Fat Duck

for Cai Bojing

Anyone who’d been along the river came away with an impression of Little Big Zhang – when giving out his business card he’d say, “Call me Manager Zhang Liuling please” – and his overly serious demeanor. His complexion was pale when he was young (he must have been very proud of it at the time), but now it was sallow and nearly transparent. His face was narrow and long and flanked by a pair of long, easily pullable ears. Because his upper lip covered by a brown mustache was always downturned and shut (the teeth inside seemed to be grinding a sesame seed), and he had the hooked nose of a Caucasian and a bald head, his face appeared even longer. Under his prominent brow bones hid a pair of eagle eyes. They always fixed on you unblinking, unwavering, and made you nervous. Even in summer, he wore two tops. Inside was a shirt, white-collar, buttoned-up, stuffy. Outside was a knee-length trench coat. He reminded people of a monk, a judge, or an undercover policeman. The grim air he exuded gave people chills.

Being around him was like being around a dark forest that blotted out the sun.

Some kids who were typically unruly and reckless shut up around him and gripped their parents’ hands or the hems of their clothes. Really anyone who knew him a little knew he was useless. He was born to a peasant family with 10 brothers. Of the 10 he was the only one who was taught at a private school, then studied at a teacher training school, and managed to live in the city. Later he started a wholesale office paper business that worked with several schools. Despite his wisdom, he couldn’t figure out what allowed him to surpass his own brothers, so he kept all of his past temperaments and allowed certain elements to flourish. He was like a man who had accidentally made a full recovery with no idea which medicine had cured him, so he used all the ones he’d taken indiscriminately. Reticence was one of those medicines. And by observing others he found that taking on a posture of not speaking created an inscrutable self. People were intimidated by him. Sometimes he shoved his hands into his trench coat pockets and got the false sense he was a powerful man who could arbitrarily dictate the actions of others.

* * *

Really the only people he could control were his family members (he didn’t control them exactly but coordinated them according to the circumstances and their characters – like never having two roosters in the same cage to peck each other bald, he kept his mother and wife apart most of the time, so the two could treat each other respectfully for a few days).

Another example: his wife and son, being his primary kin, lived with him in a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage by the river in the Shuimu Development. His son studied in Jiujiang Foreign Language School 37 kilometers away and came back to Ruichang on the weekends. His wife was a rural resident and illiterate. This made her see herself as a sinner and not dare to voice her opinions (especially when she thought that, because of her, her two children were born rural residents and laughed at by their classmates. . .Little Big Zhang bought them urban residency later). She willingly served her husband. Apart from household chores, she was responsible for transporting goods on a rickshaw from the warehouse to where clients designated. Sometimes she used a pushcart with two wheels.

His mother and daughter, like his secondary kin, lived in Jigong Ridge north of the city in a condo, which Little Big Zhang bought with the money he borrowed when he first came to the city and which still had no running water. About two thirds of the houses there were vacant, so untiled blood-red bricks were exposed (the yellow mud that filled the gaps between the bricks had long since cracked) like a body that had been skinned. The facades of some houses weren’t fitted with window frames let alone windows, some randomly covered by bright striped polyethylene. Some just let their insides be exposed, rusty steel bars like weeds coming from the ground and through the walls, while the inner walls were pitch-black from squatters cooking. After night fell, those who took the shortcut to or from the train station got an eerie feeling when facing those buildings as if they were facing buildings abandoned after a bombardment.

People called Little Big Zhang’s mother Grandma Zhang, though back in the countryside, she was called Aunt Huojin. Since she came to the city she had to be called the city way. People called her daughter-in-law Aunt Zhang, so they called her Grandma Zhang. Grandma Zhang had given birth to 10 sons in total. In that sense her constitution was exceptional. Ever since she became widowed, she had lots of time she didn’t know what to do with, so she came to her seventh son, Little Big Zhang, to the city (those in the family who came after the sixth were called Little Big Zhang; it required some familiarity to distinguish them, which I won’t explain now) to lead the city life her ancestors never had. She acted first and reported afterward. After she came to Jigong Ridge, she sat waiting outside the locked house, dripping with sweat, until her son came and let out a long sigh. “Fine, you live here with Ruijuan and cook for her,” her son said.

So Little Big Zhang sent his daughter Ruijuan who had been living with him to live with her grandma. Afterward, once or twice a month, in order to pick up boxes of printer and copy paper he went to the condo, which doubled as a warehouse, and gave his mother and daughter some money. Ruijuan was always restless and shy in front of him. Sometimes, though he said nothing, she’d hurry off, squat down at some distance, back to him, sobbing. Little Big Zhang had sloped shoulders (why else would he wear a trench coat with shoulder pads?), but back then his daughter was broad-backed and thick-waisted. When she started to cry it was like a big loaf of bread was crying. A few times Little Big Zhang felt sympathy for this strange, distant blood relation of his and wanted to go over and encourage her, for example by patting her shoulder and saying: “Who’s this beautiful little girl?” But some deeply ingrained thing held him back. I guess even if his daughter fell off a bottomless cliff in a runaway carriage he wouldn’t move an inch, just painfully and silently gape. Every time he jumped off his Jinbei pickup, his sturdy mother would totter over and, right in front of the girl, tell on her. Hearing all the exaggeration, he couldn’t help but despise her. He would teach his daughter – her face red, seemingly about to cry – a lesson, unaware that as soon as he left, she would beam with joy, bouncing up and down like a pony to meet her friends who had been waiting a long time. One day his daughter’s main teacher at the Number Two Primary School came to him and revealed the shocking secret that his daughter was a problem student with a less than 50 per cent attendance rate, and she had been absent again that day. They found her around Railway Dam. She was standing on a railway track, holding hands with Liang Lianda from the class next door. Facing a coal train approaching in the distance, they sang loudly.

The green grass on the riverbanks,

stretches to where the sea begins.

The road to the sea never ends,

Nor does my love for you.

They ran in opposite directions. As a result, Little Big Zhang handed over full custody of his daughter to his mother: that country shrew seemed to have been waiting a long time. That’s right, she thought. It’s right to give her to me. There’s no one I can’t tame. The old woman gazed down at her son, fully confident.

* * *

Time flew. After that horrible thing happened, and the deceased Zhang Ruijuan had long been cremated (rumor had it that she remained prone when being pushed into the incinerator; the worker skillfully pierced her corpse with a sharp knife, then lifted up the diesel barrel and shook diesel out over the body), people still remembered her as the little girl chased home by her grandma: the latter holding a tailless whip like a cattle salesman, whipping the former’s bottom every few steps. After each whipping, the former would shudder and straighten up, face contorted in agony. The whippings didn’t ease as the girl showed greater compliance. For at least four years residents of Jigong Ridge were used to hearing the reoccurring whippings at noon or dusk near and far. By its sound, they could conjure up the arc the whip made in the air. Whipping wasn’t easy for the old woman. I mean there were times she almost let herself succumb to laziness and fatigue and give it up. But the sense of responsibility to discipline the vile child for her son made her steel herself once more. Sometimes people could hear that the whipping really came from the old woman’s vicious desire or sometimes from her intention to get revenge for the girl’s past offenses (before Little Big Zhang clarified her custody situation, the granddaughter always saw herself as city-born and scorned the country folk who stubbornly argued with her). But sometimes they could hear nothing more than the whipping itself like it was an old custom people had to follow (such as human beings whipping animals or landlords whipping serfs working in the fields). Like rain. When the rainy season came, the rain would go on for 10 days or so. People had no idea why it rained or why it stopped raining. So when the sound of whipping suddenly stopped, people panicked (of course it was a rather unimportant type of panic). Some walked out to see why the whip stopped falling on the girl. “I need some water,” the old woman said. She wasn’t answering their question, just being an illiterate peasant living in the city, explaining her actions to the locals. When she’d drunk enough she capped the plastic bottle, slung its strap over her shoulder, and started to chase her granddaughter home. Sometimes being the grandma, she pulled the girl’s ear – that pullable ear the girl inherited from her father – all the way home. Blood dripped on the ground. The girl titled her head, gripped the old woman’s arm, and let out a heartbreaking scream: “Aunt, Aunt, my aunt.” (That was the only time she used dialect to call her mom Aunt. Most of the time she was reserved with her. She couldn’t bring herself to call her Mom in Mandarin, or Aunt in dialect because doing this amounted to revealing her ugly and shocking origins to the public.)“You’re going to rip your granddaughter’s ear off,” people would sometimes stop their knitting, concerned, and warn her.

“It won’t come off,” Grandma Zhang would say.

“See. She’s clinging to me like a monkey.”

Once Ruijuan was home Grandma Zhang would go in and latch the door. Sometimes people saw her leave alone and pull the black bolt outside then go play mahjong (she only played poker in the countryside but learned to play mahjong in the city by watching only two rounds). From inside the house came the girl’s desperate shrills. Grandma Zhang was an eccentric and meticulous disciplinarian. To show her determination, she went to the parking lot just to ask the driver to fetch the stiff broom tainted by the blood of her 10 children from the countryside. Before it was used to wash pots, clean the stove, and sweep dust. Some summer days, on the dining table lay a green mesh cover to keep flies away and beside it the tightly woven broom. It had given her 10 sons, and later her granddaughter, lashes all over their bodies, streaks and streaks of lashes like they’d been raked. Sometimes she used a club to strike the girl’s shin again and again. People often heard the old woman’s eager, irritable teaching:

“You have to admit you were wrong today – if you don’t admit you were wrong, you can’t eat – can’t leave this spot – just keep standing – stand till tomorrow morning – you hear – you hear, long ears – I’m telling you to admit you were wrong – don’t act pathetic – don’t call your aunt – you and your aunt are the same – hurry and say you were wrong – you hear – don’t trick me with that language I can’t understand – speak the language I know – okay – don’t talk like a mosquito – don’t try to get away with mumbling – what are you saying – louder – I can’t hear – you damn kid, I can’t hear, I can’t. . .”After being punished, sometimes Ruijuan was furious and threw herself on the bed (and slept), sometimes she was forced to pump water. Ashamed and resentful, she pumped the handle five or six times then realized she had done it wrong and she took a big scoop of water from the tank and poured it on the mossy pump walls. When the water got through the rubber cap she immediately pumped the handle. That way, the water would be pumped up from deep underground. Completing this process required mental focus, so only after Ruijuan finished this work, and saw the glistening water splashing down the water tank, would she go on with her crying. Other times the girl seemed possessed, madly running and finding her grandma as if she hadn’t seen her for a long time, lying prone on the ground, and shouting sorrowfully:

“Grandma, I was wrong. I know I was wrong.”

She gripped her grandma’s calves with both hands, lips trembling, mouth wide open, panting. Sometimes she’d start coughing and so have to pound her chest fast. Shamelessly, she let herself roll on the ground until she was covered in dust. Thus was her horrifying repentance. Then as if receiving a voucher, she left the house, looked herself over in the shiny window of the parked car on the side of the road, shook off the traces of humiliation, found good friends standing by the manmade lake, and began chatting. In front of her parents and grandma, she was cautious, didn’t talk much. Often you couldn’t make out half of what she said. But around classmates her age she was surprisingly loud. Vulgar sayings and swear words only the boys used to ridicule the female sex poured out of her mouth. Fat Duck always said, Your mom’s cunt, those classmates would later remember her. Or fuck your aunt’s old cunt. They always gathered around, three or four of them, scrupulously gossiping about the affairs of people around them like hyenas in a cult ritual. This always made me feel bad. I remember in Ruichang City (a county-level city, which I called Ruichang County in my previous novels but readers from my hometown sent me letters requesting me to correct the mistake: please keep in mind that Ruichang is a city, don’t degrade us) when I was living there I always came across such throngs of people. Sometimes they even brought their babies with them. For three or four hours, they’d huddle around, cover their mouths, talk without restraint. Day after day, still there. Year after year, still there. Decade after decade, their hair turning gray, still there. That was their daily ritual, a way to defend themselves against the desolation of life.

* * *

One day Zhang Ruijuan graduated from middle school. The other students were 16, she was 17. She didn’t go to school to check her scores, and Little Big Zhang couldn’t be bothered to ask (wasn’t it already decided, how good could it be), but her head teacher was restless (like a naughty child who can’t leave an unlit firecracker on the ground). She called Little Big Zhang: “Your daughter scored 126.”

“126?”

“Yes, 126 total.”

“It doesn’t matter if she scored 126 as long as her little brother can score 621.” Later, recounting this story to others, Little Big Zhang, once and only once, showed his humorous side. It seemed he had been waiting for the day to rent his daughter a shop close to Jigong Ridge, on Qiuzhi Road facing Number One Middle School, a shop with a sign reading Advertisement Design Center, doing typing and copying work. “You can type, can’t you?” he asked. “I can,” his daughter said. That year, his mother, Grandma Zhang, found that if she poked her swollen calf, the indentation would stay for a long time, so she did it in his face. “I can’t work anymore,” she spoke the line long-prepared in her heart. City folks were already retired at her age, free of all duties. They only had to open their mouths to be fed and hold out their hands to be dressed, and enjoyed the support of their children. In order to get similar treatment, she spent the first six years in the city cooking for Ruijuan (though she only cooked once a day and they ate leftovers for breakfast and dinner). She believed she had done enough. No matter what it was her turn to lead a leisurely life like the song that says: ‘You’re too tired, time to have a rest’. She widened her eyes, which easily got teary and red in the wind, and shut her lips. She had her counter ready in her head as she gazed at her seventh and weakest son. The latter closed his eyes and considered it a moment, then made a decision even God might praise:

“For now on Ruijuan will cook for you.”

From then on, every day at eleven thirty young Ruijuan would get on the electric scooter she bought on installment from the store next to the printing shop, and rush back to Jigong Ridge to cook for Grandma. Meanwhile, the latter would be holding her belt, complaining as she walked around the neighborhood. “I peed blood again this morning, peed this much,” she’d say, making gestures to justify giving up kitchen service. People, including Aunt Liang, Aunt Ai, Aunt Wen, and Aunt Chen, said afterward that the illness which kept her from oil smoke came from her wish. Grandma Zhang didn’t want to cook anymore, so her body made the illness to exempt her from cooking. (Doctor Zou Huoquan, who ran a clinic near the train station, said: “Old woman, you’d better take it easy.”). Before, so as to be more comfortable, save some effort, she would just make a quick meal, offhandedly give it to her granddaughter, offhandedly have it herself. Now she found her granddaughter treated her that way too. Sometimes she’d finish eating and her granddaughter would snatch the stainless bowl, put detergent on it, rub it in the bucket of dirty water then rinse it in the bucket of clean water – in 20 seconds everything was pretty much finished. When the old woman, forgetful of her past meanness, banged the table and reproached her, the girl would remind her, sometimes even of the exact day. “Besides, you and I eat the same,” Granddaughter said. This was exactly what the old woman had once said to the girl. Things seemed to have achieved an equilibrium with the beauty of geometric symmetry (like Borges said in ‘The Immortal’: Because of his past or future virtues, every man is worthy of all goodness, but also of all perversity, because of his infamy in the past or future.)

When Grandma Zhang implied her granddaughter’s behavior to Little Big Zhang, she received only the other’s bitter remarks.

In the end what Grandma Zhang could do was watch the clock (or ask the time from Old Wang, a retired hydroelectric worker who listened to the radio) to see if her granddaughter had come back to cook on time or not. Being punctual was something she could have a clear conscience about. Though a bad cook, there had never been a day she didn’t cook on time. Around noon she got agitated, thinking her granddaughter wouldn’t came back on time and that she would be neglected or mistreated by the girl (which she had said would happen sooner or later in complaints to neighbors). It had never occurred to her that her granddaughter, seeing cooking as a burden, wanted to have it done as early as possible so she could return more quickly to her own, youthful world. In her own world she talked about her grandma like this: “Bad teeth, can’t chew nothing, and don’t know when she’ll die, she had so many kids, had 10, all sons, unbelievable, a woman with 10 sons.” She also talked about other things, for example, the closeout sale of Camel Outdoors lasted 10 years; Yishion began to sell menswear and its staff just left the air conditioners on despite the large space; whether Propitious Phoenix had copied Auspicious Phoenix; Digital Telecom also selling gray market goods; and the pharmacy trying to recruit trustworthy night-shift workers but paying too little. But there weren’t many things worth talking about, only five or six each quarter. Then one day, Ruijuan herself became a hot topic.

A locksmith with a long dick became Ruijuan’s first love. Anyone who knew thought it was a scam. The poor girl who was just out of school had no idea of the abyss she faced. The man was collecting women. So far his collection included the deaf-mute at the foundry, the spinster with an artificial limb who worked as an accountant on the distant tree farm, and other half-alive women like Ruijuan herself whose skin was ashen from malnutrition. Some said that for years he’d been sending women to Guangdong to work as prostitutes.

“What do you like about me?” Ruijuan asked him one day. What she disliked the most about herself was her eyes, which were too wide-set, almost without eyelashes and eyebrows. Everyone said that while answering this question the man’s eyes rolled rapidly. He was thinking in front of her.

“There are good things about you,” he said.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Well, there are good things. Don’t worry about it. You just need to know I like you,” he said.

People thought Ruijuan would have left a man so short on words, but their relationship lasted a very long time. Sometimes he told her bullshit like, “You’re the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” When the words seemed insufficient to express his loyalty, he would gave her things hard to come by in the little city, like a Coach bag and a pair of leather ECCO shoes. When she first received that coral-red, litchi-skinned handbag, she carried it for 24 hours, refusing to let go, unable to resist walking around to show it off. That was the year I went back to Ruichang and saw her. I was heading southward on Qiuzhi Road to Central Hospital to see my father. She was coming in the opposite direction, up the ramp I was going down. She was eating one grain at a time, her body incredibly thin. The exposed ribs around her chest reminded me of a grill, each bar clearly distinguished. Her skeleton was big, bones from the genes of the shabby working class, which must have done a lot of work and taken a lot of beatings. She wore a pair of six-centimeter platform shoes and an above-the-knee dress bluer than the day’s sky (which was so blue it was almost unsettling). The dress was so startlingly blue that I couldn’t help but turn several times to look. In the hours of afternoon slumber, she was walking on the glaring street alone and sweating as she exhibited. I saw dense blue sweat trickling down between her legs like blue menstrual blood.

Later in Ikea I saw – I have no idea why I mention this – an extendable dining table with the following description: The extendable dining table has one spare leaf, seats four to six people, and can be adjusted as needed. When not in use, the spare leaf can be let down under the table, ready at hand. I stood there, unable to help but stroke it, then knelt down to insert the spare leaf. Meanwhile I felt a sense of shame and resentment, was eager to leave with my wife. I told her I would never buy a product like that. If it weren’t for that I never would have realized I only owned under 50 square meters of living space. Later, I also saw things like drop-leaf tables and foldable chairs. They seemed to have eyes that looked at me scornfully (sometimes in a slightly fancy restaurant or clothing shop, I also felt condescended to by sophisticated attendants). I have no idea how this was related to seeing Zhang Ruijuan on Qiuzhi Road, nor why I talked about it when talking about Zhang Ruijuan. I guess the dining table, which became as spacious and luxurious as the tables of the rich when the spare leaf was inserted, and the flamboyantly colorful dress even a supermodel from Paris wouldn’t dare wear revealed shabbiness one cannot stand. When she held the parasol, stepped on the muddy bricks, and one step after another climbed the stairs leading to Number One Middle school, I felt my gnawing at my heart. A few days later, after I left my hometown, I heard this girl I saw was dead. It seemed somehow related to a strange curse.

* * *

One morning the sanitation worker Li Shili found Zhang Ruijuan’s body on a four-feet-wide cement path off Railway Dam. The rail tracks, shiny from the grinding of wheels, were still dripping with water. The deceased’s hair was soaked through and parted into several strands, her skin horrifyingly white and covered in goose bumps, her fingers and palms soaked in water were slack and thus so shriveled skin was about to come off. The body lay prone, facing south, seemingly trampled prior to death, the mouth and nose submerged in a small puddle a cow could drink in a gulp, and bubbles came out the nose. One hand holding the garbage grabber, the other holding the strap of the windproof dustpan, Li Shili stood vacantly in the falling drizzle. Then as if suddenly remembering something, she hurried to the nearby early market, gesturing her discovery to the vendors dumping vegetables in their stalls before finally making herself clear.

Then came the spooky probable cause of death. After hearing Ruijuan had died, Aunt Wen, one of the residents of Jigong Ridge who had resolved to hide some things, who was known for her integrity, strained to hold the doorframe but was still unable to prevent herself from collapsing. When she came to from a brief stupor, there were three things:

– the unquestionable existence of the netherworld (she thought of her sister who had gone missing 38 years ago)

– the selfishness, tyranny, narrow-mindedness, and ignorance of human beings

– God’s complete indifference

she kept crying for. She was horrified. But it was the hatred toward one person and the sympathy for the other that made her tremble. Then she summoned courage and disclosed what Grandma Zhang and Ruijuan had told her before their deaths. This caused a great stir in the little city. Many people, including government officials, who were sworn atheists and had been accustomed to think in an atheistic way, participated in the discussion and dissemination of the story. Even when there was nothing more to discuss, they were not willing to leave, just lingered and kept sighing.

First Grandma Zhang, who lived on 43 City-Country Commerce Street in Jigong Ridge, went out at noon the day before. The weather was awful and gloomy, the rain seemed to be approaching yet distant, only wind chased fallen leaves about. The old woman wore a brown outfit like a monk’s robe whose neck exposed the red cotton-padded jacket inside. A hairnet wrapped around her iron-gray hair. Her face was as skinny as her son’s and was covered with tired wrinkles. Stooped, she held a dragon-head walking stick as she went down the street. She showed people the metal clock in her left arm which she’d just taken down from the wall of her house. “I can’t read, even if I could, I can’t see clearly. Tell me, is it one thirty?” she asked.

“It is, Grandma,” somebody answered.

“Look at your watch. Is it one thirty?” the old woman asked again.

“It’s one thirty.”

Then tears poured out of her bloodshot eyes as if a rock stopping them had been removed. “Poor me. Nobody came back to cook for me yet.” She pulled out a decades-old handkerchief. She wiped tears, shaking and explaining her tragic situation. Soon people crowded around to watch. She seemed to think they were qualified to witness, whether quantitatively or qualitatively, and some other day they would attest to her sorrow and outrage that day. So she leaned her walking stick against an electric pole and threw the clock on the ground. It was dented.

“Come to my house to eat, Grandma Zhang,” somebody said.

“Eat and go to my death? Eat at your house. My house isn’t empty.” She picked up the walking stick, knocked the end against the ground, and walked off in anger. Then as she walked she kept wailing, “Does anyone really care? Don’t you all really just want this old woman to starve to death? Nobody starved to death when the Nationalist Party was in charge. Now someone will.”

In fact, prior to this, at home, she’d thrown everything on the ground. You could say it was on purpose and could say it was by accident – at first it was by accident, but she had a chance to stop and instead indulged in the consequences. After breaking a porcelain bowl came the recklessness of one murder means death and so do 10 murders, or tearing the imperial cloth means death and so does killing the prince. . .teacups: four, porcelain bowls: four, porcelain plates: four, black-and-white Kunlun TV (really basically only the cathode tube was left): one, Hong Deng radio: one, iron wok: one, red thermos with printed on it: one, porcelain teapot painted with pine trees: one, a mirror: one, a flower pot: one, a flower vase: one, and a bottle of Hero carbon ink were broken. There was no way to break the water dispenser, so she pushed it over. Same with the chest of drawers. All her granddaughter’s clothes that could be ripped were ripped. The shoes were thrown into the water tank. Actually this fire had started three days ago and never extinguished. Like fire buried under ash, with a good stir it spreads. Three days prior Granddaughter came home at eleven fifty. Two days prior it was twelve fifteen. One day prior, at one in the afternoon. When she saw Granddaughter come back, Grandma Zhang muttered: “So you still know you need to come home. Why not come back even later, do you still care about this grandma, you really made a waste of all the time I spent looking after you for six years, six years, why don’t you just put rat poison in my food and kill me, poison me to death and get even?” Ruijuan just tossed her a cold, baffled look, not explaining, not responding. She left after cooking like hired help, without a word. This day, Grandma Zhang started expecting Ruijuan at eleven thirty, thought the girl should be back at twelve, if not twelve then twelve thirty. But at twelve thirty she still wasn’t back. Grandma Zhang thought, when you’re back at one see how I rip off your ears, how I use my dragon-head walking stick to break your dog legs. But at one she was still not back. The old woman went out a few times, all she found was vacant, boundless air and the smell of food cooking in other houses. What made her fly into a rage was when she asked Aunt Chen at the grocery store to call her granddaughter (she found five cents, but Aunt Chen pushed it back, saying she couldn’t accept money from her). Expecting a big scolding over the phone, the latter didn’t answer. She didn’t answer then turned it off. Grandma Zhang then smashed everything she could smash.

Grandma Zhang left the clock, walked down Guilin Road, passed People’s Park and the old prison all the way to Number One Middle. From there, she turned east onto Yanpen Road. After walking almost two kilometers, someone reminded her, and she turned back, then walked down Qiuzhi Road where her granddaughter was. Store by store, she asked, “Have you seen my granddaughter, my granddaughter is named Ruijuan,” (somebody said her granddaughter had left at 10 and not come back) until she got to her granddaughter’s store. The door was open. A white printer inside was plugged in, still humming. The old woman raised her walking stick and struck the cover, then the paper tray. The owner of the store next door, Chen Li, rushed in, grabbed the walking stick, and said: “Don’t break it, the thing cost more than 10,000 yuan.” The old woman wouldn’t listen. She said, “What do you care if I break my granddaughter’s stuff? You want to be nosy I’ll go break the stuff in your store.” That Chen Li defended herself, “If your granddaughter hadn’t asked me to look after her store I wouldn’t. Since she trusted me I have to be responsible, if you want to break stuff you can wait for her to get back.” They each gripped one end of the walking stick, shoving it left, shoving it right, on and on. Then the old woman almost knocked the young one over. So the young one said: “Grandma, I really don’t want to say this but with this energy you could have cooked the meal and washed the dishes by now. You don’t have to make things difficult for your granddaughter. It’s not like you can’t do it.” The old woman gaped, pointing at the girl, unable to speak. Then an acquaintance came to mediate. Seeing there was a mediator, the old woman said toughly to the girl: “What’s your name, tell me.” The girl wanted to say, My name is none of your fucking business. Just fuck off so I can attend to my store. The words almost slipped out of her mouth, but she gritted her teeth. That was when Grandma Zhang started to cough. She forgot how she got home, just remembered coughing all the way home. “See, I coughed up blood,” she said to Aunt Wen, her only visitor, and folded the bloodstained handkerchief in half to preserve the evidence. A while later, she unfolded it again to look at the red bloodstain one more time. Then she shut her eyes and squeezed out a pool of tears. “I’m so pathetic,” she cried, gripping Aunt Wen’s hand. “Pathetic.”

The old woman passed away at five in the afternoon. Aunt Wen (to this day she regrets visiting the Zhang home, the old woman wasn’t without children. Then, when Grandma Zhang had just returned to Jigong Ridge with a handful of dried grass from the park, she tried to set the house on fire with it, but her hands kept shaking and the matches kept breaking. A failed attempt. Seeing Grandma Zhang vent her childlike anger in such an extreme way, people called Little Big Zhang. Little Big Zhang said: “Let her, let her do whatever she wants to do, she has that kind of temper.” So everyone left except Aunt Wen who couldn’t face her own indifference. Holding a bowl of rice soaked with shredded meat soup, she avoided the broken porcelain and glass on her way to the second floor of the Zhang home) said she saw astonishment in Grandma Zhang’s eyes, the kind of astonishment she’d seen on a child’s face years before. The child kept jumping wildly on the roof of a hut in a brick factory. People warned him but it was no use. Then the roof, made of asbestos or linoleum, split open. He fell through like a heavy stove. Very heavy. Grandma Zhang sank into intense, resounding wails. Aunt Wen opened her lips and teeth with the spoon, forcing the food into her mouth, which had sworn never to accept food from anybody, the few calories from little food immediately being burned away by more manic wailing. “Go away. Go away. Pease leave. Just let me die,” she wailed feverishly, until she saw Death standing before her. Then her crying became real crying, and she seemed to become softer. She recalled to Aunt Wen the things she regretted most and told herself to take a pill, she’d feel a bit better if she took a pill. Then she must have remembered who caused all this (how could she censure herself, think she was in the wrong) and grabbed Aunt Wen’s collar to sit up, starting to curse angrily.

Done cursing, she used a vicious tone to tell Aunt Wen: “You’ll see.”

“Okay, I’ll see,” Aunt Wen said.

That’s how the old woman died.

* * *

Ruijuan went home for the wake. Her waist-length hair cut by half, her lips smeared with dark-red lipstick – wild, dangerous, aggressive yet aggrieved. It seemed she wanted to change her look to please others and wanted completely to ruin herself. Her eyes were cloudy. Two hours after her grandma had died, her phone was still off. The news of her death got to her by word of mouth. They said in Jigong Ridge a fierce old woman had been killed by her own anger.

When she got back, the first rain had wet the spent firecrackers. The doorway was being lit temporarily by a light bulb. Above the door green letters read: voice and image remain clear. Her uncles, who wore muddy black rain boots, sat hunched in the hall on the first floor, smoking silently. Halfway through a cigarette, one of them tore open a new pack and handed each person another one. “Still got one,” they said, taking it and putting it behind their ears. When Ruijuan entered, they raised their heads at once, took a look at their city-born niece, then bowed their heads. The look in their eyes was as elusive as an animal’s. She wanted to greet them then decided not to. (When they brought back their mother’s urn from the funeral parlor two days later, they each spat at it, some even blew their noses on it. They hailed a little pickup to take the urn back home. But halfway, still burning with anger, they threw their mother’s ashes in a dirty pond.) From the second floor came the fake cries of Ruijuan’s mother: “My mom, my mom, my mom, how could you leave us to go first, Mom?” How fake was it? It was fake to the point that the crying and the person could separate: the person could go pee and come back while the crying still soared beside the corpse.

Ruijuan’s father, Little Big Zhang, waited on the second-floor landing, smoking a cigarette. Due to the smog, he squinted one eye. He obviously didn’t smoke. He tried to pry open a perfectly glued-shut box, phone between shoulder and ear. He watched Ruijuan coming up while attending to the third hour-plus-long issue on the phone (first, he asked his son, Ruijuan’s younger brother, Ruijiang, not to come because exams are soon, studying is more important. Second, the cremation, it’s all right if the funeral parlor doesn’t want to send a car, we’ll take the body back to the countryside and bury it, don’t say we’re breaking the law. And transporting the remains was supposed to be the responsibility of the funeral parlor. We’ll pay, but they still refuse, I don’t understand what they’re thinking. Third, demolition, if you’re demolishing my house, you can do it however you want, I 100 per cent agree. The problem is the houses are up against each other, the houses on either side share walls, I can make my own decision, but I can’t make a decision for the neighbors. I said that yesterday, and the day before, hoping you would understand, this has nothing to do with me being a Party member or teacher of the people). It was the first time he watched his daughter coming toward him like this. He couldn’t see her face, nose, eyes, or neck, just the top of her head slowly moving up the stairs. Her newly cut hair looked like a ponytail palm, puffing up on top and hanging down around her head. He saw in her hair a slight quiver (because she was in awe of him) and a few premature white strands. I’m not the only one with white hair. My daughter has it too, he thought sorrowfully. As she was coming up, he hardened his tone and spoke each word clearly:

“You did a good job.”

He saw his daughter lurch and cry out loud. “Stop crying,” he added. Then, to his wife who had ceased crying (his loyal and ignorant servant), he said, “I’m going home. I may come back. I may not. Call me if something happens.” As a decent man, before leaving, he thanked Aunt Wen again for staying there. “There’s nothing to thank me for,” the latter said as she was walking his grieving wife to the back room to rest. Ruijuan was left alone with the body. She picked up a black gauze strip from the straw basket, pinned it to her sleeve, and quietly moved toward the body covered by a shroud. Back when she studied at Number Two Middle School, during recess, she and her classmates would run wildly to Railway Dam to see the corpses crushed by trains casually covered by straw mats. It was human nature to be curious about death. She was being curious now, though she seemed to have gone through so many things that day and was psychologically drained. The old woman’s eyes rolled up. The nostrils and mouth were wide open. A few remaining teeth were sticking out randomly like stones. She looked like someone come to a halt in a snore about to swallow down the air left in their mouth. Her female friends who went to a sermon later said: “God said to Israel that Joseph would be on his death bed and close his eyes with his own hands. But Grandma Zhang died with her eyes open.”

Then Ruijuan started to cry. Her crying was filled with the imitation of other grown-ups. She punched the edge of the bed, loudly blamed herself for not cooking for her grandma, which had led to her death (“It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be this way?” she asked herself). She also blamed herself for not coming to her grandma’s deathbed in time. Thus she took responsibility upon herself but not for a second did she believe it was the truth. Later, probably at the thought of her own unhappiness and frustration, the young woman let herself go and indulged in wailing by the body. When the crying became overly excited, she stomped. Aunt Wen hurried over, patted her back, and said: “Enough, enough. Crying like that is enough. Don’t hurt your body.” But she was still wailing, “My grandma, my grandma”. A few times her eyes rolled up in her head, and she almost passed out. Aunt Wen took care of her until she came back to this rational and normal world. The traces of tears were still on her face, but she was completely sober. She was sober yet puzzled. Like a confused pupil she asked Aunt Wen: “I wonder why my grandma said this. It seems I just heard her say: If I die, I’ll definitely take you.” Aunt Wen suddenly stood up, almost out of reflex, her face deathly pale. Half an hour later she was at her own home. Looking in the mirror, she found her face still deathly pale, without the slightest blush. Then, at the thought of what Ruijuan had said to her, she could still feel the chill in her body. Because when the old woman was about to die, she heard her say the same thing, word for word:

“If I die, I’ll definitely take her.”

To prove she meant it, the old woman gripped Aunt Wen’s hand and said again: “You’ll see, you’ll see when I take her.”

* * *

Some people remembered, around midnight in Liuhu Bar, seeing young Zhang Ruijuan wearing a black gauze strip. Grandma’s death gave her an excuse to drink. She always said, “You know, my grandma died, the grandma who raised me died.” As she spoke she shed tears. Hard rain fell all night like the Bible says: That same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. Early the following morning, the sanitation worker Li Shili found Ruijuan lying prone in a puddle, already dead. Later Li Shili returned to the scene. When two hired hands turned the body over at the instruction of the forensic scientist, everyone shouted – there was a deep hole in the body’s white waist from the body being pressed against a pointed rock, pressing the whole night. After Li Shili returned to the scene, she nervously looked at the shiny ring the dead wore on her right middle finger. She struggled a long time with herself about whether to remove it or not.

The forensic scientist denied that it was a murder or that the body had been moved there. “If she drowned herself, how could it be possible in such a small puddle?” Little Big Zhang asked. “You just never saw this before,” said Little Yuan, the forensic scientist. Little Yuan had graduated from a five-year bachelor’s program at Gan’nan Medical School, a highly educated person whose words people tended to trust. In the end, Little Big Zhang picked up his daughter’s wet body. Her eyes were like the eyes of a dead chicken, slightly closed but a slit. Her extremely thin deer legs hung loosely. She was so scrawny, so totally different from the chubby little girl she once was. She had gotten her weight down to less than 80 pounds. When Little Big Zhang first heard the news, he started running, but no matter how he tried he couldn’t get going. Walking was too slow, so he skipped, he skipped all the way. As soon as he saw his own daughter, he couldn’t help but let the tears fall.