Your mother was already in her coffin; the lid lay off to the side. Her purple funeral clothes were made of satin with dark gold longevity characters sewn in. Jinlong and Baofeng were kneeling at opposite ends of the coffin. Her hair was uncombed. His eyes were red and puffy; the front of his shirt was tear-stained. Huzhu and Hezuo threw themselves onto the coffin, pounded the sides, and cried bitterly.
“Mother, oh, Mother, why did you have to leave before we came home? Mother, it was you who held us up, now we have nothing! How can any of us go on living?” Your wife’s lament.
“Mother, oh, Mother, you suffered all your life, how could you leave just when you could finally enjoy life?” Huzhu’s lament.
Their tears wetted your mother’s funeral clothes and the yellow paper covering her face. It almost seemed as if the paper had been wetted by tears from the dead.
Your son and Ximen Huan knelt by their mothers’ sides; one’s face was dark as iron, the other’s white as snow.
Xu Xuerong and his wife were in charge of the funeral arrangements. With a shriek of alarm, Mrs. Xu pulled Huzhu and Hezuo’s faces away from the coffin.
“Oh, no, all you mourners, you mustn’t shed tears on her body. If she carries tears from the living, she may be stuck in a life and death cycle…”
Master Xu took a look around.
“Are all the close relatives here?”
No response.
“I ask you, are all the close relatives here?”
The distant relatives exchanged glances, but no one responded.
A distant cousin pointed to the west-side room and said softly:
“Go ask the old gentleman.”
I followed Master Xu over to the west-side room, where your father was sitting against the wall weaving a pot cover with dry sorghum stalks and hemp. A kerosene lamp hanging from the wall lit up that little section of the room. His face was a blur, except for his eyes, from which two bright lights shone. He was sitting on a stool, holding a nearly completed pot lid between his knees. A rustling sound emerged as he wove the hemp around the sorghum stalks.
“Sir,” Master Xu said, “did you send a letter to Jiefang? If he can get here in the next little while, I think-”
“Close the coffin!” your father said. “Raising a dog is better than raising a son!”
When she heard I was going to be in a TV show, Chunmiao said she wanted to be in it too. So we went to Mo Yan, who went to the director, who, when he saw Chunmiao, said she could play the part of Blue Face’s younger sister. The series was planned for thirty episodes, with ten stand-alone stories, each dealing with a bandit annihilation campaign. The director gave us a summary of what we’d be doing: After the gang led by the bandit Blue Face has been dispersed, he flees into the mountains alone. Knowing his reputation as a filial son, the PLA convinces his sister and mother to fake the mother’s death and sends his sister into the mountains to pass on the news. Blue Face comes down from the mountains in his mourning garments and goes straight to his mother’s bier, where PLA soldiers, who are staked out among the mourners, rush up and pin him to the floor. At that moment, his mother sits up in her coffin and says, Son, the PLA always treats its prisoners humanely, so please surrender to them… “Got it?” the director asked us. “Got it,” we said.
Before sealing the coffin, Mistress Xu lifted the yellow paper covering your mother’s face and said:
“Filial mourners, take one last look. But please control yourselves and do not let tears fall on her face.”
Your mother’s face was puffy and jaundiced-looking, almost as if a thin layer of gold powder had been applied. Her eyes were open a crack, enough to release a pair of cold gleams, as if to scold everyone who looked upon her dead face.
“Mother, why have you left me to live as an orphan?…” Ximen Jinlong was wailing so bitterly a pair of cousins had to come up and pull him back from the coffin.
“Mother, my dear mother, take me with you…” Baofeng banged her head against the side of the coffin, producing dull thuds. People dragged her away. Ma Gaige, his hair prematurely gray, wrapped his arm around his mother to keep her from throwing herself on the coffin.
Your wife gripped the edge of the coffin and wept, open-mouthed, until her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell backward. Several of the mourners rushed up and dragged her off to the side, where some of them rubbed the skin between her thumb and forefinger and others pinched the spot beneath her nose to revive her. Slowly she regained consciousness.
Master Xu signaled for the carpenters to come inside with their tools. They carefully picked up the lid and placed it over the body of a woman who had died with her eyes still slightly open. As the nails were pounded in, the chorus of wails reached another crescendo.
Over the next two days, Jinlong, Baofeng, Huzhu, and Hezuo sat on grass mats watching over the coffin from opposite ends, day and night. Lan Kaifang and Ximen Huan sat on stools at the head of the coffin facing each other and burning spirit money in an earthenware platter; at the other end, two thick red candles burned in front of your mother’s spirit tablet, the smoke merging solemnly with paper ash floating in the air.
A steady stream of mourners passed by Master Xu, who meticulously recorded every gift of spirit money, which quickly piled up beneath the apricot tree. It was such a cold day that he had to blow on the tip of his pen to keep the ink flowing. A layer of frost covered his beard; ice formed on the branches of the tree, turning it silver.
Under the director’s guidance, we assumed the moods of our characters. I had to keep reminding myself that I was not Lan Jiefang, but the ruthless bandit Blue Face, a man who had planted a bomb in his stove to explode in his wife’s face when she lit the stove to cook breakfast, and who had cut the tongue out of a boy who had called him by my nickname, Blue Face. I was grief-stricken over the death of my mother, but had to control my tears and bury my sorrow in my heart. My tears were too precious to let them flow like water from a tap. But at the sight of Chunmiao in mourning attire, her face dirtied, my personal grief overwhelmed the part I was playing; my emotions supplanted his. So I tried again, but the director still was not satisfied. Mo Yan was on the set that day, and the director went over and said something to him. I heard Mo Yan reply, “You’re taking this too seriously, Baldy He. If you don’t help me here, you and I are no longer friends.” Then Mo Yan took us aside and said, “What’s wrong with you? Do you have overactive tear glands or what? Chunmiao can cry if she wants, but all you need to do is shed a few tears. It’s not your mother who’s died, it’s the bandit’s. Three episodes, at three thousand RMB apiece for you and two thousand for Chunmiao. That’s enough for you two to live on nicely. Here’s the trick: do not mix this woman in the coffin up with your own mother, who’s back home wearing silks and satins and eating fine food. All you have to do is imagine the coffin filled with fifteen thousand RMB!”
Forty sedans drove into Ximen Village on the day of the interment, even though the road was covered with snow, which their exhaust pipes turned black. They parked across from the Ximen family compound, where the third son of the Sun family, a red armband over his sleeve, directed traffic. The drivers stayed in their cars and kept their engines running, creating a blanket of white mist.