POW! 4
Early summer mornings found the people exhausted, since the nights were so short. They'd barely closed their eyes, it seemed, and the sun was up. Father and I ran out into the dust-blown street but could not escape Mother's shouts from the yard. We were still living in the three-room shack inherited from Grandfather, passing the days in chaotic exuberance. Our shack looked particularly shabby, tucked in among a bunch of newly built red-tiled houses, like a beggar kneeling in front of a clutch of landlords and rich merchants, in silks and satins, asking for alms. The wall round our yard came up barely to an adult's waist and was topped by weeds. It couldn't keep out a pregnant bitch, let alone a thief. In fact, the pregnant bitch from the home of Guo Six often jumped into our yard to feast on our discarded bones. I used to watch, fascinated, as she scaled the wall, her black teats scraping the top and then swaying as she landed. Father carried me on his shoulders so I could look down on Mother as she scraped and sliced and chopped with her cleaver, cursing us as we walked by. She had to scavenge sweet potato scraps from the garbage heap in front of the train station. Thanks to my lazy, gluttonous Father, we lived a life of extremes, with potfuls of meat on the stove during the good times and empty pots during the bad. In response to Mother's curses, he'd say: ‘Any day now, very soon, the second land-reform campaign will begin, and you'll thank me when it does. Don't for a minute envy Lao Lan, since he'll wind up like that landlord father of his, dragged off to the bridgehead by a mob of poor peasants to be shot.’ He'd aim an imaginary rifle at Mother's head and fire: Bang! She'd grab her head with both hands and pale with fright. But the second land-reform campaign didn't come and didn't come, and poor Mother was forced to bring home rotten sweet potatoes for the pigs, two little animals that never got enough to eat and that squealed hungrily most of the time. It was so annoying. ‘What the hell are you squealing for?’ Father shouted at them once, ‘Keep it up and I'll toss you two little bastards in a pot and have you for dinner!’ Cleaver in hand, Mother glared at him. ‘Don't even think about it. Those are my pigs. I raised them, and no one's to harm a hair on them. Either the fish dies or the net breaks.’ ‘Take it easy,’ Father said, laughing gleefully. ‘I wouldn't touch those skin-and-bones animals for anything.’ I took a long look at the pigs—there really wasn't much meat on either of them, although those four fleshy ears would have made for good snacking. To me, the ears were the best part of a pig's head—no fat, not much grease and tiny little bones that crunch nicely. Best eaten with cucumbers, the thorny ones with flowers, some mashed garlic and sesame oil. ‘We can eat their ears!’ I said. Mother glared at me. ‘I'll cut off your ears and eat them first, you little bastard!’ Steaming, she came at me with her cleaver and I ran fearfully into Father's arms. She grabbed hold of my ear and jerked it hard while Father tried to pull me free—by the neck—and I screamed for all I was worth, afraid my ear would be ripped off. My screams sounded like the squeals of the pigs being slaughtered in the village. Finally, Father managed to yank me free. After examining my bruised ear, he looked up and said: ‘How can you be so mean? People say that even a tiger won't eat its young, so I guess that makes you worse than a tiger!’ Rage turned Mother's face waxen and her lips purple; she stood at the stove, shaking from head to toe. Emboldened by my father's protection, I cursed, spitting out her full name: ‘Yang Yuzhen, you stinking old lady, you're making my life a living hell!’ Stunned by my outburst, she just gaped at me, while Father chuckled as he picked me up and took off at a run. We were already out in the yard by the time we heard Mother's shrill wail: ‘I'm so mad I could die, you little bastard…’ Her two pigs wagged their curly tails and began rooting in the mud at the base of the wall, like convicts trying to burrow under a prison wall to freedom. Father rapped me on the head and said softly: ‘You little imp, how did you know your mother's name?’ I looked into his swarthy, sombre face: ‘I heard you say it!’ ‘When did I ever tell you her name was Yang Yuzhen?’ ‘You told it to Aunty Wild Mule. You said: “Yang Yuzhen, that stinking old lady, is making my life a living hell!”’ Father clamped his hand over my mouth. ‘Shut up, damn you,’ he said under his breath. ‘I've been a pretty good father so far, so don't go and ruin things for me now.’ His supple hand gave off a peppery tobacco smell; it was not the sort of man's hand you usually saw in a farming village. But he'd been a lazy good-for-nothing most of his life and never done any sort of work with his hands. I snorted in dissatisfaction. Mother came out of the house, the cleaver still in her hand, and her hair standing up round her head like the magpie's nest in the village willow tree. ‘Luo Tong,’ she shouted, ‘Luo Xiaotong, you two sons of bitches, you scruffy bastards, I wouldn't care if I died today if I could take the two of you with me. Today will see the end of this family!’ The terrible look on her face was proof that this was no joke, that this time she meant it, that she was ready to kill us both. Ten men are no match for a woman on the warpath, they say. In a situation like this, meeting the charge meant certain death. The best option? Run for your life! My father may have led a dissipated life but he was no fool. The smart man avoids dangers ahead. He swept me up, tucked me under his arm, turned and ran towards the wall, not the gate, which would have been a mistake, since, though we owned nothing of value, Mother had inherited from her family the bad habit of securing the gate with a brass lock at night. Actually, if there was one thing we owned that could bring in enough to buy a pig's head, it was that lock. I'm sure that whenever my father's hunger for meat came upon him, he must have thought of selling it. But Mother loved that lock as much as she loved her own ears, since it was part of her dowry, the one gift that symbolized her parents’ feelings for her. If Father had carried me over to the gate, even if he'd broken it down, the time wasted would have allowed Mother to reach us with her cleaver and open up our heads like blossoming flowers. So he carried me to the wall instead, and all but somersaulted over it, putting my enraged Mother and a whole lot of trouble behind us. I harboured no doubts about her ability to scamper over the wall, like we'd done, but she chose not to. Once she'd driven us out of the yard, she stopped chasing us. She jumped about for a while at the foot of the wall, then went back inside to finish chopping the rotting sweet potatoes and fill the air with loud curses. It was a brilliant way to let off steam: no bloodletting and no mess, no falling foul with the law, yet I knew that those rotten potatoes were substitutes for the heads of her bitter enemies. But now, as I think back, the true bitter enemy in her mind was neither Father nor me—it was Aunty Wild Mule. She was convinced that the slut had seduced my father, and I simply can't say if that was or was not a fair assessment of the situation. Where Father and Aunty Wild Mule's relationship was concerned, the only ones who knew who seduced whom, who cast the first flirtatious glance, were the two of them.
When I reach this point in my tale, an unusual warm current floods my heart. The woman who has just hidden behind the statue of the Horse Spirit looks a lot like Aunty Wild Mule. Though she seems familiar I won't let my thoughts turn in that direction, because Aunty Wild Mule died ten years ago. Or perhaps she didn't. Or perhaps she did and has been reborn. Or perhaps someone else's soul came back to use her body. Waves of confusion ripple through my mind as the scene before me seems to float in the air.