by Mo Yan
Lu Shengli Daughter of Lu Liren and Shangguan Pandi (Fifth Sister). Becomes mayor of Dalan.
Speechless Sun Eldest son of Aunty Sun, neighbor of the Shangguan family. Born a mute. Engaged to Laidi (Eldest Sister), is crippled in battle, and returns to marry Laidi.
Ji Qiongzhi Jintong’s inspiring teacher.
Chapter One
1
From where he lay quietly on the brick-and-tamped-earth sleeping platform, his kang, Pastor Malory saw a bright red beam of light shining down on the Virgin Mary’s pink breast and on the pudgy face of the bare-bottomed Blessed Infant in her arms. Water from last summer’s rains had left yellow stains on the oil tableau, investing the Virgin Mary and Blessed Infant with a vacant look. A long-legged spider hung from a silvery thread in the bright window, swaying in a light breeze. “Morning spiders bring happiness, evening spiders promise wealth.” That’s what the pale yet beautiful woman had said one day when she saw one of the eight-legged creatures. But what happiness am I entitled to? All those heavenly breasts and buttocks in his dream flashed through his head. He heard the rumble of carts outside and the cries of red-crowned cranes from the distant marsh, plus the angry bleats of his milk goat. Sparrows banged noisily into the paper window covering. Magpies, the so-called happiness birds, chattered in poplar trees outside. By the look of things, happiness could well be in the air today. Then suddenly his head cleared, and the beautiful woman with the astonishingly big belly made a violent appearance, haloed in blinding light. Her nervous lips quivered, as if she were about to say something. She was in her eleventh month, so today must be the day. In a flash Pastor Malory understood the significance of the spider and magpies. He sat up and got down off the kang.
After picking up a black earthenware jug, he walked out to the street behind the church, where he saw Shangguan Lü, wife of Shangguan Fulu, the blacksmith, bent over to sweep the street in front of the shop. His heart skipped a beat, his lips quivered. “Dear Lord,” he muttered, “almighty God …” He crossed himself with a stiff finger and backed slowly into a corner to silently observe the tall, heavyset Shangguan Lü as she silently and single-mindedly swept the dew-soaked dust into her dustpan, carefully picking out pieces of trash and tossing them aside. Her movements were clumsy but vigorous; her broom, woven from golden millet tassels, was like a toy in her hand. After filling the dustpan and tamping down the dust, she straightened up.
Just as Shangguan Lü reached the head of her lane, she heard a commotion behind her and turned to see what it was. Some women came running through the black gate of Felicity Manor, home of the town’s leading gentry family. They were dressed in rags, their faces smeared with soot. Why are these women, who normally dress in silks and satins, and are never seen without rouge and lipstick, dressed like that? Just then, a wagon master known to all as “Old Titmouse” emerged from the compound across the way on his new wagon, with its dark green canopy and rubber tires. The women clambered aboard even before it came to a complete stop. The wagon master jumped down and sat on one of the still damp stone lions to silently smoke his pipe. Sima Ting, steward of Felicity Manor, strode out from the compound with his fowling piece, his movements as quick and nimble as a young man. Jumping to his feet, the wagon master glanced at the steward, who snatched the pipe out of his hand, took several noisy puffs, then looked up at the early-morning rosy sky and yawned grandly. “Time to go,” he said. “Wait for me at the Black Water River Bridge. I’ll be along shortly.”
With the reins in one hand and his whip in the other, the wagon master turned the wagon around. The women in the bed behind him shouted and chattered. The whip snapped in the air, and the horses trotted off. Brass bells around the horses’ necks sang out crisply, the wagon wheels crunched on the dirt road, and clouds of dust rose in the wagon’s wake.
After taking a piss in the middle of the road, Sima Ting shouted out at the now distant wagon, then cradled his fowling piece and climbed the watchtower, a thirty-foot platform supported by ninety-nine thick logs and topped by a red flag that hung limply in the damp morning air. Shangguan Lü watched him as he gazed off to the northwest. With his long neck and pointy mouth, he looked a little like a goose at a watering trough.
A cloud of feathery mist rolled through the sky and swallowed up Sima Ting, then spat him back out. Bloody hues of sunrise dyed his face red. To Shangguan Lü, the face seemed covered by a dazzling layer of sticky syrup. By the time he raised the fowling piece over his head, his face was red as a cockscomb. She heard a faint metallic click. It was the trigger sending the firing pin forward. Resting the butt of the piece against his shoulder, he stood waiting solemnly. So did Shangguan Lü, as the heavy dustpan numbed her hands, and her neck was sore from cocking it at such a rakish angle. Sima Ting lowered his fowling piece and puckered like a pouting little boy. She heard him curse the gun: “You little bastard, how dare you not fire!” He raised it again and pulled the trigger. Crack! Flames followed the crisp sound out of the barrel, simultaneously darkening the sun’s rays and lighting up his red face. Then an explosion shattered the silence hanging over the village; sunlight filled the sky with brilliant colors as if a fairy standing on the tip of a cloud were showering the land below with radiant flower petals. Shangguan Lü’s heart raced from excitement. Though only a blacksmith’s wife, she was much better with a hammer and anvil than her husband could ever hope to be. The mere sight of steel and fire sent blood running hot through her veins. The muscles of her arms rippled like knotted horsewhips. Black steel striking against red, sparks flying, a sweat-soaked shirt, rivulets of salty water flowing down the valley between pendulous breasts, the biting smell of steel and blood filling the space between heaven and earth. She watched Sima Ting jerk backward on his perch, the damp morning air around him soaked with the smell of gunpowder. As he circled the tiny platform, he broadcast a warning to all of Northeast Gaomi Township:
“All you elders, fellow townsmen, the Japs are coming!”
2
Shangguan Lü emptied her dustpan onto the exposed surface of the kang, whose grass mat and bedding had been rolled up and put to one side, then cast a worried look at her daughter-in-law, Shangguan Lu, who moaned as she gripped the edge of the kang. After tamping the dirt down with both hands, she said softly to her daughter-in-law, “You can climb back up now.”
Shangguan Lu trembled under the gentle gaze of her mother-in-law. As she stared sadly at the older woman’s kind face, her ashen lips quivered, as if she wanted to say something.
“The devil’s gotten back into that old bastard Sima, firing his gun so early in the morning!” Shangguan Lü announced.
“Mother …” Shangguan Lu said.
Clapping her hands to loosen the dirt, Shangguan Lü muttered softly, “My good daughter-in-law, try your best! If this one’s a girl, too, I’d be a fool to keep defending you.”
Tears trickled from Shangguan Lu’s eyes as she bit down on her lip; holding up her sagging belly, she climbed back onto the dirt-covered kang.
“You’ve been down this road before,” Shangguan Lü said as she laid a roll of white cotton and a pair of scissors on the kang. “Go ahead and have your baby.” Then, with an impatient frown, she said, “Your father-in-law and Laidi’s daddy are in the barn tending to the black donkey. This will be her first foal, so I should be out there giving them a hand.”
Shangguan Lu nodded. Another explosion flew in on the wind, setting off a round of barking by frightened dogs. Sima Ting’s booming voice came in fits: “Fellow townsmen, flee for your lives, don’t wait another minute …” She felt the baby inside her kick, as if in response to Sima Ting’s shouts, the stabbing pains forcing drops of rancid sweat out of every pore in her body. She clenched her teeth to keep the scream inside her from bursting out. Through the mist of tears she saw the lush black hair of her mother-in-law as she knelt at the altar and placed three sandalwood joss sticks in Guanyin’s burner. Fragrant smoke curled up and quickly filled the room.
“Merciful
Bodhisattva Guanyin, who succors the downtrodden and the distressed, protect and take pity on me, deliver a son to this family…” Pressing down on her arched, swollen belly with both hands, cold to the touch, Shangguan Lu gazed up at the enigmatic, glossy face of the ceramic Guanyin in her altar, and said a silent prayer as fresh tears began to flow. Removing her wet trousers and rolling up the shirt to expose her belly and her breasts, she gripped the edge of the kang. In between contractions she ran her fingers through her matted hair and leaned against the rolled-up grass mat and millet stalks.
The chipped quicksilver surface of a mirror in the window lattice reflected her profile: sweat-soaked hair, long, slanted, lusterless eyes, a pale high-bridged nose, and full but chapped lips that never stopped quaking. Moisture-laden sunbeams streamed in through the window and fell on her belly. Its twisting, swollen blue veins and white, pitted skin looked hideous to her; mixed feelings, dark and light, like the clear blue of a summer sky in Northeast Gaomi with dark rain clouds rolling past, gripped her. She could hardly bear to look at that enormous, strangely taut belly.
She had once dreamed that her fetus was actually a chunk of cold steel. Another time she’d dreamed that it was a large, warty toad. She could bear the thought of a chunk of steel, but the image of the toad made her shudder. “Lord in Heaven, protect me … Worthy Ancestors, protect me … gods and demons everywhere, protect me, spare me, let me deliver a healthy baby boy … my very own son, come to Mother … Father of Heaven, Mother of Earth, yellow spirits and fox fairies, help me, please …” And so she prayed and pleaded, assaulted by wrenching contractions. As she clung to the mat beneath her, her muscles twitched and jumped, her eyes bulged. Mixed in with the wash of red light were white-hot threads that twisted and curled and shrank in front of her like silver melting in a furnace. In the end, willpower alone could not keep the scream from bursting through her lips; it flew through the window lattice and bounced up and down the streets and byways, where it met Sima Ting’s shout and entwined with it, a braid of sound that snaked through the hairy ears of the tall, husky, stooped-over Swedish pastor Malory, with his large head and scraggly red hair. He stopped on his way up the rotting boards of the steeple stairs. His deep blue ovine eyes, always moist and teary, and capable of moving you to the depths of your soul, suddenly emitted dancing sparks of startled glee. Crossing himself with his pudgy red fingers, he uttered in a thick Gaomi accent: “Almighty God …” He began climbing again, and when he reached the top, he rang a rusty bronze bell. The desolate sound spread through the mist-enshrouded, rosy dawn.
At the precise moment when the first peal of the bell rang out, and the shouted warning of a Jap attack hung in the air, a flood of amniotic fluid gushed from between the legs of Shangguan Lu. The muttony smell of a milk goat rose in the air, as did the sometimes pungent, sometimes subtle aroma of locust blossoms. The scene of making love with Pastor Malory beneath the locust tree last year flashed before her eyes with remarkable clarity, but before she gained any pleasure from the recollection, her mother-in-law ran into the room with blood-spattered hands, throwing fear into her, as she saw green sparks dancing off those hands.
“Has the baby come yet?” her mother-in-law asked, nearly shouting.
She shook her head, feeling ashamed.
Her mother-in-law’s head quaked brilliantly in the sunlight, and she noted with amazement that the older woman’s hair had turned gray.
“I thought you’d have had it by now.” Shangguan Lü reached out to touch her belly. Those hands — large knuckles, hard nails, rough skin, covered with blood — made her cringe; but she lacked the strength to move away from them as they settled unceremoniously onto her swollen belly, making her heart skip a beat and sending an icy current racing through her guts. Screams emerged unchecked, from terror, not pain. The hands probed and pressed and, finally, thumped, like testing a melon for ripeness. At last, they fell away and hung in the sun’s rays, heavy, despondent, as if she’d come away with an unripe melon. Her mother-in-law floated ethereally before her eyes, except for those hands, which were solid, awesome, autonomous, free to roam where they pleased. Her mother-in-law’s voice seemed to come from far away, from the depths of a pond, carried on the stench of mud and the bubbles of a crab: “… a melon falls to the ground when it’s time, and nothing will stop it… you have to tough it out, za-za hu-hu … want people to mock you? Doesn’t it bother you that your seven precious daughters will laugh at you …” She watched one of those hands descend weakly and, disgustingly, thump her belly again, producing soft hollow thuds, like a wet goatskin drum. “All you young women are spoiled. When your husband came into this world, I was sewing shoe soles the whole time …”
Finally, the thumping stopped and the hand pulled back into the shadows, where its hazy outline looked like the claws of a wild beast. Her mother-in-law’s voice glimmered in the darkness, the redolence of locust flowers wafted over. “Look at that belly, it’s huge, and it’s covered with strange markings. It must be a boy. That’s your good fortune, and mine, and the whole Shangguan family, for that matter. Bodhisattva, be here with her, Lord in Heaven, come to her side. Without a son, you’ll be no better than a slave as long as you live, but with one, you’ll be the mistress. Believe me or not, it’s up to you. Actually, it isn’t…”
“I believe, Mother, I believe you!” Shangguan Lu said reverently. Her gaze fell on the dark stains on the wall, grief filling her heart as memories of what had happened three years before surfaced. She had just delivered her seventh daughter, Shangguan Qiudi, driving her husband, Shangguan Shouxi, into such a blind rage that he’d flung a hammer at her, hitting her squarely in the head and staining the wall with her blood.
Her mother-in-law laid a basket upside down next to her. Her voice burned through the darkness like the flames of a wildfire: “Say this, ‘The child in my belly is a princely little boy’ Say it!” The basket was filled with peanuts. The woman’s face was suffused with a somber kindness; she was part deity, part loving parent, and Shangguan Lu was moved to tears.
“The child I’m carrying is a princely little boy. I’m carrying a prince … my own son …”
Her mother-in-law thrust some peanuts into her hand and told her to say, “Peanuts peanuts peanuts, boys and girls, the balance of yin and yang.”
Gratefully wrapping her hand around the peanuts, she repeated the mantra: “Peanuts peanuts peanuts, boys and girls, the balance of yin and yang.”
Shangguan Lü bent down, her tears falling unchecked. “Bodhi-sattva, be with her, Lord in Heaven, come to her side. Great joy will soon befall the Shangguan family! Laidi’s mother, lie here and shuck peanuts until it’s time. Our donkey’s about to foal. It’s her first, so I cannot stay with you.”
“You go on, Mother,” Shangguan Lu said emotionally. “Lord in Heaven, keep the Shangguan family’s black donkey safe, let her foal without incident…”
With a sigh, Shangguan Lü reeled out the door.
3
The dim light of a filthy bean-oil lamp on a millstone in the barn flickered uneasily, wisps of black smoke curling from the tip of its flame. The smell of lamp oil merged with the stink of donkey droppings and urine. The air was foul. The black animal lay on the ground between the millstone and a dark green stone trough. All Shangguan Lü could see when she walked in was the flickering light of the lamp, but she heard the anxious voice of Shangguan Fulu: “What did she have?”
She turned toward the sound and curled her lip, then crossed the room, past the donkey and Shangguan Shouxi, who was massaging the animal’s belly; she walked over to the window and ripped away the paper covering. A dozen rays of golden sunlight lit up the far wall. She then went to the millstone and blew out the lamp, releasing the smell of burned oil to snuff out the other rank odors. Shangguan Shouxi’s dark oily face took on a golden sheen; his tiny black eyes sparkled like burning coals. “Mother,” he said fearfully, “let’s leave. Everybody at Felicity Manor has fled, the Japanese will be here soon …�
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Shangguan Lü stared at her son with a look that said, Why can’t you be a man? Avoiding her eyes, he lowered his sweaty face.
“Who told you they’re coming?” Shangguan Lü demanded angrily.
“The steward at Felicity Manor has been firing his gun and sounding the alarm,” Shangguan Shouxi muttered as he wiped his sweaty face with an arm covered with donkey hairs. It was puny alongside the muscular arm of his mother. His lips, which had been quivering like a baby at the tit, grew steady, as his head jerked up. Pricking up his tiny ears to listen for sounds, he said, “Mother, Father, do you hear that?”
The hoarse voice of Sima Ting drifted lazily into the barn. “Elders, mothers, uncles, aunts — brothers, sisters-in-law — brothers and sisters — run for your lives, flee while you can, hide in the fields till the danger passes — the Japanese are on their way — this is not a false alarm, it’s real. Fellow villagers, don’t waste another minute, run, don’t trade your lives for a few broken-down shacks. While you live, the mountains stay green, while you live, the world keeps turning — fellow villagers, run while you can, do not wait until it’s too late …”
Shangguan Shouxi jumped to his feet. “Did you hear that, Mother? Let’s go!”
“Go? Go where?” Shangguan Lü said unhappily. “Of course the people at Felicity Manor have run off. But why should we join them? We are blacksmiths and farmers. We owe no tariff to the emperor or taxes to the nation. We are loyal citizens, whoever is in charge. The Japanese are human, too, aren’t they? They’ve occupied the Northeast, but where would they be without common folk to till the fields and pay the rent? You’re his father, the head of the family, tell me, am I right?”
Shangguan Fulu’s lips parted to reveal two rows of strong, yellow teeth. It was hard to tell if he was smiling or frowning.