Land of Big Numbers

by Te-Ping Chen

  “You are the love of my life and always have been,” he’d say.

  “We aren’t teenagers,” she’d reply, hiding her pleasure. “Go work on your airplane.”

  The neighbors found excuses to drop in so they could sneak looks at the contraption, which rose from the scraps Cao Cao had collected through the years like a metal phoenix, including parts of the old jiqiren, which the farmer had disassembled to make his plane. The reports circulated: It had wings built of hinged iron, or maybe steel. It had a rounded nose like the tip of an egg!

  In the town nearest them, he bewildered shopkeepers with his requests and came back with new motors, cables, and sheet metal, even a red vinyl cushion for the pilot’s seat. In time he had drained nearly all of his and Anning’s savings, spending thousands of yuan. Anning fretted, and Cao Cao soothed her. When the airplane was ready, he said, they’d sell it at a profit. “There are rich men in town who might like to buy such a thing. With their own airplane, they can go anywhere. So convenient.”

  She said, “How do you know what rich men will like?”

  Still, Cao Cao wasn’t deterred. The party wanted members of standing, members of reputation, and surely once his plane was built, Secretary Jiang could not say no. If Cao Cao was a party member, everyone in the village would look at him differently. He would no longer be Cao Cao, a foolish old man whose son never returned to help with the harvest and whose cornfields always looked more ragged than the rest. He would be Cao Cao, a man who’d contributed to his village, to the nation’s great revival, worthy of respect.

  April came, and with it a week in which every villager scrabbled up into the mountains to gather apricots. It was an unspoken contest every year among all the residents, who kept a careful eye on the fruit’s ripening. No one owned the land, and anyone could do the picking, but if anyone was watching, custom dictated you couldn’t take more than your fair share. Early morning, then, was the best time; if you got there ahead of everyone else, the trees were still laden and you could pick more than your fill.

  The apricot trees blossomed just before the summer, which was when the town party committee accepted party member recommendations from the countryside. For years, Cao Cao had woken early and climbed the hills to inspect the radiant white trees and their offerings. When the apricots were full and evidently ready for plucking, he would pick a whole bagful to present to the party secretary, keeping only a sticky handful in reserve for himself and Anning. Over the years, the simple transaction had gathered a tremendous significance in their eyes, though each tried to pretend it wasn’t so.

  “I probably won’t be accepted this time,” he’d tell her, as they sifted through the damp-skinned pile, picking out the roundest, the smoothest, leaving the dirt-scabbed ones behind.

  “It’s just to be polite,” she agreed.

  There were some in the village who didn’t like the muskrat-faced man much; he never cleaned out his part of the sewer, leaving it to neighbors to take a stick and occasionally poke around to make sure the street didn’t get backed up with his smelly refuse. It was whispered, too, that there were corn fertilizer subsidies the village was owed that had gotten stalled in the party secretary’s pocket, though Cao Cao was among those who refused to listen. The party was responsible for the country’s progress and prosperity—​anyone could see that.

  That year, in the week when the apricots began to beckon, Cao Cao had woken up stiff and aching in his legs; every season, it seemed, the pain grew worse. On the third day, he lay in the cold room for a while, Anning’s slow breathing beside him, before he forced himself upright in the direction of the hills. It wasn’t yet dawn. As he climbed, his legs trembled, and he stopped in the blue dark and leaned against a boulder, heart hammering, uncertain. At last he pushed himself upward toward the white trees, but on arrival he saw others had been there before him: the branches were largely stripped.

  Later in the day, he knocked tiredly on the party secretary’s door. The house was the only one in the village that was tiled, mostly in white, though the entrance tiles were painted in red and green and turquoise flowers and dragons. When the party secretary opened the door, Cao Cao noticed that he was wearing a new, fine leather jacket, its grain soft and delicate as a woman’s skin. Cao Cao ached to touch it.

  Secretary Jiang asked about Anning and about his son, and then Cao Cao pulled out his half-filled bag. “It’s not much,” he said.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t,” the muskrat-faced man said. But Cao Cao noticed that his hand was already outstretched to take them. “And how’s the plane coming along?” he asked.

  Cao Cao beamed delightedly, encouraged. “It will be ready soon,” he promised. “You will be the first to see it fly.”

  In the winter Cao Cao worked in a bulky coat and furry hat with earflaps, so that his face was scarcely visible. In the summer he worked in a white tank top and shorts that revealed wrinkled, skinny thighs. One morning he accidentally sprayed battery acid across his cheeks and neck, requiring a brief hospitalization in town. Their son, married now with a child, came to visit him, bringing with him apples and mimeographed sections of a book on airplane engineering. But he didn’t stay long, and he didn’t help peel the apples for his father, either.

  “We should have had a daughter,” Anning mourned as she left apple shavings on the ground. “A daughter you can depend on in your old age.” For years, the village had been emptied of its young people; no one wanted to farm anymore. When they came back on weekends from town it was with tinny ringtones and asymmetrical bangs and white shoelaces, and they never stayed long.

  After they got home from the hospital, the sky sulked for days, spitting rain, and when it came down harder, in great curtains, it made the roof leak. One night the wind blew loudly; it was as though a pack of ghosts was baying to get in. But then the sky cleared brilliantly, and Cao Cao worked for two months under a scrim of crystalline blue.

  Sometimes he sang softly to himself. Years ago, the party secretary’s father had died, and the whole village had been invited to his funeral. For a day the village’s main street was lined with half a dozen sleek black cars draped in paper flowers and crowded with mourners who had come from five scattered villages over the mountain. There were cigarette packs handed around, and a giant framed portrait of the dead man that was carried by the party secretary and his family in a show of immense filial piety.

  After the funeral and dinner and several speeches, a woman climbed onstage, and the audience quieted. A free meal would of course guarantee the attendance of everyone in the village, but getting mourners to honor the dead from farther away meant nighttime entertainment.

  It was hot out, but the woman was wearing a high-necked red sweater, along with a red skirt trimmed with feathers and sparkles that caught the low light, and platform shoes. Someone turned on the stereo, and a fast-paced tune with a steady, recurrent beat blared, a love song. She began to dance, knees flashing forward and backward, as though she were a cantering pony. “Can you can you can you can you see me, flying now straight into your heart.” Then, as the beat changed and grew slower, her moves grew languorous, catlike. She pouted. She shimmied one shoulder and rocked her body back and forth, using her pelvis as an anchor. Then she took off her sweater, tossing it to the crowd as though she couldn’t be bothered with it. Beneath it was another red shirt, sparkling and sleeveless this time. In another minute, she’d stepped out of her skirt, too, which lay on the ground huddled in a feathery red pool like a forlorn tropical bird.

  The crowd whooped and applauded. She arched her back, arms beating the air, and flipped her hair back and forth like she was trying to fan the crowd with her thick black tresses. Then she worked the red shirt above her shoulders and over her head, and that, too, went flying in the dark. She was down to just a red bra and her underwear now, gray with some sort of cartoon character on it.

  She danced to one more song, a high-pitched Communist tune, and her steps grew more martial in their pacing. She turned to t
he left and stared into the sights of an imaginary rifle, and then repeated the same move to the right. “Platoon Leader Jiang, I salute you!” she shouted, and the crowd roared the same words back at her. She goose-stepped for a while in a circle, long enough for some of the men to notice that her calves and butt were skinny and that her eyes looked professionally bored.

  Cao Cao had only ever heard the song that once, but he hummed it sometimes when he was happy, and he hummed it again now, working over his airplane: “Can you can you can you can you see me, flying now straight into your heart.” He pictured the villagers’ admiring stares and commentary as he unveiled his aircraft. He pictured it soaring up into the sky, just like the planes he’d seen take flight from the army base so long ago, then carefully adjusted the image to visualize the ground falling away, since he’d be the one flying it. It would place Big Duck Village on the map. It would be the pride of the village.

  After months of work, at last the airplane stood in their courtyard, neat and trim, wings outstretched, like some strange insect that had alighted and hadn’t yet decided whether to stick around. It had silver flaps and a metal body painted white with a jaunty red nose. He and Anning stood exhaling over their cups of tea, sending steam up into the air. It was done.

  Word spread quickly. By the afternoon their courtyard was crowded with a dozen onlookers and an air of genial excitement. Cao Cao let them climb into the cockpit, one by one, to admire the joystick he’d installed and the controls, and the compass he’d soldered neatly to the dashboard.

  Late in the afternoon, the party secretary came, too. He’d recently returned from a lavish party retreat at a mountain resort an hour’s flight away, and offered tips to Cao Cao about his journey, in the tone of a seasoned hand. “When the plane takes off, you should expect some clogged feeling in your ears, and they might pop. That’s normal—​don’t be alarmed,” he said, patting the plane as though he’d built it himself. “And make sure you keep your seat belt fastened at all times, of course.”

  The girls from next door were there, too, grown up now, fourteen; they attended school in town. They still had their old habit, though, of speaking in tandem. “Can we see you fly?” they asked.

  Cao Cao thought about it. His son wasn’t there, or his grandchild, and they ought to be. And he still needed to install a seat belt. “Next weekend,” he said. “Tell everyone!”

  The next weekend was overcast, the sky a pearly gray. It required three younger men, their faces serious with their efforts, to get the airplane out from the courtyard, tipped on a diagonal through the double doors.

  From there, they pushed the airplane out to the main road on the edge of the village. The crowd jostled around it excitedly. Cao Cao’s phone rang continuously. First it was his daughter-in-law, saying that a photographer and reporter had arrived from town and that she’d sent them on to the test site. Then it was Anning, saying she was on her way as well and did he want his green hat—​it would likely be cold up there. She was already bringing a scarf. She’d bring a thermos as well.

  When she arrived at the juncture in the road she could scarcely see the plane, it was surrounded by so many villagers. Even youth who usually absented themselves in town for work or play had come back, Cao Cao was a figure of such fame in the village; many had been just children when he’d invented his noodle-slicing robot.

  The cockpit was a little narrower than he’d intended, and it meant that when he and Anning climbed inside, they were pressed against each other uncomfortably. They’d both thickened in their old age. Still, once they were seated, a cheer went up from the crowd. The knitted scarf around Anning’s neck was red and matched the plane’s nose. Her eyes looked a little afraid and dazzled, by the attention as much as anything. The pink thermos containing chrysanthemum tea was wedged between her feet.

  His son was shouting at the crowd, telling them to clear the way. His grandson was in his daughter-in-law’s arms, blinking skyward, not seeing the scene. The crowd was cheering.

  “Be careful!” his son shouted. “Do not fly too high!” They’d discussed it: a simple liftoff, and then come directly down. They weren’t sure how quickly the fuel would burn.

  With ceremony, Cao Cao scrupulously buckled the seat belt over his and his wife’s laps. He grinned at the party secretary, who stood at the edge of the crowd, feeling a flush of pride at his presence. Then he pushed the throttle and the plane shot forward; it gathered speed, and then it was aloft—​he could nearly feel it—​but no, the ground was still bumping against them, they had not left the earth, and after another long minute they were approaching the end of the road, which dead-ended in a red-brick home that had NO DUMPING spray-painted on its side, and to avoid a crash, he abruptly slammed on the brakes. The party secretary’s house, the largest in the village, was just to his right.

  The crowd descended upon them, asking what had gone wrong. The photographer was snapping pictures.

  A pit had begun to form in his stomach, but he ignored it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the party secretary frown. “Not to worry,” he said. “I think it was something with the wings. Turn it around. We’ll do it again.”

  They got laboriously out of the plane, Anning shaking out the cramps in her legs, and once again wheeled the plane around. Next to them, a dog was lifting its leg against the pavement. Their daughter-in-law was walking the baby back and forth in her arms, pointing at the sky for his amusement.

  The plane turned around, he and Anning clambered back in. This time, he could not look at her. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I left my thermos on the ground,” she said in a small voice. When he turned his head, he could see it, a pink plastic cylinder sitting on the pavement with crumpled chrysanthemum blossoms floating inside.

  “That’s okay,” he said reassuringly. “We’ll get it later.” He gritted his teeth, adjusted the wings, and hit the throttle again. The plane shot forward and gained speed. It also made a groaning noise, which didn’t die down as it trundled forward and, once again, stayed stubbornly attached to the ground. They toodled on past the little shop that sold drinks and shampoo, past the public restrooms and rows of fields where yellowed, dried-out husks of corn stood in tall, stiff rows. When Cao Cao jerked it to a stop at the other edge of the village, the two of them sat frozen, with traces of scarlet creeping about Anning’s cheeks, either from cold or shame, he couldn’t tell.

  “Maybe it’s too heavy,” Cao Cao said at last.

  “Shall I get out?”

  “I think that’d be best.” The crowd was catching up behind them. Anning climbed uncertainly out, and the boys once again turned the plane. “It was too heavy!” they shouted to the rest of the group. “Stand back!”

  The crowd was a blur to Cao Cao, but if he tried to bring them into focus he could see children, the grave face of the party secretary, his friend Old Li, looking concerned. With increasing desperation, Cao Cao pressed the controls, and again the little aircraft trundled forward, rasping against the pavement. But the plane ran the length of the village—​fields, restrooms, shop—​and once more refused to go airborne.

  Behind him, he could hear the footsteps of the crowd pounding to catch up. “What’s the problem?” he heard someone shout. “It won’t fly!” someone else said.

  The reporter, a young woman with green spectacles, ran up to him with a pen. “Old Cao,” she said, “did you expect this to happen? Has the plane ever taken off successfully before? How much did you spend to make this plane?”

  He sat and stared straight ahead into the camera lens as her photographer arrived and stood in the plane’s path, clicking away; it was easier than looking at the crowd. A great wasteland of sorrow was opening up in him, unfolding dozens of tiny shacks, terrible squatters setting up residence, banging their miniature liquor bottles against his chest, a hundred feet trampling his organs. It was the same feeling he’d had as a teen when his father had died, a suicide during a year of bad harvest, and only a dirt mound to mark his gra
ve. He’d failed. He’d failed. He’d have to try again.

  Cao Cao climbed out of the cockpit, dismay and unhappiness clinging to him like dirty rain. “Friends,” he said, “it seems there may be some problem I didn’t anticipate. I am sorry for those I have inconvenienced today,” he said. “I know many of you have come from far away.”

  There was a long silence. Old Li looked at him worriedly and scanned the crowd. The party secretary was checking his watch. “What is everyone so long-faced about?” Old Li said, hurriedly. “It may not be a bird, but it is certainly a beast!”

  “Speak clearly, Old Li!” someone else shouted.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a car!” he gasped. “Cao Cao has invented a car!”

  The crowd turned to look at the little contraption with its wings outstretched, fat-bodied and content, more bee than butterfly. It wasn’t a very good airplane. But it might be a pretty good car.

  “Neat,” said one of the youth who had come home to see the show. “Can I ride it?”

  It was a girl with purple-streaked hair who worked at an internet café in town. She was wearing white heels and a shiny silver coat. Cao Cao could remember her as a plump girl who liked to play with the village dogs when she was small, who until age five seemed in fact confused about whether she was girl or canine, and used to bark when spoken to. “Sure,” he said now, swallowing with gratitude. “Come on, I’ll take you.”