Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

heat it, it will turn to mush. That made sense, so I let the boy warm up naturally on the bed and had someone in the house heat a bowl of sweet ginger water, which I poured slowly into his mouth after prying it open with chopsticks. He began to moan once some of that ginger water was in his stomach. Having brought him back from the dead, I told Old Zhang to shave off the boy’s ratty hair and the fleas living in it. We gave him a bath and got him into some clean clothes. Then I took him to see my aging mother. He was a clever little one. As soon as he saw her, he fell to his knees and cried out, “Granny,” which thrilled my mother, who chanted “Amita Buddha” and asked which temple the little monk came from. She asked him his age. He shook his head and said he didn’t know. Where was home? He wasn’t sure. When he was asked about his family, he shook his head like one of those stick-and-ball toys. So I let him stay. He was a smart little pole-shinnying monkey. He called me Foster Dad as soon as he laid eyes on me, and called Madame Bai Foster Mother. But foster son or not, I expected him to work, since even I engaged in manual labor, and I was the landlord. You work or you don’t eat. Just a new way of expressing an idea that has been around for a long time. The boy had no name, but since he had a blue birthmark on the left side of his face, I told him I’d call him Lan Lian, or Blue Face, with Lan being his surname. But, he said, I want to have the same name as you, Foster Dad, so won’t you call me Ximen Lanlian? I said no, that the name Ximen was not available to just anyone, but that if he worked hard for twenty years, we’d see about it. He started out by helping the foreman tend the horse and donkey — Ah, Lord Yama, how could you be so evil as to turn me into a donkey?— and gradually moved on to bigger jobs. Don’t be fooled by his thin frame and frail appearance; he worked with great efficiency and possessed good judgment and a considerable bag of tricks, all of which made up for his lack of strength. Now, seeing his broad shoulders and muscular arms, I could tell he’d grown into a man to be reckoned with. “Ha ha, the foal is out!” he shouted as he bent down, reached out his large hands, and helped me stand, causing me more shame and anger than I care to think about.
    “I am not a donkey!” I roared. “I am a man! I am Ximen Nao!” But my throat felt exactly the way it had when the two blue-faced demons had throttled me. I couldn’t speak no matter how hard I tried. Despair, terror, rage. I spat out slobber, sticky tears oozed from my eyes. His hand slipped, and I thudded to the ground, right in the middle of all that gooey amniotic fluid and afterbirth, which had the consistency of jellyfish.
    “Bring me a towel, and hurry!” Lan Lian shouted. A pregnant woman came out of the house, and my attention was immediately caught by the freckles on her slightly puffy face, and her big, round, sorrowful eyes. Hee-haw, hee-haw — She’s mine, she’s Ximen Nao’s woman, my first concubine, Yingchun, brought into the family as a maidservant by my wife. Since we didn’t know her family name, she took the name of my wife, Bai. In the spring of 1946, she became my concubine. With big eyes and a straight nose, a broad forehead, wide mouth, and square jaw, hers was a face of good fortune. Even more important, her full breasts, with their pert nipples, and a broad pelvis made her a cinch to bear children. My wife, apparently barren, sent Yingchun to my bed with a comment that was easy to understand and filled with heartfelt sincerity. She said, “Lord of the Manor [that’s what she called me], I want you to accept her. Good water must not irrigate other people’s fields.”
    She was a fertile field indeed. She got pregnant our first night together. And not just pregnant, but with twins. The following spring she gave birth to a boy and a girl, what they call a dragon and phoenix birth. So we named the boy Ximen Jinlong, or Golden Dragon, and the girl Ximen Baofeng, Precious Phoenix. The midwife said she’d never seen a woman better suited to having babies, with her broad pelvis and resilient birth canal. The babies popped out into her hands, like melons dumped from a burlap sack. Most women cry out in anguish the first time, but my Yingchun had her babies without making a sound. According to the midwife, she wore a mysterious smile from start to finish, as if having a baby was a form of