Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh

of the twenty windows in my vehicle, which was some thirty feet long from front to back, were broken, and the black leather seats looked like flat cakes soaked in water, curled up at the edges. My personal vehicle, with all its rusty metal parts, shuddered as it flew down the narrow dirt road, the green fields on both sides quickly disappearing behind us. My personal vehicle was like a warship plowing its way through wind and wave. Without turning to look, my driver asked, “Where are you stationed?” I told him, happily surprised at being favored with his interest. “Is it the fort?” “Yes, yes it is!” Now, I wasn't stationed at the fort, but I knew the benefits of lying — I had been contaminated by a pathological liar. That perked up my driver, and I could see the friendly look on his face even though he hadn't turned around. I must have rekindled a host of memories in him, memories of army life. I echoed his curses, adding my own for the fort's deputy chief of staff, a gangsterlike man with a face like a monkey. He told me he'd once driven for the deputy chief of staff as he sat in back with the wife of the commander of the 38 th Regiment. When he looked in the mirror and saw the deputy chief of staff feel the woman up, he'd grimaced and turned the jeep right into a tree … ha ha, he laughed. So did I. “I understand,” I said, “I understand perfectly. The chief of staff's only human.” “When I got back to the fort he told me to fill out a report, so I said, ‘I lost my bearings when I saw the deputy chief of staff feel the woman up, and crashed the jeep. It was all my fault.’ After I sent it in, our political instructor said Tuck you!’ and whacked me in the back of the head. ‘What kind of report is that? Go back and redo it!” “Did you?” “No fuckin’ way! He wrote it for me, and I copied it.” “Your political instructor sounds like a good guy,” I said. “Good guy? I had to give him ten fuckin’ pounds of cotton!” “Nobody's perfect,” I said. “That was during the Cultural Revolution, so it was all the fault of the Gang of Four.” “How are things in the army these days?” he asked. “Not bad, not bad at all.”
    When we arrived in Three Willows, our bus girl opened the door and was about to kick me off the bus. But she didn't scare me, since the driver and I had become comrades in arms. I tossed a pack of Ninety-Nines on the dashboard. That pack of smokes must have made a big hit, since he was still honking his horn in thanks far down the road.
    I started walking. I was carrying a sack of candy in my backpack and a small case of liquor in my hand. I'd have to walk the two and a half miles down a country road that never saw a bus, under a blazing sun, before I'd be home with my parents and my wife and daughter. I saw the sunflower field off in the distance. The minute I spotted the note pinned to one of the willow trees, I ran toward it. All because of that note.
    Someone had scribbled the words: “In the sunflowers, hurry, save a life!!!”
    Suddenly, the sunflower field seemed a long way off, like a cloud floating just above the ground, yellow and soft, its rich fragrance reaching out powerfully to me. I tossed down what I was carrying so I could run faster. And as I ran anxiously, images of something from the past — something I couldn't forget — surged up in my mind. Two summers before, I was walking home, following a white dog, when I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in years, a girl called Aigu. That chance meeting led to a whole string of events, which formed the basis of a short story I later wrote entitled “White Dog and Swings.” I still think it's one of my best. Every time I come home, I discover something new, which negates something in the past.
    The complex and colorful life of a farming village is like a great work of literature, one that's hard to finish and even harder to understand. That thought always reminds me of the shallow, insipid business of writing. What strange new discovery was waiting for me this time? If the note I'd read was any indication, it was bound to be “exciting” and “tragic,” to use terminology favored by elite writers. Yuri and Lara carried out their trysts amid sunflowers, a warm and romantic Eden just made for losing your senses. I was nearly breathless when I reached the edge of the field. The coarse sunflower leaves were rustling in the warm breezes; dragonflies, crickets, and katydids were making their