“Don’t go yet,” Ximen Huan said. “The program hasn’t started.”
“What program?”
“Miraculous hair, my mother’s miraculous hair.”
“Hell, I forgot all about that,” Fenghuang said. “What was it you said? You could cut off a dog’s head and sew it back on with a strand of your mom’s hair, and that dog could still eat and drink, is that it?”
“We don’t need that complicated an experiment,” Ximen Huan said. “You can cut yourself, and then burn a strand of her hair and sprinkle the ashes on the cut. You’ll be good as new in ten minutes and no scar.”
“They say you can’t cut her hair or it’ll bleed.”
“That’s right.”
“Everybody says she has such a kind heart that if one of the villagers is injured, she’ll pull out a strand of her hair for them.”
“That’s right.”
“Then how come she’s not bald?”
“It keeps growing back.”
“Then you’ll never go hungry,” Fenghuang said admiringly. “If your father loses his job one day and turns into a useless pauper, your mother can keep the family fed and housed just by selling her hair.”
“I’d go out begging before I’d let her do that,” Ximen Huan said emphatically. “Although she’s not my real mother.”
“What do you mean?” Fenghuang asked. “If she’s not your real mother, who is?”
“They tell me it was a high school student.”
“The bastard son of a high school student,” Pang said. “How cool is that!”
“Then why don’t you go have a baby?” Ximen Huan said.
“Because I’m a good girl.”
“Does having a baby make you a bad kid?”
“Good kid, bad kid. We’re all good kids!” she said. “Let’s perform the experiment. Shall we cut off Dog Four’s head?”
I barked angrily. My meaning? Try it, you little bastard, and I’ll bite your head off!
“Nobody touches my dog,” your son said.
“So then what?” Fenghuang said. “You’re wasting my time with your phony tricks. I’m leaving.”
“Wait,” your son said. “Don’t go.”
He stood up and went into the kitchen.
“What are you doing, Old Lan?” Fenghuang shouted after him.
He walked out of the kitchen holding the middle finger of his left hand in his right hand. Blood seeped through his fingers.
“Are you crazy, Old Lan?” Fenghuang cried out.
“He’s my uncle’s son, all right,” Ximen Huan said. “You can count on him when the chips are down.”
“Quit spouting nonsense, bastard son,” Fenghuang said anxiously. “Go inside and get some of your mom’s miraculous hair, and hurry!”
Ximen Huan ran inside and quickly emerged with seven strands of thick hair. He laid them on the table and let them burn, quickly turning them to ashes.
“Let’s see that finger, Old Lan,” Fenghuang said as she grabbed the hand with the bleeding finger.
It was a deep cut. I saw Fenghuang go pale. Her mouth was open, her brow creased, as if she was the one in pain.
Ximen Huan scooped up the ashes with a crisp new bill and sprinkled them over your son’s injured finger.
“Does it hurt?” Fenghuang asked.
“No.”
“Let go of his wrist,” Ximen Huan said.
“The blood will wash the ashes away,” Fenghuang said.
“No problem, don’t worry.”
“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.