Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

stool, weeping; your wife placed a bowl of steaming hot noodles on the table in front of him.
    “Eat!” she said.

50

Lan Kaifang Flings Mud at His Father
Pang Fenghuang Hurls Paint at Her Aunt
    Finally, Chunmiao and I were together. A healthy man could make the walk from my house to the New China Bookstore in fifteen minutes. It took us nearly two hours. In the words of Mo Yan: It was a romantic stroll and it was a tortuous trek; it was a shameful passage and it was a noble action; it was a retreat and an attack; it was surrender and resistance; it was weakness and strength; it was a challenge and a compromise. He wrote more contradictory stuff like that, some of it on target, some just trying to be mystifying. What I think is, leaving home, supported by Chunmiao, was neither noble nor glorious; it just showed we had courage and honesty.
    When I think back on that day, I see all those colorful umbrellas and raincoats, all the mud puddles on the street, and the dying fish and croaking frogs in some of the standing water. That torrential rainfall of the early 1990s exposed much of the corruption masked by the false prosperity of the age.
    Chunmiao’s dormitory room behind the New China Bookstore served as our temporary love nest. I’d fallen so low I no longer had anything to hide, I said to Big-head, who could see almost everything. Our relationship was not built solely on sex, but that’s the first thing we did after moving into her dormitory, even though I was weak and badly hurt. We swallowed one another’s tears, our bodies trembled, and our souls intertwined. I didn’t ask how she’d gotten through the days, and she didn’t ask who had beaten me. We just held each other, kissed, and stroked each other’s body. We put everything else out of our minds.

    Forced by your wife, your son ate half a bowl of noodles, mixed with his tears. She, on the other hand, had a huge appetite. She finished her bowl, along with three large garlic cloves, then peeled a couple more cloves and finished off your son’s noodles. The peppery garlic turned her face red and dotted her forehead and nose with beads of sweat. She wiped her son’s face with a towel.
    “Sit up straight, son,” she said firmly. “Eat well, study well, and grow up to be a man I can be proud of. They’d like nothing better than to see us die. They want us to make fools of ourselves, well, they can dream on!”
    It was time for me to take your son to school, so your wife saw us to the door, where he turned and wrapped his arms around his mother. She patted him on the back and said:
    “Look, you’re almost as tall as me, big boy.”
    “Mama, don’t you dare—”
    “That’s a laugh,” she said with a smile. “Do you really think I’d hang myself or jump down a well or take poison over scum like them? You go on, and don’t worry. I’ll be going to work in a little while. The people need their oil fritters, which means the people need your mama.”
    We took the short route, as always, and when some bright red dragonflies swooped by, your son jumped up and neatly caught one in his hand. Then he jumped even higher and caught another one. He held his hand out.
    “Hungry, Dog? Want these?”
    I shook my head.
    So he pinched off their tails, plucked a straw, and strung them together. Then he flung them high in the air. “Fly,” he said, but they just tumbled in the air and landed in a mud puddle.
    The storm had knocked down the Fenghuang Elementary School buildings, and children were already jumping and climbing on broken bricks and shattered tiles. They weren’t unhappy; they were delighted. A dozen mud-spattered luxury sedans were parked at the school entrance. Pang Kangmei, in knee-length pink rain boots, had rolled her pant legs up to her knees. Her white calves were spattered with mud. Wearing blue denim work clothes and dark sunglasses, she was speaking through a battery-powered bullhorn.
    “Teachers, students,” she said hoarsely, “the category nine typhoon has brought terrible destruction to the county and to our school. I know how bad you all must feel, but I bring sympathy and good wishes from the County Committee and the county government. Over the next three days there will be no classes while we clean up the mess and restore the classrooms. In sum, even if I, Pang Kangmei, Party secretary of the County Committee, have to work while sitting in a mud puddle, you children will have bright, airy, safe classrooms to learn