Yiyun Li - A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Later, when we read his words in the newspaper, our blood boils. For the years to come, we will live with our eyes turned to the sky, waiting for the American bombs to rain down on us, waiting to prove to the dictator our courage, and our loyalty.

THE BOY GROWS up fast like a bamboo shoot. The mother grows old even faster. After the carpenter’s death, upon her request, the Revolution Committee in our town gives her a job as our street sweeper. Every dawn, we lie in our beds and listen to the rustling of her bamboo broom. She has become a widow at the age of eighteen, as beautiful as a young widow could be, and naturally some of our bachelors cannot help but fantasize about her in their single beds. Yet none of our young men offers her another marriage. Who wants to marry a counterrevolutionary’s widow and spend the rest of his life worrying about being a sympathizer of the wrong person? What’s more, even though the dictator has said that men and women are equal in our nation, we still believe a widow who wants another husband is a whore inside. Our belief is confirmed when we read in newspapers the dictator’s comment about one of his close followers who has become an enemy of the nation: A man cannot conceal his reactionary nature forever, just as a widow cannot hide her desire to be fucked.

So the young mother withers in our eyes. Her face becomes paler each day, and her eyes drier. By the time the boy is ten, the mother looks like a woman of sixty. None of our bachelors bothers to lay his eyes on her face anymore.

The boy turns ten the year the famine starts. Before the famine, for three years, we have been doing nothing except singing for our communist heaven and vowing to liberate the suffering working class around the world. Farmers and workers have stopped toiling, their days spent in the pains and joys of composing yet another poem, competing to be the most productive proletarian poet. We go to the town center every day to discuss the strategy of how to conquer the world under the leadership of the dictator. When the famine catches us unprepared, we listen to the dictator’s encouraging words in the loudspeakers. He calls for us to make our belts one notch tighter for our communist future, and we happily punch more holes in them. The second year of the famine, the dictator says in the loudspeakers: Get rid of the sparrows and the rats; they are the thieves who stole our food and brought hunger to us.

Killing sparrows is the most festive event in the three long years of famine. After months of drinking thin porridges and eating weed roots, on the morning of the sparrow-killing day we each get two steamed buns from the municipal dining room. After breakfast we climb to the roof of every house, and start to strike gongs and drums at the Revolution Committee’s signal. From roof to roof, our arrhythmic playing drives the sparrows into the sky. All morning and all afternoon we play, in different shifts, and whenever a sparrow tries to rest in a treetop we shoo him away with colorful flags bound to long bamboo poles. In the evening the sparrows start to rain down on us like little bombs, dying in horror and exhaustion. Kids decorated as little scarecrows run around, collecting the dead sparrows for our dinner.

The boy is trying to sneak a sparrow into his sleeve when a bigger boy snatches his hand. “He is stealing the property of the People,” the big boy shouts to the town.

“My mom is sick. She needs to eat something,” the boy says.

“Hey, boy, what your mom needs is not this kind of bird,” a man says, and we roar with laughter. The buns in our stomachs and the sparrows in the baskets have put us in a good mood.

The boy stares at the man for a moment and smacks into him with his head.

“Son of a bitch,” the man says, bending over and covering his crotch with his hands.

“Beat the little counterrevolutionary,” someone says, and we swarm toward the boy with fists and feet. The famine has made us angrier each day, and we are relieved to have found someone to vent our nameless rage.

The mother rushes into the crowd and tries to push us away. Her presence makes us hit the boy even harder. Some of us pick up bricks and boulders, ready to knock him out. Some of us bare our teeth, ready to eat him alive.

“You all look at his face. Whoever dares to touch him one more time, I’ll sue him for his disrespect for our greatest leader,” the mother yells, charging at us like a crazy woman.

Our bodies freeze. We look at the boy’s face. Even with his swollen face and black eyes, we have no problem telling that he has the face of the dictator, young and rebellious, just as in the illustrations in the books about the dictator’s heroic childhood. The boy stands up and limps to his mother. We look at his face in awe, not daring to move when he spits bloody phlegm at our feet.

“Remember this face,” the boy says. “You will have to pay for this one day.” He picks up a couple of sparrows and walks away with his mother. We watch them supporting each other like husband and wife.

FOR YEARS WE do not know if it is a blessing or a disaster that a boy with the dictator’s face lives among us. We treat the boy and his mother as the most precious and fragile treasure we have, never breathing one word about them to an outsider.

“It may not be a good thing,” our old people warn us, and tell us the story of one of our Great Papas, who happened to have the same nickname as the emperor and was thrown into a well to drown. “There are things that are not allowed to exist in duplicates,” the old people say.

Yet none of us dares to say one disrespectful word about the boy’s face. As he grows older, he looks more and more like the dictator. Sometimes as we walk past him in the street, there is a surge of warmth in our chests, as if the dictator himself were with us. This is the time when the dictator becomes larger than the universe in our nation. Illiterate housewives who have used old newspapers as wallpaper and who have, accidentally, reversed the titles with the dictator’s name in them are executed. Parents of little first-graders who have misspelled the dictator’s name are sent to labor camps. With the boy living among us, we are constantly walking on a thin layer of ice above deep water. We worry about not paying enough respect to the face, an indication of our hidden hatred of the dictator. We worry about respecting that face too much, which could be interpreted as our inability to tell the false from the true, worshipping the wrong idol. In our school the teachers never speak one harsh word to him. Whatever games the students play, the side without him is willing to lose. When he graduates from the high school, the Revolution Committee has meetings for weeks to discuss what is an appropriate job for a young man with a face like his. None of the jobs we have in town is safe enough to be given to him. Finally we think we have come up with the best solution to the problem — we elect him as the director of the advisory board to the Revolution Committee.

The young man prospers. Having nothing to do, and not liking to kill his time over cups of tea with the old board members, he walks around town every day, talking to people who are flattered by his greetings, and watching the female sales assistants in the department store blush at his sight. His mother is in much better shape now, with more color in her face. The only inconvenience is that no girl will date the young man. We have warned our daughters that marrying him would either be the greatest fortune or the greatest misfortune. Born into a town where gambling is genuinely disapproved of, none of us wants to marry a daughter off to a man like him.

THE DAY THE dictator dies, we gather at the town center and cry like orphans. On the only television set our town owns, we watch the whole nation howling with us. For three months we wear black mourning armbands to work and to sleep. All entertainments are banned for six months. Even a year or two after his death, we still look sideways at those women who are growing bellies, knowing that they have been insincere in their mourning. Fathers of those children never receive respect from us again.