The fall harvest season arrived before you knew it. In the mountains, the sweet smell of corn was so thick it would stick in your throat. Drop by drop, the autumn light streamed down onto the roofs of houses, onto the tips of grass, and onto the hair of the peasants out working in the fields. This sunlight, shimmering like agate, illuminated the entire village.
It illuminated the entire mountain ridge.
It illuminated the entire world.
It was a bountiful harvest. During this period of the year, a dry spell would usually be followed by a flood, and by the time the corn was ready for pollination, the balance of sun and rain would be perfect. Down in the plains the harvest was meagre, while up in the mountains it was extraordinary. The ears of corn were almost as thick as a man’s leg, leaving the stalks doubled over like a hunchback. A few of the stalks were broken and lying on the ground, struggling to grow. You Village, often called Four Idiots Village, consisted of a few hills, and had abundant harvests. Between the white dew and the autumn equinox – which is to say, between the fifteenth and the sixteenth solar terms – people began harvesting corn. All the land belonging to the family of Fourth Wife You was on the mountain ridge furthest from the village. During previous years’ land reallocations, all of the families in the village felt that this field was too far away. The village chief told Fourth Wife You that if her idiot children wanted to eat, she would need to farm the field herself, and she was welcome to farm as much of it as she wished. Fourth Wife You therefore took her four children with her to sow the field. She sowed the entire ridge, amounting to perhaps eight or ten mu of land, but who knew this year it would yield such an extraordinary harvest?
Fourth Wife You took her idiot children out to the fields three days in a row, and spent another three transporting everything back, but still had only harvested a third of her grain. By this point she was exhausted, and found herself increasingly annoyed by this extraordinary harvest. In the endless corn field, green stalks and dried leaves were piled high, and stepping inside was like entering the sea. As Fourth Wife You was carrying the baskets of corn up to the head of the field, she heard her Third Daughter calling softly out to her, ‘Ma, Ma! Won’t you do something about Fourth Idiot? He keeps following me around, touching my breasts and pinching my nipples.’ By this point, there was already a huge pile of corn at the head of the field. The sky was high and the clouds were sparse. The purple strands of corn silk were just beginning to emerge, and they swayed back and forth in the sunlight. Fourth Wife You turned in the direction of the voice, and sure enough her son was chasing her daughter around. He had ripped open her dress, and her swollen breasts, white as a rabbit’s head, were bouncing around as though they were about to hop out of her clothes. Fourth Wife You stared in disbelief. She saw no shame on her Third Daughter’s face as Fourth Idiot grabbed her breasts. Instead her face had a light glow, like a New Year’s painting. Behind her, Fourth Idiot giggled, desiring his sister yet fearing his mother, his mouth full of saliva and his eyes full of tears. Fourth Wife You didn’t know what exactly had led to this. Part of her wanted to get to the bottom of things, but at the same time she recognised that her children were idiots and she didn’t know how to begin to ask them. As she stood there hesitating, something flashed before her and suddenly her husband, Stone You, appeared at the head of the field. He said that Fourth Idiot had grabbed the buttons on Third Daughter’s dress, and that he had seen it all clearly from the field. Fourth Wife You shifted her gaze from her husband back to her son, and said, ‘Fourth Babe, come over here. Mother wants to tell you something.’ The boy came over hesitantly, and Fourth Wife You slapped his face.
Fourth Idiot grabbed his cheek and began sobbing.
Fourth Wife You roared, ‘Don’t you know that Third Daughter is your own sister?’
Fourth Idiot headed into the corn field like a dog with its tail between its legs. He sat on a pile of corn stalks, staring into the sky and bawling. Soon, the entire hillside was filled with his cries.
Thinking the storm had passed and that they needed to get back to harvesting the corn, Fourth Wife You emptied the basket on the ground and told her husband, ‘You can go do your thing, I’ll continue working until nightfall. You don’t need to keep returning.’ She turned around and saw Third Daughter staring at her intently, as if she were dying for something to eat.
She said, ‘I’ve already beaten your brother. What more do you want?’
Third Daughter said, ‘Ma, I want a husband. I dream of having a husband, like my two sisters, to hold when I sleep.’
Fourth Wife You stared at her in shock.
Her husband also stared in shock.
Standing next to the pile of corn, Fourth Wife You looked at her daughter, who was a full head taller and half a body wider than she, whose breasts were as large as mountains. She suddenly realised that her daughter was already twenty-eight years old. By the time she herself was twenty-eight, Fourth Wife You had already given birth to four children, and it was also when she was twenty-eight – when Fourth Babe was six months old – that her husband decided to blow out his own flame. That day, she carried her son to the town clinic, and it was the clinic’s doctor who blew out the final flame of the You family lamp.
Fourth Wife You was seventeen when, humming a line of opera, she married into the You family. She got pregnant a year later, and proceeded to have another child every eighteen months or so. After her first child, she lay on the post-partum bed and enjoyed having her husband wait on her, and hummed continuously for an entire month. What she didn’t know was that her eldest, second, and third daughters would all turn out to be idiots. At the age of six months, their eyes grew dull and their pupils shrank. They didn’t learn to speak until they were three or four, and at the age of five or six they were still playing with pig shit and horse urine on the ground. Even as teenagers, they were still wetting their beds and soiling their pants. After seeing three children in a row turn out to be idiots, she and her husband didn’t dare have any more, and they didn’t dare sing a single line of opera. But after several years of not having children, they decided they wanted a son and, full of hope, the couple set to work. In the end, Fourth Wife You gave birth to a son. By six months he could already speak, and by eight or nine months he could run around. Thinking that she had finally given birth to a bright one, she and Stone You would sometimes recite to their son several lines from a play. When the child was eighteen months old, however, he came down with a fever. This initially appeared to be an ordinary illness, but the fever continued overnight. When his parents examined him the next morning, they found that his mouth was crooked and his eyes were slanted. He could no longer speak, and couldn’t even hold a rice bowl. He giggled and stared into space, and didn’t seem to be aware of anything.
Everyone in the village was astonished by this development. Fourth Wife You and Stone You’s faces and bodies, rooms and courtyard, all turned black, and then white from the devastating news.
The villagers all told them to go quickly to the township clinic. So, they went.
The doctor asked, ‘How many brothers does the boy have?’
Fourth Wife You said, ‘He has three older sisters.’
The doctor asked, ‘Are his sisters all right?’
Fourth Wife You replied, ‘Their minds… are not all there.’
The doctor paused and stared intently at Fourth Wife You for what seemed like an eternity. He asked whether there was anyone else in her family who suffered from this illness. Fourth Wife You said no, there wasn’t, and added that both of her parents were wholers. The doctor asked about her grandparents, and she said that they were wholers as well. The doctor asked about her great-grandparents, and Fourth Wife You replied that she had not met them but her father had told her that her great-grandfather could still do the lion dance at the age of eighty-two, and that her great-grandmother could still belt out opera lines at the age of seventy-nine. As the doctor continued his questions, he shifted his gaze to Stone You.