Pow!

the walls was transformed into crystalline beads of water not quite ready to slither to the floor. The chilblains on my hands and feet itched and pus oozed from my ears. The melting of humans is a painful process. Mother, who had prepared corn congee in an undersized metal wok, about half full, selected a turnip from the pickling jar outside the kitchen window, broke it in two and handed me the larger piece. That would be our breakfast. I knew she'd saved at least three thousand RMB in the bank, apart from the two thousand she'd lent Shen Gang, a barbecued-meat vendor, at 20 per cent interest a month (a textbook case of usury, with compound interest). How could I be happy eating that kind of breakfast, given the amount of money we had? But I was a ten-year-old boy whose opinion didn't count. Oh, I complained sometimes, but those complaints were invariably met with looks of distress followed by a tongue-lashing over my youthful ignorance. Mother would tell me she was being frugal for my benefit, so that one day I could buy a house and a car, which in turn would make it easier for her to find me a wife.

    ‘Son,’ she'd say, ‘that heartless father of yours abandoned us, and I have to show him what I'm made of. I want people in the village to see that we get along better without him.’

    She also told me that her father, my grandfather, often told her that a person's mouth is only a conduit, and that after fish and meat or grains and vegetables pass through this conduit there's no longer any difference among them. You can indulge a mule or a horse, but you can't indulge yourself. If you want to live well, you must struggle against your mouth. I saw the logic in what she was saying, that if we'd concentrated on eating well over the five years Father had been gone, then we'd have had no tiled roof over our heads, and what good would a bellyful of fatty food do us if we had to live in a thatched hut? Her and Father's philosophies were poles apart. He'd have said: ‘Who wants to live in a mansion if you have to subsist on vegetables and chaff?’ I raised both hands in support of Father's view and stomped both feet in rejection of Mother's. I wished he'd come back and take me away with him, even if he sent me right back after a meal of nice, fatty meat. But all he cared about was eating well and enjoying life with Aunty Wild Mule. He'd forgotten I even existed.

    We finished our congee, licking the bowls so clean that they didn't need to be washed. Then Mother took me into the yard, where we piled goods onto the bed of the rickety old walking tractor, a Lan clan castaway whose handles still carried the marks of Lao Lan's big hands. The tires were bald, the diesel engine's cylinder and piston were badly worn and the valve stuck, making the engine sound like an old man with a heart condition and asthma. When it finally turned over, it belched black smoke. It had both an air and a fuel leak and thus produced a bizarre sound somewhere between a cough and a sneeze. Lao Lan had always been a generous man, and that generosity increased drastically after he made his fortune selling water-injected meat. It was he who invented the scientific method of forcing pressurized water into the pulmonary arteries of slaughtered animals. With this method, you could empty a bucketful of water into a two-hundred- jin pig, while with the old method you could barely empty half a bucket of water into the carcass of a dead cow. In the years since, how much of the purchase price for meat the clever townspeople had spent on water from our village will never be known, but I'm sure it would be a shockingly high figure. Lao Lan had a potbelly and rosy cheeks and his voice rang out like a pealing bell. In a word, he was born to be a rich official. That ran in the family. After he became village head, he selflessly taught his water-injection method to the villagers and thus served as the leader of a local riches-through-ruse movement. Some villagers spoke out angrily and some others put up posters accusing him of being a member of the retaliatory landlord class intent on overthrowing the village dictatorship of the proletariat. But talk like that was out of fashion. Lao Lan's response to all of this, announced over the village PA system, was: ‘Dragons beget dragons, phoenixes beget phoenixes and a mouse is born only to dig holes.’

    Some time later we came to realize that he was like a kung fu master who would never pass on all his skills to his