Wu Yunyu started it with a kick, which Guo answered with a punch. Then they tore into each other. Guo ripped off Wu’s cap, his prized possession, and scratched his scabby head bloody. Wu stuck his fingers into Guo’s mouth and pulled with all his might, opening a cut in one corner. As soon as the factions of Red Guards saw what was happening, they turned it into a gang war, and in no time clubs were cutting through the air, bricks were flying, leaving the participants bloody but determined to fight to the death. Wu Yunyu’s subordinate Wei Yangjiao stabbed two combatants in the gut with the steel tip of his red-tasseled spear; blood and some sticky gray oozed from the wounds. Guo Pingen and Wu Yunyu backed off to direct their troops in battle. At that moment, Jintong saw the veiled young woman he recognized as Zaohua pass in front of Guo Pingen, her hand seeming to brush his face as she passed; a moment later he set up a loud agonizing wail, a gash appearing on his cheek, almost as if he’d grown a second mouth. Blood gushed from the wound, a terrifying sight. He turned and ran in the direction of the commune clinic; nothing else mattered to him at that moment. Seeing that the battle had turned deadly and that blood might wind up on their hands, the peddlers packed up their goods and disappeared down a myriad of lanes.
One of the two combatants with belly wounds died on the way to the clinic, while the other needed a blood transfusion before he was out of danger. The blood came from the veins of the Ox-Demons and Snake-Spirits. Upon his subsequent release from the clinic, none of the Red Guard units wanted anything to do with him, since his poor-peasant blood had lost its purity; now the blood of class enemies – landlords, rich peasants, and historical counterrevolutionaries – flowed in his veins. According to Wu Yunyu, Wang Jinzhi was now a class enemy himself, like a grafted fruit tree, possessor of the five evils. Poor Wang had been a member of the fighting propaganda unit of the Wind and Thunder Faction. Given the cold shoulder and incapable of dealing with loneliness, he formed his own faction, the “Unicorn Struggle Team,” complete with official seal, banner, and armbands; he even talked those in charge of the commune public address system into giving him five minutes of airtime, all the news items for which he personally selected. They ran the gamut from developments in the Unicorn faction to historical anecdotes relating to Dalan, interesting tidbits, sex scandals, items of general interest, and so on. The show ran three times a day – morning, noon, and night. Before the PA began to broadcast, representatives from all the various factions sat lined up on a bench to await their turn. Unicorn was given the last slot, so when his five minutes were up, “The Internationale” was played, and that ended the broadcasting day.
In an age when there were no radio dramas and no musical programs, the Unicorn five-minute program served as entertainment for the citizens of Northeast Gaomi Township. Whether tending their pigs, sitting down to eat, or lying in bed, the people would prick up their ears in anticipation. One night, the Unicorn announcer said, “Low and middle poor peasants, revolutionary comrades-in-arms, according to an authoritative source, the individual who attacked the onetime leader of the Wind and Thunder Faction, Guo Pingen, leaving a gash in his cheek, was the infamous thief Sha Zaohua. Thief Sha is the daughter of the traitor Sha Yueliang, who ran rampant for years in Northeast Gaomi Township, and Shangguan Laidi, who murdered a public servant and was herself executed for the crime. In her youth, thief Sha met a strange man at Southeast Lao Mountain, from whom she learned martial arts. She can fly over eaves and walk up walls, she is a master of sleight-of-hand who can pick a pocket or walk off with a purse right under your eyes, and you’ll never know it. According to my authoritative source, thief Sha sneaked back to Northeast Gaomi Township three months ago, and has already established secret contacts in every village and hamlet. Using intimidation and coercion, she has enlisted the services of underlings who report to her on everything and serve as a little army of spies. The youngster who stole the dogskin cap of poor peasant Fang Shixian at the Dalan marketplace was one of thief Sha’s accomplices. Thief Sha has plied her evil trade in large towns. She has many aliases, but the most commonly heard is Swallow Sha. Her purpose in sneaking back to Northeast Gaomi this time is to avenge the deaths of her father and mother, and the gash on Guo Pingen’s cheek signals the first stage of her class retaliation. Even cruder, even more terrifying incidents can be expected in the days to come. It has been reported that one of the tools of her trade is a bronze coin she placed on a railroad track to be run over by a passing train. It is thinner than paper and so sharp it can cut a hair in half by blowing on it. When it cuts skin it takes ten minutes for the wound to bleed and twenty for the victim to feel the pain. Thief Sha hides this weapon between her fingers, and with an unnoticeable flick can sever a man’s carotid artery, bringing instant death. Thief Sha’s skills are unmatched. When she was studying with her master, she tossed ten coins into a pot of boiling oil, then reached in with bare fingers and removed every single one without so much as singeing her skin. Her movements are so fast, and so precise, they are barely visible. Revolutionary comrades-in-arms, low and middle poor peasants, the enemies who use guns have been eliminated, but the ones who use coins remain among us, and they can be counted on to fight us with ten times the deceit and a hundred times the frenzy.” Time’s up, time’s up! That was what the listeners heard over the PA all of a sudden. “I’m almost done, almost done.” No, that’s it. The Unicorn can’t talk over uThe Internationale”! “Can’t we go on a little longer?” But the strains of “The Internationale” abruptly poured out of the PA.
The following morning, the PA broadcast the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment’s detailed renunciation of Unicorn’s Sha Zaohua myth, and then laid all the crimes at the feet of Unicorn. The mass organizations broadcast a joint declaration retracting Unicorn’s broadcast privileges and ordered the faction’s leaders to disband within forty-eight hours and to destroy the official seal and all propaganda materials.
Even though the Golden Monkey Rebel Regiment denied the existence of a super-thief named Sha Zaohua, they nonetheless assigned secret agents and sentries to watch the Shangguan family. Not until the following spring, during the Qingming Festival, when a police van from the County Security Bureau came to take Jintong away, did Wu Yunyu, who by then had risen to the position of chairman of the Dalan Revolutionary Committee, relieve the agents and sentries, who were pretending to be wok menders, knife sharpeners, and shoe repairmen, of their duties.
When they were clearing out the Flood Dragon River Farm, a diary kept by Qiao Qisha was discovered. In it she recorded in detail the illicit relationship between Shangguan Jintong and Long Qingping. As a result, the County Security Bureau arrested Jintong on charges of murder and necrophilia and, even before the investigation began, sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, which he began to serve at a labor reform camp on the edge of the Yellow Sea.
Chapter Seven
1
During the first spring of the 1980s, Jintong, having served his time, sat in an out-of-the-way corner of a bus station waiting room, feeling shy and confused as he waited for the bus to Dalan, the capital of Northeast Gaomi Township.
The fifteen long years now behind him truly seemed like a bad dream. He thought back until his head ached, but all he could conjure up were memory fragments, all linked to bright light that stung his eyes like shards of glass imbedded in mud. He recalled the moment when handcuffs were first snapped on his wrists, and the reflected light that seared his eyes just before darkness enshrouded him and he heard his mother’s shouts in the distance: “What right do you have arresting my son? My son is a good man, he’s never hurt anyone”… and then he recalled the frightful days spent in the lockup awaiting sentencing, how every night by the muted light in his cell he had been forced to perform oral sex on the bearded guard… and he recalled the unbearable heat beating down on the labor camp salt works, creating even more blinding light. The guards wore sunglasses; the inmates were not permitted to. Wherever he looked the salty, corrupting, blinding light brought tears to eyes that were exposed to the salty air… then he recalled scenes of gathering kindling in the freezing cold of winter, sunlight sparkling on the snow-covered ground and glinting off the guards’ rifle barrels. The deafening crack of rifle fire straightened him up, and as he looked into the sun he saw a dazzlingly dark figure wobble and fall to the ground. He later learned that it was an inmate who had tried to escape, only to be shot by a guard… his thoughts then took him back to a summer when bursts of lightning the size of basketballs lit up the skies over the fields. Terrified, he fell to his knees. “Heavenly Father,” he prayed, “spare me. I did nothing wrong, please don’t strike me dead… let me go on living… let me live out my sentence and regain my freedom… I want to see my mother once more”… another blast of thunder rent the sky, and when he came to, a goat lay beside him, struck dead by lightning, the smell of burnt flesh hanging in the air…