Mo Yan - Pow!

We stood at the door of the station's waiting room, trying to catch our breath. Ours was a tiny station on a feeder line, and only a few local freight trains that also carried passengers stopped there. A wall with posters, fragments of slogans still stuck to them, stood in the windswept plaza. Underground enemies had scrawled counterrevolutionary slogans in chalk, mostly insults hurled at leaders of the local Party and government organizations. A woman selling roasted peanuts had set up shop in front of the wall—she wore a dark red scarf and a white surgical mask that showed only her eyes and their furtive look. A man stood beside her, arms crossed, a cigarette dangling from his lips, bored stiff. An iron basin sat on the rear rack of the bicycle in front of him, and the smell of cooked meat wafted across from beneath a strip of gauze. It wasn't Shen Gang, and it wasn't Su Zhou. Where had they gone? Had all their beautiful, ambrosia-scented meat already wound up in someone else's stomach? How would I know? One sniff told me that the meat in that man's basin was beef and cow entrails, and that it had been injected with a large amount of food colouring and formaldehyde, which made it look fresh from the slaughterhouse and smell quite wonderful. My gaze sidled over to it, like a fishhook, aiming to snatch a piece. But my body was in the grip of my mother and being reluctantly dragged to the waiting-room door.

It was one of those spring doors that had been out of fashion for more than a decade. You had to fight to get it open, which it did at last and with a loud clang. When you let go, it sprang shut and then bounced right back—if you hadn't moved away, it would slam into your backside and make you stumble if you were lucky and knock you to the floor if you weren't. I pulled the door open for Mother, then leapt in behind her; by the time the door slammed shut I was safely inside, ruining the crafty door's plan to send me flying.

I immediately spotted Father and the pretty girl he and Aunty Wild Mule had created—my little sister. Thank God they hadn't left yet.

Someone—I don't know who—flings a bloody, foul-smelling army uniform through the door, and it lands between the Wise Monk and me. I stare at the ominous object, startled, and wonder what's going on. There's a coin-sized hole in the uniform, right where the rank smell is the strongest. I also detect the faint odour of gunpowder and cosmetics. Something white is tucked into one of the pockets. A silk scarf? Filled with curiosity, I reach out to touch it but just then a pile of mud and rotting reeds, loosened by shards of roof tile, falls from the sky and covers the bloody clothes, and there, between the Wise Monk and me, a tiny grave is created. I look into the rafters, where a sun-drenched skylight has broken through the blackness. I'm terrified that this temple, forgotten by the world, is about to come crashing down, and I begin to fidget. But the Wise Monk doesn't budge, having regulated his breathing so as to appear absolutely still. The haze outside has cleared and bright sunlight covers the ground, turning the dampness in the yard into steam. The leaves on the gingko tree have an oily sheen, radiating life. A tall man in an orange leather jacket, drab olive wool pants and bright red calfskin knee-length boots, his hair parted in the middle, wearing a pair of small, round sunglasses and gripping a cigar between his teeth, materializes in the courtyard.

The man stands straight and stiff; his dark skin, with its reddish glow, reminds me of one of those arrogant yet brave US army officers you see in war films. But he's not one of those—he's Chinese through and through. And the second he opens his mouth to speak I can tell he's a local. Despite his familiar accent, his clothes and the way he moves tell me there's something mysterious about his origins, that he's no ordinary man. He's been around. Compared to him, our resident VIP, Lao Lan, looks like a country bumpkin. (As I think this I can almost hear Lao Lan say: ‘I know those urban petty bourgeois look down on us, think we're a bunch of country bumpkins. Crap! Just who are they calling country bumpkins? My third uncle was a pilot in the Chinese Air Force, a drinking buddy of Chennault, the Flying Tigers leader. Back when most Chinese hadn't even heard about the US, my third uncle was making love to an American woman. How dare they call us bumpkins?’) The man walks up to the temple and smiles, a mischievous, childlike gleam in his eyes. I feel as if I know him, that we're close. He unzips his pants and aims a stream of piss at the temple door, and some of the drops splash onto my bare feet. The man's tool does not suffer in comparison with that of the Horse Spirit behind the Wise Monk. He must be trying to humiliate us, but the Wise Monk doesn't so much as twitch; in fact, a barely perceptible smile appears on his face. There's a direct line between his face and the man's tool, while I can only see it out of the corner of my eye. If he can look straight at it and not be upset, why should I let a sideways glance upset me? The man's bladder holds enough to drown a small tree. The urine bubbles, like the foam on a glass of beer, as it pools round the Wise Monk's tattered prayer mat. Finally finished, he shakes his tool contemptuously. Realizing that we're ignoring him, he turns his back, stretches his arms and throws out his chest and a muted roar emerges from his mouth. Sunlight shines through his right ear, turning it as pink as a peony. I catch sight of a crowd of women who look like 1930s dance-hall socialites, in form-fitting qipaos that show off their curvaceous, slim bodies, their hair permed in loose or tight curls, their bodies glittering with jewellery. The way they carry themselves, the way they frown and the way they smile—modern women would have trouble keeping up. Their bodies give off a stale but regal odour, and I find it deeply moving. I have a feeling that we are somehow related. The women are like brightly feathered birds, warbling orioles and trilling swallows—chirp-chirp, tweet-tweet—as they rush to surround the man in the leather jacket. Some of them tug at his sleeves, others grab his belt; some sneak a pinch on his thigh, others stuff slips of paper in his pockets; some even feed him sweets. One of them, of an indeterminate age, seems more daring than the others. She wears silver lipstick and a white silk qipao with a red rose embroidered on the breast that, at first glance, makes her look as if she's been struck by bullets but has survived. High breasts, like doves. She looks like a siren. She walks up to the man, jumps into the air, her stiletto heels leaving the muddy ground, and grabs hold of his large ear. ‘Xiao Lan, you're an ungrateful dog!’ she curses in a sweetly husky voice. The man called Xiao Lan responds with an exaggerated scream: ‘Ouch, Mamma, I might be ungrateful to others but not to you! ‘How dare you argue with me !’ she says, squeezing harder. The man cocks his head and pleads: ‘Mamma, dear Mamma, not so hard. I'll be good from now on. Why don't I make it up by taking you out for a late-night snack?’ The woman lets go: ‘I know your every move like the back of my hand,’ she says spitefully, ‘and if you think you can get frisky with me, I'll get someone to cut off your balls, you dog bastard!’ Cupping his crotch with his hands, the man shouts: ‘Spare me, Mamma, I need these little treasures to carry on my line! ‘You can carry on your old lady's thighs’ she curses. ‘But I'll give you a chance to redeem yourself for the sake of my sisters out there. Where will you take us?’ ‘How about Heaven on Earth?’ he asks. ‘No. They've hired a new bouncer, a foreign devil with terrible BO. Just a whiff's enough to make me ill,’ says a woman with big eyes, a pointy chin and a shrill voice. She's in a purple qipao with tiny flowers and has tied her hair with a purple silk band. Lightly made-up, she has a refined, cultured look, a sort of cornflower elegance. ‘Then let Miss Wang decide,’ says a woman so fat she's nearly bursting through the seams of her yellow silk qipao. ‘She's shared meals with Xiao Lan in every eatery in town, so she must know where to go! Miss Wang manages to keep smiling, though there is the trace of a sneer. ‘You can't beat the shark's fin soup at Imperial Garden. What do you think, Mrs Shen?’ she says, seeking the opinion of the woman who'd pinched Xiao Lan's ear a moment earlier. ‘If Miss Wang likes Imperial Garden, that's good enough for me,’ replies Mrs Shen with aristocratic nonchalance. ‘Then let's go!’ cries the man says with a wave of his arm as he sets off in the company of the women, his arms circling the nicely rounded buttocks of the two closest to him. They're gone before I know it but their fragrances remain, saturating the air in the compound and merging with the smell of the man's urine to produce a strange, irritating, ammonia-tainted odour. The sound of a car engine and they're off. As tranquillity returns to the temple and its compound, I cast a glance at the Wise Monk and know what's expected of me: to continue my story. ‘Since there's a beginning, there has to be an ending.’ So I say —