The townspeople burst into riotous laughter, slapping their bellies and shouting, "Excellent!" Baldy Li gestured for them to quiet down, then continued: "The reason I decided to have a vasectomy was because the woman I loved decided to marry someone else. From that point on, I fell into despair and lost all scruples, or why else would I have slept with so many women? If a man chooses to sleep around, all the women he comes across will of course also be loose. Today I have reached an epiphany and realized, to put it coarsely, that not until you've slept with a woman with her hymen intact can you say that you've really slept with a woman. Or, to put it more elegantly, it is only after you have slept with a woman who genuinely loves you that you can be said to have really slept with a woman. The sad truth of the matter is that there hasn't been a single woman who has genuinely loved me. And so it doesn't matter how many women I've slept with. I might as well have been sleeping with myself."
The townspeople were now laughing so hard they couldn't catch their breath, and the sound of their delirious gasps and guffaws resonated throughout the courtroom. Displeased, Baldy Li cried out, "I'm not joking!"
After everyone had quieted down, Baldy Li patted his chest earnestly and said, "I am speaking from my heart." He dabbed at his eyes and then continued to share his heartfelt sorrows. "To tell the truth, I am no longer able to court a woman. I once tried courting a few young women, but it didn't work out. Why? Because I am already debauched."
He tried to explain. "In courtship, women are always likely to get emotional, and sometimes they'll throw a minor tantrum or two. Whenever that happens, I can't help cursing and shouting at them, ‘Damn it, what kind of attitude is this?’ After I shout out a few times, the nice ones always run away!"
Baldy Li paused, then smiled bitterly. "Why? Because I have already become used to paying for sex. Naturally, women who are sleeping with me because I have paid them have better attitudes. For me, sleeping with women is like doing business and has nothing at all to do with love. I am no longer able to respect women, and since I can't respect them, I therefore can't court them. That is my tragedy!"
Amid the laughter of the townspeople, Baldy Li concluded his speech. After wiping his eyes, he then pointed to the thirty plaintiffs and said magnanimously, "This hasn't been easy for them either — they protested in front of my company for an entire month." He turned to one of his underlings. "Tell my CFO to pay each of them one thousand yuan, and we will treat it as one month's wages."
The townspeople shouted their approval. The former plaintiffs each relaxed and put aside their anger, thinking that although they hadn't succeeded in stealing a chicken, at least they hadn't lost a fistful of rice in the process, and furthermore, they did come away with enough money to buy another fistful. Amid everyone's shouts of approval, Baldy Li walked out of the courthouse, beaming with satisfaction. Before stepping into his Santana sedan, he turned around and waved to the cheering crowd; after getting into the car, he rolled down his window and continued waving at them, even after the car had driven off.
After this incident Baldy Li viewed the medical record of his vasec-tomy operation as a great treasure and thought it was truly fortunate that he had decided, in a fit of anger, to have the operation. He had never imagined that it would save him so much trouble. He carefully tore the page documenting his vasectomy out of the booklet, had a framer mount it, then hung it right between his masterpieces by Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian.
The townspeople agreed that Baldy Li's decision to have a vasectomy had been a stroke of genius. Just think, if he hadn't had the vasectomy, then who knows how many little Baldy Lis might be running around in every street and alley, including perhaps a few big-nosed, blond-haired, and blue-eyed ones?
Then everyone let their imaginations go wild as they invented a prehistory for Baldy Li's operation, transforming into something truly legendary the tale of his decision to have the vasectomy after having had his heart broken. They told how he had taken a rope and tied it around his neck and tried to hang himself from a tree branch, but how neither the rope nor the branch held, and consequently he fell to the ground and ended up with a mouthful of mud. Next they described how he tried to drown himself in the river, but after jumping in, he remembered that he actually did know how to swim and therefore wasn't able to drown himself. They imagined him climbing out of the river and cursing, "I can't seem to fucking kill myself!" So he returned home and removed his pants, took out his penis and placed it on the cutting board, picked up the cleaver, and was about to lop it off when he suddenly had to take a piss. When he returned from the bathroom, he discovered that he couldn't bear to part with his penis after all. Therefore, he went to look for a razor blade to slice off his balls, but he discovered that they were so terrified they had shrunken up. Baldy Li therefore felt sorry for them and couldn't bring himself to slice them off. It was only then that he went to the hospital to have the vasectomy.
Now that Baldy Li's vasectomy from a decade earlier was brought to light, the people of Liu once again started paying attention to Lin Hong. Many would point, feeling sorry for her, shaking their heads at her fate. Some of the women of Liu liked to gloat over other people's misfortunes, and they sniffed that Lin Hong might appear clever but was actually quite stupid, while others sighed that this was just another instance of beauty being often cursed with a harsh fate. But some of the men of Liu Town tried to defend her, saying that no one could have anticipated what would happen, and even a fortune-teller can only predict other people's futures but not his own. They said that if everyone could predict the future, the emperors of the past would never have lost their mandate of power, and Lin Hong would never have given up Baldy Li.
CHAPTER 57
WRITER LIU, one of Liu Towns two Men of Talent, had attended the hearing at the courthouse, where he saw firsthand that hilarious scene and heard with his own ears Baldy Li's heartfelt speech. Writer Liu was so excited that night that he couldn't sleep, feeling that he had stumbled across a once-in-a-lifetime story. Therefore, he climbed out of bed, got dressed, and proceeded to spend the entire night writing a lengthy article entitled "Millionaire Crying Out for Love." In his article, Writer Liu deployed the Lofty, Expansive, and Thorough rhetorical precepts to embellish Baldy Li's story. He prettified Baldy Li's having slept with hundreds of women into his having had his heart broken by hundreds of women. He wrote that Baldy Li had fervently sought his romantic ideal in each of these encounters, but each time he found himself entangled not with a virgin but, rather, with a slut.
Writer Liu also sought to trace the source of Baldy Li's woes to his traumatic childhood — transforming the adventures of a fourteen-year-old Baldy Li peeping at bare bottoms in the public toilet into a tale of tragic victimhood. He recounted how the young Baldy Li had entered the latrine, squatted down, and grunted a couple of times; and how, before he had even started to defecate, his key accidentally slid out of his pants pocket and fell into the cesspool below. As he was leaning down to look for it, a certain Mr. Zhao came in and, ignoring Baldy Li's protests, grabbed him and accused him of being a Peeping Tom, then paraded him up and down the streets and alleys of Liu. Under Writer Liu's pen, Liu Town's other Man of Talent, Poet Zhao, was transformed into an anonymous Mr. Zhao, a hopelessly confused fellow who couldn't tell his ass from a hole in the ground. Writer Liu movingly described how a pure youth thereby became besmirched by false accusations, and how that youth unexpectedly didn't fall into depravity but, rather, from an early age simply bit his lip, endured the unjust humiliation, and grew up to exert himself for the sake of others, finally succeeding in building a vast business empire.