IN THE MORNING, OLD MR. LIU said to me: I couldn’t sleep last night thinking of two things; one was to eat a duck, and two was to learn chess from Wang Er and figure out just why DODC is so hard to beat. I said to him: this particular version of DODC is a new variation. In the year 19661 of the Common Era, the greatest Chinese chess players under heaven including Yang Guanlin from Guangdong, He Shunan from Shanghai, Liu Dahua from Hubei, Wang Jialiang from Heilongjiang, and more—about fifteen in total—gathered in the city of Hangzhou. Everyone said: Hu Ronghua from Shanghai is too good; he won several championships in a row, the nerves! Let’s conspire against him. Everyone agreed Opposite Direction Cannon was a vulgar opening so they decided to tinker around the strategy to give Hu a big surprise and hence, defeat! They pondered for seven weeks or forty-nine days before coming up with fifteen moves that were as unconventional as they were vicious! As Old Mr. Liu listened, his eyebrows danced in fascination and he smacked his lips. Bell laughed and said, don’t listen to Wang Er’s tall tales. Old Mr. Liu said: Bell, you don’t understand chess, don’t interrupt! This story is real! Keep talking, what happens then? I said: then the gang decided to each memorize one of the new-fangled moves, and the move could only be used against Hu Ronghua, never against one another—Bell, go clean up the duck, you won’t understand—but in the end, none of them used a single move. Hu Ronghua was still the champion! Old Liu, you know chess; can you guess what happened?
Old Mr. Liu thought for a long time before stuttering: earlier did you say, He Shunan?
I said: that’s right! An elder after all! That son of a bitch was from the same county as Hu Ronghua, always playing the spy (had Old Mr. Liu not given me the prompt, I wouldn’t have known where the story was going—Wang Er’s note)! The day before the championship, all the chess players who gathered in Hangzhou received a letter which read: chariot eight cross five. It was signed: you know who! Old Liu, can you guess what happened there? He slapped the table and shouted: what a Hu Ronghua! Truly amazing! He Shunan knew one of the moves, but he couldn’t have remembered the other fourteen. Old Hu knew he was in trouble so he wrote down the first variation of DODC and sent it to everyone. When they received the note and knew that Hu knew they were going to use the DODC, they no longer had the confidence to go through with it. He used the old trick of a dead Zhuge Liang scaring away a living army! I’m certain that you know all fifteen moves; no wonder I can’t beat you. This DODC certainly has a feted origin, just teach it to me already. I said, sure I can teach you, one yuan per move. He said, that’s a deal!
It’s true when they say old people are like children. Old Mr. Liu set up the chessboard, cut out a few pieces of paper, and prepared a pencil to take notes. With his eyes wide open, he stared at me from top to bottom. I felt an itch to bop him on the head. After only one move, Old Mr. Liu announced in a high-pitched voice: chariot eight cross—five! He lifted up his arm to write. He made me laugh so hard that I knocked over the chessboard.
Later when I told him there was no new-fangled variation and that I had made everything up to just to mess with him, he became upset. But in the blink of an eye, he was happy again because he remembered the duck. Old people are innocent like that; they always do what you expect them to do. Old Mr. Liu stared at the poor duck’s corpse and thought up many ways of partitioning it. One portion he wanted to deep fry, one portion he wanted to poach, one he wanted to make a soup with, and the last portion he wanted to grill. If the dead duck still had a soul, it would have wanted to ask: Old Mr. Liu, why? If after my death, someone chopped me up into four pieces, cremated a quarter me of, buried a quarter of me, fed a quarter of me to vultures and mummified the last quarter of me, I too would ask: why? Unfortunately in our kitchen, there was only some condensed soy sauce, so we could only make soy sauce duck. Old Mr. Liu said, the soy sauce duck won’t taste good until the meat falls off the bones, which won’t be before dark. He had used up the last of his food budget to buy the duck, which meant he had to go hungry for lunch. Old Mr. Liu said, good food requires patience, but he was constantly opening the lid to check. Apparently, even looking at the food gave him some amount of satisfaction. His gluttonous expression was hard to watch. The room was filled with the aroma of a boiling duck. Old Mr. Liu couldn’t sit still, he paced back and forth like a maniac. There was still a whole day before nighttime. With his high blood pressure, he wouldn’t have made it. That was why Bell called me over, gave me some money and told me to take him out to lunch. She added, she wasn’t hungry. So I said to Old Mr. Liu: old man, take a ride with me. I got on a man’s bike, he got on a lady’s bike, and we rode out the school gate. At that point, I said to Old Mr. Liu: I still have some money on me; let’s go to the new restaurant street to eat some lamb chowder with croutons. But with a sudden clang, Old Mr. Liu fell on the ground along with his bike. I stopped and turned to look only to see him crawl back onto his feet while drooling: lamb … chowder with croutons!!
I treated Old Mr. Liu to the chowder because I had yelled at him in the morning and felt guilty. But later, he died. He never got to eat the duck. That evening, the duck was the only thing on our table. I threw up after the first bite. Bell couldn’t swallow it either so we threw it out. The duck was sticky and slimy, it left a morbid feeling in your mouth. Even now, I don’t much fancy eating ducks.
When I ate the lamb chowder with Old Mr. Liu, we got to talking about Mr. He. The old man’s eyes bulged as he said: eat, eat, don’t talk about those things, it’s too creepy. I said: we’re just talking, old man, what are you so afraid of? He said: don’t talk about dead people. I said: that’s funny, at your age, you’re still scared of death? The old man said innocently: I’m not scared. I said: can you avoid death by fearing it? Old man, look what you’re eating; it’s all lamb intestines, full of cholesterol. It’ll clot your blood vessels and bring you closer to death. The old man looked funny with his trembling hands.
After that, Old Mr. Liu gathered his courage (he said, I’ll drink some vinegar at home, that’ll take care of it—Wang Er’s note), and began to tell me about what happened before Mr. He’s death, but it wasn’t very interesting. Before Mr. He jumped off the building, he said, tell my family to not grieve too much. He didn’t say anything like, in twenty years I’ll come back a new man, or even something like, let my sons avenge my death. At the time I thought, people like Old Mr. Liu are so boring that even their stories become boring.
After lunch, I told Old Mr. Liu to go home while I wandered around until dark. I was lethargic as I wandered around like an aimless dunce. When a person reaches that point, he begins to think grandiose thoughts. At the time I thought: if only we were at war or something.
People bored with life and hoping for war is nothing out of the ordinary. My generation grew up under constant expectation of war. Take me for example: even though I feared neither pain nor death, all I could do in those peaceful years was dig holes. It wasn’t as if China had ever been short of hole diggers.
In peaceful times, life was just a competition for digging holes and planting grains. Even though I had the physique of a stallion, I was no better than anyone else. First of all, I didn’t grow up doing farm work so I wasn’t used to it. Second of all, I had lower back pain and you can’t farm without a good back. So I was always hoping for war. On a battlefield, my heroism would have surpassed that of all others. Had I become a prisoner of war, I could have secreted away a shard of glass with which I could cut open my stomach and choke my enemies with my intestines. I would have made an effective soldier. But without a war, I was as useless as Old Mr. Liu.
Now I understand that wrapping your guts around someone’s neck is a really bad idea. Just because I wasn’t happy with my life, I wanted to start a fight with somebody, anybody. If everyone thought that way, we would never get any peace. Now I also understand that for Old Mr. Liu to fear death was the most natural thing in the world. He had nothing left in this world other than his short and final days.
When Old Mr. Liu peed in the bathroom, his urine often ended up on his pants.
1 1966 was the year a ban on chess was imposed in China, under the Cultural Revolution.