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Chapter One

A Present Just for Me

I was eight years old the year my kid sister was born. You know, when you are just around the age of eight, you get hit by virtually every stroke of bad luck out there. I ended up with a case of German measles that later turned into pneumonia—I was laid up for, must have been what, six months? During that time my parents ditched me at the run-down juancun where my grandpa lived. Grandma made me hot chicken soup and rice with pig liver. After five meals a day of that it got to the point where even in my dreams I was coughing up chicken necks. I will always remember the strange sight of Grandma's gold-plated front teeth as she blew on the hot soup and lectured me. Puffing on the soup, she would tell me, "A bowl of soup before you eat is even better than prescription medicine. Once you're all better and get your strength back, you can go home and see your little sister." (At the time my sister had yet to be born, but Grandma was already quite sure about her sex.) She made it seem as if my little sister were my present for being such a good patient.

    In the beginning I really thought that if I was good and had my shots, took my medicine, ate my chicken soup and pig liver, stayed away from the window so I wouldn't get a draft—as long as I did everything that I didn't want to do and didn't do anything that I wanted to do—I would get a baby sister as a present. And then one day when my father came over to Grandpa's place with a couple jars of beef cubes, powdered milk, and all kinds of other worthless garbage, I told him that I wantedto go home. He glared back at me, saying, "Go home? Your little sister hasn't even been born yet and already you want to kill her with your pneumonia?"

    Last year I went with my sister when she had her abortion, and in that gynecology ward, which reeked with the irritating fishy stench of disinfectant, I shared our father's bullshit comment with my sister for the very first time. She opened her pale cracked lips and said, "You must have fucking hated me back then." Pulling her slender hand out from underneath the sheet, she first wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes and then grabbed hold of my wrist. "I must be hateful," she said, laughing. "I've always been nothing but a despicable wang ba dan, haven't I?"

    I have absolutely no idea where I learned the term wang ba dan, or just how I taught it to my sister. All I know is that the first time I used this expression it was directed at my father. Hearing that word sneak out of my mouth, my grandpa and grandma instantly screamed out in unison, "What did you say?"

    "Dad's a wang ba dan," I repeated.

    Grandpa and Grandma must have been shocked out of their wits. They immediately jumped out of their rattan chairs and came over to me. One of them glared at me with light-bulb eyes while the other squatted down to rub my forehead. They spent the entire afternoon cross-examining me on how wang ba dan had escaped from my mouth and explaining the origin of the term.

    Grandma believed that wang ba referred to a turtle. Now this turtle represents any one of those johns who, after going for his share of romps in the whorehouse, starts to really hit it off with one particular prostitute. So wang ba dan, under normal circumstances, refers to the illegitimate child of the prostitute and the turtle. Now if I curse my father as a wang ba dan, that will make me a turtle grandson, and if we follow this logical progression, it will make my grandparents a turtle and a hooker. This explanation truly enriched my knowledge of the world—at least I learned "romp," "turtle grandson," and other new vocabulary words that I would later make frequent use of. What broadened my horizons even further was the fact that Grandpa disagreed—he insisted that that wang ba did not mean the turtle in the whorehouse, but the turtle in the ocean! He said that after sea turtles breed, the male runs off, leaving the female to lay and incubate the eggs. But the female can't do everything herself, so she gets another nearby male turtle to help out. This male turtle, who obviously has absolutely zero common sense, keeps believing that all those baby turtles are his, so he faithfully carries out all fatherly responsibilities with the utmost care. Looking at it like this, the male turtle is a worthless idiot while the female is nothing better than a prostitute; this is why, in so many people's minds, wang ba dan is tied to the term "bastard."

    It seemed as if my grandparents had come to a bit of a disagreement as to the origin of the term wang ba dan. This apparently stemmed from the fact that Grandma felt that the first male turtle was truly the most despicable figure in the story. She thought that he took advantage of the mother turtle, leaving her to take care of all those baby turtles; so how could she be compared to a prostitute? Moreover, that second male who came to help out wasn't bad; at least he knew what loyalty was. And that little wang ba in the egg, what did he do wrong? How can you compare him to a bastard? It's not like he doesn't have a father, this father is that first male turtle, so just what is so illegitimate about him? The more Grandma spoke, the more furious she became. In the end I couldn't figure out if she was annoyed at that male turtle, at the whole origin of the expression wang ba dan, or at Grandpa, who was sitting beside her violently shaking his head. In any case, she declared that she wasn't cooking dinner that night.

    "It is totally unnecessary for you to get so pissed off over a bastard wang ba!" Grandpa exclaimed.

    That was the last sentence uttered for the evening in our tattered room in the run-down juancun. Even today I still haven't forgotten that scene and the stunning impression that it left. As time goes by, I feel more and more that the whole thing stemmed from the simple fact that Grandma didn't know just whom she should be angry at, and all the while it was, as Grandpa said, "totally unnecessary."

    During the last period of my sick stay at the dingy juancun, I had all but given up hope of returning home. Just like the chicken soup and pig liver, my father's temper had lost its flavor. I had even forgotten about my baby sister—the prize I was to get for coming home. Even after Grandpa ran home excitedly all the way from the hospital and confirmed Grandma's conjecture about my kid sister's sex, I still didn't think there was anything the least bit odd about it. That day was the fourteenth of April, a date my little sister would remind me of for many years to come. According to those who are experts in being thankful, birthdays are a "day of suffering" for the mother. April fourteenth was also my grandpa's day of suffering. While he was sprinting home from the hospital, he fell down, and from that day onward he needed a cane to help him walk. He also knocked out one of his front teeth, so that whenever he would speak, curse people, sing opera, or recite the holy verses in church he would always appear a bit ridiculous.

    As for those elements of the comic and ridiculous that often manifested themselves in Grandpa's overly serious life, I needn't go into them. But the reason people felt he was funny while being so solemn was simply that he wanted so badly to prove that he really was an extremely earnest person. Yet every time he got close to proving just how serious he was, some comical aspect of his nature would rear its ugly head. You can imagine what it was like to see him with his missing tooth (the other front tooth was also half crooked), shouting out, "Hallelujah? In high school, while reading through some awkward-sounding and abstruse books on existentialism, I picked up some new vocabulary words that were both peculiar and attractive. One of them was "absurd" (this term was extremely easy to adapt to daily life circumstances, much less complicated than "nothingness" and "existential"). That's right, "absurd," and it was that grandpa of mine, whose ridiculousness seemed to increase with his attempted seriousness, that enabled me to understand absurdity on an incomparable level.

    As for my kid sister, she was eight years old when she first learned the term "absurd"—she used it in class to describe that little peckerhead who was using a cigarette lighter to burn the girls' ponytails in class. She and my grandfather are so different and yet so very similar. It was as if she was trying so hard to prove how funny she could be, but every time she tried to be the clown, I realized just what a serious character she really was.

    Putting it like that is perhaps a bit too abstract. Here, let me give you a more concrete example: The night my sister was lying on the bed in the gynecology ward telling me how much of a wang ba dan she was, her eyes suddenly popped open and she said, "Did you notice? That doctor who was just here was cross-eyed." I shook my head; of course he wasn't crosseyed. "He definitely is!" She focused her eyes on the bridge of her nose so that they would cross and continued, "Just now as he was beginning, he kept going like this, didn't you see? After doing this operation so many times, you end up crosseyed."

    "Stop playing around, I'm not in a laughing mood."

    "Humph!" She continued to cross her black eyes. "Don't tell me you're crosseyed too?"

    Has my sister ever been sad? This is such a childish question. Back when I was even more childish—that was just about nineteen years ago—and had just come home from my grandparents', I saw my mother lying in bed. In her arms was this little thing that wouldn't stop crying. The baby's eyes, nose, and mouth were completely squished together in the center of her face, her swollen red cheeks were full of wrinkles, and on top of her head there was a piece of skin that kept twitching up and down. "Your baby sister," my mother announced.

    She was a sad baby sister.

    But that's not what Grandpa thought. After spending several days digging through countless books, he chose an upbeat name for my kid sister: Junxin, or "merry god." Grandpa mysteriously pulled the small piece of paper bearing my sister's name from the pocket of his white shirt. With his fingers shaking, Grandpa opened the folded paper and laid it flat on the coffee table. Immediately, Grandma, Dad, Mom, my kid sister in Mom's arms, and I practically bumped heads as we leaned forward to read aloud in unison, "Junxin."

    "Junxin." My Grandpa still wasn't quite used to the impediment in his speech caused by his missing tooth, so he did the best he could to cover the gap with his upper lip. When he spoke he looked like a kissing fish. "It's a literary quotation," he said through his puckered lips. "Where did I get the allusion? It's from The Songs of the South. The first section of chapter 1, The Nine Songs, is titled The Great Unity, God of the Eastern Sky. Just who is this God of the Eastern Sky? He is the god of the gods! To the gods he's this!" Grandpa said, flashing us a thumbs-up sign. "So they say, 'On a lucky day with an auspicious name, / Reverently we come to delight the Lord on High.' Now what this means is that this is a good day, so we have to be extremely serious—no goofing around—to make the Lord on High happy—that means make God happy—this ..."

    "So she's called Junxin." With a satisfied look on her face, Grandma cut him off and provided the conclusion.

    "What's your rush?" Grandpa asked as his upper lip quickly pouted up. Covering his lone front tooth again with his lip, Grandpa continued, "So the section ends with these two lines: 'The fine notes mingle in rich harmony, / And the god is merry and takes his pleasure.'"

    "So she's called Junxin," Grandma once again added.

    "Junxin," said Grandpa.

    It was just at that moment that Junxin started sneezing. It was not until after I had become comfortable holding a baby that I learned the reason. It was because she had wet herself. Normally if she sneezed for a while and still no knowledgeable adults came to change her diaper, she would start to cry sadly.

    Just before the weather began to turn cold, I went back to school and entered the third grade. My classroom also moved to the campus one street over. Just under our classroom was the music room, which was haunted by those rich whiz kids. Below the music room were the kindergarten and the nursery school. That's also where they had the swing set, merry-go-round, slide, miniature jungle gym, and the small spherical iron cage that we called the S.S. Earth. For us "normal third-grade boys," who were neither wealthy nor brilliant and had already lost the special right of little kids to be spoiled, S.S. Earth became our secret weapon. We would often keep watch from the grassy field behind the swings; if not there, we would be hiding under the water fountain beside the hallway. As soon as those little geniuses were finished performing their Bach, Mendelssohn, or Mozart, or those chirping little devils from the kindergarten entered the metal cage, we would emerge like a swarm of hornets. As we closed in, we would shout: "S.S. Earth, preparing for takeoff!"

    We used every bit of strength we had to spin the S.S. Earth as fast as we could, not stopping for even a second. As we began, the kids inside would laugh and have a good time, but before long they would discover that something was wrong. We were a group of Herculean alien warriors with a never-ending supply of magic powers. We could propel the world, making it turn faster than the speed of sound, faster than the speed of light—we could spin the planet a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a billion times faster than anything else. With sweat dripping from our pores, we mischievously propelled the Earth to the edge of the universe. And that was when we heard the sound of screams, curses, and crying. It was the echo of their crying that was most pleasing to our ears. The weak earthlings on board stretched out their arms to hit us; they spit at us and cursed our families and several generations of our ancestors—but this only increased our ecstasy. When the school bell rang, we would summon up the last vestiges of our strength to propel the S.S. Earth even faster. It was also under the safety of the bell that we would chant our anthem: "S.S. Earth! S.S. Earth! Take your daddy to get banged, take your mommy to get hanged! S.S. Earth! S.S. Earth! Take your daddy to get banged, take your mommy to get hanged...."

    In the midst of this mischief, there wasn't a single one of us who took that perverted song seriously. But just as winter was arriving, Family Morals Shen, who sat in the back row in class, suddenly left the ranks of the alien warriors. Afterward, he would always wear a wool turtleneck sweater, at least until the end of the next semester when he transferred to a new school and disappeared. It was not until we were in the fifth grade (it may have been a bit later than that), after a parent-teacher conference, that we heard what had happened: Family Morals Shen's father really did end up banging some other woman. Then during the winter we were in the third grade, Family Morals's mother hanged herself and her two children—Family Morals was the sole survivor.

    During that last winter we spent together, I remember taking my kid sister to the school playground and seeing Family Morals Shen sitting all alone in the S.S. Earth. He was trying so hard to spin the iron cage, but the S.S. Earth just gently rocked back and forth with no intention of taking off.

    "Give me a spin," said Family Morals as he pulled my sister inside.

    At the time my sister was wearing a wool hat, blouse, pants, and a pair of wool socks. On the outside she was wearing a cotton-padded jacket and was wrapped up in a cotton blanket. In Shen's arms she looked like a big cloth bundle, especially once the S.S. Earth began to pick up some speed—from the outside it looked like Family Morals Shen was holding on to a bunch of luggage preparing for a distant journey.

    "How old is your kid sister?" Family Morals asked in mid-flight.

    "Almost ten months," I responded as, hand over hand, I spun the equatorial bar. My feet left the ground and we began to fly.

    "She's much younger than my sister."

    "How old is your sister?"

    "On Earth she is six, but she has been on Neptune three months now. One day on Neptune is equal to one year on Earth, so my sister is almost one hundred. Faster! We are about to pass Mars! Next stop is Jupiter. Be careful of the asteroids. And don't screw up the direction! Veer starboard .75 degrees!"

    Just as the S.S. Earth was speeding by Saturn, my kid sister began to wail. I jumped back to ground to let the S.S. Earth automatically reduce its speed. Then I even grabbed hold of the Mediterranean line to stop it completely.

    "Don't you realize that we were almost there?"

    I ignored him and grabbed hold of my sister to console her.

    "Doesn't your sister look like a meat dumpling?" he asked with indignation.

    "Your sister is the meat dumpling!" I responded. I kicked the S.S. Earth and set it spinning. I kicked it a few more times and it began to pick up speed. Family Morals Shen was about to squeeze his way out, but he was so scared that he had to curl back inside.

    "You're a wang ba dan!"

    "Well, you're a turtle grandson!" I yelled, and dashed out of the schoolyard and ran all the way home. I'm not sure when my sister stopped crying and began concentrating on studying my face, but as we got close to home and I slowed down, I saw her smile. As far as I can remember, that is the first time I saw her smile. I will never forget her smiling face, for it enabled me to rediscover the happiness of having a living person as a present. Right after that, my present cruelly vomited milk all over my face and head.