Yu Hua - Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

Xu Yulan burst into howls of protest and jabbed both hands toward his face. “You’re really no better than a beast. I’d already forgotten about your affair with that bitch. Now you insist on reminding me. What did I do in my past life to deserve this? Whatever it was, it’s coming back to haunt me.”

As she shouted, she edged toward her place on the doorstep.

Xu Sanguan rushed to block her way, saying as he held her fast, “Okay, okay, okay then, I’ll never bring it up again, all right?”

Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “This year is 1958. We’ve had People’s Communes, the Great Leap Forward, Backyard Steel Furnaces, and what else? They took back my grandpa’s and my fourth uncle’s land down in the countryside. From now on it looks like no one will have their own land anymore. All the land belongs to the state. If you want to plant crops, you’ll have to rent the land from them, and when you harvest the crop, you have to give some grain to the state too. The state is just like the landlords before. Of course, you can’t say that the state is a landlord. You should call it the People’s Commune instead. And our silk factory’s started to smelt steel too. We made eight little furnaces. Me and four other people are responsible for looking after one of them. So now I’m not the man who distributes the silkworm cocoons anymore. I’m a steel smelter now. You know why we have to smelt so much steel? Because steel is like grain, grain for the state. It’s like rice, wheat, meat, and fish for the state. That’s why smelting steel is just like planting rice in the paddies.”

Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “I was out taking a walk today, and I saw lots of people in red armbands going from house to house confiscating people’s woks, and their bowls, and their rice, and all their oil, salt, soy, and vinegar. I’ll bet they’ll show up at our place too in a couple of days. They say no one’s allowed to cook at home anymore. If you want to eat, you have to go to the canteen. You know how many canteens there will be in town? I counted three on the way home. There’s one at the silk factory, one at Heavenrest Temple, and they turned the old Buddhist monastery into a canteen too. All the monks have to wear white hats and aprons, so they look like real chefs now. And then there’s the theater around the block. That’s a canteen now too. You know where the kitchen is? Right on the stage. All the singing clowns from the Yue Opera Company are up onstage rinsing vegetables. I hear the leading man’s the deputy of the canteen, and the guy who always played the villains is the vice deputy.”

Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “I took you to the canteen at the silk factory the day before yesterday, and we went to Heavenrest Temple canteen yesterday. I’ll take you to the canteen at the theater again to eat today. There’s not enough meat in the dishes at the Heavenrest Temple canteen. The monks who do the cooking all used to be vegetarians, so they don’t use much meat. When we had the green pepper fried pork yesterday, didn’t you hear everyone joking that it was ‘green pepper minus the pork’? Now that we’ve tried three of the canteens, it looks like you and the kids like the one at the theater the best, but I still like the big canteen at the silk factory. The dishes at the theater aren’t bad, but they don’t have big enough portions. Over at the factory they give you more of everything, including meat, and you can eat as much as you want. I didn’t burp once after I ate at Heavenrest Temple canteen, and I didn’t burp after eating at the canteen at the theater either. But when I ate at the silk factory, I was burping all night long. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the big canteen at City Hall. They have the best food in town. That’s what Blacksmith Fang told me. He said the chefs over there are all from the Victory Restaurant, and those chefs definitely know how to cook the best dishes in town. You know what their specialty is? It’s fried pork livers.”

Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “Let’s not go to the City Hall canteen tomorrow. It’s so exhausting to eat over there. At least a quarter of the people in town go there for dinner. It’s more like getting in a big fight than having a meal. Besides, the kids almost got squashed to death over there, it was so crowded. My undershirt was wet through with sweat. And with so many people farting and stinking up the place, it’s hard to have much of an appetite. Let’s go to the silk factory tomorrow, okay? I know you want to go to the theater, but they’ve already shut down the canteen there, and I hear the one at Heavenrest Temple has been closed for a few days too. But the silk factory’s canteen is still open. But we’d better go early or else there won’t be anything left to eat.”

Xu Sanguan said to Xu Yulan, “They shut down all the canteens in town. Looks like the good times are over. No one’s going to take care of our meals anymore. Does that mean we have to cook for ourselves again? But what are we going to cook?”

Xu Yulan said, “There’s two crocks of rice underneath the bed. When they first came by to take the wok, the rice, the oil, salt, soy, and vinegar, I couldn’t bear to give them those two crocks of rice. That’s the rice I saved over the years by short-changing all of you, so I just couldn’t bear to let them take it away.”

Xu Yulan had been married to Xu Sanguan for more than ten years now, and she had spent those years scrimping and saving and carefully calculating just to get by. The two crocks of rice she had under the bed were originally used for ladling; there was a slightly larger crock in the kitchen. Every day when she cooked rice, Xu Yulan removed the wooden lid from the rice crock in the kitchen and ladled just enough for the whole family’s daily consumption into the pot. Then she removed one handful of rice from the pot and placed it in one of the crocks under the bed. As she explained to Xu Sanguan, “None of you would have especially noticed an extra mouthful of rice anyway, and you won’t really miss a mouthful either.”

What this signified was that Xu Sanguan had eaten two less mouthfuls of rice than he was due every day. After Yile, Erle, and Sanle came along, they too were made to miss out on two mouthfuls a day. As for Xu Yulan, she cheated herself of even more rice. The rice that was saved by way of these measures ended up in a small crock underneath the bed. When the first crock was full, she got another empty rice crock and proceeded to fill that one up as well.

But Xu Sanguan disagreed. “It’s not as if we’re planning to open a rice shop or something. What’s the point of keeping so much rice around? If we don’t eat it by the summer, the bugs will get into it.”

Xu Yulan agreed, and she stopped putting away any more rice after she filled up the second crock.

If the rice was kept in storage for too long, the bugs would start to infest the crock. The bugs lived, ate, shat, and slept in the rice, turning grain after grain into powder. Their excrement looked a bit like flour, and it was difficult to tell the two apart— the only difference was that their shit was slightly yellow. As soon as the two crocks were full, then Xu Yulan would dump the contents into the bigger crock in the kitchen.

She would sit on the bed measuring how much rice there had been in the two small crocks and, based on its weight, how much money the rice had been worth. She would proceed to fold an equivalent sum into a neat packet and place it on the bottom of her trunk. This money was not to be spent.

She told Xu Sanguan, “This money was snatched bit by bit from out of your mouths. And you didn’t even notice the difference, did you?” She added, “We can’t use this money for anything ordinary. Something really important has to come up before we can spend it.”