by Yu Hua
Xu Yulan pointed at his retreating figure and shouted to her neighbors, “I’ve never seen anyone so shameless! He steals your things and still struts away like he’s done you a good turn.”
She continued to curse in the direction of the bespectacled man until he disappeared into the distance. Then she turned and caught sight of Xu Sanguan. As soon as she saw him, she fell heavily on the doorstep and began to cry.
“It’s all over for us. With other folks the old saying holds true: ‘As goes the nation so goes the family.’ But it’s different for us. The country’s just fine, but we’re ruined. First Blacksmith Fang came to take away all our things. Not one month later, and we’ve been betrayed by one of our own. That Xu Sanguan is no better than a beast. Usually, he’s famously stingy! If I buy a yard of fabric, he feels sick to his stomach for a whole month! But as soon as that Fatty Lin comes on the scene, things change. As soon as that bitch shows up, he’s handing out ten pounds of soup bones, four, even five pounds of yellow beans, and no less than two pounds of mung beans! Not to mention the chrysanthemum flowers! I wonder how much all of that stuff cost?”
At this point Xu Yulan appeared to have thought of something else, because she interrupted her harangue to shout toward Xu Sanguan, “You stole my money! You must have stolen the money I hid inside my trunk. I saved that money one or two fen at a time. I worked for ten years to save that money! Ten years of blood, sweat, and tears! And you gave it all away to that fat bitch!”
Xu Yulan darted over to her trunk, opened the lid, and rifled through the contents. Soon she fell silent; she had found her savings intact.
Having securely refastened the lid of the trunk, she looked up to see that Xu Sanguan had closed the front door, shutting the neighbors outside. He smiled ingratiatingly toward her with thirty yuan in his hand, the three ten-yuan notes fanned out from his fingers like a poker hand. Xu Yulan sidled over to where he was standing, took the money from his hand, and asked in a low voice, “Where did this money come from?”
Xu Sanguan also lowered his voice. “I earned it selling blood.”
“You sold blood again?”
Xu Yulan gave a low moan and, after a moment of silence, began to cry. Between her sobs, she said, “Why did I marry you? I’ve suffered and I’ve struggled for ten years now, and I’ve given you three sons. When did you ever sell blood for my sake? I never knew until now what a heartless son of a bitch you are. I can’t believe you sold your blood just to give that fat bitch some soup bones.”
Xu Sanguan tapped her on the shoulder. “Since when have you given me three sons? Is Yile my son? And when I sold blood to pay Blacksmith Fang, who do you think I was doing it for?”
Xu Yulan fell silent. Then she gazed at Xu Sanguan for a moment. “Tell me. What exactly happened between you and that Fatty Lin? Did you really want a woman as fat as all that?”
Xu Sanguan stroked his face thoughtfully. “She broke her leg, so I went to see her. It was just common courtesy.”
“And was it just common courtesy to hop in bed with her? Go on.”
Xu Sanguan said, “I reached out my hand to squeeze her leg and asked her where it hurt.”
“On her thigh? Or her calf?”
“At first it was the calf, but then I somehow got to her thigh.”
“You’re shameless.” Xu Yulan jabbed a finger at his face. “Then what happened? What did you do next?”
“What happened next?” Xu Sanguan hesitated for a moment. “What happened next was I grabbed her tits.”
“Aiya!” Xu Yulan cried out. “You worthless son of a bitch! Since when did you start taking tricks from that bastard He Xiaoyong’s book?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Xu Yulan spent twenty-one and a half of the thirty yuan that she had captured from Xu Sanguan’s outstretched fingers to make new clothes. She made herself a new pair of gray cotton pants and a light blue cotton-padded jacket embroidered with dark blue flowers. Yile, Erle, and Sanle each got a new cotton-padded jacket as well. Xu Sanguan was the only one in the family who didn’t get any new clothes, because every time Xu Yulan thought of the incident with Lin Fenfang, she was too angry.
Soon winter came. When Xu Sanguan saw that Xu Yulan, Yile, Erle, and Sanle all had new padded jackets, he said to Xu Yulan, “If you spend the money I earned selling blood on yourself or on Erle and Sanle, that’s fine with me. But I can’t stand for you to spend it on Yile.”
“Would you feel any better if I spent it on Fatty Lin?”
Xu Sanguan, hurt by this outburst, lowered his head and continued quietly, “Yile’s not my son. I’ve raised him for nine years already, and it looks like there’ll be many more years to come. I’ve already accepted that. And I’m perfectly willing to spend the money I make sweating over at the factory on him. But it just doesn’t feel right to spend any more of my blood money on him.”
Xu Yulan took the remaining eight and a half yuan, supplemented the sum with two yuan of her own, and used it to make Xu Sanguan a navy blue Mao jacket. She told Xu Sanguan, “This jacket was made with the money you earned selling blood. And I contributed two yuan of my own. Do you feel any better now?”
Xu Sanguan remained silent. Xu Yulan had something on him now, and he couldn’t afford to ride as high as he once had. In the past Xu Yulan had taken care of all the household chores while Xu Sanguan worked at the factory. After the affair with Lin Fenfang came out into the open, it was Xu Yulan’s turn to ride high. She took to wearing her finely woven sweater and strolling around with a handful of melon seeds, leisurely ducking in and out of the neighbors’ places for a chat. And once they had gotten started, she and her friends might prattle on for two, even three hours. Xu Sanguan, meanwhile, would be in the kitchen cooking rice and stir-frying some dishes, bathed in sweat. His neighbors would often poke their heads inside the door and, catching sight of Xu Sanguan busy with his cookery, laugh and say:
“Xu Sanguan, cooking again tonight?”
“Xu Sanguan, go a little easier. Chopping vegetables isn’t like chopping firewood, you know.”
“Xu Sanguan, since when did you get become so hard-working?”
Xu Sanguan would say to them, “There’s nothing I can do. Xu Yulan’s got something on me. It’s like the old saying goes: ‘A moment of pleasure leads to a lifetime of regret.’ ”
For her part, Xu Yulan was wont to tell the others, “I think I’ve finally got things straight. It used to be that I was always looking out for my man and doing everything for the sake of the kids. Just as long as they got enough to eat, I was perfectly happy to go hungry. As long as they were comfortable, I was willing to put up with any kind of discomfort. But I’ve finally got things straight. In the future, I’m going to look after myself. If I don’t care about my own welfare, no one else will. You just can’t trust men. Even if they have a beauty at home, they still think they can play around with other women. You can’t count on the kids either.”
Xu Sanguan realized how stupid he had been. The affair itself was one thing, but buying Lin Fenfang a heap of soup bones and yellow beans had been stupid. Even an idiot would have started to suspect something was going on when he found all those things on his wife’s table.
But the more he thought about it, the more he felt that the affair with Lin Fenfang hadn’t done much harm. After all, he hadn’t knocked her up. That was more than he could say for He Xiaoyong and Xu Yulan. They had produced Yile, and he was still responsible for the boy.
The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. So he called Xu Yulan over and told her, “From this day on, I’m not doing the housework anymore.” He said to Xu Yulan, “You did it one time with He Xiaoyong, and I did it once with Lin Fenfang. You and He Xiaoyong ended up with Yile. Did Lin Fenfang and I make a ‘Four-le’? We did not. We’ve both made serious mistakes, but yours was much more serious than mine.”
Xu Yulan burst into howls of protest and jabbed both hands toward his face. “You’re really no better than a beast. I’d already fo
rgotten about your affair with that bitch. Now you insist on reminding me. What did I do in my past life to deserve this? Whatever it was, it’s coming back to haunt me.”
As she shouted, she edged toward her place on the doorstep.
Xu Sanguan rushed to block her way, saying as he held her fast, “Okay, okay, okay then, I’ll never bring it up again, all right?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “This year is 1958. We’ve had People’s Communes, the Great Leap Forward, Backyard Steel Furnaces, and what else? They took back my grandpa’s and my fourth uncle’s land down in the countryside. From now on it looks like no one will have their own land anymore. All the land belongs to the state. If you want to plant crops, you’ll have to rent the land from them, and when you harvest the crop, you have to give some grain to the state too. The state is just like the landlords before. Of course, you can’t say that the state is a landlord. You should call it the People’s Commune instead. And our silk factory’s started to smelt steel too. We made eight little furnaces. Me and four other people are responsible for looking after one of them. So now I’m not the man who distributes the silkworm cocoons anymore. I’m a steel smelter now. You know why we have to smelt so much steel? Because steel is like grain, grain for the state. It’s like rice, wheat, meat, and fish for the state. That’s why smelting steel is just like planting rice in the paddies.”
Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “I was out taking a walk today, and I saw lots of people in red armbands going from house to house confiscating people’s woks, and their bowls, and their rice, and all their oil, salt, soy, and vinegar. I’ll bet they’ll show up at our place too in a couple of days. They say no one’s allowed to cook at home anymore. If you want to eat, you have to go to the canteen. You know how many canteens there will be in town? I counted three on the way home. There’s one at the silk factory, one at Heavenrest Temple, and they turned the old Buddhist monastery into a canteen too. All the monks have to wear white hats and aprons, so they look like real chefs now. And then there’s the theater around the block. That’s a canteen now too. You know where the kitchen is? Right on the stage. All the singing clowns from the Yue Opera Company are up onstage rinsing vegetables. I hear the leading man’s the deputy of the canteen, and the guy who always played the villains is the vice deputy.”
Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “I took you to the canteen at the silk factory the day before yesterday, and we went to Heavenrest Temple canteen yesterday. I’ll take you to the canteen at the theater again to eat today. There’s not enough meat in the dishes at the Heavenrest Temple canteen. The monks who do the cooking all used to be vegetarians, so they don’t use much meat. When we had the green pepper fried pork yesterday, didn’t you hear everyone joking that it was ‘green pepper minus the pork’? Now that we’ve tried three of the canteens, it looks like you and the kids like the one at the theater the best, but I still like the big canteen at the silk factory. The dishes at the theater aren’t bad, but they don’t have big enough portions. Over at the factory they give you more of everything, including meat, and you can eat as much as you want. I didn’t burp once after I ate at Heavenrest Temple canteen, and I didn’t burp after eating at the canteen at the theater either. But when I ate at the silk factory, I was burping all night long. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the big canteen at City Hall. They have the best food in town. That’s what Blacksmith Fang told me. He said the chefs over there are all from the Victory Restaurant, and those chefs definitely know how to cook the best dishes in town. You know what their specialty is? It’s fried pork livers.”
Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “Let’s not go to the City Hall canteen tomorrow. It’s so exhausting to eat over there. At least a quarter of the people in town go there for dinner. It’s more like getting in a big fight than having a meal. Besides, the kids almost got squashed to death over there, it was so crowded. My undershirt was wet through with sweat. And with so many people farting and stinking up the place, it’s hard to have much of an appetite. Let’s go to the silk factory tomorrow, okay? I know you want to go to the theater, but they’ve already shut down the canteen there, and I hear the one at Heavenrest Temple has been closed for a few days too. But the silk factory’s canteen is still open. But we’d better go early or else there won’t be anything left to eat.”
Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “They shut down all the canteens in town. Looks like the good times are over. No one’s going to take care of our meals anymore. Does that mean we have to cook for ourselves again? But what are we going to cook?”
Xu Yulan said, “There’s two crocks of rice underneath the bed. When they first came by to take the wok, the rice, the oil, salt, soy, and vinegar, I couldn’t bear to give them those two crocks of rice. That’s the rice I saved over the years by short-changing all of you, so I just couldn’t bear to let them take it away.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Xu Yulan had been married to Xu Sanguan for more than ten years now, and she had spent those years scrimping and saving and carefully calculating just to get by. The two crocks of rice she had under the bed were originally used for ladling; there was a slightly larger crock in the kitchen. Every day when she cooked rice, Xu Yulan removed the wooden lid from the rice crock in the kitchen and ladled just enough for the whole family’s daily consumption into the pot. Then she removed one handful of rice from the pot and placed it in one of the crocks under the bed. As she explained to Xu Sanguan, “None of you would have especially noticed an extra mouthful of rice anyway, and you won’t really miss a mouthful either.”
What this signified was that Xu Sanguan had eaten two less mouthfuls of rice than he was due every day. After Yile, Erle, and Sanle came along, they too were made to miss out on two mouthfuls a day. As for Xu Yulan, she cheated herself of even more rice. The rice that was saved by way of these measures ended up in a small crock underneath the bed. When the first crock was full, she got another empty rice crock and proceeded to fill that one up as well.
But Xu Sanguan disagreed. “It’s not as if we’re planning to open a rice shop or something. What’s the point of keeping so much rice around? If we don’t eat it by the summer, the bugs will get into it.”
Xu Yulan agreed, and she stopped putting away any more rice after she filled up the second crock.
If the rice was kept in storage for too long, the bugs would start to infest the crock. The bugs lived, ate, shat, and slept in the rice, turning grain after grain into powder. Their excrement looked a bit like flour, and it was difficult to tell the two apart— the only difference was that their shit was slightly yellow. As soon as the two crocks were full, then Xu Yulan would dump the contents into the bigger crock in the kitchen.
She would sit on the bed measuring how much rice there had been in the two small crocks and, based on its weight, how much money the rice had been worth. She would proceed to fold an equivalent sum into a neat packet and place it on the bottom of her trunk. This money was not to be spent.
She told Xu Sanguan, “This money was snatched bit by bit from out of your mouths. And you didn’t even notice the difference, did you?” She added, “We can’t use this money for anything ordinary. Something really important has to come up before we can spend it.”
Xu Sanguan took exception to this entire procedure. “This makes about as much sense as taking off your pants to fart. It’s all completely unnecessary.”
Xu Yulan said, “I really can’t agree with you. No one can get through life without ever getting sick or having some kind of disaster happen to them. Everyone has their ups and downs. And when hard times come, it’s better to be prepared than not. Smart folks always prepare some way out of a jam before it happens. And anyway, this is how I save a little money for all of us.”
Xu Yulan would often say, “Hard times are going to come. No one can go through their life without running into hard times once or twice. You just can’t escape.”
When Sanle was eight, Erle was ten, and Yile was eleven, th
e whole town was flooded. The floodwaters reached one meter at their deepest, and even the shallows came up to the knees. That June Xu Sanguan’s house lay in a pool of water for seven days. The water lapped back and forth across the floor, and when they slept at night, they could hear the sound of the rippling waves.
After the flood came famine. At first Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan did not realize what was happening. They heard that most of the rice in the countryside was rotting in the paddies. Xu Sanguan thought of his grandpa and his fourth uncle and reassured himself that it was a good thing they were already gone—otherwise, how could they make it through the year? His other three uncles were still alive, but they almost never occurred to him, because they had never been good to him or paid him any mind.
It wasn’t until a constant stream of destitute people begging for food began to arrive in town that Xu Sanguan and Xu Yulan truly understood that famine was at hand. Every morning when they opened the front door, they would see beggars sleeping in the lane in front of their house. There were new faces every day, but they all grew more and more wasted and sallow as time went by.
The rice shop was open on occasion and sometimes closed. Every time it reopened, the price of rice would double or even triple. After a short while the money that used to buy ten pounds of rice would get you only two pounds of sweet potatoes. The silk factory stopped work, because there were no more silkworms. Xu Yulan no longer needed to go fry dough in the morning because there was no flour and no cooking oil. The schools shut down, and most of the shops in town closed their doors. Of the twenty or so restaurants that used to be in operation, only one— the Victory Restaurant—remained open.
Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “This famine has come at the worst possible time. If it had been a few years back, we would have been able to squeak through just fine. But we were already running low on supplies.