AT FIRST, I THOUGHT CHEN QINGYANG would come look for me right away, but I was wrong. I waited for a long time, then I gave up. I sat in my hut, listening to the rustling of leaves until I felt empty of self and of the world. I felt the monsoon clouds rumbling above my head as my soul sought to surge above me. I was like a bamboo shoot deep in the mountain, popping off one coat of fibrous husk after another, shooting up higher with every peeling layer. During the low tides, I lay low; but when the tide was high, I rose and soared with it. Chen Qingyang stepped into the room and saw me sitting naked on my bamboo bed with a foot-long penis on my lap like a bright red, freshly skinned rabbit. When she saw me, she screamed.
Chen Qingyang’s journey to find me went like this: two weeks after I went into the mountain, she came to look for me. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, but she was dressed like one of those easy women who slipped out barefoot by the cover of night; she was wearing nothing under her white gown. She trekked across sunlit fields until she arrived at a dry ravine. She walked for a long time along the forking, meandering streambed without taking a single wrong turn. She left the ravine and walked toward a sun-facing dell where she saw a newly built thatched hut. Had there not been a Wang Er to give her the directions, she couldn’t possibly have found it. But when she walked in and saw Wang Er sitting there with his little monk sticking up, she screamed.
Chen Qingyang later said, she couldn’t believe that any of what had happened was real. Real things happened for real reasons. She took off her clothes and sat down next to me. She stared at my little monk, it was the color of a burn scar. A gust shook the hut, letting in specks of sunlight through the thatched roof that dotted her body like tiny galaxies. I reached out to touch her nipple, she blushed, her nipple hardened. Suddenly, she woke from her reverie and her face went flush with embarrassment. She wrapped herself around me.
It was the second time Chen Qingyang and I made love. Many details of our first time had left me puzzled. It was only later that I understood: she was still resentful about being called an old shoe. Since she couldn’t prove she wasn’t an old shoe, she was willing to become a real one. She felt like one of those women who was caught in the act of infidelity and taken to a stage on a public square to be questioned over every salacious detail. The more her lecherous audience listened, the less they could contain themselves until someone would finally shout: tie her up! Someone would go up to the stage with a rope to tie her up. She would stand there and take in all the humiliation. She didn’t mind that. She wasn’t afraid of being stripped, tied to a millstone, and drowned in a pond. Or like the concubines of old times, she could have been forced to kneel, neatly dressed, with a wet piece of yellow mourning paper glued to her face until she suffocated to death. Those sorts of things didn’t frighten her. She wasn’t afraid of being a real old shoe. It was so much better than being wrongly accused of something. What bothered her was everything that had led her to turn herself into a real old shoe in the first place.
As Chen Qingyang and I made love, a lizard crawled in through a crack in the wall. It flitted across the middle of the floor in stops and starts. Something spooked it and it darted off toward the sunlight beyond the door. Meanwhile, Chen Qingyang’s moans filled the room like gushes of water. Startled by her sounds, I stopped. She said, hurry on, you bastard, and pinched my leg. After I hurried, it felt as if waves of tremors emanated from the earth’s core. She said she felt full of guilt and that karma would one day come back to bite her.
AS SHE TALKED about her karma, a red flush was fading from her breast. We were still in the middle of sex, but her tone suggested that she felt guilty only for what had happened up to that point. Suddenly, my body tightened from the top of my head to my tailbone and I ejaculated massively. That wasn’t a part of her karma. I was solely responsible for that part, I suppose.
Later, Chen Qingyang told me Luo Xiaosi was looking everywhere for me. When he went to the hospital to ask for me, the doctor said I didn’t exist. When he went to ask the captain about me, the captain said I didn’t exist. Finally, he went to Chen Qingyang. She told him since everyone said I didn’t exist, then maybe I really didn’t exist, to which I had no objections. When Luo heard this, he wept.
I found the whole question strange. I shouldn’t exist just because some old hag hit me. Therefore, I shouldn’t not exist just because some old hag hit me. The truth of the matter was, my existence was unequivocal. I felt like I needed to make a statement. In order to prove the obvious, I ran down the mountain on the day the welfare committee arrived and revealed myself at their meeting. After the meeting, the captain said, you don’t look very sick, maybe you should come back to feed the pigs. He even tried to organize people to catch me and Chen Qingyang making love. Of course, it wasn’t easy to catch me, I was too fast, no one could follow me very far. But still, it was a hassle. By then, it was too late for me to realize that I didn’t need to prove my existence to anyone.
Feeding pigs meant I had to yoke buckets of water every day. It was exhausting work that you couldn’t be lazy about. When the pigs got hungry, they became very loud. I had to chop loads of vegetables and split many logs of firewood. Feeding the pigs used to be a three-woman job. Now it was just me. It was clear that I couldn’t replace three women, especially with my lower back pain. At times like those, I wished I could prove I didn’t exist.
At night, Chen Qingyang and I made love in the little thatched hut. In those days, I was entirely dedicated to lovemaking and charged every kiss and every caress with sweltering passion. There was the classic missionary style, and all the others, dog, spoon, cowgirl, we tried them all meticulously. Chen Qingyang was extremely pleased. And me too. At moments like those, I knew that I had no need to prove my existence to anyone. I also learned an important lesson: never draw attention to oneself. In Beijing, they have a saying, “Don’t be afraid of thieves, be afraid of thieves who remember you.” Never let yourself be remembered like that.
Not long after the committee’s visit, our whole intellectual-youth battalion was disbanded. The men went to work in the sugar factory. The women went to teach in rural schools. I was the only one left still feeding pigs. Apparently, it was because I wasn’t reformed enough yet. Chen Qingyang said, someone must really “remember” me. That someone was probably the army cadre in charge of the farm. The guy was a real piece of work. At the hospital where she previously worked, the army cadre had tried to touch her so she had slapped him on the face. The next day, she was transferred to Team 15’s infirmary. The water at Team 15 was bitter and there was nothing to eat. She got used to it eventually, but it was meant as a punishment. She said, he’ll probably torture you half to death. I wondered what could he possibly do to me? If the son of a bitch pushed me too far, I could always skip town. This notion would later prove useful.
ONE DAY AT DAWN, I came down the mountain to feed pigs. When I passed by the washing station, I saw the army cadre brushing his teeth. He pulled his toothbrush out of his frothy mouth and said something to me. I thought it was gross so I walked away without answering. A while later, he came running into the pigsty to give me a scolding. He asked me how I dared to walk away like that. I listened and stayed silent. Even when he accused me of pretending to be a mute, I stayed silent. I walked away again.
The army cadre decided to hang out in our production team; he came and just stayed. He said, until he got Wang Er to open his mouth, he wasn’t going anywhere. There were two possible reasons for his stay. One, he had come down to do an inspection, came across me pretending to be deaf and dumb, and got really angry. Or two, he wasn’t there to inspect anything but got wind of Chen Qingyang and me having an affair; therefore, he came down to personally make my life hell. Either way, I refused to speak and there was nothing he could do about it.
The army cadre sat me down for a talk. He told me to prepare a confession. He added, having an affair was the kind of thing that would make the people angry. If I didn’t confess, it would be the people who would come after me. He added that I was a bad element and required rehabilitation. I could have tried to argue that I was innocent; who could have proven that I had done the old-shoe thing? But I just stared at him. Like a wild boar, I stared at him. Like I was deaf, I stared at him. Like a male cat staring at a female cat, I stared until he ran out of steam and let me go.
In the end, he never got a single word out of my mouth. He doubted if I could speak at all. Everyone else said I wasn’t a mute, but he had trouble believing that since he had never heard me utter a single word. Still today, when he thinks of me, he doesn’t know whether I’m a mute. I feel titillated by the very thought of it.