Frog (20 page)

The speedboat easily caught up with Wang Jiao’s raft, and as they drew near, Qin He slowed to nudge up close.

Wang Jiao stood at the back of his raft, pole in hand, ferocity written on his face as he took a fighting stance.

Wang Gan sat up front with Chen Er in his arms.

Chen Bi sat in the middle, holding Wang Dan in his arms, alternately crying and laughing. Wang Dan, he was shouting, have the baby, have it now. Have it and it’s a living human being. Have it and they won’t hound us any more. Wan Xin, Little Lion, you’ve lost. Ha-ha, you’ve lost!

Tears streaked the man’s stubbled face.

The air was split by Wang Dan’s screech, a terrifying, gut-wrenching cry.

The speedboat was right next to the raft. Gugu stood up and reached out her hand.

Chen Bi whipped out his knife and growled menacingly, Take that fiendish hand back.

This isn’t the hand of a fiend, it’s the hand of an obstetrician.

As my nose smarted, I suddenly realised what was happening. Chen Bi, I shouted, take Gugu aboard and let her deliver Wang Dan’s baby!

I hooked his raft with my pole to let Gugu shift her stout frame over.

Little Lion jumped aboard after her, medical kit in her hand.

When they took out a pair of scissors and slit open Wang Dan’s bloody trousers, I turned around, though I held on tightly to the pole behind me to keep the raft and speedboat from separating.

An image of Wang Dan floated into my head: she lies on the raft, her lower body blood-soaked, a tiny body with a big belly, looking like an angry, frightened dolphin.

The river roiled, day and night. The clouds parted, freeing the sun to send down bolts of light. The flotilla of rafts and boats rode downriver with its loads of peaches. My raft, now pilotless, actually followed the flow of water with them.

I was hoping expectantly, hoping amid the sound of Wang Dan’s shrieks, hoping amid the pounding of the surf, and hoping amid the braying of animals on the bank.

A baby’s first cries came on the air.

I spun around and saw Gugu holding a newborn, early-arriving baby in both hands. Little Lion was wrapping gauze around its middle.

Another girl, Gugu said.

Chen Bi, head down, was devastated, like a deflated tyre. He pounded his head with both fists. The heavens have abandoned me . . . The agony he felt was unmistakable. The heavens have abandoned me . . . five generations of the Chen family will end with me. I can’t believe it!

What a scumbag you are! Gugu cursed him.

Even though Gugu sped Wang Dan and the baby back up the river in her speedboat, the mother could not be saved.

According to Little Lion, Wang Dan rallied just before she died, her mind clear for a brief spell. She had lost so much blood her face was like a sheet of gold foil. With a smile on her face, she mumbled something to Gugu, who bent down to hear what she was trying to say. Little Lion told me she did not hear what was said, but Gugu did. The gold pallor on Wang Dan’s face faded to grey, her eyes were opened wide, though the radiance was gone. Her curled body looked like an emptied sack or a cast-off cocoon. Gugu sat beside Wan Dan’s lifeless body, her head hanging low. A long time passed before she stood up, heaved a long sigh, and said, either to Little Lion or to herself: What was all that for?

Gugu and Little Lion cared for Wang Dan’s baby, Chen Mei, until she was out of danger and healthy enough to go on living.

Dear Sugitani sensei,

I find it hard to believe it’s already been three years since we retired and moved back to Gaomi. Though the period has not been without its hardships, they have been more than offset by one very pleasant surprise. With fear and trepidation I read the high praise over the material on Gugu in the letter I sent. You said that a bit of reorganisation could turn it into a publishable novel, but I’m not so sure. First, publishers may not welcome a novel on this theme or topic. Second, if it is published, it could seriously upset Gugu. Though I have taken pains to show my respect, many painful episodes are still there for all to see. As for me, I am using this epistolary narrative form as a way to atone for my sins and find a way to lessen their impact. Your comforting remarks and reasoning have eased my mind considerably. Since writing can serve as an apology or an appeal for forgiveness, I will keep at it. And since writing must be sincere to make that appeal, that will be my goal.

Over a decade ago I said that writing must touch the most painful spots in one’s heart as it records mankind’s most unbearable memories. Now I believe that one must write things about which people feel most discomfited, about people’s most uncomfortable conditions. The writer must put himself on the dissection table and under the microscope.

Twenty-odd years ago I boasted shamelessly: I write for myself. Writing for absolution is writing for myself, but only to a point; I think I ought to write for the people I hurt, and for the people who hurt me. I am grateful to them, because each time they hurt me I cannot avoid thinking about the people I hurt.

Sensei, I am sending you a packet of what I’ve been writing off and on over the past year. I think I’ll stop writing Gugu’s story and concentrate on a play with her as the central character.

Every time I see her she asks after you. She really and truly hopes you will visit again. She even wondered if you might have trouble affording a plane ticket, and she said I must tell you that she will buy one for you. Gugu added that there are many things she wants to say, but cannot bring herself to say to anyone. If you were to come, however, she’d tell you everything. She said she knows one of your father’s deepest secrets, something she’s never revealed to anyone. If it were to become known, it would shock you to your core. Sensei, I have a good idea what that secret is, but I’ll wait till you return, so you can hear it directly from her.

Finally, while it has already appeared in the material I’m sending, I want to tell you anyway: though I am not that far from the age of sixty, I have recently become the father of a newborn infant! It makes no difference how this came about, Sensei, nor how much trouble will follow this child through life. I ask the blessing of a man of such noble standing, and hope that you would honour us by conferring a name on him.

Tadpole

October 2008, Gaomi

Gugu always impressed me as a woman of incredible audacity. There did not seem to be a person alive who frightened her, and there was nothing she was afraid to do. But Little Lion and I personally witnessed her frightened to the point of foaming at the mouth and passing out – over a frog.

It happened one April morning when Little Lion and I were to be guests of Yuan Sai and my cousin Jin Xiu, who had opened a bullfrog breeding farm. In the space of only a few years, Northeast Gaomi Township, a one-time backwater, had undergone a major transformation. Impressive white stone levees had been built on both sides of the river, and the green belts along the riverbanks had been beautified by the addition of rare flowers and exotic plants. Over a dozen residential developments, some with towers, and European-style villas, had sprouted on both banks. The area developed until it began to merge with the county capital, and was only a forty-minute car ride to the Qingdao airport. Korean and Japanese investors were building factories there, and most of our village had been given over to the Metropolitan Golf Course. Although the area’s name had been changed to Chaoyang District, we still called it Northeast Township.

The distance from our community to the bullfrog farm was about five li; my cousin wanted to send a car, but we declined, preferring to take the riverside pedestrian path, where we passed young housewives pushing baby strollers. Their faces radiated health, their eyes shone, and the elegant aroma of expensive perfumes wafted from their bodies. The babies were sucking on pacifiers or sleeping soundly or looking around, eyes darting in lively fashion; they all emitted a sweet smell. Little Lion never missed asking these young mothers to stop so she could bend down and stroke the little babies’ pudgy hands and tender, fair faces. Her expression proved her love of the little ones. As she stood in front of one blond, blue-eyed foreigner’s stroller with a pair of twin babies in seersucker caps, she reached down, touched one and then the other, and said something under her breath as tears came to her eyes. I watched the mother smile politely as she grabbed hold of Little Lion’s clothing: Don’t dribble on their faces.

Little Lion sighed.

Why did I never notice how cute babies are before?

That just shows that we’re getting old.

That’s only part of it, she said. The quality of people’s lives has improved now, and so has the quality of their offspring. That’s what makes them so adorable.

We met some people we knew on the way, stopping to shake hands and chat, emotionally commenting on how old we’ve gotten and wondering where the decades had gone.

We saw a fancy cruise boat sailing slowly down the river; it looked like a floating old-style tower. Joyful sounds came across the water from women dressed in ancient costume, like characters in paintings, playing music and singing in the ship’s cabins. A speedboat throwing up rooster tails of spray raced past and scared away all the gulls.

We were holding hands, a loving couple, though we were each thinking our own thoughts. She was probably thinking about children, all those lovely children; but what flashed through my mind were images of that frightful chase on this very river so many years before.

We crossed on the pedestrian walk of the recently completed cable bridge, on which BMW and Mercedes sedans were common sights. It was an elegant, gull-winged bridge that ended with the golf course to the right and the renowned Temple of the Fertility Goddess to the left.

A temple fair was in progress on that eighth day of the fourth lunar month. The temple grounds were packed with automobiles whose licence plates showed them to be from outlying counties, even a few from other provinces.

The spot had once been known as Fertility Goddess Village, its reputation gained from the temple that had stood there. As a child I’d gone there with my mother to burn incense; the image had stuck with me, though the temple had been torn down at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

The new Fertility Goddess Temple had a towering main hall with red walls and yellow tiles. On both sides of the crowded paved path peddlers of candles, incense sticks, and clay dolls hawked their wares to tourists.

Buy a doll here, buy a doll.

One of the peddlers, dressed in a yellow Chinese gown, head shaved, looked like a monk. He rapped a stick against his Buddhist temple block, known as a wooden fish, and sang out rhythmically:

Buy a doll and take it home, a happy family you will soon be.

Take one this year, raise one the next, soon Mum and Dad, you will see.

No finer dolls you’ll ever find, all crafted from the finest clay.

Lovely faces have all my dolls, eyes, noses, mouths of beauty.

My dolls are most potent, sold to villages in eight counties.

Buy one, you’ll have a dragon; buy two, a dragon and a phoenix.

Buy three for happiness, wealth, and a long life; buy four for two pairs of officials.

Buy five for five distinguished scholars; buy six, no, I can’t give you six or the wife will surely pout.

The voice sounded familiar, so I walked up to see. Just as I thought – it was Wang Gan.

He was trying to sell dolls to a gaggle of Japanese or Korean women. I thought about taking Little Lion’s hand and walking off to spare him the pain of what could only be an uncomfortable meeting for everyone. But she pulled her hand back and walked straight up to him.

No, I realised, she was going up to his stand of dolls. He was not overselling his dolls, which were indeed special. Those at other stalls were uniformly painted, boys and girls, all bright and all the same. Wang Gan’s dolls were more understated; each was unique with individual expressions that ran the gamut from lively to peaceful, mischievous to naive, angry to joyful. One look told me they must have been made by Northeast Gaomi Township’s master doll maker, Hao Dashou – Hao married my aunt in 1999 – who had for decades employed a unique sales approach for his dolls. What had led him to hand them over to Wang Gan? Wang pointed with puckered lips to the dolls and stalls to either side, then said in a soft voice to the women: Their wares are cheap, machine-produced, but mine are handmade by Northeast Gaomi Township’s master craftsman, Qin He, who fashions them with his eyes closed. Perfectly lifelike and exquisitely fragile. Wang Gan picked up a doll with a petulant pout. Alongside Master Qin He’s creations, Madame Tussaud’s wax figures are mere figurines, he said. All creatures are born of clay, understand? The goddess Nüwa created humans out of clay, you see? Clay is invested with intelligence. Our Master Qin He uses clay dug from two metres deep in the Jiao riverbed, silt that is more than three thousand years old, cultural silt, historical silt. The silt is put out to dry in the sun and aired in the moonlight, soaking up the essence of the sun and the moon. After being broken down by a roller it is reconstituted with river water taken at daybreak and well water drawn as the moon starts its climb, to become clay, which he kneads for a while and pounds for a spell to form a nice round, doughy ball; only then does the creative process begin. I must tell you ladies that after each doll is made, Master Qin He pokes a tiny hole in the top of its head with a pointed bamboo strip, then pricks his middle finger and releases a drop of his blood into the hole. He seals the hole and places the doll in a cool, shady place for forty-nine days before applying paint, beginning with the eyes. These dolls are themselves spirits – don’t let what I’m about to reveal frighten you, but at every full moon they dance to the music of flutes, twirling and clapping and laughing, the sound like speech emerging from a cell phone, soft yet clear. If you don’t believe me, buy a few and take them home. If they don’t come to life, bring them back and smash them here in front of my stall. But I doubt you will do that, for that releases its blood and you will hear it cry. After listening to Wang Gan’s sales patter, the women bought two dolls each, which he packed in special gift boxes. His customers walked off happily. And then Wang Gan turned to greet us.

I think he knew we were there all along. He might not have recognised me, but there was no way he missed Little Lion, whom he had pursued with single-minded devotion for more than a decade. But he reacted with surprise, as if he’d just spotted us.

Aiya! It’s you two.

How are you, my friend? I said. Haven’t seen you in years.

Little Lion smiled and said something too soft for me to hear.

We exchanged a hearty handshake and cigarettes; I smoked the Eight Joys he handed me, he smoked the General I handed him.

Little Lion was busy admiring the dolls.

I heard you were back, he said. You can travel the world, but there’s no place like home, it seems.

That’s right, I said. A fox dies in the den where it was born, a leaf falls to the ground right below. But we’re fortunate to be living in a new age. I hate to even think about how it was all those years ago.

We lived in cages back then, he said, either that or we were led around with leashes. Now we know what freedom is. You can do anything you want if you’ve got the money and it isn’t illegal.

You’re right. You’ve got quite a sales pitch, I said. I pointed to the dolls. Are they really as spirited as you say?

Do you think I’m just blowing smoke? He was dead serious. Every word is the sacred truth, with just a hint of acceptable exaggeration. Even the national media is allowed that.

I’m no match for you, I said. Did Qin He really make those?

Would I say he did if he didn’t? That bit about flutes and dancing on a full moon, that was an exaggeration, but it’s true that Qin He made them with his eyes shut. If you don’t believe me, name the day and I’ll take you to see for yourself.

So Qin He settled down here too, did he?

Who talks about settling these days? You live where it suits you. Wherever your aunt is, that’s where you’ll find Qin He. His kind of diehard loyalty is rare, no matter where you look.

Little Lion held up a lovely little doll with big eyes and a high nose, like a girl with mixed Chinese and European blood. I want this little girl, she said.

I began to sense something as I looked at the doll. Of course, I’d seen that face somewhere. But where? Who was it? Oh, my, it was Wang Dan’s daughter, Chen Mei, the girl Gugu and Little Lion took care of for nearly six months, but then had to turn over to her father, Chen Bi.

I still recall the evening Chen came to our house to retrieve his daughter – it was on the night we sent the Kitchen God off to report on the family, not long before New Year’s, with firecracker explosions and the smell of gunpowder in the air. Little Lion had filled out the paperwork to accompany me and had left her position with the commune health centre. I’d soon be taking her and Yanyan with me to Beijing. A two-room unit in a Beijing compound would be our new home. Father would not go with us, and was unwilling to move in to my older brother’s home in the county capital. He wanted to stay where he was. Fortunately, my second brother had a job in the township, close enough to take care of him.

After Wang Dan’s death, Chen Bi began to drown himself in liquor. He walked the streets, alternating between weeping and singing. People sympathised with him at first, but with the passage of time that turned to annoyance. Back when the pursuit of Wang Dan was on, Chen Bi’s savings had been used to pay the villagers’ wages. But after her death, most gave the money back to him. Additionally, the commune did not ask him to repay the money spent on him during his confinement. A conservative estimate put his savings at thirty thousand yuan, enough for him to spend on drink for several years. To all appearances, he had put out of his mind the child Gugu and Little Lion had taken to the health centre to fight for her life. In basic terms, his goal in subjecting Wang Dan to the dangers of a second pregnancy had been to produce a boy to carry on the family line, and when all the suffering and hardships in reaching that goal ended with the birth of another girl, he pounded himself in the head. The heavens have abandoned me! he wept bitterly.

Gugu named the child. Since she had a fresh, pretty face and a sister named Chen Er (Ear), she settled on Chen Mei (Eyebrow). Little Lion pronounced it to be a beautiful name.

Gugu and Little Lion thought seriously about raising the child on their own, but with the residence issue and the difficult procedures involved in adoption, when Chen Bi came and lifted her from Little Lion’s arms, she still had no resident status. In accordance with the laws of the People’s Republic of China, she did not exist, what is known as a ‘bootleg kid’. How many of those there were at the time no one could say, but the number had to be astonishingly high. The bootleg kid residence issue was finally resolved in 1990 during the Fourth Census. The income derived from fining the masses for illegal births reached astronomical heights, but how much of that money actually made it into the national coffers is too tangled an affair for anyone to sort out. And the number of bootleg kids the masses have produced over the past decade or so is certainly another astronomical figure. The fine for such births is now ten times greater than twenty years ago, and when the next census rolls around, we’ll see if the bootleg-kid parents can afford to pay the fines . . .

Back then, Little Lion’s motherly instincts were in full bloom. She held Chen Mei, showering her with kisses, hardly ever taking her eyes off her, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tried to nurse her, since her nipples looked funny – whether or not she could actually produce milk was hard to say, but such ‘miracles’ were said to have occurred. As a youngster I saw a play about a family in which the parents died tragically, leaving behind an eighteen-year-old daughter and her baby brother. Given no choice, she offered her virgin breasts to him, and in only a few days, milk oozed from her nipples. In the real world, such things are likely impossible these days. An eighteen-year-old girl with a nursing brother? Mother said it was common in old times for a woman and her mother-in-law to have children at the same time. Now? It could still happen. A girl in my daughter’s college class has a newborn baby sister. Her father, a coalmine owner who hires migrant workers under slave-like conditions, was immeasurably wealthy. People like that live in luxurious villas in Beijing, Shanghai, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Melbourne and Toronto with their mistresses, who produce babies for them.