Yu Hua - Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

“It’s all over for us. With other folks the old saying holds true: ‘As goes the nation so goes the family.’ But it’s different for us. The country’s just fine, but we’re ruined. First Blacksmith Fang came to take away all our things. Not one month later, and we’ve been betrayed by one of our own. That Xu Sanguan is no better than a beast. Usually, he’s famously stingy! If I buy a yard of fabric, he feels sick to his stomach for a whole month! But as soon as that Fatty Lin comes on the scene, things change. As soon as that bitch shows up, he’s handing out ten pounds of soup bones, four, even five pounds of yellow beans, and no less than two pounds of mung beans! Not to mention the chrysanthemum flowers! I wonder how much all of that stuff cost?”

At this point Xu Yulan appeared to have thought of something else, because she interrupted her harangue to shout toward Xu Sanguan, “You stole my money! You must have stolen the money I hid inside my trunk. I saved that money one or two fen at a time. I worked for ten years to save that money! Ten years of blood, sweat, and tears! And you gave it all away to that fat bitch!”

Xu Yulan darted over to her trunk, opened the lid, and rifled through the contents. Soon she fell silent; she had found her savings intact.

Having securely refastened the lid of the trunk, she looked up to see that Xu Sanguan had closed the front door, shutting the neighbors outside. He smiled ingratiatingly toward her with thirty yuan in his hand, the three ten- yuan notes fanned out from his fingers like a poker hand. Xu Yulan sidled over to where he was standing, took the money from his hand, and asked in a low voice, “Where did this money come from?”

Xu Sanguan also lowered his voice. “I earned it selling blood.”

“You sold blood again?”

Xu Yulan gave a low moan and, after a moment of silence, began to cry. Between her sobs, she said, “Why did I marry you? I’ve suffered and I’ve struggled for ten years now, and I’ve given you three sons. When did you ever sell blood for my sake? I never knew until now what a heartless son of a bitch you are. I can’t believe you sold your blood just to give that fat bitch some soup bones.”

Xu Sanguan tapped her on the shoulder. “Since when have you given me three sons? Is Yile my son? And when I sold blood to pay Blacksmith Fang, who do you think I was doing it for?”

Xu Yulan fell silent. Then she gazed at Xu Sanguan for a moment. “Tell me. What exactly happened between you and that Fatty Lin? Did you really want a woman as fat as all that?”

Xu Sanguan stroked his face thoughtfully. “She broke her leg, so I went to see her. It was just common courtesy.”

“And was it just common courtesy to hop in bed with her? Go on.”

Xu Sanguan said, “I reached out my hand to squeeze her leg and asked her where it hurt.”

“On her thigh? Or her calf?”

“At first it was the calf, but then I somehow got to her thigh.”

“You’re shameless.” Xu Yulan jabbed a finger at his face. “Then what happened? What did you do next?”

“What happened next?” Xu Sanguan hesitated for a moment. “What happened next was I grabbed her tits.”

“Aiya!” Xu Yulan cried out. “You worthless son of a bitch! Since when did you start taking tricks from that bastard He Xiaoyong’s book?”

Xu Yulan spent twenty-one and a half of the thirty yuan that she had captured from Xu Sanguan’s outstretched fingers to make new clothes. She made herself a new pair of gray cotton pants and a light blue cotton-padded jacket embroidered with dark blue flowers. Yile, Erle, and Sanle each got a new cotton-padded jacket as well. Xu Sanguan was the only one in the family who didn’t get any new clothes, because every time Xu Yulan thought of the incident with Lin Fenfang, she was too angry.

Soon winter came. When Xu Sanguan saw that Xu Yulan, Yile, Erle, and Sanle all had new padded jackets, he said to Xu Yulan, “If you spend the money I earned selling blood on yourself or on Erle and Sanle, that’s fine with me. But I can’t stand for you to spend it on Yile.”

“Would you feel any better if I spent it on Fatty Lin?”

Xu Sanguan, hurt by this outburst, lowered his head and continued quietly, “Yile’s not my son. I’ve raised him for nine years already, and it looks like there’ll be many more years to come. I’ve already accepted that. And I’m perfectly willing to spend the money I make sweating over at the factory on him. But it just doesn’t feel right to spend any more of my blood money on him.”

Xu Yulan took the remaining eight and a half yuan, supplemented the sum with two yuan of her own, and used it to make Xu Sanguan a navy blue Mao jacket. She told Xu Sanguan, “This jacket was made with the money you earned selling blood. And I contributed two yuan of my own. Do you feel any better now?”

Xu Sanguan remained silent. Xu Yulan had something on him now, and he couldn’t afford to ride as high as he once had. In the past Xu Yulan had taken care of all the household chores while Xu Sanguan worked at the factory. After the affair with Lin Fenfang came out into the open, it was Xu Yulan’s turn to ride high. She took to wearing her finely woven sweater and strolling around with a handful of melon seeds, leisurely ducking in and out of the neighbors’ places for a chat. And once they had gotten started, she and her friends might prattle on for two, even three hours. Xu Sanguan, meanwhile, would be in the kitchen cooking rice and stir-frying some dishes, bathed in sweat. His neighbors would often poke their heads inside the door and, catching sight of Xu Sanguan busy with his cookery, laugh and say:

“Xu Sanguan, cooking again tonight?”

“Xu Sanguan, go a little easier. Chopping vegetables isn’t like chopping firewood, you know.”

“Xu Sanguan, since when did you get become so hard-working?”

Xu Sanguan would say to them, “There’s nothing I can do. Xu Yulan’s got something on me. It’s like the old saying goes: ‘A moment of pleasure leads to a lifetime of regret.’ ”

For her part, Xu Yulan was wont to tell the others, “I think I’ve finally got things straight. It used to be that I was always looking out for my man and doing everything for the sake of the kids. Just as long as they got enough to eat, I was perfectly happy to go hungry. As long as they were comfortable, I was willing to put up with any kind of discomfort. But I’ve finally got things straight. In the future, I’m going to look after myself. If I don’t care about my own welfare, no one else will. You just can’t trust men. Even if they have a beauty at home, they still think they can play around with other women. You can’t count on the kids either.”

Xu Sanguan realized how stupid he had been. The affair itself was one thing, but buying Lin Fenfang a heap of soup bones and yellow beans had been stupid. Even an idiot would have started to suspect something was going on when he found all those things on his wife’s table.

But the more he thought about it, the more he felt that the affair with Lin Fenfang hadn’t done much harm. After all, he hadn’t knocked her up. That was more than he could say for He Xiaoyong and Xu Yulan. They had produced Yile, and he was still responsible for the boy.

The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. So he called Xu Yulan over and told her, “From this day on, I’m not doing the housework anymore.” He said to Xu Yulan, “You did it one time with He Xiaoyong, and I did it once with Lin Fenfang. You and He Xiaoyong ended up with Yile. Did Lin Fenfang and I make a ‘Four-le’? We did not. We’ve both made serious mistakes, but yours was much more serious than mine.”