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  Penguin Specials

  ‘We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’

  Sir Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books.

  The first affordable quality books for a mass audience were brought out by Penguin nearly eighty years ago. And while much has changed since then, the way we read books is only now becoming different. Sometimes it is still only a hardback or paperback book that will do. But at other times we prefer to read on something either more portable – a dedicated reading device or our smart mobile phone – or more connected, such as a tablet or a computer.

  Where we are or how much time we have often decides what it is we will read next.

  Penguin Specials are designed to fill a gap. They are short, they are original and affordable, and they are written by some of today’s best and most exciting writers.

  Written to be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, these brief books provide a short escape into a fictional world or act as a primer in a particular field or provide a new angle on an old subject.

  Always informative and entertaining, Penguin Specials offer excellent writing that you can read on the move or in a spare moment for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

  Also by Mo Yan

  Explosions and Other Stories

  Red Sorghum

  The Garlic Ballads

  The Republic of Wine

  Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh

  Big Breasts and Wide Hips

  Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

  Change

  POW!

  Sandalwood Death

  Frog

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter One

  An autumn morning, the air thickly humid, a layer of transparent dewdrops clung to blades of grass and roof tiles. Leaves on the scholar tree had begun to turn yellow; a rusty iron bell hanging from a branch was also dew laden. The production team leader, a padded jacket draped over his shoulders, ambled toward the bell, carrying a sorghum flatbread in one hand and clutching a thick-peeled leek in the other. By the time he reached the bell, his hands were empty, but his cheeks were puffed out like a field mouse scurrying away with autumn provisions. He yanked the clapper against the side of the bell, which rang out loudly – clang, clang, clang. People young and old streamed out of the lanes to converge beneath the bell, eyes fixed on the team leader, like a crowd of marionettes. He swallowed hard, and wiped his stubble-ringed mouth on his sleeve. All eyes watched that mouth as it opened – to spit out a stream of curses: ‘I’ll be fucked if those stupid commune pricks aren’t taking two of our stonemasons one day and two carpenters the next. He turned to a tall, broad-shouldered young man. ‘They’re breaking up our workforce. The commune plans to widen the floodgate behind the village, mason,’ he said to him. ‘Every team has to send them a mason and an unskilled labourer. It might as well be you.’

  The handsome young mason had black eyebrows and white teeth, the contrast lending him a heroic bearing. A gentle shake of his head sent back a lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead. Speaking with a slight stammer, he asked who the unskilled labourer would be.

  The team leader folded his arms, as if to fight off the cold, and rolled his eyes like pinwheels. ‘A woman makes the most sense,’ he rasped, ‘but we need them for picking cotton, and sending a man would be a waste of manpower.’ He looked around and his gaze fell on the wall. A boy of ten or so stood in a corner. He was barefoot and stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of long, baggy, green-striped white shorts that were stained by grass and dried blood. The shorts ended at his knees, above calves shiny with scars.

  ‘I see you’re still with us, Hei-hai, you little shit!’ the team leader said as he studied the boy’s jutting breast-bone. ‘I thought you’d gone down to meet the King of Hell. Are you over the shakes?’

  The boy didn’t respond, just kept his bright black eyes fixed on the team leader. He had a big head and a skinny neck that seemed in danger of snapping from the load it carried.

  ‘Feel like earning a few work points? Though I don’t know what a pitiful little thing like you could possibly do. A fart would knock you off your feet. Go with the mason to the floodgate, how’s that? But first run home and get a hammer, then you can sit up there and smash rocks, as many as you feel like, or as few. If history’s any judge, these commune jobs are just busy work meant to fool the foreign devils.’

  The boy shuffled up to the mason and tugged at his jacket. He was rewarded with a friendly pat on his shaved gourd of a head. ‘Go home and ask your stepmother for a hammer, and I’ll meet you at the bridgehead.’

  The boy took off. He had all the appearance of running, his rail-thin arms flailing like a scarecrow in the wind, but none of the speed. All eyes were on him, and as they looked at his bare back, they suddenly felt the cold. The team leader tugged at his jacket. ‘When you get home,’ he shouted, ‘tell your stepmother to give you a shirt, you poor little beggar!’

  He stole in quietly through the gate. A snot-nosed little boy with a pushed-in face was sitting in the yard, playing in the urine-wetted mud. He looked up and threw open his arms: ‘Bro . . . bro . . . pick up . . .’ Hei-hai bent down, picked up a light red apricot leaf to wipe his stepbrother’s nose, then slapped the snotty leaf onto the wall like a leaflet. He waved the boy off and slipped into the house, where he picked up a claw hammer from a corner and slipped back outside. The little boy called out again, so Hei-hai snatched up a fallen branch, drew a wide circle around his stepbrother on the ground, then tossed the branch away and sped to the rear of the village, where a medium-sized river flowed, spanned by a stone bridge with nine arched openings. Owing to summer floods, the trunks of weeping willows growing in profusion on the levee were covered with red fibrous roots. Now that the water had receded, the roots had dried out. The willow leaves had yellowed and fallen into the river, to be carried slowly downstream. Ducks gliding near the riverbank quacked as they dug their red beaks into aquatic grasses in search of food, though who knew if they found any.

  The boy was wheezing by the time he reached the levee. His jutting breastbone seemed to contain a clucking hen.

  ‘Hurry up, Hei-hai!’ the mason shouted from the bridgehead.

  Hei-hai, still appearing to be running, made his way over to the mason. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ the mason asked as he looked him over.

  Hei-hai just gaped at him. The mason was in work clothes – pants and jacket over a red athletic shirt, its dazzling collar turned up flamboyantly. The boy stared at that collar as if it were a bonfire.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ the mason asked, rubbing the boy’s head, which rocked back and forth like a drum rattle. ‘You,’ he said, ‘your stepmother has knocked the sense right out of you.’

  The mason whistled a tune, rapping his fingers on the boy’s head as they walked onto the bridge. The boy stepped carefully to keep his head where the mason could rap it with thick knuckles that were hard as little clubs. It hurt, but he bore it silently, with only a slight wince. The mason could whistle just about anything with his moist, red lips. Puckering them up and spreading them a bit, he mimicked the crisp, melodic notes of a meadowlark and sent them soaring into the sky.

  They crossed the bridge, climbed the levee and headed west to the floodgate, about half a li away. The floodgate was also a bridge of sorts, the difference being a flashboard that held back the water when it was down and released it when it was raised. The levee’s gentle slope, densely covered with feathery river locusts, gave out onto a wide, spon
gy sandbank where wild grass was already taking root in the wake of the summer flood. Rich open country spread out beyond the levee as far as the eye could see, saturated from the annual floods with silt deposits that turned once hard black earth into fertile soil. The most recent flood had been light enough to spare the levee, so the gate had remained shut. The floodplain was so densely planted with Bengalese jute it was like a virgin forest. A light mist shrouded the field on that early morning, lending it an oceanic quality.

  The mason and Hei-hai strolled up to the floodgate, where two teams waited on the sandy ground. Men made up one team, women the other, like a pair of rival camps. A commune cadre, notebook in hand, stood between the teams and gestured as he spoke to them, raising and lowering his arms. The mason led Hei-hai along the floodgate’s concrete steps and walked up to the man. ‘Reporting in from our village, Deputy Director Liu,’ he said. He had often been temporarily assigned to the commune, where Director Liu was frequently in charge of projects, so they already knew each other.

  Hei-hai was staring at Director Liu’s broad mouth. When the purple lips that formed that mouth came together they produced a string of sounds: ‘You again, you slippery devil. That damned village of yours sure knows how to meet quotas. They’ve sent me a man who could slip through the holes of any strainer. Just my luck. Where’s your helper?’

  Hei-hai felt the mason’s knuckles on his head.

  ‘Him?’ Director Liu wrapped his hand around the boy’s neck and wobbled his head back and forth. Hei-hai’s heels nearly left the ground. ‘Why send me this skinny little monkey?’ he snarled. ‘Can he even lift a hammer?’

  ‘All right now, Director Liu Taiyang,’ the mason said as he pried the man’s hand from Hei-hai’s neck. ‘The glory of socialism is that everyone eats. Hei-hai comes from three generations of poor peasants. If socialism won’t take care of him, who will? Besides, his mother’s gone, and he lives with a stepmother. His daddy went off to the north-east like a man possessed and hasn’t been home for three years. He might be bear food by now or lying in the bellies of wolves. Where’s your class sentiment, Director Liu Taiyang?’ This he said partly in jest.

  Hei-hai was lightheaded from the shaking. He’d been close enough to the director to smell the alcohol on his breath, and it made him sick. It was what his stepmother smelled like much of the time. After his father left, she often sent him to the canteen to barter dried yams for alcohol, and she didn’t stop drinking till she was drunk. That was when the beating and the pinching and the biting started.

  ‘A skinny little monkey!’ Director Liu spat out, then turned and continued lecturing the others.

  Hammer in hand, Hei-hai scampered onto the floodgate, about a hundred metres long and a dozen or more metres tall, and fronted on the north by a rectangular trough, the same length as the floodgate itself. It contained the remnants of the summer floodwaters. The boy stood atop the floodgate, gripping the stone railing as he gazed down at the water, where scrawny black fish swam clumsily between the rocks. Both ends of the gate butted up against the towering levee, which was part of the road to the county town. There were stone railings, half a metre high, at each end of the five-metre-wide gate. A few years earlier, a passing horse cart had knocked a number of cyclists over the side, leading to broken legs and hips and even a fatality. He’d been younger then, of course, and had had a lot more meat on his bones. His father hadn’t left for the north-east and his stepmother hadn’t started drinking. He ran over to see what was going on, but arrived too late, after the cyclists had been taken away, and all that remained in the trough was muddy water stained red. His nose was keen enough to detect the stink of blood floating up from the water.

  Gripping the cold white stone railing with one hand, he rapped it with his hammer, causing both railing and hammer to ring out. And as he listened intently to the sound, scenes from the past flitted in and out of his eyes before disappearing. A bright sun shone down on the jute field beyond the levee, and he watched a fine mist skitter among the plants. The fields were too densely planted: low to the ground there were gaps between the stalks, but the upper branches and leafy tops came together, damp and glistening. He let his eyes drift westward, past the jute field to a patch of sweet potatoes, where the fleshy purple leaves gleamed. Hei-hai knew they were a new variety, short vines heavily laden with potatoes bigger and sweeter than most, with white skins and red pulp; they burst open when cooked. A vegetable plot bordered the sweet potato patch to the north. Now that all private land had reverted to the commune, this is where production brigade members planted vegetables. Hei-hai knew that both the vegetable plot and the sweet potato patch belonged to a village five li away. It was one of the richer villages. The vegetable plot was planted with cabbages and radishes, whose long, lush tassels were such a deep green they were nearly black. A lonely two-room shed in the centre of the plot was home to a lonely old man. The boy knew all this. Jute plants as far as the eye could see spread out north of the field. The same was true to the west. With jute on three sides and the levee on the fourth, the sweet-potato plot and vegetable field looked like a big square well. As the boy’s thoughts wandered, the purple and green leaves turned into autumn well water, and then the jute became water, while sparrows skimming the tips of the jute plants were transformed into green kingfishers snapping up tiny shrimp from the water’s surface.

  Deputy Director Liu was still lecturing. Here is what he said: If agriculture is to follow the Dazhai Commune model, irrigation will be its lifeblood. That’s one of the points of the Eight Point Charter for Agriculture. Agriculture without irrigation is like a child with no mother. Or a child with a mother with no breasts. Or it’s a child with a mother with breasts but no milk. Without milk the child will die, or if it lives, it’ll turn out like this little monkey (Director Liu pointed to Hei-hai, up on the floodgate. The boy had his back to the people and they could see two sun-illuminated scars streaking down his back like jagged lightning bolts). And besides, the gate is so narrow it claims lives every year. The commune’s revolutionary committee takes this very seriously, and after studying the problem from all angles, we’ve decided to widen the gate. To get the job done, we’ve mobilised labourers from all brigades, more than two hundred of you. This is the first stage: girls and married women, young and old, plus the little monkey (he pointed a second time to Hei-hai up on the gate whose scars now shone like mirrors) will break up all the rocks within five hundred square metres to the size of restorative pills or egg yolks. Masons will then shape the pieces of stone appropriately. These are our two blacksmiths (he pointed to a pair of deeply-tanned men, one tall, the other short, one old, the other young), who will repair chisels the masons have dulled. Those of you who live close by will return to your villages for meals, the others will eat in the village up ahead, where we’ve set up a field kitchen. The same for sleeping: those who live farther away will spend the nights under the bridge openings (he pointed to the arched openings below the floodgate). The women will sleep from east to west, the men from west to east. Straw will be spread out on the ground for sleeping, fluffy as spring mattresses, too fucking comfy for the likes of you.

  ‘Are you going to sleep under one, Director Liu?’

  ‘I’m in charge, I’ve got a bicycle, and it’s none of your business where I plan to sleep, so don’t get your guts in a stew. Do soldiers ride horses just because their officer does? Now get your asses to work. You’ll get plenty of work points, and I’ll throw in a measure of water conservation grain and twenty water conservation cents. Anyone who doesn’t want to work can fuck off. Even the little monkey will get money and rations, and by the time work on the gate is finished he’ll have put on weight, you can bet on it.’

  Hei-hai didn’t hear a word Director Liu said. He had draped his skinny arms over the railing and was holding his hammer in both hands. He heard music like birdsong and the chirps of autumn insects from the jute field. The retreating mist seemed to thunder as it caromed off jute leaves and both deep
red and light green stalks. The sound of grasshoppers rubbing legs against forewings was like a train crossing an iron bridge. He’d once seen a train in a dream, a one-eyed monster running at a crouch, faster than a horse. What if it had run standing up instead? The train had just stood up in his dream when he was awakened by a swat from his stepmother’s hearth broom. She told him to fetch water from the river. The swat didn’t hurt, that was just a blast of heat, but the sound was like someone far away clubbing a jute sack filled with cotton. With the carrying pole over his shoulder, he hooked on the full buckets of water; they barely cleared the ground, and he could hear his bones creak. His ribs pushed against his hipbones. Holding the swaying pole with both hands, he climbed the steep levee onto a path twisted by willow trees, whose trunks seemed fitted with magnets; they pulled the tinplate buckets away from him. One hit a tree and sloshed water onto the path, turning it so slippery it was like stepping on melon rinds. He fell awkwardly, and the water soaked him like a waterfall. His face smacked into the ground, flattening his nose, which was scored by a grassy stalk. Blood ran from his nose into his mouth. He spit out one mouthful, swallowed the next. His buckets sang merrily as they rolled down to the river. He clambered up and ran after them. One rested at an angle in riverbank reeds, the other was being carried downstream. He chased it down the riverbank, running on four-spined star thistle that he and the other kids called dog-turd grass. He tried to grip the burrs with his toes, but still slipped into the river. It was warm and nearly reached his navel. His shorts billowed out and wrapped around his waist like a jellyfish. Now wading, he sloshed after his bucket, and when he caught it, he turned and headed back upstream, holding up the bucket in one hand and paddling with the other. The river ran hard, making him stumble as he leaned forward and thrust his neck out. It felt to him as if a school of tiny fish had encircled his legs, and began nibbling gently. He stopped, trying to capture the sensation, but it vanished. The river darkened, as if the fish were fleeing in panic. But the pleasant sensation returned once he started walking again. The fish were back, it seemed. This time he didn’t stop, just kept forging ahead, eyes half shut, moving forward.