The Explosion Chronicles (15 page)

He therefore had no choice but to acknowledge her.

As a gesture of filial piety, Zhu Ying had hired him a maid. The maid was neat and tidy, and even though she was in her forties, she still retained her youthful beauty. Her hair was still jet-black, and she had barely any wrinkles. The only problem was that she had put on some weight. When she was younger she had been so slight that she appeared to float when she walked. She lived in a building in the corner of the courtyard, and every day she would silently cook the family’s meals, wash their clothes, and sweep the courtyard—thereby permitting Kong Dongde to live as though he were a rich landowner. She quietly worked for the Kong household until the day Mingliang was appointed town mayor, but that afternoon—after the maid had prepared a tableful of dishes, and
as the family was celebrating Mingliang’s new appointment—there was a sudden change.

Just as the food had been brought out and the entire family had sat down at the table, Mingliang strode in. His parents and Zhu Ying, as well as his eldest brother, Mingguang, and his fourth brother, Minghui, who had failed to pass the college entrance exams—all turned around and looked through the door, where they saw Mingliang shaking the snow off his clothing. He laughed and announced in a loud voice, “From now on, Explosion Town will belong to our family. Whatever you want, just tell me.” He sat in an empty seat and, staring intently at his father, said, “The town has established a nursing home. Would you like to be appointed the director?” When his father merely laughed and looked at him, Mingliang then turned to his mother and said, “In the future, when you have a toothache, you won’t need to go to the hospital in Cypress Town. After we establish our town’s clinic, the doctor will be able to make house calls and see you at home.”

Mingliang turned to Mingguang and asked solemnly,

“Do you want to be a cadre? Do you want to be appointed to the town board, to serve as deputy town mayor, and to be in charge of education?” Initially, his brother was surprised, but then he reflected for a moment and replied very seriously, “All I want is to be transferred from primary school to a high school. I want the other teachers to listen to my lessons, and if they say I’m knowledgeable and my classes are the best, then I’ll be satisfied.” Mingliang was rather scornful of Mingguang’s lack of ambition. Finally, he turned to Minghui and asked him what he wanted to do, saying that he could have any job he wanted. Mingliang saw that Minghui no longer appeared depressed as a result of having failed his university entrance exams, and instead was smiling like a sunflower at dawn. This reminded Mingliang of the amorous activities he and Cheng Qing had engaged in that morning in the village
board office—he remembered how, afterward, Cheng Qing’s face had resembled a sunflower, and it occurred to him that Cheng Qing and Minghui would make a good couple. But the thought of Minghui with Cheng Qing made him feel as though a bowl of boiling water had been poured onto his heart. His entire body began to tremble, and he quickly turned to his wife, Zhu Ying, and asked, “What do you want to do? Do you want to be the director of the town’s Women’s Federation and oversee all of the women’s jobs in the entire town?”

Zhu Ying replied, “I don’t want to do anything. I just want to be a housewife and take care of our parents. With that, everything would be perfect.” She initially said this merely as a social nicety, but after she uttered these words the entire Kong household stared at her in astonishment, as though they had finally seen through her—as though she were completely naked. In that instant, the room became so quiet that you could even hear the sound of the snow falling outside. As they stared at one another in embarrassment, not knowing what to do next, the maid walked in with a plate of stewed chicken and placed it on the table. Her face lit up and she looked at Mingliang, then said in a warm voice, “Chief Kong … no, you are now the town mayor … Mayor Kong, may I ask you a favor? Can you have me transferred, to serve as a cadre for the Women’s Federation? If your wife Zhu Ying doesn’t want to be a town cadre, then I’d like to serve as a cadre for the Women’s Federation. Let me oversee the jobs of all of the town’s women.”

She added, “I’ve already served as a maid in your home for half a year and have not received a single cent, so I deserve this compensation.”

She also added, “Mayor Kong, I don’t count as a member of your family, but since I wait on your family’s elders, I should at least count as half a member. So, please make me a national cadre.”

That evening, Zhu Ying packed the maid’s bags and spat in the maid’s face, then slapped her. The maid left the Kong household, and no one had any idea where she went.

3. TOWN APPEARANCE

The village’s redesignation as a town had enormous historical significance, and before the unveiling ceremony the people had to make countless preparations. All of the houses and shops on both sides of the street had to take down their original signs and replace them with new ones. For instance, if a sign read
ZHANG FAMILY LOCKSMITH,
it would have to be changed to read
EXPLOSION TOWN LOCK CITY,
and if a sign read
WANG FAMILY SEWING,
it would be changed to read
EXPLOSION TOWN SEWING WORLD.
Similarly, someone who had been selling roasted chicken from a street cart labeled
ROAST CHICKEN
would now be required by the business and tax administration to rename the cart
EXPLOSION TOWN CULINARY MANSION.
By the same logic, a shop selling flatbread would be called
EXPLOSION TOWN’S FLATBREAD KING,
and a small noodle shop would have to change its sign to
EXPLOSION’S CLASSICAL CUISINE
or
EXPLOSION TOWN’S CULINARY CAPITAL.
The store names needed to be stylish and forceful, to reflect the majesty and grandeur of Explosion’s redesignation from a village to a town.

The busiest stores were those that specialized in printing signs. Several of these moved to Explosion from the county seat and then worked day and night printing all sort of different signs.

The snow stopped falling.

The sun came out and was blindingly bright. Along the river in front of Explosion, the streets that had suddenly become prosperous were lined with trees full of green leaves and colorful flowers. It was winter, but given that the village was being changed to a town, the climate had no choice but to change as well. The cold receded
and was replaced by warmth, everything came to life, and a spring fragrance circulated. The cement roads that had been constructed two years earlier were washed clean by the melted snow, filling the air with an appealing moist odor that made people feel as though the world had changed. A few days later, the county mayor brought several groups to Explosion to announce the official inauguration of Explosion Town, and naturally they wanted to visit Explosion’s streets, its factories, and the various small businesses that were scattered around the town’s periphery. Mayor Kong had been busy preparing for the arrival of the county mayor, Hu Dajun. After everything was established, he took a group of town cadres preselected by the county and led them from one end of the town to the other, to observe the appearance of the streets and to see the progress of each family’s preparations. They saw the new buildings that had been erected, the walls of which had been given a fresh coat of red paint. The street resembled a blazing fire, as the scent of fresh paint mingled with the snowy sunlight, yielding a scene that was as beautiful as a sheet of silk. Every store had a new sign, either printed in red on a white background or printed in yellow on a green background, and in front of each door there was a couplet printed in red, together with at least four flowerpots. The shops that didn’t have fresh flowers had bought plastic ones from the city, and the street resembled a flower street.

Mingliang led the group. Everyone crowded around, and when people saw him they shouted, “Mayor Kong, Mayor Kong!” He smiled and said, “It hasn’t yet been announced.” Someone replied, “But it will be soon!” Mingliang was delighted by this, like someone dying of thirst who suddenly receives a cold drink. He saw a house that wasn’t decorated with either fresh or plastic flowers, but an old lady was inside using scissors to cut out eight red paper blossoms, each of them larger than a basket. Mingliang remarked to those accompanying
him, “This is one of the village’s famous martyrs. She doesn’t have any children. However, as of next month the town will issue her an extra five hundred yuan a month, so that she will have enough money that she won’t even be able to spend it all.”

They reached a store run by a family named He, which specialized in cooked pork entrails, and as everyone was debating between the names Explosion Cooked Meat and Explosion’s He Family Meat Stand, Mingliang told the shop owners, “You should use the name Delicacy of the Century.” They then wrote
OLD DELICACY OF THE CENTURY RESTAURANT
on their sign.

The group reached the southernmost end of the street, where there was a Healthy Amusement Park and a Satisfaction World featuring hair salons, pedicure shops, and a variety of other restaurants and shops that Zhu Ying had transferred from the county seat. The Amusement Park and Satisfaction World signs had been replaced with new ones printed with beautiful, artistic characters, and the girls standing in the doorways were all dressed modestly and neatly, and appeared quite happy. The group walked by, then crossed the street and visited a small shop. The shop specialized in designing and printing different sorts of documents, such as high school diplomas, certificates for government agencies, IDs for military cadres, and police badges for city police. The shop had steel and wooden stamps, as well as a variety of ID cards and an assortment of blank receipt booklets for people to use when getting reimbursed. After the certificates were designed and printed, they were shipped to be sold in the city, where they enjoyed robust sales; the shop received one order after another. In front of the shop there was a large sign that read
RED STAR PRINTING COMPANY
, and inside there were numerous imported printing presses and piles upon piles of revolutionary books and student notebooks. Everything was in accordance with specifications. A smell of ink surged out of the shop like the scent of summer
wheat in the mountains. They led the group on a tour, then walked out satisfied. As they were about to leave, they accidentally stepped on several seals lying in the grass, and when they leaned over to take a look, they saw that these were the big round seals belonging to the county and municipal governments.

Mingliang called for the director of the printing factory.

The factory director had previously helped Mingliang unload goods from the trains, so when he came out he addressed Mingliang familiarly as Brother Mingliang. Mingliang showed him the two seals, then hit him over the head with them. He kicked the factory director in the stomach and stalked out, his face pale with fury.

The factory director squatted on the ground in agony, as though his intestines had been ruptured. Only after Mingliang and his group disappeared down the street did the factory director finally get up and go look for another job.

1. INDUSTRY AND INDUSTRIAL WORKERS

The new town’s industries included wire factories, cable factories, cement factories, and printing shops, as well as prefab factories making cement products for use in construction. Family industries included shoe factories that used recycled car tires to make rubber soles, and factories that used recycled plastic to make buckets, bowls, and washbasins. There were also textile plants and agricultural processing plants. One agricultural processing plant was located in a compound next to the river, and mountain products such as walnuts, mushrooms, and tree fungus all went in smelling of dirt, only to emerge as highly refined swallow nest soup. At a rubber factory, rubber shoe soles collected from the city went in, and what emerged were water buckets, washbasins, and tooth-brushing cups for people in both the city and the countryside. Someone’s colorful plastic cup might be made from the rubber soles of that same person’s shoes or
sandals, while someone else’s tooth-brushing cup might be made from former toilet plungers.

There was also a newspaper story processing plant, and the factory director was Yang Baoqing, who on the dream-walking night had picked up an old conch shell. He loved to read, and on top of that enjoyed the benefits of being in a favorable position. At a time when the entire nation’s journal and periodical industry was flourishing, Yang bought subscriptions to countless newspapers and magazines, and directed his children to take scissors, glue, and colored pens, and every day cut out stories of events happening in the south, then change the reference to time and location, repaste them, and send them to newspapers in the north. They would also take stories from the north, turn them around, and send them to newspapers in the south. Alternatively, they would copy an article from a journal, add their own names to the byline, and send it to another editorial office. Those manuscripts were all published quickly, and the royalty checks came flooding in, with sacks upon sacks of checks arriving in the mail every day. The family’s strategy was to take stories from the south and send them north, and take ones from the north and send them south; to transform stories from Shanghai into stories from the heartland and send them to Xi’an and Lanzhou, and to take stories from Xinjiang and transform them into coastal stories and send them to Shanghai. Their acceptance rate was 98 percent, and they became a famous news processing plant in the new Explosion Town.

In the end, everyone in Explosion stopped farming, though no one was left idle. The various industries and factories made this new town bustle like a pot of boiling water. Every day, the sky was filled with black smoke from the factories’ smokestacks, producing a burning stench that you could smell in the air and taste in the water. But everyone in Explosion quickly grew accustomed to this odor, so
much so that when it was washed away by a rainstorm, the fresh air would leave everyone with a cold. As a result, the hospitals became extremely busy, having more sick patients than the schools had students. With this sudden increase in patients, the town needed its own pharmaceutical factories and medical packaging plants, and with this increase in packaging plants there also developed an increased need for tax collection and sanitation services. With the rise in tax collection, the town was even busier than before, and virtually every day there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of a new industry. Later, when Kong Mingliang recalled the initial period of Explosion’s growth and development, he told me:

“Those were good times, when you could open a new newspaper story processing plant with nothing more than some glue and a pair of scissors. I’m afraid that China will never see times like those again.”

2. AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY AND AGRICULTURAL WORKERS

Once, the sound of shouting and crying could be heard coming from the top of the mountain ridge. It continued for three full months, until finally someone went to the town government to report it. At that point, the town government’s new compound was still under construction and several new buildings had just appeared. The construction site was in complete chaos, the cement mixers and paving machines shook the earth, and if you didn’t shout at the top of your lungs, no one would be able to hear you. One of the town residents appeared in front of Mayor Kong and began noisily issuing directions, but Mingliang simply stared at him and asked,

“What did you say?”

The other person then shouted in his ear,

“The peasants have gone mad! The peasants in the mountains are all crying like crazy.”

“What are they crying about?”

“They are crying over the land!”

Mingliang reflected for a moment, then followed the man to the mountain ridge behind the town. When they were halfway up the mountain, they turned and the mayor noticed with surprise that buildings had suddenly sprouted up everywhere, and the streets were bustling with activity that was quite different from the kind of rustic excitement the town had enjoyed when it was a mere village. Streetlamps now lined the streets like chopsticks, and each house’s chimney spat out thick smoke like clouds on an overcast day. Everywhere, the ground had been opened up and resealed, like a patient randomly cut up by a surgeon, and things were vibrant but also covered in scars.

“But Explosion is developing so quickly!” Mingliang sighed.

“They are crying because they don’t have any land to farm,” the other man replied with a laugh.

“How many of the town’s families are living in villas?”

“They have been crying continuously for three days and three nights, and look as if they’re about to collapse.”

They hurried up the mountain. The road they followed was the same one Mingliang had taken every day back when they were unloading goods from the train. As he walked, Mingliang had a sense of warmth and couldn’t help glancing over to the other side of the road. The landscape flowed past like water, and he saw that there was an electrical line and cable factory on the hill. The workers were drinking beer in the entranceway to the factory and in the streets, eating peanuts and pork, and throwing wrappings all over the ground. Mingliang asked a passerby why they were drinking beer when they should be at work, and the man replied that the factory had just received a large order from a certain city in which all of the electrical lines and cables came from this factory in Explosion. These electrical lines were embedded within the city walls and the electrical
cables were buried underground, but within a few years they would both start to disintegrate, as the insulating rubber became degraded and the cables leaked electricity. Consequently, they would produce short circuits and electrical fires, often resulting in casualties. People from other places might use wires and cables from this factory, but after they suffered a fire they would invariably go somewhere else for their supplies. This particular city, however, once had a fire that killed over a hundred people, but even now it still bought wires and cables from only this factory in Explosion.

“But why is that?” Mingliang asked.

“Because the city gets enormous kickbacks,” the other man responded with a smile.

Mingliang then asked the other man to go notify the factory that he would give an extra 10 percent in kickbacks to all who came to make purchases after suffering a fire—if they ordered ten million yuan’s worth of goods, he would give them an extra million yuan. “I’m not at all concerned that those fuckers might not come to buy our electrical lines and power cables!” Mingliang cursed. Then he told the passerby to relay this message to the factory, while he proceeded alone to the top of the ridge. The factories and workshops lining both sides of the road swept by him like village houses. The leaves of the trees were covered in dust, and an enormous assortment of plastic bags were caught by the branches, so that whenever the wind blew the bags would inflate and make a crackling sound. The mayor looked up at these plastic bags that filled the sky and began to wonder when Explosion could be redesignated as a county. When would the county seat, in recognition of Explosion’s prosperity, be relocated from its current location forty kilometers away?

Some workers approached and waved to him. “Come have some beer!”

Mingliang shouted back, “We can drink together after Explosion becomes a county!”

By the time he reached the top of the mountain ridge, the sun had reached its zenith. On the mountain ridge were a wild chicken and a wild hare looking around, but when they saw the mayor they immediately ran away. Hu Dajun had erected a massive stele for Zhu Ying in what had been the village square, but given that the town was increasingly prosperous and visitors from out of town all wanted to be down by the river, the stele appeared solitary and lonely. Even Zhu Ying herself rarely visited. It was as if this event had never even occurred in her life. The inscription on the stele was so covered in dust that it was virtually invisible. The elders from Explosion Village—meaning all of the old peasants over sixty—wept beside the stele and said, “We don’t have any land, nor do we have anywhere to plant our crops.” They had recently entered their sixties, but appeared as young and strong as the sun at high noon. However, the town’s rising prosperity had sent them into a retirement home, and didn’t permit them to use their hoes and shovels to interact with the soil. They couldn’t get used to this life of not interacting with the soil, so they came to weep at this empty field, which was previously a plot of farmland.

Zhu Ying’s stele was like a storm wall. Previously, in the land around the stele there had been wheat in winter and corn in the autumn. Every spring, the wheat sprouts grew black, and when they ripened in the summer a fragrant odor would enter the village and circulate to the dining table of every home. But now, no one planted anything. The weeds were as tall as a person, and the wild birds and hares were going in and out, as though this were their heavenly park. Old people gathered there, weeping and wailing, shouting and hollering. On large sheets of white paper they scrawled phrases like
RETURN US OUR LAND
!
WE WANT TO LIVE AND DIE WITH OUR CROPS
! and so
forth. Some of these slogans were posted on the stele itself, while others were posted as freestanding signs in the middle of the field. The elders shouted and wept, and when they tired of shouting and weeping they ate the food they had brought with them, and then began shouting and weeping again.

The demonstration was like an uprising. People gathered for three days and three nights, and while there were initially only a handful of people, they soon grew to several dozen, and by the third day there were more than a hundred. Even peasants from Liu Gully, Zhang Peak, and other nearby villages—who had had their land confiscated for mining and road building—all came here to protest. They didn’t realize that their behavior constituted a form of revolution, and instead merely saw themselves as resisting development and post-industrialization. Their simplicity helped create this protest peasant movement, even as it also helped destroy the great peasant movement. By the third day, a dark mass of more than two hundred people had gathered, as those banners with slogans such as
WE SWEAR TO THE DEATH THAT WE’LL REMAIN WITH OUR LAND
fluttered over the mountainside like flocks of white homing pigeons tumbling down the hill. Mayor Kong stood before the crowd of sixty-year-olds and shouted emotionally,

“Go home. Aren’t you concerned that you will hurt yourselves from weeping so much?”

Everyone stopped talking and gazed at him silently.

“Go home and ask your sons and daughters—and other young people—whether they want to farm the land or make Explosion a city.”

No one said a word, and instead everyone just watched him silently.

“If you don’t leave, I’ll summon your children to come fetch you!”

No one said a word, and everyone just watched him silently.

The silence was like black ink on the faces of those elderly peasants. They had deep wrinkles, which made them appear sedate and powerful. Virtually every one of the peasants had gone gray, and when they stood in the middle of the field, they resembled random pieces of straw. No one responded to Mingliang, and no one wanted to leave the field and return to the newly constructed houses and retirement homes. They knew that Mingliang wouldn’t dare force them to return home and also wouldn’t dare summon the town’s police to drive them away. They had watched him grow up, and even now—when he encountered them individually—he would address them as Uncle and Grandpa. They continued standing there, until suddenly a yellow leaf blew over and passed in front of the mayor, as though it were a message that had been sent out from Mingliang’s brain. At this moment, Mingliang was standing on the base of his wife Zhu Ying’s stele. He gazed down imperiously at those elders who were asking for their land back, then shouted in his most forceful voice,

“Uncles and Aunts, Grandpas and Grandmas, please listen to me and return home. I will agree to one thing …” Looking down at that sea of expectant faces gazing up at him, the mayor looked as though he had just encountered a drought-stricken piece of land. He said, “In a few years, the nation, on account of a shortage of land, will implement a policy of mandatory cremations, whereby corpses will be placed in furnaces and burned to ashes. At that point, none of you will be permitted to be buried, and instead your weeping sons and daughters will push you into a large furnace, where your flesh and bones will be reduced to ashes.” Mingliang paused and looked again at that sea of dry and hard faces, which all appeared pale with fear, like ashes from freshly cremated corpses. With expressions of terror, everyone turned to everyone else as though searching for something. “How about this …” The mayor stood even taller than before and shouted even louder, “Everyone disperse and return home, now! I
promise that after the mandatory cremation policy goes into effect in a couple of years or so, those who go home now will not need to be cremated and instead can be buried, as they would have been in the past. You can all be buried in a coffin with a funeral shroud and have a traditional burial. That way, after you die, you will never have to leave the land and will instead remain with the land for eternity. On the other hand, those of you who refuse to listen to me, and continue insisting that your land be returned—you will be cremated when you die, and your ashes will be stored in a cinerary urn measuring only a few inches in diameter. The urn will be placed on a cement ledge, and you will never be reunited with the land. Whether it be before birth or after death, in this life or the next, either way you have only these two options. So you should consider carefully and decide which one you want.”