by Ha Jin
He guffawed, slapping his gut, and said, “Between pigs and men I don’t see any difference.”
As I was reaching the doorway, the waitresses came out of the kitchen again, each holding a platter of fried silkworm pupas. I turned away in disgust, despite knowing the dish was a kind of delicacy to the country people.
A crew from Shanning Film Studio was staying at the guesthouse. They had come to this mountainous area to shoot a movie. The two young fellows sharing the room with me were cameramen on the team. They told me they were making a movie about the historical figure Heng Zhang, who had been an upright official and an expert in earthquake forecasting in the Han Dynasty, about two thousand years ago.
“Why did you pick this place?” I asked the shorter man, who seemed better tempered than his hulking colleague.
“Because this is one of the poorest areas. Look at the landscape.” He waved his squarish hand as if he were sitting in the open air. “Rocky valleys and barren hills, they’re perfect scenery for the movie. The soil’s so poor it looks like even rabbits won’t shit here.”
I knew the story of Heng Zhang, but I couldn’t picture what the film would be like. I didn’t go to the movies very often and instead read books, so I was not terribly interested in what they were making. I picked up the washbasin from under my bed, fetched some hot water, and bathed my feet in it. My only desire now was to get some sleep. I went to bed early despite the two men chattering without cease. Exhausted by the trip, I slept soundly that night.
28
It turned out that Hanlong Commune had been disbanded a few years before. The investigation letter from our school had been addressed to the former commune; that was why it had gone astray. A typical case of bureaucratic negligence.
A woman clerk at the Town Government told me that the best way to carry out my mission was to go directly to Sandy Rock, the village where Banping’s uncle lived, to get a reply from the Party branch there. She assured me that if the letter had ever arrived at Hanlong, it must already have been forwarded to the village, so I’d better go to Sandy Rock personally. It was four miles away to the north. Not far; I could walk. But having wasted a solid hour at the Town Government, I couldn’t set out until ten o’clock.
The walking was pleasant in the beginning as the road was flat and the air fresh. I liked the chirrup of the grasshoppers, the scent of wormwood, and the sight of the furry soybeans that were just about four inches tall. But as the road grew more sloping, I started puffing a little. From time to time sand got into my shoes, and I stopped to take them off and tip it out. The sun was blazing right overhead; there were neither clouds nor breeze. It was so dry that most fields had become tawny, the young corn, sorghum, and millet drooping with curled leaves. Far away, some dwarf trees clustered on the surrounding hills, whose tops were mostly bare rocks. Occasionally a cart, drawn by oxen or horses or by a mixed team of both, would emerge from the opposite direction, coming up and halting away toward Hanlong Town. The drivers nodded off behind the haunches of the shaft animals with their backs against loads of rocks or bricks or oil cakes; without exception each held a long whip in the crook of his arm.
Soon I felt thirsty and looked around for water, but there was no stream or spring in view. So I kept walking. As I was approaching a crossroads, a teenage boy appeared from the road on the right, coming my way. He carried two buckets of water on a shoulder pole shiny from use. Because of the heavy load, which seemed to weigh more than himself, he moved much faster than I, almost rushing forward in a tottering gait. After the crossing point, I slackened my pace.
When he caught up with me, I said to him, “May I have a drink of water, little brother? I’m so parched.”
He looked reluctant, but stopped and put down the load, gasping for breath. Staring at me with his sparkling eyes, he nodded yes. I took my mug out of my bag, scooped up some water from the front bucket, and drank it. It tasted slightly salty and must have had a lot of sulfur in it. After two mugfuls I still felt thirsty.
Without a word he shouldered the load and went on his way. He looked about fifteen, and his thin shoulders showed no muscles. He didn’t wear shoes, his bare feet large and broad compared with his lean calves. I watched him swaying his left arm rhythmically as he hastened away. Gradually I lagged farther behind. At the mouth of a granite quarry he turned away from my road, heading west.
It took me an hour and a half to reach Sandy Rock. Approaching the village, I heard a child crying in the distance. The screaming, which I had at first mistaken for a reed pipe being played by a tyro, was sharp and staccato, growing more guttural as I walked closer. I wasn’t sure if the crier was a boy or a girl. The voice seemed to come from the hill in the northwest; it rose and subsided, but never fully stopped.
The village consisted of more than sixty houses, most of them adobe and thatched with wheat straw. Every front yard was surrounded by a low wall made of rocks piled together. An unusual hush enveloped this place as if it were deserted, and I wondered where the people had gone. As I walked around a bit looking for the village office, a few foraging sheep bleated from behind wattle gates. In the distance the child was still crying, rather furiously. By now I was sure it was a boy, whose screams came from the hillside.
Without much difficulty I found the village office, a little tumbledown house with a decaying roof, in which sat the man temporarily in charge of the daily affairs of the Party branch. His family name was Hao, and he must have been a small cadre in the former production brigade here, for he spoke with a manner of authority, though without any arrogance. The low-pitched room resembled a tiny barn; slender, crooked rafters supported bundles of sorghum stalks that formed the lining of the roof. A few cracks meandered on the north wall like rivers on a map; one of them was so wide that it could let in a thumb. Sitting opposite me at the only desk, Hao told me, after searching through the drawers, that the investigation letter had never arrived. I felt at a loss and kept scratching the warped desktop, which was glossy and must have been painted recently. I turned my head away. On the west wall was pasted a portrait of Deng Xiaoping in a pork-pie hat, smiling and holding a cigar between his forefinger and thumb, and on either side of the portrait was a strip of calligraphy. One said, “Poverty Is Not Socialism”; the other, “We Must Liberate Our Minds.” Near the door hung a clock, whose face looked rusty, its long pendulum swaying, with a lazy clack.
What should I do? I wondered, my eyes resting on an oil lamp made of a small amber bottle.
Though upset, I didn’t show my disappointment to Hao, who had a narrow forehead and a broken front tooth. His caterpillar brows and rheumy eyes made him look ill, but he seemed good-natured. His blue jacket had a large rectangular patch on the right shoulder. His hands were huge, sinewy, and chafed. Maybe he can help me, I thought.
My guess proved correct. After I said I couldn’t go back empty-handed, he assured me, “No need to worry. There’s something we can do. I know the format of this kind of letters. They’re all the same.” He kept fanning himself with a folded newspaper.
“Can you fill out a form for me?” I asked.
“Well, I can write you a letter and put in all the information you need. I know the Fang clan well and can answer all the general questions. How would you like that?”
“Great, please do it! That will save my skin!” I said with relief.
He put down the newspaper, took out a sheet of stationery with a scarlet seal at its bottom, dipped a pen into a lumpy glass inkwell, and started writing. The steel nib scratched the paper with a rapid rustle. I was impressed by how dexterously he handled the pen despite his massive hand. Evidently he was quite literate, familiar with this kind of writing and with Banping’s uncle’s life, but I had no idea what he put into the letter or whether he answered the right questions. I didn’t care. As long as I could bring back a letter, my mission would be completed.
“Rest assured, there’s no problem with Wanmin Fang,” Hao said about Banping’s uncle, and put down the pen on the desk. “He’s
from a poor peasant family, always active in political movements. He’s a Party member too.” He told me this probably because he assumed I also belonged to the Party. I nodded to show my appreciation.
Having stuck the letter into a manila envelope without sealing it, he handed it to me and said, “You’re all set.”
I picked up the glue bottle on the desk and sealed the flap of the envelope. He rose to his feet, took an earthenware teapot from the windowsill, and poured some tea into a ceramic mug. “Here, have some tea. You must be thirsty.” He placed the mug before me.
“Thanks.” I lifted the tea, which looked thin and brownish, and took a gulp. Yech, what tea is this? It tasted bitter, a bit oily, like a medicinal decoction.
Hao saw the surprise on my face and smiled with some embarrassment. “It’s pomegranate tea, good against the summer heat,” he explained.
“Er . . . thanks.”
Many years ago I had heard that some country people were so poor they couldn’t afford to drink tea, so they used some kinds of tree leaves instead. Call this stuff whatever you liked, it wasn’t tea at all. They might just want the brown color from pomegranate leaves. Heaven knew whether this substitute actually could help relieve internal heat like real tea. What astonished me was that never had I imagined that people here still drank this stuff. I tried to appear unsurprised, lifting the mug and taking a sip again.
“How’s Old Fang’s nephew doing?” Hao asked me.
“Banping’s fine.”
“The Fangs used to be one of the poorest clans in this area. That boy had no shoes to wear for school when it snowed. Every winter his hands were frostbitten, swollen like rotten taters.”
“They were that poor?”
“Yes, in the year when the locusts came and ate up all our crops, his whole family had only one jacket. Whoever was going out put it on.”
It was incredible that Banping had lived through that kind of hardship. No wonder he was so tough and phlegmatic. I said, “He’s doing well now, quite rich actually. His wife just bought a Flying Pigeon bicycle. He’ll start to work at the Provincial Administration next month.”
“You don’t say so! Who could tell he’d go to college and become a big official? A phoenix hatched in a chicken coop indeed. He’s really something.” Hao kept shaking his stubbled head, a bald patch on his crown. “That boy was smart, a quick hand at the abacus.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“He was very good at numbers. No matter how poor the Fangs were, they wouldn’t take him out of school. In those days schooling was free, you know. After middle school, he became our accountant and didn’t have to go to the fields like the others. That’s how he got the time to study for the college exams. ‘Education, education is the thing,’ I always tell my younger brothers this.”
I felt hungry, so I fished out of my bag half a corn bun, left over from breakfast, and began chewing it. I meant to appear natural in front of him. “Do you mind if I’m eating while we talk?” I asked, intending to show how I enjoyed the food they ate every day.
“No, go ahead. I should’ve invited you to lunch, but all the folks have gone to the shooting.”
“What shooting?”
“You don’t know? Some people came here and want us to take part in a movie they’re making. I’ve no idea what it’s about, though.”
The clock struck two. The door opened and in came a woman holding a toddler, a boy with a runny nose. She wore a fuchsia shirt that was so soiled it looked almost purple. One of her blue cloth shoes had a hole in its front, her big toe peeping out. The baby was wearing a clean bib that carried on its front the large words LOVE PEACE. His hand held a chunk of black bun like a stone.
“This is my wife, Fulan,” Hao introduced.
“How do you do? I’m Jian,” I said and almost stretched out my hand. She looked at least ten years older than her husband, as if in her fifties; but seen closely, she must have been in her early thirties, without a single gray hair. In spite of her leathery face and flat chest, she had thick arms, muscular like a man’s.
“Welcome,” she said in a shy voice. I realized that women in the countryside usually were not addressed formally by a male stranger.
Meanwhile, the baby boy fixed his watery eyes on the corn bun in my hand. “Yellow cake,” he cried, his hooked fingers pointing to my bun. “Yellow cake, Mama, I want yellow cake.”
“Don’t be naughty. I’ll bake you a big yellow cake this evening. Be a good boy.” She rocked the child from side to side to stop him.
“No, I want yellow cake now.” He looked at me ravenously.
“All right, let’s trade.” I got up and put the corn bun into his hand and took his black chunk away. “How’s that?” I smiled at him.
He nodded assent, then started munching the bun.
“Thank Uncle,” his mother ordered, smiling with curvy eyes.
“Thank you,” he mumbled.
“What a good boy,” I said and put the piece of black bun into my bag. “Old Hao, please don’t let Wanmin Fang know I came. I was told to keep this secret.”
“Sure, I won’t tell him. It’s the Party’s rule, I understand.” He grinned.
Although I had said good-bye, Hao walked me outside of the yard. I had told him several times not to come farther; still he wouldn’t turn back, accompanying me all the way out of the village. He seemed to enjoy talking with me.
On the distant hillside the boy was still crying, his voice fierce like the buzz of cicadas. I saw a few goats grazing almost motionlessly on the slope, but I couldn’t see the child. Why did he scream without stopping? I asked Hao, “What’s wrong with that boy?”
“What boy?”
“Don’t you hear him crying over there?” I pointed to the hillside in the northwest.
“Oh, he may’ve been stung by a scorpion.”
“What? A scorpion can make him cry for hours nonstop?”
“It can make a man cry too.” The corners of his mouth stretched aside as if he had just been stung.
“Why don’t his parents help him? They can at least cover the sting with some ointment or give him a sleeping pill, just stop him from screaming in the heat.”
“Easier said than done. Where can his folks get the drug and the ointment? We have no money for those fancy things. Many kids are hurt by scorpions when they look after sheep on the mountain. My daughter got bitten last fall. Oh, she hollered her head off, hoarse for a month afterward.”
“How long will he cry?”
“He’ll be all right before dark. Don’t worry.”
This meant the boy would continue to scream for another few hours. My heart sank, but I kept silent. As we went out of the village, a hen burst into cackling behind us, triumphantly announcing that she had just laid an egg. Ahead of us, about five hundred yards away in the south, stretched a barren slope narrowing into a valley between two knolls. Many people were gathered there, some standing and some sitting on yellowish boulders.
Hao said, “They’re shooting the picture there. Why don’t we go have a look?”
“All right, let’s go.” I realized why he had accompanied me all the way here—he wanted to see the shooting.
Up on the slope the two men who shared my room at the guesthouse were busy working on their camera. This was indeed an ideal setting for an earthquake scene. The slope was strewn with boulders and rocks, and there were no trees anywhere. Only a little grass spread on the edges of some dried ditches. The tops of the two knolls were plantless too, baring patches of granite. Farther up in the valley, at the foot of the eastern hillock, sat a small temple, before which stood a flagpole, whose upper half was missing. Around the temple, nearly all the gravestones had toppled over, as if an earthquake had just struck this area and tossed everything into a mess.
A few guards, hired from the local militia, stopped us and said we were allowed to watch the shooting only from a distance of thirty yards. So we had to stay where we were. In the meantime, a few membe
rs of the crew were assembling the villagers for a scene.
More than a hundred country people knelt down. Men, women, and children all were in straw sandals and ancient ragged clothes. A few shaggy men carried bedrolls slung over their shoulders. Beyond the villagers, about sixty yards up the slope, stood a two-wheeled carriage in which sat the figure of Heng Zhang, a tall, stately official. The sunlight lit up his ruddy face, glittering on the golden tassels hanging on his black hat.
A spare man with ratty gray whiskers and a mustard-colored cap, who must have been the director, shouted to the villagers, “If you don’t do it right this time, I won’t pay you. Understood?”
“Yes sir,” replied some voices.
He went behind a lop-eared young man kneeling on the ground and stepped on his calf. “Ouch!” the fellow cried, then gave a muffled moan.
“Don’t spread your legs like a crippled duck,” the director rapped out.
“I won’t, sir.”
Then the bigwig went over to an old man, who was skinny and hunchbacked. He grabbed a tuft of his white hair and shoved his head down, which hit the ground so hard that the man groaned and would have keeled over if he hadn’t put out his right hand to break his fall. The director ordered, “Let your head touch the dirt when you kowtow. Got it?”
“Yes sir.”
“Now ready?” The big boss turned around and saw Hao and me. He shouted, “Hey, you two over there, get away. Hide in the gully.”
The guards pushed us away while the short cameraman recognized me and gave me a military salute, though he was bareheaded.
Hiding in the ditch, Hao and I couldn’t help but poke out our heads to watch. The director instructed the villagers loudly, “This time you must all knock your heads on the ground and cry like your parents just died.” He raised his slim-fingered hand and called, “Ready?”
All the crew nodded.
“Action!”
The carriage, drawn by two white ponies that looked like twins, began rolling down the narrow trail. The four men walking beside it looked sweaty and exhausted, slightly staggering; one of them was carrying across his back a long sword with a red tassel. Down the slope the villagers kowtowed and cried in singsong voices, “Savior! Our Savior is descending!”