by Liu Zhenyun
The cow nodded. The courage to continue swelled inside Xuelian. Her mental problems were abruptly a thing of the past. Then ten more years passed, and the cow reached the age of twenty-one. One night, as it lay dying, it looked up at Xuelian, who said:
“Please don’t die, little one. You are the only one in the whole world who believes me.”
Tears filled the cow’s eyes.
“Before you die,” Xuelian said, “tell me if I should keep protesting?”
The cow shook its head, breathed its last and shut its eyes. Xuelian threw herself on its body and wept.
“You shit, even you stopped thinking I can win my case!”
She cried on:
“No one on earth believes me, so why the fuck keep at it!”
Most people whose cows die simply sell the carcass to the town’s knacker, but Li Xuelian did not do that for either of the two cows that died during that ten-year period. She had them buried them on the riverbank instead, the daughter next to her mother.
After the cow shook her head, Li Xuelian decided to take the dying animal’s advice to stop. In truth, the cow’s response to her question was not the sole deciding factor. Twenty years of protests had worn her down to the point where though her body managed to hold on, her heart could not. So she buried her impulse to torment people along with the younger cow. But then she told Mayor Ma Wenbin and the others about her cow, and they didn’t believe her, accusing her not only of telling a lie, but also of humiliating the officials with a rebuke so strong they stormed off. Her actions had nearly made Chief Justice Wang Gongdao explode from anger. Xuelian found it hard to blame them, for if they told people they’d run into a woman whose cow could talk, no one would believe them. What angered her was the fact that not a soul on earth ever believed her. How come no one was the equal of a cow?
Of greater significance in Xuelian’s decision not to protest this year than what the cow told her was something her classmate Big Head Zhao said. Zhao, who’d cooked for the Beijing resident representatives of the province twenty years before, had put her up in his room on her first trip to Beijing. There, as we recall, she had caused a political firestorm by crashing the National People’s Congress in the Great Hall of the People, for which Zhao should have shouldered some of the responsibility. But one of the national leaders had made a case for Xuelian’s action, which had then led to an investigation of local officials who had created the conditions for the protest. No one else dared launch a similar investigation on this angle of the case, and Zhao worked on in his kitchen for another eighteen years without incident. He retired at the age of fifty and returned to his home, where he got a job in the kitchen of the Hongyun lou Restaurant, where he could earn a bit of extra money. His wife had died of breast cancer the year before and their son had married and moved out, leaving him all alone. He regularly rode his bicycle from the county town to visit Xuelian, and was there the day after her cow died. As they sat under the jujube tree in her yard, she told him the story of her cow and then asked him:
“Do you believe me that my cow talked to me?”
He did not.
“I know how bitter you must be, but don’t think crazy thoughts.”
Li Xuelian glared at him.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me. So tell me this: I don’t plan to protest this year. Do you believe that?”
Suddenly bringing a halt to her protest after twenty years came as a shock to him. When that wore off, he asked the same question the chief justice and county chief had asked:
“Why stop now?”
“Because my cow said so. Just before she died she told me not to keep at it.”
With a clap of his hands, Zhao said:
“I don’t care if your cow talked or not, that’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time. I just didn’t want to upset you.”
“What sort of talk?”
“The same as the cow. You can’t keep protesting forever. After twenty years, what good has come of it?”
“But that’s why I keep doing it, because nothing good has come of it.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at. Twenty years of torment, initially intended for someone else, has now come back to you. Let me ask you this: who planted the seeds of your protest?”
“That bastard Qin Yuhe.”
Again Zhao clapped his hands.
“There, you see, twenty years of protesting have had no effect on him. Despite the constant harassment campaign, he continues to sleep with his wife and child, leaving you as the only victim of harassment. Look at you, your hair has turned gray.”
“That’s exactly why this sticks in my craw.”
“Then let me ask you this: You say your divorce was a sham, but Qin Yuhe says it was real. Why would he say that?”
“He found himself a willing whore.”
More hand clapping.
“There’s your answer. He’s got a new life with his whore, but you’re stuck on harassing something belonging to the past, so of course he won’t admit that the divorce was a sham. Unless he relents one day, you cannot win.”
“That bastard has done this to me. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
“As I see it,” Zhao said, “instead of killing him back then, you should have done what he did.”
“Like what?” a surprised Li Xuelian asked.
“Found a man and gotten married. If he could do it, so could you. You know, what’s good for the goose … Wouldn’t that have been a lot better than fighting over who’s right and who’s wrong? If you’d done that back then, you could have enjoyed a happy life these past twenty years instead of growing old on the path of protest.”
Li Xuelian just stood there. Not only had Big Head Zhao been a social outcast in school, but he’d spent his adult life as a cook, and yet at this critical moment, he spoke with the sort of good judgment no one else had managed. He might not have said it as a high school student, but as a cook he did. He might not have said it twenty years before, but he did now. Back then Li Xuelian had had a similar thought. She’d gone to the fertilizer plant to get Qin Yuhe to say honestly that the divorce had been a sham. If he’d done that, she would not have pestered people the way she did and could have put her grudge aside to start a new life. But he had called her a Pan Jinlian and given her no choice but to protest for the next twenty years. Regrets crept in: if she’d simply ignored Qin and looked for another man with whom she could start anew, she might now have a wonderful life instead of winding up as empty as a bamboo basket used to fetch water.
“What good does it do to talk about that now?”
“Plenty,” Big Head said. “There’s still time to find a man.”
With a look of disdain, she said:
“Who would want a forty-nine-year-old, gray-haired woman like me?”
“I would,” Zhao said without a second’s hesitation.
Li Xueilian froze on the spot. She thought he was joking, but he looked dead serious. And yet it was a corner she could not turn, not the idea of marrying Big Head Zhao, but because in twenty years of lodging her protest, unwilling to stop until she remarried and then re-divorced Qin Yuhe, the thought of marrying someone else had never occurred to her. To have it brought up as a proposal put a scowl on her face. She gave Zhao a little kick.
“How could you make fun of me in the midst of all my troubles?”
“I’m not. You and I are both single and would make a perfect match.”
“But everybody knows me as Pan Jinlian.”
“I’m a fan of Pan Jinlian. I love a woman with spice.”
She kicked him a second time.
“See, you’re making fun of me.”
Zhao moved out of kicking distance.
“Okay,” he said with a laugh, “I don’t believe your name is Pan, how’s that?”
He turned serious.
“Think it over. It’s a lot better than protesting.”
After Zhao left, Li Xuelian did think it over,
thought about it all night. By morning she was convinced that Zhao had been right, that he made more sense than the cow had. What good had it done to tell her not to protest with no idea as to how she was supposed to get by afterward? Big Head had told her what he thought she could do when she stopped protesting. Remarry. Then there’d be no need. And if Pan Jinlian remarried, she’d no longer be Pan Jinlian. Or so she figured. The problem was Zhao’s unexpected proposal. Unexpected, maybe, but he was no stranger. Thirty years earlier they’d been schoolmates, and he was interested in her enough even then to hand her candy from the desk behind hers. Thirty years earlier, Zhao had been a coward; ten years after that he was still a coward. But not now, not if he could stand there and propose marriage. Pan Jinlian couldn’t scare him off now; he was a different man, and she was tempted. But a proposal alone could not make her leap from protest to a second marriage. It was a hairpin curve that required time to get used to. She had told Mayor Ma Wenbin only part of the reason she planned not to protest this year, the part about the cow; she hadn’t said anything about the possibility of remarrying, and not just anybody, but someone who had already proposed, a hotel cook, Big Head Zhao by name. Talk of the cow and not of Zhao had sent Ma and his entourage off in anger, thinking she was playing games with them. Their anger had fueled hers. If the chief justice, county chief, and mayor had not come to talk to her individually, she’d have listened first to her cow, and next to Big Head Zhao, and there’d be no talk of protest this year. But when they pressed her to stop her campaign, she saw through their scheme to fool her enough to get past this year’s National People’s Congress, and knew that they didn’t care one iota about her. They were only worried about themselves, afraid that if she went to Beijing again, they could lose their jobs. That was all the reason she needed to decide to go after all. She could put the situation between her and Big Head on hold for the time being; after twenty years, a little more time couldn’t hurt. If she decided to accept his proposal, before they married she had to get something off her chest, and one last protest could do that. The difference this time would be the addition of a bit of spite, and would no longer resemble those that had gone before. The target would no longer be Qin Yuhe. This year, she’d take aim at the chief justice, the county chief, and the mayor.
5
In the wake of the disaster at the Lamb Stew Diner, Mayor Ma Wenbin rode silently out of Round the Bend Township. County Chief Zheng Zhong sat beside him, Ma’s secretary was up front next to the driver. Since Ma didn’t say a word, neither did the other two. All they could see in the darkness was the up and down movement of their headlights on the bumpy, twisting country road, which did not smooth out until they were on the open highway; the inside of the car was quiet as death. Ma was heading back to the city, Zheng and his people to the county, so at the intersection where the roads split, Zheng got out of Ma’s car and waited for his car to pull up behind them. Zheng and his retinue then stood on the side of the road to see Mayor Ma off. But when Ma’s car reached the toll station, it stopped and began backing up. Zheng Zhong rushed up in time for Ma to roll down his window and gaze into the night, still without saying a word. Zheng was forced to stand there as Ma’s gaze turned toward the highway up ahead, where he could see the headlights of speeding vehicles. After a long moment, he said:
“That countrywoman has really disappointed me.”
That simple comment made Zheng Zhong shudder. The words “really disappointed” from Ma in regard to a cadre would have been a clear indication that the individual’s political life had come to an end. But Li Xuelian was not a cadre, just a simple countrywoman with a protest, someone no local official could abide. Ma drew back his gaze and sighed.
“I think we all underestimated her,” he said.
Zheng did not know how to respond to that. If he echoed the other man’s comment, by belittling himself, he would also be doing the same to Ma Wenbin. Everyone present at the Lamb Stew Diner could see that the woman had ridiculed Ma, or offended him, something none of them could have predicted. But he could not come up with a good reason to disagree? Best to merely open his mouth and shut it right away. Ma glanced at him, adjusted his gold-framed glasses, and said:
“So we’ll do it your way.”
What did that mean? Zheng did not know. If he had a “way” he wasn’t aware of it. Of course, he didn’t dare ask for an explanation. But then he recalled how he had handled the government office siege when he was Executive Deputy Chief in that neighboring county. He’d waged a tit-for-tat struggle. So that was what Ma meant.
“I’ll go back and arrest her,” he said. “I’ll find an excuse.”
Too bad he’d misunderstood Ma’s meaning.
“I don’t want you to arrest her,” Ma said with a frown. “You can’t go around arresting anybody you want. Without a good cause, it can come back to bite you—hard. Why do you think all those people were sacked twenty years ago? They tossed her in jail, that’s why. You can’t lock her up forever. And she’s definitely no ordinary countrywoman.” He was getting hotter by the minute, and Zheng was beginning to sweat. He’d misunderstood what his superior said and spoken too fast, bringing the night’s wrath down on his head. Lucky for him, Ma was a self-possessed man who could keep his anger in check.
“When you were Deputy County Chief you had to deal with a siege, but not here. You can’t paint a melon with a calabash model, understand?”
Normally quick on the uptake, Zheng didn’t have an answer now. Did he understand or didn’t he? He was terrified of saying the wrong thing a second time and really setting the mayor off. Ma’s secretary saved the day by sticking his head out the window and saying:
“Mayor Ma is right, all matters need to be dealt with in their own way.”
Then, in a more jocular tone, he said:
“Since she didn’t lay siege to our government building, I guess we’ll have to find a way to lay siege to her.”
Finally, Zheng understood what Ma wanted him to know, which was to have someone from the county keep her under surveillance to prevent her from taking her protest to Beijing. Nothing new there, since officials at all levels of government regularly did that to stop people from airing grievances. Zheng realized that Ma Wenbin’s anger had not been directed at him, after all; it was directed at himself. He had been pestered by a countrywoman with a protest, and had not been able to come up with a means of dealing with her. Not only had he wasted a whole evening, but now he needed to devise a strategy to keep her home. As someone who took pleasure in trying out new things, things others hadn’t thought of and could not manage, Ma was angered by the knowledge that this was something he could not manage. Zheng Zhong tried to help him out of his predicament.
“The problem originated in my county,” he said, “so the responsibility is mine. You can rest assured, Mayor Ma, you and your secretary, that I’ll do whatever it takes to convince her to stay home and not go to Beijing to disrupt the Congress this year.”
6
From the next day on, a policeman was stationed outside Li Xuelian’s house, day and night, one at each corner. Dressed in civilian clothes, they just smoked and moved around. This was not the first time she’d been under police surveillance. Over the past twenty years, three or four police had taken up positions around her house each year at NPC time. There were also two or three during county and municipal elections, and it had become a habitual occurrence both for Li Xuelian and for the police, who greeted one another amicably. Since she was not a criminal and bore no grudge against the police, they treated her with deference, smiling and calling her “Aunty.” Some were even returnees.
“Nice to see you again,” she’d say.
“Back to serve as your bodyguard, Aunty,” they’d reply with a little laugh.
As long as she stayed in the yard, they left her alone, but the minute she left her home, they fell in behind her.
“How could I be so lucky as to deserve all you footmen?” she’d remark.
“You
and the American president,” they’d joke.
At home, when her handlers were thirsty, she gave them water.
This year’s force was made up of two regulars and two new policemen, one of whom, the son of the town’s one-time butcher, was an auxiliary worker. Twenty years before, Li Xuelian had gone first to her younger brother for help in killing Qin Yuhe; but when she learned that he had gone to Shandong, she had turned to Old Hu, the butcher, telling him—untruthfully—that she only wanted to beat Qin, not kill him. But when he’d heard that it was about killing, and not just one person, but several, he’d nearly wet himself. Now he was confined to bed, the victim of a paralytic stroke, and could no longer sell meat in the market. Xuelian was surprised to learn that one of her new “bodyguards” was butcher Hu’s son, a slim, handsome young man, nothing like his squat, dark-skinned father. She struck up a conversation with him, and quickly sensed that the kid could be a problem.
“So you’re Hu’s son. How’s he doing?”
“Not so good. Confined to bed. Probably not long for this world.”
“How come they sent you here today?”
“To get even. I had an argument with the station chief last month, and he paid me back by dumping this shitty job on me.”
“Isn’t watching people better than arresting them?”
“That’s easy for you to say, since you sleep warm and toasty in your bed at night, while we have to stand out here in the cold. They say spring is right around the corner, but you wouldn’t know it by the temperatures.”
“Who said I had to be watched?”
“Aunty, let’s not talk about that. It’s not your fault and it’s not mine. Let’s blame it on the NPC.”
She laughed.
Laughter and chatting, however, did nothing to change her decision to lodge her protest. And to get to Beijing she had to escape the surveillance. But not yet, since the Congress would not start for a week. There had been escape attempts in the past, some successful, some not, and all at night. On this particular day, Big Head had ridden his bicycle over, and when he saw the cordon around her house, he greeted one of the cops, whom he knew. Inside the house, he said to Xuelian: