Pow!

nothing makes her happy. Dieh, when you left you were looking forward to a second land reform. Well, I'm looking forward to it more than you ever did. But it won't ever come. It's easier for people to get rich illegally. They're afraid of nothing. After Father left, Mother came to be known as the Queen of Trash. That should have made me the Queen of Trash's son, but in fact I was the Queen of Trash's slave. Her grumbling grew to cursing, and my self-pity shrank to despair. I took off the gloves and grabbed the pump handle with my bare hands. With a sucking sound they immediately stuck to the cold metal. Go ahead, pig iron handle, be cold, be frozen, peel the skin off my hands if you want to. It's hopeless anyway. Smash a broken jar—what difference does it make? I'll freeze to death, so what! She'll wind up with no son, and her big house with a tiled roof and her big truck will be meaningless. She's actually dreaming about my child marriage. Marriage to whom, you ask? To Lao Lan's stupid daughter, that's who. A year older, and a head taller, she doesn't even have a real name—only a nickname, Tiangua, Sweet Melon. A nose infection all year round means she always has two lines of snot above her mouth. Mother would love to improve her social standing by linking up with the Lan clan, and all I think about is setting up my mortar and flattening the Lan house. Dream on, Mother! So what if my hands stick to the pump handle! They belonged to ‘her son’ before they belonged to me. I pushed down, there was a gurgle and water gushed into the bucket. I immediately buried my face in it and began to drink. Stop that, she shouted. She didn't want me drinking cold water. But I ignored her. Best to drink till my belly ached and I was rolling on the ground like a donkey that's stopped turning a millstone. After I carried the bucket over to her, she told me to fetch the ladle. I did. Then she told me to splash water on the paper—not too much and not too little, just enough to give it a coat of ice. That done, she spread another layer of paper over the ice and I splashed on more water. We'd done this so many times it had become routine; there was no need for words. What I spread over the paper was water; what we received in return was money. What the butchers in town injected into the meat was water; what they received in return was also money. After Father ran off, Mother would not allow herself to wallow in self-pity. So, deciding to become a butcher, she apprenticed herself to Sun Zhangsheng. I went along. Mother and Sun's wife were distant cousins. But the ‘white knife in, red knife out’ profession is not suited to women; and even though Mother had an abundance of patience and endurance, she never matched the ferocity of Madame Sun. She and I did all right when it came to slaughtering young pigs and sheep but adult cows were a different matter altogether. They made things almost impossible as we stood there clutching a glinting butcher knife. ‘This is no job for you, Aunty,’ Sun Zhangsheng said to Mother. ‘They're telling people in town to sell undoctored meat, so sooner or later what we're doing will be illegal. We butchers earn our living by injecting the meat with water. The day they put a stop to that is the day our profits dry up.’ He's the one who urged Mother to take up the scavenging business—it required no capital and was a guaranteed livelihood. He was right. In three years, everyone within thirty li knew us as the Queen and Prince of Trash.

    We carried the frozen paper over to the tractor, then tied it down with rope. Our destination was the county seat, which we visited every few days and which always left me very sad. So many delicacies were sold there, I could smell them from twenty li away, especially the meat, but also the fish. Yet for me meat and fish might as well not have existed. Mother had our provisions all ready—two cold corncakes and a lump of salted greens. If, by hook or by crook, we got a good price for our scrap, slipped a thing or two past a buyer—local businesses had become increasingly clever over the years, after being cheated by scrap-peddlers from all over—she'd be in a good mood and I'd be rewarded with a pig's tail. We'd sit on our haunches in a sheltered area by the front gate of the local-products business—in the summer we'd sit under a shady tree—and treat ourselves to all the aromas wafting over from a street that slanted off from where we sat while we chewed