Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

my failing eyesight,” Iron Mountain said, “I'm not the one to do it. If my aim was off even a little, I could kill her. Hong Xi should do it.”
    He handed the bamboo bow and a feathered, razor-sharp arrow to Hong Xi, who took them from him, but merely stood there deep in thought. “I can't do it,” he said, suddenly realizing what was expected of him. “I can't, I won't. She's my wife, isn't she? My wife.”
    “Hong Xi,” Iron Mountain said, “don't be a fool! In your arms, she's your wife, but perched atop a tree, she's some kind of strange bird.”
    “You people,” the policeman said with annoyance, “can't you do anything? If you're just going to stand there hemming and hawing, hand me that bow and arrow.”
    He holstered his revolver, took the bow and arrow, took aim at the shape at the top of the tree, and let an arrow fly. A muted thud told them he'd hit the mark. The treetop rustled, and the men watched as Yanyan, an arrow embedded in her belly, rose into the moonlight, only to crash into the canopy of a short tree nearby. Obviously, she could no longer keep her balance. The policeman fitted another arrow to the bow, took aim at Yanyan, who was sprawled atop the short pine, and shouted, “Come down here!” The second arrow flew before his shout had died out; there was a cry of pain, and Yanyan tumbled headlong to the ground.
    “You fucking bastard,” Hong Xi shrieked, “you've killed my wife….”
    People who had withdrawn from the grove came up with their lanterns and torches. “Is she dead?” they asked anxiously. “Are there feathers on her body?”
    Without a word, Iron Mountain picked up a bucket of dog's blood and splashed its contents over Yanyan's body.

Iron Child
    D URING THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD SMELTING CAMPAIGN, THE government mobilized 200,000 laborers to build a twelve-mile rail line; it was completed in two and a half months. The upper terminus linked with the Jiaoji trunk line at Gaomi Station; the lower terminus was located amid dozens of acres of Northeast Gaomi Township bushland.
    Only four or five years old at the time, we were housed in a nursery school thrown up beside the public canteen. Consisting of a row of five rammed-earth buildings with thatched roofs, it was surrounded by saplings some six to seven feet tall, all strung together by heavy wire. Powerful dogs couldn't have bounded over it, let alone children like us. Our fathers, mothers, and older siblings — in fact, anyone who could handle a hoe or a shovel — were conscripted into the labor brigades. They ate and slept at the construction site, so we hadn't seen any of them for a very long time. Three skeletal old women were in charge of our “nursery school” confinement. Since all three had hawklike noses and sunken eyes, to us they looked like clones. Each day they prepared three cauldrons of porridge with wild greens: one in the morning, another at noon, and a third in the evening. We wolfed it down until our bellies were tight as little drums. Then after the meal, we went up to the fence to gaze at the scenery outside. New branches of willow and poplar sprang from the fence. Those with no green leaves were already rotting away; if they weren't removed, they sprouted yellow wood-ear fungi or little white mushrooms.
    Feasting on the little mushrooms, we watched out-of-town laborers walk up and down the nearby road. They were grubby and listless, their hair a mess. As we searched for relatives among these laborers, tears in our eyes, we asked:
    “Good uncle, have you seen my daddy?”
    “Good uncle, have you seen my mommy?”
    “Have you seen my brother?”
    “Have you seen my sister?”
    Some of them ignored us, as if they were deaf. Others cocked their heads and cast a fleeting glance, then shook their heads. But some ripped into us savagely:
    “Come here, you little bastards!”
    The three old women just sat in the doorways and paid no attention to us. The six-foot-high fence was too tall for us to climb over, and the spaces between the saplings were too narrow for us to wriggle through.
    From our vantage point behind the fence we saw an earthen dragon rise up out of the distant field and watched hordes of people scramble busily up and down the earthen dragon, like ants swarming over a hill. The laborers who passed in front of our fence said that it was the roadbed for the rail line. Our kinfolk were a part of that human ant colony. From time to time people would suddenly stick thousands of