Jia Pingwa - Ruined City

“What wrong with him?”

“You haven’t heard? Don’t tell anyone what I’m going to tell you now. He got himself some more fake paintings and is now under investigation.”

“Is it serious?”

“Hard to say, but let’s hope not. Go get yourself checked at the hospital, Zhidie. You look like you’re coming down with something.”

“I’m fine.”

“Then why are you suddenly a few inches shorter?”

Knowing that he couldn’t have shrunk, Zhuang nevertheless checked himself out and laughed. “So a single trip to Shanghai has made you so arrogant that nothing looks good to you anymore.”

“You’ve got a point there. The city of Shanghai—”

“Enough. Just because I say you have tiny feet, don’t walk with your hands on a wall for support. In fact, it’s the same with me. Every time I return from Shanghai, I feel that the streets of Xijing have become narrower and dirtier and that the people look like country bumpkins. But the feeling usually goes away within a few days. Are you free? Come have a drink at my place.”

When they got there and started drinking, Zhuang asked about Ruan’s treatment. Ruan said he was given a pair of dog’s eyeballs. “You can’t tell, can you?” Zhuang couldn’t, and he chortled. “What are you laughing about?” Ruan said. “I thought the new eyes would be ugly, but then I realized that all eyes look the same. Pretty women have pretty eyes, don’t they? But when you take them out and put them on a table, they’re no different than pig’s eyes. The face that goes with the eyes is what makes them pretty.”

“You have a good-looking face, so the new eyes are pretty, but you said I’m shorter. That must be what’s meant by ‘to a dog, people all look small.’”

Ruan took a swing at Zhuang. “Yes, you do look shorter to me. Maybe this new pair of eyes has given me invisible powers.” Seeing the cowhide on the wall, he suddenly exclaimed, “Where did you get that? Are you making a leather coat? Can you sell it to us? I had an idea for the Cultural Festival. Besides getting all the folk artists to perform and exhibit their works, I think we ought to redecorate the clock and drum towers, so that during the festival the clock would sound at seven each morning and the drum would be beaten at seven at night. Those are the sounds of heaven and earth, as indicated by ancient texts. Moreover, eighteen drums and eighteen clocks would be set up at each of the four city gates to echo the sounds from the towers. How impressive would that be! That cowhide is great. Sell it to us, and we will make a big drum to place at the north city gate, the grandest one of all. What do you say?”

Zhuang mulled it over for a while and said, “I won’t sell it, but you can take it to make a drum, as long as you promise it will be hung over the north city gate even after the festival. It will be good enough for me if its sounds could remain in this city forever.”

Elated, Ruan asked if he could take the hide down right away, so Zhuang went over to give him a hand; to their surprise, it crashed down from the wall and wrapped itself around Zhuang, who had to struggle out of it. Ruan then rolled it up and got ready to leave.

“Are you really going to take it?” Zhuang asked.

“I really am. Hate to part with it?”

“At least leave me the tail.”

Ruan went to the kitchen for a knife. He lopped off the tail, then walked out with the hide over his shoulder to hail a taxi.

Zhuang had not anticipated giving away the hide, something that made him unhappy. When the shop owner delivered his noodles over the next few days, they didn’t taste as good as they had before. “Why do the noodles seem to lack flavor? In the past I’d be drooling as I waited for you to deliver them.” The woman just smiled. “Does that mean I’m unhappy with what I’m eating?” he asked.

“I’m going to be frank with you, but you can’t tell anyone else. If you do, they’d shut me down. I’d suffer and you’d go hungry. In the past the noodles tasted so good because there were opium poppy pods in the soup.”

“Poppy pods! No wonder it was so fragrant. But how could you do something like that for money?”

“Now I regret telling you. Of course we shouldn’t do that, but it’s not the same as smoking opium. It makes you just addicted enough that you’ll return to our diner. It can’t hurt you. Do you prefer it that way? I was worried you might find out, so I didn’t use the soup the past few days.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have it the old way.”

As he requested, she brought him the delicious noodles that afternoon.

If she hadn’t told him, he would have thought only that she made delicious noodle soup. But now that he knew about the poppy pods, he had the sensation of smoking opium after finishing the soup, which gave him a buzz as he lay in bed. The sensation intensified over time, and he often had trouble distinguishing between reality and illusion. One night, after watching television for a while, he felt that he was walking into the TV as the characters on the screen came out to bring him in. He went deeper and deeper into the set until he saw tiny openings on the sides. One of the openings had a sign for “spirit writing.” He opened the door and walked in; four people were using planchettes to write in sand. He laughed at their superstitious practice and began cursing all the health products that were so popular in Xijing, complaining that everyone was obsessed with their health, which was why there were products such as magic head covers, magic stomachers, even magic shoe inserts. Now a turnip was no longer just a turnip, but a health product that warmed the stomach and increased virility. And bok choy? It wasn’t just cabbage; it was a nutritious health food that nourished the yin and supplemented the qi. Vegetable market vendors even put on white smocks and caps with a red cross. Hearing his fulminations, the four men told him to shut up, adding that what they were doing provided accurate predictions. So Zhuang said he would offer a word for the deity to interpret. When he wrote the character for vagina, he did not expect to see a poem appear in the sand, a sight that made him cry out in shock and that brought him out of his reverie. His eyes snapped open. The same gangster drama was playing on TV, which told him he had been dreaming. But he had never been able to remember his dreams in the past, yet now he actually recalled the poem: Standing it’s a monk with palms together / sitting it’s a lotus with blooming petals / stop the horseplay / it’s where you came from .

Filled with confusion and questions, he could not get the poem out of his mind all that night. Then he began reliving his relationship with Tang Wan’er, followed by a trancelike trip to Shuangren fu to see Niu Yueqing. She wasn’t there, and her mother stopped him at the gate. “Why haven’t you been to see me for so long? Your uncle was mad at you, so I had to lie and tell him you were off writing somewhere. But what have you been doing? Can’t you even find time to stop by? Has Zhou Min’s woman come back yet? I tied a rope around her clothes and shoes and hung them down the well to make sure she’d return. Have you done the same thing?”

“Zhou Min’s woman? Who’s that?”

“Have you forgotten her? I just saw her yesterday. She was crying in a room; she couldn’t move because her legs were bent. I asked her what happened, and she showed me. My god! Her privates were a bloody mess under a lock. I asked her why. Didn’t she need to pee? She said it didn’t affect her peeing, but it had gotten rusty from the urine, and she couldn’t open it. I asked her to give me the key and I’d open it for her. She said Zhuang Zhidie has the key. Since you have the key, why don’t you open it for her?”