Lenin's Kisses (71 page)

Someone asked, “What is this about having a Dragon Day,
⁹
Phoenix Day,
¹¹
or Old People’s Day
¹³
on these loose days?”

Someone replied, “Don’t ask me. Now that Grandma Mao Zhi is gone, you should ask whoever is the eldest.”

Someone asked, “Then how do you sing the livening song?”
¹⁵

“Now that Grandma Mao Zhi has departed, I’m afraid there is probably no one who remembers the words.”

Someone else asked, “Now that Grandma Mao Zhi is gone, who will manage the village’s affairs?”

Someone else replied, “Given that no one here manages anyone else, why do we need anyone to handle things?”

At that point, a paraplegic, a cripple, and a blind man reached Liven. When they arrived in the village, a pregnant Huaihua was waiting for them at the entrance to the village, an astonished look on her face. When she saw the villagers returning from the funeral, she called out to them from a distance,

“Chief Liu has had a car accident.
. . .
Both of his legs are broken, and furthermore he is no longer the county chief. . . . He has come to live in Liven. At the moment he is in the temple guest house. He said that he will stay there from now on.”

The villagers at the entrance to the village all stared in astonishment. Tonghua, Yuhua, and Mothlet stood in the crowd like chicks that had just fallen from the nest. Their mother, Jumei, was right behind them, pale from shock, as though someone had just hit her or kissed her.

The villagers all stared at one another, not knowing what to do. Only One-Legged Monkey looked pleased.

In this way, Chief Liu settled down to live in Liven, becoming one of the village’s disabled residents.

As for Huaihua, she gave birth six months later. She gave birth to a thin and frail daughter.

Although it was a daughter, at least she belonged to the next generation. As for what the future held, only the future would tell.

C
HAPTER 3:
F
URTHER
R
EADING—
S
ISTER
H
UA
S
LOPE,
H
OLIDAY,
AND
L
IVENING
S
ONG

1)
Departed.
The term means “to die,” but also connotes a degree of respect for the deceased. This is the way in which people in Balou pay their respects when someone highly esteemed passes away.

3)
Sister Hua Slope.
“Sister Hua Slope” is the name of a place in the village of Liven, and “Sister Hua” is the name of a person. Everyone in Liven knows the story of Sister Hua and of Sister Hua Slope.

It’s said that the story began four
jiazi
cycles ago, in the
gengzi
Year of the Rat, when Sister Hua was seventeen years old. One of her parents was deaf and the other was mute, and while Sister Hua herself had sharp hearing and a sweet voice, her legs didn’t work very well. She nevertheless had a graceful beauty, with skin as white as pristine clouds in the sky, beneath which there was a shade of light pink like that of a water orchid.

Sister Hua lived with her parents on a mountain slope not far from Liven, in a house consisting of several thatched rooms and a well. The family had oxen and goats, chickens and ducks, and the soil on the slope was so fertile that if you stuck a chopstick in it, it would immediately start budding.

One day followed the next, and by the time Sister Hua turned seventeen she was already one of the most beautiful women anyone had ever seen. It was in that year, at the height of the Qing dynasty, as the entire realm was enjoying peace and prosperity, that a young man coming from Xi’an attempted to cross over Funiu Mountain to reach the Shuanghuai county seat, where he had been assigned an official post. But because the young man felt the route was too long, he decided to cut across the Balou mountains. By the time he arrived in Liven he was parched, and he proceeded to Sister Hua’s house to request a bowl of water. It was there that he encountered Sister Hua herself.

As he stood in front of her house holding a water bowl, he noticed that the crops Sister Hua’s parents had planted were growing exceptionally well. The wheat stalks on the mountain slope were full of grain, and a single year’s harvest would give them enough grain to last them another three years. Closer by, there was row upon row of bundled corn hanging under the house eaves from previous years, and even if the village were to have poor harvests for the next decade the family would still have more corn than it could eat. All of the vegetables, flowers, and sunflowers planted in front and back of the house were in full bloom, bright red in the springtime and green in the summer, with carriage-wheel chysanthemums, white mountain orchids, and moon grass combining with cloudy shade and red sunlight. There were also wild purple wisteria and chaste tree shrubs, geckos climbing the walls, and red flowers and green willows, vegetation and plant fragrance everywhere.

Having encountered this idyllic setting, the young man, who had just been appointed to a seventh-grade prefect position, decided not to continue on to Shuanghuai to become the county magistrate and to instead stay in Liven, marry Sister Hua, settle down with her, and set up a business.

Of course, Sister Hua’s family adamantly rejected this proposal to permit her to marry a man who would then move in with them as their son-in-law, rather than having her marry out. They asked her, We are just villagers, so how could we presume to have you marry a county official?

The prefect proceeded to take out his imperial letter and stamps, together with the paperwork he had brought with him in his quest for fame and glory, and tossed them all into the ravine.

Sister Hua’s father said, Everyone in our family is disabled. How can we accept a healthy wholer as our son-in-law?

The prefect went into the family’s kitchen. Everyone thought he was going to put away his water bowl, never expecting that he would instead grab a cleaver and proceed to chop off his left hand at the wrist, thereby leaving himself permanently disabled.

Sister Hua therefore had no choice but to marry him.

From that point on, the prefect ceased being a prefect, and instead became Sister Hua’s husband and moved in with her. Sister Hua’s father began teaching this young man, who had been studying ever since he was young, how to farm and use a hoe. Her father taught him to use one hand to hold a sickle and thresh the grain, while Sister Hua herself taught him how to plant vegetables and flowers. From that point on, they enjoyed their heavenly days.

By the time Sister Hua’s parents passed away, the prefect could already use one hand to plant millet and sow beans, pick sorghum and harvest wheat, and transplant seedlings. As a result, in summer the hillside was always covered in wheat, and in autumn it was covered in corn that grew as large as a wooden club. When the cotton turned white, it was as though clouds had descended from the sky, and when the rape plants bloomed in spring, it looked as though the sun had been swallowed up by the water. All year round, there were fresh flowers and vegetables, and the ducks and chickens were able to feed from dawn to dusk.

Because Sister Hua not only was incomparably beautiful, but from the time she was young had loved to plant flowers behind the house, she would transplant magnolias, wild crysanthemums, and moon grass to the mountainside, so that in spring the slope would be full of the fragrance of magnolias; in summer it would have the red and green aroma of sunlit flowers and moon grass; in autumn there would be the scent of wild crysanthemums, melons on vines, and beans laid out to dry; and in winter she would plant a kind of wild bramble that grew over the eaves of the house and mountain plums to grow along the cliff. She would let the moon grass grow in the warm sunlight at the head of her bed, where it would produce little red flowers like those of carriage-wheel chrysanthemums, and in winter she would plant fragrant purple Chinese roses and Chinese peonies, which always wilted in the sunlight but bloomed when it was overcast. In this way, it was like spring throughout the year, and she could always enjoy the smell of fresh flowers. All year round, you could smell this spring fragrance from far, far away.

This was an excellent place, a heavenly place.

During the day, while the prefect was working in the fields, Sister Hua would be either sewing or mending shoes. With one of them working in the fields and the other in the doorway of their home, they would always be carrying on a conversation,

She asked, How could you have decided to simply chop off your hand?

He said, If I hadn’t been disabled, would you have agreed to marry me?

She said, No, I wouldn’t have.

He said, Well, there you have it.

Sometimes, when he was working in the fields and happened to stray too far from the house, such that the two of them could no longer hear each other, she would move her spinning wheel over to where he was working, and would spin cotton or mend shoes while he worked.

He said, This soil is very rich; it’s full of oil.

She said, Actually, you should have accepted the position of magistrate —that is a man’s true honor.

He said, To tell the truth, when I was seven I had a dream that if I wanted to enjoy a heavenly existence, I should study hard. If I studied hard and became an official, heavenly days would await me. So, I studied diligently for thirteen years, passed the
jinshi
exam, and was appointed county magistrate. When I passed in front of your house, that dream from thirteen years earlier suddenly reappeared in my mind’s eye, with you and the fields of crops appearing just as they had in my dream. I remembered that in my dream there were nine chickens, and your house also turned out to have nine chickens. In my dream there were six or seven ducks, and your house also turned out to have six or seven ducks. In my dream the girl was three years younger than I, and when I met you it turned out that you were seventeen while I was twenty. In my dream there was a pile of grain as big as a mountain, and the mountain slope was covered in fresh flowers, and it turned out that your house also had a pile of grain as big as a mountain and a mountain slope covered in fresh flowers.

He asked, Why wouldn’t I have stayed behind?

Needless to say, each night they would hug each other tight. He told her countless stories he had learned from books, and she would tell him endless stories about life in the mountains. Time flowed like water, grass, or wheat fragrance, as one day followed another, year after year. Eventually she said, Someday, I want to give you a child.

He said, I worry that the child might turn out to be a wholer.

She said, Actually, I
hope
we have a wholer.

He said, If it is a wholer, then when he grows up he won’t understand people’s lives here, and might miss out on this heavenly life and instead leave and wander aimlessly. He would endure immense hardship and sorrow.

She reflected for a moment, but didn’t respond. She ended up getting pregnant anyway, and while she was pregnant provincial officials discovered that as the new magistrate was on his way to assume his new post in the Shuanghuai county seat, he had happened to encounter days of livening and had decided not to take his assigned post after all. The provincial officials reported this matter to the emperor, who thought, Are you not using the livening days of the disabled to mock the prosperity of the able-bodied? He therefore replied angrily, Having only one hand, he can’t very well fight, but he can certainly cook, so send someone to make him join the army, to cook for the troops.

At that time, there were many uprisings in the area around Yunnan, so the prefect was told to go there to serve as an army cook. When he left, Sister Hua gabbed him by the leg and sobbed. He said, I should have chopped off both of my hands, because if I had, today’s events would never have come to pass. He added, These past few years of livening have been worth it. I’m just worried that after our child is born, you won’t be able to bring yourself to render him disabled. He added, Mark my words. First, wait for me to return, and second, after our child is born, you must at the very least make him lame in one leg, so that he can’t walk properly and would be counted as disabled.

Having said this, the magistrate was taken away by the troops.

Sister Hua gave birth to their child on Sister Hua Slope. The child was a perfectly healthy wholer. Afraid that Sister Hua might have a difficult delivery, the women of Liven all came to watch over her bedside, and they were delighted when she gave birth to a wholer. Given that she was the child’s own mother, how could she possibly bear to maim him? Even the prospect of shaving off a layer of skin from the back of his hand was enough to make her burst into tears. She and the child therefore waited at Sister Hua Slope for her husband to return from Yunnan. They waited and waited, and when her son turned seventeen he announced that he wanted to leave the Balou mountains and go look for his father. One day, the son did in fact leave Liven and set out in search of his father, wandering through distant lands.