The Explosion Chronicles

by Yan Lianke

  Mingliang stood across the table two meters in front of the CEO and saw that the American’s mottled face was crawling with tropical fire ants, ladybugs, and Vietnamese dung beetles. His cavernous belly, however, was covered with the dollar bills and gold bars that everyone in the world desires. Mingliang said, “Then, how about if tonight, rather than giving you two Chinese girls, I instead give you four Vietnamese ones?” He continued, “In order to grant you Americans a heavenly existence, how about if I build you a Vietnamese-style gambling parlor?

  “… All of your workers at the level of technicians or above will be permitted to sleep with girls free, and Explosion will cover their gambling losses.

  “… What if I issue a directive ordering the people of Explosion to nod and bow whenever they see any of you Americans?”

  Finally, Mingliang said, “Let’s go! I want to take you back to the Vietnam from forty years ago.” As he was saying this, he wrote a note and asked someone to deliver it. Then he took those former US soldiers, most of whom had fought in Vietnam, and led them out of the county government building. After crossing several old streets, they reached a newly constructed street. Following a directive by the county mayor, all of the walls in the county had been covered in green to resemble a forest from the south, and had been painted with images of Vietnam’s rivers and palm trees. The men of Balou were wearing the same coarse white gowns and wide-leg pants that Vietnamese peasants had worn forty years earlier, while the women were wearing homespun shirts and dresses, and bamboo-leaf pointed sun hats, and they were carrying bamboo baskets. Peddlers selling vegetables, meat, and French bread had built roadside shacks that featured a combination of Vietnamese and Yunnan elements. In this way, the entire street was designed to be a precise replica of a Vietnam street from forty years earlier. Even the people pedaling three-wheeled carts and pushing wheelbarrows had traditional Vietnamese large-wheeled carts and wooden-wheeled wheelbarrows. To the Americans’ astonishment, a group of several dozen women from Balou walked up, chatting and laughing, and appeared to take the Americans’ presence in this Vietnam as quite commonplace. While the Americans stared in astonishment, the women glanced at them as though they were ordinary neighbors.

  “In this group, do you see the girls you remember from when you were based in Vietnam?” Mingliang asked the American CEO.

  Another dozen or so Vietnamese girls walked over, and again the Americans stood on the side of the road staring at them.

  Following the seventh group of Vietnamese girls, the eighth group consisted of the same girls who had been in the first group. By this point, the Americans arrived at a small village on the edge of the town. That village featured a tragic scene following the conclusion of America’s Vietnam War. There were houses that had been bombed by the Americans and smoldering cowsheds. There were rotting corpses lying along the fields, and an old woman was sitting in the yard of her collapsed house. The woman’s clothing was ragged, her hair was gray, and when she saw the Americans walking over she appeared surprised and uneasy, as her teeth started chattering loudly. When the Americans reached this postwar village, they stood there without moving. The potbellied CEO had a nostalgic expression, and when he heard the sound of an American helicopter taking off or landing, he turned away from the old woman and looked east. There, he saw a stone-filled Vietnamese riverbed, and in the man-made tropical rain forest snakes were crawling amid the painted palm trees. Because it was so quiet, the river sounded like a barrage of gunfire in the distance.

  The Americans stopped in front of the river.

  A solitary eagle soared over from what appeared to be a fire-filled sky.

  Standing beneath the burning sky, each of them was parched with thirst. As they were about to lean down and drink directly from the river, a curious Vietnamese boy ran over from a smoldering house. Then there was a loud explosion, as the young boy stepped on a mine. A lifelike rubber arm flew into the air and landed right in front of the American who was bending over to drink some water.

  The entire river quickly turned bloodred, and the American who was drinking from the river broke out in a cold sweat and quickly rejoined the rest of the group.

  Next, they proceeded up the river, with Kong Mingliang leading the way like a Vietnamese peasant in wartime, crossing back and forth from one side of the river to the other, standing in the middle of that jungle made from plastic foam, wire, and pigment, then returning to a rope bridge over the river and standing there for a while. In front of them there appeared a small Vietnamese town. The town had American military barracks, Vietnamese restaurants, and cafés, as well as dance halls and brothels designed specifically for US soldiers on leave. Next to the brothel there were beer halls and gambling halls with the roulette that Americans at the time were particularly fond of playing. There were Explosion men dressed as US servicemen walking up and down the street, as though they were looking for something. There were several girls from Guangxi, who had been brought over to Explosion because they looked Vietnamese, with light yellow skin, flattened noses, high foreheads, and sunken eyes but an attractive gaze. They were wearing translucent gowns and were sitting in front of the brothel chatting happily. When the girls saw the real Americans approaching, they smiled and waved. A sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl emerged from that gaggle of prostitutes and stared at the group of Americans with their enormous bellies. She stood coquettishly in front of them and looked at them shyly. At this point a couple of older prostitutes walked over from behind the younger one and said,

  “Commander, war is tough. Come in and enjoy yourself.”

  They caressed the younger woman’s head and shoulders and said,

  “She is not even seventeen yet. You have come here from America, and we Orientals prize newness … and particularly the deflowering of virgins.”

  The two older prostitutes pushed the teenage Guangxi girl up to the hulking Americans and said,

  “War is hell, and you never know if you’ll survive from one day to the next. If you enjoy this girl tonight, then even if you were to die on the battlefield tomorrow, you would still be able to die without regrets.”

  The Americans entered a building labeled Garden of Red Delights. Bashful young girls led the potbellied men into the brothel’s innermost rooms. They went inside, closed the door, opened the small Vietnamese-style window, then turned on the Vietnamese-style rotating fan mounted on the wall—and after half an hour, all of the guns in the Vietnamese town discharged at once. After the American soldiers emerged from their respective rooms, Vietnamese guerrilla fighters and soldiers from the American barracks proceeded to do battle in the town’s streets, shooting at one another. There were several American corpses, which the Vietnamese guerrillas had hung from the branches of a nearby willow tree. After the guerrillas emerged from the center of town, the American soldiers rushed over from the barracks and proceeded to search the town, executing Vietnamese soldiers as casually as one might slaughter a chicken. By evening, the entire street was lined with piles of dead and wounded Vietnamese, their blood flowing like a river toward the Americans’ feet. After emerging from the brothel, the Americans proceeded to a beer hall, but the foamy red Vietnamese blood flowing past the brothel also followed them there. They emerged from the beer hall and proceeded to a French patisserie, but the blood from the beer hall, the brothel, and the patisserie kept following them around, pushing them into a public square in the center of town. It turned out that the entire square was filled with the bodies of the Vietnamese that had been brought here from throughout the town, including dead and wounded, old and young, men and women. A helmet-wearing American was forcing Vietnamese men to bring all of the corpses into the square and pile them up. The ground was soaked as though it had been raining blood. In order to get away from these mountains of corpses and rivers of blood, the Americans circled through a bamboo-filled hill behind the town. But just as they were about to sit down to rest and recall what had just happened, they saw hundreds or even thousands of Vi
etnamese running out of the bamboo forest and kneeling down in front of them. The Vietnamese started shouting in unison,

  “After having killed so many of us, you should come here to invest! You should come here to invest!”

  Next, a group of Vietnamese men and women, young and old, emerged from who knows where. They knelt down and began weeping and shouting, “Let bygones be bygones! Why don’t you establish your automobile electronics factories here? As long as you invest here, those dead Vietnamese will overlook the fact that you invaded and murdered them.”

  They shouted, “For the sake of your conscience, you should invest your money here.”

  They promised, “If you open a factory and start an industry here, we will give you our last baguette and our last cup of Vietnamese coffee.”

  They kowtowed to the Americans and said, “You should invest here—not just for our sake, but also for America’s. Each of our households has lost someone to the Americans, and in every household there is a table with memorial tablets inscribed with the names of our ancestors, brothers, and sisters whom you killed. If you invest here and help us to become prosperous, you will thereby be absolved of your sins. On the other hand, if you invest somewhere else, your conscience will never be clear, and after you die your souls will not go to heaven.”

  Finally, thousands upon thousands of residents of Explosion gathered under the light of the setting sun. They were all wearing Vietnamese clothing and were carrying the bodies of people who had been shot and killed by the Americans, and embracing the bodies of children killed in war. They were kneeling down together and loudly exhorting the American industrialists, saying,

  “For the sake of your conscience, you should invest here!

  “For the sake of your God and your sense of justice, you should let your money take root here.”

  Darkness fell.

  After darkness fell, the American industrialists signed an investment agreement with Explosion for tens of billions of yuan. For the sake of their collective conscience, they decided to select Explosion and its outskirts as the site for their car factory, electronics factory, and hundreds of other production companies.

  III.

  Mingyao’s office was more luxuriously furnished than a general’s war room. He had completely blocked off most of the entrance to the floor, leaving only a small doorway leading to his immense office. Right next to the doorway was a freestanding two-meter-wide copper globe, and on either side there were a pair of sand tables that were each ten square meters in size and contained maps of the world. The map on the right featured the Eastern Hemisphere, while the one on the left featured the Western Hemisphere. On the Eastern Hemisphere map, China was drawn in red, Japan was drawn in black, and the other countries—including South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia—each had different colorations and elevation levels based on the nation’s status, wealth, prominence, and military power. All socialist countries were drawn in sunny red, while all capitalist countries were in funereal black. But even among the socialist countries, North Korea’s red had a hint of yellow, making it appear shallow and a bit childish, while Vietnam was light red, making it appear poor and boring. In the Western Hemisphere, Europe’s Russia was drawn in a combination of red and black, while France, England, and Germany were each outlined in funereal black, though for France Mingyao had added another layer of shiny black in recognition of the country’s refined and cultured relationship with China, as though it had a layer of fire and magical power. New Germany was formed out of a united East Germany and West Germany, with socialist blood flowing through a capitalist body, and therefore Mingyao made Germany’s black different from Russia’s reddish-black. Mingyao could still hear England spreading rumors about China in the newspapers and on television, from when it handed Hong Kong back to China, and therefore he added a layer of white to the black that he used for England, so that the entire model of England resembled a funeral procession in which black and white were clearly distinguished.

  In Latin America, Cuba and Venezuela appeared in red, while the remaining countries were either winter gray or autumn yellow. In Africa and Central Asia, the anti-American countries appeared in light red or pink, whereas allies of the United States appeared in black and gray. On the sand tables, the entire world was divided into Chinese red and American black. Every day, Mingyao would adjust each country’s color and elevation based on corresponding changes in the nation’s political status. In his office, no one was permitted to enter the room with the sand table maps—with the exception of the cleaning staff who would periodically come by to lightly dust them with a feather duster. Mingyao had installed a television in this room and had subscribed to a number of magazines and papers dealing with military, national, and political matters, so that he could sit in his office every day reading the newspaper, leafing through his magazines, and watching the news on television in order to catch all of the Chinese news relating to international affairs, and based on this he would continually readjust the color and boundaries of each country on his maps and would plant red, black, and white flags on the countries’ territories.

  That year, Mingyao rarely thought about ephemeral topics like women. Instead, from the beginning of March he locked himself in his war room and didn’t permit anyone to approach—with the exception of mealtimes, when someone would knock and bring food to his door, and his second sister-in-law Zhu Ying, who for two days would repeatedly knock on his door and then slide a couple of envelopes under it.

  One day in March, just like the day when the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia was bombed, the sky was as dark as though there was a total solar eclipse. On that particular day, a US EP-3 spy plane collided with a Chinese J-811 interceptor fighter jet. The Chinese plane broke in half and crashed into the sea. The pilot, whose name was Wang Wei, parachuted out but was lost. The American plane, meanwhile, suffered only minor damage and proceeded to land without permission in the Lingshui military airfield in southern China. When Mingyao heard this news, he was in his war room standing in front of the map of the Western Hemisphere, hesitating over whether or not he should add a white flag to the map of Italy, since in its recent elections the prime minister had invoked China to gain votes, claiming that at the peak of China’s socialist construction in the twentieth century, it had used bodies of people who died of starvation as fertilizer, burying them in the fields. Mingyao definitely did not believe that this sort of thing could have happened. He found Italy rather curious and couldn’t decide whether to give this country two or three white flags as punishment for viciously attacking China. As he was hesitating, the map of China on the wall behind him suddenly began to shake, as though it were being blown by the wind, though the maps of surrounding nations, including Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and India, did not move at all.

  He knew something momentous had occurred.

  When he turned on the television, he saw the news of the collision between the Chinese and US planes above Hainan Island, whereupon he immediately sprang up from the couch, paused for a second, then closed the door to his war room and, apart from the person who came to bring him his food, didn’t allow anyone else to enter. No one knew what he was doing in there, much less what he was thinking. Even the dozen or so must-read military newspapers that were delivered every day had to be slipped under his door. On the seventh or eighth day, Zhu Ying came several times to knock on his door, but when he didn’t respond she eventually slid two identical envelopes under it. In each there was a letter that said the following:

  Mingyao, my brother,

  Ever since you returned to Explosion, I’ve been thinking day and night that if the three of us—you, your brother, and I—were to unite, we could accomplish great things. But you are the only person who would be capable of uniting us. You are the only one your brother listens to, and the only one who can get rid of those sluts who hang around him… .

  No one knew Mingyao’s reaction after he read these two letters, or whether he even read them at all. Aft
er Zhu Ying stuffed the letters under his door, she stood at the entrance to his war room, shouting in a loud voice,

  “Mingyao, please read those two letters and open the door. Let me say a few words.

  “… Open the door so that I can say a few words.

  “… If you don’t want to open the door, please at least read the two letters I gave you.”

  At that point, Mingyao responded from inside the room, saying something that made those standing outside the room stop in their tracks. He said, “Everyone get the fuck out of here… . At this moment of national crisis, anyone who bothers me can expect to be treated poorly… . Everyone get the fuck out of here!” After this, there were no longer any voices or footsteps in the hallway outside Mingyao’s war room. In the surprised silence that followed, his sister-in-law murmured, “I’ve done everything I can.” She quietly turned and walked away, but as she was leaving two crystalline tears appeared in her eyes.

  In the days that followed, the entire building was as silent as a grave. But on the tenth day, someone quietly slipped a document from the county seat under Mingyao’s door, whereupon this tomblike room once again began to show signs of life. This document was issued by a US car company that had finally decided to build a factory in Explosion, and the day after the first group of elite businessmen moved in with their considerable investment funds from the United States, the county mayor issued a directive that whenever residents of Explosion ran into foreigners in the street—regardless of whether the foreigners were there as investors or merely as tourists—the locals always had to nod and say, “Hello!” and then bow down to them and step out of the way so that the foreigners could proceed down the middle of the street. This was intended to fully demonstrate the high level of civilization of a country known for its rituals and order. Less than three minutes after this document was slipped into his room, Mingyao roared and threw open his door. Everyone standing outside saw Mingyao—who had just spent ten days locked up in his war room—suddenly appear in the doorway with sunken eyes. The two letters that Zhu Ying had slid under the door had been tossed aside like empty cigarette boxes. The directive from the county government, meanwhile, had been ripped up and scattered like snowflakes all over the sand table model of the Western Hemisphere. Even the US territory and the Pacific Ocean were covered in paper and spittle from his cursing.