Pow!

her arms out to stretch her upper torso, then puts her hands on her hips to limber her midsection. Her buttocks shift as if rubbing against an invisible object. I don't know how I'll ever be able to take my eyes off that body, but the possibility of becoming a disciple to the Wise Monk is important enough to make me sacrifice such visual pleasures. For an instant I wonder: if she were to take my hand and lead me to some faraway place, the way Aunty Wild Mule did with my father, would I be able to refuse?

    Mother told me to secure the rear hatch of the walking tractor while she went to the wall to drag over a couple of baskets of cow and goat bones. Bending down, she picked up each basket and dumped its bones into the tractor bed. These were discarded bones we'd bought, not the remains of our meals. If we'd eaten the meat off this many bones, even 1 per cent of that many, I'd have had no complaints and no need to miss my father, I'd have stood firmly beside my mother as she denounced him and Aunty Wild Mule for their crimes and their sins. There had been times when I'd felt like cracking open a couple of fresh-looking bovine leg bones just to get at the marrow, but the hawkers always cleaned them out before selling. Once they were loaded, Mother told me to help her dump in some scrap metal. This so-called scrap metal actually included intact machine parts: diesel-engine flywheels, connecting joints for construction scaffolds, even some manhole covers from the city's sewer system; a little of everything. Once we found a Japanese mortar, brought to us on the back of a mule by an old man in his eighties and an old woman in her seventies. Back when we were just starting out, we bought everything as scrap and then sold it back as scrap—at a minuscule profit. We figured things out, though, and began sorting the scrap and selling it to appropriate companies in town. We sold construction materials to builders, manhole covers to sewer industries and machine parts to hardware stores. But since we couldn't find the right buyer for the mortar, we kept it at home as a collectible. I'd made up my mind not to sell it even if we did find a buyer. A typical boy—warlike—I was fascinated by weapons. Since my father had run off with another woman, I'd not been able to raise my head round other children, but now that I owned a mortar I could walk with my back straight, cockier than those who had fathers at home. I once overheard a couple of young village bullies quietly agree to stay clear of Luo Xiaotong because his family had a mortar and he'd use it against anyone who offended him, taking lethal aim at the offender's house. POW! the place would go up in smoke, burn to the ground! You can imagine how proud that made me. I was so happy I could burst. Selling scrap metal to speciality buyers did not bring in as much as the items were worth new but it did sell for more than ordinary scrap and that was how we were able to build a house with a tiled roof in five years.

    After we'd loaded the scrap metal, Mother dragged over some cardboard boxes and laid them on the ground. Then she told me to draw water from the pump. This was one of my regular chores, and I knew that the handle was cold enough to peel the skin off my hands. So I put on stiff pigskin safety gloves we'd picked up on our rounds. Almost everything we owned, in fact, from foam pillows to a spatula, had come the same way. Some of our pickings had never even been used—my wool cap, for instance, which was brand-new army ration. It smelt like mothballs and had the date of manufacture—November 1968—stamped in red on the inside. My father was still a bed-wetting little boy back then, my mother a bed-wetting little girl, and me, well, I wasn't. With the gloves on, my hands were next to useless, but it was a bitterly cold day and the base of the pump was frozen solid. A leak at the edge puffed out air each time I pressed down on the handle but no water came out. ‘Hurry up!’ Mother shouted irritably. ‘Stop dawdling. “A poor child grows up fast” but you're ten years old and can't even draw water from a well. Raising you has been a waste of time and effort. All you're good at is eating—eat eat eat. If you devoted half your eating talent to getting your chores done, you'd be a model worker with a red sash.’ Mother grumbled, I seethed. Ever since you left us, Dieh, I've been eating pig and dog food and dressing like a beggar and working like a beast of burden. But