Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

were stopped at the crosswalk.
    “I advise you to leave him and find someone else to fall in love with. Get married, have a child, and you’ve got my word I’ll never tell anyone about this. Huang Hezuo may be ugly and someone to be pitied, but she means what she says.” Then your wife wiped her eyes with the back of her hand before sticking the first finger of her right hand in her mouth. I saw her jaw muscles tense. She pulled her finger out of her mouth, and I smelled blood. The tip of her finger was bleeding, and I watched as she wrote two words in blood on the glossy trunk of the French plane tree:
    LEAVE HIM
    With a moan, Pang Chunmiao covered her mouth with her hand, spun around, and stumbled off down the street, running a few steps, then walking, running and walking, running and walking, the way we dogs move. She kept her hand over her mouth the whole time. The sight saddened me. Instead of going back to New China, she turned and disappeared down a lane. I looked over at your wife’s ashen face and felt chilled. It was clear that Pang Chunmiao, a silly little girl, was no match for your wife, the victim in all this; her tears refused to leave the safety of her eyes. It was time, I thought, for her to take me home; but she didn’t. Her finger was still bleeding, too much to waste, so she filled in missing strokes and reapplied the fuzzy parts. There was still blood, so she added an exclamation mark to the words. Then another, and another . . .
    LEAVE HIM!!!
    A perfectly good slogan, though she seemed to want to write more. But why gild the lily? So she shook her finger and stuck it in her mouth, then reached under her collar with her left hand and pulled a medicinal plaster off her shoulder to wrap her injured finger. She’d put it on just that morning.
    After stepping back to admire the slogan, written in blood to goad Chunmiao into action and as a warning to her, she smiled contentedly before pushing her bike down the street, with me some three or four yards behind her. She stopped to look back at the tree a time or two, as if afraid someone would come along and rub the words out.
    At an intersection we waited for the green light, though we crossed with our hearts in our throats, thanks to all the black-jacketed motorcyclists for whom a red light was a mere suggestion and the drivers of cars who paid little attention to traffic lights. In recent days a bunch of teenagers had formed what they called a “Honda Speed Demons Gang,” whose purpose was to run their Honda motorcycles over as many dogs as possible. Whenever they hit one, they ran over it over and over, until its guts were spread all over the street. Then with a loud whistle it was off to the next one. Just why they hated dogs so much was something I never could figure out.

46

Huang Hezuo Vows to Shock Her Foolish Husband
Hong Taiyue Organizes a Government Protest
    The meeting to discuss Jinlong’s idiotic proposal went on till noon. The elderly Party secretary, Jin Bian — the onetime blacksmith who had fitted my dad’s donkey for shoes — had been promoted to vice chairman of the Municipal People’s Congress, and it was a foregone conclusion that Pang Kangmei was next in line for the Party position. She was the daughter of a national hero and a college graduate with rich experience at the grassroots level. Barely forty years old and still attractive, she had the enthusiastic backing of her superiors and the support of those beneath her. In other words, she had everything she needed for success. The meeting was highly contentious, with neither side willing to back off its position. So Pang Kangmei simply pounded her gavel and announced: “We’ll do it! For the initial phase we’ll need 300 million yuan. We’ll leave it up to the banks to come up with that amount. We’ll form a Merchants Investment Group to attract investment capital from both domestic and overseas sources.”
    I was distracted throughout the discussion, using visits to the toilet as an excuse to make phone calls to the New China Bookstore. Pang Kangmei’s gaze followed me like a laser. I could only smile apologetically and point to my stomach.
    I phoned the bookstore three times. Finally, on the third try, the clerk with the husky voice said heatedly:
    “You again. Stop calling. She was led outside by the crippled wife of Deputy County Chief Lan, and she still hasn’t returned.”
    I called home. No answer.
    My seat felt like a heated grill, and I know how