Ji Qiongzhi raised her voice to drown out the sounds of crying: “The reactionary landlord class lived a life of luxury and excess. Why, Sima Ku alone had four wives!” Her pointer banged impatiently against one of the drawings, which was a portrait of Sima Ku, but with the head of a wolf and the body of a bear, his long, hairy arms wrapped around four alluring female demons: the two on the left had snake heads; the two on the right had bushy yellow tails. A clutch of little demons stood behind them, obviously the fruit of Sima Ku’s loins. They included Sima Liang, the hero of my youth. But which one was he? Was he the cat spirit, with triangular ears on both sides of his forehead? Or was he the rat spirit, the pointy-mouthed one in the red jacket, claws reaching up out of the sleeves? I felt Du Zhengzheng’s cold glare sweep past me. “Sima Ku’s fourth wife, Shangguan Zhaodi,” Ji Qiongzhi said in a loud but passionless voice as she pointed to a woman with a long fox tail, “feasted on so many delicacies from land and sea that the only thing left for her to eat was the delicate yellow skin of a rooster’s leg. So a mountain of Sima roosters was slaughtered in order to indulge her extravagant desire!” That’s a lie! When did my second sister ever eat the yellow skin of a rooster’s leg? She never ate chicken. And there was never a mountain of slaughtered Sima roosters! The slander they were heaping onto my second sister filled me with anger and a sense of betrayal. And tears of complex origins gushed from my eyes. I wiped them away as fast as I could, but they kept coming.
Now that she’d completed her indoctrination duties, Ji Qiongzhi moved to one side, breathing heavily from exhaustion. Her place was taken by a woman who had just been sent down from the county government, Teacher Cai. She had thin brows over single-fold eyelids and a clear, melodic voice. Her eyes brimmed with tears before she even began speaking. This portion of the lesson had a fury-spewing topic: Monstrous Crimes of the Landlord Restitution Corps. Cai carried out her task scrupulously, pointing to each heading and reading it aloud, like a vocabulary lesson. The first drawing was of a crescent moon partially hidden behind dark clouds in the upper right-hand corner; in the upper left-hand corner were some black leaves trailing black lines. But this drawing was of an autumn, not a winter wind. Beneath the dark clouds and crescent moon, buffeted by icy autumn winds, the head of all of Northeast Gaomi evils, Sima Ku, in his military overcoat and bandolier – mouth open, fangs bared, blood dripping from his lolling tongue – held a bloody knife in one claw that poked out from his loose left sleeve and a revolver in his right, badly drawn flames spewing from the barrel, which had just fired several bullets. He was wearing no pants; his army overcoat hung all the way down to the top of his bushy wolf’s tail. A pack of savage, ugly beasts was right on his heels. The neck of one of them was stretched out straight; it was a cobra spitting red venom – “This is Chang Xilu, a reactionary rich peasant from Sandy Ridge Village,” Teacher Cai said as she pointed to the head of the cobra. “And this one,” she said as her pointer touched a wild dog, “is Du Jinyuan, the despotic landlord of Sandy Ridge Village.” Du Jinyuan was dragging a spiked club (dripping blood, naturally). Next to him was Hu Rikui, a soldier of fortune from Wang Family Mound; he looked more or less human, but with the long, narrow face of a mule. The reactionary rich peasant Ma Qingyun from Two County Hamlet was a big, clumsy bear. All in all, a pack of armed savage beasts, murderous looks on their faces as they made their assault on Northeast Gaomi Township under Sima Ku’s leadership.