Pow! (30 page)

‘No tea for us,’ Mother said. ‘We've already taken up too much of your time. We'll just sit a moment longer and then be on our way.’

‘You're already here, so what's the hurry? Lao Luo, seeing you here is a rare treat. Of all the men in the village, you're the only one who never dropped by, until today.’ He stood up, went across to the cabinet and selected five long-stemmed glasses. ‘Instead of pouring tea, let's have a drink. That's how the Westerners do it.’

He took out a bottle of imported liquor—Remy Martin XO, brandy that sold in the mall for at least a thousand yuan. Mother and I once bought some for three hundred yuan a bottle in the city's infamous Corruption Lane, then resold it to a little store near the train station for four-fifty apiece. We knew that the people who sold them to us were relatives of officials who'd received them as gifts.

Lao Lan poured brandy into all five glasses.

‘Not for the children,’ Mother said.

‘A little taste won't hurt.’

The amber liquid created a strange light show in the glasses. Lao Lan held out his glass; we did the same. ‘Happy New Year!’

Our glasses clinked, a crisp, pleasant sound.

‘Happy New Year!’ we echoed.

‘Well, how do you like it?’ he asked as he swirled the liquid in his glass, watching it closely. ‘You can add ice, you can even add tea.’

‘It has an interesting aroma,’ Mother said.

‘How's a farmer supposed to tell good from bad?’ asked Father. ‘It's wasted on us.’

‘Don't say things like that, Lao Luo,’ responded Lao Lan. ‘I want you to be the Luo Tong before he went to the northeast, not this passive shell of a man. Stand straight, my brother. Once a bent back becomes a habit, it's impossible to break.’

‘Lao Lan's right, Dieh,’ I said.

‘Xiaotong, who do you think you are,’ Mother bawled at me as she gave me a slap, ‘calling him Lao Lan?’

‘Great!’ Lao Lan said with a smile. ‘That's exactly what I want you to call me. From now on it's Lao Lan. I love the sound of it.’

‘Lao Lan!’ Now it was Jiaojiao's turn.

‘Terrific!’ said Lao Lan excitedly. ‘Just terrific!’

Father held his glass out, tipped his head back and drained his glass. ‘Lao Lan,’ he said, ‘I have only one thing to say. I work for you.’

‘No, you don't—we work together. I'll tell you what I'm thinking. We can take ownership of the one-time commune canvas factory and refit the buildings for a meatpacking plant. My sources tell me that officials in town are up in arms over the injection of water in the meat and are about to mount a “safe meat project”. The next step will be to outlaw independent butchers, which will put an end to our prosperity. We need to act before that happens by opening a meatpacking plant. We'll welcome any villager willing to join our consortium. As for the rest, well, we'll never have a shortage of manpower, since unemployment is rampant in all villages…’ The phone rang. He picked it up, dealt briefly with his caller and then hung up. ‘Lao Luo,’ he said, looking up at the digital clock on the wall, ‘something's come up, so we'll have to continue this another day.’

We stood up and said our goodbyes, but not before Mother reached into her black, faux-leather bag, took out the bottle of Maotai and placed it on the tea table.

‘Yang Yuzhen,’ Lao Lan said, looking displeased, ‘what's this?’

‘Don't be angry, Village Head, this isn't a gift,’ Mother said, smiling meaningfully. ‘Yao Qi brought this to our house last night as a gift for Luo Tong. How could we presume to drink anything as expensive as this? We'd rather you had it.’

Lao Lan picked the bottle up and held it close to the light to get a better look. Then he smiled and handed it to me. ‘Xiaotong, you be the judge. Is this the real thing or a knock-off?’

Without even looking at the bottle, I said with complete assurance: ‘A knock-off.’

Lao Lan tossed the bottle into a bin against the wall and laughed heartily. ‘You are very discriminating, worthy Nephew!’

Tongue stiff, cheeks numb, eyes dull and heavy, one yawn after another. I fight to keep going, muddling along with my tale…a car horn startles me awake. Morning sunlight streams into the temple; there's bat guano on the floor. An ambiguous smile adorns the little, basin-like face of the Meat God; just looking at it gives me a sense of pride, mixed with remorse and trepidation. My past is a fairy tale or, more accurately, a big lie. I stare at him, he stares back, lively and expressive, almost as if he's about to speak to me. I feel as if I could animate him with a single puff of air, send him running happily out of the temple over to the feast and the meat forum to eat his fill and join the discussion. If the Meat God is really anything like me, then he's someone who can talk and talk and talk. Wise Monk continues to sit, lotus position, on his rush mat, unchanged. He casts a meaningful look at me before shutting his eyes. I recall my sleep being interrupted by pangs of hunger in the middle of the night, but when I awoke this morning I wasn't hungry at all. I'm now reminded of how, I think, the woman who resembles Aunty Wild Mule nourished me with her spurting milk. I lick my lips and detect its sweet taste again. This is the second day of the Carnivore Festival, when forums and discussion groups on a variety of topics will take place in guest houses and restaurants in the twin cities, followed by all manner of banquets. Barbecue stands will continue in operation in the field across the temple, albeit with a new batch of cooks. At the moment, none of them and no prospective customers have arrived. No one but fast-moving cleanup crews are up and working at this hour, busy as battlefield mop-up units.

My parents sent me to school soon after New Year's, not the normal time to begin. But, thanks to Lao Lan's intervention, the authorities were happy to let me enrol. They also enrolled my sister in the Early Red Academy, or, as it's called now, preschool.

The school gate was just outside the village, a hundred metres on the other side of Hanlin Bridge. The one-time manor of the Lan family, it had
fallen into a state of rot and disrepair. The buildings, with green brick walls and blue tiled roofs, had once heralded the glories of the Lan family to all who laid eyes on them. Locally, the Lans were not thought of as rustic rich. Members of Lao Lan's father's generation had studied in America, which gave him something to be proud of. Four metal characters in red—
—that spelt out ‘Hanlin Primary School’ were welded onto the cast-iron arch spanning the gate. Already eleven, I was placed in the first grade, which made me nearly twice the age of, and a head taller than, my classmates. I was the centre of attention for students and teachers alike during the morning flag-raising ceremony, and I'll bet they thought that a boy from one of the upper classes had mistakenly lined up with them.

I was not cut out to be a student. It was sheer agony to sit on a stool for forty-five minutes and behave myself. And not just once a day, but seven times, four in the morning and three in the afternoon. I began to feel dizzy at about the ten-minute mark and wanted nothing more than to lie down and go to sleep. I could hear neither my teacher's murmurs nor my classmates’ recitations. The teacher's face faded from view and was replaced by what looked like a cinema screen across which danced images of people, cows and dogs.

My homeroom teacher, Ms Cai, a woman with a moon face, a head of hair like a rat's nest, a short neck and a big arse—she waddled like a duck—hated me from the beginning but chose to ignore me. She taught maths, which invariably put me to sleep. ‘Luo Xiaotong!’ she shouted once, grabbing me by the ear.

Eyes open but brain not yet in gear, I asked: ‘What's wrong? Someone die at your house?’

If she interpreted that as a curse that augured a death in her family, she was wrong. I'd been dreaming of doctors in white smocks running down the street shouting: ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry, someone's died at the teacher's house.’ But, of course, she couldn't know that, which is why she interpreted my shout as a curse on her. If I'd said that to one of the less civilized teachers at the school, my ears would have been ringing from a resounding slap. But she was a cultured woman; she merely returned to the front of the room, her cheeks flushed, and sniffled like an ill-treated girl. Biting her lip, as if to pluck up
courage, she said: ‘Luo Xiaotong, there are eight pears and four children. How do you divide them up?’

‘Divide them up? You fight over them! This is an age of “primitive accumulation”. The bold stuff their bellies, the timid starve to death and the biggest fist wins the fight!’

My answer got a laugh out of my dimwitted classmates, who could not possibly have understood me. They just liked my attitude, and when one laughed the others followed, filling the room with laughter. The boy next to me, whom everyone called Mung Bean, laughed so hard that snot spurted from his nose. Under the guidance of a dimwitted teacher, that pack of dimwits was growing even more dimwitted. I stared at the teacher with a triumphant look but all she could do was bang the table with her pointer.

‘Stand up!’ she demanded angrily, her face turning deep red.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why should I stand when everyone else stays in their seat?’

‘Because you're answering a question,’ she said.

‘I'm supposed to stand when I answer a question?’ My voice dripped with sarcasm and arrogance. ‘Don't you have a TV at home? If you don't, does that mean you've never watched TV? Have you never seen a pig walk just because you've never eaten pork? If you've watched TV, have you ever seen a press conference? The officials don't stand up to answer questions—the reporters stand up to
ask
the questions.’

That drew another laugh from my dimwitted classmates, who, once again, could not possibly have understood me. Not a clue! They might watch TV but cartoons only—never serious programmes, like I did. And never, not in a million years, would they be able to understand world affairs like I did. Wise Monk, even before that year's Lantern Festival, we had a Japanese 21-inch colour TV with a rectangular screen and a remote. A TV like that these days would be considered an antique, but then it was ultra-modern; and not onlu in our village but even in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Lao Lan had sent it over with Huang Bao and, when he took it out of the box, all black and shiny, we were absolutely amazed. ‘It's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous,’ was Mother's comment. Even Father, never one to beam with happiness, said: ‘Would you look at that! How in the world did they make something like
that!’ Even the Styrofoam packing elicited whoops of surprise from him—he found it incredible that something useful could be so light and airy. It was nothing to me, of course—we'd seen plenty of it on our scavenging route, but we never gave it a second thought because none of the recycling centres would take it. Besides the TV set, Huang Bao brought along a herringbone antenna and a seamless 15-metre metal pole coated with anti-rust material. When we stood it up in the yard it made our house look like a crane amid chickens, towering over the neighbourhood. If I could have climbed to the top of the pole, I'd have had a bird's-eye view of the whole village. Our eyes lit up when the first gorgeous images flashed across the TV screen. That TV raised the standing of our family to a new level. And I grew a lot smarter. Enrolling me in school—in the first grade, no less—was little more than a joke of international proportions. Slaughterhouse Village could boast two individuals who were knowledgeable and well informed: Lao Lan and me. Written words were a stranger to me, but I was no stranger to them, at least that's how it felt to me. There are lots of things in this world that do not need to be studied, at least not in a school, in order to be learnt. Don't tell me you have to go to school to be able to know how to divide eight pears among four children!

My response rendered the teacher speechless. I saw something glitter in her eyes and knew that when they finally spilt they'd be tears. I was proud of myself but I was also frightened. I knew that a student who made his homeroom teacher cry would be seen as a bad seed, although, paradoxically, people would know he had a bright future with endless possibilities. If his development went in the right direction, a child like that was virtually guaranteed an official position; if not, we're talking big-time criminal. But one way or other, he'd be special. Sad to say, but thank goodness, those glittering objects in the teacher's eyes did not spill.

‘Leave the room,’ she said, softly at first, and then shrilly: ‘Roll that fanny of yours out of here!’