The Garlic Ballads

have … I’ll dump it.” An embarrassed Gao Yang tried to talk and beg his way out of a bad situation.
    “No need for that,” the smiling police chief said. “A man’s piss can clean the poisons out of his body. Go on, drink it.”
    Suddenly exhilarated by a strangely wonderful emotion, he blurted out, “Uncle, it’s really a bottle of fine wine.”
    The police chief grinned and exchanged looks with the two militiamen. “If it’s a fucking bottle of fine wine,” he said, “then drink it!”
    Without another word, Gao Yang picked up the bottle and took a mighty swig. It was still warm, and on the salty side, but not bad, all in all. Tipping the bottle back a second time, he gulped about half of the remaining urine, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve as hot tears gushed from his eyes. With a smile frozen on his face, he said, “Gao Yang, oh Gao Yang, you bastard, how could you be so lucky? Who else could have the good fortune to feast on a delicious onion roll and wash it down with fine wine?”
    He finished off the bottle, then sprawled out on the brick floor and cried his eyes out.
    Later that day Party Secretary Huang came to tell him that the police had to deal with containing the floodwaters of the Sandy River, and hadn’t time to waste looking for the body of his mother, anyway. So he was fined two hundred yuan and released.
    The roads were already a sea of mud when he trudged home at dawn, and it was raining again; large drops pelting him on the head felt wonderful. “Mother,” he thought aloud, “I wasn’t a filial son while you were alive, but at least I managed to give you a decent burial. The poor and lower-middle-class peasants go to the crematorium when they die, but not you. That makes it all worth it.”
    As he turned into his yard he witnessed the roof of the three-room hut he called home slowly caving in, sending pockets of water and mud splashing in all directions. Then the whole thing collapsed with a roar, and there in front of him, all of a sudden, was the acacia grove and the roiling yellow water of the river that flowed behind his house.
    He cried out for his mother and fell to his knees in the mud.

2.

    Dawn came. He had, apparently, gotten a little sleep, but now he was sore all over. Fire seemed to shoot from his nose and mouth, both of which nearly ignited spontaneously from the superheated air. He shivered so violently that the metal springs of the cot creaked. Why do people shiver? That’s what I want to know—why do people shiver? A covey of little red girls ran and jumped and screeched and yelled on the ceiling, so flimsy that swirling gusts of wind easily bent them this way and that. One of them—naked, holding a bamboo staff—stood off by herself. “Isn’t that Xinghua?” he asked out loud. “Xinghua, get down from there this minute! If you fall, you’ll kill yourself!”
    “I can’t get down, Daddy.” She began to cry. Large crystalline tears hung suspended in midair on the tips of her hair instead of falling to the floor.
    A strong gust of wind swept the children away, and a gray-haired old woman slogged unsteadily through the roadside muck, a tattered blanket thrown over her shoulders, one shoe missing. She was mud-spattered from head to toe.
    “Mother!” he screamed. “I thought you were dead!”
    As he ran toward her, he felt his body grow lighter, until he was as insubstantial as the cluster of little girls. Buffeted by gusty winds, his body was stretched to several times its original length, and he had to hold on to the rails around him to keep his balance as he stood before his mother. She rolled her muddy eyes and gaped at him.
    “Mother!” he exclaimed excitedly. “Where have you been all these years? I thought you were dead.”
    She shook her head lightly.
    “Mother, eight years ago all the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists had their labels removed, and land was parceled out to people who work the fields. I married a woman with a crippled arm and a good heart. She bore you a granddaughter and a grandson, so our line wont die out. We have a surplus of food, and if this year’s garlic crop hadn’t rotted before it could be sold, we’d even have some money saved up.”
    Mother’s face underwent a metamorphosis, and a pair of wormy maggots slithered out of her muddy eye sockets. Once the initial shock had worn off, he reached over to pluck out the maggots; but when he touched her skin, a