Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

General Lin said, “I came to get you a week later. You were always holding a little matchbox with two bees inside. The women were afraid you’d get stung, and wanted to take the matchbox from you, but you cried and howled and wouldn’t give it to them. Your ferocity frightened them.”

Lin Yun said, “I told you that I wanted to train those bees so they’d sting the enemy, like they’d stung Mom. I proudly described to you all my ideas for killing the enemy… like how I knew that pigs liked to eat, so we should put lots and lots of pigs where the enemy was living and let the pigs eat all of their provisions so the men would starve to death. I thought a small speaker placed outside the enemy’s homes could produce an eerie sound at night to frighten them to death…. I constantly came up with ideas like these. It became a fascinating thought exercise for me that amused me to no end.”

“I was alarmed to see that in my daughter.”

“Yes, Dad. After I finished telling you my ideas, you looked at me in silence for a while, then took out two photos from a briefcase. Two identical photos, except that the corner of one was singed, and the other had brown marks on it that I later learned were blood. They were photos of a family of three. Both parents were military officers, but their uniforms were different from yours, Dad, and they wore epaulets that you and the others didn’t have back then. The girl was around my age and pretty, her pale skin a little pink, like fine porcelain. Growing up in the north, I had never seen skin like that. Her hair was so black and so long, down to her waist. So cute. Her mother was pretty, too, and her father was so handsome that I envied the entire family. But you told me that they were enemy officers who had been killed by our artillery fire, and the photos had been recovered from their bodies when the battlefield had been swept. Now the pretty kid in the photographs didn’t have a mom or dad anymore.”

General Lin said, “I also told you that the people who killed your mom weren’t bad. They did it because they were soldiers and had to carry out their duty to the fullest. Like your father the soldier, who also had to carry out his duty to kill the enemy on the battlefield.”

“I remember that, Dad. Of course I remember. You need to understand that it was the 1980s. The way you educated me was pretty alternative and unrecognized back then. If it had gotten out, it would have spelled the end of your political career. You wanted to dig out the seed of my hatred to keep it from germinating. That showed me how much you loved me, and I’m still grateful for that.”

“But it didn’t help,” General Lin said, with a sigh.

“Right. Back then I was curious about a thing called duty, which made it possible for soldiers to kill but not hate each other. But not for me. I still hated them. I still wanted to have them stung by bees.”

“It pained me to listen to you. Hatred born out of the lonely melancholy of a child who lost her mother doesn’t go away easily. The only thing capable of wiping out that hatred is a mother’s love.”

“You understood that. For a while there was a woman who came over often and was kind to me. We got on well. But for some reason she didn’t end up as my new mother.”

The general sighed again. “Xiao Yun, I should have paid more attention to you.”

“Later, I slowly got used to life without Mom, and the naïve hatred in my heart faded with time. I never stopped the fascinating thought exercises, though, and I grew up with all kinds of fantasy weapons. But it wasn’t until that summer holiday that weapons became a real part of my life. It was the summer of second grade. You had to go to the south to work on building up the PLA Marine Corps, and when you saw how disappointed I was that you were going, you took me along. It was a fairly remote unit, and with no other kids around. My playmates were your colleagues and subordinates, all of them officers in the field army, most of whom didn’t have children. Bullet casings were what they usually gave me to play with. All kinds of casings. I used them as whistles. One time I saw a man eject a bullet from a magazine and I started fussing for it. He said, ‘That’s not for children to play with. Children can only play with headless ones.’ I said, ‘Take off the head and give it to me!’ He said, ‘Then it’ll be just like the casings I gave you before. I’ll give you some more of those.’ I said, ‘No, I want that one with the head taken off!’ ”

“That’s just how you were, Xiao Yun. Once you got something in your sights, you didn’t care about anything else.”

“I gave him such a hard time that he said, ‘Fine, but this one’s hard to take off. I’ll shoot it for you instead.’ He shoved it back into the magazine, carried the rifle outside, and fired once at the sky. Then he pointed at the casing that bounced onto the ground and said, ‘Take it.’ Rather than picking it up, I asked with wide eyes, ‘Where did the head go?’ He said, ‘It flew away, way up high.’ And I said, ‘Was the sound right after the crack the sound of it flying?’ He said, ‘You’re really clever, Yunyun.’ Then he aimed at the sky and fired again, and again I heard the sound of a bullet whistling in flight. He said it flew fast enough to puncture thin steel plates. I rubbed the rifle’s warm barrel, and all the weapons I had fantasized about in my thought exercises instantly seemed weak and impotent. The real weapon in front of me held an irresistible attraction.”

General Lin said, “The rough army guys thought it was adorable that a little girl loved guns, so they continued to amuse you with them. Ammunition was far less strictly supervised back then, and lots of ex-soldiers took dozens of rounds away with them, so they had plenty for you to play with. Eventually it got to the point where they let you fire, at first helping you hold the gun, and eventually letting you do it on your own. By the time the summer holiday ended, you could drop to the ground with an assault rifle and fire bursts all by yourself.”

“I held the gun and felt the vibrations of it firing the way other girls cradled singing dolls. Later on, I watched light machine guns firing on the practice range. To me it was a song of delight, not a painful sound…. When summer was over, I no longer covered my ears for hand grenade explosions or recoilless rifles.”

“I took you to the front-line troops for subsequent holidays, mostly with the thought that I’d be able to spend more time with you, but also because I felt that, even though the army wasn’t a place for a kid, it was at least a fairly innocent place that wouldn’t do you much harm. But I was wrong.”

“I had more contact with weapons during those holidays, since the enlisted officers and troops liked to let me play with them. They were proud of their weapons. In their childhood memories, guns were always their favorite toys. Teaching me to shoot was a pleasure for them, so long as they kept things safe. Other kids only had toy guns to mess around with, but I was lucky enough to play with the real thing.”

“Right. I remember this was just after the marines had been established, so there were frequent live-fire exercises, and you also got to see live firing of heavy equipment. Tanks, artillery, and ships. On that seaside hill, you watched warships shell the shore, and bombers drop column after column of bombs on sea targets….”

“What made the deepest impression on me, Dad, was the first time I saw a flamethrower. I watched in excitement as the whooshing flame left a pool of fire on the beach. A marine colonel said, ‘Yunyun, do you know what the scariest thing on the battlefield is? Not a gun or a cannon, but this thing. On the southern front, it licked the ass of one of my buddies, and his skin fell right off and put him in a living hell. In the field hospital, when no one was paying attention, he took a gun and offed himself.’ I remembered my last sight of Mom in the hospital, all the skin on her body festering, her blackened fingers so swollen there was no way for her to turn a gun on herself…. Such an experience might turn some people off of weapons, but for others, it made them even more fascinating. I was in the latter group, for whom those fearsome machines possessed the intoxicating power of a drug.”