by Yan Lianke
Under the family’s expectant gaze, Zhu Ying pulled out a letter from the bottom of her bag of gifts. As everyone watched her with a smile, she returned to the table, opened the letter, and produced blueprints for two new mansions—one for a Chinesestyle courtyard compound and the other for the kind of expensive villa you might find in the city. She asked her future father-in-law to pick one of them, saying that the following month she would begin construction on whichever one he preferred. She exclaimed that it was humiliating for her father-in-law to have to live in such a dilapidated adobe house, and that he should instead live in a large Western-style mansion. She would install heat and air-conditioning in the new house, so that it wouldn’t be cold in the winter or hot in the summer, and this way she hoped to grant her father-in-law everything that he previously lacked.
“Father, please pick one of the houses, and I’ll have it built for you this year,” Zhu Ying said loudly, then handed the blueprints to him.
Everyone’s gaze was riveted on Kong Dongde. He was in his sixties, with a thin but sturdy frame, and although his hair was beginning to turn gray, his face was increasingly bright. He looked at the blueprints Zhu Ying handed him, with a vigilant and depressed expression, as tears began to flow from his eyes as though trickling out from behind a dammed-up river. He looked at the blueprints but didn’t take them. Then he looked at his two sons and their wives sitting around the table, and saw that everyone was watching him expectantly. When Mingliang caught his eye, he subtly gave his father a look indicating which blueprint he should pick. Kong Dongde turned away from the table and took the two blueprints Zhu Ying was holding. With a smile, he said, “Please let me think about it before deciding.” Then he stared at the blueprints and saw that the one for the courtyard compound included a living room with a row of furniture, and next to the wall there was a kitchen cabinet that looked just like a rectangular coffin. He said, “This looks like a large pantry but also resembles a coffin.” The pleased look vanished from his face. He quickly turned to the blueprint for the villa and saw that in the living room there was one item that resembled a piece of furniture but was nevertheless clearly a coffin. Kong Dongde looked at Zhu Ying in astonishment and saw that she was not looking in that direction but rather was saying something to her sister-in-law. He immediately realized what was going on—she had hidden a coffin in each of the blueprints she gave him. He slowly accepted the blueprints, with a hard look on his face. Then he cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention and he pulled a red envelope the size of a regular letter out of his pocket. On the envelope were written the words “Good Fortune for a Hundred Years.” He stared at these words for a moment and read them aloud. Then, as everyone was watching, he walked toward Zhu Ying.
Everyone smiled and applauded as he read those words aloud again. Zhu Ying’s look of concern vanished and was replaced with a peaceful expression. But when Zhu Ying received the red envelope and was about to open it in front of the family, Kong Dongde suddenly picked up his chopsticks and said, “Let’s eat first—there isn’t very much money, so you can open the envelope after you return home.” He smiled again. Zhu Ying smiled as well and put the red envelope in her pocket.
They all enjoyed the engagement banquet and, as they helped one another to more food, the family’s happiness spread to the entire table and gathered inside the house. The eldest son, Kong Mingguang, kept looking over at his new sister-in-law Zhu Ying’s face, then back at his own wife’s, and would crack a stupid joke to cover up his actions. Zhu Ying noticed what he was doing but feigned ignorance, and instead periodically peeked at Mingliang’s face, and then at her father-in-law, Kong Dongde. She detected something in their expressions and noticed that as Kong Mingliang ate his food, his gaze remained fixed on the pocket in which she had placed the red envelope. As everyone else was still eating, she suddenly excused herself, saying that she was going to the kitchen to get some more soup.
In the kitchen, she opened the red envelope Kong Dongde had given her. Inside, she found that there was no money but rather only a white sheet of paper that read: “You whore, what are you trying to do to the Kong family?”
She stared at these words for a long time, until she was finally able to master the cloud of emotions that covered her face. Once she recovered her composure, she refolded the sheet of paper and put it back in the envelope, then ladled out a bowl of egg-drop soup. When she walked out of the kitchen, she ran into Kong Mingliang, who was heading into the kitchen. He knew she had gone inside to open the red envelope. Whenever a woman marries in Explosion, she is always eager to know how much money will be in her red envelope. So, when Zhu Ying took such a long time to emerge from the kitchen, Mingliang decided to look for her.
“How much was there?” Mingliang asked. “As long as you have me, you’ll have everything you need. Don’t worry about how much my father gives you.”
Zhu Ying smiled and said, “It’s a bankbook, which I’ll never be able to spend down for as long as I live.”
When the two of them went back into the room, Zhu Ying and her father-in-law exchanged a meaningful glance, then each of them immediately turned away. At that point, Zhu Ying began acting as though she were one of the Kong family’s daughters-in-law and proceeded to pour a bowl of soup for everyone at the table, then placed it in front of each person. When she came to give Kong Dongde his bowl, she took the red envelope out of her pocket, waved it around, then laughed loudly. “I just looked at this. It’s a bankbook, which I’ll never be able to spend down as long as I live.” Kong Mingguang’s wife turned pale. When she entered the Kong household, she received not a bankbook but rather just an envelope containing two hundred yuan. As Dongde’s wife was trying to grab that red envelope to see for herself, she accidentally knocked over a bowl of soup. The bowl broke into three pieces, and the egg-drop soup spilled all over the floor.
Everyone stared in shock, and only Zhu Ying reacted to the broken bowl with a bright smile on her face, as though it were a red curtain onstage.
3. LIVING ROOM
The Kong household quickly replaced their thatched-roof house with a tile-roofed one.
The day of the wedding, the entire village went crazy.
The village chief and Zhu Ying, who was the village’s richest resident, were going to get married. At the time of the election for village chief, the two families were clearly still enemies, but now they were joining into a single family. Some people said that the town mayor had served as a matchmaker. Whatever the case may be, this wedding was a momentous event for Explosion. Both the town and the county mayors came to attend, and they each brought astonishing gifts. There wasn’t anyone in Explosion, including the residents of Liu Gully and Zhang Peak, who didn’t send a wedding gift. In the entrance to the village there were two tables for depositing gifts, and next to the enormous stele that had been erected in Zhu Ying’s honor there were two accountants recording the name of everyone bringing a gift, and the type of gift or amount of money—and the accountants wrote so much that their wrists became swollen. So many people gave bedding and blankets that the gifts wouldn’t even fit in the Kong family’s two granaries. Every girl who had gone out with Zhu Ying to engage in romantic work in the city rushed back and gave her so many rings and necklaces that she needed a large bamboo basket to hold them. Throughout the whole day, these seductive women wandered through the streets and alleys of Explosion. Their perfume drove the men of Explosion mad with desire and attracted all of the sparrows in the world to fly overhead. To prepare the banquet for everyone who had come to offer gifts, the Kong household built countless stoves along the village streets. Everywhere that they could set up tables, they combined the Balou region’s traditional square tables with round tables they had borrowed from hotels in the township seat several dozen li away. The banquet began on the morning of the sixth day of the month and continued uninterrupted for three full days. The cooks used two large barrels of MSG just to prepare the vegetables. The wine and cigarettes were brought over
in a large truck from the county seat, and after the owners of those stores sold out their entire stock of cigarettes and wine, they squatted in front of their shops and regretted they didn’t have more goods in stock. Finally, at dusk on the third day, everyone began to drunkenly head home, as a modicum of peace and quiet was finally restored to the streets of Explosion.
After three days of festivities, the horses and oxen that had been frightened away by the tumult slowly made their way back to the village.
The startled chickens, ducks, and geese also returned from wherever they had gone. They could be seen walking up and down the streets, as the chickens started laying goose eggs and the geese started laying duck eggs.
Dusk arrived in the village, and brought the peace and quiet the village had previously enjoyed. The men who planned to eavesdrop outside the bridal chamber had already hidden in the courtyard or leaned their ladders against the Kong family courtyard wall. In Balou, it was considered a veritable disaster for a wedding not to have any onlookers roughhouse the newlyweds and eavesdrop on the bridal chamber: that would be taken as evidence of the family’s isolation and reclusion. Only if the eavesdroppers were able to listen from dusk till dawn was the event thereby considered auspicious. Everyone therefore began making preparations early, with some people hiding under the chopping board in the Kong family kitchen, others hiding at the base of the courtyard wall, and others climbing a tree and hiding amid the leaves. There were the young men who had helped Mingliang unload goods from passing trains, and the young women who had gone with Zhu Ying to the south or to the country seat—all of them were now happily chatting as they walked into and out of the bridal chamber. They kept pushing Mingliang on top of Zhu Ying, and pushing Zhu Ying into Mingliang’s arms, and then would burst out laughing. In this way, they turned the Kong family’s enormous courtyard upside down.
After Mingliang and Zhu Ying had kowtowed first to the heavens and earth, and next to the Kong father and mother, Mingliang’s father, Kong Dongde, disappeared from the festivities and wasn’t seen again by the crowds of visitors.
Kong Mingliang’s elder brother, Mingguang, and his wife, Cai Qinfang, had spent all day on the wedding, and that evening when they retired to their own bedroom the visitors who had come to eavesdrop on the bridal chamber also heard them making a tumult. Then the visitors heard someone’s face being slapped, and the bedroom became as silent as a grave.
Fourth Brother Minghui had taken a leave of absence from his school in the city and returned to the village for the wedding. He was assigned to serve as the page boy who would fetch Zhu Ying from the Zhu household and bring her to the Kong household. Since both families lived in the same village, their houses were less than half a li from each other, but when the magnificent caravan had set out from the Zhu home it circled around the whole village and through the township, loudly playing drums and setting off fireworks. As a result, although the caravan had set out at nine in the morning, it did not make its way back until eleven. In the luxurious caravan sedan, Minghui had been sitting on Zhu Ying’s left and a twelve-year-old flower girl had been sitting on her right. The girl was dressed up in Western attire, and during the entire ride she sucked on a candy and leaned her head on Zhu Ying’s shoulder. The only thing she had said to Zhu Ying was that when she grew up she wanted to go out into the world as Zhu Ying had done, and then return home to marry the village chief or town mayor. Minghui and Zhu Ying had said a lot to each other. She asked him about his studies in the city, and what he wanted to study in college. She also asked,
“After college, do you plan to return to Explosion?
“… What kind of job and wife do you plan to find?”
Finally, she told him very solemnly, “I’m your sister-in-law, so listen carefully to what I have to say. After college, you mustn’t return to Explosion. After I marry your second brother, Explosion sooner or later will be destroyed by us.” Minghui didn’t understand what she was saying, and when he turned to look at her he saw that her eyes were filled with tears as big as the diamond on her ring, but the crooked smile on her face made the blood freeze in his veins. He stared at her in bewilderment, until she finally laughed, wiped away her tears, and gave his cheek a sisterly pat.
This is how the day had proceeded.
That night, no one knew where Minghui—who most needed to participate in the bridal room tumult—had gone.
After the room in the Kong home directly across from Mingguang’s was renovated, it was designated as Mingliang’s and Zhu Ying’s bridal suite. The entire room and courtyard were filled with red double happiness characters, the courtyard and streets were filled with red couplets, the street and the village were filled with fireworks, while the entire world was filled with the smell of burning paper. As the tumult gradually faded in the moonlight, it was replaced by a humid stillness. In the bridal chambers, there was not a sound to be heard. Some people placed their ears against the wall, while others climbed down from a nearby tree and tiptoed up to the bridal chambers and placed their ears under the window. When they still couldn’t hear anything, they looked in surprise at the window to the darkened room and used their tongues to poke tiny holes in the paper window shade. One person squatted so that another could stand on his shoulders. The latter closed his left eye and peered through the hole in the window shade with his right eye, but apart from some red furniture and a table with a candle that was about to burn out, there was only the bed made up with a combination of tumult and quiet.
The person on top climbed down to let the person on the bottom climb up, but apart from the red tumult on the bed and the quiet in the room, there was nothing else to be seen or heard. At this point, however, there was a movement in the matrimonial bed. Someone who had hidden under the bed in order to watch and eavesdrop on the bridal room had fallen asleep, and after waking up he slowly crawled out, looking disappointedly at the enormous bed. Apart from the bride and groom, who were both sound asleep, everything was completely peaceful. The interloper tiptoed out of the bedroom, and everyone asked him what was wrong. Had the bride and groom whispered something to each other? The interloper didn’t say anything, and instead cut through the crowd. Only after he reached the Kong household’s outer gate did he finally turn around and say to those who had followed him:
“After an entire day of excitement, the bride and groom went to sleep without even taking their clothes off.”
The second night, it was the same story.
The third night, as all of the children and young people were in the depths of their disappointment at not having been able to satisfy their voyeuristic fantasies, they had no idea what astonishing and earth-shattering things were unfolding in the bridal chamber.
Love exploded with earth-splitting force.
Following the house-toppling excitement, Kong Mingliang and Zhu Ying had fallen asleep, and when Mingliang woke up he hugged Zhu Ying and exclaimed,
“My god, my god! I’ve found a nymph!”
Zhu Ying laughed and said, “In the future, you should listen to this nymph!”
Then, they engaged in a second round. When they were done, Mingliang rubbed the sleep from his eyes and got out of bed. He knew that Zhu Ying had sucked the strength from his legs, and if he didn’t lean against the walls he would probably collapse. The sky was overcast, and the sunlight was being captured by the clouds. When he opened the doors to the bedroom, Kong Mingliang looked out and saw that the courtyard was virtually full of the young people who had previously gone with him to unload goods from passing trains. They all had mysterious expressions of envy and excitement, but in their eyes there was a look of puzzlement. There were also a couple of fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds who had kept their ears pressed against the bedroom door until Mingliang came out.
Kong Mingliang kicked those two youngsters in the butt.
The two youngsters hopped like a pair of springs and said with chagrin, “Chief Kong, you and your wife were so animated in the bridal chamber last night that even our ow
n beds were bouncing.”
Everyone crowded around the village chief and asked what was the best part of being married to Zhu Ying? What had they done differently? Kong Mingliang spun around and, with his arms folded across his chest, he kept repeating over and over again, “Incredible! Just incredible!”
Everyone else spun around with him and kept asking,
“What was incredible?”
“It was like a volcano.”
“Could someone have burned up?”
“Someone who was weak could have been burned alive.”
The young men of Explosion resolved that they wanted to imitate Kong Mingliang, and would get engaged and married to those young women who had gone out to seek romantic work in the city. The young men were heedless of the disdain of their elders, as long as they could earn money from the outside world. As long as their fiancées desired money and a family, the young men could pretend that their past never occurred. They surrounded Kong Mingliang and asked what he would do next. After all, he couldn’t keep spending money that someone else had earned. Kong Mingliang then announced to those youngsters that if Explosion Village really wanted to get rich and be redesignated as a town and then a city, it wouldn’t be able to rely on the money the young women earned in the city doing romantic work, but rather it would have to open factories, and the factories would need to be as crazily prosperous as the young women in their bridal chambers.
“I’ve experienced all sorts of hardships,” Mingliang shouted. “During the Reform and Opening Up period, you could earn whatever you wanted. If you had money, you could be a grandfather or grandmother, but if you didn’t, you would be a grandchild or a lowly rat. If you had money, the town and county mayors would listen to you, but if you didn’t, the town and county mayors would treat you like a grandchild or a great-grandchild.” As he was shouting this, he observed that the villagers crowded around in ever-greater numbers, and after they filled his family’s courtyard, he stood on one of the newlyweds’ chairs and shouted even more loudly, “All of you elected me to serve as your village chief, casting 820 votes for me, while casting only 410 for Zhu Ying. Because of my vote count, which was precisely double hers, her dreams of becoming village chief were shattered. She admitted defeat, and in order to marry me she went to the village board and knelt down, crying like a child. She cried so hard, as though she were made of tears, that I agreed to marry her. She then agreed that, after the marriage, she would bring in her outside business and install it in the streets of Explosion. This included foot-washing parlors, hair salons, and amusement parks—she would create an entire amusement avenue here in Balou. In this way, she would attract those rich people to pour into Explosion to spend their money. They would come to Explosion with their pockets full of gold and silver, and then return home with their pockets empty. Within two or three years Explosion will become a town, and a few years later it will become a city. If girls and women love Explosion so much, and are willing to sacrifice their bodies, their reputations, and even their lives for the sake of Explosion’s prosperity, then what about the men?” As Mingliang was shouting this, he looked out at the crowded courtyard and saw that it contained not only strong young men from the village but also old people, children, women, and girls—all of whom were surging into his courtyard as though he were holding an assembly. Kong Mingliang let them take one of the newlyweds’ tables from his house and place it outside the main gate, as though he were holding an oath-taking meeting in the village streets. He stood in front of the table decorated with red matrimonial double happiness characters and gazed out at the dark crowd of villagers. He even sent people to fetch those families who had not come. The sun appeared from behind the clouds, as the village streets became warm and bright, and the villagers in attendance became drenched in sweat. They looked at the groom standing on the red table, as though watching a young Buddha dancing in midair. They listened as he shouted, his voice thundering through their veins.