The Explosion Chronicles (33 page)

Now, the wooden stage had been carried to the center of the three basketball courts, and under the midday sun the rug sparkled as if it were on fire. When Mingyao walked up onto the stage, warm blood seemed to surge from the stage into his veins and then rush to his head. As soon as he got onstage, the thousand-odd soldiers in the audience all stood at attention and saluted him—and as they were doing so, you could hear the swooshing sound as their hands moved through the air, as though a series of lightning bolts were whizzing
by. This scene made Mingyao’s blood boil with excitement. He gazed down at the crowd, then gathered his energy to shout to them,

“Comrades!”

The thousand-odd soldiers shouted back, “Commander!”

Mingyao shouted, “Comrades, you have worked hard!”

The soldiers shouted back, “Serve the People!”

Mingyao asked, “Do you all know what happened recently?”

The soldiers shouted back, “Overturn American imperialism! Drive the Americans out of Explosion!”

Mingyao shouted to the troops, telling them that they had spent a thousand days training for this one moment. But this moment of combat ultimately consisted not of fighting the Americans directly but rather of using their own poverty to attack their opponents’ wealth, using their own weakness to attack their opponents’ strength, and using their wisdom to attack their opponents’ stupidity. In short, they proposed to use Explosion’s prestige to attack America’s arrogance and insanity. After everyone had quieted down, Mingyao proceeded to speak for half an hour, as though giving his soldiers a lecture on military strategy. Eventually, he ordered the soldiers to disband and wait for further orders while he summoned all of the cadres at the level of the company or higher to his war room and proceeded to hold another military strategy meeting. In the end, they came up with three basic strategies in response to recent developments:

Two days later, when the county mayor went into the city for a meeting, something happened that left America and the Americans
astounded. Those former US soldiers who had come to Explosion to invest in the automobile factory were all living in a European-style villa complex on the outskirts of the city. A two-hundred-meter-wide, man-made river flowed through the villa complex, and the air there was much more humid than in the city. The northern elms were blooming with southern ceiba blossoms. The pagoda tree blossoms were large and red, just like the phoenix tree blossoms that you normally find only in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. It turned out that now, in early spring, the wormwood, thatch, and dogtail plants, all of which were indigenous to the area, were blooming like a Vietnamese garden in the middle of summer. In the villa complex there were persimmon and apple trees, which had already begun to sprout mangoes and coconuts. In the center of this fruit orchard was a flower garden, and on the tenth day of the fourth lunar month, the flowers were blooming and the fruit was fragrant. But by the eleventh day of the month, that first group of Americans arrived and enjoyed the local nightlife, and when they woke up after ten o’clock the following morning, they opened their windows and saw that a two-story white canvas tent had been erected in the flower garden. In the center of the tent a rusty chimney rose into the air, and on the side facing the Americans’ villa complex there was the word
CREMATORIUM
in English, together with the corresponding Chinese characters, 火?场, and below this there were a dozen corpses. The corpses were each covered in a white sheet, and on the sheets were written, in English, the names of President Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary, their daughter Chelsea, Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate majority leader, together with the names of the commander of the EP-3 spy plane and the other American pilots. Standing at attention behind this group of corpses were all of Mingyao’s troops, dressed in full military uniform. They had solemn expressions and were standing in formation in the garden, trampling on the flowers underfoot. The Americans
didn’t know when these Chinese soldiers had arrived in the garden, and neither did they know when exactly the Chinese had built that impromptu funeral parlor with a crematorium inside. When the first American noticed this unusual scene outside his window, a young soldier from Explosion had just pulled down the US flag in front of the funeral parlor. When a second American opened his window with surprise, another of Mingyao’s soldiers lit the US flag on fire. When all of the remaining Americans rushed outside to stand in front of the mortuary, Mingyao—wearing a commander’s uniform, shiny black shoes, and a bright red leather munitions belt—came to the front of the soldiers. Facing an American who had just come running outside, he saluted them and then made a gesture, whereupon two soldiers approached carrying a corpse on a stretcher.

Several Americans stood directly in front of the crematorium with shocked expressions. As they watched, Mingyao slowly pulled back the white sheet and revealed a real corpse, in full makeup, underneath. The corpse was large and tall, and was dressed in a suit, with short hair and thick eyebrows. Its face looked exactly like Bill Clinton’s, and even its tie was the same one that Clinton liked to wear. The Americans stared in surprise. When the American standing in front of the group first saw the corpse, his arms froze and he fell back a step. He swayed from side to side and looked as though he were about to collapse, but was supported by a couple of his companions. With a hard, eerie smile, Mingyao pushed the Bill Clinton corpse aside and pulled over the Hillary corpse, followed by the Chelsea corpse. Finally, he brought over the corpse of the pilot of the US spy plane. He slowly lifted the white sheets covering each of them, as though removing an article of clothing, so that the Americans could see the made-up face of each corpse. Each of them looked exactly like an American. At this point, the cremation began. The mortuary workers turned on the electricity and opened the gas pipe leading
to the furnace, then transferred the first corpse—which was the Bill Clinton one—from the stretcher to the crematorium cart. Mingyao told the Americans to take a final look, before he slowly pushed the cart into the crematorium. The door to the crematorium was as wide as that of a warehouse door and was directly facing the Americans standing outside. Two mortuary workers dressed in white uniforms—including one who was outside Mingyao’s line of sight—pushed a button, and the door clanged open and a flame shot into the oven and immediately filled the furnace with fire. A wave of heat surged out of the crematorium, pushing back the people standing outside. After this, another mortuary worker slowly pushed the Clinton corpse into the oven, then closed the inch-thick iron door.

Above the crematorium there was a series of sunlit clouds moving across the clear sky, such that the soldiers, the Americans, and other onlookers standing there alternated between being covered by clouds and enjoying a cool breeze, on one hand, and being baked under the blazing sun and engulfed by hot air from the crematorium, on the other.

The news that twelve corpses had been cremated, including those of the US president, Bill Clinton, and the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, permeated every corner of Explosion. Immediately, the residents of the city and the surrounding rural regions all crowded around the villa complex. To prevent a disruption of the ceremony, Mingyao and the troops held hands and surrounded the crematorium. The people who had come to watch began shouting noisily, and those who couldn’t see proceeded to climb atop a rockery, fruit trees, and the roofs of the foreigners’ villas.

Someone was leading chants that included “Overturn American imperialism!” and “Kick the Americans Out of Explosion!” Initially the chants were rather chaotic, but they quickly became quite rhythmic, as though the thousands of citizens had suddenly become soldiers.
But just as these chants were reaching their peak, everyone suddenly became quiet, and the only thing that could be heard was the sound of muffled breathing. After thirty minutes, the crematorium button was pressed again. The gas nozzle closed and the flame died down. The Bill Clinton corpse had already been reduced to ashes and was ready to be removed. A soldier wearing a white gown brought over an urn made from white marble, and the lid was printed with Bill Clinton’s name in both Chinese and English, together with his official portrait. The soldier opened the urn and let the American businessmen look inside, inviting them to verify the quality of the materials and their workmanship. Then he went to the opening in the back of the furnace, where one mortuary worker was holding a wooden box while another was using a small shovel and a metal broom, designed expressly for crematoriums, to sweep up the ashes. After they finished, they brought the wooden box to the front of the crematorium and proceeded—right there in front of the Americans—to dump the ashes into the urn labeled with Bill Clinton’s name.

There was a thighbone and a vertebra that had not been completely reduced to ashes and were too large to fit into the urn. The mortuary workers looked to Mingyao, who was standing beside them, and asked, “What should we do?”

“Smash them!”

The mortuary workers therefore took the small hammers they had brought with them and began striking the two bones. Shards flew everywhere, covering the Americans’ faces and bodies. As the mortuary workers smashed the bones, they cursed, “Serves you right for bombing our embassy! Serves you right for having your plane collide with ours.” After they had finally succeeded in smashing the bones into dust, they scooped up the bone dust and deposited it in the urn.

Next, they began to burn the Hillary corpse, followed by the Chelsea corpse, and then the pilot corpse. In each case, the sequence
was the same—they would allow the Americans to view the corpse and bid farewell; then would place it in the furnace, close the door, and turn on the gas; and finally they would collect the ashes and crushed bones and place them in an urn. However, when they were burning the pilot corpse, as soon as they ignited the flame, the mortuary workers came out and told Mingyao, “We don’t have enough gas.” Mingyao replied, “Then use an electrical flame.” In this crematorium, if the gas nozzle was not working they would have no alternative but to incinerate the corpse with an electrical flame and use a crucible to reduce the bones into ashes. But for some reason, when they burned the pilot corpse, the flesh was reduced to ashes but the bones remained intact. Those bones—including hip, leg, arm, and toe bones—were removed from the oven like a pile of leftover kindling and dumped in front of the American businessmen. All of Mingyao’s troops lined up in a row and the soldiers, wearing gloves, took turns going up to the pile of bones and smashing them with a hammer, whereupon they would each say a word and then step aside so that the soldier behind could do the same. They collected skull or vertebra fragments, placed them on a brick, and then began smashing them with a hammer. As they did so they cursed angrily, saying,

“Let’s see if you dare collide with another Chinese plane!”

Another hammer strike.

“Do you want peace or a good fight? It’s your choice!”

Another hammer strike.

“The world belongs not only to America, but also to China.”

Another hammer strike.

“When it comes to war and peace, we in China love peace!”

They finally succeeded in reducing all of the pilot’s bones to ashes, which they then placed in an urn. The sun hung overhead for a long time, and as the spectators from Explosion watched this final
scene, they shouted, “Let’s smash the United States! … Let’s smash the United States!” But as the mortuary workers were placing those twelve urns to the side, the residents of Explosion suddenly grew silent, as everyone waited for the next step. In this moment of silence, the sound of China’s national anthem suddenly could be heard coming from inside the crematorium, as solemn as the morning sun rising in the east. Then, twelve soldiers, all of whom were over 1.8 meters tall, marched out of the crematorium. They stopped in front of the row of urns and stood at attention, then each took one urn and marched over to the group of Americans. At this point, the broadcast of the Chinese national anthem ended and was replaced by the US national anthem. The latter was as commonplace as the sun setting in the west, but when the Americans heard their own anthem, their expressions became very serious, as they adopted a look of curious anticipation. At this moment, the first Chinese soldier solemnly handed them the urn containing the ashes of the Clinton corpse, as though it were a bar of gold. The second soldier then handed them the urn containing the ashes of the Hillary corpse, and the other soldiers handed them the remaining urns. The Americans received the urns, with pale, expressionless looks, as though they had no idea what was happening. They stood there in shock, holding urns containing the ashes of the entire First Family, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the other US political leaders. They heard Mingyao read out a statement titled “Arrogance Will Lead to Extinction,” then inform the Americans that China wanted peace but would not tolerate being bullied, and that the people of Explosion sought greater prosperity but would not tolerate fraud and deception. He stated that the outsiders who had come to Explosion to conduct business must be fair, just, and polite to the people of Explosion, and if they weren’t, then all they would receive would be these cremated corpses and urns full of ashes.

At this point, Mingyao led his troops away.

He expected that the first thing the Americans would do, after returning to their villas with the urns containing the ashes of the First Family, would be to purchase plane tickets back to the United States. After leaving the Americans, who looked as though they had just watched a performance, Mingyao gestured, and his troops proceeded to dismantle the crematorium. He gestured again, and the troops returned to their original formation, and then left this Explosion economic development zone.