Yan Lianke

MARROW

Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas

As people retreat further and further from reality, they find themselves as distant as two generations separated by an endless road;

As people come closer and closer to reality, they find themselves like children in a mother’s loving embrace.

– An author’s reflections

Translator’s Preface

Blood and bones. The old timers believed that the blood came from the mother and the bones from the father.

- Fae Myenne Ng, Bone

Fae Myenne Ng’s debut novel, Bone, anticipates with uncanny foresight some of the central themes of Yan Lianke’s Marrow. Published in 1993, Bone describes a family of three girls from San Francisco’s Chinatown. The family includes the protagonist, Leila, and her two younger half-sisters, Ona and Nina, and the book opens with Ona having recently committed suicide by jumping off a building. Her family struggles to respond to this loss, agonising over how they may each have contributed to it. Ona’s father, Leon Leong, originally came to the United States as a ‘paper son’ – someone who pretends to be another man’s son for immigration purposes. Leon promised his ‘paper’ father, Grandpa Leong, that he would return the older man’s bones to China after his death, but Leon happened to be away at sea when the older man died. Consequently, Grandpa Leong’s remains ended up buried in San Francisco, and Leon never managed to have the bones repatriated. After Ona’s suicide, Leon becomes even more distressed by his failure to send the bones back; he thinks that he ‘gave those bones power, [and] believed that they were the bad luck that stirred Ona’s destiny.’

Similar concerns with death and inheritance run through Yan Lianke’s Marrow, which he wrote in 1999. Set in a remote mountainous region of central China’s Henan Province, Yan’s novella focuses on a family of three girls, each of whom suffers from a combination of epilepsy and other mental illnesses. The girls have a brother who is several years younger, and although it was initially believed that the boy was born normal, he begins displaying symptoms similar to those of his sisters when he is a year and a half old. The parents take him to see a doctor, who concludes that all four children have inherited their conditions via their father (though the father himself is asymptomatic). Upon hearing this news, the father proceeds to jump to his death from a cliff, leaving the mother to raise all four children on her own. Although the novella’s main plotline unfolds two decades after the father’s death, the mother nevertheless continues to interact with him as though he were still alive, particularly with respect to questions of how she should raise their children. The father’s spectral presence symbolises the way in which his family continues to struggle with the disabilities they have inherited from him.

By the time the novel begins, the mother has already found (disabled) husbands for her two elder daughters, and is similarly determined to find a husband for her third, who has become increasingly aware of her sexuality. Moreover, even though the third daughter’s illness is more acute than that of her sisters, the mother is determined to find her a non-disabled husband – or a ‘wholer’ (quanren), to use Yan Lianke’s term. In so doing, the mother is hoping to domesticate her daughter’s errant desire while also giving her the chance to have children who might escape the clutches of the family illness. The youngest son, who is referred to in the novella as ‘Fourth Idiot’, is also driven by a set of aberrant desires – including incestuous and even zoophilic tendencies. In the end, however, the novella ends up hinging on the boy’s more literal hunger, and the ways in which it may be rechanneled for alternative ends.

Like Marrow, many of Yan Lianke’s other works revolve around a dialectics of death and desire. Lenin’s Kisses (2004), for instance, focuses on a remote village whose residents all suffer from congenital (and apparently hereditary) disabilities. A local bureaucrat recruits the villagers to form a travelling performance troupe, wherein they perform for local audiences a set of special skills they have each developed to compensate for their disabilities. The bureaucrat’s objective in creating this performance troupe is his hare-brained scheme to purchase Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russia, so that he may then turn it into a profitable tourist attraction in China. By having the villagers perform their disabilities precisely in order to arrange for Lenin’s corpse to be put on display, the bureaucrat is flaunting traditional funeral conventions, which are driven by a desire to remove the body of the deceased from view. Dream of Ding Village (2006) describes a remote village that has been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, and one subplot involves an adulterous, terminally-ill couple who resolve to divorce their respective spouses and marry each other before they succumb to their illnesses. The novel is narrated through the eyes of a young boy who has recently died, and whose father becomes determined to disinter his son’s remains so that the son may be granted a post-mortem marriage to the dead daughter of a local politician. The resulting ‘ghost marriage’ may be viewed as a perversion of both conventional marriage and funeral rituals, while at the same time reaffirming the underlying concerns with identity and inheritance that drive these sorts of rituals in the first place.

Rituals generate identity and continuity through a process of repeated citation, though embedded within that process of citation is the necessary possibility of transformation. Rituals may be reinvented and transformed, and the identities and beliefs that they anchor are similarly fungible. In Fae Myenne Ng’s novel, for instance, Leon’s status as a paper son means he has spent the past fifty years living a fiction, inhabiting another man’s identity. One of his most valued possessions is a suitcase full of papers, including official documents, letters, newspaper clippings, and even countless rejection notices. The narrator explains that Leon’s collection reflects a ‘tradition of honouring paper, how the oldtimers believed all writing was sacred’, but also, more simply, it illustrates the fact that ‘Leon kept things because he believed time mattered. Old made good.’ Yan Lianke’s Marrow similarly focuses on the ways in which ritual and tradition offer the possibility of self-invention.

Virtually none of the characters in Marrow is given an actual name, and instead they are identified by their kinship status: for instance, Eldest Daughter, Second Daughter, and so forth. The son is referred to as either Fourth Idiot, Fourth Son, or Fourth Babe, depending on the context. The parents are both identified by the family’s surname, You, with the father also given the name ‘Stone’ (shitou) and the mother, for reasons never explained in the text, consistently referred to as ‘Fourth Wife You’ (You sipo). The original Chinese title of the novella, meanwhile, is Balou tiange, which could be translated as ‘sky songs of the Balou Mountains’. For this edition, however, we have re-titled the work Marrow, in recognition of the degree to which the story, like Fae Myenne Ng’s novel, pivots around the concept of ‘blood and bones’.

Carlos Rojas, 2015

Chapter One

The entire world smelled of autumn.

The fall harvest season arrived before you knew it. In the mountains, the sweet smell of corn was so thick it would stick in your throat. Drop by drop, the autumn light streamed down onto the roofs of houses, onto the tips of grass, and onto the hair of the peasants out working in the fields. This sunlight, shimmering like agate, illuminated the entire village.

It illuminated the entire mountain ridge.

It illuminated the entire world.

It was a bountiful harvest. During this period of the year, a dry spell would usually be followed by a flood, and by the time the corn was ready for pollination, the balance of sun and rain would be perfect. Down in the plains the harvest was meagre, while up in the mountains it was extraordinary. The ears of corn were almost as thick as a man’s leg, leaving the stalks doubled over like a hunchback. A few of the stalks were broken and lying on the ground, struggling to grow. You Village, often called Four Idiots Village, consisted of a few hills, and had abundant harvests. Between the white dew and the autumn equinox – which is to say, between the fifteenth and the sixteenth solar terms – people began harvesting corn. All the land belonging to the family of Fourth Wife You was on the mountain ridge furthest from the village. During previous years’ land reallocations, all of the families in the village felt that this field was too far away. The village chief told Fourth Wife You that if her idiot children wanted to eat, she would need to farm the field herself, and she was welcome to farm as much of it as she wished. Fourth Wife You therefore took her four children with her to sow the field. She sowed the entire ridge, amounting to perhaps eight or ten mu of land, but who knew this year it would yield such an extraordinary harvest?

Fourth Wife You took her idiot children out to the fields three days in a row, and spent another three transporting everything back, but still had only harvested a third of her grain. By this point she was exhausted, and found herself increasingly annoyed by this extraordinary harvest. In the endless corn field, green stalks and dried leaves were piled high, and stepping inside was like entering the sea. As Fourth Wife You was carrying the baskets of corn up to the head of the field, she heard her Third Daughter calling softly out to her, ‘Ma, Ma! Won’t you do something about Fourth Idiot? He keeps following me around, touching my breasts and pinching my nipples.’ By this point, there was already a huge pile of corn at the head of the field. The sky was high and the clouds were sparse. The purple strands of corn silk were just beginning to emerge, and they swayed back and forth in the sunlight. Fourth Wife You turned in the direction of the voice, and sure enough her son was chasing her daughter around. He had ripped open her dress, and her swollen breasts, white as a rabbit’s head, were bouncing around as though they were about to hop out of her clothes. Fourth Wife You stared in disbelief. She saw no shame on her Third Daughter’s face as Fourth Idiot grabbed her breasts. Instead her face had a light glow, like a New Year’s painting. Behind her, Fourth Idiot giggled, desiring his sister yet fearing his mother, his mouth full of saliva and his eyes full of tears. Fourth Wife You didn’t know what exactly had led to this. Part of her wanted to get to the bottom of things, but at the same time she recognised that her children were idiots and she didn’t know how to begin to ask them. As she stood there hesitating, something flashed before her and suddenly her husband, Stone You, appeared at the head of the field. He said that Fourth Idiot had grabbed the buttons on Third Daughter’s dress, and that he had seen it all clearly from the field. Fourth Wife You shifted her gaze from her husband back to her son, and said, ‘Fourth Babe, come over here. Mother wants to tell you something.’ The boy came over hesitantly, and Fourth Wife You slapped his face.

Fourth Idiot grabbed his cheek and began sobbing.

Fourth Wife You roared, ‘Don’t you know that Third Daughter is your own sister?’

Fourth Idiot headed into the corn field like a dog with its tail between its legs. He sat on a pile of corn stalks, staring into the sky and bawling. Soon, the entire hillside was filled with his cries.

Thinking the storm had passed and that they needed to get back to harvesting the corn, Fourth Wife You emptied the basket on the ground and told her husband, ‘You can go do your thing, I’ll continue working until nightfall. You don’t need to keep returning.’ She turned around and saw Third Daughter staring at her intently, as if she were dying for something to eat.

She said, ‘I’ve already beaten your brother. What more do you want?’

Third Daughter said, ‘Ma, I want a husband. I dream of having a husband, like my two sisters, to hold when I sleep.’

Fourth Wife You stared at her in shock.

Her husband also stared in shock.

Standing next to the pile of corn, Fourth Wife You looked at her daughter, who was a full head taller and half a body wider than she, whose breasts were as large as mountains. She suddenly realised that her daughter was already twenty-eight years old. By the time she herself was twenty-eight, Fourth Wife You had already given birth to four children, and it was also when she was twenty-eight – when Fourth Babe was six months old – that her husband decided to blow out his own flame. That day, she carried her son to the town clinic, and it was the clinic’s doctor who blew out the final flame of the You family lamp.

Fourth Wife You was seventeen when, humming a line of opera, she married into the You family. She got pregnant a year later, and proceeded to have another child every eighteen months or so. After her first child, she lay on the post-partum bed and enjoyed having her husband wait on her, and hummed continuously for an entire month. What she didn’t know was that her eldest, second, and third daughters would all turn out to be idiots. At the age of six months, their eyes grew dull and their pupils shrank. They didn’t learn to speak until they were three or four, and at the age of five or six they were still playing with pig shit and horse urine on the ground. Even as teenagers, they were still wetting their beds and soiling their pants. After seeing three children in a row turn out to be idiots, she and her husband didn’t dare have any more, and they didn’t dare sing a single line of opera. But after several years of not having children, they decided they wanted a son and, full of hope, the couple set to work. In the end, Fourth Wife You gave birth to a son. By six months he could already speak, and by eight or nine months he could run around. Thinking that she had finally given birth to a bright one, she and Stone You would sometimes recite to their son several lines from a play. When the child was eighteen months old, however, he came down with a fever. This initially appeared to be an ordinary illness, but the fever continued overnight. When his parents examined him the next morning, they found that his mouth was crooked and his eyes were slanted. He could no longer speak, and couldn’t even hold a rice bowl. He giggled and stared into space, and didn’t seem to be aware of anything.

Everyone in the village was astonished by this development. Fourth Wife You and Stone You’s faces and bodies, rooms and courtyard, all turned black, and then white from the devastating news.

The villagers all told them to go quickly to the township clinic. So, they went.

The doctor asked, ‘How many brothers does the boy have?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘He has three older sisters.’

The doctor asked, ‘Are his sisters all right?’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘Their minds… are not all there.’

The doctor paused and stared intently at Fourth Wife You for what seemed like an eternity. He asked whether there was anyone else in her family who suffered from this illness. Fourth Wife You said no, there wasn’t, and added that both of her parents were wholers. The doctor asked about her grandparents, and she said that they were wholers as well. The doctor asked about her great-grandparents, and Fourth Wife You replied that she had not met them but her father had told her that her great-grandfather could still do the lion dance at the age of eighty-two, and that her great-grandmother could still belt out opera lines at the age of seventy-nine. As the doctor continued his questions, he shifted his gaze to Stone You.

‘How about you?’ he asked.

Stone You fell silent.

Fourth Wife You tapped her husband on the shoulder and said, ‘He’s asking you.’

Only then did Stone You stammer, ‘My father had epilepsy, and when I was three years old he suddenly had an episode while ploughing the ridge, and fell into a ravine and died.’

Fourth Wife You’s face hardened.

The doctor sighed and said, ‘You should return home. This illness can skip a generation, and there is no cure. You have four children and all four are idiots. You could have eight, and you’d have eight idiots. If you were to have a hundred children, they would all be idiots as well. You should go home and think hard about how you’ll care for your four children for the rest of their lives.’

The parents left without saying a word, and returned to their village in the depths of the Balou Mountains. On the way home, Stone You carried their son as he followed his wife. After leaving the town they exchanged a few words, but as the sun began to descend in the west, they stopped speaking. They were both exhausted, and the child on Stone You’s shoulders drooled as he slept. As they approached the banks of Thirteen Li River just below the village, Stone You glanced over at the flowing water, then back at the child on his shoulders. His son seemed to be grinning at him in his sleep. Suddenly, he began to tremble, and his eyes rolled back into his head. The sight startled Stone You, but the child’s unnatural appearance quickly disappeared as he fell back asleep – half-crying and half-laughing.

Stone You continued standing next to the river, staring intently at his idiot son’s face.

Stone You’s wife – who by this point had already walked away – turned and shouted, ‘Come… quickly… otherwise the heat will be the death of us.’

He said, ‘Why don’t you carry our son over to the tree up ahead, to rest in the shade? I’ll get a drink and then catch up with you.’

Fourth Wife You took the child to a chinaberry tree and waited beneath it. She waited for what seemed like months, like years, until dusk fell and the earth grew dark, but still there was no sign of her husband. She walked along the river, shouting, ‘Father of our child… father of our baby… where have you gone? Where have you gone, father of our child?’ She walked several hundred steps and then, next to a pool, she saw Stone You, the father of her four idiot children. After he jumped into the river and drowned, his corpse had floated up to the riverbank like an old log. She sprinted down to the water’s edge and dragged him to shore. She placed her hand under his nostrils to see if he was breathing and then, after a long pause, she galloped down to the village to report his death.

Her man had killed himself, terrified of the future.

After her husband died, the light vanished from Fourth Wife You’s life. When she was working in the fields there was no one to bring her shovels and sickles, and when she was resting there was no one to chat with. When the cistern froze over and cracked in the winter and she needed to bind it with wire, she had no choice but to do it herself.

During that year’s wheat harvest, Fourth Wife You tied her four idiot children to a tree at the head of the field as though they were dogs, then placed some grasshoppers, sparrows, stones, and tiles in front of them for them to play with while she was harvesting the wheat. She worked from dawn until noon, at which point she returned to the tree to rest – and discovered that her children had pelted the grasshoppers and sparrows with stones, pounding the sparrows on the tiles like crushed garlic until their heads were shattered and their blood was everywhere. The children were eating the sparrows’ legs, wings, bodies, and heads, and their own mouths and faces were all smeared red. Everything reeked of sparrow blood.

Fourth Wife You stared in horror. Eventually, she began sobbing – sobbing as though there was no tomorrow. Facing the mountain ridge where she had buried her husband, she cursed, ‘Stone You, you should have been tortured to death, but you’ve gone off to enjoy yourself, leaving me and our children to suffer in this world all alone.’

She added, ‘You call yourself a man? You’ve ruined me, and ruined our four children.’

She continued, ‘Did you think that death would be the end of it? That you’d be able to rest in peace? I’m telling you, I won’t let you rest until our children have their own families and their own jobs.’

She continued, ‘Come back here! You’ve abandoned us in this world and gone off somewhere else.’

She continued, ‘Come back here and kneel in front of me – kneel down and see your four children, then see how much wheat I harvested all by myself.’

As Fourth Wife You cursed her husband, her voice grew weak and hoarse as her expression changed from one of fury to one of resignation. She dissolved into silence, but continued staring out at an empty space in front of her. In an open space right between the wheat fields and the mountain ridge, there was an area that resembled a reed mat, full of rocks and weeds. Weeds grew out of the cracks between the stones, completely covering them with vegetation. Sure enough, her husband was kneeling in the clearing, crushing the wild grass beneath him. His grey shadow, thin as a cicada’s wing, swayed between the green grass and the yellow stones. The other villagers who were out harvesting had already returned to the village to have lunch and sharpen their scythes, and then they left the village again, heading toward their own fields. Some of them were spreading the freshly harvested wheat to dry in the sun. Her husband knelt there, at first looking up at her, and then down at the ground.

He said, ‘In all my life, I’ve never disappointed anyone as badly as I disappointed you.’

He said, ‘I left you behind to endure pain and exhaustion.’

He said, ‘Come what may, you must raise our children. When they have families and jobs, life will be easier for you.’

As Stone You mentioned their children, Fourth Wife You looked behind her. Her four idiot children were still eating live sparrows and grasshoppers, and her look of pain gradually faded and the colour returned to her face. Abruptly, she picked up her scythe and began beating her husband like a madwoman, striking his head, his face, and his arms – whatever she could. The mountainside was filled with the sound of her blows, echoing from one side to the other. The sunlight was sliced into pieces by her blade, as was the long, cool breeze into burning hot segments.

The following year, she harvested the summer wheat but was unable to plant the autumn crops. Other families’ autumn crops had already begun to sprout, but her own fields were still bare. Each family’s plough oxen worked endlessly day and night, and Fourth Wife You had no choice but to take advantage of the moonlight to hoe her field. She placed a mat on the ground, where her four idiot children could sleep, then took off her shirt and proceeded to hoe the field from one end to the other and back again. The freshly-hoed soil had a moist and earthy smell that resembled dark crimson. The wheat sprouts gleamed in the moonlight, producing a warm and alluring white aroma. The red and white odours mixed together in the night air, like smoke and fog, and the sound of her hoeing and the sound of her snoring children trickled lazily through the watery moonlight. Fourth Wife You continued working until she was exhausted, but as soon as she sat down on the cool earth to rest, someone approached from the mountain ridge. It was a middle-aged man from a neighbouring village, who came over and stuck his shovel in the ground at the head of the field. He looked at the topless Fourth Wife You and said,

‘Haven’t you finished hoeing yet?’

Fourth Wife You quickly reached for her shirt.

The man laughed, and said, ‘No need to put it on. There’s nothing I haven’t seen before.’ Fourth Wife You sat back down, her face and breasts both facing the man.

The man said, ‘Do you want some help?’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘Sure.’

The man asked, ‘What would I get in return?’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘What do you want?’

The man said, ‘I’ll hoe this entire field better than an ox could plough it, and break up the dirt as though I were milling grain. But you’ve got to sit there at the head of the field, so that whenever I turn around I can see your bare chest.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Go ahead.’

The man said, ‘When the field has been hoed, I’ll plant your autumn crops. All I ask is that tonight you and I sleep together on that ridge.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Don’t waste time talking. Get to work.’

The man leaned over and began hoeing. He did, in fact, hoe much better and much faster than she. He brought the hoe down vigorously and pulled it back and forth, then bent down and turned the earth over, the scent of fresh earth wafting over the field. At one point the man looked up and stared at the topless Fourth Wife You, and asked, ‘You don’t know how good your breasts look, do you?’ He hoed some more, then looked up again and said, ‘I’ve been watching, and you’ve got the best breasts of anyone in the villages around here. Even after four children, they’re still nice and firm.’ He hoed some more, then looked up again and said, ‘It’s getting chilly. You can put your shirt back on, but don’t button it.’ Fourth Wife You draped her shirt over her shoulders and covered her children with a sheet, then returned to where she had been sitting, still with her breasts and chest facing the man.

He continued hoeing, walking backward down the field while periodically glancing over at Fourth Wife You’s pert breasts. In order to see them more easily, he didn’t hoe the field from one end to the other, but rather proceeded back to the head of the field and hoed it again in the same direction as before. Every time he looked up, he said something sweet to Fourth Wife You. She didn’t reply, and instead merely sat there with her breasts exposed and her arms either on her knees or resting at her side, permitting the man to watch her as he repeatedly approached and drew away. The mountain ridge was as quiet as a sleeping herd of cattle. Fourth Wife You’s husband, Stone You, sat down behind her.

He said, ‘Don’t you know who this man is? He is an ass from a neighbouring village.’

Fourth Wife You ignored him.

He said, ‘Mother of our children, I never imagined you could be so shameless. If the children woke up and saw you like this, and didn’t open their idiot mouths to eat you right up, well, they would be no children of mine.’

It was only then that Fourth Wife You turned and looked at him in the moonlight. With a ‘Pah!’, she spat on the ground in front of him and said, ‘If you have any pride at all, go turn the earth yourself, like that ass.’

Stone You said nothing more, and stood behind her, muttering. Fourth Wife You heard him begin to weep, but didn’t say anything else and didn’t look at him again. She just sat there motionless, like a statue made of wood or clay, and remained there until only a narrow patch of land was left to be hoed, like a grey ribbon running along the edge of the ravine. By this point the man was tired and had something else on his mind.

He said, ‘Let’s sleep for a while. Then I’ll finish.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘Finish what you started, and the sleep will be all the sweeter.’

The man said, ‘That triangular bit at the front, too?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘That, too. I can grow forty or fifty stalks on it.’

In the end, the white wheat stubble in the gully became invisible, and the ground appeared dark red under the moonless, nearly starless night, as soft as if it were laid with a thick layer of crimson flowers. There was dew on the tips of the grass at the head of the field.

The eldest daughter sat up and, without opening her eyes, peed on the ground next to her youngest brother’s feet, then lay back down. Her brother, finding his feet in a pool of steaming urine, pulled them away, rolled over, and murmured, ‘Ma, Ma! Who’s boiling my feet in a pot?’ Fourth Wife You went over to cover her children with the sheet, and said, ‘Go back to sleep. No one’s boiling your feet.’

At that point the man walked over excitedly, treading on the soil he’d just hoed. He had broad shoulders and walked with vigour, each step making a small depression in the loose soil. Fourth Wife You watched him approach, and moved away from her children. In a flash, she had her arms in the sleeves of her shirt and was buttoning it up.

The man tossed his spade to one side, and asked, ‘Why are you buttoning your shirt?’

Fourth Wife You glanced at him.

‘Do you plan to marry me? If you don’t plan to marry me, then don’t think of touching me.’

The man stared in surprise.

‘But we agreed – we agreed that if I hoed the entire field, we would spend the night together on this ridge.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘You also said you would help me plant the autumn crops. Have you done that?’

The man grabbed his spade angrily.

‘I worked all night, and now it’s almost dawn. If you won’t sleep with me I’ll split your head open with this spade.’

Stone You turned pale and dropped to his knees before the man.

Fourth Wife You looked at Stone You, at the man’s upraised spade, then at his furious expression. She calmly walked several steps toward the spade, squatted down beneath it, and said, ‘Then go right ahead and strike me down. I’m burdened with these four idiot children, and long ago lost my desire to live. Strike me down and you won’t even need to pay with your life. Just raise my four children for me.’

The man turned to look at the reed mat on the ground, and saw that the four children had all woken up and were rubbing their eyes, staring at him and Fourth Wife You. He lowered his spade and planted his foot on Fourth Wife You’s chest, saying, ‘Fuck, I might as well just rape you.’

Fourth Wife You wiped the dirt from her chest and replied, ‘If you rape me, then I’ll hang myself in your doorway. You still won’t have to pay with your life, you’ll just need to raise my four children until they all have families and jobs of their own.’

The man stood there for a while, then walked away furiously.

The dawn came creaking in, interrupting the footsteps of the man in the distance, as well as the look Fourth Wife You exchanged with her husband.

And so Fourth Wife You got her field hoed, planted, fertilised, weeded, and harvested. Then, she moved on to the next season. One season followed another, just as night follows day – propelling her forward and propelling her children into adulthood. Her hair went grey, and she grew visibly older.

Chapter Two

In the middle of the harvest season, Third Daughter suddenly decided she wanted a husband and a family, and also to learn about sex. By the time Fourth Wife You was fifty, she had succeeded in finding husbands for her two elder daughters, and while they lived an impoverished life with their new families as they had with her, at least they had a life. Although both of her elder daughters were addled, when their illness wasn’t acting up they could still sew buttons and count to ten. They knew how to go out and buy salt, and could bring back the correct change. They knew to bow their heads when a man looked at them, and only when their illness acted up did they fall to the ground, vomiting, foaming at the mouth, convulsing, and ultimately losing consciousness. But Third Daughter was different. She couldn’t count to seven even when her illness wasn’t acting up, and when she went to the village entrance to buy staples such as oil and salt, she never remembered to bring back the change. Whenever Third Daughter had her period, Fourth Wife You had to help her clean herself. Fourth Wife You had always assumed that Third Daughter would never have a chance to learn about sex, but now she was saying that she did in fact want a family and a husband, just like her elder sisters. Standing in the field of ripe corn, looking at her daughter’s glow of excitement, Fourth Wife You saw some sparks in the sunlight fly between the corn stalks. The sky was high and the clouds were sparse, and the sound of corn being harvested on the ridge travelled toward them as clouds of dust rained down on the stems and leaves of the corn plants. The calm summoned Stone You from his grave, whereupon Fourth Wife You asked her daughter in his presence, ‘Daughter, what did you just say?’

Third Daughter straightened her neck and replied, ‘I want a family, and I want to be able to hug a man at night while I sleep, as my sisters do.’

Fourth Wife You thought for a while, then asked, ‘What kind of man do you want?’

Third Daughter replied, ‘I want a wholer, not a cripple or a one-eyed freak. I want a good man, not the kind who would make me go into the fields to harvest corn.’

Stone You said, ‘Daughter, don’t you know what you are?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘What is she? Whatever she is, she inherited it from your family.’

Stone You said, ‘Can she find a wholer?’

Fourth Wife You spit on the ground and snorted. ‘We can look for a wholer, and if we can’t find one, we can look for a semi-wholer. You can go to each village on the mountain ridge and find a suitable man for our Third Daughter to marry.’

At this point Third Daughter looked at Fourth Wife You in surprise, and exclaimed, ‘Ma, you’re crazy too, and talk to people who don’t even exist.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Daughter, go pick some corn. If your brother tugs at your clothing again, you can slap him. After the fall harvest, and after we have planted the next crop, I’ll find you a good family to marry into. I’ll find you an even better husband than either of your two sisters have.’

Third Daughter’s eyes widened in surprise. Her mouth trembled and her cheeks turned bright red.

She hopped over toward the depths of the corn field. Immediately, the sound of harvest rippled across the ridge, like a river overflowing its banks. There was the smell of autumn and of corn stalks being trampled, which mixed together like smoke, blanketing the sky and the earth.

The mountain ridge was left completely bare after the hectic autumn harvest. The corn stalks had all been cut down and left to dry at the head of each family’s field so that they could be used as kindling in the winter. In the bare fields along the mountain ridge, some people had already begun ploughing the earth and planting the next wheat crop, while others, because they had neither ox nor plough, had no choice but to take a shovel and do it by hand. Fourth Wife You led Third Daughter and Fourth Idiot to hoe the fields the first day. At one point she went into a gully to pee, and when she returned she found that her daughter had unbuttoned her shirt and was giggling as her brother sucked her breasts.

Fourth Wife You simply stared. She knew she couldn’t delay in finding Third Daughter a husband, so she picked up her spade and immediately took her children home, then proceeded to lock her son up in a room. This was a small garden in the village, and the entire courtyard was filled with piles of corn and post-harvest smells and shadows. The house had three main rooms and two side rooms. The three main rooms included two bedrooms in which Fourth Wife You and Third Daughter each had a bed. Of the two side rooms, one was a kitchen and the other was Fourth Idiot’s bedroom. The window in the latter bedroom had a wooden frame that was built right into the wall. When one of her children had an episode, Fourth Wife You would lock them up in this prison-like room. The door was two inches thick and was made from a combination of ash and persimmon wood. When the door was locked from the outside, there was absolutely no way of opening it from the inside.

Fourth Wife You locked Fourth Idiot up in this room. He climbed up to the window like an aggrieved criminal and began shouting, ‘Ma, Ma! I didn’t have an episode. My mind is completely clear. I won’t touch my sister’s nipples anymore, OK?’ Fourth Wife You ignored him, and instead changed into a freshly-washed fluorescent blue shirt and combed her hair in front of the window with a wooden comb. She removed several cold buns and placed them on the kitchen counter, then put half a bowl of noodles on the corner of the cooking counter. Finally, she brought Third Daughter over to the kitchen doorway, pointed, and said, ‘Your mother is going to find you a family to marry into. At noon you can cook a bowl of noodles, and you and your brother can each have two steamed buns. You can hand your brother a bowl of noodles through the window.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Can you do that?’

Third Daughter replied, ‘Yes, I can.’ Then she added, ‘Ma, find me a good family to marry into. Find me a wholer.’

Without another word, Fourth Wife You went into the courtyard, collected half a bowl of crushed rocks, then handed the bowl to Fourth Idiot through the window, saying, ‘Count these rocks. If you count them right, I’ll let you out. If you count them wrong, you can continue stewing inside.’ Then she walked out into the street.

She passed a middle-aged woman nursing an infant. ‘Fourth Wife You, where are you headed on such an important day?’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘A relative is sick, and I’m going to visit.’

The woman asked, ‘But aren’t you planting wheat? It’s important to plant the wheat.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘My relative’s illness is terminal, so I really need to go, even if it means not planting the wheat.’

Fourth Wife You didn’t tell the woman that she was actually trying to find a family for her daughter to marry into. Her four idiot children had made her infamous throughout the Balou Mountains. No one in the neighbouring villages called You Village by its actual name; they all called it Four Idiots Village. The residents of You Village complained that those from other villages were rude and that Fourth Wife You had ruined their village’s reputation. Several years earlier, when Fourth Wife You was looking for husbands for her two elder daughters, the villagers leaked the secret of her daughters’ illness, and no one would have them. Fourth Wife You had proceeded to stand at the eastern edge of the village and shout at the top of her lungs,

‘Hey… I want everyone to listen carefully… I’ll fuck your ancestors, I’ll dig up their graves. You’re trying to keep my two elder daughters from finding husbands. You told everyone that my family is full of idiots, but when did this family of idiots ever keep you from screwing around, or keep your elders from kicking the bucket? Now, everyone listen to me… from this point onward, my children will marry whomever they choose, and whoever says otherwise will get sores in their mouths, run pus from their gums, get cancer of the throat, and after they die their graves will be dug up by grave robbers and their bones will be left out to be devoured by wild animals!’

Fourth Wife You moved to a pile of shit in the centre of the village and cursed, then to a tree stump on the western side of the village and continued to curse. She cursed in all directions as she walked from one end of the village to the other. The door to every house was open, and people’s heads popped out like eggplants along the edge of the fields. But by the time she finished cursing at the western end of the village, and turned around to head back, the doors of every house were tightly shut, and the street was completely empty. The chickens and pigs were so terrified that they cowered in nooks and crannies.

Half a year later, the two elder daughters moved out of Fourth Wife You’s home and into those of their respective husbands. Eldest Daughter’s husband was a cripple who walked with a cane and had to lean on his bed when he wanted to go to sleep. Second Daughter’s husband, meanwhile, had a bad eye, which was always covered with a yellowish film as though it hadn’t been washed properly. Before the marriage, both men asked Fourth Wife You if her daughters were really cured, and she said, ‘Yes, and if you don’t believe me, go ask around the village.’ They did so, and the villagers all said they hadn’t heard that Fourth Wife You’s children were sick, and even if they had been sick when they were younger, they were better now.

The cripple married Eldest Daughter in the latter half of that year. It was snowing hard on the day of the wedding, and after their marriage, their lives were dark and cold. By contrast, the one-eyed man married Second Daughter at the start of spring in the following year. The sun was shining brightly on the day of the wedding, and the wind was blowing down from the mountain ridge like a sheet of silk. Their lives, however, stumbled along. On the first night of her marriage, Second Daughter had an episode and began foaming at the mouth. At the time, One-Eye happened to be in bed with her, and afterwards each time they tried to sleep together her illness would act up, and she constantly had to take medication. The summer after Second Daughter was married off, Fourth Wife You went to visit her son-in-law’s home. Her village was located thirty-nine li from that of her son-in-law, but before she had gone ten li she heard her daughter crying after having to take her medicine. When she arrived at their house, she found a pile of empty medicine bottles so high it reached the window ledge.

She asked One-Eye, ‘If she gets sick every time you try to sleep with her, couldn’t you simply not sleep with her?’

One-Eye replied, ‘I didn’t get married until I was already thirty-seven, and if I can’t sleep with my wife, then why did I get married at all? If I can’t sleep with my wife, how will my family name live on?’

After that, Fourth Wife You never returned to the home of her second son-in-law, and she rarely visited that of her first son-in-law either. As a result, she didn’t know whether or not her daughters’ illnesses were still acting up, nor whether Second Daughter ever ended up getting pregnant. Originally, Fourth Wife You had planned to visit her two daughters after the autumn harvest, but then the problem of her Third Daughter’s marriage presented itself.

The mountain ridge was vast and endless. The wind brought in surge after surge of the smell of freshly-turned earth. Sometimes, Fourth Wife You would pass people going to the market beyond the Balou Mountains. Both of Fourth Wife You’s elder daughters had married into families who lived beyond the mountains. Outsiders were normally not willing to marry women from the mountains, feeling that a visit to the in-laws would be too much work. Never mind the Yous, whose idiot children could only look to the deep hills for mates. Fourth Wife You walked quickly as the sun’s shadows fluttered around her like black veils. Li Village, Liu Gully, and both Large and Small Scholar Town were now all behind her, like discarded sheets of paper strewn across the sunlit hills. She proceeded alone, accompanied by the sound of countless sparrows and grasshoppers. In the afternoon, after the sun had passed its highest point, she heard footsteps slowly approaching, like an old person clapping. The sound faded into the distance, and she lifted her head to see if she could figure out exactly what the footsteps sounded like, whereupon she discovered that her husband, Stone You, was following her. She asked, ‘Where are you going?’

He replied, ‘If you keep going west to Wu Ravine, you’ll find five brothers who are all bachelors, any one of whom would make a match for Third Daughter.’

Fourth Wife You stopped and looked at her husband sceptically. She noticed that a mosquito had landed on his left cheek, so she swatted it away and proceeded forward. When she reached an intersection, she stood there looking uncertain, and her husband said, ‘You should take the road heading west.’ So, she took the road heading west, and soon saw Wu Ravine Village up in front of her. The village was not very large, only a hundred or so residents. In front of the village there were several villagers busy harvesting the corn and planting wheat. Because she was so dressed up and walking so quickly, the villagers all stopped what they were doing and stared at her. One of her sisters recognised her from a distance. The woman’s family was large, with children and grandchildren, and all three generations were out in the fields planting wheat. They held their hands up to their foreheads to block out the glare of the sun as they looked at her. Suddenly, the woman pulling one of the plough’s side ropes suddenly threw the rope down.

The woman’s son-in-law asked, ‘Ma, what are you doing?’

The woman replied, ‘That’s one of my sisters from when I still lived with my mother.’

Stone You pulled Fourth Wife You over to the entrance of the village and told her to wait there for a moment.

When the woman came over, she shouted, ‘Hey, are you my younger sister?’

Fourth Wife You called out in surprise, ‘Sis… it’s you!’

The woman said, ‘This is such a busy time of year. How is it that you’ve come all the way over here?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘I’ve come to find a husband for Third Daughter. I hear that in your village there is a family with five sons, none of whom has a wife.’

They stood there on the side of the road, staring at each other. After a while, their eyes filled with tears. As girls, they had gone together into the fields to fetch water and take the cattle out to graze, but after they each married they rarely had a chance to see each other. The other woman was only about half a year older than Fourth Wife You, but looked as though she were more than a decade older, and had endured hardships that Fourth Wife You could only imagine. The other woman had only just turned sixty, and was already walking unsteadily and had a face full of wrinkles. Fourth Wife You watched her, and said, ‘Sis, you’re old, and have gone completely grey.’ The other woman replied, ‘You’ve also aged. I heard that before you even turned thirty, you were widowed with four children. I always said that I wanted to go visit you and your children, but could never seem to find the time.’ Fourth Wife You asked, ‘How are your grandchildren doing? I hear you replaced your house with a tile-roofed one. I couldn’t leave my children alone, or else I’d have come to help cook for you while you were building your new house.’

The woman looked at her in surprise, and asked, ‘Then who’s looking after Third Daughter and Fourth Idiot now, while you’re here?’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘I locked Fourth Idiot in his room.’

The two sisters chatted there at the head of the field, until the tractor came rumbling over and the old man in the cabin urged them to return home. Only then did it occur to them that they should start heading back.

When they entered the village, Fourth Wife You saw that her sister did indeed have a new tile-roofed house with a courtyard – a house so new that the smell of sulfur from the bricks still lingered. The path through the courtyard and the ailanthus tree in the centre of the courtyard were still enveloped in waves of dust from the new tiles. Under the tree, Fourth Wife You complimented her sister on how big and bright the new building was, how straight its girders were, how good its wood was, and how much she envied her sister’s good life. Eventually, she broached the topic that had brought her there, revealing countless shameful details about Third Daughter and Fourth Idiot. The other woman lit a fire, rinsed some vegetables, kneaded some dough, and boiled some water. Then she went to a house in the back of the village and, in the blink of an eye, had summoned the eldest of their five sons. He was almost forty years old, and was thin and hunchbacked. When he heard that there was someone who wanted to marry her daughter to one of the brothers, he entered the room smiling brightly. He brought a pile of fresh dates, and invited Fourth Wife You to sit under the ailanthus tree and eat the dates as they chatted about the crops, the harvest, the drought, the house, and countless other topics.

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘So, none of you is married?’

The eldest son bowed his head and replied, ‘No, we’re not.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘My daughter is twenty-eight years old, by the lunar calendar.’

Eldest Brother replied, ‘In my family, Second Brother is thirty-five, Third Brother is thirty-three, Fourth Brother is thirty, and Fifth Brother is only twenty-seven.’

Stone You said, ‘Either Second Brother or Third Brother would be fine.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘I think it would be best to have my daughter marry Fourth Brother, since the two of them are closest in age.’

Eldest Brother replied, ‘Of the five of us, Fourth Brother is definitely the most handsome. He is trained as a carpenter, and a matchmaker has already offered to set him up with a young woman from a neighbouring village.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘How about Third Brother?’

Eldest Brother said, ‘Third Aunt mentioned that your third daughter has epilepsy, but is not unattractive. I understand that she can work and cook, and can even sew. Our second brother is deaf, having lost his hearing as a result of a fireworks accident when he was young, but apart from that there’s nothing wrong with him. Do you think your daughter could get engaged to Second Brother?’

Stone You said, ‘She and Second Brother would make a good match.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘That won’t do. I want to find a wholer for Third Daughter to marry. If only I can find her a wholer, then our family wouldn’t need any betrothal gifts. In fact, we’ll even give the groom’s family a dowry chest, a double bed made from ailanthus wood, and a bedding set, together with two sets of year-round men’s clothing.’

Stone You asked, ‘Can we really provide all that?’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘Don’t interfere.’

Eldest Brother said, ‘That is certainly a lot of gifts. But my brothers are interested in marrying a wife, not just things.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘We would be willing to accept any of the brothers, except for the deaf one.’

Eldest Brother stood up and was about to walk away. He said, ‘Even if we were to let our deaf brother marry your daughter, it would only be because we were doing Second Aunt a favour.’

Fourth Wife You also stood up and said angrily, ‘Go on, leave. May you all remain single for the rest of your lives.’

Stone You tried to pull Fourth Wife You aside, but she knocked his hand away. Eldest Brother stood there, unsure of what to do. He watched as his third aunt walked out of the kitchen. Fourth Wife You turned around and walked briskly toward the door. In the street there were many villagers who had just got off work, and everyone looked at her and urged her to return to at least have lunch before leaving. She, however, merely looked back at Eldest Brother, who was left standing stock still in the courtyard of the tile-roofed house. She repeated, ‘Other than the deaf one, can we marry any of the others?’ Seeing Eldest Brother shake his head, she walked away.

She left behind a table full of food.

Chapter Three

By this point, the sun was already high in the sky and a thin mist was rising up out of the mountain ridge. In the distance, the smoke from Wu Ravine Village gradually dissipated. Fourth Wife You ate some grain, drank some spring water, then followed her husband Stone You’s directions and visited several other villages. There, she met a number of men, but either they didn’t want Third Daughter because of her illness, or else Fourth Wife You didn’t want them because they were not wholers. She walked so far that her entire body ached, but in the end she couldn’t find a husband for her daughter. She headed back toward the Balou Mountains, and on the way drew near her Eldest Daughter’s village. From a distance, she saw her Elder Daughter’s husband hobbling around in their apple orchard, irrigating the trees. He was alone, and in the empty mountain range he resembled a three-legged ox ploughing the fields. Fourth Wife You’s tears began streaming out.

Stone You asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

She said, ‘I’ll find Third Daughter a husband if it kills me.’

Proceeding along the mountain path in the direction of Eldest Daughter’s village, she saw clearly her daughter’s twin caves, straw stove, and an apple orchard with no apples. The orchard represented the family’s hopes and dreams, and after they planted the sprouts several years earlier, Eldest Daughter’s crippled husband irrigated them, caring for them as though they were his own children. Eldest Daughter mended her husband’s clothing, cooked food, and waited for those sprouts to grow into trees and begin producing fruit. But after three years, all of their neighbours’ fruit trees were full of red blossoms, while her family’s had only a few green sprouts without a trace of red. The following year, the trees in every other orchard were heavy with fruit, while her family’s had just a few green apples that were as small as dates. As every other family was madly selling their fruit, Eldest Daughter had a nervous breakdown. She rushed into the orchard and began cursing her husband, saying, ‘You promised me that if we planted an apple tree, within three years we would have enough money to buy me a colourful new shirt. I want that new shirt!’ Cripple sat under the tree and stared into space, despair etched into the mountain-like ridges on his face. He became increasingly distressed by his wife’s shouts, and suddenly lifted one of his crutches and violently brought it back down again. Eldest Daughter’s head began bleeding and her mouth began foaming, whereupon she fell to the ground unconscious.

At that point Fourth Wife You was out in the field picking beans. Her husband Stone You rushed over and told her what had happened. She immediately went to her daughter’s house, several dozen li away. When she arrived in their courtyard, she saw that Cripple was in the process of chopping down the fruit trees, and one entire hillside was already stripped bare. Fourth Wife You rushed up to him and asked, ‘Are you crazy?’

Cripple responded, ‘Even our fruit trees won’t bear fruit; I simply can’t endure it any more.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Did you use the same sprouts as everyone else?’

Cripple replied, ‘I bought them from the nursery.’

She asked, ‘Did you use pesticide?’

Cripple replied, ‘These trees didn’t have any insects to begin with.’

She asked, ‘Did you graft them with a different strain?’

Cripple asked, ‘What do you mean?’

She explained, ‘I notice that other people first plant seedlings, and then the following year they ask someone to graft them.’

Cripple stared at his chopped down trees, then he dropped his axe and began slapping his own face, exclaiming, ‘My legs are stunted, but how is it that my mind is also stunted? My legs are crippled, but how is it that my mind is also crippled?’ He stared up into the sky and began raving, ‘How could I not know that I needed to graft them? How could I not know?’ He collapsed and, like Eldest Daughter, lay unconscious in the middle of the orchard.

The life of Eldest Daughter’s family was a dark alley, and although they could occasionally discern a light at the end, it nevertheless seemed that they could never make their way out. Eldest Daughter and her husband planted another crop of fruit trees, and Cripple cared for the seedlings as though they were his own children. The seedlings produced green sprouts, and at the beginning of the year Eldest Daughter and her husband performed a graft. But, though that year apples were as plentiful as sweet potatoes, they weren’t able to sell a single one of theirs. Even though he wasn’t able to sell his apples, Cripple nevertheless needed to hobble down to the river to fetch water to irrigate his crops, as if he planted fruit trees and fetched water for some purpose other than earning money. When Stone You passed by that orchard, he saw Cripple carrying the water up the hill, and the shrimp that had jumped out of the bucket were crawling around on the dry hillside. Stone You stood there watching from a distance, his hand up to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. His face looked deathly pale.

Stone You said, ‘Let’s go and have a word with our son-in-law.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘What is there to say? He has a wife and an orchard. Eldest Daughter, meanwhile, has a husband and food to cook. They have everything they need, and their lives are infinitely better than those of Third Daughter and Fourth Idiot.’

Saying this, Fourth Wife You hurried off toward Wu Village several li away. Stone You noted that someone’s wife in Wu Village had passed away about six months earlier, and he thought maybe she’d died just so her husband could marry Third Daughter. By this point the sun was already low in the west and the mountain ridge was shrouded in a red glow. The autumn warmth washed over their feet like water. There was a scent of fresh earth, and the smell of grass filled the air. As though walking along a tightrope, they went down a small path overrun with weeds, followed by a flock of sparrows. They passed one ridge after another, as they proceeded down to the bottom of a ravine. Fourth Wife You saw many villagers speaking with her husband, but most of them were old people herding their sheep and oxen back to the village. There was also a woman wearing a black silk shirt with the character for ‘Longevity’ stitched on the back, who asked Stone You how to get to the Li Temple Primary School. Fourth Wife You asked, ‘She’s not that old, is she?’ Stone You replied, ‘This is the wife of that man from Wu Village. She was only thirty when she died in a car accident.’

Fourth Wife You paused and examined the other woman. She saw that she was somewhat bow-legged and wobbled a bit with each step. Fourth Wife You heard the woman walking over, as soft as settling dust. She thought what a shame it was to pass away at such a young age. At this point the other woman turned around and, looking at her wanly, said, ‘Are the two of you going to Wu Village? My husband is a good-for-nothing who is only interested in eating, and is never willing to do any work. Now that I’m gone, he leads a completely joyless existence. As long as you can provide him with enough to eat and drink, he will surely agree to your marriage proposal.’

Fourth Wife You stared at his wife in astonishment.

The woman nodded to Fourth Wife You, then appeared to float away.

They continued forward. The setting sun before them made a faint swishing sound. They turned a corner and followed the river for a while until a village appeared on the hillside. At several points along the path to the village, there were wooden signs bearing the names of the owner of the land. On some of the signs there also appeared, in small characters, the words ‘This land is under contract, and will remain so for fifty years, without change’ or ‘If anyone’s livestock ventures onto this land, that person’s family can expect to die!’ The wheat planted here had all been harvested, leaving row upon row of tracks where the wheat had been dragged through the field. You could also see the grain kernels that had not been buried, shimmering in the sunlight. Fourth Wife You and her husband came over from the recently harvested field and gazed out at the village in front of them. They could smell the evening air, and could see people in the village staring back at them.

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Do you know the man’s name and where he lives?’

Stone You replied, ‘I do. His name is Wu Shu, and he lives under the date tree in the centre of the village. As long as someone is willing to marry Third Daughter, you shouldn’t be too picky about other details.’

Fourth Wife You replied angrily, ‘I don’t care if it’s his second marriage, but I definitely want him to be a wholer.’

Stone You said, ‘So what if he’s a bit disabled? We’ve already visited five villages and seen seven men; any of them would be fine for her.’

Fourth Wife You stopped abruptly to look at her husband, and asked, ‘Have you gone to see how Eldest Daughter and Second Daughter are doing? Their pigs won’t litter, their chickens won’t lay eggs, and they themselves are not getting pregnant – there is not a single thing that does not give cause for worry. If our daughters had married wholers, would they have had a problem with their apple trees not bearing fruit? Would Second Daughter have been so frustrated with not being able to get pregnant that she would eventually resort to swallowing poison? Would they have been unable to wake up when it was time to harvest the crops?’ As Fourth Wife You pummelled her husband with questions, he bowed his head and slowed down, such that he was now walking behind her. He didn’t say a word, while Fourth Wife You continued muttering to herself. When they reached the village, they saw that in front there was a large empty field, about two or three mu in size, shaped like a cross between a circle and a square. The corn from the previous season had been swallowed up by weeds, and all that was left were a few bare stalks, which made the land appear more overgrown than it actually was. Wormwood, saw-tooth, and twitchgrass were all growing haphazardly in the field, to the point that someone standing beside it would have difficulty seeing the ground underneath. It was on the edge of that overgrown field that a man was sitting on a hoe and leaning against a pagoda tree. A fly had landed on his face, but he didn’t bother to brush it away. They could see that his face was covered in the ash-grey pallor of the abandoned field, and it looked as if he were on the verge of death. As he heard someone approaching, he opened his eyes then immediately closed them again, as if he were completely exhausted.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Hey, it’s time for dinner. Is this Wu Village?’

The man moved a bit, but grunted without looking around.

Fourth Wife You asked again, ‘Do you know where we can find Wu Shu’s home?’

The man suddenly opened his eyes and stared at Fourth Wife You, and asked ‘Why are you looking for Wu Shu?’

Stone You said, ‘This is Wu Shu.’

Fourth Wife You examined the man and saw that his dishevelled hair was full of straw and crawling with lice. His sleeves were torn, revealing inner arms covered in a layer of black dirt, and his black pants had dark blue patches sewn on the bottom with white thread. She also noticed he was wearing one old hand-made cloth shoe and one new canvas and rubber one. Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Are you Wu Shu?’

The man chuckled and said, ‘I knew that you would come to see me. Today I saw a ghost, who told me that when the sun set someone would come and see me, and, sure enough, someone has now come.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Please lift your arm.’

Wu Shu hesitated a moment, then raised his arm.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Roll up your pant legs.’

Wu Shu did so, revealing a pair of calves that were as thick as tree trunks.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘You’re not sick, are you?’

Wu Shu said, ‘What do you mean, sick?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Like deaf, mute, or mentally disabled.’

Wu Shu said, ‘Don’t you see me standing here in front of you? I’m a wholer.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Let me see you take a few steps.’

Wu Shu stepped out from under the pagoda tree and walked back and forth in front of her. She saw that he had a nimble gait, his arms and legs looked strong, and he appeared happy. She thought, Third Daughter has had good fortune, we’ve found a wholer. She then told him to stop, and he stood in front of her, his body as straight as a rod, and asked, ‘What else would you like to see?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘How many houses does your family own?’

Wu Shu said, ‘A three-room thatched house, which leaks when it rains.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘That’s not a problem. Do you own any fruit trees?’

Wu Shu said, ‘After my wife died, I sold all of my trees to buy food.’ He gestured toward a pagoda tree with a trunk as wide as a bowl, and said, ‘The day before yesterday, I gave this one to a neighbour in exchange for a basket of wheat, and in a few days he will come to chop it down.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘You don’t raise chickens or pigs?’ Wu Shu replied, ‘If I don’t even have enough food for myself?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Did you sew the patches on your clothing yourself?’

Wu Shu replied, ‘If I didn’t do it, who would?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Do you also cook your own food?’

Wu Shu replied, ‘If I didn’t cook it, who would?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘How about if I find you someone to mend your clothing and cook for you?’

Wu Shu replied, ‘Do you mean your family’s Third Daughter?’

Fourth Wife You stared in surprise, and said, ‘You already know everything?’

Wu Shu replied, ‘I really did see a ghost.’

Stone You said, ‘Was it your wife who told you everything?’

Wu Shu asked, ‘So, what’s the story with her illness?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘It doesn’t act up more than once every ten days or two weeks, and sometimes she’ll go for a whole half year without a single episode.’

Wu Shu hesitantly looked upward, as though considering something.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Maybe after you and she get married, her illness will be cured. That is what happened with our eldest two daughters. Previously, their illness was as bad as a stormy day, but as soon as they got married the rainclouds cleared.’

Wu Shu said, ‘And if it isn’t cured?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘It will be. Just marry her, and you’ll see.’

Wu Shu was silent for a long time. Then he straightened his neck and glanced at Fourth Wife You, saying, ‘If you want me to marry your family’s third daughter, that’s fine, but your family should add something extra to the dowry.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘What do you want?’

Wu Shu said, ‘A dowry chest, including three sets of bedding with new covers and new cotton stuffing.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Done.’

Wu Shu said, ‘I’d also like five pairs of cloth shoes. I don’t have any shoes to wear, and don’t have any clothing either.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘I’ll give you eight pairs of cloth shoes, two pairs of rubber shoes, and I’ll also buy you two wool jackets.’

Wu Shu said, ‘Can you also re-thatch the roof on our house?’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘That wouldn’t cost very much.’

Wu Shu said, ‘Also buy me an ox.’ Looking out at the barren field next to his house, he added, ‘Hoeing this field by hand every year is exhausting.’

Fourth Wife You hesitated, and asked, ‘How much does an ox cost?’

Wu Shu said, ‘I wouldn’t need it immediately, so if I receive it within six months of the marriage, that would be fine.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘OK, in that case let’s add an ox.’

Stone You rushed in and shouted, ‘Are you crazy? Even if we were to sell everything we own, we still wouldn’t have enough to buy an ox.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘I’m just trying to find a wholer.’

Her husband said, ‘This wholer is a thief who is robbing you blind.’

Fourth Wife You repeated, ‘I’m just trying to find Third Daughter a wholer.’

Wu Shu asked, ‘Who are you talking to?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘How about if you get married after planting the wheat?’

Wu Shu said, ‘My fields have been barren for a year, and I don’t have a single seed to plant. You need to give me half of your family’s corn and wheat crop, and also come and help me hoe my fields and plant my grain.’

Stone You said, ‘You’re trying to take advantage of my family, aren’t you?’

Wu Shu said, ‘I still don’t have any wheat to sow.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘When we come to help hoe the fields, we’ll also bring fertilizer and wheat seeds.’

Stone You said, ‘I’d rather Third Daughter was dead than have her marry this sort of greedy man. Are you trying to push our daughter into the fire?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘As long as she can get married, she’ll be fine. Many people are a total mess, but after they get married they become diligent and frugal.’

Wu Shu looked around, then turned to Fourth Wife You and said, ‘I keep hearing someone twittering next to me. Look at that grass there – it used to be straight and tall but now someone has stomped it flat.’

Fourth Wife You glanced down at the patch of grass, and said, ‘If you marry Third Daughter, will you treat her well?’

Wu Shu straightened his neck, and said, ‘How could I not treat my own wife well?’

Fourth Wife You proceeded to arrange her daughter’s marriage as though she were completing a business transaction in which both parties were left satisfied. Then the bright red sun set behind the mountains, bathing the village’s houses, trees, and streets in a purple glow, like a strange summer cloud.

Chapter Four

Autumn was over.

Many families had already sown their winter wheat.

It was during this period that Fourth Wife You planned to marry Third Daughter to the man from Wu Village, forty-five li away. She carried new thatching from her own village to her future son-in-law’s house to help fix his leaky roof. She even stayed there and hoed several mu of barren soil. She collected all of the weed and flower stems, together with the rocks and tiles that were mixed in with the soil, and piled them all up along the edge of the field. Everything her son-in-law had requested was prepared to order, and the only thing left was for him to come over and haul away half of their autumn harvest. The first time he came, Wu Shu took the grain that had been given to him as part of the dowry, and the second time would be to collect more grain. The first time had been for the grain that was Third Daughter’s dowry, and the second time had been for the grain she would eat after moving into her new home.

When Wu Shu first arrived, it was the third day of the lunar year, and they all woke at the crack of dawn. As soon as the sun came up, Wu Shu hauled a cart up to the You family’s front door. It was Third Daughter who went to open the door, and when she saw Wu Shu her eyes lit up with delight. Several days earlier, when she first realised that Wu Shu was a wholer, she hid in her room and refused to come out. Alone in her room, however, she laughed to herself. When Wu Shu left her home that time, she escorted him to the mountain peak and then returned, and that entire night she sat next to her bed chortling happily, refusing to lie down and go to sleep.

This time when she saw Wu Shu, Third Daughter was very friendly, and her blush of embarrassment had disappeared like storm clouds on a clear day. She turned toward the main room and called out, ‘Ma, he’s here,’ then proceeded into the kitchen, where she fried him an egg and brought it out.

Like a pear tree that bursts into bloom overnight, Third Daughter’s illness was suddenly cured – and apart from sounding a bit manic when she laughed, and the fact that the stitches on the shoes she made for Wu Shu were somewhat too large, there was nothing about her that was out of the ordinary. On the other hand, Fourth Idiot’s illness had become more and more acute. As soon as he learned that Third Daughter had got engaged and would be married in a few days, he kicked the door for several days straight, refusing to eat or speak. When Fourth Idiot saw Third Daughter, he began sobbing. His snot ran all the way down his neck, but he wouldn’t even reach up to wipe it. It was as though he had lost something when Third Daughter got married.

Wu Shu ate his fried egg and wiped his mouth. When he handed his bowl back to Third Daughter, he pinched her mountain-like breasts, but she just laughed and stepped aside. When Fourth Idiot saw this, his face turned scarlet. He stood in the courtyard staring angrily at Wu Shu, his hands curled into fists as though he were about to rush forward and beat him.

Wu Shu stepped back half a step, then said, ‘I’m your brother-in-law, and your third sister is my wife.’

Fourth Idiot cried out, ‘You’re a pig, a dog, an ass!’

Third Daughter shouted, ‘Ma, your fourth son won’t let me get married! Are you going to fix this?’

At that moment, Fourth Wife You was in her room packing up the several pairs of new shoes she had made for Wu Shu. She carefully threaded each pair together, then wrapped them in cloth. When she emerged, she stood under the awning and told Fourth Son to come over, saying that she wanted to tell him a secret. When he hesitantly approached, however, she slapped him and then pushed him inside and locked the door.

Fourth Idiot wailed, ‘I want a wife. I want to get married too! I want to marry a wholer wife.’ At this point the sun was shining down on the courtyard, and Fourth Idiot’s cries, tears, and snot were illuminated by the sunlight streaming in through the window, as though a handkerchief used to wipe away tears had been hung out to dry.

Wu Shu said, ‘I don’t know if joining this family was auspicious or not.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘You are marrying our third daughter, not our son. Quick, go load your grain onto the cart.’

Wu Shu said, ‘I want to take some more.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Take as much as you are able to haul away.’

He parked the cart in the doorway and tied a rope to the end. He took sack after sack out of the cart, then opened the jar beneath the bed and began filling the sacks with the grain that was stored there. Fourth Wife You held the sacks open as Wu Shu used a basin to ladle the grain out of the jar. The entire room was filled with the sound of grain rubbing against the side of the basin. The scent of wheat had accumulated over the years like water behind a dam, lingering thickly in the room. Wu Shu filled one sack after another, and after each one was filled he would pick it up and shake it a bit to let the grain settle to the bottom, so that he could then stuff in another couple of bowls. After Wu Shu filled the third sack, Third Daughter suddenly appeared from the kitchen with a rolling pin, and as he was stuffing grain into the sack she used the rolling pin to stuff it down. In this way, a sack that was usually able to hold twelve or thirteen bowls of grain could now hold fifteen.

Upon tying up the sack, Wu Shu looked at Fourth Wife You and laughed. ‘Third Daughter is not stupid at all.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘Load it up, take as much as you can. As long as you treat her well and don’t beat or curse her, it’s OK.’

Wu Shu said, ‘How could I do otherwise? For better or worse, she’s now my wife. After all, a crazy person is still a person.’

At this point, shouts could be heard coming from inside the house: ‘Good news! Your second son-in-law has arrived!’ At first she couldn’t believe it, but then she listened more carefully and sure enough, Second Son-in-Law had arrived. Fourth Wife You felt oddly anxious and hurried outside to take a look. Her son-in-law was strolling up from the village entrance. In the sunlight, he stood as big and strong as a century-old tree, and each time he took a step, a cloud of dust swirled up from under his feet. Fourth Wife You thought to herself that his arrival must mean something, since it had been several years since he last visited. As he approached, Fourth Wife You couldn’t discern anything out of the ordinary from his expression; there was only a glint of happiness in his one good eye. She said, ‘You’ve arrived! What about Second Daughter?’

He stopped in front of the main gate and replied with a smile, ‘She’s at home resting. We think she may be pregnant, as she has suddenly developed a craving for sour and spicy foods.’

Fourth Wife You’s heart jumped for joy, and she asked, ‘Do you need anything?’

He replied, ‘No, nothing in particular.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘If there is anything you need, just let me know.’

Her son-in-law sat on her doorstep and said, ‘I don’t need anything.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Then why don’t you go home and rest? If you want to eat something, I’ll fix it for you.’

Second Son-in-Law loosened his collar, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said, ‘I already had breakfast at home. Second Daughter cooked me a fried bun.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘She can cook fried buns? You should go and meet with Third Son-in-Law.’

Second Son-in-Law’s hand froze as he was wiping his brow. He looked at the cart in the entranceway, and asked, ‘Has he come to claim some grain?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Let him. Do you need any?’

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘We don’t need any grain, but there is something else I want.’

A cloud passed over Fourth Wife You’s face. She pulled aside her greying hair and said, ‘Just tell me what you need.’

Second Son-in-Law stood up. He was silent for a moment, then stuttered that now that Second Daughter was pregnant, her illness had been acting up again, and in the past month she had had several more episodes. In fact, she had had two episodes the day before – the first occurred when she was leaning over the basin to ladle out some water for cooking. She suddenly cried out in pain and with a thunk fell into the cistern. When the second episode occurred, she collapsed on the well platform and nearly fell into the well and drowned. When Second Son-in-Law finished telling this to Fourth Wife You, he gazed ahead at the village and asked, ‘What are we going to do? What in the world are we going to do? It was hard enough for her to get pregnant in the first place.’ Four Idiots Village was located on a mountainside, and there were old straw mats hanging everywhere. The villagers living downhill all emerged from the village’s streets and alleys, herding sheep and carrying shovels and scythes; as they disappeared into the distance, the sparkling dust on their bodies gradually melted into the light from the distant fields. Second Son-in-Law looked back at Fourth Wife You, and pleaded,

‘If Second Daughter is not able to have this child, I don’t even want to live.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Tell me what you need.’

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘Every night, I dream I’m running around and find an old Chinese medical practitioner. He tells me I should make her some bone marrow soup, which will cure her illness.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Then make her some.’

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘But the prescription doesn’t call for just any kind of bones.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘What kind of bones do you need?’

Second Son-in-Law hesitated, then said, ‘It calls for the bones of a dead person, a relative, and the closer the kin the better.’

Fourth Wife You was silent for a while. She looked at her son-in-law’s face, then over at the village. She turned toward her house, and from beneath the awning she pulled out a hoe and a couple of shovels. Standing in the courtyard, she shouted upstairs, ‘Third Daughter… Wu Shu… there is something I need to attend to. The two of you can take as much grain as you need. Go ahead and fill up the entire cart, since you’ve made the trip.’ Then, carrying the tools, she left the house. Second Son-in-Law was still standing there waiting. Fourth Wife You came over and handed him the hoe, then led him up to the mountain ridge.

Second Son-in-Law asked in surprise, ‘Ma, where are you going?’

‘To dig up the grave of Second Daughter’s father,’ Fourth Wife You replied without turning around. ‘Didn’t you say you needed a dead person’s bones to cure Second Daughter’s illness? I’ll help get whatever you need.’

Second Son-in-Law ran up to her, the colour draining from his face, surprised at how quickly everything was progressing. He said, ‘I feel a bit bad about her father.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘Her father is the one who should feel bad about us.’

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘Even dead, he can’t lie in peace.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘He is the one who is not letting us live in peace.’ They walked quickly. Fourth Wife You was only a step away from sixty, but even carrying the shovel she was still faster than her thirty-year-old son-in-law.

Wheat sprouts already blanketed the entire field. The grave was located in a cemetery several li away, where each of the You family graves had a cypress or pine tree planted next to it, covering the ground in shade. The sunlight was squeezed by the shade into a variety of different shapes, or else simply remained shapeless. In front of Stone You’s grave there was a mountain pine, and since Stone You had been dead for a long time, the pine tree had already grown quite tall and bore several sparrow nests. When they reached the grave, Second Son-in-Law hung his shirt on a branch and used a shovel to dig open the grave, knocking down many twigs, leaves, and pinecones in the process.

The grave was opened.

The warm soil emitted milky white steam that spiralled upward and mixed with the scent from the pine trees, the decayed odour of the casket and the fragrant smell of wheat. Second Son-in-Law tossed out spadeful after spadeful of soil, as Fourth Wife You waited under the pine tree and collected pine nuts. Several sparrows were sitting on the tree branches, singing as they looked down at the village before flying away. Another dozen or so sparrows came and alighted in the tree, their songs like a shower on a clear day.

Second Son-in-Law stood on his tiptoes and peeked out of the grave. ‘What are they twittering about?’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Keep digging. They’re a good omen – it means Second Daughter’s illness really will be cured.’

Second Son-in-Law opened the door to the tomb, and inside he found the decayed coffin. The black paint had long since peeled off, and the wood had been gnawed by insects into a dense honeycomb. The tomb was actually a cellar, and was half a normal person’s height. He squatted in the opening of the tomb, and in the sunlight could see that the coffin was resting on several large stones, and there were two white maggot crawling around on the lid. He knew that these were ordinary grubs, but the sound of them crawling around was as though a mosquito had flown into his ear. The character for ‘Offering’, inscribed on the lid of the coffin, was still faintly visible, and below it there was a date-sized opening that looked like a dark eye staring out. White smoke wafted out of the opening, up past the opening of the tomb and Second Son-in-Law’s head. Second Son-in-Law squatted at the opening of the tomb, as though he had lost the keys to his house and was locked out. Fourth Wife You shouted down to him, ‘Are you afraid?’ He replied, ‘Have I ever been afraid?’ She said, ‘Then open the coffin,’ and he replied, ‘I was just about to.’ He ducked his head and shuffled forward a couple of steps, then placed his hands on the front of the coffin and gently shook it back and forth.

The coffin fell apart. There was the sound of decayed wood shattering, and a cloud of smoke surged out, like water vapour from a hot steamer.

After the dust and smoke dissipated, Second Son-in-Law stood there motionless. Not a speck was left of his father-in-law’s flesh, and the clothing had completely disintegrated. Instead, there was just a layer of dust and a skeleton – foot bones, leg bones, hip bones, back bones, neck bones, and a skull, all neatly arranged in their original configuration. The skull resembled a sheet of dirty paper that had fallen to the ground in the middle of the night, while the two eyes were still clear and bright, like two wells sitting in the sunlight. A shiver ran down his spine, as he took two steps back and shouted,

‘Ma… come take a look.’

Fourth Wife You went down.

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘Say something to my father-in-law. Give him some sort of explanation.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘We are trying to cure his daughter’s illness. There’s nothing to explain.’ With this, she entered the tomb, squatted down in front of the coffin and pushed aside a couple of maggots that had fallen onto the leg bones. She looked everything over and saw that, apart from some white moss, the walls of the tomb were completely intact. ‘Good soil in this tomb,’ she remarked. Then she turned and asked, ‘Did you bring a sack?’

Second Son-in-Law took a white cloth out of his pocket and laid it out in the lighted area at the entrance to the tomb.

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Which bone do you want?’

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘Whenever Second Daughter has an episode, her hand begins to tremble, so let’s take a bone from his hand.’

Fourth Wife You took two bones from her husband’s hand and placed them on the cloth, then asked, ‘What else?’

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘Whenever she has an episode she loses the ability to walk.’

Fourth Wife You took one of her husband’s leg bones and placed it on the cloth, then asked, ‘What else?’

Second Son-in-Law said, ‘Anything is fine. Just take a few more.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Mental illness is the result of something wrong in the brain, and if the brain can be fixed the illness will be cured. So, we should definitely use the skull.’ As she was saying this, she took the skull and held it in both hands as though it were a bowl, then gently placed it on the cloth. She tied up the four corners of the cloth, and after Second Son-in-Law climbed out of the grave, she handed him the bundle. Then she stepped out of the mud hole and, holding Stone You’s hand, left the graveyard.

Outside, the sun was already at its apex, shining down brightly as the trees and mountains twinkled in the sunlight. On the opposite hill, a villager was preparing his field for planting. He was standing on an elevated area and asked Fourth Wife You what she was doing at the graveyard. She replied that the grave of her husband, who had gone on to enjoy better days, had been flooded by the rain, and she and Second Son-in-Law had come to fill in the collapsed pit. The villager went back to preparing his soil, and the rhythmic sound of his work reverberated up the ravine to the riverbank opposite, and to the other side of the mountain ridge beyond.

After filling in the grave and replacing the grave mound, Fourth Wife You and Second Son-in-Law picked up their tools and returned home. The bone-filled bundle was tied to the handle of Second Son-in-Law’s spade, and it swung back and forth as he walked. All the while, the bones made a grinding sound like bright moonlight falling to Earth, and a stench of decay trailed silently under their feet. Along the mountain ridge, villagers were on their way home after a day’s work. They were driving sheep and oxen, some villagers walking in front of the animals and others walking behind. Upon reaching the crossroad that turned into the village, Fourth Wife You asked, ‘What are we going to have for lunch? Garlic noodles?’ Second Son-in-Law replied, ‘I’m not going. Let Third Son-in-Law eat there. I don’t like him; he takes everything he wants just because he’s a wholer.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘But it is still another several dozen li back to your house.’

Second Son-in-Law replied, ‘I’m worried about Second Daughter home alone, with no one to take care of her if she has an episode.’

Fourth Wife You took the hoe and the shovel from Second Son-in-Law and said, ‘You go ahead then.’

Second Son-in-Law switched the bundle of bones to his other hand, and said, ‘I’m leaving.’

He left, and in the blink of an eye he and his bundle of bones disappeared into the mountain light.

Fourth Wife You continued standing there in the road watching him, and after he was out of sight she called out, ‘Hey… you should treat Second Daughter well… be more compassionate with her…’

She heard his reply emerge from the yellow sunlight, ‘Ma… don’t worry! After the baby is born, I’ll bring you to live with us for a few days…’

Fourth Wife You returned home and was shocked by what she saw. Everything had been turned upside down. The courtyard was covered in spilled grain, and the ancestral tablet on a table in the main room had been toppled over. Stone You’s portrait had fallen to the ground, and the curtains along the wall had been torn down. The grain jars in the interior room had all been opened, and the lids had been left strewn around the bed, the chest, and on the floor. Fourth Wife You went inside to take a look, and it was only then that she noticed that all of the jars were completely empty. Even the jar at the head of the bed, which had been filled with freshly ground flour, had been completely emptied out, and all that was left was a thin layer of flour on the bedding. As for the two jin of sesame oil that had been stored under the table, even the bottle itself was gone. She spun around and walked out, only to notice that there was a ladder leaning against the tree in the courtyard and the freshly-picked ears of corn that had been hanging from the tree branches and the courtyard wall were also missing. Everything had been taken by that wholer, Third Son-in-Law.

It was as though they had been robbed. In the blink of an eye, all of the new and old grain was gone, together with the grain stored in a jar under the table. The corn in the courtyard and a sack of beans in the kitchen were also missing. Fourth Wife You stood stunned in the middle of the courtyard, staring at the bare tree branches and the courtyard wall. She felt her legs grow limp and almost collapsed. She managed to stagger forward a couple of steps, leaning against the tree branch on which they had previously hung corn to dry, then called out for Third Daughter, but there was no response. A deep silence flooded the courtyard, and swept over Fourth Wife You. She suddenly remembered Fourth Idiot, whom she had left locked up in his room. She quickly went up to look in through the window, and saw that he was sleeping soundly, with saliva dribbling out of his mouth. At the head of the bed, there was half a fried bun.

Fourth Wife You leaned against the window and shouted, ‘Pig! Will you wake up?’

Fourth Idiot woke up and sat up in bed.

Fourth Wife You asked him, ‘Where’s Third Daughter?’

Fourth Idiot rubbed his eyes and said, ‘She left with her husband.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Where did they put all of our grain?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘They hauled it away. I saw them load it onto their cart.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘They were able to get it all on one cart?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘When Third Daughter married her husband, that ass caressed her breasts in the courtyard, then she went into the village to help him borrow another cart. After that, they left – each of them hauling a cart full of grain.’

Fourth Wife You felt her legs go limp, as though her bones had turned to rubber. She slid to the ground, where the midday sun beat down on her. Through the window, she heard Fourth Idiot chewing on his fried bun, and asked,

‘Fourth Babe, so you just watched as they hauled away all of our grain, and didn’t do anything to stop them?’

Fourth Idiot replied, ‘They cooked me a fried bun – a scallion bun I never had before.’

He added, ‘Ma, have you ever had a fried bun?’ As he said this, a piece of fried bun fell from the window onto Fourth Wife You’s head, and then dropped to the ground. She looked at the bun, which was round and had a bite taken out of it. She could make out every individual tooth mark. She focused her attention on the canine marks, and after staring for a while and resting a moment, she leaned against the wall and stood up. She retrieved a key from where it was hidden in the doorframe, opened the door and let Fourth Idiot out.

Fourth Idiot walked out as though he had just been released from prison. He squinted in the sunlight, ran around the courtyard, and came to a stop in front of Fourth Wife You.

Fourth Wife You asked him, ‘Fourth Babe, do you think Third Uncle treats Third Sister well?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘Yes, extremely well. They even hold hands when they go to the outhouse together.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Now you and I are the only ones left. What do you want to eat?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘I just had five fried buns, and now I’m thirsty.’ Fourth Wife You then told him that, now that Third Daughter was gone, she wouldn’t lock him up in his room anymore. Instead, she would go fix him a bowl of soup and boil him two cloves of pickled garlic.

Chapter Five

Night fell.

As night fell, the sky grew overcast. The mountain ridge behind the village dissolved into darkness like overcooked vegetables being boiled in a pot. The empty house suddenly appeared as desolate as an empty field at night. The grain was all gone, and two of the jars were shattered. Third Daughter and that wholer had even taken the string of chili peppers that had been hanging over the door. Also missing was a pagoda tree branch they had cut to serve as a hoe handle, which had been leaning against the wall behind the door. Carrying an oil lamp, Fourth Wife You put Fourth Idiot to bed, then paced around her room several times. She wanted to clean up the house before going to sleep, but was so exhausted that she couldn’t muster the energy to take another step.

So, she went directly to bed.

As she was about to fall asleep, Fourth Wife You heard a shadowy sound in the room, as though the wind were whispering to her. There was also the soft sound of footsteps pacing back and forth. At this point, the wind began to thin the black clouds outside, and through the window one could see them floating away like water pooled up along the riverbank. The clouds sounded like sparrows breathing. The darkness crowding in through the window piled up on the table and the bed, passed over the bedding and crawled up the wall. Fourth Wife You lay in bed with her eyes half-open, but after a while she suddenly heard the soft sound of sobbing coming from inside the house. She got up to take a look, and saw that it was her husband Stone You, who was curled up in the darkness streaming in through the window, like an earthworm dried in the sun. She said, ‘You worthless thing, your daughter boils a few of your bones and suddenly you are left like this?

He replied, ‘Now that the house has been emptied out, how are you and Fourth Idiot going to manage?’

She said, ‘We can still live in the house. We have a bed to sleep in and we still have land on the ridge, so we won’t starve.’ She added, ‘You should move on, and in the future if you find yourself missing some bones or sinews and have difficulty walking, don’t come looking for me. What good would it do to come to me? Can you help me plough the fields? Can you help me fetch water? Can you help me fetch a sack of someone’s leftover grain?’ He bowed his head so low it seemed as though his hair was draped over his feet. Outside the window, the clouds had already completely dispersed, and inside the house the moonlight cascaded down like water. As Stone You remained curled up on the floor, Fourth Wife You returned to bed and said, ‘If you aren’t going to leave, at least you can make yourself useful and help me clean up the house. Tomorrow, I’m going to get up early to take out the night soil, and then you and I can go visit Eldest and Second Daughters.’

Then, Fourth Wife You abruptly went to sleep.

The next day, she woke up at dawn and saw that the house was still a mess. The only change was that there were now two pools of wet tears in the spot where her husband, Stone You, had lain curled up in a ball all night. She looked over at the two wet patches and said to herself, What’s the point? I still need to do everything myself. She righted the overturned jars, straightened the ancestral tablets, swept the floor, covered the two pools of tears, and took the night soil out into the fields.

Autumn had ended, and the frost had fallen. She cooked Fourth Idiot a fried bun and placed it at the head of his bed, then made a pot of watery soup and left it on the stove.

She took a couple of days to go visit her two daughters.

Second Daughter lived close by, so Fourth Wife You went to visit her first.

Second Daughter lived in a three-room adobe-walled house, and the courtyard was filled with tung trees that had already begun to shed their leaves. The ground was covered in river sand, and when they sprinkled water on the ground and swept up all the dirt and dust, the sand would sparkle in the sunlight. The courtyard walls were made of recently tamped earth, and stood straight and tall. There was a red glow in the air, and a fresh scent emanated from the courtyard, entrancing everyone as though it were early spring. Fourth Wife You thought that, as in previous years, she would be able to smell even from several li away the bitter scent of the Chinese medicines her daughter was brewing, and that after entering the village half the villagers would give her the cold shoulder on account of the fact that she had given birth to four idiot children and married her idiot daughter into this village. This time, they didn’t. Instead, all of the villagers had gone into the fields, and the few familiar people Fourth Wife You did run into simply smiled and nodded to her. As she was walking down the street, at one point she stopped and stood in the sun in front of Second Daughter’s courtyard. She stroked the smooth adobe walls, and looked up at the rows of small tiles lining the tops of the walls. She gently pushed open the door to enter the courtyard, and then stood there silently. The sand got into her shoes and made her feet itch. The steam from the ground had a fragrant smell. She went over to the window and saw that the medicine dregs that had been piled there were now gone, and instead there was a brown stone table surrounded by several stone benches. The sun was shining down, and Second Daughter was drying out the cloth shoe soles she had just sewn. Her daughter had her back to Fourth Wife You, and each time she sewed a stitch she would hold her hand in the air and look over to the right, then run the needle through her hair. Fourth Wife You stood quietly behind her daughter for a while. She was surprised to see her daughter’s hair neatly arranged in a thick braid without a single strand out of place. In thirty years, she had never seen her daughter’s hair so tidy. Fourth Wife You’s heart began to race with excitement. She saw that her daughter’s face was bright red, like the leaves of a persimmon tree after a rainstorm. Her daughter could embroider and sew shoe soles – things she’d never been able to do before the marriage. Now, not only could she apparently do these things, but furthermore the soles she sewed were all tight and even, and on the bottoms she had embroidered a pattern like a woman’s braids. Turning to the sewing kit sitting on the stone table, Fourth Wife You saw that it was made from wicker and smelled of fresh paint. She turned to Second Daughter’s neatly arranged clothes, and noticed that the stitching consisted of a single continuous thread – turning and going straight where necessary, like a path through a mountain range. At this point Fourth Wife You couldn’t help calling out to her daughter.

Second Daughter turned around, and the hand holding the thread froze in mid-air.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Daughter.’

Second Daughter put down her needle and thread, and immediately stood up. ‘Mother.’

Mother and daughter gazed at one another, as the leaves from the tung tree in the courtyard gently fluttered to the ground.

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘You can make shoes?’

Second Daughter blushed, and said, ‘I want to make a pair of shoes for my brother.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Did you make the clothes you are wearing now?’

Second Daughter looked down at her clothes and replied, ‘Yes, I did.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘That sewing kit is also yours?’

Second Daughter said, ‘My husband just bought it for me – a home needs a sewing basket.’

Fourth Wife You’s eyes filled with tears. She remained silent for a long time, and then asked, ‘And what about your illness? Are you any better?’

Second Daughter began to sob silently, tears streaming down her face and onto her clothing. Her face, however, continued beaming, a glow of excitement emanating from her cheeks. She said, ‘Mother, I drank an entire cartload of that Chinese medicine, until the dregs were piled as high as a mound of night soil, but it didn’t have any effect whatsoever. Last month, however, my husband brought back a bag of bones he found somewhere, and boiled them with some red dates and crystal sugar. After I drank the first dose I became so excited I couldn’t sleep that night, and after the second I felt as though I could fly. Those bones yielded seven doses in all, and yesterday I finished the final one. After I drank the third dose, whenever other villagers saw me they said my illness seemed almost cured, and by the time I finished the sixth batch my husband said I no longer had the slightest trace of illness. As Second Daughter was saying this, her tears gradually dried, leaving behind only a glow of excitement. When she opened her mouth to speak, it was as if she were opening a sluice gate and letting the water pour out. As the sun began shining on the eastern side of the courtyard, her entire face was bathed in light, as red as though it had been painted. It didn’t even occur to Second Daughter that her mother had walked several dozen li to visit her, and might need to sit down and have something to eat or drink. Instead, Second Daughter continued standing at a distance, chattering non-stop as though she had never before had a chance to speak with her mother. She said that after her illness was cured, she asked her husband countless times whose bones these were and where he had found them. She asked him to go fetch some more, so that her sisters and her brother could take the medicine as well, but her husband wouldn’t say a word. Second Daughter said that her husband had taken several saplings to sell in the township. He had planned to buy a few things and then return, and afterwards the two of them would go to her mother’s house. She added that, before returning to visit her mother, she had planned to finish making this pair of shoes for her younger brother as part of her sisterly devotion to her idiot brother. At this point, Second Daughter picked up one of the shoes and examined it, noting that this one was already finished and that she would finish the other one later that day. She would nail the straps on overnight, and then her younger brother would be able to wear the shoes she had made for him with her own hands. Fourth Wife You’s tears began welling up and she suddenly doubled over, as though she had been standing for too long and needed to stop and rest. She squatted down in front of her daughter and began wailing. She covered her face with her hands as tears streamed down. Her weary sobs became bright, as they flowed through Second Daughter’s house and courtyard and out into the village and the mountain range. In the blink of an eye, the entire world was filled with the sound of weeping.

Second Daughter was startled. She stared at her mother, then rushed over and shouted, ‘Ma, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy I’m cured?’ She shook her mother’s arm with both hands, until her mother almost toppled over. Upon hearing the ruckus, her neighbours came rushing over, as did people who were merely walking down the street. Soon, a large crowd was standing in the courtyard, and they all asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ Second Daughter replied, ‘When she saw I was cured, my mother started crying. And she cried so hard it seemed as though she were made of tears.’ One villager tried to comfort Fourth Wife You, saying, ‘It is a miracle your daughter’s illness has been cured. Why would you cry over a miracle?’ Another said, ‘Don’t pressure her. Let her cry it out. She is crying from delight that her daughter is cured. Those are tears of happiness.’ So the villagers stopped trying to restrain her, and assumed she would eventually stop on her own. But she continued crying harder than ever, as long as the endless road through the fields. Eventually, the villagers got fed up, and one man said, ‘How are you still crying? What is there to cry about? Why don’t we buy some more of the medicine your daughter took, and cure your other three children as well?’

With this, the man walked away.

Fourth Wife You stared silently at the man’s departing shadow. She had a peaceful expression, beneath which there was a sudden burst of excitement. She looked out at her daughter’s neighbours and said, ‘You can all leave now. I won’t cry anymore. The You family has been saved.’ After the villagers all left, her excitement gradually faded and was replaced by a layer of pale determination, as though she were wearing a metal mask. She said, ‘Second Daughter, come here to mother.’ Then she squeezed her daughter’s hand, pulled and stretched her arms, and peeled back her eyelids. She waved her hand in front of her daughter’s face and saw that her large black eyes spun to follow her hand. Eventually, she asked,

‘Do you still fear your husband at night?’

Second Daughter blushed and said, ‘I am cured now.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Give mother two bowls of egg noodle soup, and then mother will return home.’

Second Daughter said, ‘Ma, why don’t you sleep over tonight? Tomorrow my husband will return from town. He said that he was going to buy you a scarf.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘I have to go home tonight. Now I know how to cure this illness. Give mother two bowls of soup, and I’ll be on my way.’

Second Daughter stood there with a look of surprise.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Go on, and give me some extra eggs in the soup, and some extra sesame oil.’

Chapter Six

Fourth Wife You left after lunch. By that point the sky was high, the clouds were sparse, and vast fields of grain sprouts blanketed the mountains and ravines virtually overnight. There was a pungent odour in the air. Second Daughter escorted her mother to the mountain ridge, whereupon Fourth Wife You told her to return home. She said, ‘Go back. If you can find your brother a wholer wife, then you will have done your part as a sister. Don’t think that simply making a pair of shoes will do it.’

Second Daughter stood on the ridge as her mother disappeared into the distance. Fourth Wife You did not return to her Eldest Daughter’s home. Along the mountain ridge she glanced in the direction of her Eldest Daughter’s home and began to shout, ‘Daughter, Mother is leaving. Mother can cure you and your sisters.’ She watched as her shout drifted out through the mountain ridge like a piece of silk, then quickly headed home. As Fourth Wife You proceeded through the mountain range, she felt the urge to talk to someone. When it occurred to her that her husband Stone You had not accompanied her to her Second Daughter’s house, she felt a pang of loneliness. It was the first time in years that her husband had not accompanied her when she went on a trip. She wondered what was wrong with him. Now that he was no longer among the living, was it still possible for him to get sick? As she walked, she began to cry out, ‘Dead one, where are you? When I want you to talk to me, you really are dead; but when I don’t want you to keep talking, you come back to life…’ She shouted as she continued forward, at which point a man leading a plough ox approached from the opposite direction. He stopped and asked, ‘Who are you talking to?’

She replied, ‘Are you going to plough your fields? I’m talking to my husband.’

The man looked around and said, ‘I’m going to plough a barren field. Where is your husband?’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘You’re going to plough a barren field? My husband died twenty years ago.’

The man stared in surprise and said, ‘Are you sick or delirious? This is crazy talk.’

Fourth Wife You replied, ‘I’ve never been sick my entire life. My mind has never been clearer than it is now, and I’ve never been happier.’

The man walked away in confusion, but even as he was leaving he kept turning around to look back at her.

By the time Fourth Wife You reached You Village, it was already dusk and the village was bathed in red light. Even the pig troughs and the horse stables outside each house appeared red. Everyone eating their dinner came out to the street holding their rice bowls, gossiping about this and that. An old midwife rushed into the village, whereupon all the villagers realised that they were about to have a new addition. One villager standing at the entrance to the village was holding his rice bowl but he wasn’t eating; instead he was staring at the home of the family that was about to give birth. He asked if the baby was going to be a girl or a boy, and noted that you can predict someone’s fortune based on where they are born. Children born in the county seat may go on to become government officials, while those born in the provincial seat may go on to study at the university. There was also a granddaughter who, before she had even turned ten, went to the district to represent the township in some competition. As he was saying this, he saw the family’s octogenarian grandmother hobble out of an alley, followed by a lamb and a dog, and after exchanging a few auspicious remarks with the villagers she proceeded toward the village entrance.

The sunset was warm and tranquil, and the fields were bathed in red light. The grandmother stood motionless in the entrance to the village, gazing out at the road leading into the mountain ridge. The dog and the lamb were lying at her feet, as though they were her own grandchildren. At this point Fourth Wife You came down from the mountain ridge, her face hard, her head and body covered in a layer of dust as thick as a padded jacket. She proceeded quickly, as though she were going somewhere to pick up money or take care of some important business – as though if she were late all would be lost, but if she were on time she could make a fortune. When Fourth Wife You reached the entrance to the village, the elderly woman stopped her, took two red eggs out of her pocket, and handed them to Fourth Wife You. With an embarrassed smile on her deeply wrinkled face, the woman said, ‘Fourth Idiot’s mother, I’ve been waiting for you. My grandson’s wife is about to give birth.’

Fourth Wife You looked at the red eggs, and said,

‘Congratulations, Fourth Idiot’s grandmother! Soon you’ll be able to live in a four-generation family.’

The old woman said, ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you; I think the baby will be a boy. If you agree not to pass in front of our house, my son says he will give you two hundred jin of wheat to help you and Fourth Idiot make it through the winter.’

Fourth Wife You paused for a moment, her face pale as snow. As she shuddered, the dirt and dust from the road fell to the ground. She asked coldly,

‘Why would I not pass by your house?’

The old woman said ‘I apologise, but what if you pass him some sickness as you go by? If you agree to circle around the other end of the village, then I’ll also give you a basket of corn in addition to the wheat.’

Fourth Wife You didn’t say anything else, and instead she simply stared at the old woman. Fourth Wife You’s gaze was hard and her face was dark purple. It seemed as though she could devour the old woman with her gaze or drive her away with her face. But the old woman was, after all, merely an old woman, and she said, ‘Fourth Wife You, if you agree not to pass in front of our house, I’d be happy to have my children give you some extra money.’ At this point, all eyes in the street had turned their way, and several were coming over to watch the excitement. Along the mountain ridge, the setting sun sounded like water running over dry desert sand, and in the peace of the village there were explosive sounds of wood burning. The dog and lamb stood behind the old woman, gazing expectantly at Fourth Wife You, who slowly shifted her gaze away from the old woman and toward the blood-red street. She turned pale and, without saying a word, walked past the old woman and down the street, taking large strides that seemed out of proportion with her slight body, as she headed to the entranceway of the old woman’s home.

The old woman looked deathly pale, and said,

‘Fourth Idiot’s mother, besides the grain, how about if I give you some more money?’

Fourth Wife You took several more steps, then turned around and threw the red eggs to the dog and the goat.

The old woman said, ‘Fourth Son’s mother, shall I call you Sister, Mother, or Grandmother?’ Fourth Wife You didn’t look back, and instead looked straight ahead as she walked faster.

Several men approached and stood in the middle of the road, blocking her way.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘If you don’t let me pass this evening, I’ll hang myself at your doorstep.’

The men slowly stepped aside to let her pass.

With her head up, Fourth Wife You passed through the crowd of men as if pushing through a half-open door. The village street was uncommonly quiet. The chickens, ducks, pigs, and cattle had all returned to their pens, leaving only a handful of villagers still eating in the streets, in the canteen, or in their own doorways. Fourth Wife You’s footsteps were loud and heavy. They echoed as she walked down the street, and the afterglow trembled in that sound like a silk sheet. The elderly woman stood blankly behind her, watching as she receded into the distance. Eventually, she approached that old woman’s tile-roofed house, and by this point the screams of the woman about to give birth reverberated through the village, like a whirlwind of sand and rocks. The old woman was startled, and she rushed after Fourth Wife You, shouting, ‘Fourth Idiot’s mother, Fourth Idiot’s mother!’ Just before Fourth Wife You reached the doorway to the old woman’s house, the old woman grabbed her and said, ‘I’m eighty years old, and in another six months I’ll be eighty-one. But I’m still willing to kneel down and beg you not to pass by my house.’ Fourth Wife You turned around and saw that the old woman, her eyes full of tears, was indeed in the process of kneeling down in front of her.

Fourth Wife You’s heart softened and she grabbed the old woman, as though grabbing a pole that was about to topple over. She held the woman in front of her, looked at her coldly, and suddenly spat in her face. Then she spun around and walked away. The entire village was silent, and even the dog and the goat stared at Fourth Wife You in surprise. Fourth Wife You’s spittle flew like bullets in all directions, splattering all of the villagers nearby. The old woman stood there in confusion, with phlegm dripping down her face. The other villagers also stood there blankly, and by the time it occurred to them to wipe their faces and curse Fourth Wife You, she had already turned a corner and disappeared from view.

The rivers dried up and the earth had been overturned in the blink of an eye. Fourth Wife You walked back stiffly, like a statue carved out of stone. In the alley, a couple of chickens and ducks saw her coming and squawked as they hid by the side of the road, leaving her ample room to pass. She stood for a while at the door to her house, looking toward the centre of the village. She heard the new wife’s screams as they rippled her way like water, and proceeded to spit a gob of snow-white spittle in their direction – after which she followed the screams into the courtyard.

The front gate, which had been locked, swung open. It turned out that her husband, Stone You, was home waiting for her. Fourth Wife You stepped through the front gate and found Stone You sitting on the doorstep watching Fourth Idiot, as though watching a calf trying to break free of its rope. In the courtyard, there was also a snow-white lamb, and under the tree Fourth Idiot was staring intently at the animal, unable to see that his father was at his side. Fourth Idiot wanted to hug the lamb, kiss it, and caress its head, body, and belly. He also wanted to stroke the animal’s tiny red bean-like teats, and touch it where it shouldn’t be touched. In the end, however, Fourth Idiot decided the lamb must be very clever, because it would always wait until he was almost in front of it before slipping away. As a result, even though Fourth Idiot chased it like crazy through the courtyard, he could never catch the lamb. What he didn’t realise was that Stone You was right next to him, and each time Fourth Idiot was about to catch the lamb, Stone You would go up to the animal and scare it, causing it to run away. Fourth Idiot chased the lamb all afternoon, and by evening he was exhausted. He sat in the middle of the courtyard trying to catch his breath, and Stone You watched over him as Fourth Idiot stared at the lamb. It was at this point that Fourth Wife You arrived. She stood in the doorway, and Fourth Idiot turned pale.

He said, ‘Ma, I can’t catch the lamb. I want to sleep with it.’

Fourth Wife You stood in the entranceway. Her eyes had a greenish tint, and, like a block of ice in winter, she immediately chilled all the warmth from the courtyard’s evening sunlight.

Stone You asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

Fourth Wife You bit her purple lips, but didn’t respond.

Stone You said, ‘I originally wanted to go with you to visit Eldest and Second Daughters, but after lunch Fourth Idiot kept chasing someone’s heifer all around the village. The villagers began cursing and beating him, and the other village kids picked up rocks and clumps of earth and threw them at his head.’

Fourth Wife You shifted her icy stare toward Stone You.

The screams of the woman giving birth once again wafted over, and in the quiet dusk they resembled an early autumn wind scattering red and yellow leaves everywhere.

As Fourth Wife You looked in the direction of those screams and then back at Fourth Idiot, her face gradually acquired a trace of warmth.

She said, ‘Fourth Idiot, come here.’

Like a famished infant who sees a stranger, Fourth Idiot cautiously approached and hid in the embrace of Fourth Wife You, who smoothed down his hair and saw that his head was in fact so swollen and lacerated that it resembled tree bark. Several of his wounds had scabbed over, though the blood continued to flow out from beneath. Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Why were you chasing the village cattle? Didn’t I tell you to stay home and not leave no matter what?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘I want to sleep with that cow.’

Stone You said, ‘He was also chasing the chickens and ducks in the village.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Did the chickens and ducks ever bother you?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘I want to sleep with the chickens and ducks, and have a baby with them.’

As he was saying this, wave after wave of the new bride’s cries swept toward them, pushing the setting sun’s last rays back over the mountain. In the end, a final bloody scream rent the sky, and the sun disappeared in silence. The village immediately fell quiet, and there wasn’t the lightest breath of sound. It was as if the woman about to give birth had fallen asleep, or had passed out from the pain. The entire world had fallen quiet.

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Fourth Idiot, why do you want to have a baby?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘I want to have a baby so that it can cry for milk.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘If mother really does find you a wife, will you be able to give her a baby?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘If Ma finds me a wife to hold while I sleep, I’ll give Ma a baby, and also make her a black coffin.’

Stone You turned pale.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Do you want me to find you a wholer wife?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘I’ll make Ma a coffin out of cypress wood.’

Stone You stared at Fourth Idiot and stamped his foot.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘A wholer wife, and a pretty one, too?’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘I’ll make the coffin from cypress wood, one inch thick.’

Stone You turned completely white and kept stamping his foot in front of Fourth Idiot.

Fourth Wife You continued asking questions, and each time she heard Fourth Idiot’s answers, her face would lighten. Eventually, she looked as peaceful as a bowl of water tucked beneath a wall so that it is never touched by the wind. In the entranceway a woman walked forward quickly. She said, ‘Third Auntie, can you guess what she gave birth to? It’s a boy! Quick, bring your family’s scale. People say that if you hang your scale outside your door for three days, then when the boy grows up and finds a wife, he will end up with the beautiful daughter of the county mayor. Fourth Wife You agreed, and the other woman departed, leaving the You Family courtyard as quiet as the rest of the village. In the mountains, this period just before sunset was the quietest moment of the day, like a cloud fading in the distance. Stone You stamped his feet in front of Fourth Wife You and screamed, ‘You must beat Fourth Idiot. Slap him! If you don’t, he’ll just get stupider, and will keep flying in the face of Heaven and Earth.’ But Fourth Wife You ignored him. Instead, she pushed Fourth Idiot away from her and stared at him for a long time. She saw that he had a clown-like smile on his face, as though Fourth Wife You really was about to find him a wife – as though his new wife was about to appear before him.

The woman who wanted to borrow a scale returned. The banging of the scale’s chain and weight sounded like music as she came nearer.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Fourth Idiot, repeat to mother what you just said.’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘If Ma finds me a pretty wife, I’ll give her a baby boy, and also make her a coffin from cypress wood.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘The coffin should be made without any cracks, so that my bones won’t decay for decades.’ She added, ‘There is something else – tomorrow mother will prepare some packages, and you should take one to the families of your eldest and third sisters.’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘What am I taking them? The road to their homes is as long as the sky is high.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘If you deliver the packages, I’ll make you a fried bun.’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘I want five fried buns.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘Then I’ll fry five of them.’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘Use extra oil, and also some scallion blossoms.’

Fourth Wife You said, ‘I’ll use all of the oil we have left in the barrel.’

Fourth Idiot said, ‘After I finish eating I’ll go to sleep and won’t go anywhere.’

Fourth Wife You paused in surprise and stared at Fourth Idiot’s face as though it were a wooden board. A pre-dusk glimmer of sunlight shone down, and Fourth Wife You hurried into the kitchen, grabbed a cleaver, and re-emerged. She held it up in front of Fourth Idiot and said with severity, ‘What am I making you the buns for?’

Fourth Idiot turned pale, and his pupils shrunk until his eyes appeared almost entirely white. He stepped back several paces, saliva dribbling from his trembling lips. He said, ‘Ma, don’t chop me. Let me make you a cypress-wood coffin without any cracks. Then I’ll take the two packages to my sisters’ families.’

Fourth Wife You threw the cleaver down next to a whetstone in the kitchen doorway, and said, ‘Fourth Idiot, don’t be afraid. Mother is going to fry you some buns.’

The white receded from Fourth Idiot’s eyes and he licked the saliva from his face while watching his mother.

Fourth Wife You turned and headed into the house. After a while, she walked into the kitchen carrying a grain jar with a broken mouth and a barrel full of used oil. She began kneading the dough, and proceeded to dump all of the grain onto the table, whereupon she broke open the bottom of the jar by smashing it against the table. After removing all of the remaining grain, she threw the broken jar to the ground. The sky was almost black by this point, and the village was once again filled with the sound of people walking back and forth. These were men who, after eating, would congregate in the entrance of the village to chat. The women were still at home washing up after dinner, and the bright clinking of dishes circulated through the night. Fourth Wife You lit a lamp, and as she was kneading the dough, her face became covered in white flour. At this point Stone You walked in, stood in front of her, and said, ‘If you eat all of the grain you borrowed, what are you going to have tomorrow?’ She didn’t see him, nor did she answer. The dough in the bowl was a little stiff, so she got two handfuls of water from the water basin. Stone You said, ‘Something seems to be on your mind. What happened today?’ She placed the dough on the table and spread it out, then dumped out all of the oil in the barrel. She rubbed the inside of the barrel with some dough to remove all of the remaining oil. When the inside of the barrel was finally so clean you could see your reflection in it, she threw the barrel to the ground next to the broken grain jar. She added a pinch of salt to the dough, then another. She hesitated a moment, then added an entire fistful of salt. Stone You cried out, ‘You’re making it too salty! Do you want Fourth Idiot to die of thirst after he eats it?’ Fourth Wife You still didn’t answer, and instead glanced at Stone You and proceeded to dump all of the remaining salt onto the dough. She was about to throw the salt bucket under the table as well, but hesitated. She turned it upside down and looked at it, saw that there were two cracks in the side, then tossed it aside.

Stone You said, ‘Do you want to die? I don’t think you want to live. But if you die, how is Fourth Idiot going to survive?’

Fourth Wife You took some scallions from under the table and peeled them. Without even washing them, she chopped them up and sprinkled them over the dough. Then she squeezed the dough into a spiral and cut it into five portions. As she was doing so, some grains of salt rolled off like peas, and she scooped them up and placed them back on the dough. When she finished, she slowly lifted her head and looked up at Stone You as though seeing someone she didn’t recognise. At this point she appeared very calm and full of kindness. A warm glow radiated from her face. The night was as endless as the sky, and a mysterious sound from the fields crept inexorably into the You family courtyard. When Fourth Wife You heard this sound, she dropped her gaze from Stone You’s face, so thin and indistinct as to almost not be there, and looked at the one leg Stone You had left, after she had boiled the other for Second Daughter. She told Stone You quietly,

‘Second Daughter has been cured.’

He stared in shock.

She said, ‘Now we cure Eldest Daughter, Third Daughter, and Fourth Idiot.’

He stepped back half a step, staring at her in surprise.

She said, ‘You don’t have that many bones left, so let me have a turn.’ She added, ‘Tonight you can bring home the butcher from the village next door. I hear he died only yesterday and now is lying on a pallet in the main room of his house. You should bring him over while his body is still warm and his hands still retain some of the strength of a living person. He will know everything.’ She added, ‘Sharpen the knife. Fourth Idiot’s illness is the worst, so boil my head while it is still warm and then feed it to him. Eldest and Third Daughters’ illnesses are not as severe, so you can divide the rest of my bones in two, and then wrap them in three layers of white cloth and place them on the table. After Fourth Idiot becomes a bit more clear-headed, he can take them to his sisters.’

The moon came out.

The mountain ridge and the village were both floating in the water-like moonlight. In the You family’s courtyard, there was a slight chill, as a yellowish-green autumn breeze blew through, sweeping the chicken feathers and weeds into a pile at the base of the wall. The nocturnal sounds from the fields along the mountain ridge resonated past the kitchen counter, in the bellows, and on the kitchen table. Fourth Wife You had already lit a fire and was furiously pumping the bellows, making a rhythmic sound like a wooden clapper. Stone You left, but before he did he looked at Fourth Wife You and said, ‘Mother of our four children, you should reconsider. Can’t you just use my remaining bones?’

She threw him a look that was half hot and half cold, and asked, ‘How could that be enough? You’ve been dead for more than twenty years, and your bones have been decomposing this entire time. Do you even know how much medicine they can yield?’

He said, ‘You should reconsider. You really should. This is truly a matter of life and death.’

She said, ‘Go fetch that butcher and have him come over tonight. Give him some money, so that you’re not asking him to come here for nothing.’

He replied, ‘Mother of our four children, you really must reconsider.’

She roared, ‘Are you going or not? If your ancestors hadn’t passed down this disease to us, I wouldn’t have to be doing this now.’

He didn’t answer, and instead quietly backed out of the kitchen and left. Fourth Wife You heated the skillet and placed the greased bun on top, immediately filling the kitchen with the fragrant scent of oil and baked scallions.

In the courtyard, Fourth Idiot shouted, ‘Ma, are the buns ready? I’m hungry…’

Fourth Wife You shouted back, ‘Fourth Babe, wait just a moment.’

She turned down the stove until it was just a single flame, allowing the buns to bake slowly. At this point Fourth Idiot walked in and looked at the skillet with the buns. He appeared parched, as layers of excitement peeled off his face and fell to the ground, and his shirt was drenched in saliva. Fourth Wife You asked him, ‘Do you remember everything mother told you?’

He replied, ‘Yes, I do.’

Fourth Wife You asked, ‘Will you forget?’

Fourth Idiot replied, ‘If I forget, Ma can take a cleaver and chop me up.’

By this point, the fried buns were ready, and their fragrance filled the kitchen. As Fourth Wife You was removing them from the skillet, Fourth Idiot began gurgling with anticipation, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He tried to grab one of the buns, but Fourth Wife You gently pushed his hand away. She cut the bun into quarters, placed them in a bowl, then handed it to him.

Fourth Idiot devoured several bites, and said, ‘Delicious. Ma, I’ll have four and a half of these five buns, and will leave the remaining half for you.’

Fourth Wife You placed another bun on the hot skillet, and watched as Fourth Idiot ate ravenously.

After taking several more bites, Fourth Idiot suddenly stopped and said,

‘Ma, it’s salty. It’s incredibly salty.’

Fourth Wife You relit the stove, and said,

‘Keep eating. They’re good when they’re salty.’

Fourth Idiot started eating again.

Fourth Idiot ate four and a half buns, one after another. As his belly was filling up, he wanted to drink some water, but Fourth Wife You said that he shouldn’t – if he did, his stomach would hurt. Instead, after he finished eating the buns, he should go sleep for a while. Fourth Idiot took several bites from that final bun and handed the remainder to Fourth Wife You, saying, ‘Ma, would you like some?’ Fourth Wife You looked at the row of tooth marks on the bun, like a row of crescent moons. She said, ‘Fourth Babe, mother doesn’t want any. Why don’t you keep it for later?’ Fourth Idiot laughed, and placed the bun into his breast pocket. Then he went into the courtyard to look at the closed gate and the full moon, and listen to the sound of villagers heading home to rest. Finally, patting his belly as though it were a drum, he retreated to his room.

Fourth Idiot entered his room, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.

The village’s peacefulness was tall and thick, except for the silver-chain cries of the crickets, which echoed through the streets and alleys. The fields outside the village were also full of the cries of nocturnal creatures, which sounded like the rustling of silk. The stars were somewhat sparse, though the moon was so full it looked as though it might burst. In the moonlight, you could occasionally see some ants and other insects out for a midnight stroll. Fourth Idiot stared intently, but as soon as he went to bed he immediately fell into a deep sleep. Even then, his hands resting on his swollen belly, he continued to grip that final half of a fried bun.

Fourth Wife You emerged from the kitchen and leaned up to Fourth Idiot’s window to peer in. She picked up a shovel that had fallen down and set it against the wall, then hung the hoe from a wooden beam. She took the sickle that was on the window ledge and stuck it into a crack in the wall, then returned to the kitchen, where she carefully overturned the cistern and poured out all the water inside. Then she poured out the water bucket into the courtyard, too. Finally, she poured out all of the remaining water in the house, so that not a drop was left, and only then did she leave.

By this point the rest of the village was sound asleep, and from the streets you could hear the faint sounds of people snoring in their rooms. In the cattle pens there was the coarse sound of cattle breathing, while the warm smell of fresh grass wafted through the village streets and alleys. The village dogs were also sleeping soundly, undisturbed by the occasional sounds coming from the village or the mountain ridge. Fourth Wife You stood in her doorway gazing up at the sky, but as she was anxiously walking toward the village entrance, she arrived at the large gate tower that she hadn’t passed through the preceding evening. Its doors tightly shut, the structure stood proud under the moonlight. The two large ‘Happiness’ characters that had been posted there during the previous year’s New Year’s festival were still clearly visible in the night light.

Fourth Wife You stood in front of the gate tower, staring at it in a daze.

After a moment, she began loudly singing just as she had done after being married into the You household more than thirty years earlier. She sang:

Tonight the maid lifts her head

Because now she, too, has her own embroidery room

Whereas she was previously a maid, she is now a wife

And now she can order her maid around, just like a young wife

Hey, little Lian, come massage my feet!

Her voice gradually increased in volume, going from dark to bright, and by the time she reached the final line, ‘Hey, little Lian, come massage my feet,’ she was roaring. The entire village was awakened by her shouts, which rang through the peaceful and empty mountain ridge like a thunderstorm, and in no time at all had covered the earth in water. Several dogs came running out and stood in the middle of the street, barking madly. Some people opened their front doors and stuck their heads out. Amidst all of the ruckus, someone’s rooster began crowing, and the cattle asleep in their pens also stood up. The entire village awoke with a start, as the newborn baby’s cries surged through the cracks in the doors, down the streets, and out into the fields.

Fourth Wife You sang her song twice in front of the gate tower, and continued as she walked toward the village entrance.

In the entrance, she saw Stone You and someone else whose face she couldn’t make out walking down from the mountain ridge. At that point, she abruptly stopped singing and returned home, and only after she returned home did she finish the song. Then, she leaned up to the window to the side room to check on Fourth Idiot. When she saw he was sleeping soundly, she proceeded to the central room and slowly folded the sheets, blankets, and bedding, placing them all in a neat bundle for Fourth Idiot to use when he got married. She looked around the room, hung an oil lamp from the wall, then moved the sewing kit from the table to the lid of the box. Next, she wiped the dust from the bed and slowly lay down. As she lay down she seemed to slide on the bed, and a noisy chill seeped into her spine. It was then that she remembered the mat on the bed was a new one that had been placed there at the beginning of the year. She got up and rolled up the mat, put it next to the wall, then looked around the room before slowly lying down again on the hard wooden bed frame. She slammed her eyelids shut like a pair of city gates.

Time rumbled forward like a flour mill.

The sound of footsteps drifted into her room like a spectre.

Eventually, a shout in the front room was violently suppressed – like a leaf that had just been picked up by the wind, only to run into the wall or a closed door. The courtyard, village, and the entire mountain ridge suddenly became as peaceful as a lake after a boat has sunk beneath the surface. The entire world seemed to go back into a dream.

Fourth Idiot was awakened in the middle of the night by an acute thirst. He dreamed he was entering a furnace, as his stomach was dried up and his throat was on fire. After gulping for air several times, he woke up, jumped out of bed, and rubbed his eyes. When he went to the kitchen to get some water, he discovered that there wasn’t a single drop left in the cistern. When he went to the bucket, he found that it was lying upside down on the ground. He then went to the wash basin, which usually had half a bowl of water, but all he saw was the reflection of the moon in the bottom of the basin. He couldn’t find a single drop of water in the entire kitchen. He kicked the cistern and the bucket, then grabbed the wash basin and threw it to the ground as well. Finally, he went into the courtyard and shouted in the direction of the main room.

‘Ma… you’re making me die of thirst…

Ma, you’re deliberately making me die of thirst.’

Hearing no response, he pushed open the door to the main room, walked in, and saw his mother lying peacefully in bed. On the bedside table there was a bowl of dark red soup. Without saying a word, Fourth Idiot stepped forward, grabbed the bowl, and drank its contents. There was a thick, dark red taste in his mouth, throat, stomach, and intestines, which spread between his sinews and his bones. On the verge of vomiting, he noticed that on the table there were two bowl-like white bags. As he was reaching out to open one, he saw lying on it the cleaver with which his mother had frightened him the night before. He suddenly remembered that his mother had asked him to take the contents of the two bags to his eldest and third sisters.

And so, before dawn, he carried the two bags into the depths of the Balou Mountains.

Chapter Seven

They didn’t bury Fourth Wife You until half a month later.

Her pallbearers were her son and three sons-in-law, while her eldest, second, and third daughters followed behind, wailing. When the other villagers came to help with the funeral, they discovered that Fourth Idiot’s illness was completely cured, and he was now as clear-headed as everyone else. Moreover, the three daughters standing beside their mother’s corpse were all pregnant. They had all become wholers and were now beautiful and neatly dressed, even as they cried inconsolably. They had each prepared a present for their mother. Eldest Daughter brought sets of winter burial shrouds made of cotton, Second Daughter brought three sets of summer burial shrouds made of silk, while Third Daughter brought her three sets of Spring and Autumn clothing she had sewn herself, together with origami figures of virgin children of good fortune, mountains of gold, and silver chariots. Fourth Wife You’s four children, who had all become as clearheaded as ordinary people, borrowed money to buy some wooden boards, and then asked someone to make her an inch-and-a-half thick coffin made out of cypress wood. On the day of the burial, Stone You and his neighbours in the graveyard went to meet Fourth Wife You, but her four children all crowded around the coffin, crying their eyes out. As the coffin was being placed in the grave, it was impossible to tear away Fourth Wife You’s children, as one after another they threw themselves onto the lid of the coffin.

Stone You asked, ‘Do you think you can bring your mother back to life with your crying?’

They all kept crying.

Fourth Wife You said, ‘This illness is hereditary. Do all of you know how to treat your own children?’

When then heard this, they all abruptly stopped crying.

They buried Fourth Wife You’s body to the right of Stone You’s.

Preview of Radish by Mo Yan

Chapter One

An autumn morning, the air thickly humid, a layer of transparent dewdrops clung to blades of grass and roof tiles. Leaves on the scholar tree had begun to turn yellow; a rusty iron bell hanging from a branch was also dew laden. The production team leader, a padded jacket draped over his shoulders, ambled toward the bell, carrying a sorghum flatbread in one hand and clutching a thick-peeled leek in the other. By the time he reached the bell, his hands were empty, but his cheeks were puffed out like a field mouse scurrying away with autumn provisions. He yanked the clapper against the side of the bell, which rang out loudly – clang, clang, clang. People young and old streamed out of the lanes to converge beneath the bell, eyes fixed on the team leader, like a crowd of marionettes. He swallowed hard, and wiped his stubble-ringed mouth on his sleeve. All eyes watched that mouth as it opened – to spit out a stream of curses: ‘I’ll be fucked if those stupid commune pricks aren’t taking two of our stonemasons one day and two carpenters the next. He turned to a tall, broad-shouldered young man. ‘They’re breaking up our workforce. The commune plans to widen the floodgate behind the village, mason,’ he said to him. ‘Every team has to send them a mason and an unskilled labourer. It might as well be you.’

The handsome young mason had black eyebrows and white teeth, the contrast lending him a heroic bearing. A gentle shake of his head sent back a lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead. Speaking with a slight stammer, he asked who the unskilled labourer would be.

The team leader folded his arms, as if to fight off the cold, and rolled his eyes like pinwheels. ‘A woman makes the most sense,’ he rasped, ‘but we need them for picking cotton, and sending a man would be a waste of manpower.’ He looked around and his gaze fell on the wall. A boy of ten or so stood in a corner. He was barefoot and stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of long, baggy, green-striped white shorts that were stained by grass and dried blood. The shorts ended at his knees, above calves shiny with scars.

‘I see you’re still with us, Hei-hai, you little shit!’ the team leader said as he studied the boy’s jutting breast-bone. ‘I thought you’d gone down to meet the King of Hell. Are you over the shakes?’

The boy didn’t respond, just kept his bright black eyes fixed on the team leader. He had a big head and a skinny neck that seemed in danger of snapping from the load it carried.

‘Feel like earning a few work points? Though I don’t know what a pitiful little thing like you could possibly do. A fart would knock you off your feet. Go with the mason to the floodgate, how’s that? But first run home and get a hammer, then you can sit up there and smash rocks, as many as you feel like, or as few. If history’s any judge, these commune jobs are just busy work meant to fool the foreign devils.’

The boy shuffled up to the mason and tugged at his jacket. He was rewarded with a friendly pat on his shaved gourd of a head. ‘Go home and ask your stepmother for a hammer, and I’ll meet you at the bridgehead.’

The boy took off. He had all the appearance of running, his rail-thin arms flailing like a scarecrow in the wind, but none of the speed. All eyes were on him, and as they looked at his bare back, they suddenly felt the cold. The team leader tugged at his jacket. ‘When you get home,’ he shouted, ‘tell your stepmother to give you a shirt, you poor little beggar!’

He stole in quietly through the gate. A snot-nosed little boy with a pushed-in face was sitting in the yard, playing in the urine-wetted mud. He looked up and threw open his arms: ‘Bro… bro… pick up…’ Hei-hai bent down, picked up a light red apricot leaf to wipe his stepbrother’s nose, then slapped the snotty leaf onto the wall like a leaflet. He waved the boy off and slipped into the house, where he picked up a claw hammer from a corner and slipped back outside. The little boy called out again, so Hei-hai snatched up a fallen branch, drew a wide circle around his stepbrother on the ground, then tossed the branch away and sped to the rear of the village, where a medium-sized river flowed, spanned by a stone bridge with nine arched openings. Owing to summer floods, the trunks of weeping willows growing in profusion on the levee were covered with red fibrous roots. Now that the water had receded, the roots had dried out. The willow leaves had yellowed and fallen into the river, to be carried slowly downstream. Ducks gliding near the riverbank quacked as they dug their red beaks into aquatic grasses in search of food, though who knew if they found any.

The boy was wheezing by the time he reached the levee. His jutting breastbone seemed to contain a clucking hen.

‘Hurry up, Hei-hai!’ the mason shouted from the bridgehead.

Hei-hai, still appearing to be running, made his way over to the mason. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ the mason asked as he looked him over.

Hei-hai just gaped at him. The mason was in work clothes – pants and jacket over a red athletic shirt, its dazzling collar turned up flamboyantly. The boy stared at that collar as if it were a bonfire.

‘What are you looking at?’ the mason asked, rubbing the boy’s head, which rocked back and forth like a drum rattle. ‘You,’ he said, ‘your stepmother has knocked the sense right out of you.’

The mason whistled a tune, rapping his fingers on the boy’s head as they walked onto the bridge. The boy stepped carefully to keep his head where the mason could rap it with thick knuckles that were hard as little clubs. It hurt, but he bore it silently, with only a slight wince. The mason could whistle just about anything with his moist, red lips. Puckering them up and spreading them a bit, he mimicked the crisp, melodic notes of a meadowlark and sent them soaring into the sky.

They crossed the bridge, climbed the levee and headed west to the floodgate, about half a li away. The floodgate was also a bridge of sorts, the difference being a flashboard that held back the water when it was down and released it when it was raised. The levee’s gentle slope, densely covered with feathery river locusts, gave out onto a wide, spongy sandbank where wild grass was already taking root in the wake of the summer flood. Rich open country spread out beyond the levee as far as the eye could see, saturated from the annual floods with silt deposits that turned once hard black earth into fertile soil. The most recent flood had been light enough to spare the levee, so the gate had remained shut. The floodplain was so densely planted with Bengalese jute it was like a virgin forest. A light mist shrouded the field on that early morning, lending it an oceanic quality.

The mason and Hei-hai strolled up to the floodgate, where two teams waited on the sandy ground. Men made up one team, women the other, like a pair of rival camps. A commune cadre, notebook in hand, stood between the teams and gestured as he spoke to them, raising and lowering his arms. The mason led Hei-hai along the floodgate’s concrete steps and walked up to the man. ‘Reporting in from our village, Deputy Director Liu,’ he said. He had often been temporarily assigned to the commune, where Director Liu was frequently in charge of projects, so they already knew each other.

Hei-hai was staring at Director Liu’s broad mouth. When the purple lips that formed that mouth came together they produced a string of sounds: ‘You again, you slippery devil. That damned village of yours sure knows how to meet quotas. They’ve sent me a man who could slip through the holes of any strainer. Just my luck. Where’s your helper?’

Hei-hai felt the mason’s knuckles on his head.

‘Him?’ Director Liu wrapped his hand around the boy’s neck and wobbled his head back and forth. Hei-hai’s heels nearly left the ground. ‘Why send me this skinny little monkey?’ he snarled. ‘Can he even lift a hammer?’

‘All right now, Director Liu Taiyang,’ the mason said as he pried the man’s hand from Hei-hai’s neck. ‘The glory of socialism is that everyone eats. Hei-hai comes from three generations of poor peasants. If socialism won’t take care of him, who will? Besides, his mother’s gone, and he lives with a stepmother. His daddy went off to the north-east like a man possessed and hasn’t been home for three years. He might be bear food by now or lying in the bellies of wolves. Where’s your class sentiment, Director Liu Taiyang?’ This he said partly in jest.

Hei-hai was lightheaded from the shaking. He’d been close enough to the director to smell the alcohol on his breath, and it made him sick. It was what his stepmother smelled like much of the time. After his father left, she often sent him to the canteen to barter dried yams for alcohol, and she didn’t stop drinking till she was drunk. That was when the beating and the pinching and the biting started.

‘A skinny little monkey!’ Director Liu spat out, then turned and continued lecturing the others.

Hammer in hand, Hei-hai scampered onto the floodgate, about a hundred metres long and a dozen or more metres tall, and fronted on the north by a rectangular trough, the same length as the floodgate itself. It contained the remnants of the summer floodwaters. The boy stood atop the floodgate, gripping the stone railing as he gazed down at the water, where scrawny black fish swam clumsily between the rocks. Both ends of the gate butted up against the towering levee, which was part of the road to the county town. There were stone railings, half a metre high, at each end of the five-metre-wide gate. A few years earlier, a passing horse cart had knocked a number of cyclists over the side, leading to broken legs and hips and even a fatality. He’d been younger then, of course, and had had a lot more meat on his bones. His father hadn’t left for the north-east and his stepmother hadn’t started drinking. He ran over to see what was going on, but arrived too late, after the cyclists had been taken away, and all that remained in the trough was muddy water stained red. His nose was keen enough to detect the stink of blood floating up from the water.

Gripping the cold white stone railing with one hand, he rapped it with his hammer, causing both railing and hammer to ring out. And as he listened intently to the sound, scenes from the past flitted in and out of his eyes before disappearing. A bright sun shone down on the jute field beyond the levee, and he watched a fine mist skitter among the plants. The fields were too densely planted: low to the ground there were gaps between the stalks, but the upper branches and leafy tops came together, damp and glistening. He let his eyes drift westward, past the jute field to a patch of sweet potatoes, where the fleshy purple leaves gleamed. Hei-hai knew they were a new variety, short vines heavily laden with potatoes bigger and sweeter than most, with white skins and red pulp; they burst open when cooked. A vegetable plot bordered the sweet potato patch to the north. Now that all private land had reverted to the commune, this is where production brigade members planted vegetables. Hei-hai knew that both the vegetable plot and the sweet potato patch belonged to a village five li away. It was one of the richer villages. The vegetable plot was planted with cabbages and radishes, whose long, lush tassels were such a deep green they were nearly black. A lonely two-room shed in the centre of the plot was home to a lonely old man. The boy knew all this. Jute plants as far as the eye could see spread out north of the field. The same was true to the west. With jute on three sides and the levee on the fourth, the sweet-potato plot and vegetable field looked like a big square well. As the boy’s thoughts wandered, the purple and green leaves turned into autumn well water, and then the jute became water, while sparrows skimming the tips of the jute plants were transformed into green kingfishers snapping up tiny shrimp from the water’s surface.

Deputy Director Liu was still lecturing. Here is what he said: If agriculture is to follow the Dazhai Commune model, irrigation will be its lifeblood. That’s one of the points of the Eight Point Charter for Agriculture. Agriculture without irrigation is like a child with no mother. Or a child with a mother with no breasts. Or it’s a child with a mother with breasts but no milk. Without milk the child will die, or if it lives, it’ll turn out like this little monkey (Director Liu pointed to Hei-hai, up on the floodgate. The boy had his back to the people and they could see two sun-illuminated scars streaking down his back like jagged lightning bolts). And besides, the gate is so narrow it claims lives every year. The commune’s revolutionary committee takes this very seriously, and after studying the problem from all angles, we’ve decided to widen the gate. To get the job done, we’ve mobilised labourers from all brigades, more than two hundred of you. This is the first stage: girls and married women, young and old, plus the little monkey (he pointed a second time to Hei-hai up on the gate whose scars now shone like mirrors) will break up all the rocks within five hundred square metres to the size of restorative pills or egg yolks. Masons will then shape the pieces of stone appropriately. These are our two blacksmiths (he pointed to a pair of deeply-tanned men, one tall, the other short, one old, the other young), who will repair chisels the masons have dulled. Those of you who live close by will return to your villages for meals, the others will eat in the village up ahead, where we’ve set up a field kitchen. The same for sleeping: those who live farther away will spend the nights under the bridge openings (he pointed to the arched openings below the floodgate). The women will sleep from east to west, the men from west to east. Straw will be spread out on the ground for sleeping, fluffy as spring mattresses, too fucking comfy for the likes of you.

‘Are you going to sleep under one, Director Liu?’

‘I’m in charge, I’ve got a bicycle, and it’s none of your business where I plan to sleep, so don’t get your guts in a stew. Do soldiers ride horses just because their officer does? Now get your asses to work. You’ll get plenty of work points, and I’ll throw in a measure of water conservation grain and twenty water conservation cents. Anyone who doesn’t want to work can fuck off. Even the little monkey will get money and rations, and by the time work on the gate is finished he’ll have put on weight, you can bet on it.’

Hei-hai didn’t hear a word Director Liu said. He had draped his skinny arms over the railing and was holding his hammer in both hands. He heard music like birdsong and the chirps of autumn insects from the jute field. The retreating mist seemed to thunder as it caromed off jute leaves and both deep red and light green stalks. The sound of grasshoppers rubbing legs against forewings was like a train crossing an iron bridge. He’d once seen a train in a dream, a one-eyed monster running at a crouch, faster than a horse. What if it had run standing up instead? The train had just stood up in his dream when he was awakened by a swat from his stepmother’s hearth broom. She told him to fetch water from the river. The swat didn’t hurt, that was just a blast of heat, but the sound was like someone far away clubbing a jute sack filled with cotton. With the carrying pole over his shoulder, he hooked on the full buckets of water; they barely cleared the ground, and he could hear his bones creak. His ribs pushed against his hipbones. Holding the swaying pole with both hands, he climbed the steep levee onto a path twisted by willow trees, whose trunks seemed fitted with magnets; they pulled the tinplate buckets away from him. One hit a tree and sloshed water onto the path, turning it so slippery it was like stepping on melon rinds. He fell awkwardly, and the water soaked him like a waterfall. His face smacked into the ground, flattening his nose, which was scored by a grassy stalk. Blood ran from his nose into his mouth. He spit out one mouthful, swallowed the next. His buckets sang merrily as they rolled down to the river. He clambered up and ran after them. One rested at an angle in riverbank reeds, the other was being carried downstream. He chased it down the riverbank, running on four-spined star thistle that he and the other kids called dog-turd grass. He tried to grip the burrs with his toes, but still slipped into the river. It was warm and nearly reached his navel. His shorts billowed out and wrapped around his waist like a jellyfish. Now wading, he sloshed after his bucket, and when he caught it, he turned and headed back upstream, holding up the bucket in one hand and paddling with the other. The river ran hard, making him stumble as he leaned forward and thrust his neck out. It felt to him as if a school of tiny fish had encircled his legs, and began nibbling gently. He stopped, trying to capture the sensation, but it vanished. The river darkened, as if the fish were fleeing in panic. But the pleasant sensation returned once he started walking again. The fish were back, it seemed. This time he didn’t stop, just kept forging ahead, eyes half shut, moving forward.

‘Hei-hai!’

‘Hei-hai!’

He snapped out of his reverie and opened his eyes. The fish vanished. The hammer slipped out of his hands and dropped into the green water below the gate, spraying a watery chrysanthemum into the air.

‘That little monkey’s not all there,’ Director Liu said as he climbed onto the gate and grabbed the boy by the ear. ‘Go on, go break rocks with the women and see if you can find a mother who’ll take you in.’

The mason also came up onto the gate and rubbed the boy’s cold scalp. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘go find your hammer. Break as much rock as you can. Then you can go play.’

‘If I catch you loafing on the job, I’ll cut your ear off as a snack to go with my drink,’ Director Liu thundered.

Hei-hai trembled. He slipped through the handrail, grabbed the base of a pillar with both hands and hung there.

‘You’ll kill yourself doing that!’ the mason shouted in alarm as he reached down to grab the boy’s hand. But Hei-hai pulled away, clung to a bulge in one of the bridge pylons and slid down nimbly. Pressing up against the stone like a wall lizard, he let himself down into the trough, scooped up his hammer, climbed out and disappeared under a bridge opening.

‘That damned little monkey!’ Director Liu said, stroking his chin. ‘He’s just a goddamned little monkey!’

Hei-hai emerged from under the bridge and timidly made his way to the women, who were talking and laughing. The young women blushed red as coxcombs, wanting to listen to the dirty talk, but afraid to hear it. When the boy appeared darkly in their midst, the women’s mouths clamped shut. A moment later, there was a bit of whispering, and when they saw that he did not react, their voices grew louder.

‘Would you look at that sorry little kid! They let him go half naked in this weather!’

‘You can’t love a kid that doesn’t come out of you.’

‘I hear she does you-know-what at home…’

Hei-hai turned away from the women and gazed at the river. The surface was red in places, green in others. Willow trees on the southern bank fluttered like dragonflies.

A young woman in a crimson bandana walked up behind Hei-hai and said softly, ‘Where’s your village, boy?’

He cocked his head and glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He spotted a fine dusting of yellow fuzz on her upper lip. She had big eyes, but dense, fuzzy lashes gave her a sleepy look.

‘What’s your name, boy?’

Hei-hai was fighting with the star thistles in the sand, pinching off six-and eight-thorned thistles with his toes. Then he stepped on them, snapping off all the thorns and crushing them with feet as hard as a mule’s hooves.

She laughed gaily. ‘That’s quite a talent, dark little boy. You have feet like horseshoes. Why don’t you say something?’ She poked him on the shoulder with two fingers. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I asked you a question.’

Hei-hai felt the two warm fingers trail down from his shoulder and stop at one of the scars on his back.

‘Oh my, where did you get these?’

His ears twitched. That caught her attention, such incredibly long ears.

‘So, you can wiggle your ears,’ she said. ‘Just like a bunny rabbit.’

Now the hand had moved up to Hei-hai’s ear, and he felt the two fingers pinch his delicate lobe.

‘Tell me about these scars.’ She gently tugged his ear until he was facing her, level with her chest. Rather than look up, he stared straight ahead, at red-checked fabric across which lay the tip of a yellowed braid. ‘Dog bites? Boils? Climbing trees? You poor thing.’

Moved, he gazed up at her smooth, round chin. He sniffled.

‘Looking to adopt, Juzi?’ a large, round-faced woman shouted.

Hei-hai’s eyes rolled in their sockets, the whites fluttered like moths.

‘That’s right, my name’s Juzi,’ she told him. ‘I’m from a village up ahead about ten li. If you feel like talking, just call me “big sister Juzi”.’

‘Looking for a husband, Juzi? Have you found the one you want? How many years will you have to hold out till this duckling is ready to mount?’

‘Stinking old crone!’ Juzi cursed the fat woman. ‘Nothing but shit comes out of that mouth.’ She led Hei-hai over to the mountain of broken rock and dug around to find one with a flat surface. ‘Sit on this,’ she said, ‘and stay close to me. Start breaking rocks, but take it easy.’ She found a smooth rock for herself and placed it near his. In a matter of moments, the sandy area in front of the floodgate was ringing with the sound of metal on stone. With Hei-hai as their topic, the women exchanged views on a hard life and the reasons behind it. In this ‘women’s philosophy’ eternal truths were mixed with plenty of nonsense. Juzi paid no attention to it – she was focused on the boy. At first he acknowledged her attention with an occasional glance, but before long he looked to be in a trance, eyes wide, gazing into space, while she looked on anxiously. He grasped a rock with his left hand and raised the hammer with his right. The effort seemed to exhaust him, and the hammer dropped like a heavy object in free fall. She nearly cried out every time she saw the hammer descending toward his hand, but nothing happened – the hammer traced a wobbly arc in the air, but always landed on the rock.

Hei-hai’s eyes were fixed on the rocks at first, but a strange sound drifted over from the river, thin and faint, like nibbling fishes, now near, now far. Straining to capture it with both eyes and ears, he saw a bright gassy cloud rising over the river, which seemed to capture the oscillating hum within. His cheeks grew ruddy and an affecting smile gathered at the corners of his mouth. He had long forgotten where he was sitting and what he was doing, as if the arm that moved up and down belonged to someone else. Then the index finger of his left hand went numb, and the arm jerked. A sound emerged from his mouth, something between a moan and a sigh. He looked down and saw that the nail on that finger was cracked in several places, and that blood was oozing from the cracks.

‘Have you smashed your finger?’ the woman asked as she jumped up and stepped over to crouch by him. ‘Oh no, look what you’ve done! Who works like that, letting his thoughts fly off to who knows where?’

Hei-hai scooped up a handful of dirt while she was scolding him and pressed it on the injured finger.

‘Have you lost your mind, Hei-hai?’ She dragged him down to the river. ‘There’s filthy stuff in that dirt.’ The soles of his feet slapped loudly on the gleaming banks. He crouched down at the river’s edge, where the woman stuck his finger into the water. A trickle of dirty yellow formed in front of his finger. Once the dirt had washed away, red threads of blood quivered in the water. The boy’s fingernail looked like cracked jade.

‘Does it hurt?’

He didn’t make a sound. His eyes were fixed on river shrimp at the bottom. The transparent crustaceans’ feelers fluttered slowly, exquisitely.

She took out a handkerchief embroidered with a China rose and wrapped it around the finger, then led him back to the rock pile. ‘Sit here and relax,’ she said. ‘No one will bother you, you poor little devil.’

The other women stopped what they were doing to cast misty looks their way. Silence lay over the rock pile. Patches of cloud floated through the bright blue sky like lambs, casting fleeting shadows that enshrouded the pale riverbank and the stoic water. The women’s faces wore dreary looks, like barren soil in which nothing grew. After a long moment of indecision they went back to work, as if waking from a dream, the monotonous sound of metal on stone creating an aura of resignation.

Hei-hai sat silently, staring at the red flower embroidered on the handkerchief. Another red flower adorned the edge, this one created by blood from under his fingernail. The women quickly put him out of their minds and went back to laughing and talking. Hei-hai brought his injured finger to his mouth and untied the knot in the handkerchief with his teeth, then packed the finger in another handful of dirt. Juzi was about to say something, but stopped when she saw him retie the handkerchief around the finger using his teeth and free hand. She sighed, raised her hammer and brought it down hard on a dark red rock. Its knife-like edges emitted enormous sparks when they came in contact with the hammer, visible even in the bright sunlight.

At noon, Liu Taiyang rode out from Hei-hai and the mason’s village on a black bicycle. Standing in front of the floodgate, he blew his whistle to stop work and announced that the field kitchen was up, but only available to those who lived farther than five li. Everyone hurriedly gathered up their tools. The young woman stood up. So did the boy.

‘How far away do you live, Hei-hai?’

Hei-hai ignored her, turning his head this way and that, as if searching for something. Juzi’s head followed, and when his stopped swivelling, so did hers. Looking straight ahead, her eyes met the lively eyes of the mason, and they held the look for nearly a minute.

‘Time to eat, Hei-hai,’ the mason said. ‘Let’s go home. Don’t give me that look, it won’t do you any good. We live a couple of li from here, and we’re not lucky enough to eat in the kitchen.’

‘You two are from the same village?’ she asked the mason.

Stuttering with excitement, he pointed toward his village, telling her that he and Hei-hai lived just across the bridge. They chatted cordially, about ordinary things. He knew she lived in the village up ahead, so she could eat in the kitchen and sleep under the bridge. She was willing to eat in the kitchen, but not to sleep under the bridge. The autumn winds were too cold. She lowered her voice and asked if Hei-hai was a mute. Absolutely not, he assured her, adding that he was very intelligent, and at the age of four or five had been a real chatterbox, his crisp voice, like a bean in a bamboo tube, hardly ever stopped. But over time he spoke less and less, and often froze like a statue; no one had any idea what he was thinking. Look at his eyes, so black you can’t see the bottom. The woman remarked that he did seem smart, and for some reason she’d taken a liking to him, almost like a kid brother. The mason said that’s because you’re a good person with a kind heart.

The three of them – mason, woman, Hei-hai – lagged behind, the man and woman talking fervently, as if hoping to drag out the walk. Hei-hai followed, lifting his legs high and stepping lightly, his expression and movements like those of a small tomcat patrolling the base of a wall. Liu Taiyang, who had been delayed in the grove of river locusts, caught up with them on his creaky bicycle when they reached the bridge, which was so narrow he had to get off and walk.

‘What are you hanging around here for? How’d you do this morning, you dark little monkey? Hey, what happened to your paw?’

‘Smashed his finger with the hammer.’

‘Shit! Mason, go see your team leader and have him send somebody else. I won’t be responsible if the kid kills himself.’

‘It’s a work injury,’ the woman complained. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘You and I have known each other for years, Director Liu,’ the mason said. ‘What’s one kid for a big project like this? And what can he do in the production team with that hand?’

‘Damn you, you skinny little monkey.’ Director Liu mulled it over. ‘I’ll give you a new job. You can pump a bellows for the blacksmiths, how’s that? Think you can handle it?’

The boy sent pleading looks to the mason and the woman.

‘You can do that, can’t you, Hei-hai?’ he asked.

She pitched in with an encouraging nod.

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This paperback edition published by Penguin Group (Australia) in association with Penguin (Beijing) Ltd, 2015

Text copyright © Yan Lianke, 2015

Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas

Originally published in Chinese as Ba Lou Tian Ge by Beiyue Literature & Art Publishing House, Beijing

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ISBN: 978-1-76014-280-3

Content

Yan Lianke
MARROW
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas

Translator’s Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Preview of Radish by Mo Yan

Chapter One

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