Mo Yan - Frog

The militiamen took advantage of Wang’s temporary blindness to rush him, wrench the shovel away, and yank his arms around behind him.

As they started to wrap their ropes around him, he burst into loud wails. There was such agony in his howls that rubberneckers sprawled atop his wall or gawking at his gate were pained by what they heard. The four men stood there helpless, ropes hanging from their hands.

Are you a man, Wang Jiao, Yuan Lian asked, or aren’t you? How can a little procedure like this put such a fear in you? I already did it, and it hasn’t affected me at all. If you don’t believe me, have your wife ask my wife.

That’s enough, Wang Jiao sobbed. I’ll go with you.

That bastard Xiao Shangchun set a bad example at the commune, Gugu said. His rationale for opposing the vasectomy campaign was his trifling service as a stretcher-bearer for an Eighth Route Army underground hospital. But when research determined that he was to be removed from his public office and sent back to his village to work the land, he rode his rickety bicycle up to the health centre and insisted that I personally perform the procedure. A notorious lecher, he was a filthy-mouthed hooligan. As he climbed onto the operating table he said to Little Lion: Here’s what puzzles me. There’s a saying — ‘When the essence reaches fullness, it will flow on its own.’ But if you tie off my tube, where will my essence flow to? Will my belly swell to bursting?

She looked at me, red-faced from embarrassment. Prepare him for surgery.

I hadn’t expected him to have an erection while she was prepping him. She’d never seen anything like that before; she dropped the scalpel and cowered in a corner. Clean up your thoughts! I demanded. My thoughts are perfectly clean, he said shamelessly. It got stiff on its own, and there’s nothing I can do about that. All right, then, Gugu said as she picked up a rubber mallet and, with a nonchalant tap, put an end to his erection.

I swear to the heavens, Gugu said, I took scrupulous care in carrying out the procedure on both Wang Jiao and Xiao Shangchun, with total success, but afterward, Wang Jiao walked around bent at the waist, complaining that I’d cut a nerve, and Xiao made a pest of himself at the centre, complaining to county officials that I’d made him impotent. Of those two, Wang Jiao was probably emotionally unstable, while Xiao was nothing but a troublemaker. During the Cultural Revolution, as head of a Red Guard faction, he raped more women than you can count. If we hadn’t performed a vasectomy on him, he might have retained some scruples out of a fear that he’d impregnate someone and suffer serious consequences. But tying off his tubes freed him from all that.

Winter, 1967

So many people turned out for the rally to denounce Party Secretary Yang Lin that the revolutionary committee head, Xiao Shangchun, came up with the ingenious idea of moving the site to the retarding basin on the northern bank of the Jiao River. It was the dead of winter. As people looked out over the ice-covered river, they were treated to a vista of glazed beauty. I was the first villager to learn that the rally was to be held there. One day I was ice fishing beneath a floodgate bridge over the basin when I heard loud voices above me. One of them was Xiao Shangchun. I could have picked his voice out of ten thousand. Damn, he said, what a great setting. We’ll hold the rally here. We can put the stage here on the bridge.

A floodgate had been built above the Jiao River Dam to protect the lower reaches. Every year, when summer turned to autumn, the Jiao River crested and the floodgate was opened, transforming marshland into a lake. Northeast Township residents were unhappy with what was done, since marshland was still land, and the only crop that could be planted in the marsh was sorghum. But who were we to take issue with the needs of the nation? This was one of my favourite hangouts when I skipped school, a place where I could sit and watch water rushing through twelve sluice holes. After the water was let out, the former marshland became a lake some ten square li in size, where fish and shrimp were plentiful enough to bring hordes of fishermen and, increasingly, fishmongers. They tried setting up their stalls on the bridge, and when that didn’t work, they moved to the eastern bank, under a row of willows. During the busy season, a line of stalls would stretch at least two li. Once they formed a market, the local marketplace moved from the commune to the eastern bank of the river. The vegetable peddlers came, the egg sellers came, the oil cruller peddlers came, and with them came other marketplace denizens: thieves, hooligans and beggars. Members of the commune’s armed militia turned out several times to clear the area, and their arrival sent undesirables scurrying; the militiamen’s departure witnessed a probing return of the same people. A combination of legal and illegal commerce thus came into being. I loved looking at fish: carp, silver carp, crucian carp, catfish, snakehead fish, eel, and, while I was at it, crabs, loaches and clams. The biggest fish I ever saw there weighed a hundred jin and had a white belly; it looked a little like a pregnant woman. The old fishmonger stood cowering behind the fish, as if he were in possession of a deity. By then I was palling around with those sharp-eyed, keen-eared fishmongers. Why sharp-eyed and keen-eared? Because agents from the tax bureau often came to confiscate their fish, not to mention the idlers in the commune who pretended to be from the tax bureau to trick them out of their wares. That huge fish was nearly taken away by two men in blue uniforms, cigarettes dangling from their lips, and black satchels in their hands. If the fishmonger’s daughter hadn’t come running up crying and making a fuss, and if Qin He hadn’t exposed the two men’s real identities, they’d have carried that fish off with them.

Qin He wore his hair with a side part and dressed in a blue gabardine student’s uniform, with a Doctoral brand fountain pen and a New China two-colour ballpoint pen clipped to his breast pocket; he looked like a college student reduced to begging during the May Fourth period. His face was deathly pale, his expression gloomy, his eyes moist, as if he were forever on the verge of tears. Yet he was an eloquent speaker of standard Mandarin, his every utterance stage-play quality. He exerted considerable influence on my later decision to try my hand at being a playwright. He was never without his enamel mug, emblazoned with a five-pointed red star and the word ‘Prize’. Standing in front of the fishmongers, he’d say emotionally: Comrades, I’m a man who’s lost the ability to work. And you might say: You’re too young to be a man who’s lost the ability to work. Well, I tell you, comrades, what you cannot see is that I have a serious heart condition, caused by a stabbing. Any physical exertion could cause my damaged heart to rupture, and I’d bleed to death. Won’t you give me one of those fish, comrades? It doesn’t have to be a big one, a small one, even a tiny one will do…

He was always successful, and then he’d rush down to the riverbank, clean his bounty with a penknife, find a spot protected from the wind, gather some kindling, and stack a couple of bricks; then, after placing his water-filled enamel mug on top, he’d make a fire and start to slow cook. I often stood behind him to watch him cook his fish and breathe in the aromatic steam emerging from his mug, which soon had me drooling. Oh, how I envied him and his lifestyle…

Qin He, who’d been one of the most talented students at the Number One High School, was the younger brother of Qin Shan, the commune’s Party secretary. According to some, the reason Qin He was like he was stemmed from his insane infatuation with my aunt, which became so serious that he tried, but failed, to kill himself with his brother’s pistol. The injury left him in that state. At first people laughed at him, but after he helped the old man hold on to that giant fish, the fishmongers’ view of him changed. To me he was like a magnet. I tried very hard to understand him. The look in his moist eyes cried out for sympathy.