Pow!

been a lazy good-for-nothing most of his life and never done any sort of work with his hands. I snorted in dissatisfaction. Mother came out of the house, the cleaver still in her hand, and her hair standing up round her head like the magpie's nest in the village willow tree. ‘Luo Tong,’ she shouted, ‘Luo Xiaotong, you two sons of bitches, you scruffy bastards, I wouldn't care if I died today if I could take the two of you with me. Today will see the end of this family!’ The terrible look on her face was proof that this was no joke, that this time she meant it, that she was ready to kill us both. Ten men are no match for a woman on the warpath, they say. In a situation like this, meeting the charge meant certain death. The best option? Run for your life! My father may have led a dissipated life but he was no fool. The smart man avoids dangers ahead. He swept me up, tucked me under his arm, turned and ran towards the wall, not the gate, which would have been a mistake, since, though we owned nothing of value, Mother had inherited from her family the bad habit of securing the gate with a brass lock at night. Actually, if there was one thing we owned that could bring in enough to buy a pig's head, it was that lock. I'm sure that whenever my father's hunger for meat came upon him, he must have thought of selling it. But Mother loved that lock as much as she loved her own ears, since it was part of her dowry, the one gift that symbolized her parents’ feelings for her. If Father had carried me over to the gate, even if he'd broken it down, the time wasted would have allowed Mother to reach us with her cleaver and open up our heads like blossoming flowers. So he carried me to the wall instead, and all but somersaulted over it, putting my enraged Mother and a whole lot of trouble behind us. I harboured no doubts about her ability to scamper over the wall, like we'd done, but she chose not to. Once she'd driven us out of the yard, she stopped chasing us. She jumped about for a while at the foot of the wall, then went back inside to finish chopping the rotting sweet potatoes and fill the air with loud curses. It was a brilliant way to let off steam: no bloodletting and no mess, no falling foul with the law, yet I knew that those rotten potatoes were substitutes for the heads of her bitter enemies. But now, as I think back, the true bitter enemy in her mind was neither Father nor me—it was Aunty Wild Mule. She was convinced that the slut had seduced my father, and I simply can't say if that was or was not a fair assessment of the situation. Where Father and Aunty Wild Mule's relationship was concerned, the only ones who knew who seduced whom, who cast the first flirtatious glance, were the two of them.

    When I reach this point in my tale, an unusual warm current floods my heart. The woman who has just hidden behind the statue of the Horse Spirit looks a lot like Aunty Wild Mule. Though she seems familiar I won't let my thoughts turn in that direction, because Aunty Wild Mule died ten years ago. Or perhaps she didn't. Or perhaps she did and has been reborn. Or perhaps someone else's soul came back to use her body. Waves of confusion ripple through my mind as the scene before me seems to float in the air.

POW! 5

    My father was much smarter than Lao Lan. He'd never studied physics but he knew all about positive and negative electricity; he'd never studied biology but he was an expert in sperm and eggs; and he'd never studied chemistry but he was well aware that formaldehyde can kill bacteria, keep meat from spoiling and stabilize proteins, which is how he guessed that Lao Lan had injected formaldehyde into his meat. If getting rich had been on his agenda he'd have had no trouble becoming the wealthiest man in the village, of that I'm sure. He was a dragon among men, but dragons have no interest in accumulating property. People have seen critters like squirrels and rats dig holes to store up food, but who's seen a tiger, the king of the animals, do something like that? They spend most of their time sleeping in their lairs, coming out only when hunger sends them hunting for prey. Most of the time my father cared only about eating, drinking and having a good time, coming out only when hunger pangs sent him looking for money. Never for a moment was he like Lao Lan and people of that ilk, who accumulated blood money, putting a knife in white and taking it out red. Nor was he interested in going down to the train station