The propaganda team drove up in a Soviet truck left over from the Korean War. Its original green paint had faded after years of being buffeted by the elements, and a frame with four high-powered loudspeakers had been welded to the top of the cab. A gas-driven generator was mounted in the truck bed, the two sides of which were lined with Red Guards in imitation army uniforms, each gripping the side with one hand and holding up a Little Red Book in the other. Their faces were crimson, either from the cold or from revolutionary passion. One of them, a slightly cross-eyed girl, was grinning from ear to ear. The loudspeakers blared so loud a farmer’s wife had a miscarriage, a pig ran headlong into a wall and knocked itself out, a whole roost of laying hens took to the air, and local dogs barked themselves hoarse. The first sounds after the playing of “The East Is Red” were the roar of the generator and static from the loudspeaker. They were followed by a melodious woman’s voice. I climbed a tree so I could see inside the bed of the truck, where there were two chairs and a table on which rested some sort of machine and a microphone wrapped in red cloth. One of the chairs was occupied by a girl with little braids, the other by a boy who wore a part in his hair. I’d never seen her before, but he was Little Chang, who’d come to our village during the Four Clean-ups campaign, the one they called Braying Jackass. I later learned that he had been assigned to the county opera troupe and, as a rebel, the commander of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction. I shouted down to him from my perch up in the tree: Little Chang! Little Chang! Jackass! But my shouts were swallowed up by the loudspeaker.
The girl shouted into the microphone, and the loudspeaker carried her voice like thunderclaps. Here is what everyone in Northeast Gaomi Township heard: Capitalist-roader Chen Guangdi, a donkey trader who wormed his way into the Party, opposed the Great Leap Forward, opposed the Three Red Banners, is a sworn brother to Lan Lian, Northeast Gaomi Township’s independent farmer who stubbornly hews to the Capitalist Road, and acts as the independent farmer’s protective umbrella. Chen Guangdi is not only an ideological reactionary, he is also immoral. He had sexual relations with a donkey and made her pregnant. She gave birth to a monster: a donkey with a human head!
Yes! The crowd roared its approval. The Red Guards on the truck followed Jackass’s lead in shouting slogans: Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey rapist Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey molester Chen Guangdi! Jackass’s voice, magnified by the loudspeaker, became a vocal calamity, as a flock of wild geese flying overhead dropped out of the sky like stones. Now, the meat of these birds is a delicacy, and nutritious to boot, a rarity for the people below. For them to fall out of the sky at a time when the people’s nutritional lives were so impoverished seemed to be a blessing from heaven, when in fact it was anything but. The people went crazy, pushing and shoving and shouting and screeching, worse than a pack of starving dogs. The first person to get his hands on a fallen bird must have been wild with joy, until, that is, everyone around him tried to snatch it away. Feathers fluttered to the ground, fine down floated in the air; it was like tearing apart a down pillow. The bird’s wings were torn off, its legs wound up in someone else’s hands, its head and neck were torn from its body and held high in the air, dripping blood. People in the rear pushed down on the heads and shoulders of those in front to leap like hunting dogs. People were knocked to the ground, squashed where they stood, trampled where they lay. Shrill cries of Mother!… Mother!… Help, save me… emerged from dozens of black knots of humanity that seethed and churned. Screams and shouts – Ow, my poor head!-merged with the howl of the loudspeaker. Chaos turned to tangled fighting and from there to violent battles. The final tally: seventeen people were trampled to death, an unknown number suffered injury.
Some of the dead were taken away by kin, others were dragged to the doorway of the Butcher Section to await identification and removal. Some of the injured were taken to the clinic or taken home by relatives, some walked or crawled away on their own; some limped away to wherever they wanted to go, some just lay on the ground and wept or wailed. These were Northeast Gaomi Township’s first reported deaths in the Cultural Revolution. In the months to follow, while there were pitched battles, with bricks and tiles flying in the air and an assortment of weapons, from knives to guns to clubs, the number of casualties paled in comparison with this incident.
I was perfectly safe up in the tree, where I saw the whole incident unfold in all its detail. I saw the birds fall from the sky and watched as they were torn apart by people. I saw the whole range of expressions – greed, madness, astonishment, suffering, ferocity – during the incident; I heard everything from cries of torment to those of wild joy; I smelled blood and other noxious odors; and I felt both chilled currents and overheated waves in the air. All this reminded me of tales of wartime, and even though the county annals of the Cultural Revolution recorded the wild geese incident as a case of bird flu, I believed then, and I believe now, that they were knocked out of the sky by the high-volume shrillness of the loudspeaker.
After things quieted down, the parades started up again, although the incident had a cautionary effect on the observing crowds. A gray path opened up in the market where heads once bobbed; it was now dotted with bloodstains and squashed bird carcasses. Breezes carrying a heavy stink blew feathers here and there. The woman who had been selling chickens was hobbling up and down the street, wiping her nose and drying her eyes with her red armband and moaning: My chickens, oh, my chickens… give me back my chickens you bastards, you ought to be shot…
The truck was parked between the livestock and lumber markets. By now most of the Red Guards had climbed off the truck and were sitting lethargically on a log that smelled of pine tar. Chef Song, the pockmarked cook from the commune kitchen, came out with two buckets of mung-bean soup to welcome the Red Guard little generals from the county seat; fragrant steam wafted from the full buckets.
Pockmarked Song carried a bowl of the soup over to the truck, where he offered it up with both hands to Braying Jackass and the female Red Guard who was in charge of broadcasting. Ignoring the offering, the commander shouted into the microphone: Drag out the ox-demons and snake-spirits!
At that signal, the ox-demons and snake-spirits, led by County Chief Donkey Chen Guangdi, charged out of the compound with boundless joy. As we have already seen, Donkey Chief Chen’s body had fused with the papier-mâché donkey, and as he came on the scene now, he had a human head. But that changed with a scant few motions. In one of those scenes you see in the movies or on TV, his ears got longer and stood straight up, like fat leaves growing out of a tropical stem or large gray butterflies emerging from cocoons, looking like satin glistening with an elegant gray luster, covered by a layer of long downy hairs, without doubt soft to the touch. Then his face elongated; his eyes grew bigger and moved to the sides of his widening nose, white in color and covered with short, downy hairs, without doubt soft to the touch. His mouth sagged and split into a pair of thick fleshy lips, also without doubt soft to the touch. Two rows of big white teeth were covered at first by donkey lips, but the moment he laid eyes on the female Red Guard, with her red armband, his lips flared back and the big teeth made an appearance. We’d owned a donkey before, so I was well acquainted with donkey ways, and I knew that when one of them flares back his lips, sexual excitement is on its way, and he will display his enormous organ, up till then safely sheathed. Happily, County Chief Chen retained enough of his human instincts that the donkey transformation remained incomplete, and though he flared his lips, he kept his organ hidden from view. Fan Tong, former commune Party secretary, was next to appear – that’s right, County Chief Chen’s onetime secretary, the one who absolutely loved donkey meat, especially the male organ – so the Red Guards fashioned one for him out of a big white turnip, Northeast Gaomi Township’s most abundant crop. Actually, there wasn’t much fashioning involved: a few swipes with a knife on the head and some black ink was all it took. There are few things richer than the people’s imagination. No one needed to be told what the black-dyed turnip represented. This Fan fellow, his face twisted in a frown, moved slowly owing to the fat he carried on his body; he could not keep up with the rhythm of the drums and gongs, and that threw the entire column of ox-demons and snake-spirits into mass confusion. A Red Guard tried to remedy the situation by smacking him on the rump, which only succeeded in making him jump and cry out in pain. The smacks then moved to his head, which he tried to ward off with the fake donkey dick in his hand. But it snapped in two, exposing its true nature as a turnip: white, crunchy, high water content. The crowd laughed uproariously, including even the Red Guards. Fan Tong was handed over to two female Red Guards, who forced him to eat the two halves of the fake donkey dick in front of everyone. The black dye, he said, was toxic, and he refused to eat. The female Red Guards’ faces reddened, as if they’d been humiliated. You hoodlum, you stinking hoodlum! A beating is too good for you, what you need is to be kicked! They stepped back and began kicking Fan Tong, who rolled around on the ground, crying piteously, Little generals, little generals, don’t kick me, I’ll eat it, I’ll eat… He scooped up the turnip and bit off a chunk. Faster, eat faster! He bit off another chunk. His cheeks bulged so much he couldn’t even chew, so he tried to force it down his throat and ended up choking himself until his eyes rolled back in his head. A dozen or more ox-demons and snake-spirits followed County Chief Donkey out, each with a unique trick and display, an entertainment extravaganza for the lookers-on. The drums, gongs, and cymbals were handled with high professional standards, since the musicians were members of the county opera percussion division. Their repertoire consisted of dozens of cadences, and the local musicians were not in their league. In comparison with them, our Ximen Village percussion team was like a bunch of kids banging on pieces of scrap metal trying to scare off sparrows.