Yu Hua - Brothers

Amid the laughter of the townspeople, Baldy Li concluded his speech. After wiping his eyes, he then pointed to the thirty plaintiffs and said magnanimously, "This hasn't been easy for them either — they protested in front of my company for an entire month." He turned to one of his underlings. "Tell my CFO to pay each of them one thousand yuan, and we will treat it as one month's wages."

The townspeople shouted their approval. The former plaintiffs each relaxed and put aside their anger, thinking that although they hadn't succeeded in stealing a chicken, at least they hadn't lost a fistful of rice in the process, and furthermore, they did come away with enough money to buy another fistful. Amid everyone's shouts of approval, Baldy Li walked out of the courthouse, beaming with satisfaction. Before stepping into his Santana sedan, he turned around and waved to the cheering crowd; after getting into the car, he rolled down his window and continued waving at them, even after the car had driven off.

After this incident Baldy Li viewed the medical record of his vasec-tomy operation as a great treasure and thought it was truly fortunate that he had decided, in a fit of anger, to have the operation. He had never imagined that it would save him so much trouble. He carefully tore the page documenting his vasectomy out of the booklet, had a framer mount it, then hung it right between his masterpieces by Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian.

The townspeople agreed that Baldy Li's decision to have a vasectomy had been a stroke of genius. Just think, if he hadn't had the vasectomy, then who knows how many little Baldy Lis might be running around in every street and alley, including perhaps a few big-nosed, blond-haired, and blue-eyed ones?

Then everyone let their imaginations go wild as they invented a prehistory for Baldy Li's operation, transforming into something truly legendary the tale of his decision to have the vasectomy after having had his heart broken. They told how he had taken a rope and tied it around his neck and tried to hang himself from a tree branch, but how neither the rope nor the branch held, and consequently he fell to the ground and ended up with a mouthful of mud. Next they described how he tried to drown himself in the river, but after jumping in, he remembered that he actually did know how to swim and therefore wasn't able to drown himself. They imagined him climbing out of the river and cursing, "I can't seem to fucking kill myself!" So he returned home and removed his pants, took out his penis and placed it on the cutting board, picked up the cleaver, and was about to lop it off when he suddenly had to take a piss. When he returned from the bathroom, he discovered that he couldn't bear to part with his penis after all. Therefore, he went to look for a razor blade to slice off his balls, but he discovered that they were so terrified they had shrunken up. Baldy Li therefore felt sorry for them and couldn't bring himself to slice them off. It was only then that he went to the hospital to have the vasectomy.

Now that Baldy Li's vasectomy from a decade earlier was brought to light, the people of Liu once again started paying attention to Lin Hong. Many would point, feeling sorry for her, shaking their heads at her fate. Some of the women of Liu liked to gloat over other people's misfortunes, and they sniffed that Lin Hong might appear clever but was actually quite stupid, while others sighed that this was just another instance of beauty being often cursed with a harsh fate. But some of the men of Liu Town tried to defend her, saying that no one could have anticipated what would happen, and even a fortune-teller can only predict other people's futures but not his own. They said that if everyone could predict the future, the emperors of the past would never have lost their mandate of power, and Lin Hong would never have given up Baldy Li.

WRITER LIU, one of Liu Towns two Men of Talent, had attended the hearing at the courthouse, where he saw firsthand that hilarious scene and heard with his own ears Baldy Li's heartfelt speech. Writer Liu was so excited that night that he couldn't sleep, feeling that he had stumbled across a once-in-a-lifetime story. Therefore, he climbed out of bed, got dressed, and proceeded to spend the entire night writing a lengthy article entitled "Millionaire Crying Out for Love." In his article, Writer Liu deployed the Lofty, Expansive, and Thorough rhetorical precepts to embellish Baldy Li's story. He prettified Baldy Li's having slept with hundreds of women into his having had his heart broken by hundreds of women. He wrote that Baldy Li had fervently sought his romantic ideal in each of these encounters, but each time he found himself entangled not with a virgin but, rather, with a slut.

Writer Liu also sought to trace the source of Baldy Li's woes to his traumatic childhood — transforming the adventures of a fourteen-year-old Baldy Li peeping at bare bottoms in the public toilet into a tale of tragic victimhood. He recounted how the young Baldy Li had entered the latrine, squatted down, and grunted a couple of times; and how, before he had even started to defecate, his key accidentally slid out of his pants pocket and fell into the cesspool below. As he was leaning down to look for it, a certain Mr. Zhao came in and, ignoring Baldy Li's protests, grabbed him and accused him of being a Peeping Tom, then paraded him up and down the streets and alleys of Liu. Under Writer Liu's pen, Liu Town's other Man of Talent, Poet Zhao, was transformed into an anonymous Mr. Zhao, a hopelessly confused fellow who couldn't tell his ass from a hole in the ground. Writer Liu movingly described how a pure youth thereby became besmirched by false accusations, and how that youth unexpectedly didn't fall into depravity but, rather, from an early age simply bit his lip, endured the unjust humiliation, and grew up to exert himself for the sake of others, finally succeeding in building a vast business empire.

This article was initially published in the city's evening paper. When Baldy Li read it, he was very satisfied, especially with the part describing how his key had fallen out of his pocket and how he had leaned over to try to fish it out of the cesspool. Baldy Li repeatedly praised the article, pounding the table with his left hand as he waved the newspaper with his right hand and shouting, "That bastard Writer Liu is truly talented. With this key, he has single-handedly redressed Liu Towns most notorious false accusation!" Grinning, Baldy Li proclaimed, "When it comes to history, the truth will always win out."

Baldy Li did have one small complaint about the title of the article. He held up five fingers and said that he had at least fifty million yuan in personal assets, so how was it that Writer Liu described him as being a mere millionaire? However, he didn't make a big deal about this and reasoned to one of his underlings, "For someone who has never seen much money, its impressive that he should even be able to write the word million."

Within two months Writer Liu's article had been reprinted in several hundred local papers and tabloids throughout the country. With each reprinting it continued to evolve, and the title was changed to "Multimillionaire Crying Out for Love." When Baldy Li read this, from a small town hundreds of li away from Liu, he was even more pleased with the new title and declared, "This article was written with an attention to pursuing truth from facts."

After Writer Liu's article had circulated throughout the entire nation, it finally returned to Liu, appearing in a provincial paper, though this time the headline had been upgraded to "Billionaire Crying Out for Love." When Baldy Li read this, he laughed modestly. "That is a bit of an exaggeration."