Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

finger of his left hand in his right hand. Blood seeped through his fingers.
    “Are you crazy, Old Lan?” Fenghuang cried out.
    “He’s my uncle’s son, all right,” Ximen Huan said. “You can count on him when the chips are down.”
    “Quit spouting nonsense, bastard son,” Fenghuang said anxiously. “Go inside and get some of your mom’s miraculous hair, and hurry!”
    Ximen Huan ran inside and quickly emerged with seven strands of thick hair. He laid them on the table and let them burn, quickly turning them to ashes.
    “Let’s see that finger, Old Lan,” Fenghuang said as she grabbed the hand with the bleeding finger.
    It was a deep cut. I saw Fenghuang go pale. Her mouth was open, her brow creased, as if she was the one in pain.
    Ximen Huan scooped up the ashes with a crisp new bill and sprinkled them over your son’s injured finger.
    “Does it hurt?” Fenghuang asked.
    “No.”
    “Let go of his wrist,” Ximen Huan said.
    “The blood will wash the ashes away,” Fenghuang said.
    “No problem, don’t worry.”
    “If that doesn’t stop the bleeding,” she said threateningly, “I’ll chop those dog paws of yours off!”
    “I said don’t worry.”
    Slowly Fenghuang loosened her grip on your son’s wrist.
    “Well?” Ximen Huan said proudly.
    “It worked!”

52

Jiefang and Chunmiao Turn the Fake into the Real
Taiyue and Jinlong Depart this World Together
    Lan Jiefang, you gave up your future and your reputation all for love; abandoning your family was something upright people would not countenance, yet writers like Mo Yan sang your praises. But not returning for your mother’s funeral was such an unfilial act I’m afraid even Mo Yan, who has a reputation for twisting logic, would find it hard to come to your defense.
    I never received word of my mother’s death. I was living anonymously in Xi’an like a criminal in hiding. I knew that no court would grant me a divorce as long as Pang Kangmei was in a position of power. Denied a divorce but living with Chunmiao, my only option was to reside quietly far from home.
    At first we both worked in a factory established through foreign investment. They manufactured fuzzy dolls. The manager was a so-called overseas Chinese, a bald man with a big belly and yellow teeth, a lover of poetry who was friendly with Mo Yan. He was sympathetic to our plight, actually got a kick out of our experience, and was willing to find office work for me and take Chunmiao on as a bookkeeper in the workshop. The air there was pretty foul, and her nose was constantly being tickled by loose fuzz. Most of the factory workers were girls brought in from the countryside, some as young as thirteen or fourteen, by all appearances. Then one day the factory burned down, claiming many lives and leaving most of the survivors with horrible disfigurements. Chunmiao was spared only because she happened to be home sick that day. For the longest time after that, the tragic fate of those factory girls kept us awake at night. Eventually, Mo Yan found openings for us at his local newspaper.
    On many occasions I spotted familiar faces out on the streets of Xi’an and was tempted to call out to whoever it was. But instead I lowered my head and hid my face. Sometimes, when we were in our little apartment, thoughts of home and family had us both weeping miserably Our love was why we’d left our homes, and that love made it impossible to return. Time and again we picked up the telephone, only to put it right back down, and time and again we dropped letters into the mailbox, only to find an excuse to ask for them back when the postman came to collect outgoing mail. Whatever news of home we received came from Mo Yan, who passed on good news and withheld the bad. His greatest fear was not having something to talk about, and we figured he saw us as valuable material for his novels. And so, the crueler our fate, the more convoluted our story became, and the more dramatically our circumstances developed, the more it interested him. Although I was kept from going home for my mother’s funeral, during those days I actually played the role of filial son due to a combination of strange circumstances.
    One of Mo Yan’s classmates from his writers workshop days was directing a TV drama about the bandit annihilation campaign by the People’s Liberation Army. One of the characters was nicknamed Lan Lian, or Blue Face, a bandit who cut down humans as if they were blades of grass but was a