Yu Hua - Brothers

After Wandering Zhou emerged from the snack shop, Poet Zhao thought that he, too, was going to get a room in a hotel, but instead he came to stay at Poet Zhao's house. Upon entering he took one look at Poet Zhao's cramped home and said, his voice dripping with disdain, "Fine, I'll just sleep on your tattered couch."

Poet Zhao said, "This is simply too humiliating. You should go and stay in a hotel."

Wandering Zhou shook his head, crossed his legs and made himself comfortable on the old, tattered sofa, as if he were in his own home. He said, "I'm not used to sleeping in a regular hotel room. When I stay at hotels, the cheapest room I ever get is a suite, but the suites here have all been rented out to the political leaders and judges."

Poet Zhao suggested, "You could rent two rooms, and that would make a suite."

"Nonsense," Wandering Zhou replied. "How can you call two rooms a suite? How can I sleep in two rooms?"

Poet Zhao said, "You could sleep in one room the first half of the night, and in the other room the second half."

Wandering Zhou laughed out loud, saying, "To tell the truth, I'm not really comfortable in a regular suite. When I stay in hotels, I only use the presidential suites."

Poet Zhao said, "Then why don't you rent an entire floor? You could take a nap in every room. Wouldn't that be a presidential suite?

Wandering Zhou glared at Poet Zhao. "Don't start with me. I just want to sleep on your old, tattered couch. I've had my share of abalone and shark fin, and right now I'm in the mood for some pickled vegetables and rice gruel."

Though this charlatan was Poet Zhao's temporary boss, he hadn't yet paid him. If Zhou wanted to hang out in Poet Zhao's home, therefore, Poet Zhao had no choice but to grin and bear it. After all, if he were to shoo him away, he might also be shooing away his own wages.

THE SEMIFINALS of the Inaugural National Virgin Beauty Competition were held two evenings later. Once again, tens of thousands of townspeople streamed into the streets to watch the excitement. This time, however, there weren't any trucks or tractors, nor were there any country bumpkins serving as judges. Instead, a giant platform covered with sponsors’ ads had been erected in the middle of the street, which was lined with billboards advertising everything from cell phones to tourism, beauty products to laxatives, underwear to quilts, toys to health products. There were ads for things to eat, to play with, and to use; things for living people and dead people; things from China and things from abroad; things for people and things for pets. Even if you were to rack your brain like a high school student preparing for the college entrance exams, you wouldn't be able to come up with a product not covered by these ads.

Baldy Li and the organizing committee's political leaders and judges all sat on the platform, joined by Yanker Yu and Popsicle Wang. Under Yu's careful tutelage, Wang was now also dressed to the nines. Pop music blared from loudspeakers, but after every two lines or so the crooning would be interrupted by a commercial. After one ad concluded, the song would play for two more lines before being interrupted by another commercial. Each song would be interrupted at least four times, with the result that the famous stars singing through the loudspeakers were transformed into stuttering singers. One thousand virgins lined up, and each paraded back and forth three times in front of the platform to the beat of the stuttering music and the blaring commercials. This time the crowds were roped off, so the men couldn't grope the contestants’ bottoms but could merely harass them from a distance with lecherous gazes and salacious comments. By the time each of the virgin beauties had paraded back and forth three times, the sun had set behind the mountains, thus concluding the semifinals of the competition. Baldy Li, the political leaders, and the judges all left, as did the one thousand virgin beauties and the tens of thousands of spectators. The loudspeakers, however, continued blaring commercials late into the night.

The semifinals eliminated nine hundred more contestants, leaving only one hundred to compete in the finals. The finals would be held in a movie theater, thereby allowing Baldy Li to sell more tickets and stuff his pockets with more wads of cash. Baldy Li had become a professional escort — escorting party leaders, judges, and sponsors to eat, play, and admire female beauty. As a result, the formerly awe-inspiring Baldy Li now simply spent the entire day smiling broadly as he escorted people around, to the point that he even began to resemble PR Liu.

The original three thousand virgin beauties had left him blurry-eyed and dizzy; the one thousand semifinalists had left him blurry-eyed but no longer dizzy; the one hundred finalists left him completely clear-eyed and clearheaded again. He summoned PR Liu, saying that if he didn't get his hands on some of these virgins now, he would lose his chance. He was sure that as soon as the competition concluded, they would disperse, and his only chance to bed one of them would be in his dreams. He remarked that all of the one hundred remaining beauties were quite fine, and he would be interested in sleeping with all of them; but since only a few days were left, he had to make some choices. The first one who caught his eye was contestant #1358—a beauty six feet two, perfectly proportioned, with a red-hot body. Baldy Li said that the tallest woman he had previously slept with had been just six feet, and therefore he was now in a position to break two personal Guinness records at once: his record for the tallest woman he had slept with, and also his first virgin.

Despite being busier than ever, PR Liu immediately made time to meet with contestant #1358. PR Liu, blurry-eyed and hoarse from overwork, had long since become inured to beautiful women, but the moment he saw the tall and sweet-faced #1358, his pulse started to race. Though he had been associating with the virgin beauties for quite a while by that point, he had never noticed this one. Liu decided that Baldy Li was truly formidable, being able to pick her out of a group of women more numerous than the hairs on a cow, thus demonstrating that Baldy Li's womanizing skills were truly in a class of their own.

PR Liu didn't arrange to meet contestant #1358 in the temporary office that the organizing committee was using. Instead they met in the company's café, the most ridiculously overpriced coffee shop in all of China. Naturally PR Liu footed the bill. He first smiled and congratulated #1358 on reaching the finals, then began to beat around the bush. This being the first time he had acted as a pimp for someone, he didn't know how to get to the point. He couldn't speak too baldly, but at the same time he needed to make sure that she knew what he was getting at.

PR Liu didn't realize that Virgin Beauty #1358 wasn't actually a virgin anymore but was in fact already a mother. After spending three thousand yuan having hymen-recon surgery, she had traveled to Liu Town to participate in the competition. Upon arriving, she immediately figured out what the competition was really all about. Especially after they entered the semifinals, each of the contestants went and slept with the judges. There were only ten judges, so with several thousand virgin beauties vying to sleep with them, by the end the poor judges had been reduced to skin and bones. Contestant #1358 regretted that she had spent three thousand yuan on her surgery, feeling that that was a case of using an ox knife to slaughter a mere chicken. She realized now that she could have just gone to Wandering Zhou and bought either a Joan of Arc or a Lady Meng Jiang artificial hymen, and that would have done the trick. When she saw that the other contestants were using one artificial hymen after another to refashion themselves into born-again virgins to secure their positions with the judges, #1358 began to feel extremely anxious. Her own hymen, which she had spent good money to reconstruct, still had not been of any use, while the women with those cheap artificial hymens were all running wild. She felt that she needed to take some initiative and could no longer afford to wait for the judges to come to her. Those judges, their heads spinning from sleeping with so many women, were so exhausted that even if #1358 had been a goddess on earth, they wouldn't have had the energy to give her a second glance.