by Yan Lianke
In this way, Zhu Ying walked through the streets distributing money in amounts ranging from one hundred to several hundred yuan. Her behavior resembled that of Kong Mingyao, though the weaponry she was carrying was somewhat different. Cash was her weapon—fistfuls of hundred-yuan bills, which she distributed to the villagers. She proceeded from one end of the village to the other, giving away who knows how much money along the way. Eventually, she reached her father’s grave in the village square, and immediately knelt down and began kowtowing. She burned real bills as though they were fake funeral money and mumbled to herself. Then she proceeded back up the street distributing money, before disappearing into an alley. In the end, all of the villagers were left wondering what had just happened in Explosion, what was happening now, and what would happen in the future.
In a moment of quiet after Zhu Ying disappeared, one of the several hundred villagers who had gathered in the square cried out, “Zhu Ying has returned … Zhu Ying has returned, and has given money to everyone in Explosion!” With that, everyone began surging toward the Zhu family’s new house. It was on that day that the people of Explosion first glimpsed the possibility of a twenty-four-hour bank from which they could withdraw money whenever they wished. They discovered that although Zhu Ying wasn’t wearing new clothes when she returned to the village, in her house there was a cape made from an assortment of red, yellow, and blue bills. Moreover, that money was not simply printed on the fabric; rather, the cape was made from real hundred-yuan bills that had been pasted on. This had been done so skillfully that they looked like part of the fabric itself. In Zhu Ying’s living room hung her other clothing, including sweaters, undershirts, underwear, coats, socks, and shoes—all with real hundred-yuan bills pasted on them. Two decades later, when Explosion would be transformed from a county seat into a city, the most valuable possession of the newly established Explosion Development museum would be Zhu Ying’s money clothes.
It was because Zhu Ying had been busy having this new clothing made that she was delayed in returning to Explosion.
Eventually, the living room of the Zhu family’s three-story house would be transformed into a gallery. Men and women, young and old, including those people who previously had been on good terms with the Kong family and who regarded themselves as the enemies of the Zhus, all took the opportunity to visit the Zhu home to see the various articles of clothing—which featured cut-up hundred-yuan bills arranged into images of flowers and trees, bees and butterflies—suspended on clothes hangers and displayed along the wall of her living room, or else they were being passed around from hand to hand. Unlike the Kong family, who brought a tractor-full of gifts and distributed them to everyone in an attempt to buy votes, Zhu Ying didn’t go to anyone’s house; instead she simply waited for everyone to come to her. On that day, the road in front of her family’s house, together with the mountain ridge behind the village, was full of people talking about Zhu Ying and her money clothes, as well as the election for village chief.
People whispered to her, “It would be best if you were village chief.”
Zhu Ying waved them away and said, “You should vote for Mingliang. I’ve declared my candidacy only because the town and county mayors required that I return.”
Everyone complained, “You’re as rich as a stallion; how can you leave us to live like fat sparrows?”
“Then who would look after my business in the city and the provincial seat?” Zhu Ying asked, unwilling to sacrifice something valuable for something inferior.
Everyone was quite disappointed, but then became even more determined to elect her. Zhu Ying proceeded upstairs and downstairs, to the living room and the courtyard, pouring tea for the villagers and chatting with them. For those households that were still rather poor, she offered three or five hundred yuan to help them out. Those young women who, like her, had gone out into the cities to work—including those from Liu Gully, Zhang Peak, and other villages in the Balou mountain range—all came to Zhu Ying’s home for her to take care of them. They said, “Sister Zhu Ying, you absolutely must not become the new village chief, because if you do, what will happen to us? Would not every factory, every store, as well as the region’s largest and best amusement park—would they not have to close down within days?” Later, after the first group of observers left the Zhu household, another group entered and said the same thing. At midday, the Zhu family prepared a lot of home-cooked food, and Zhu Ying invited everyone who had come to see her money clothing to come in and eat. This continued from the afternoon into the evening, and only then did Zhu Ying take her money clothing and carefully fold it. It was then that she turned around and saw Kong Mingliang standing in the doorway, smiling coldly. He resembled a stone statue as he stood there, with the light from the setting sun shining on his face. The pomegranate trees planted in the courtyard sprouted apple blossoms, and there was a peach tree that sprouted not only pomegranate blossoms but also crab apple blossoms and camellias. Some flower blossoms fell on the bricks and tile floor, like a poem in which people were like miswritten words. Kong Mingliang looked around and, with a mocking expression, asked,
“You’ve returned?”
Zhu Ying also laughed, and replied, “These money clothes were not put on display for you.”
Mingliang’s smile evaporated. “Money is more powerful than munitions.”
Zhu Ying said, “If you aren’t going to come inside and sit down, then you should just leave.”
It was hard to tell whether they were quarreling or merely chatting. When they parted, Mingliang headed toward the entrance to the courtyard and Zhu Ying accompanied him—both to walk him out and also in order to close the outer gate and lock out the entire day’s tumult. Just as Zhu Ying was about to close the gate, however, he turned around and said,
“You whore, do you still want to marry me?”
After a shocked pause, Zhu Ying said quietly, “I may be a whore, but tomorrow I’ll be the new village chief. You can then come kneel down and beg me.”
“Do you really think the villagers are going to pick you?”
“They aren’t going to vote for me, they’re going to vote for money. Right now, I’ve got a lot of money.”
Kong Mingliang didn’t say anything. His heart was pounding and he bowed his head; then he suddenly rushed back into the courtyard. Zhu Ying tried to keep him out, but he continued to force his way in. They struggled, until finally Mingliang succeeded in pushing Zhu Ying aside. By this point dusk had fallen, but the courtyard seemed to be full of the scent of spring combined with the warmth of summer. The air was full of birds chirping, as a flock of sparrows alighted on the pomegranate tree and the peach tree in the courtyard. The two of them stared at each other coldly for a long time.
“You should leave,” Zhu Ying said. “If you continue standing here, soon you’ll have to beg me.”
Kong Mingliang stared at her intently. “You should withdraw from the election—and leave the position of village chief for me!”
Zhu Ying laughed. “Are you begging me?”
After a pause, Mingliang laughed as well. “If you don’t withdraw, then after I’m elected I’ll have you killed!”
Zhu Ying, still laughing, asked, “When you were sleepwalking that night, apart from running into me, what else did you find?”
Mingliang didn’t reply, and instead he just stood there until eventually he turned and headed back out. He walked toward the village board building. The entire day, he had been in the village board building, watching the gate to Zhu Ying’s home, but now, as he was preparing to head back there, he heard Zhu Ying shout behind him, “You once again missed your chance to ask for my hand in marriage… . You have now twice missed your chance, and you will regret it to the point that you will want to bash your brains out against the wall.”
After that, he heard the sound of Zhu Ying slamming her gate.
II.
That night, footsteps echoed through Explosion like hailstones. Some people went to the Kong house
hold, others went to the Zhu household, and still others went back and forth between the two. These would be village chief elections with national consequences and would be the topic of a major report that the county mayor would give to the provincial city, before he was promoted to city mayor. The residents of Explosion didn’t know how many reports the county mayor had filed and how many preparations he had made, all so that he could take this election as a gift up to the city and offer it to the entire province.
So they prepared to elect their new village chief.
At ten in the morning on the day of the election, the residents of Liu Gully and Zhang Peak, both of which were under Explosion’s jurisdiction, were summoned to the riverbank in front of the village. There, they used an assortment of house doors to construct a stage, and on the stage they placed a table. The table was covered by a new, red tablecloth, and the stage was draped with a large banner, on which was written EXPLOSION VILLAGE’S FIRST DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS. In this way, the proceedings were granted a degree of solemnity. There were reporters and police cars, as well as more than a dozen spectators from the county and the town. The officials placed a ballot box in the center of the stage and then issued each villager (or citizen) over the age of eighteen a ballot printed with the names Zhu Ying and Kong Mingliang, and asked the voters to make a check mark after the name of their preferred candidate. Then, each villager would go up onstage and insert the ballot through the slot in the ballot box. The result would be democracy, and their responsibilities would be over. After this, they would only need to wait for the ballots to be counted and tabulated, and then it would be announced how many votes each candidate received.
The candidate with the most votes would thereby be elected village chief.
There was nothing particularly extraordinary about any of it. Explosion had already experienced this sort of thing many times before. The only difference was that previously the voters had been electing battalion chiefs, but now the battalion had been replaced by the village and everyone was now electing a village chief. Previously, they would simply drop a pea into the bowl of the candidate they wanted to elect, but now they had to use an anonymous ballot box. In the past, the villagers organized the elections themselves, but now it was the police and the town and county mayors who had come to organize and observe the elections.
The county and town mayors arrived in the village at the crack of dawn. In order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, they didn’t go to the house of either of the candidates for breakfast, and instead they brought their own soy milk and fried dough sticks, and ate in their cars. After breakfast, the villagers (citizens) started heading toward the meeting site. They arrived one group after another, each carrying a small stool as though they were going to the theater. By ten o’clock, thousands of people had gathered along the riverbank, where a loudspeaker announced that the election was about to begin. The former county mayor served as election mobilizer and said a variety of things about the earth-shattering nature of democracy and elections. The town mayor then announced the general rules of the election, and also what was improper and illegal. Next, the candidates gave their speeches. Kong Mingliang stood onstage and read aloud the text that his brother Mingguang had written for him a couple of weeks earlier, though it wasn’t clear whether the audience was listening or not. There was a droning sound, as though there were thousands of flies buzzing around the meeting site; the entire area came to resemble a cesspool in the middle of summer—becoming a performance stage for the flies. Mingliang glanced down at the audience in surprise and saw that in front of him there was a mother holding her child while he relieved himself. The mother was using that stiff, yellow ballot as toilet paper, and Mingliang couldn’t resist going down and slapping her. While the county mayor was speaking, the audience had been completely silent, but once the town mayor began speaking, the audience had started mumbling, though it was impossible to make out what they were saying.
By the time the sound reached Kong Mingliang, it was a dull roar.
He had taken out a sheet of draft paper and looked at the county and town mayors. He saw that the county mayor was being interviewed by a reporter, so Mingliang had gone up to the town mayor and whispered, “You must tell the police to come maintain order!” To his surprise, the mayor had whispered back, “Read it now. Otherwise you’ll miss your chance.” Then Mingliang had cleared his throat and had begun reading his speech out loud. His dream, he explained, was for the drawers of every family to remain full of cash year-round. Within a few years he wanted Explosion to become a town, and a few years afterward he hoped it would become a city. After reading his speech, amid the sound of fighting from the ground, he slipped away like a cloud and returned to his seat next to the town mayor, and just as he was about to complain, the mayor did so first, saying,
“Your speech was too long.”
He glared back in consternation.
Looking at Mayor Hu’s face, Mingliang noticed that his eyes never once left Zhu Ying, who was sitting beside him. He wanted to curse the mayor, calling him a pig and a whoremonger. Suddenly, however, Mingliang felt the ground beneath his feet begin to tremble, to the point that he couldn’t even keep his balance. He discovered that Zhu Ying’s attractiveness and appeal were all concentrated in the area around her eyes. Her red sweater, straight-legged pants, low-heeled leather shoes, and flesh-colored socks, together with the scarf she kept either wrapped around her neck or draped over her chest and shoulders, were very tasteful and attractive. Although these were from the city, and although she had acquired her fashion sense there, that seductive expression and that glow around her eyes, which produced a laser beam that could stop men in their tracks—these were something that even city women didn’t possess. The town mayor stared at that milky-white and bright red area between her eyebrows, as though looking at a virgin’s bare genitals. At that moment, Mingliang had a sensation that almost knocked him off his feet. A shudder ran down through his heels. He abruptly sat down and heard someone announce that it was Zhu Ying’s turn to go onstage and read her nomination speech. He saw her walk past the town mayor like a breeze. She gazed at the mayor and he looked back at her. For an instant their eyes met, whereupon she walked to the front of the stage, as though floating through the air.
At that point, Kong Mingliang’s only thought was, This is it—I lie in defeat between the gazes of this whore and the mayor. In order to forestall the defeat that had not yet come to pass, he forced himself to calm down and see whether or not the audience would be louder during Zhu Ying’s speech than it had been during his. Even now, his palms were still sweaty from hearing the audience’s roar as he was trying to read his speech. He stared at Zhu Ying as he waited for her to begin, as though waiting for a thunderstorm to arrive. However, she simply stood there without opening her mouth. There was a long pause, and then another, until finally Zhu Ying used silence to quiet the audience. After waiting until everyone’s gaze was fixed on her to begin speaking, she suddenly pulled a thick wad of bills out of her pocket and tossed them down to the audience. Those bills fluttered through the air like so many flowers or snowflakes, and before the audience had a chance to recover, Zhu Ying made a promise:
“If I’m elected village chief … I will make sure that every family has more money than it can spend—so much that it will be able to toss money out the door, like this… .”
And that was it.
Her entire speech—from her initial act of tossing the money into the air until her final word—lasted less than twenty seconds. As she was waiting for the audience to rush forward to retrieve the money, she returned to her seat. Before Kong Mingliang was able to recover his senses, everyone onstage and in the audience erupted into thunderous applause, which seemed to last for a full day and night. Eventually, the loudspeaker announced that it was time for all citizens, under the direction of their village organization chief, to come up onstage to cast their ballots.
This election was like a theatrical performance. Everythi
ng Kong Mingliang had done dissipated like smoke under the gaze of the county mayor, the town mayor, and the police. Mingliang got up from his seat in the middle of the stage and sat down in a corner, then watched as Zhu Ying, the town mayor, and the county mayor chatted and laughed as they proceeded to a table beneath a tree in back of the stage. Zhu Ying was acting as though she had already been elected and was accompanying them as though accompanying familiar guests.
A whore and her pimps! Mingliang cursed them to himself, as a feeling of lonely hatred rose up from his heart. He truly wanted to knock over the ballot boxes and the table. Eventually, however, he saw his father and eldest brother, as well as his fourth brother, who had returned from his high school in the county seat for the express purpose of voting for him, and Mingliang decided that things were not yet over and that the villagers would not necessarily elect Zhu Ying.
She was, after all, a whore.
And who didn’t know what kind of business she had engaged in while in the city?
It was decided that during the period between when the ballots were cast and when they were counted, the local leaders and the candidates would leave the ballot box area and wait at the tea table behind the stage. It turned out, however, that Kong Mingliang was not willing to leave, and he didn’t want to wait with the others. As Zhu Ying led the men away as if she were an enormous golden butterfly, Mingliang thought he should hate her with the sort of disgust one feels when one sees a swarm of flies circling around a pile of dung. But for some reason, even as Mingliang was calling Zhu Ying a whore, he couldn’t find it in his heart to hate her. He simply couldn’t forget that entrancing expression in her brows. He therefore smoked a cigarette—having taken up smoking when he began preparing for the election—and watched from a distance as everyone came up onstage in an orderly fashion to vote, including the people … villagers … citizens. He saw a magpie that looked as though it was about to alight on a tree next to him, but just as it was about to land, it flew away. In the end, it landed on a tree next to Zhu Ying, then sang happily for a while before flying away again. The county and town mayors pointed at the magpie and spoke with Zhu Ying for a long time, as the sound of their laughter came over in waves, piercing Kong Mingliang’s heart. He wondered whether they had slept together or had visited Zhu Ying’s brothel. Did they have the girls at the brothel bathe them, wash their backs, massage their feet, and then sleep with them? Kong Mingliang was certain they had. He thought that only this could explain why they were so friendly toward her and cold toward him. Otherwise, how could they all be over there chatting and laughing without thinking of inviting him (the other candidate) to join them?