Mo Yan - Pow!

All of a sudden I felt very afraid. Was there something wrong with his mind? I was suddenly afraid that he'd throw himself onto the pyre and join that meat in its martyrdom. So I grabbed Jiaojiao's hand and ran towards the burning pile as shouts of alarm erupted behind us, followed by uproarious laughter. Instinctively, we turned to see what had happened. Apparently the meat on October's pike had flown off like a leaping flame and landed on top of a parked luxury sedan. The driver shrieked in alarm, he cursed, he jumped, he tried desperately to knock the flaming meat off his car but carefully for fear of being burnt. He knew the car could go up in flames, perhaps even explode. Suddenly he took off one of his shoes and knocked the meat to the ground.

‘We are committed to putting in place a system of checks that will enable us to carry out our sacred duty, ensuring that not a single piece of nonstandard meat ever leaves this plant…’ The passionate voice of Lao Han, chief of the Inspection Station, momentarily drowned out the noises on the street.

Jiaojiao and I reached Father, then we pushed and shoved and pinched him until he reluctantly took his eyes of the pyre and gazed down at us. In a hoarse, raspy voice—as if the flames had seared his larynx—he asked: ‘What are you children doing?’

‘Dieh,’ I said, ‘you shouldn't be standing here.’

‘Where do you think I should to be standing?’ he asked, a bitter smile on his lips.

‘Over there.’ I pointed to the meeting site.

‘I'm beginning to get annoyed, children.’

‘Please, Dieh,’ I said. ‘Take a page out of Lao Lan's book.’

‘Do you really want me to turn into someone like him?’ he asked darkly.

‘Yes,’ I said, with a look at Jiaojiao. ‘But better than him.’

‘That's a tune I can't sing, children,’ he said. ‘But for your sake, I'll try.’

Mother ran up breathlessly. ‘What's the matter with you?’ she hissed. ‘You're up next. Lao Lan says to come now.’

With one last reluctant look at the fire, Father said: ‘All right, I'm coming.’

‘And you two, don't get close to that fire,’ Mother warned.

Father strode purposefully towards the meeting site. Mother walked away from the fire, and we followed her. On the way we spotted the young driver, who had put his shoe back on, kicking the flaming chunk of meat as far as he could. He then ran up to ‘madman’ October and kicked him in the shin. October yelped and staggered but didn't fall.

‘What the hell are you up to?’ the driver cursed.

Terrified by the attack, October gaped at the man for a moment before raising his pike and, with an eerie shout, swinging it at his head. The man ducked, and the pike merely glanced off his cheek. Pale with fright, he managed to grab it before uttering a stream of curses, assuring October that he'd make him pay. Spectators rushed up and held him back. ‘Forget it, comrade,’ they urged. ‘You don't want to get into a dispute with someone who's not right in the head.’

The driver let go of the pike and stormed off angrily. Then he opened the car's trunk, took out a rag and began to clean the grease off the top of the car.

October walked off, dragging his pike behind him, limping slightly.

Suddenly, we heard Father's voice over the loudspeakers: ‘I guarantee that we will not inject our meat with water.’

The people on the street looked up, trying to locate the source of his voice.

‘I guarantee that we will not inject our meat with water,’ he repeated.

‘Movie star Huang Feiyun, a beauty for the ages, was my third uncle's lover.’ Or so Lao Lan told me more than a decade ago. ‘If you could gather up all the newspapers, magazines and posters with her pictures, there'd be enough to fill the hold of a ten-thousand-tonne freighter,’ Lao Lan said on several occasions back then. I tell you, Wise Monk, he wove a riotous romantic history of his third uncle for us. Of course I'm familiar with this Huang Feiyun—her somewhat boyish look hangs before my eyes like a beaded curtain. Though she's retired from public life, and is now the wife of a very rich man, the mother of his children and the hostess of his extravagant villa on Phoenix Mountain, she continues to be an important target of the paparazzi. When she drives her luxury sedan, with its tiny figure of a man as a hood ornament, out of the villa's underground garage, she keeps her foot on the accelerator and races down the winding mountain road. From a distance, it looks like the car is plummeting from the heavens. Her drives down the mountain have been labelled ‘The Descent of the Heavenly Fairy to the Mortal World’ by scandal-mongering tabloid reporters. She steps out of the car, wearing dark glasses and attended by a maidservant who carries her dogs, Napoleon and Vivian Leigh, of a famous breed little known to the average person. She moves quickly through the chandelier-graced hotel lobby, her designer dress reflected off the mirror-like surface of the granite floor (an aspect of the hotel that has been roundly criticized but that attracts a multitude of stars). The concierge knows exactly who she is but dares not make her identity known. He keeps his eyes on the hem of her skirt as she glides across the floor. At the bank of lifts she gestures for her dog-carrying maid to wait in the lobby. Then she steps into a lift, and her progress up to the twenty-eighth floor is observed through the glass in its exterior. She knocks on the door of the Presidential Suite, so luxurious it could cause a public revolt. A young man answers the door and asks who she's looking for. She brushes past him and enters the enormous, flower-festooned living room. Stepping on the rare black peonies strewn across the floor, she heads straight for the oft-visited master bedroom, where there is a bed so frightfully big you could ride a bicycle on it. The bed is vacant but watery sounds emerge from the bathroom. She kicks the door open, and steam billows out accompanied by the sounds of splashing water and feminine giggles. As the steam dissipates, an enormous whirlpool tub comes into view, water gurgling from its sides like a wellspring. Four virginal-looking girls surround Lan Laoda in water covered by flower petals. The star takes a black bottle from her purse and tosses it into the tub. ‘Sulphuric acid,’ she says softly. Then she turns and walks out. The girls shriek and clamber out of the tub, their fair bodies suddenly turned black—but only their bodies; their faces are still white. Lan Laoda, on the other hand, stretches out in the tub, shuts his eyes and says: ‘Dinner tonight, third floor, Huaiyang Chun.’ As she walks out of the bedroom she says: ‘You should invite classier girls.’ ‘They're all younger than you,’ he replies from the bath. We see the star retrace her steps through the living room, spitting on the flowers beneath her feet. The young man who'd opened the door can only stand still and stare. The doorbell rings in loud bursts and then a two-man security detail enters. ‘What's going on here?’ they demand. The star picks up a bunch of black flowers and smacks one of them across the face. He backs away, clutching his cheek. Bells ring out in the corridor.

One night, soon after the United Meatpacking Plant began operations, Father, Mother, Lao Lan, Jiaojiao and I were sitting round our table, steaming platters of meat glowing beneath the electric lights. There was a bottle and several glasses filled with wine as red as fresh cow's blood. The adults were drinking more than they were eating, unlike my sister and me. Truth be known, the two of us had a respectable capacity for liquor but Mother wouldn't let us drink. At some point, Jiaojiao began to snore; I was quite sleepy myself, which was usual after a big, meaty meal. After putting Jiaojiao to bed, Mother said: ‘You get some sleep too, Xiaotong.’