Commander of the Golden Monkey Red Guard faction, Little Chang, the Braying Jackass, and commander of the Ximen Village branch of the Golden Monkey faction, Jinlong, Junior Jackass, linked up in the middle of the marketplace, that is, the square in front of the Supply and Marketing Cooperative Restaurant, where they held hands and exchanged revolutionary greetings, red glints seeming to emanate from their eyes, their hearts bursting with revolutionary fervor; they may have been thinking about how the combined forces of China’s peasants, workers, and soldiers at Jinggangshan had vowed to plant red flags all over Asia, Africa, and Latin America and free all oppressed members of the proletariat from the abyss of suffering. The two Red Guard units linked up, county and village; the two groups of capitalist-roaders linked up, with Donkey County Chief Chen Guangdi, Donkey-dick Secretary Fan Tong, an alien class enemy, Hong Taiyue, a capitalist-roader who beat his ox hip bone, and Hong’s running dog, Huang Tong, who had married the concubine of a landlord. They cast furtive glances all around, letting their facial expressions convey their reactionary thoughts. Lower your heads. Lower. Lower! The Red Guards kept pushing their heads down, lower and lower, until their hindquarters were as high in the air as they’d ever get; one more push, and they’d be on their knees. Instead, their assailants pulled them back by their hair and their collars. My dad refused to lower his head, and owing to his special relationship with Ximen Jinlong, the other Red Guards let him get away with it. Braying Jackass was the first to speak. He stood on a table that had been moved out from the dining hall; with his left hand on his hip, he waved his right in a variety of gestures: a sword slice, a bayonet stab, a fist pound, and a judo chop, each gesture matched by the oration, the tone, and the cadence. Saliva gathered in the corners of his mouth, his words bristled with ferocity, but with no substance, like red condoms blown up in the shape of wax gourds to fly around, crashing noisily into one another until they exploded with loud pops. One of the more interesting episodes in the history of Northeast Gaomi Township involved a nurse who had once blown up a condom until it burst and injured her eyes. Braying Jackass was a master speechmaker. He modeled himself after Lenin and Mao Zedong, especially the way he thrust out his right arm at a right angle, tossed his head back, chin out, and gazed far into the distance. When he shouted: “Attack, attack, and again attack the class enemies!” he sounded like Lenin reborn. The Lenin of Lenin in 1918 had arrived in Northeast Gaomi Township. Silence fell over the crowd, as if the people’s throats were squeezed shut, but only for a moment, and then shouts arose – Hooray! by the uncultured, Long Life! by their opposite numbers. The Hoorays and Long Life shouts were not intended for Braying Jackass, but, like a blown-up condom, he was so carried away he was virtually floating. There were even grumblings down below, such as: We can’t treat that bastard lightly! uttered by an old-timer who had studied in a private school, could read just about everything, and who hung around the barbershop, where he said to men getting haircuts, Ask me how to write any character you want, and if I can’t do it, I’ll pay for your haircut. A couple of middle-school teachers asked him how to write several obscure characters they’d found in dictionaries, and even they couldn’t stump him. One teacher decided to trick him by making up a character, a simple circle with a dot in the middle. The man sneered. Think you can stump me, do you? This one is pronounced peng, and is the sound of a stone tossed into a well. I got you this time, the teacher said. I made it up. In the beginning, the man said, all characters were made up. The teacher was at a loss for words; the self-satisfied man beamed. Junior Jackass followed Braying Jackass onto the bench, but his speech was a pale imitation of the one by his predecessor.
Now, Ximen Ox, I should relate what you were doing on that market day. At first, you meekly followed behind my dad, matching him step for step. But your glorious image and your obedient behavior seemed odd to people, especially to me. You were a spirited animal that had displayed extraordinary behaviors in prior months and years. If, at the time, I’d been aware that the arrogant soul of Ximen Nao and the memory of a renowned donkey were hidden deep inside you, I’d have been disappointed in your behavior. You should have fought back, should have raised havoc in the marketplace, should have played the major role in that carnivalesque episode, like one of those bulls in a Spanish corrida. But you didn’t. You held your head low, tattered shoes hanging from your horns, a symbol of shame, unhurriedly chewing your cud, as people could tell from the rumblings down in your stomachs. And so it went, from early morning till noon, from chilled air to warm, till the ground baked in the sun, till the fragrance of braised buns emerged from the Supply and Marketing Cooperative dining hall. A one-eyed young man with a badly worn coat thrown over his shoulders came limping out of the marketplace, dragging an impressive yellow dog behind him. He was an infamous dog-killer. Born into a poor family, and quickly orphaned, he was sent to school by the government free of charge. But, hating school with a passion, he ruined what could have been a glorious future. Preferring a life of complete freedom over one involving books and study, he made no attempt to better himself, and the Party could do nothing about it. Killing dogs and selling them for their meat, he enjoyed life to the fullest. Now at the time, private butchering was illegal, whether it was pigs or dogs. The government held a monopoly in the trade. But they left one side of the net open for this particular dog-killer. Any government, whatever its makeup, would treat someone like him with leniency. He was a dog’s natural enemy. Neither very tall nor very big, he wasn’t particularly quick on his feet and had poor eyesight. A dog wouldn’t have trouble tearing him limb from limb. But any dog, from mild-mannered to vicious, tucked its tail between its legs, shrank in on itself, and, with naked fear in its eyes, whimpered imploringly when it saw him, accepting its fate as it let him put a rope around its neck and hang it from a tree. He’d then drag the strangled animal back to the hole beneath a stone bridge where he lived and worked to skin and clean the dog with river water, then chop it up and toss the meat into a pot. After he fired up his stove with kindling, the water would come to a boil and release dense steam from under the bridge; as it followed the currents, the fragrance of dog meat would suffuse the river all around.