The Explosion Chronicles (24 page)

Mingliang was very busy and didn’t even have time to return home for his father’s burial, and Zhu Ying also left before the
burial. Mingguang and Qinfang got divorced, and there was an enormous distance separating the two of them, though Minghui didn’t really know why this was. Minghui wanted to kneel down in front of his father’s grave on the last day of the third seven-day mourning period and tell his father these things. Neither Mingguang nor Mingliang came to pay his respects, and Mingyao took a large wad of cash back to his military regiment. While Minghui thought that he would have a chance to see Mingguang, Mingliang, and Zhu Ying at his father’s grave, none of them came. Minghui realized that after their father’s death, the Kong family would topple like a tree or a building. Many years earlier, when the family had been so poor that they couldn’t even afford salt to cook their rice, they remained completely upright. Now, Mingliang was about to be become county mayor and Mingguang was apparently about to be promoted to school principal. Originally Mingguang had aspired merely to become a model teacher, but with a single telephone call Mingliang had arranged for Mingguang to be not only a model teacher but also school principal. As for Mingyao, he also had gone crazy in pursuit of money. But as a result, the family collapsed, to the point that no one came to pay respects and burn incense at the end of the third seven-day mourning period. As Minghui sat under the setting sun in an open area several dozen meters from his father’s new grave, he suddenly heard the sound of ripping cloth. The summer warmth and heat were circulating and piling up around him. Several ladybugs climbed on a blade of grass in front of him, but the black dots on their bodies had disappeared and been replaced by red dots, as though several drops of blood had fallen on the grass. Minghui looked up from those blood-like dots and shouted into the mountain ridge, “Aren’t you coming? Aren’t you coming?” When the dog heard
Minghui’s voice, it began walking slowly toward the grass in the middle of the grave.

Minghui no longer had any hope that his brothers and sister-in-law would join him at the grave. When he remembered what Eldest Brother and Second Brother had said after their father’s death, his heart lurched with pain. Mingguang had said, “Father is a pig. How else could he have died while lying on a woman?” Mingliang, meanwhile, had looked over at their father lying in his coffin, then kicked the coffin and said, “Let’s cremate you. That way, we can be counted as supporting the county mayor’s directive on cremations.” Mingguang had said, “Cremation is good. If we burn the corpse, my heart will also be purified.”

The family transported the father’s body from Explosion to the county seat’s new crematorium. In order to celebrate the arrival of the first corpse to be cremated voluntarily, the crematorium was decorated with fresh flowers and banners, and there was frenetic drumming as though it were a holiday. Afterward, they pushed their father’s body into the oven, and then deposited the ashes in an urn, which they placed inside a coffin. Mingliang took the lead in writing an article about his father’s cremation and printed it in a prominent location in the county, city, and provincial newspapers. The television stations repeatedly broadcast this news, as excitedly as though they were frying beans in a pot. Newspapers even printed the father’s photograph, saying that before his death he managed to rescue someone who had come to Explosion to work, while after his death he became the first person to offer himself on behalf of the new directive encouraging cremations.

Seeing those newspaper articles and photographs, Mingliang laughed and tossed the newspaper aside. Mingguang looked it over as well, then spat on it—but from the spittle on the newspaper a seed formed and grew into a red apricot tree full of mangoes and pomegranates.

An icy breeze blew in from somewhere, and the ladybugs that had been crawling in front of Minghui turned into dragonflies and flew away. It looked as though it were about to rain. Minghui gazed at the setting sun, which was obscured by clouds, and then at his father’s portrait in the middle of the funeral wreath. The portrait was being licked by that dog—so that after the father’s corpse had been cremated and his face had been reduced to ashes, the portrait was moistened by the dog’s licking, as though the pain of being cremated was being washed away from his face and body. Finally, Minghui walked over toward his father’s grave, where he kowtowed three times and heard his father say,

“Go home. It is about to rain.”

In the rain, Minghui left the grave and slowly made his way home.

1. ASSESSMENT

I.

When Mingliang found Zhu Ying in her house, he noticed that the former globe-trotter now resembled a peasant who had never left the confines of her own house. Her courtyard and the table in her entranceway were filled with her father’s funereal portraits and tributes. In front of every portrait, there were three incense sticks, each as thick as a man’s arm; and on either side there were a pair of red couplets. The upper couplet read, “It’s not that there isn’t karma, it just isn’t time yet,” while the lower one read, “When the time comes, karma will kick in.” Inside, the room was full of smoke, and there was quiet music playing, as if a summer stream and evening breeze were circulating throughout the Zhu household. From the day of Kong Dongde’s death, Zhu Ying had closed her
outer gates. She would occasionally go to this memorial table to replace the incense sticks in front of her father’s portrait, and would pour three glasses of wine and kowtow as she offered the wine to the portrait, saying, “Your daughter has already done everything that needed to be done. You can therefore rest in peace.” She would then proceed to the next portrait, replace the incense sticks, pour some wine and sprinkle it in front of the portrait, and say, “Father, that bastard Kong Dongde is dead, and everyone in the village—and even the entire town—knows he died while lying on a woman. They all spat at him behind his back, to the point that his entire body is now soaked in spittle.”

For seven days, Zhu Ying almost didn’t have a chance to close her eyes. The outer gates to her house remained tightly shut, and no one in the entire town knew where she was, or that she was in fact at home doing these things. It was not until the evening of the seventh day, after Kong Dongde’s ashes had been buried, that Zhu Ying—who was dozing off in a chair in her courtyard—suddenly opened her eyes and saw Kong Mingliang standing in front of her. He had a disdainful and mocking expression, as though he were watching a child at play.

She glanced at the front gate, which remained tightly shut, and asked, “How did you get in?”

Kong Mingliang laughed coldly and said, “I hope you’re satisfied now.”

“Has the town been redesignated as a county?”

“I’ve come to tell you that in a few days you and I will be divorced.” Mingliang sat down in front of her and glanced at the funeral portraits and tributes, then waved away the incense smoke. He laughed and continued, “It was on account of the Kong family that your father drowned in spittle, and it was on account of your
Zhu family that my father was completely covered in spittle after his death. In this way, our fates have now been settled, and there is nothing left for us to discuss.”

After he said this, dusk fell. The entire courtyard and house were filled with a sorrowful evening light. There were mosquitoes flying around, but because of the dense smoke they didn’t land on anyone, and the sound of their buzzing filled the air. The area next door to where the Explosion Village committee had been located had now been bought up by a vegetable oil company. More specifically, the company extracted oil from sesame and peanuts, then converted it into rubber and water to make leather belts, and into paste to make rubber soles. One
jin
of sesame seeds could yield three
jin
of oil, while one
jin
of peanuts could yield three and a half
jin
of oil. Business was good, and soon the two-story building was expanded to three stories. All four sides of the building were encased in brown glass, and when the setting sun shone on the building it looked like a flaming torch. Beneath that torch, Zhu Ying’s house remained brightly illuminated without her even needing to turn on any lamps. Under that light, she saw that Mingliang was holding a set of blueprints for Explosion County. She leaned toward him and said very gently,

“I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. All that remains is to serve as your wife and help you succeed in becoming county mayor.”

Then she asked, “Have you stopped to consider how you’ll be promoted to county mayor if you divorce me?”

She laughed and added, “No man can stay away from Otherworldly. Without my Otherwordly Delights, Explosion would never be upgraded to a county, and you could forget about being promoted to county mayor.”

Then night fell, and it became so dark that it seemed as though the entire world had disappeared. Kong Mingliang also disappeared like a shadow.

II.

By the evening of the final day of the third seven-day cycle following Kong Dongde’s death, Zhu Ying finally emerged from her house. She was pale and gaunt, and suddenly had two streaks of gray in her hair. By this point she was thirtysomething but looked as though she were already in her forties. Her face’s former radiance had almost completely disappeared. In town, people who knew her took a few steps back in surprise when they saw her. They stood there by the side of the road, with their mouths wide open but unable to say a word. She looked at one person and smiled, and only then did he nod back at her. She asked, “Have you eaten?” or “Has your business taken off?” But the other person merely muttered, “Yeah, yeah,” and immediately dashed off to do something else.

She shouted in surprise, “Don’t you recognize me?”

The other person froze and replied with a laugh, “You do look familiar, but I can’t quite place you.”

She shouted, “I’m the mayor’s wife, and the owner of Otherworldly Delights. Don’t you know me?”

The other person immediately wiped away his smile and scurried away. With this, Zhu Ying realized that the people of Explosion didn’t even recognize her. At first she was confused, but then she rushed along the bustling street. She half-walked and half-ran, and from a distance she could see that Otherworldly Delights was empty and peaceful, and she saw that the light-box sign in front of the entrance had disappeared. On the door, there was an enormous sheet of white paper with a giant “X” written on it. The ground was covered with shattered glass, rusted barbed wire, and discarded glue bottles that had been used when the door was sealed shut. She ran to the sealed door and stood there, her face suddenly covered in sweat. A car drove up behind her, and some people buying and selling goods
in the market darted into and out of her line of sight. Water, used by several restaurants to wash their vegetables and rinse their rice, flowed out of a drain at the base of the wall across the street from Otherworldly Delights, as it had in the past. The sun was already well into the western sky and the people who had come into town for the market began packing their things to head home again. After standing before the front door for a while, Zhu Ying proceeded around to the back door, where she saw that the old doorkeeper was in the process of moving all of the courtyard’s tables and chairs and placing them in a corner next to the wall.

“What’s wrong? What happened to Otherworldly Delights?” she asked. When the doorkeeper heard her, he spun around and the two wooden chairs he was holding fell to the ground.

“Are you Zhu Ying? You’ve returned!”

Exhausted, the old man took a couple of steps forward and stood in front of her. In a voice as hoarse as tree bark, he told her that three days earlier the mayor had personally brought some people over, who then proceeded to demolish Otherworldly Delights’ business. They beat the girls who worked there and drove them away, and then the mayor had stood on the second floor where his father had died and announced,

“Father, I’ve destroyed Otherwordly Delights. From this point on, Zhu Ying is no longer the wife of the town or county mayor. Instead, I, Kong Mingliang, hereby express my filial devotion to you.” The old man reported that after Mingliang finished making this announcement, he proceeded to spit several times in the direction of the selection stage and repeatedly kicked the row of couches. He ordered that those couches, where countless customers had sat, be taken away, to be either dismantled or burned. With this, the mayor angrily stalked away. The old doorman followed behind Zhu Ying as he was recounting all of this. They walked one behind the other,
and after the old man finished his report he ran to catch up with Zhu Ying and asked,

“Is it true that the mayor divorced you?

“… Look at how after you spoke of getting divorced you became so thin that we almost don’t recognize you. Are you really the same Zhu Ying?

“… If you haven’t already gotten divorced, then you definitely shouldn’t get divorced now,” the old man urged her. “He’ll be promoted to county mayor in a few days, and as long as you don’t get divorced, you will still officially be his wife, meaning that you will be one of the most powerful people in the county.” The old man proceeded from the first to the second floor, where sunlight was streaming in through the ripped curtain. He rested for a moment in the hallway, in the stairwell, and in the door that kept opening and closing. In just a few days, countless weeds had sprouted on the floor of this previously bustling building. Cobwebs in the corner of the room happily stretched over an area the size of a tatami mat, while in the washrooms that the girls and their clients had used there were now tiny fish and shrimp in the porcelain sinks and everywhere else where there was standing water. Meanwhile, the places where there had been no standing water were now overgrown with weeds, since everything was so humid and fertile. There were even bonsai plants in some of the toilet bowls, and their leaves and branches had grown so fast that they almost blocked the light coming in through the windows. A cricket crawled onto her foot, chirping loudly, and then started to crawl up her pants leg, whereupon she kicked it away. In one luxurious guest room there was an enormous, round water bed, which had been warm in winter and cool in summer, and girls and their rich clients would lie on the bed, feeling as though they were sleeping on a cloud. Although there was no longer anyone around to sleep on the water bed, it was still plugged in and the water was
completely frozen, so that now it was like a huge black ice cube sitting in the middle of the room. When people approached the doorway they would feel a bitterly cold breeze. Because it was so cold, even the water faucets had frozen, and the liquid soap and shampoo in the bathroom had also frozen solid. Zhu Ying stood there trembling from head to toe. The old man went inside and struck the frozen water bed with a brick of frozen soap, as though he were striking one stone with another.

When Zhu Ying reached the stage on the second floor, she saw that the wooden stage had been completely destroyed. The curtains had been ripped down. Behind the stage, the dress racks the girls used when they were changing were strewn around, like a grove of trees that had been chopped down. The wardrobes lined up against the wall like people lined up in a bathhouse were empty, and the girls’ clothes, dresses, bras, and underwear were strewn across the floor. Needless to say, as the girls were up onstage performing naked, the town mayor—who was about to be promoted to county mayor—had rushed in with the police, and the girls and their clients must have been as startled as a flock of sheep suddenly encountering a pack of wolves. At first they must have stared in shock, and then they must have run away, leaving their purses scattered across the floor, like pumpkins scattered across the stage. Their makeup kits had fallen out of their purses, and from each of them countless roses were blooming. Unfortunately, because the roses hadn’t had any water or sunlight, the petals had fallen off and begun to rot. Zhu Ying smelled the stench of rotting grass and flower petals. She stood in front of the mess onstage and noticed a condom peeking out of one of the purses. Inside the condom several tadpoles had grown, but they had died from lack of water and their shriveled bodies were lying in the opening of the condom, like so many beans. When Zhu Ying saw all that death her eyes filled with tears, but before the tears dropped she
quickly wiped her face with her hand. Then she suddenly shouted in the direction of the stage,

“I, Manager Zhu of Otherwordly Delights, am still the mayor’s wife!

“… I want all of you to remember that I, Manager Zhu of Otherwordly Delights, am still the mayor’s wife!”

After shouting this a couple of times at the top of her lungs, she turned around on the stage and screamed even more loudly in the direction of where customers used to sit when making their selections. “When Explosion becomes a county and Kong Mingliang is appointed the new county mayor, he mustn’t dream of discarding me. Even after he is promoted to city mayor or emperor, he will still be my husband, and no one should even think of trying to take him from me… .”

After screaming crazily from the stage, Zhu Ying turned again and began yelling in the direction of the streets of Explosion. She shouted in the direction of Explosion’s town hall to the south, and in the direction of the factories and coal mines on the outskirts of town. Eventually, her voice grew hoarser, as her throat and lips were ripped apart by her screams, and blood started coming from her mouth.

Just as the day’s final rays of light were fading, Zhu Ying charged into the town hall’s meeting room. The room was located on the easternmost side of the eighteenth floor, and if you opened a window you could see a vast provincial-level metropolis like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, while inside there were the desks of the county mayor, the city mayor, and the provincial governor. On that day, just as the town mayor was in the meeting room reviewing the county government’s directive to transform the town into a county, Zhu Ying suddenly burst in. When this building was first completed, she had come several times to the town mayor’s office, and they had even had sex on his desk and his couch. This,
however, was the first time she had entered this eighteenth-floor meeting hall. Standing in the doorway, she gazed coldly at this hall that was as big as a family’s courtyard. She saw that in the center of the room was a table as large as three houses, on which there was an enormous city map depicting all of the buildings, streets, parks, and squares. She shifted her gaze to her husband, Mayor Kong, and noticed that he appeared to have grown taller and more portly. He was wearing a suit and dress shirt, just like the county mayor and the city mayor. Had it not been for his distinctively taut face and the mole in the corner of his mouth, she almost wouldn’t have recognized him. Fortunately, when he turned toward her, the mole at the corner of his mouth moved, allowing Zhu Ying to see that he was indeed her husband—and the town mayor who had not yet been promoted to county mayor. She stared at him for a moment, then grabbed a chair from the other side of the table and took it over to the window. Grasping the window frame with both hands, she looked out, then turned back, and when she saw her husband staring at her in astonishment, she said,