Arrest the hoodlum, Qin ordered.
Ning Yao (Waist) from commune security, pistol on his belt, led a group consisting of the Party secretary, the Women’s League chairwoman, the militia commander and four of his men; they burst unannounced into Wang’s yard.
Wang’s wife was on a stool in the shade of a tree, a nursing infant in her arms, making a braid out of grass. She threw her handiwork down at the sight of the intruders, sat down on the ground, and wailed.
Wang Gan was standing under the eaves, not making a sound.
Wang Dan was sitting on the front door threshold, gazing at her small face in a tiny hand mirror.
Come out here, Wang Jiao! Yuan Lian shouted. The first time was a request, this time it’s a demand. Commune Security Chief Ning is here. You might get away today, but there’s always tomorrow. Be a man and do this on your own.
The Women’s League chairwoman turned to Wang Jiao’s wife. Stop crying, Fang Lianhua, and tell your man to get out here.
Not a sound from inside the house. Yuan Lian glanced at Security Officer Ning, who waved the four militiamen into the house, ropes in hand.
From where he stood under the eaves, Wang Gan pointed his chin at the pigpen for Ning’s benefit.
Even though one of Ning’s legs was longer than the other, he was fast on his feet. He hightailed it to the pigpen, unholstered his pistol, and shouted at the top of his lungs, Come out of there, Wang Jiao!
Wang Jiao crawled out of the pigpen, sporting cobwebs on his head, and was immediately surrounded by the four militiamen. He wiped his sweaty face. Cripple Ning, he fumed, what are you shouting at? Who do you think you’re scaring with that rusty piece of steel?
I’m not trying to scare you, Ning said. Come quietly and there’ll be no problem.
And what if I don’t? You going to shoot me? He pointed to his crotch. If you’ve got the balls go ahead and shoot me in mine. I’d rather lose my balls to a bullet than to a bunch of old biddies with scalpels.
Wang Jiao, the Women’s League chairwoman said, Don’t be so stubborn. All they do is tie off that little tube…
They ought to sew up that thing of yours, Wang Jiao retorted crudely, pointing at her crotch.
As he waved his pistol, Ning gave the command: Tie him up!
I’d like to see you try, Wang Jiao threatened as he reached behind for a shovel, then held it out in front of him, eyes blazing. I’ll lop off the head of anyone who comes close!
The diminutive Wang Dan chose this moment to stand up, still holding her mirror. She was thirteen at the time, but stood only two and a half feet tall. Though extraordinarily small, she wasn’t misshapen, and was like a lovely Lilliputian. She shone rays of blinding sunlight into Wang Jiao’s face with her mirror and giggled with girlish naivety at the sight.
The militiamen took advantage of Wang’s temporary blindness to rush him, wrench the shovel away, and yank his arms around behind him.
As they started to wrap their ropes around him, he burst into loud wails. There was such agony in his howls that rubberneckers sprawled atop his wall or gawking at his gate were pained by what they heard. The four men stood there helpless, ropes hanging from their hands.
Are you a man, Wang Jiao, Yuan Lian asked, or aren’t you? How can a little procedure like this put such a fear in you? I already did it, and it hasn’t affected me at all. If you don’t believe me, have your wife ask my wife.
That’s enough, Wang Jiao sobbed. I’ll go with you.
That bastard Xiao Shangchun set a bad example at the commune, Gugu said. His rationale for opposing the vasectomy campaign was his trifling service as a stretcher-bearer for an Eighth Route Army underground hospital. But when research determined that he was to be removed from his public office and sent back to his village to work the land, he rode his rickety bicycle up to the health centre and insisted that I personally perform the procedure. A notorious lecher, he was a filthy-mouthed hooligan. As he climbed onto the operating table he said to Little Lion: Here’s what puzzles me. There’s a saying — ‘When the essence reaches fullness, it will flow on its own.’ But if you tie off my tube, where will my essence flow to? Will my belly swell to bursting?
She looked at me, red-faced from embarrassment. Prepare him for surgery.
I hadn’t expected him to have an erection while she was prepping him. She’d never seen anything like that before; she dropped the scalpel and cowered in a corner. Clean up your thoughts! I demanded. My thoughts are perfectly clean, he said shamelessly. It got stiff on its own, and there’s nothing I can do about that. All right, then, Gugu said as she picked up a rubber mallet and, with a nonchalant tap, put an end to his erection.
I swear to the heavens, Gugu said, I took scrupulous care in carrying out the procedure on both Wang Jiao and Xiao Shangchun, with total success, but afterward, Wang Jiao walked around bent at the waist, complaining that I’d cut a nerve, and Xiao made a pest of himself at the centre, complaining to county officials that I’d made him impotent. Of those two, Wang Jiao was probably emotionally unstable, while Xiao was nothing but a troublemaker. During the Cultural Revolution, as head of a Red Guard faction, he raped more women than you can count. If we hadn’t performed a vasectomy on him, he might have retained some scruples out of a fear that he’d impregnate someone and suffer serious consequences. But tying off his tubes freed him from all that.
15
Winter, 1967
So many people turned out for the rally to denounce Party Secretary Yang Lin that the revolutionary committee head, Xiao Shangchun, came up with the ingenious idea of moving the site to the retarding basin on the northern bank of the Jiao River. It was the dead of winter. As people looked out over the ice-covered river, they were treated to a vista of glazed beauty. I was the first villager to learn that the rally was to be held there. One day I was ice fishing beneath a floodgate bridge over the basin when I heard loud voices above me. One of them was Xiao Shangchun. I could have picked his voice out of ten thousand. Damn, he said, what a great setting. We’ll hold the rally here. We can put the stage here on the bridge.
A floodgate had been built above the Jiao River Dam to protect the lower reaches. Every year, when summer turned to autumn, the Jiao River crested and the floodgate was opened, transforming marshland into a lake. Northeast Township residents were unhappy with what was done, since marshland was still land, and the only crop that could be planted in the marsh was sorghum. But who were we to take issue with the needs of the nation? This was one of my favourite hangouts when I skipped school, a place where I could sit and watch water rushing through twelve sluice holes. After the water was let out, the former marshland became a lake some ten square li in size, where fish and shrimp were plentiful enough to bring hordes of fishermen and, increasingly, fishmongers. They tried setting up their stalls on the bridge, and when that didn’t work, they moved to the eastern bank, under a row of willows. During the busy season, a line of stalls would stretch at least two li. Once they formed a market, the local marketplace moved from the commune to the eastern bank of the river. The vegetable peddlers came, the egg sellers came, the oil cruller peddlers came, and with them came other marketplace denizens: thieves, hooligans and beggars. Members of the commune’s armed militia turned out several times to clear the area, and their arrival sent undesirables scurrying; the militiamen’s departure witnessed a probing return of the same people. A combination of legal and illegal commerce thus came into being. I loved looking at fish: carp, silver carp, crucian carp, catfish, snakehead fish, eel, and, while I was at it, crabs, loaches and clams. The biggest fish I ever saw there weighed a hundred jin and had a white belly; it looked a little like a pregnant woman. The old fishmonger stood cowering behind the fish, as if he were in possession of a deity. By then I was palling around with those sharp-eyed, keen-eared fishmongers. Why sharp-eyed and keen-eared? Because agents from the tax bureau often came to confiscate their fish, not to mention the idlers in the commune who pretended to be from the tax bureau to trick them out of their wares. That huge fish was nearly taken away by two men in blue uniforms, cigarettes dangling from their lips, and black satchels in their hands. If the fishmonger’s daughter hadn’t come running up crying and making a fuss, and if Qin He hadn’t exposed the two men’s real identities, they’d have carried that fish off with them.