I TIPTOED OUT OF THE COURTYARD and rode my bike home. I carried it up the apartment stairs and locked it to the handrail. Quietly, I opened the door and stepped into a pitch-black room. After kicking off my shoes, I leaned onto the bed but somehow ended up on the floor. The lights turned on. My wife was sitting on the bed. She must have kicked me off it. Her face was crimson red and her hair stood on ends.
“Where did you go? I thought you had died! I called the school, the mining school, and even went to the police station. You were out drinking? Who were you with all night?”
Though I knew how to lie, I never lied to my wife. To tell only truths to some people and to tell only lies to other people, that was one of my rules. So I began to mutter, “I ran into Little Bicycle Bell, had a couple of drinks.”
She screamed and did some backstroke-type moves under the bedcover. At that point, nothing I said would have mattered, so I went to wash my feet in the bathroom. When I returned, I turned off the light and lay down on one side of the bed. Suddenly, I was being chocked to the point of seeing stars. Erniuzi growled by my ear, “I’ll show you who’s the boss!”
That shrew was a wrestler with thick arms and a thick neck. It was common for her to challenge me, but I was never intimidated. No matter what move she tried to put on me, I could always just pick her up and throw her on the bed. She was in the 47 kg weight class and I was in the 90 kg weight class, which made a difference of over 40 kilograms. But on that bed with her hands around my neck, I was in real trouble. She was always practicing this stuff, what they called “ground game.” I failed twice to flip over. The veins beneath my temples were getting ready to burst. With my last remaining breath, I bellowed and pushed only to hear a loud crack. The bed collapsed. We rolled around on the ground for a bit until we knocked over the tea table and shattered everything. I was finally able to push her aside. I got up and turned the light on only to see her crying on the floor. That was my opportunity to strike.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning! Have you lost your mind? You feral zombie!”
I spoke with such fervor that she was stunned for a moment. When she came to, she said, “Asshole! Divorce!”
“I will accompany you in the morning. Right now, I have to sleep.”
“I’ll tell your mother!”
“Go ahead, but just so you know, you’re not in the right.”
“How am I not in the right?”
“The fact of the matter is: Little Bell is an old friend of mine, so I couldn’t just ignore her. Having a meal and a couple of drinks with her is perfectly acceptable.”
“A couple? How many is a couple?”
“Maybe half a pint. But not the clear stuff, it was brandy.”
“You son of a gun, you drank that much. Where did you eat?”
“Moon-Taker Pavilion by the Jijia River. The food was awful; Little Bell paid the bill.”
“Son of a gun! Showing off her money. We’re going to eat there tomorrow. Or I’ll castrate you. Dishes! Name every last one of them.”
Was this ever going to end? It was the middle of the night and my head was pounding. “Fried pig vagina!”
Erniuzi laughed and cried. By the time we finished talking, it was four o’clock. Just as I was closing my eyes, Erniuzi told me to bring the bike inside, but it was already too late. The air had been emptied out of both tires. Although, it was nice of the culprits to put the nozzles back on. It must have been the neighbor’s way to protest against our midnight fisticuffs.
I practically went all night without sleep. Erniuzi tossed and turned incessantly. Just before sunrise, as I was beginning to doze off, a pair of small hands gripped my vital region. She wanted me to prove that I was still true to her. Proving it wasn’t a problem, but I no longer had a chance to sleep. In the morning, there was a faculty meeting where the president assigned responsibilities. A quarter of an hour into the meeting, I collapsed and rolled on the ground. The president screamed, “Wang Er, get up!”
“At your orders, Mister President, I have already stood up!”
“Stand there and wake up! The reason I always let you off sleeping through meetings was because you were doing experiments at night. You even got an award, so it was understandable. But you’re not doing overtime anymore. What were you doing last night?”
He shouldn’t have asked. But since he did, I lost it. Why was I the only one who worked overtime? A roomful of smug faces, all a bunch of frauds! Patience, just wait until I show them: “At your orders, sir, my wife beat me.”
The room exploded. There was applause from the back row.
“Reporting to you, sir, I stood up for the honor of our school and defeated my wife in the end. I didn’t lose face for the school!”
The brothers in the back stood up with thundering applause. The president’s face turned purple as he roared, “Get out! Wait for me in my office!”
When I got to the president’s office, I began to regret my outburst. I put him in a difficult spot and didn’t offer him a way to save face. The president treated me like one of his own, sticking up for me in front of everyone. He had nominated me to be the director of the biology lab. Even though I was going to only have one person under me, Xu You, people had still complained. The human resources director had had my file in his hand and said: Wang Er has some troubling history. He and Xu You were implicated in an explosion incident. These guys could blow up the whole building, maybe just make him a codirector and move the fat lady from the canteen over to be the director. The president had laughed: two kids getting into trouble during the Cultural Revolution, what’s so remarkable about that? The fat lady from the canteen was unscrupulous. Putting her in charge of the biology lab was just asking for trouble. The award Professor Lü and I won had come with a 2,000-yuan prize. He had taken the bulk of it and left me with 300. When the money had gotten to the school’s accounting department, the head of accounting had wanted to confiscate all of it. His reasoning was that Wang Er was working for other organizations at night when he was still on the school’s payroll. He yawned so much in the morning that the students seated in the front row could see his tonsils. The president had stood up for me and said Wang Er’s project was a contribution to the nation and brought honor to the school. Withholding my prize would have been like scraping gold off the Buddha’s face. In the end, I got most of the money, even more than Professor Lü.
I felt a bit ashamed. I didn’t want to be known as the ungrateful type. But upon further reflection, my heart hardened again: fuck it, who’s to say I’m his guy? I’m my own goddamn guy. On that note, the president entered the room. He sat in silence for two minutes before solemnly declaring, “Young Wang, I need to discipline you.”
“At your orders, president, I should have been disciplined long ago!”
“Don’t get so emotional. The whole sabbatical abroad thing left you feeling disappointed, I understand. But you didn’t have to make a scene at the meeting! If I don’t discipline you, people will harbor resentment.”
“Yes, sir, I wasn’t being emotional. I only ever tell the truth to my colleagues. Erniuzi did attack me. Look at the purple bruises on my neck … and that’s me, if it had been somebody else, they would be dead already.”
The president took a look at my neck and couldn’t decide if he wanted to laugh or cry. He said, “You little son of a gun! Even a couple’s quarrel should have limits!”
“President, you misunderstand. This wasn’t a couple’s quarrel! My wife assaulted me for real. She’s on the wrestling team! Last time, she dislocated my elbow, I had to apply tiger-bone paste bandages. See, it’s still on there now.”
The president pondered for a moment before walking out. I thought with glee: how are you going to discipline me now? A minute later, he returned with the chairman of the labor union and the head of human resources, both of whom were my enemies. The president spoke to them in an excited pitch.
“Take a look at that, completely unacceptable! To use so much violence on someone! When our male comrades beat their wives, the organization has to intervene. So when our female comrades beat their husbands, should we just stand by and watch? Don’t laugh! It’s a special matter! Give the athletics department a call, tell them to discipline their athlete! The labor union and human resources have to be involved. An injury like this has negative effects on the workplace. Young Wang, why don’t you take the rest of the day off. But if possible, hang in there for a little longer until the meeting’s over.”
Hang in there my ass. The moment I walked off campus, I slapped my butt and laughed: what a one-of-a-kind college president! I took a nap the second I got home and didn’t wake up until three in the afternoon. My wife had left a note telling me to meet her at Moon-Taker Pavilion at four. She had laid out my suit on the table. I dressed up and took a look at myself in the mirror. The more I looked, the more it didn’t look right. I wasn’t the type to appear stylish. Once out the door, I walked close to the walls to avoid being spotted by my neighbors. When I got to New Bridge, close to the restaurant, I saw my wife right away. She was wearing a bright red satin cheongsam that looked more like a duvet cover. With rouge and lipstick, she looked like a streetwalker. I walked up to her and took her hand in my sweaty palm.
She whined, “I’m gonna die!”
“Don’t be scared, keep moving, where’s that bone-shattering spirit of yours? Don’t look at the ground; there’s no money there, even if there was, I’d be the first to see it. Chin up! Chest out!”
“I’m afraid people will see that I’m wearing makeup!”
“What are you afraid of? You’re pretty good-looking. Wearing a little powder is still better than having no nose. Walk like a supermodel. Swing those shoulders, sway that ass!”
The walk seemed to have given her a renewed sense of confidence. Her joints were cracking again. When my wife dressed casually, she turned quite a few heads on the street. But now, everyone seemed to be turning away from her. After sitting down in the restaurant, she began to cry.
It was an uncomfortable meal, like we were a pair of mannequins eating in a restaurant. After we got home, I pondered for a long time in silence, which seemed to have led to some sort of a breakthrough. Next morning at work, I was more of a jerk than usual.
The first thing I did when I got to school was to meet up with Xu. I had come to terms with the fact that a sabbatical abroad just wasn’t in the cards for me. Our fight two days before had left us at odds. We were due for a good talk. Ever since we were little, he had been my bodyguard. I couldn’t let distance grow between us. Just as we were reaching the height of camaraderie, there was a banging on the wall. That was the president’s signal for me to go see him.
When I walked into the president’s office, I could tell something was off. On his desk was the annual budget proposal for the biology lab. He let out a long sigh.
“Wang Er, oh, Wang Er, your conduct can be summed up in just four syllables!”
“I know, selfless comrade.”
“No. Young and feckless! Take a look at your budget proposal. What do you mean by three units of two-hundred-liter refrigerators, for storing the fat lady’s milk?”
“She’s always putting milk in the fridge, saying it was empty and wasting electricity. I use the fridge to culture mold. She took all the cultures out and they died. Now that she got knocked up, don’t you think it’s time to plan ahead?”
“You can make suggestions but don’t write a bunch of nonsense. Besides, why three units? Someone thought you were trying to make it a bigger deal than it is in order to subvert group unity.”
“President, this will be the fat lady’s second child. The first child only warms up the belly; there won’t be much produce. The second pregnancy could easily lead to eight or ten kids, that is, if we were talking about sows with that many nipples. The big lady has two, but we still have to take the young ones into consideration. It’s all in the proposal.”
“Rubbish! This perfectly reasonable concern is now ammo in someone else’s gun. Sit down. Let’s be honest with each other. Are you aware that our school is going through difficult times?”
“At your orders, sir, I’ve seen the news. Too many new colleges have been built. Consolidation is a wise strategy on the part of the Party Central Committee. Take our school for example, there’s no money for teachers or equipment. It may as well close.”
“Again, with the nonsense! Our school was built out of nothing. But through hardship and grit we have trained thousands of graduates for the nation. Our success is as clear as day. We now have hundreds of faculty members and loads of equipment. How can we just close? If the school closed, where would you go?”
“I would go to the mining school. Professor Lü has tried to transfer me several times, but you’ve always put a stop to it. Take a good look at me. Wouldn’t it be better if I was out of your hair?”
“Dream on. The school is in difficult times. Many people want to transfer. If I let you go, how I can stop the others? The committee has decided that not a single person can be let go. Whoever decides to quit will get handed a punishment that will stick with him all his life. On the other hand, we will aggressively promote young talent. Those who are capable will get to go abroad and be promoted to full professor. Take you for example. You break every rule in the book, yet we still let you be the biology lab director. How has the school let you down?”
“In so many ways. Take housing for example. My classmate who was assigned to the agriculture department got a house the moment he graduated. Me? After countless applications, I ended up with a wet and dark basement perfect for growing mushrooms. Even if I was subpar, I don’t think I deserved that. Mushrooms are of kingdom fungi, division basidiomycota. Me, I’m at least mammal, primate, homo sapiens, of the East Asian variety, just like you. Do I look like a mushroom?”
“All right! Nobody is a mushroom here! We need to take care of our fellow humans. The housing will be there. Please don’t cry poor. You live in a bigger flat than I do!”
“That’s because it is from the athletics department’s housing. My wife said, I got the better end of the bargain, so I have to let her have her way with me. Of course I can beat her in a fight, but I’ll never win in the court of public opinion. I’m a nearly two-meters-tall man. It’s only because I’m stuck in this school that I have to take abuse from my wife and I can’t even get a divorce—I’d be homeless if I divorced. That or I would have to share the lab office with Xu You. Do you have any idea how bad Xu’s feet smell?”
“Is that why you want to turn the school upside down? Let me be frank with you, I’m not the only person who makes decisions around here. You can mouth off all you want to me but it’s no use. Even if you manage to transfer, it won’t do you any good. I have already prepared your political assessment: do you want to hear what it says? ‘Comrade Wang Er, despicable character. Reactionary in political thinking, lackadaisical at work, and reprehensible in everyday life.’ We can stick that in your permanent files and let you carry it for the rest of your life, how does that sound? Do you want it?”
The president sneered at me, giving me goose bumps all over. I had no choice but to back down.
“President, your honorable, how can you treat me so? I really do want to learn to be good. I just wasn’t born with the talent, and it doesn’t come across right. It’s all right, I can rewrite the budget proposal. I’ll keep my eyes on Xu You. Is there anything else you need? Let’s have it out in the open, no more backstabbing.”
“If you really wanted to learn to be better, you could start with your mouth. Your attitude just now, is that the right attitude for a faculty member to take with the president?”
“Understood. Next time I come here, I will first say goodbye to my true self. Anything else?”
“You must hold political seminars! You’re the class supervisor for Ag-3-Beta, do you understand?”
“What’s Ag-3-Beta, sounds like the name of a pesticide. All right, I understand. Every Wednesday afternoon, talk to the students. What do I get if I do all of these? Do I get to go abroad?”
“In your dreams! The political committee submitted their report accusing you of reactionary speech. What was it that you said during the last faculty meeting on spiritual pollution?”
“A paper was read during the meeting that was obscene, talking about why jeans should not be worn. Criticizing spiritual pollution should be a serious matter and shouldn’t be trivialized. What’s this about jeans constricting airflow, squeezing girls’ reproductive organs, leading to mold? Question, who’s gotten any yeast infection? How did you come to see this? If the Chinese will grow mold after a few days of wearing the thing, wouldn’t American cowboys have grown mushrooms by now?”
“You’re thinking too narrowly. You have to look at the bigger picture. All the foreign stuff coming in must be resisted. What’s so great about jeans anyway? I don’t see it.”
“With your three-foot waistline, wearing a pair of jeans would turn you into a big radish, of course they shouldn’t be worn. But skinny people wearing them just look good—anyway, it’s pointless to argue. But even suppose it did cause mold. We could improve upon it and install a battery-powered fan on it. If it turns out to be a good invention, we can export it and make a fortune. If it doesn’t sell, then whoever wrote that paper can carry the losses. That’s what he gets for making stuff up. That was my only input.”
“And it is incorrect! I chose for that paper to be read. When there are female instructors in our college wearing the thing, we need to raise public awareness; but we’re not talking about dress codes anymore, so I don’t need to say any more about it. Of course, you’re the expert on yeasts and molds, but don’t make everything so radical, do you understand?”
“I don’t fully understand. Why are you staring at me like that?”
“What do you mean? I care about you. I want to nurture you.”
“Why do you want to care about me!”
“All right, allow me to say a few things to you unofficially. Right now, the school is still in a developing stage; it needs entrepreneurial talent. People have their doubts about you, but I look at you in this way: no matter how many problems you have, you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to do things. As long as you satisfy these two conditions, I’d take you even if you were a green-eyed demon with fangs—young people these days, how many of them are really willing to work? That’s how things look from where I stand. From where you stand, how do I treat you? The ancients have a phrase, honor your benefactors! After all that work with Old Lü from the other school, what did you get out of it? He left the country without even telling you. But I was the one saying good things about you in front of the committee. How many wishes did Professor Lü grant you? Did he come through? Irresponsible. I’m just going to lay it out for you: as long as you behave, you will be prioritized for every opportunity. There are young people who are much better ass-kissers than you, but I won’t consider them, because I consider you a talent. Is that clear enough for you?”
It all made sense now. I had always wondered why the president was like that! So that was the reason. It was because I was a talented individual! Knowing that he believed in me, I couldn’t let him down. I decided to not transfer to the mining school.
That afternoon, I took the students out for a field trip. They were waiting for me eagerly. I took them to the reception office to wait for a school car. While waiting, I called the breeding station that would be receiving us. One of my old classmates was the manager there.
“Breeding station? I’m looking for Manager Guo. No! I’m not bringing anything in … I’m not interested personally … we have both male and female. Guo Er, we’re coming. I know it’s not season yet, we just want to take a look. Who was that on the phone just now?”
“There’s no supervisor here. Wang Er, come on over. It’s not yet the season but we can stimulate them artificially. Our livestock have had their shots. They’re trying to take over the place! I designed a synthetic sow using the latest electronics; the boars can’t get enough of the thing!”
“We don’t need to see too much of the synthetic stuff. Our class is introductory, we don’t need to get into advanced topics.”
“We got the natural kind as well. I have a little jack donkey from Yunnan about the size of a dog. Its dick is even longer than a Guanzhong’s jack.1 Nobody has ever seen it and not laughed. Hurry on over!”
“Not so loud, I have a bunch of students here. They can hear everything you’re barking.”
“Hey, who are you trying to play? Can’t fool me. Let’s talk shop when you get here!”
“Man, you are getting sleazier by the day! Students, cover your ears. All right, that’ll do. See you in half an hour.”
After putting down the phone, I felt ambivalent. Maybe I shouldn’t be taking the students to a breeding station. Maybe it would make me look deviant. We waited for a long time but no car came. Just as I was about to send someone to check, the dean of the agriculture department, Mr. Liu, arrived. His lips were puckered like he was sucking on a nipple.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wang, I’m sorry fellow students, our car-riding plan has been canceled. Please everyone return to your classroom. The field trip can wait until next week.”
“Dean Liu, as an agricultural scientist, you shouldn’t joke around like that! At this time of the year, breeding requires artificial stimulation. If we keep doing last-minute changes, what are they going to tell the jackasses! But since you’re already here, there’s nothing I can say. Let me give the breeding station a call.”
When Guo Er heard that we were rescheduling for next week, he screamed, “No way, mister, you are not welcome next week. You think this breeding station is for your personal use?” He slammed the phone down. I said to Mr. Liu, “Just listen to what they’re saying about me! My personal breeding station. What does that make me? Students, we will not be going on a field trip today. Next week, we’ll have an exam.”
The students began to clamor. Some of them threatened to strike. All this commotion blocking the school’s front gate was too much for any authority to handle. I said, “Fine, let’s go! We’ll walk there. The weak and the wounded are exempt; we’ll have to walk over six kilometers after we get off the bus. We’ll snap some overhead slides to share with those who stay back.”
That didn’t work either. One of the students was on a sports team. He had injured his leg and had come to class on a pair of crutches just to visit the breeding station. The other students offered to carry him there. What a joke. I turned to Mr. Liu and said, “So, what if we had a small car? At least we could carry the wounded.”
“Mr. Wang, it’s not that I don’t want to send a car. Our department isn’t as obtuse as some others. To keep first-year agriculture students from visiting a breeding station, that would have to be some sort of a joke! But if the administration says there’s no car, there’s nothing anyone can do. Those buffoons, didn’t even think to warn us ahead of time.”
“Really? I don’t believe it. Let me try.” I picked up the phone and called the driver’s office, “Who’s this? Young Ma? Send over a large sedan. I need to take my students on a field trip.”
“Wang Er, are you the one who needs the car? Our director must have made a mistake. Let’s see, would sitting in a truck cabin do?”
“No! Someone else can sit in the truck. I want the sedan.”
“The director told us to hide the sedan so no one would see it. He wants to use it himself. Let’s let him save some face, all right?”
“What about my face? Whose face do you think is more important?”
“It’s Wang Er’s of course. Wang Er is my big brother! The car will be there shortly.”
Mr. Liu didn’t leave. Apparently, he didn’t think the car was going to show up. Moments later, when the car pulled in from the road, the students cheered and ran to it. Old Liu was red in the face, fists clenched, quaking in anger. I immediately offered him a save, “Mr. Liu, Young Ma is putting himself on the line for us. Someone’s bound to try to put the small shoes on him. But this is for the good of our department …”
The old man roared, “Don’t you worry. I won’t let any harm come to Young Ma. I’m going to go find the president and talk to him about people hiding cars!”
The students came back from the field trip changed. They gathered in small groups, whispering secrets. I took several rolls of film. I called the class captain over and gave him instructions.
“Take these films to be made into slides and hold onto them. Remember, don’t let anyone borrow them, other than Ag-3-Beta. They will only get to go to the botanical garden, so they might feel left out. But if you lend the slides to any other class, I will never take you guys on another field trip ever again.”
“Teacher, our class is completely loyal to you. The Beta class bad-mouths you, but there’s no one like that in our class. I won’t lend these slides to anyone. I’ll just say they were overexposed.”
“Sounds good. What did they say about me?”
It was nothing out of the usual. They said I dressed sloppily and that when my lectures reached a fever pitch, I sounded like a country yokel. I knew all these things before he even mentioned them, but I wanted to hear it again anyway. When I returned to school, the president called me into his office. What’s with all the talking? I was starting to lose my patience.
The president wanted to talk about the incident concerning the administrative director hiding the car—in fact, he knew more about the situation than I did. The administrative director had wanted to use the car to take people from a different organization on a tour of the Great Wall, only for me to have foiled his plan. The president heaped me with praises and all sorts of encouragements. But I wasn’t that interested: I was only a faculty member and did not want to get involved in the affairs of the upper echelon. The plan for that afternoon was to take the students to the botanical garden. The students were full of complaints.
“Teacher, the Alpha class said they saw a donkey at the breeding station that looked like it had five legs. Its middle leg was five times longer than its other legs. They must have been exaggerating, right?”
“Don’t listen to their nonsense. This is science, not playtime. But yes, that donkey was rather special.”
“Teacher, you’re playing favorites! We want to visit the breeding station too!”
“That’s enough. The animals need to rest. Do you know what season it is? They were only able to perform after getting shots.”
“Give ’em more shots! The more shots the better!”
“Shush! You can’t treat them like machines. They are flesh and blood just like us. What if we gave you a shot? If you guys could bad-mouth me a little less, maybe I’ll let the Alpha class show you the slides.”
“Teacher, don’t listen to those provocateurs! Only Erjunzi bad-mouthed you and we’ve held three class meetings criticizing him. Tang Xiaoli from their class said you ate during class, and many other mean things about Mr. Xu. Bad-mouthing Mr. Xu is just like bad-mouthing you. If you think they are the good class, then you’ve been duped!”
I had heard it too many times already. I figured: bad-mouthing me meant loving me, the more the better. When we got to the botanical garden, I left the students with an assistant researcher in charge of guided tours and slipped away to enjoy the flowers in peace. I knew it wasn’t going to be some short little break when I ran into my old mentor Liu Er.
Liu Er was one hell of a character with eyes the size of a pair of balls (bull testicles) and a face as black and bumpy as the bottom of a burnt wok. He knew how to do everything, but back in ’75, when I became his apprentice at the factory, he was unwilling to do anything. He grew up in an orphanage and married a country bride. He raised a couple of pigs in the countryside, which was where he poured all his heart and soul. When he told everyone that he refused to work, the factory manager and team captains all had to put their own skills to the test. Meanwhile, he hummed a little song, putting his own lyrics to the tune of the northeastern classic “Red Sorghum.” I sang the accompaniment. Whenever he got to the end of a verse, he would call to me, “Oh me, oh my ma!” and I would return, “Aye.” We were both off-key; anyone listening couldn’t help but laugh.
I could never keep track of all the verses in Liu Er’s song. The words seemed to change every time. Every version began with his childhood. He was raised by whores, which was bad luck. Then, he sang about how when he joined the factory, he had entered from the wrong door. Our factory was built in ’58 by a bunch of old ladies doing street organizing. When the factory was built, he was fifteen years old so he became an apprentice. Then, the song talked about how he never got a raise in over a decade, always the same old twenty-six yuan and fifty cents. That was followed by how he couldn’t find a wife. Only the crippled and infirm were willing to marry a street mechanic, finding an intact specimen just wasn’t in the cards. With no other option, he looked for a country bride and ended up with a really lazy one. As they say, marry a man, have clothes to wear, and food in hand. His wife slept all day on the bed-stove (a so-called kang) and ate a pound of pork meat at every meal. Then, the song talked about his two, waddling rat-browed sons. Their eyes glowed whenever they saw white steamed buns. Those two ate him into oblivion. He had to find some way to make money, but every way somehow involved capitalism (at this point, someone would just cough and be pointed out as reactionary—this was in ’75). His only way out was raising pigs. After that, he only sang about pigs. They were his mother, his father, his food and clothes and everything else. One of the pigs he called Father, and he sang an ode to Father describing everything from its long mane down to its trotters. His love for it knew no bounds but he needed the money, so he had to castrate it. Another pig he called Mother. She was as beautiful as can be, and pregnant with a litter of his little brothers, which meant she had to eat well. If his little brothers came out with tiny snouts, nobody would want to buy them. Thus, the next part of the song was about finding food for the pigs. If someone didn’t interrupt him, the song could have gone on for a hundred years. Liu Er sang about what it was like to reap grass, what it was like to gather vegetable stumps, and a hundred more adventures like such. After those endless verses, he went on to sing about how he couldn’t only feed his Father and Mother vegetables, because that would have been unfilial, so he went around gathering kitchen swill. Later that year, the agricultural college had a new initiative. Every household was given a vat to collect kitchen swill to make fertilizer for farmers. When the season got warm, a foul stench filled the air. Snow-white maggots crawled everywhere, there wasn’t a soul in Beijing who didn’t complain. My mentor complained too, but not about the stench. He complained that the new policy took away his father’s and mother’s food source. The song suddenly changed to the subject of stealing swill at midnight. As he and I (I would sometimes help him), with our criminal implements (ladle and bucket), moved stealthily toward our target, everyone listening to the song couldn’t help but pinch their noses. Suddenly, my mentor disappeared. The old man was hiding under a workbench, signaling me to be quiet. If you listened closely, you could hear an old lady cursing from beyond the factory gate. Her curses were in verses that metered and rhymed, all the way to the factory gate. The old lady was in charge of collecting swill from the vats. She was cursing Liu Er. With her hands on her hips, she stood outside the gate and screeched, “Wang Er, where’s your mentor? Tell him to come out!” I said my mentor had the swine flu and was resting at home. She continued to curse verse after verse, saying basically how everyone hated her lot and blamed them for all the stinky swill vats. On top of that, they were only making twenty-five yuan a month, working through the cold and rain. When the vats froze, they had to break up the ice, what a horrifying job. When it got hot and they fell behind on the collection, the vats filled up with maggots. The whole community pinched their noses and cursed at them. In short, they were up to their necks in frustration. Then came the aria, describing their state of disbelief: how in the world was there a creature like Liu Er who would actually steal swill. They would have loved nothing more than to have their swill stolen, but this Liu Er was so afraid that people would notice that he replaced the stolen swill with rocks and dirt, giving them even more work to do. It was one thing for the community to scorn them, but what Liu Er did to them was simply sadistic. Her piece ended with an upbeat hymn in which heaven was invoked to put a lightning bolt through Liu Er. The factory manager came out to invite her into the office to talk. She declined and walked away cursing. My mentor crawled out from under the bench, his dark face purple from anxiety. He pretended like nothing happened and went on to do his thing.
I often advised my mentor to stop stealing swill, why not just ask for it? Even if he had to steal the swill, why fill the vats up with rocks? He wouldn’t listen, something about dignity and reputation. At the time, I couldn’t understand. How can you worry about dignity when you’re stealing swill? But later, I understood: swill was something that you could steal but you couldn’t beg for because even pigs didn’t stoop that low.
My mentor was very down to earth. In all the years that I had known him, that was the only time he had ever worried about his reputation. But when I saw him this time around, he was different. You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you. He was wearing a checkered suit with a thick gold ring on his finger. The moment he saw me, he offered me a Hilton cigarette. It turned out that after he was suspended from the government factory, he became an independent contractor. He was leading a band of migrant workers in the construction of a greenhouse for the botanical garden. He was a bit surprised by my appearance and quietly asked me if I knew anyone personally from his client’s side (as in from the botanical garden).
I said I knew one person but it would most likely amount to nothing. We felt embarrassed by our very exchange. It was almost worse than getting caught stealing swill. I asked about his wife and two sons, but there wasn’t really much else to talk about. He looked awkward in his pristine white shirt and I assumed he felt uncomfortable in it as well.
I could only guess what my mentor thought of me. So, this little Wang Er turned out to be a teacher, scurrying around with his little pack of students! Frankly, I didn’t like my role either, not one bit.
1 Guanzhong is a Chinese breed of workhorse.