‘So hit me, you vicious boy!’
And I did.
‘Again.’
I wanted to kill her. She would rather have my hate than my love. She groaned. I groaned as well. My whip was very hard.
She cried out once, but she didn’t want to waste her breath. She held it in like a jug holds the smell of a good wine. With every blow her ecstasy increased. She was so far gone she couldn’t move. How could she think only of her own pleasure? I had to wake her up.
But how?
I knew. I knew what she was most afraid of. As I fucked her I shouted ‘Mum, Mum! I love you, I love you, Mum! I love you, Mum!’
Write that down. Make sure you write that down. You’re looking at me as if I’m despicable, as if I deserve to die, as if my dead body should be paraded through the streets. You think I’m some kind of animal, but look around you. We’re all animals. You won’t admit it, I know. You’ve been washed clean of your mother’s blood. You’re civilised. You have a clear conscience …
In 1877, Lewis H Morgan in his work Ancient Society observed that American Iroquois Indians have a very unusual naming convention for kinsfolk. They address their biological father as ‘Father’, but also all of their father’s brothers. In the same way, ‘my mother’s sister is my mother’. This form of address is like a living fossil that preserves information about primitive bloodlines. Similarly in Chinese, the word 
(jie) originally meant ‘mother’, as shown in a number of old works, and yet in common speech today the word is used to mean ‘wife’, ‘lover’ or ‘young woman’. 
(niang) means ‘mother’, but the original meaning was ‘young woman’. An ancient dictionary says: ‘Niang: a word meaning young girl’. The Southern Dynasties poem ‘Midnight Songs’ has this lyric: ‘See a beautiful young girl’s happy face/ she hopes to make a golden match.’ But the word used here for ‘young girl’’ 
(niangzi) also meant ‘wife.’
Are you sure about this?
You can shut the book now.
Do you choose to read on?
Going to Heaven
1
When I was learning to write, I always got a thrill as I traced over the character ‘death’ in my red-lined copybook. Some Chinese characters are so expressive: the character ‘smile’, 
looks like a radiant grin, and ‘cry’, 
has a sad face. ‘Death’, 
looks like someone meeting the end fearlessly, head on.
My dad used to make his living from the dead. He was an undertaker. Our house was always filled with strangers coming and going. My dad would paste up hand-written leaflets with his address and phone number in the towns and villages nearby: ‘For all weddings and funerals — you’re in safe hands with us.’ Eventually he began to get his notices printed and they looked as elegant as wedding invitations.
My dad was a fine figure of a man with big square features and ruddy cheeks like Lord Guan, the legendary general in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. My grandmother used to sigh ‘With a face like that, you should have been a civil servant, but you ended up messing about with ghosts.’ I never understood what my granny had against my dad’s line of business.
Dad always kept things very relaxed in the office, handing out cigarettes to the bereaved. They hardly ever tried to bargain him down — when they thought the price was too high, they simply found some excuse to leave. If anyone did have the nerve to start bargaining, my dad would draw himself up to his full height, and say: ‘Are you trying to get this thing done properly, or just save money?’
And they would fall silent.
My father always refused to haggle because it would demean his profession. And the truth was, hardly anyone tried to scrimp and save where a burial was concerned. You might be poor in life, but never in death. My dad took their money and put it to good use — he was a good businessman. He only ever carried a battered leather briefcase packed with pens, notebooks and rope, but once the family bought him paper and cloth, he could fit out a mourning room with flowers, swags and hangings in no time at all. If he made them buy a lot, they thought he’d done a good job — he wasn’t worried about taking their money.
When someone died, crowds of mourners would show up and stand around chatting. Gifts of carpets and bedding to honour the deceased were piled against the walls, with heaps of silver candles and coloured cakes all over the floor. Everyone talked and laughed and waited for the food, as if they’d come to a party. It was a chance for people who had not met in years to meet up. They gave out name cards and talked about how to stay in touch. Even before the burial, people would be fixing up drinking competitions for the wake and laying bets that they could drink each other under the table.
When my dad had a funeral to arrange my mum helped too, so I got taken along. I enjoyed mooching around the mourning room. Even when I was pretty small, I was quite used to it all — the smell, the casket with the dead person. The first time I saw one, I thought it looked funny.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘A coffin,’ said the grown-ups. Or, at least, that’s what I realised later. At the time, I thought they said ‘coffer’ — somewhere for a rich man to keep his savings. No wonder a funeral was a big show like a wedding.
The coffin was always a gleaming red. I could never understand why it was such a cheerful colour when someone had died, but red was for a big occasion. When someone died the neighbours had to let the family put tables burning incense outside the door, and had to put up with the noise of fire crackers, the smoke and smell of candles and paper offerings, the general pandemonium. No one could complain, because there had been a death.
The music started up at first light. I loved the tunes, I loved listening to the trumpets and tubas. The players all dressed up in military uniforms with badges and peaked caps. Sometimes, if we went to a crematorium, other families would have their own musicians, dressed in different uniforms. Each funeral had its own band with outfits in all colours — green, blue and red — and as soon as one finished playing, another took over.
Our bandleader was a man with one eye. He could play anything. When he first arrived, he had his tuba tied to his back with a piece of rope.
‘What can you play, One Eye?’ asked my dad.
‘Anything. I only have to hear it once on TV.’
‘I don’t want any old thing from the TV,’ said my dad sternly. ‘I’ll tell you just want I want: Serving as a Soldier.’
So One Eye stretched out his neck like a cockerel and started to play Serving as a Soldier. He followed up with Where is Happiness? A Springtime Story, Into New Times, and The Wedding Sedan … ‘taking my bride in my arms into the wedding sedan’. He really could play anything.
As he tootled away on his tuba, Dad laughed and said: ‘OK, One Eye, god may have messed up your eye, but at least you’ve got a good mouth on you. You certainly can play a good tune.’
One Eye never had any money. He was no good at farming and he was no businessman. He couldn’t afford a wife, so he spent all day playing his tuba and took it to bed with him at night. Before he started in our band, he had so little to eat, he was half starved. Luckily for him there were always weddings and funerals.
Dad looked down on One Eye, and didn’t try to hide it. One Eye wore his band uniform all the time — it was his best outfit. ‘That’s for when you’re in the band!’ Dad shouted at him. ‘If you wear it out, you’ll have to buy a new one.’
One Eye was the leader of the band, always the first to play, making splurting sounds as the tip of his tongue licked away at the tuba. As soon as he started to play, the other band members joined in, making a great wave of sound. Then One Eye would stop, take his lips from the tuba, swear at this musician for losing his way or that one for playing out of tune, and carry on.