When they heard Blacksmith Tongs name, the middle-schoolers yanked back their hands. After looking around and making sure that Blacksmith Tong was nowhere to be seen and that no one else was paying them any heed, they reached over again. Baldy Li opened his mouth and prepared to bite down on any invading digits when Song Gang suddenly shouted, "Shrimp for sale! Shrimp for sale!"
As he yelled out Song Gang nudged Baldy Li with his elbow. When Baldy Li saw that Song Gang's hawking had attracted some passersby he too began shouting, "Shrimp for sale! Fragrant fried shrimp!"
A crowd instantly gathered and stared curiously at Baldy Li and Song Gang. The three middle-schoolers were squeezed off to the sides and stood there cursing Song Gang's dad, Baldy Li's mom, as well as all of their ancestors, before finally wiping their lips and going away.
Someone asked Baldy Li and Song Gang, "How much for the shrimp?"
Song Gang replied, "One yuan a shrimp."
"What?" the man exclaimed. "Do you think you are selling gold?"
"Just smell." Song Gang let Baldy Li hold up the bowl. "These are fried shrimp."
Baldy Li raised the bowl over his head. The crowd all caught a whiff of the shrimp and someone said, "They do smell good. But it should really be two shrimp for a cent."
Someone else added, "With one yuan you could buy a golden shrimp. These two little bastards are real profiteers."
Song Gang stood up, retorting, "You can't eat a golden shrimp."
Baldy Li also stood up and said, "Plus, golden shrimp aren't tasty."
Seeing that the three middle-schoolers were no longer around, Baldy Li and Song Gang breathed a sigh of relief and extricated themselves from the crowd of people. Holding their bowls, the boys swaggered away and proceeded down the street and over the bridge until they reached the front gate of the warehouse. The warehouse was still being guarded by the father of long-haired Sun Wei — who had just missed an opportunity to eat Baldy Li's shrimp. Sun Wei's father saw the two boys walking toward him and chuckled, "Hey, you're not dangling your elbows anymore?"
The two boys answered, "Can't dangle ‘em. We're carrying bowls." Sun Wei's father caught a whiff of the shrimp. He walked over to peer down at the bowls, then grabbed a shrimp and started munching on it. He asked, "Who cooked these?"
Baldy Li answered, "We did."
Astonished, he said, "You little bastards, you're top chefs."
As he said this he reached into the shrimp bowl again, but Baldy Li quickly dodged. So Sun Wei's father simply thrust out both hands, demanding both the shrimp and the wine. The children backed away, dodging his grasp. After cursing "Fuck that!" he walked back to the warehouse door and kicked it open, bellowing, "Song Fanping! Get out here. Your sons brought you stuff to eat and drink!"
He lingered on the words stuff to eat and drink, and soon five or six people wearing red armbands rushed out. Looking all about as they hurried over, they asked, "What's there to eat? What's there to drink?"
Their nostrils flared as they sniffed, and they said, "How fragrant, even more fragrant than lard." They had been eating carrots and greens day in and day out, and tasted pork at most once a month. Now that they caught sight of the fried shrimp in Baldy Li's hands, they felt so ravenous that claws seemed to emerge from their mouths. They surrounded the two children like a high wall encircling two saplings. A din of "Lemme try it!" filled the air, and a stream of saliva rained down on Baldy Li and Song Gangs faces. Frightened, the boys cradled their bowls and yelled, "Help! Help!"
Song Fanping walked out with his dangling arm. The boys spotted their savior and cried out, "Papa, come quickly!"
Song Fanping walked over to the boys, and Baldy Li and Song Gang hid behind him. Relieved, they raised their bowls of shrimp and wine and offered them to him. Song Gang said, "Papa, we made you fried shrimp, and we got you two ounces of rice wine to go with it."
Song Fanping's left hand dangled there uselessly, so he accepted Baldy Li's bowl of shrimp with his right. He didn't eat any, however, but instead politely passed it along to those red-armbanded people. He then accepted Song Gang's wine and also extended it to them. They were all still busy munching on the shrimp, so he waited politely with the bowl of wine. There were as many hands on the shrimp as branches on a tree, and in the blink of an eye they were all gone. The red-armbanders then noticed Song Fanping standing to the side waiting politely with the bowl of wine, and so took the wine and passed it around, each one of them downing a big gulp and finishing it off in no time.
Baldy Li and Song Gang wiped at their tears. Their shrimp and wine had been for Song Fanping, but he didn't get a taste of either. Song Gang said, "We were imagining how you would laugh while enjoying our shrimp and wine."
Song Fanping knelt down and, without a word, wiped away their tears. When he smiled, the boys noticed that he too had tears streaming from his eyes.
After finishing the shrimp and wine, the red-armbanders kicked at Song Fanping and bellowed, "Get up, scram! Get back in the warehouse!"
Song Fanping wiped away his tears and patted first Baldy Li's face, then Song Gang's, and said gently, "Now go on home."
Song Fanping stood up, no longer crying. He smiled contentedly at the red-armbanders, then walked heroically toward the front gate. When he reached the gate he turned around and, his dislocated left elbow still dangling at his side, waved to Baldy Li and Song Gang with his right hand. With that wave he looked so confident and magnanimous, like Chairman Mao waving at the parading masses from atop Tiananmen Square.
CHAPTER 15
YEARS LATER, whenever Baldy Li spoke of his stepfather, he only had one thing to say. Raising his thumb, he would sigh and say, "What a real man."
In that warehouse that was in fact a prison, Song Fanping suffered every torment and abuse imaginable. Yet he never uttered a word of complaint, even as his dislocated left arm became increasingly swollen. He also never stopped writing Li Lan. He had written his first letter on the day of his flag-waving atop the bridge. This was the most glorious moment of his life, so his letter was filled with passion and energy. This was the first time Li Lan, sitting in a hospital bed in Shanghai, had ever received a letter from a man, and what a letter it was! Reading it made her feel as though she had been given a shot of adrenaline. Baldy Li's biological father, who had drowned in the public latrine, had never written her, and for him the height of romance consisted of knocking on her window in the middle of the night, hoping to lure her out to the fields for a romp. So when she received her first letter from Song Fanping, she blushed bright red. And as Song Fanping's letters continued coming one after another, her pulse would race each time she received a new one.
By this point, Song Fanping had been thoroughly beaten down, but in order for Li Lan to feel at ease while receiving her treatment in Shanghai, he continued filling his letters with passion and energy. He didn't tell her what had actually happened but instead described how things were getting better and better, so she believed that he was riding the crest of the red waves of the Cultural Revolution. Even after Song Fanping had his left elbow dislocated, he nevertheless continued, using his right hand to embroider his glorious exploits for her, and Baldy Li and Song Gang would mail the letters off for him. The boys would come to the front gate of the warehouse, and long-haired Sun Wei's father would hand them the letters, which they would then take to the post office. When Song Fanping mailed his own letters, he always pasted the stamp in the top right corner of the envelope. But when Baldy Li and Song Gang mailed them, they didn't know where to put the stamp. Once they saw someone else place it on the back of the envelope, so Baldy Li did the same. The next time, when it was Song Gangs turn, he saw that someone had pasted it over the opening, and did the same.