Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

The crowd roared its approval. The Red Guards on the truck followed Jackass’s lead in shouting slogans: Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with County Chief Donkey-head Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey rapist Chen Guangdi! Down with the donkey molester Chen Guangdi! Jackass’s voice, magnified by the loudspeaker, became a vocal calamity, as a flock of wild geese flying overhead dropped out of the sky like stones. Now, the meat of these birds is a delicacy, and nutritious to boot, a rarity for the people below. For them to fall out of the sky at a time when the people’s nutritional lives were so impoverished seemed to be a blessing from heaven, when in fact it was anything but. The people went crazy, pushing and shoving and shouting and screeching, worse than a pack of starving dogs. The first person to get his hands on a fallen bird must have been wild with joy, until, that is, everyone around him tried to snatch it away. Feathers fluttered to the ground, fine down floated in the air; it was like tearing apart a down pillow. The bird’s wings were torn off, its legs wound up in someone else’s hands, its head and neck were torn from its body and held high in the air, dripping blood. People in the rear pushed down on the heads and shoulders of those in front to leap like hunting dogs. People were knocked to the ground, squashed where they stood, trampled where they lay. Shrill cries of Mother! . . . Mother! . . . Help, save me . . . emerged from dozens of black knots of humanity that seethed and churned. Screams and shouts — Ow, my poor head!—merged with the howl of the loudspeaker. Chaos turned to tangled fighting and from there to violent battles. The final tally: seventeen people were trampled to death, an unknown number suffered injury.
    Some of the dead were taken away by kin, others were dragged to the doorway of the Butcher Section to await identification and removal. Some of the injured were taken to the clinic or taken home by relatives, some walked or crawled away on their own; some limped away to wherever they wanted to go, some just lay on the ground and wept or wailed. These were Northeast Gaomi Township’s first reported deaths in the Cultural Revolution. In the months to follow, while there were pitched battles, with bricks and tiles flying in the air and an assortment of weapons, from knives to guns to clubs, the number of casualties paled in comparison with this incident.
    I was perfectly safe up in the tree, where I saw the whole incident unfold in all its detail. I saw the birds fall from the sky and watched as they were torn apart by people. I saw the whole range of expressions — greed, madness, astonishment, suffering, ferocity — during the incident; I heard everything from cries of torment to those of wild joy; I smelled blood and other noxious odors; and I felt both chilled currents and overheated waves in the air. All this reminded me of tales of wartime, and even though the county annals of the Cultural Revolution recorded the wild geese incident as a case of bird flu, I believed then, and I believe now, that they were knocked out of the sky by the high-volume shrillness of the loudspeaker.
    After things quieted down, the parades started up again, although the incident had a cautionary effect on the observing crowds. A gray path opened up in the market where heads once bobbed; it was now dotted with bloodstains and squashed bird carcasses. Breezes carrying a heavy stink blew feathers here and there. The woman who had been selling chickens was hobbling up and down the street, wiping her nose and drying her eyes with her red armband and moaning: My chickens, oh, my chickens . . . give me back my chickens you bastards, you ought to be shot. . . .
    The truck was parked between the livestock and lumber markets. By now most of the Red Guards had climbed off the truck and were sitting lethargically on a log that smelled of pine tar. Chef Song, the pockmarked cook from the commune kitchen, came out with two buckets of mung-bean soup to welcome the Red Guard little generals from the county seat; fragrant steam wafted from the full buckets.
    Pockmarked Song carried a bowl of the soup over to the truck, where he offered it up with both hands to Braying Jackass and the female Red Guard who was in charge of broadcasting. Ignoring the offering, the commander shouted into the microphone: Drag out the ox-demons and snake-spirits!
    At that signal, the ox-demons and