for feeding you? Well, if you don’t break it up right now, you’ll be on bread and water for three days!”
Having made his point, he stomped noisily down the corridor back to his station.
The two prisoners, one old, one young, glared at each other like combatants in a cockfight-one with hardly any feathers left, the other waiting for the first ones to grow in-trying to intimidate each other during a lull in the fighting. Still clutched in the old inmate’s palsied grip was the steamed bun, his prize, and the cause of a number of cuts and bruises on his bald skull.
“Hand over that bun, you old scoundrel,” the middle-aged inmate said in a controlled, authoritative voice.
The trembling in the old man’s hands worsened as he pressed the steamed bun hard against his navel.
“If you don’t,” the middle-aged inmate said menacingly, “I’ll stick your head in the chamber pot tonight and drown you!” Even in the fading light in the cell, the middle-aged inmate’s eyes seemed luminous.
The old mans eyes pooled with tears; since there were no eyelashes to control the flow, the tears fairly gushed from ducts in the festering corners. Gao Yang saw this with great clarity. The old inmate slowly stretched out his arms until they were about eight inches from his body, then opened his hands. Gao Yang counted seven old fingers buried in the steamed bun, which had long since given up its original shape. The whimpering old man suddenly went crazy, ripping off a hunk of the bun and cramming it into his mouth. Then he flung what was left into the puddle of piss Gao Yang had been unable to hold back.
“You want it? Then go get it!” he shrieked.
The middle-aged inmate curled his lip and said, “Is that the way you want it, you mongrel prick?” He walked up and grabbed the man’s neck in a viselike grip. “Either you pick up that bun and eat it or I’ll soak your head in the chamber pot! You choose.”
The old man’s eyes rolled back into his head.
“Well, what’s it going to be?” the middle-aged man asked in measured tones.
“I’ll eat… eat it,” the old man wheezed.
The middle-aged inmate loosened his grip and turned to Gao Yang. “You don’t look like somebody who’s going to give me any trouble,” he snarled. “I expect you to do as I say, and what I want you to do now is lap up the piss you deposited on the floor.”
2.
“Come on, let’s see who can drink his own pee!” announced Wang Tai, a sixth-grader at the Gaotong Village elementary school in Paradise County’s Tree Trench Commune as he stood in the lavatory. It was the summer of 1960. Wang Tai, whose father was the leader of Gaotong Production Team Number 2, had a poor-peasant background.
It was recess time. As soon as the bell rang, the students had swarmed out of the schoolhouse, merging into a single body until they reached the athletic field, where they split up by gender, with boys to the east and girls to the west. Weeds grew all over the athletic field, whose wooden basketball post sported a nice crop of edible fungus; the basket rims were rust red. A blue-eyed, bearded old billy goat tied to a wooden post on the eastern edge of the field stared at the gang of gaunt, wiry, wild children.
The lavatories were located on the southern edge of the athletic field: two open-air structures, with the boys’ lavatory to the east and the girls’ to the west, separated by a low wall made of brick fragments. Gao Yang recalled that the wall barely cleared his head at the time. But Wang Tai, who was the oldest boy in the class, was as tall as the wall, so by standing on bricks he could see what was happening on the other side.
Gao Yang thought back to the sight of Wang Tai standing on three bricks to peek over the wall into the girls’ lavatory. He also recalled what the boys’ lavatory looked like: a large brick-lined pit in the center, with boys
