Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

say anything.” She stopped me. “I don’t care if it’s climbing a mountain of knives or swimming a sea of fire,” she said calmly, “I’ll be there with you.”
    On the morning of the first day back to school, your son and Pang Fenghuang met at the school entrance. He looked away, but she strode up and tapped him on the shoulder, indicating she wanted him to follow her. When they reached a French parasol tree east of the school gate, she stopped and said excitedly, her eyes shining:
    “You did great, Lan Kaifang!”
    “What did I do?” he muttered. “I didn’t do anything.”
    “Don’t be so modest,” Fenghuang said. “I was listening when they reported to my mother. She ground her teeth when she said, ‘Those two have no shame, and it’s time they got what they deserved!’”
    Your son turned to walk away, but she grabbed his shirt and kicked him in the calf.
    “Where do you think you’re going?” she spat out angrily. “I’ve got more to say to you.”
    She was a delicate little witch, pretty as a perfectly sculpted statue. With tiny breasts like budding flowers, she had a young maiden’s beauty that was impossible to resist. Your son’s face said anger, but in his heart he’d already completely surrendered. I could only sigh. While the father’s romantic drama was playing out, the son’s romantic history was just beginning.
    “You hate your father, I hate my aunt,” Fenghuang said. “She must have been adopted by my maternal grandparents, because she wasn’t close to us at all. My mother and her parents locked her in a room and took turns trying to talk sense into her and get her to leave your father. My grandmother even got down on her knees and begged, but she wouldn’t listen. Then she jumped the wall and ran off to her depraved life with your father.” Fenghuang clenched her teeth. “You punished your father, and I want to punish my aunt!”
    “I don’t want anything more to do with them,” your son said. “They’re a couple of horny dogs.”
    “Right, that’s what they are!” Fenghuang said. “They’re a couple of horny dogs. That’s exactly what my mother called them.”
    “I don’t like your mother,” your son said.
    “How dare you not like my mother!” She punched him. “My mother is the County Committee Party secretary,” she grumbled. “She sat in our schoolyard and directed the rescue operations there with an IV bottle hanging from her arm! Don’t you have a TV set? You didn’t see her cough up blood on TV?”
    “Our TV is broken, but I don’t like the way she does things. What are you going to do about it?”
    “You’re just jealous, you and your blue face, you ugly shit!”
    He grabbed her schoolbag strap and jerked her toward him. Then he pushed her back so hard she bumped into the tree behind her.
    “You hurt me,” she said. “All right, I won’t call you Blue Face again. I’ll call you Lan Kaifang. We spent our childhood together, which means we’re old friends, doesn’t it? So you have to help me carry out my plan to punish my aunt.”
    He walked away, but she ran up and blocked his way. She glared at him.
    “Did you hear what I said?”
    The idea of moving somewhere far away never crossed our minds. All we wanted was to find a quiet spot somewhere to stay out of the limelight and resolve my marital status through legal means.
    Lüdian Township’s new Party secretary Du Luwen, who had once succeeded me as political director of the Supply and Marketing Cooperative, was an old friend, so I phoned him from a bus station and asked him to help me find a quiet place somewhere. He hesitated at first, but in the end he agreed. Instead of taking the bus, we sneaked over to a little place by the Grain Transport River called Yutong Village, southeast of the county town, where we hired a boat at the pier to take us downriver. The owner was a middle-aged woman with a gaunt face and large, deerlike eyes. She had a year-old child in the cabin, tied to her leg by a length of red cloth to keep him falling into the water.
    Du Luwen met us at the Lüdian Township pier in his car and drove us to the cooperative, where we moved into a three-room apartment in the rear compound. After taking a pounding by independent entrepreneurs, the cooperative was on the verge of closing for good. Most of the employees had moved on to new ventures, leaving behind only a few old-timers to keep watch over the buildings. A former cooperative Party secretary who had