Big Breasts and Wide Hips (77 page)

The following morning, the PA broadcast the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment's detailed renunciation of Unicorn's Sha Zaohua myth, and then laid all the crimes at the feet of Unicorn. The mass organizations broadcast a joint declaration retracting Unicorn's broadcast privileges and ordered the faction's leaders to disband within forty-eight hours and to destroy the official seal and all propaganda materials.

Even though the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment denied the existence of a super-thief named Sha Zaohua, they nonetheless assigned secret agents and sentries to watch the Shangguan family. Not until the following spring, during the Qingming Festival, when a police van from the County Security Bureau came to take Jintong away, did Wu Yunyu, who by then had risen to the position of chairman of the Dalan Revolutionary Committee, relieve the agents and sentries, who were pretending to be wok menders, knife sharpeners, and shoe repairmen, of their duties.

When they were clearing out the Flood Dragon River Farm, a diary kept by Qiao Qisha was discovered. In it she recorded in detail the illicit relationship between Shangguan Jintong and Long Qingping. As a result, the County Security Bureau arrested Jintong on charges of murder and necrophilia and, even before the investigation began, sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, which he began to serve at a labor reform camp on the edge of the Yellow Sea.

During the first spring of the 1980s, Jintong, having served his time, sat in an out-of-the-way corner of a bus station waiting room, feeling shy and confused as he waited for the bus to Dalan, the capital of Northeast Gaomi Township.

The fifteen long years now behind him truly seemed like a bad dream. He thought back until his head ached, but all he could conjure up were memory fragments, all linked to bright light that stung his eyes like shards of glass imbedded in mud. He recalled the moment when handcuffs were first snapped on his wrists, and the reflected light that seared his eyes just before darkness enshrouded him and he heard his mother's shouts in the distance: “What right do you have arresting my son? My son is a good man, he's never hurt anyone” … and then he recalled the frightful days spent in the lockup awaiting sentencing, how every night by the muted light in his cell he had been forced to perform oral sex on the bearded guard … and he recalled the unbearable heat beating down on the labor camp salt works, creating even more blinding light. The guards wore sunglasses; the inmates were not permitted to. Wherever he looked the salty, corrupting, blinding light brought tears to eyes that were exposed to the salty air… then he recalled scenes of gathering kindling in the freezing cold of winter, sunlight sparkling on the snow-covered ground and glinting off the guards' rifle barrels. The deafening crack of rifle fire straightened him up, and as he looked into the sun he saw a dazzlingly dark figure wobble and fall to the ground. He later learned that it was an inmate who had tried to escape, only to be shot by a guard … his thoughts then took him back to a summer when bursts of lightning the size of basketballs lit up the skies over the fields. Terrified, he fell to his knees. “Heavenly Father,” he prayed, “spare me. I did nothing wrong, please don't strike me dead … let me go on living … let me live out my sentence and regain my freedom … I want to see my mother once more” … another blast of thunder rent the sky, and when he came to, a goat lay beside him, struck dead by lightning, the smell of burnt flesh hanging in the air …

Outside, the predawn sky was still dark. The dozen hanging lights in the waiting room were mere decorations; the little bit of light inside was supplied by a pair of low-wattage wall lamps. The ten or so black benches were monopolized by trendy youngsters who lay there snoring and talking in their sleep, one with his knees bent and his legs crossed, his bell-bottom trousers looking as if they were made of sheet metal. Hazy morning sunlight gradually filtered in through the windows and lit up the place, and as Jintong examined the clothes of the sleepers arrayed around him, he knew that he had reentered the world in a new age. In spite of the patches of spittle, the filthy scraps of paper, even the occasional urine stain, he could see that the floor was constructed of fine marble. And even though the walls provided rest for plenty of fat but weary black flies, the wallpaper pattern was bright and eye-catching. For Jintong, who had just emerged from a rammed-earth hut in the labor reform camp, everything around him was fresh and new, completely alien, and his unease deepened.

Finally, the early-morning sun lit up the foul-smelling waiting room, and passengers began to stir. A pimply-faced young man with a mass of wild hair sat up on his bench, scratched his toes and feet, closed his eyes as he took out a flattened filter cigarette, and lit it with a plastic lighter. After taking a deep drag, he coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it on the floor. He slipped his feet into his shoes and rubbed the sticky mess into the floor. Turning to the young woman lying beside him, he patted her on the rear. She moaned seductively as she squirmed herself awake. “Here's the bus,” he said louder than he needed to. Slowly she sat up, rubbed her eyes with her reddened hands, and yawned grandly. When it finally occurred to her that her companion had tricked her, she gave him a few symbolic thumps and moaned once more, before stretching out on the bench again. Jintong studied the young woman's fat face, her stubby, greasy nose, and the white, wrinkled skin of her belly, which poked out from under her pink shirt. With an air of impertinence, the man slipped his left hand, on which he wore a digital watch, under her blouse and caressed her flat chest, eliciting a feeling in Jintong that he had been left behind by time, and it gnawed at his heart like a silkworm feasting on mulberry leaves. For the first time, apparently, a thought occurred to him: My god, I'm forty-two years old! A middle-aged man who never had a chance to grow up. The young man's display of affection reddened the cheeks of this covert observer, who looked away. The unforgiving nature of age spread a layer of deep sadness over his already gloomy mood, and his thoughts spun wildly. I've lived on this earth for forty-two years, and what have I accomplished? The past is like a hazy path leading into the depths of a wilderness; you can only see a few feet behind you, and ahead nothing but haze. More than half my life is over, a past utterly lacking in glory, a sordid past, one that disgusts even me. The second half of my life began the day I was released. What awaits me?

At that moment he spotted a glazed porcelain mural on the opposite wall of the waiting room: a muscular man in a fig leaf was embracing a bare-breasted woman with a long ponytail. The looks of longing on the faces of the young couple — half human and half immortal — gave rise to a sad emptiness in his heart. He had experienced this feeling many times before, while lying on the ground at the Yellow Sea labor reform camp and looking up into the vast blue sky. While his herd of sheep grazed in the distance, Jintong often gazed up at the sky, within sight of the row of red flags that marked the inmates' boundary line, and patrolled by mounted armed guards who were followed by the mongrel offspring of army dogs belonging to former soldiers and local mutts that interrupted their lazy rounds by howling meaning-lessly at the foamy whitecaps on the sea just beyond the dike.

During the fourteenth spring of his imprisonment, he became acquainted with one of the grooms, a bespectacled man named Zhao Jiading who was incarcerated for attempting to murder his wife. A gentle man, he had been an instructor at a college of politics and law before his arrest. Without holding back any of the details, he related to Jintong how he had planned to poison his wife: his well-conceived plan was a work of art, and yet his wife somehow survived the attempt. Jintong repaid him by relating the details of his case. When he finished, Zhao said emotionally, “That's beautiful, sheer poetry. Too bad our laws can't tolerate poetry. Now if at the time I'd … no, just forget it, that sounds stupid! They gave you too heavy a sentence. But of course you've already served fourteen of your fifteen years, so there's no need to complain about it now.”

When the labor reform camp leadership proclaimed that his time was up and he was free to go home, he actually felt abandoned. With tears in his eyes, he pleaded, “Can't I spend the rest of my life right here, sir?” The official who had given him the news looked with disbelief and shook his head. “Why would you want to do that?” “Because I don't know how I'm going to survive out there. I'm useless, worse than useless.” The official handed him a cigarette and lit it for him. “Go on,” he said with a pat on the shoulder, “it's a better world out there than in here.” Never having learned to smoke, he took a deep drag and nearly choked to death. Tears gushed from his eyes.

A sleepy-eyed woman in a blue uniform and hat walked past him, lackadaisically sweeping up the cigarette butts and fruit peels on the floor. The look on her face showed how much she hated her job, and she made a point of nudging the people sleeping on the floor with her foot or broom. “Up!” she'd shout. “Get up!” as she swept puddles of piss onto them. Her shouts and nudges forced them to sit or stand up. Those who stood stretched and yawned, while those who remained sitting on the floor wound up getting hit by her dustpan or her broom, and they too jumped to their feet. And the minute they did that, she swept the newspaper they'd been lying on into her dustpan. Jintong, who was huddled in a corner, did not manage to escape her tirade. “Move aside!” she demanded. “Are you blind?” Employing an alertness tempered over fifteen years at the camp, he jumped to the side and watched her point unhappily at his canvas traveling bag. “Whose is that?” she snarled. “Move it!” He picked up the bag that held all his possessions, not putting it down until she'd passed her broom across the floor a time or two; he sat back down.

A pile of trash lay on the floor in front of him; the woman dumped the contents of her dustpan on the pile, then turned and walked off. The mass of flies resting on the garbage she had disturbed buzzed in the air for a moment before settling back down. Jintong looked up and spotted a line of gates along the wall where the buses were parked, each topped by a sign with a route number and destination. People were lined up behind some of the metal railings waiting to have their tickets punched. By the time he located the gate for bus number 831, with a destination of Dalan and the Flood Dragon River Farm, a dozen or more people were already in line. Some were smoking, others were chatting, and still others were just sitting blankly on their luggage. Studying his ticket, he noted that the boarding time was 7:30, but the clock on the wall showed it was already 8:10. A touch of panic set in as he wondered if his bus had already left the station. Tattered traveling bag in hand, he quickly joined the line behind a stone-faced man carrying a black leather bag and took a furtive look at the people in line ahead of him. For some reason, they all looked familiar, but he couldn't put a name to any of them. They seemed to be observing him at the same time, their looks running from surprise to simple curiosity. Now he didn't know what to do. He longed to see a friendly face from home, but was afraid of being recognized, and he felt his palms grow sticky

“Comrade,” he stammered to the man in front of him, “is this the bus to Dalan?” The man eyed him up and down in the manner of the officials at the camp, which made him as anxious as an ant on a hot skillet. Even to himself, let alone others, Jintong saw himself as a camel amid a herd of sheep, a freak. The night before, when he'd seen himself in the blurry mirror on the wall of a filthy public toilet, what had looked back at him was an oversized head covered with thinning hair that was neither red nor yellow. The face was as mottled as the skin of a toad, deeply wrinkled. His nose was bright red, as if someone had pinched it, and brown stubble circled his puffy lips. Feeling the man's eyes scrutinizing him, he felt debased and dirty; the sweat on his palms was now dampening his fingers. The man's response to his question was limited to pointing with his mouth to the red lettering on the sign above the gate.

A four-wheeled cart pushed by a fat woman in a white uniform walked up. “Stuffed buns,” she announced in a childishly high-pitched voice. “Hot pork and scallion buns, right out of the oven!” Her greasy red face had a healthy glow, and her hair was done up in a tight perm, with countless little curls like the backs of the woolly little Australian sheep he'd tended. Her hands looked like rolls straight from the oven, the pudgy fingers like sausages. “How much a pound?” a fellow in a zip-up shirt asked her. “I don't sell them by the pound,” she said. “Okay, how much apiece?” “Twenty-five fen.” “Give me ten.” She removed the cloth covering — once white, but now almost completely black — tore off a piece of newspaper hanging on the side of the cart, and picked out ten buns with a pair of tongs. Her customer flipped through a wad of bills to find something small enough to give her, and every eye in the crowd was glued to his hands.

“The peasants of Northeast Gaomi have done well for themselves the past couple of years!” a man with a leather briefcase said enviously. Zip-up Shirt stopped wolfing down a bun long enough to say, “Is that a greedy look I see, old Huang? If it is, go home and smash that iron rice bowl of yours and come with me to sell fish.” “What's so great about money?” Briefcase Man said. “To me, it's like a tiger coming down from the mountain, and I don't feel like getting bitten.” “Why worry about stuff like that?” Zip-up Shirt said. “Dogs bite people, so do cats, even rabbits when they're scared. But I never heard of money biting anyone.” “You're too young to understand,” Briefcase Man said. “Don't try that wise old uncle routine on me, old Huang, and you can stop slapping your face to puff up your cheeks. It was your township head who proclaimed that peasants were free to engage in business and get as rich as they can.” “Don't get carried away, young man,” Briefcase Man said. “The Communist Party won't forget its own history, so I advise you to be careful.” “Careful of what?” “A second round of land reform,” Briefcase Man said emphatically. “Go ahead, do your reform,” Zip-up Shirt shot back. “Whatever I earn, I spend on myself —eating, drinking, and having a good time — since true reform is impossible. You won't find me living like my foolish old grandfather! He worked like a dog, wishing he didn't have to eat or shit, just so he could save up enough to buy a few acres of unproductive land. Then came land reform and — whoosh — he was labeled a landlord, taken down to the bridge, where you people put a bullet in his head. Well, I'm not my grandfather. I'm not going to save up my money, I'm going to eat it up. Then, when your second round of land reform is launched, I'll still be a bona fide poor peasant.” “How many days since your dad finally had his landlord label removed, Jin Zhuzi?” Briefcase Man asked. “And here you are, acting so pompous!” “Huang,” Zip-up Shirt said, “you're like a toad trying to stop a wagon — you overestimate yourself. Go home and hang yourself! You think you can interfere with government policy? I doubt it.”