Gugu rolled down her sleeve, feigning indifference, and said, It’s only a watch. What’s the big deal? That casual comment — intended as such — intensified our interest dramatically. My brother spoke up first: Gugu, I’ve only seen teacher Ji’s watch from a distance… can I take a look at yours? Please, Gugu, show it to us, we joined in.
She smiled. You little rascals, it’s just an old wristwatch, not worth looking at. But she took it off her wrist and handed it to him.
Be careful! Mother said.
My brother accepted the watch timidly, cradling it in his palm at first, and then put it up to his ear. When he was finished, he handed it to my sister, who handed it to my second brother when she was finished. He didn’t even have time to hold it up to his ear before Eldest Brother snatched it away and handed it back to Gugu. I showed how unhappy I was by crying.
Mother was quick to scold me: When you grow up, Xiaopao, you’ll run far enough away to have a watch of your own.
Him? Eldest Brother snapped. His own watch? I’ll draw one on his wrist tomorrow.
People cannot be judged by appearance alone any more than the ocean can be measured by bushels, Gugu said. Don’t be swayed by how ugly our Xiaopao is. He could grow up to be someone special.
If he becomes someone special, my sister said, then the pigs out in the sty can turn into tigers.
What country is this from, Gugu? Eldest Brother asked. What brand is it?
It’s Swiss, an Enicar.
Wow! he exclaimed. Second Brother and Sister echoed him.
Warty toads! I hissed angrily.
What’s it worth, Little Sister? Mother asked her.
I don’t know. It was a gift from a friend.
What sort of friend gives something that valuable? Mother said as she gave Gugu a searching look. Are we talking about a new uncle?
It’s almost midnight, Gugu said as she stood up. Bedtime.
Thank heavens my little sister is spoken for, Mother said.
Now don’t you go around saying things, Gugu said, giving us all a stern look. We haven’t even exchanged the horoscope for our birth dates. I’ll tan your hides if you do.
The next morning, maybe because he was feeling guilty for not letting me see Gugu’s watch the night before, my brother drew one on my wrist with a fountain pen. It looked like the real thing; it was beautiful, and I took pains to keep it that way. I kept it dry when I washed my hands and covered it up in the rain. Whenever it started to fade, I borrowed my brother’s pen to add ink. It stayed on my wrist for three whole months.
6
The man who gave Gugu the Enicar wristwatch was an air force pilot. In those days that was something to be excited about — an air force pilot! When they heard the news, my brothers and sisters croaked like an army of frogs, while I turned somersaults in the yard.
This was a joyous event for more than our family; the elation spilled across the township. Everyone considered a pilot the perfect match for Gugu. Cook Wang from the school kitchen, who had fought in the Korean War, was of the opinion that they were made of gold. Can you make a person out of gold? I asked him, filled with doubt. In front of the teachers and the commune cadres, who were eating their dinner, he said: How stupid can you be, Xiaopao Wan? What I mean is, the cost of training an air force pilot to the nation is the equal of seventy kilograms of gold. Oh, my, Mother said when I told her what Wang had said. How in the world are we supposed to treat your new uncle when he comes to the house?
We youngsters spread all sorts of fanciful talk about pilots. Chen Bi said his mother had seen a Soviet pilot when she lived in Harbin. They wore deerskin jackets, high-topped leather boots, had gold inlays in their mouths, wore gold wristwatches, ate black bread and sausage, and drank beer. Xiao Xiachun (Lower Lip, the characters later changed to summer and spring), son of Xiao Shangchun (Upper Lip), the granary watchman, said that China’s pilots ate better than their Soviet counterparts, and even created a menu, as if he were going to cook for them. Breakfast: two eggs, milk, four oily fritters, two steamed buns, and a chunk of pickled tofu. Lunch: braised pork, a whole croaker, and two large corn cakes. Dinner: roasted chicken, two pork buns, two mutton buns, and a bowl of millet congee. Fruit, of course, after each meaclass="underline" bananas, apples, pears, grapes… whatever they couldn’t eat they could take home. Pilots’ leather jackets had two large pockets. What for? For carrying fruit. What people said about the pilots made us drool. We all dreamed of one day becoming air force pilots and living a magical life.
When the air force announced that they were coming to our county’s Number One High School to recruit pilots, my eldest brother signed up excitedly. Our great granddad had worked as a landlord’s hired hand, was a tenant farmer, and served the People’s Liberation Army as a stretcher-bearer. He’d fought in the battle of Mengliang Mesa and was one of those who’d carried the body of Zhang Lingfu down the mountain. My maternal grandmother’s family was also dirt poor. Add to all that the fact that my great granddad was a revolutionary martyr, and our family background and social status were above reproach. One day my brother, who was a high school sports star, a discus thrower, came home for lunch and feasted on a fat lamb’s tail. Back at school that afternoon, he had energy to burn, so he picked up a discus and flung it over the school wall into the field beyond. It so happened that the farmer was ploughing his field at that moment, and the discus hit his water buffalo’s horn, slicing it off. All this is to say that my brother’s background was unimpeachable, his grades in school were excellent, he was especially fit, and his aunt was going to marry an air force pilot. Everyone naturally assumed that even if they only picked one candidate from our county, it would surely be him. He wasn’t chosen. The reason: a scar on his leg from a childhood boil. Our school cook told us that scars were immediate disqualifiers, because the pressure of high-altitude flying would cause them to rupture. Even a set of uneven nostrils would squelch one’s chances.
In sum, from the time my aunt began a romantic relationship with the pilot, we were alert to anything having to do with the air force. I’m now in my fifties, and still haven’t shaken off the essence of vanity or my penchant for showing off, someone who would blare all over town the news that he’d won a hundred yuan in the lottery. Just think, I was only in elementary school and had a future uncle who was an air force pilot. You can imagine how insufferable that made me.
The Jiaozhou airport was fifty li south of our village; the Gaomi airport was sixty li to the west of us. Aeroplanes flying in and out of the Jiaozhou airfield were big, black, and very slow — bombers according to what the adults told us. Aeroplanes that used the Gaomi airfield were swept-wing, silvery aircraft that left contrails and could make spectacular manoeuvres. Eldest Brother said they were Jian-5s, modelled after Soviet MIG-17s, elite fighter planes, the ones that shot the shit out of US jets during the Korean War. Needless to say, these were the planes our future uncle flew, at a time when war fever was at its peak, and training manoeuvres filled the skies over the Gaomi airfield every day. They swept over the township, opening up a site for dogfights. Three more planes arrived one moment, then six, one plane nipping at the tail of another. Suddenly one plane went into a steep dive, pulling up just before crashing into a pine tree at the head of our village and soaring back into the sky like a sparrow hawk. One day there was a thunderous explosion in the sky — Gugu told us she was assisting an older woman who was experiencing convulsions from anxiety, preparing to use her scalpel, when the explosion startled the woman, breaking her concentration; the convulsions stopped, and with one push, the child emerged. The explosion tore the paper window coverings in every house in the village. Shocked by the sound, we couldn’t move for a moment, until our teacher led us outside, where we looked up into a clear blue sky and saw several aeroplanes chasing one that was towing a tubular object. We saw puffs of white smoke emerge from the tubular object, followed by earsplitting explosions. But these bursts of cannon fire weren’t nearly as powerful as the blast that had pounded our eardrums just a moment before, the second most powerful explosion I’ve heard in my entire life. Not even a lightning strike powerful enough to split a willow tree in half made that much noise. It seemed as though the fliers did not want to bring the target down, since the puffs of white smoke appeared near but not on the tubular object. Even as it disappeared from view, it had not suffered a direct hit. Chen Bi rubbed his nose, which had earned him the affectionate title of ‘Little Russian’, and sneered: China’s flyboys can’t hit a damned thing. If those had been Soviet pilots, one burst would have brought that target down! I knew his comment stemmed from jealousy towards me. Born and reared in our village, he’d never seen a Soviet dog, let alone one of its air force’s top guns.