by Yan Lianke
Everyone crowded around Minghui and asked,
“Are you really the mayor’s younger brother?
“… If you are the mayor’s brother, then why did you walk all the way to our village?”
Qinfang was the wealthiest person in the village, and even though she was divorced, it was nevertheless still true that she had been married to the brother of the former town, county, and now city mayor. This brother who had arrived, meanwhile, was now a university president, and furthermore had come to Zhang-Wang Village to fetch Qinfang and take her to her former husband’s house, where she could live in harmony with Mingguang. After Minghui said that he wanted to take Qinfang back and have her remarry Mingguang, the entire courtyard fell silent. Everyone stared at Minghui and asked, “Really? Really?” Then someone tugged at Qinfang’s arm, saying, “Your hard work has finally yielded results.” They said that from now on, the mayor would call her Sister, and all the section chiefs, bureau chiefs, and department heads would address her as Sister. They tugged at Sister-in-Law’s sleeve while crowding around Minghui, saying that it was no wonder that two days earlier thousands of magpies had flown over to the village and spent the entire day singing, while a day earlier two peacocks and two phoenixes had flown over Qinfang’s courtyard wall and opened their wings to her, like the sun coming up over the horizon.
The sun, which was shining down on the villagers’ happy faces, slowly set behind the mountains.
As the sun was setting, Qinfang squatted down and began to cry. Then she suddenly rushed out into the courtyard, grabbed her father, who was lying down in his chair, and exclaimed, “It’s over, it’s over! Your illness will be healed!” It was then that Minghui learned that when Qinfang agreed to get divorced, Mingliang, who was town mayor at the time, had signed ten sheets of white paper. He told Qinfang that if she wanted to build a house, she just needed to write down what she needed on a sheet of that paper, and it would be delivered to her. He told her that if she wanted to sow a field of crops, she just needed to fill out one of the sheets and some cadres would issue her a ready-made contract to sublease the land. If she had any legal troubles with a family in the village, she simply needed to fill out one of those sheets explaining the situation, and she would win the lawsuit and keep her reputation. Those ten sheets of paper could help Qinfang accomplish ten critical tasks. But after she returned home and her father heard that she had divorced Mingguang, he immediately fell silent, and the next morning they discovered that he had had a stroke and had been left partially paralyzed. She therefore began filling out those blank sheets of paper—using them to have the hospital send its very best doctors to visit her father, and to obtain ingredients with which to brew Chinese medicine for her father to drink. She begged him to hang on to life, even if it meant that he would be partially paralyzed.
Once, when her father collapsed in the mountains and looked as though he were dead, Qinfang asked someone to quickly write several lines on one of those sheets of white paper, requesting that doctors from the hospital in the mountains come over as quickly as possible. Those doctors rushed over, out of breath and bathed in sweat, and they managed to pull her father from the brink of death. Another time, when her father was at home and fell down in the courtyard, he began foaming at the mouth, and not even a trace of breath could be detected from his nostrils. Qinfang knew that her father’s time had finally arrived and that, even if the doctors came rushing over, they still wouldn’t be able to save him. She therefore took all of the blank sheets of paper that Mingliang had signed, rolled them into a ball, and stuffed them into her father’s mouth, while crying, “Father, Father … My brother-in-law is no longer the town mayor, but is now the county mayor!” With this, she was able to bring her father back to life. To this day, she still kept one of those blank pages signed by Mingliang, and no matter what happened, she refused to part with it. At most, she would, at a crucial junction, take it out and wave it in people’s faces, telling them that her brother was Kong Mingliang, the city mayor, and if they didn’t believe it they could see his signature right there! When her father suffered an aneurysm on the coldest day of the year and fell into a coma, she knelt by his bedside and held up that signed sheet of paper, crying out, “He is the mayor! He is the mayor!” Then the room gradually warmed up, the blood flow to her father’s head returned to normal, and he became so clearheaded that it was as though he were not ill.
The moment the sun touched the western mountains, the mountain ridge became as peaceful as a silk cloth fluttering to the ground. In the fields of Zhang-Wang Village, all of the wheat sprouts were green, as they turned their leaves in the direction of Qinfang’s house. The bare tree branches also beckoned in the direction of her house, while the grass and flowers around the entrance to her house also had a hint of green. When her father heard that his middle-aged daughter wanted to marry back into the Kong family and return to her former husband’s house, he didn’t say a word and instead he merely raised his hand—the same hand he had not raised for many years owing to his paralysis. He caressed his daughter’s head and face as the tears falling on his hand, wrist, and arm bloomed like flowers and emitted an early spring fragrance.
Shortly afterward, the villagers surged toward Qinfang’s house, asking Minghui if it was true that he had come to fetch her and take her back to Explosion to remarry his elder brother.
Minghui nodded.
“Has your brother agreed?”
“My brother asked me to look after the family,” Minghui responded solemnly. “It goes without saying that he would agree.”
Next, someone began lighting fireworks outside Qinfang’s house, and someone else went to fetch some musical instruments. The sound of drumming and fireworks filled the courtyard and the entire village, radiating in all directions, making everything as festive as New Year’s. Everyone surrounded her and lifted Minghui up, grateful that he had come to fetch her and take her home. The villagers congratulated her on once again becoming a member of the Kong family and asked, “Now that you’ll be married back into the Kong family, and will once again be the mayor’s sister-in-law, could you not take that final unused sheet of blank paper that the mayor—back when he was still only a town mayor—signed for you, and write something on it? We are enduring an unusually cold and dry winter, and are about to enter a period of drought. Could you not write on that sheet of paper, ‘Let it snow! Let it snow!’ That way, the heavens might dump a heavy snowfall onto our fields.”
When Qinfang heard this request, she returned to her room and opened the chest at the head of her bed, and from the bottom drawer she took out an envelope. From the envelope, she removed the final signed letter, which had begun to yellow, and wrote, “Let it snow! Let it snow!” Then the villagers crowded around her and Minghui, and under the moonlight the two of them proceeded to the front of the village, where they knelt down and waved that sheet of paper in the air, chanting, “Let it snow! Let it snow! It is the mayor who is calling for snow! It is the mayor who is calling for snow!” They chanted, “A snowstorm is an omen for a prosperous year. It is the mayor who is calling for snow!” Sure enough, the air was soon filled with moist, dirty snowflakes, and under the moonlight the moonlike blossoms fell onto the uncultivated fields at the head of the village. As soon as the ground was covered in a dusting of snow, everyone knelt down, whereupon Qinfang lit a match and set the sheet with the mayor’s signature on fire. Then she lifted the burning sheet into the air, and the snowfall turned into a blizzard. The snow continued to fall heavily all night, blanketing the village and the surrounding fields, as well as the entire mountain ridge. The snow ended up being a foot deep, and all the wheat sprouts, trees, and grasses were warm and moist, as though they were hibernating, and there was no need to worry about the future because prosperity was in sight.
The next day, Minghui and Qinfang extracted themselves from this snowfall and returned to Explosion, where Qinfang and Mingguang were reunited and resumed a peaceful life.
4. CULTURE A
ND CULTURAL RELICS
There was also a snowfall in Explosion.
After the snow stopped, the entire city was put on display. The buildings and overpasses in the distance looked as though they had been constructed out of bricks of snow. Meanwhile, the trees and street signs were all wrapped in snow. After fetching Qinfang from her mother’s house and taking her to Mingguang’s house and helping her straighten it up, Minghui returned home.
On that snowy night, the moonlight shone through as dimly as a sheet of gauze. When Minghui reached the former village square, he picked up a shard of moonlight from the ground. This shard was about the same weight as a window shade but was as cool and slippery as a piece of wet silk. After returning the shard to where he found it, Minghui walked home through the snow. By the time he arrived his mother was already sound asleep, like an old cat curled up next to a stove. Minghui opened the courtyard gate and heard his mother ask in her sleep, “Have you returned? Are your eldest brother and sister-in-law OK?”
Through the window to her room, Minghui nodded to his mother, who then turned over and fell back asleep. Seeing that everything was all right, Minghui went to his own room, but as he was about to fall asleep he remembered the almanac under his pillow. One page had partially peeled away from the others, but apart from the words Second Brother, the rest of the text remained buried in a blob of ink. The ink resembled dried mud from a pond, and the tiny fly-like writing resembled wisps of water plants. Minghui had already looked at this dried pond and its plants thousands of times, but he was unable to discern any trace of the plants’ former greenery, nor was he able to make out anything regarding Second Brother’s life. He also had no way of knowing what this almanac wanted him to do on his brother’s behalf.
Lying in bed, Minghui thought about that half page dealing with his brother, and then abruptly sat up and grabbed the almanac. He turned to the half-moistened page concerning his brother and looked at the date—“third month, third day”—which turned out to be Second Brother’s birthday. On this page, there appeared an ink splotch half as big as a fist. Minghui remembered that shard of moonlight he had found in the old city street, as well as this old almanac printed on coarse paper that had been used for who knows how many years. Because of the dampness of the hole in the tree, all of the pages had stuck together. He had taken the old volume out into the sun, whereupon the pages dried up and became even more tightly stuck together, and it was not until he took the book out into the night mist that several of the pages had begun to dampen and peel away from one another. Minghui had to mist the page on Eldest Brother and Sister-in-Law for three nights in a row before he could separate it. As for this page on Second Brother, he had to mist it for fifteen straight nights before he was able to peel away even a single corner, but because he had misted it for too long, the ink on the page had run together. But now, it suddenly occurred to Minghui how he could decipher the page on Second Brother. While in the sun the pages would dry and stick together, and in the night mist they would moisten and peel apart though the ink would then run together, in this mist of snowy night the stuck-together pages could be peeled apart. The light of the cold winter moon could suck out moisture better than the sun could, thereby allowing him to dry out those pages so that the indistinct writing could once again resemble a muddy pond streaked with water plants.
When this approach occurred to Minghui, he jumped out of bed and ran over to the window to look at the snowy-night moon, which at that point was shining down on the old street. He quickly grabbed a table, which he placed in the middle of the courtyard. Then he opened the almanac and put it in the middle of the table. He walked to the area between the two courtyard walls where the moonlight was falling and carefully picked up the brightest shard of moonlight from the ground. Slowly, he carried the shard to the table and placed it upright next to the almanac. When he went back to the courtyard wall to get another shard, he noticed that the spot where the first shard had been was now jet-black, and this blackness had dimmed all of the remaining shards at the corner of the wall. Minghui stood there for a while; then he turned around, opened the courtyard gate, went out into the street, and brought in a second shard of moonlight. He went to the former square and brought back a third shard. Finally, he went to the area on the outskirts of the old street and brought back a fourth and a fifth shard.
Upon returning home, Minghui first leaned the shards of moonlight against the table legs. Then, after locking the outer gate, he took one shard after another, each of which was a different size and shape, and placed them all erect on the table, arranging them into a square. He brought over the largest square-shaped shard and placed it on top of the others. In this way, on this snowy night, he was able to cover his almanac with a tiny house made of moonlight. Minghui stood quietly next to this moon house, looking at the opened almanac lying peacefully in its home. The humidity of the snowy night gradually moistened the page discussing Second Brother together with the following page describing the events of the fourth day of the third month. The walls and ceiling of the cool, dry moon house absorbed the moisture and steam emitted by the pages as they dried. The moon gradually moved from directly overhead toward the western part of the sky, and while during the first half of the night the moon was in its waxing phase, in the second half of the night it entered its waning phase. When it transitioned from a round full moon into its waning phase, Minghui saw that a corner of the page describing Second Brother had begun to separate from the page beneath it. He carefully moved aside the shard of moonlight directly in front of him, then reached into the moon house with both hands and carefully lifted the page for the third day of the third month until he was able to separate the entire page from the one beneath it.
He saw that what had previously been merely a dark smudge of ink was slowly clearing up, and eventually he was able to discern the two characters for Zhu and Ying. The Zhu character appeared very clearly, while the Ying one was somewhat indistinct, though the right-hand portion of the latter character appeared as clear as though an autumn leaf had fallen on the page. When Minghui discovered that he could discern the characters for Zhu and Ying within that smudge of ink, his hands froze as he realized that the almanac wanted him to do something involving Second Brother and Second Sister-in-Law. Minghui was elated, as though he had finally succeeded in solving a riddle. His hands started trembling, to the point that he almost knocked down the moon house he had just built.
CHAPTER 16
New Members of the Clan
1. ZHU YING
The day after the snowfall, before Minghui went to see Mingliang, he first went to see his sister-in-law Zhu Ying. She was in her courtyard in front of a large pile of snow she had swept up. In the snow she had drawn a picture of Second Brother with her finger, and over his belly she had written the word Die! However, her entire house—inside and outside, on the walls and ceilings, upstairs and downstairs—was still covered with photographs and newspaper clippings about Mingliang, and beneath them there still appeared countless phrases like Mine till death do us part! But over these phrases, Zhu Ying had used a thick red marker to draw the sort of red X that one normally would see on a poster announcing someone had been sentenced to death. Every inch of wall in the house was covered with postings and writing, and in addition to the earlier photographs of Mingliang that had already been there, now there were new ones from the national and provincial papers of him giving speeches and shaking people’s hands. The phrases such as He is mine! and the red X’s were like fireworks on a holiday. Minghui stared at these red X’s and realized that Zhu Ying’s hatred of Mingliang had already driven her insane. This made Minghui even more convinced that he needed to go see Mingliang.
Minghui stood in front of Zhu Ying’s house and looked around, but on this occasion, unlike his previous visit, he did not see the girls Zhu Ying was training in preparation for Explosion’s transformation into a city or even a provincial-level metropolis or even a province. Instead, he stood directly in front of Zhu Ying in her
living room and gently said,
“I’m going to see Second Brother.
“… Second Brother hasn’t been home in years, has he?”
Zhu Ying bit her lower lip as she thought for a moment, then said very deliberately, “There is no need to see him. His business is about to collapse, and once it does he will be begging to come home—to come back to me. But when the time comes, even if he is literally dying at my feet, I won’t necessarily rescue him, as I did before.”
As Zhu Ying said this she smiled coldly, but behind that smile she was secretly beginning to cry. Without waiting for the tears to appear, she quickly wiped her eyes with her hand, then invited Minghui to sit on the couch beside her as she pulled out an exquisitely decorated small wooden box. She opened the box and took out a leather pouch. Clenching her jaws, Zhu Ying removed from the pouch a collection of photographs of her son Victory, beginning with the day of his birth and continuing through his first month celebration to his first birthday to his enrollment in nursery school. The photographs were wrapped in paper consisting of a series of documents and directives specifying that Zhu Ying was not permitted to visit Mingliang in the city government without Mingliang’s express permission, so as not to interfere with the work he was doing on behalf of Explosion’s development. The earliest of those documents was dated three days after Mingliang was appointed city mayor, while the most recent one was from the preceding month. Upon looking at these photographs of his nephew, Minghui proceeded to examine each of the documents and noticed that their language became progressively sharper, to the point that the final document concluded with the line, “If you return again to city hall to disrupt the mayor and the government’s work, you will receive either a certificate of divorce or a letter assigning you to reside in a mental asylum in perpetuity.”
With a look of shock and horror, Minghui read though all of those documents line by line. The winter sunlight shone in through the window, shining down on his body like a sheet of ice and chilling him to the bone. To warm himself, he wanted to embrace Zhu Ying or drape his body over the stove.