Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

idiocy. My brain went back to work, my nervous system returned to normal. This was my second bloody nose within two weeks. The first was when I’d been tripped by one of Hong Taiyue’s volunteer activists in front of the county government office building, and I’d sprawled on the hard ground like a hungry dog going after a pile of shit. Ah, now I remember. I saw Baofeng help Mother to her feet. Slobber was running down her chin on the twisted half of her face.
    “My son,” she said in a barely intelligible voice. “Don’t you dare hit my son—”
    Mother’s prickly-ash cane lay on the floor like a dead snake. She was struggling with such astonishing strength that Baofeng couldn’t hold her without help. By the look of it, she wanted to go pick up her dead-snake cane, and when that became clear to Baofeng, she reached out her foot, without letting go of Mother, and dragged the cane closer, then quickly bent down, picked it up, and put it in Mother’s hand. The first thing she did was point the cane at Father, who was still wrapped up in Jinlong’s arms, but her arm lacked the strength to control it, and it fell to the floor again. So she abandoned violence and railed at Father, her words muffled but understandable:
    “Don’t you dare hit my son, you mean . . .”
    The unpleasantness continued for a while longer before peace was reestablished. The cobwebs disappeared. Father was crouching against the wall, holding his head in his hands. I couldn’t see his face, just his quill-like hair. Someone had put the bench back the way it was, and Baofeng was sitting on it, her arms still around Mother. Jinlong picked up the shoe and laid it on the floor in front of Father.
    “At first I didn’t want to get involved in a scandal like this,” he said to me icily. “But when they asked me to, as a son I had no choice.” His arm described an arc from one parent to the other, and I saw that they’d done whatever they’d been moved to do, that now they were consumed with sadness and helplessness. That was when I spotted Pang Hu and Wang Leyun, who were sitting behind a table near the center of the room. The sight of them brought me crippling shame. Then I turned and saw Huang Tong and Wu Qiuxiang, sitting side by side on a bench against the eastern wall, and Huang Huzhu, who was standing behind her mother and drying her tears with her sleeve. Even in the midst of all that tension, I couldn’t help notice her captivatingly glossy, lush, thick, and mysterious hair.
    “Everyone knows you want a divorce from Hezuo,” Jinlong said. “We also know all about you and Chunmiao.”
    “You little blue face, you have no conscience,” Wu Qiuxiang said sobbingly as she made an attempt to come at me; Jinlong blocked her way, and Huzhu helped her sit back down. “What did my daughter ever do to you?” she asked. “And what makes you think she’s unworthy of you? Lan Jiefang, aren’t you afraid the heavens will strike you dead if you go through with this?”
    “You think you can get married when you want and divorced when you want, is that it?” Huang Tong said angrily. “You were nothing when Hezuo married you, and now that you’ve had a bit of success, you want nothing more to do with us. Well, you’re not getting off that easy. We’ll take this up with the local Party Committee or the Provincial Party Committee, all the way up to the Central Committee if necessary!”
    “Young brother, divorce or not, that’s your business. By law not even your own parents have the last word in that. But this whole affair touches many lives, and if word got out, there’d be hell to pay. I want you to hear what Uncle and Aunty Pang have to say.”
    I tell you from the bottom of my heart that I did not put much stock in what my parents or the Huangs had to say, but in the face of the Pangs, I felt like finding a hole and crawling into it.
    “I shouldn’t be calling you Jiefang anymore, I ought to be calling you Deputy Chief Lan,” Pang Hu said sarcastically. He coughed a couple of times and then turned to his wife, who had grown quite heavy. “Which year was it they came into the cotton processing plant?” Without waiting for his wife to answer, he said, “It was 1976, when you, Lan Jiefang, were just a crazy, know-nothing kid. But I took you in and taught you how to evaluate cotton, a light but highly respectable job. Lots of youngsters who were smarter, better looking, and had a better background than you carried