Red Sorghum

filling her eyes with hot tears.
    Yu Zhan’ao removed his rain cape and tramped out a clearing in the sorghum, then spread his cape over the sorghum corpses. He lifted Grandma onto the cape. Her soul fluttered as she gazed at his bare torso. A light mist rose from the tips of the sorghum, and all around she could hear the sounds of growth. No wind, no waving motion, just the white-hot rays of moist sunlight crisscrossing through the open cracks between plants. The passion in Grandma’s heart, built up over sixteen years, suddenly erupted. She squirmed and twisted on the cape. Yu Zhan’ao, getting smaller and smaller, fell loudly to his knees at her side. She was trembling from head to toe; a redolent yellow ball of fire crackled and sizzled before her eyes. Yu Zhan’ao roughly tore open her jacket,exposing the small white mounds of chilled, tense flesh to the sunlight. Answering his force, she cried out in a muted, hoarse voice, ‘My God . . . ,’ and swooned.
    Grandma and Granddad exchanged their love surrounded by the vitality of the sorghum field: two unbridled souls, refusing to knuckle under to worldly conventions, were fused together more closely than their ecstatic bodies. They ploughed the clouds and scattered rain in the field, adding a patina of lustrous red to the rich and varied history of Northeast Gaomi Township. My father was conceived with the essence of heaven and earth, the crystallisation of suffering and wild joy.
    The braying donkey threaded its way into the sorghum field, and Grandma returned from the hazy kingdom of heaven to the cruel world of man. She sat up in a state of utter stupefaction, her face bathed in tears. ‘He really does have leprosy,’ she said. As Granddad knelt down, a sword appeared in his hand, as if by magic. He slipped it out of its scabbard; the two-foot blade was curved, like a leaf of chive. With a single swish, it sliced through two stalks of sorghum, the top halves thudding to the ground, leaving bubbles of dark-green liquid on the neat, slanted wounds.
    ‘Come back in three days, no matter what!’ Granddad said.
    Grandma looked at him uncomprehendingly. He dressed while she tidied herself up, then put his sword away – where, she didn’t know. Granddad took her back to the roadside and vanished.
    Three days later, the little donkey carried Grandma back, and when she entered the village she learned that the Shans, father and son, had been murdered and tossed into the inlet at the western edge of the village.
    Grandma lies there soaking up the crisp warmth of the sorghum field. She is as light as a house swallow gracefully skimming the tips of the plants. The fleeting images begin slowing down: Shan Bianlang, Shan Tingxiu, Great-Granddad, Great-Grandma, Uncle Arhat . . . so many hostile, grateful, savage, sincere faces appear and disappear. She is writing the final page of her thirty-year history. Everything in her pastis like a procession of sweet, fragrant fruit falling rapidly to the ground. As for her future, she can only dimly see a few holes of light, which are quickly extinguished. She is holding on to the fleeting present with all her might.
    Grandma feels Father’s little paws stroking her. He calls out ‘Mom!’ timidly. All her hate and her love evaporate. She longs to raise her arm and stroke Father’s face, but it won’t do her bidding. Rising into the air, she sees a multicoloured ray of light streaming from above, and hears heaven’s solemn music, played by horns and woodwinds, large and small.
    Grandma is exhausted: the handle of the present, the handle of the world of men, is slipping from her grasp. Is this death? Will I never again see this sky, this earth, this sorghum, this son, the lover who has led his troops into battle? The gunfire is so far away, beyond a thick curtain of mist. Douguan! Douguan! Come help your mom. Pull your mom back. Your mom doesn’t want to die. My heaven . . . you gave me a lover, you gave me a son, you gave me riches, you gave me thirty years of life as robust as red sorghum. Heaven, since you gave me all that, don’t take it back now. Forgive me, let me go! Have I sinned? Would it have been right to share my pillow with a leper and produce a misshapen, putrid monster to contaminate this beautiful world? What is chastity then? What is the correct path? What is goodness? What is evil? You never told me, so I had to decide on my own. I loved happiness, I loved strength, I loved beauty; it was my