With Old Jin as his guide, Jintong traveled to every corner of Dalan, where he was introduced to people who had dealings – direct and indirect – with the recycling station and the various sales outlets. He took up smoking foreign cigarettes and drank foreign liquor, learned the ins and outs of mah-jongg, and mastered the arts of playing host, passing out bribes, and evading taxes; once he even took the delicate hand of a young waitress in the Gathering Dragons Guesthouse restaurant in front of a dozen or more guests; flustered, she dropped the glass she was holding, smashing it to pieces. He took out a wad of bills and stuffed them into the pocket of her white uniform. “A little something for you,” he said. She thanked him in a flirtatious voice.
Every night, like a farmer who never tires, he cultivated Old Jin’s fertile soil. His inexperience and clumsiness brought her special pleasure and a new kind of excitement; her shouts often woke the fatigued workers as they slept in their shacks.
One evening, a one-eyed old man strolled into Old Jin’s bedroom, his head cocked. Jintong shuddered when he saw him and pushed Old Jin to the side of the bed before scrambling to cover himself with the blanket. He recognized the man at once: it was Fang Jin, at one time in charge of the People’s Commune production brigade, Old Jin’s legal husband.
Old Jin sat there with her legs crossed. “Didn’t I just give you a thousand yuan?” she asked, a sharp edge to her voice.
Fang Jin sat down on the Italian leather sofa in front of the bed, where he had a coughing fit and spat a gob of phlegm onto the beautiful Persian rug at his feet. The glare of hatred in his good eye was hot enough to light a cigarette. “I didn’t come for money this time,” he said.
“Then what do you want?” she asked irately.
“Your lives!” Fang Jin pulled a knife out from under his jacket, jumped up from the sofa with an agility that belied his age, and threw himself onto the bed.
With a shriek of horror, Jintong rolled to the far edge of the bed and wrapped the blanket around him. He was too petrified to move after that. He then watched in terror as the cold gleam of Fang Jin’s knife pressed toward his chest.
Like a fish flopping on the ground, Old Jin placed herself between Fang Jin and Jintong, so that the tip of the knife was aimed at her chest. “If you’re not the illegitimate child of a first wife, you’ll stab me first!” she said coldly.
Grinding his teeth, Fang Jin said, “You whore, you stinking whore…” Despite the savagery of his words, the hand holding the knife began to tremble.
“I’m no whore,” Old Jin said. “Sex is how a whore earns her living. But me, I actually pay for it. I’m a rich woman who’s opened a brothel for her own pleasure!”
Fang Jin’s gaunt face twitched like waves on the ocean. Beads of snot hung from the sparse ratlike whiskers on his chin. “I’ll kill you!” he said shrilly as he thrust his knife at Old Jin’s breast. But she spun out of the way, and the knife stuck into the bed.
With a single kick, she knocked Fang off of the bed. After whipping off her martial arts belt, slipping out of her short robe, taking off her canvas bra, and kicking off her shoes, she slapped her belly wantonly, the hollow sound nearly frightening Jintong out of his skin. “You old coffin shell,” she shouted. “Can you do it? Climb on up if you can. If not, get the fuck out of here!”
Fang Jin was sobbing like a baby by the time he rose to a stooped position. With his eyes on Old Jin’s jiggling pale flesh, he pounded himself on the chest and wailed in agony, “Whore, you whore, one of these days I’m going to kill you both…” Fang Jin ran away.
Peace returned to the room. The roar of a power saw came from the carpentry shop, merging with the whistle of a train entering the station. At that moment, Jintong heard the dreary sound of the wind whistling through the empty liquor bottles at home. Old Jin sprawled in front of him, and he saw her single breast splayed in all its ugliness across her chest, the dark nipple looking like a dried sea cucumber.
She gave him an icy stare. “Can you do it like this?” she said. “No, you can’t, I know that. Shangguan Jintong, you’re dog shit that won’t stick to a wall, you’re a dead cat that can’t climb a tree. I want you to get your balls out of here, just like Fang Jin!”
4
Except for the fact that her head was on the small side, Parrot Han’s wife, Ceng Lianlian, was actually quite a stunning woman, especially her figure. She had long legs, nicely rounded hips, a soft, narrow waist, slender shoulders, full breasts, and a long, straight neck – from the neck down there was absolutely nothing to complain about, since she’d inherited it all from her water-snake mother. Thoughts of her mother reminded Jintong of that stormy night in the mill years earlier, back during the civil war. Her head, small and flat as the blade of a shovel, had swayed in the early-morning rain and mist, and she truly looked to be three parts human and seven parts snake.
After Old Jin fired him, Jintong wandered the streets and lanes of the increasingly prosperous Dalan City. He didn’t have the nerve to go home to see his mother. He’d sent her his severance pay, even though he’d spent nearly as much time lined up at the post office to wire the money as it would have taken to go over to the pagoda, and even though she’d have to go to the same post office to get the money, and even though the clerk there would be puzzled by his action, that’s how he did it.
When his steps took him to the Sandy Ridge district, he discovered that the Cultural Bureau office had set up two monuments on the ridge. One commemorated the seventy-seven martyrs who had been buried alive by the Landlord Restitution Corps, the other commemorated the courageous fight against the German imperialists by Shangguan Dou and Sima Daya, who had given their lives in the cause nearly a century before. The text, in virtually incomprehensible classical prose, made Jintong’s head swim and his eyes glaze over. A group of boys and girls – college students, by the look of them – was gathered around the monuments, discussing them animatedly before huddling together for group photos. The girl with the camera was wearing skintight blue-gray pants, the flared bottoms covered with white sand, and uneven rips at the knees, under an incredibly bulky yellow turtle-neck sweater that hung from her armpits like the sagging neck of a cow. A heavy Chairman Mao pin was pinned to her chest, and a camera vest with pockets of all sizes was draped casually over her sweater. She was bent at the waist, raising her backside in the air like a horse doing its business. “Okay!” she said. “Don’t move. I said don’t move!” Then she began looking for someone to take their picture. Her gaze fell on Jintong, who was still wearing the outfit Old Jin had given him. The girl said something in a foreign language, which he didn’t understand. But he sensed at once that she’d mistaken him for a foreigner. “Say, girl, if you speak to me in Chinese, I’ll understand you!” She gulped, probably surprised by his heavy local accent. For someone from a distant land to come to China and actually learn the Northeast Gaomi dialect was really something! is what he assumed she was thinking, and even he heaved a sigh. How wonderful it would be if a real foreigner could speak like someone from Northeast Gaomi. But, of course, there was such a person – the sixth son-in-law of the Shangguan family, Babbitt. Not to mention Pastor Malory, who had spoken better Chinese than Babbitt. “Sir,” the girl said with a smile, “would you mind taking our picture?” Infected by her vitality, Jintong forgot for the moment his current situation, shrugged his shoulders, and made a face the way he’d seen foreigners do in the movies. He was quite convincing. Taking the camera from her and watching as she showed him which button to push, he said Okay, followed by a few comments in Russian. That produced the desired effect; the girl stared at him with obvious interest, before turning and running over to the monuments, where she leaned on her friends’ shoulders. He looked into the viewer like an executioner, cutting all the girl’s friends out of the shot and zeroing in on her. Click. He pressed the button. “Okay,” he said. A moment later he was standing alone in front of the monuments, watching the youngsters as they walked off. An aura of youth lingered in the air, and he breathed in it greedily. He had a bitter taste in his mouth, as if he’d just eaten an overripe persimmon, a stiff tongue, and a bellyful of disapproval.