by Yan Lianke
“Smash them!”
The mortuary workers therefore took the small hammers they had brought with them and began striking the two bones. Shards flew everywhere, covering the Americans’ faces and bodies. As the mortuary workers smashed the bones, they cursed, “Serves you right for bombing our embassy! Serves you right for having your plane collide with ours.” After they had finally succeeded in smashing the bones into dust, they scooped up the bone dust and deposited it in the urn.
Next, they began to burn the Hillary corpse, followed by the Chelsea corpse, and then the pilot corpse. In each case, the sequence was the same—they would allow the Americans to view the corpse and bid farewell; then would place it in the furnace, close the door, and turn on the gas; and finally they would collect the ashes and crushed bones and place them in an urn. However, when they were burning the pilot corpse, as soon as they ignited the flame, the mortuary workers came out and told Mingyao, “We don’t have enough gas.” Mingyao replied, “Then use an electrical flame.” In this crematorium, if the gas nozzle was not working they would have no alternative but to incinerate the corpse with an electrical flame and use a crucible to reduce the bones into ashes. But for some reason, when they burned the pilot corpse, the flesh was reduced to ashes but the bones remained intact. Those bones—including hip, leg, arm, and toe bones—were removed from the oven like a pile of leftover kindling and dumped in front of the American businessmen. All of Mingyao’s troops lined up in a row and the soldiers, wearing gloves, took turns going up to the pile of bones and smashing them with a hammer, whereupon they would each say a word and then step aside so that the soldier behind could do the same. They collected skull or vertebra fragments, placed them on a brick, and then began smashing them with a hammer. As they did so they cursed angrily, saying,
“Let’s see if you dare collide with another Chinese plane!”
Another hammer strike.
“Do you want peace or a good fight? It’s your choice!”
Another hammer strike.
“The world belongs not only to America, but also to China.”
Another hammer strike.
“When it comes to war and peace, we in China love peace!”
They finally succeeded in reducing all of the pilot’s bones to ashes, which they then placed in an urn. The sun hung overhead for a long time, and as the spectators from Explosion watched this final scene, they shouted, “Let’s smash the United States! … Let’s smash the United States!” But as the mortuary workers were placing those twelve urns to the side, the residents of Explosion suddenly grew silent, as everyone waited for the next step. In this moment of silence, the sound of China’s national anthem suddenly could be heard coming from inside the crematorium, as solemn as the morning sun rising in the east. Then, twelve soldiers, all of whom were over 1.8 meters tall, marched out of the crematorium. They stopped in front of the row of urns and stood at attention, then each took one urn and marched over to the group of Americans. At this point, the broadcast of the Chinese national anthem ended and was replaced by the US national anthem. The latter was as commonplace as the sun setting in the west, but when the Americans heard their own anthem, their expressions became very serious, as they adopted a look of curious anticipation. At this moment, the first Chinese soldier solemnly handed them the urn containing the ashes of the Clinton corpse, as though it were a bar of gold. The second soldier then handed them the urn containing the ashes of the Hillary corpse, and the other soldiers handed them the remaining urns. The Americans received the urns, with pale, expressionless looks, as though they had no idea what was happening. They stood there in shock, holding urns containing the ashes of the entire First Family, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the other US political leaders. They heard Mingyao read out a statement titled “Arrogance Will Lead to Extinction,” then inform the Americans that China wanted peace but would not tolerate being bullied, and that the people of Explosion sought greater prosperity but would not tolerate fraud and deception. He stated that the outsiders who had come to Explosion to conduct business must be fair, just, and polite to the people of Explosion, and if they weren’t, then all they would receive would be these cremated corpses and urns full of ashes.
At this point, Mingyao led his troops away.
He expected that the first thing the Americans would do, after returning to their villas with the urns containing the ashes of the First Family, would be to purchase plane tickets back to the United States. After leaving the Americans, who looked as though they had just watched a performance, Mingyao gestured, and his troops proceeded to dismantle the crematorium. He gestured again, and the troops returned to their original formation, and then left this Explosion economic development zone.
As the soldiers, urbanites, and peasants were saying good-bye to the Americans under the setting sun, they raised their fists and shouted, “We’ve achieved victory; we’ve kicked the Americans out! … We’ve destroyed your president; you should go back to where you came from!” Afterward, the villa complex fell silent. Apart from the plants and flowers that had been trampled underfoot, the assorted scarves and shoes that the residents of Explosion had left behind hanging from trees, and the tissues that were scattered over the villa roofs, together with the leftover bones from the First Family, the secretary of state, and the Speaker of the House, which were scattered on the ground where the crematorium had previously been—everything else was calm and clean. The stream coming from the villa complex and the pond they had built there both contained water that was clean and blue, and the air was full of mist. Meanwhile, overhead there were flocks of wild geese flying home, together with a flock of pigeons that stopped flying north and instead settled down in Explosion. The grasshoppers and wasps in the grass all became naptis and eye butterflies, and the world began to improve. Holding their urns, the Americans stood in the middle of the garden. They didn’t know whether to send the urns back to the United States or deposit them somewhere else. At the end of the day, the urns merely contained bone ash. As the Americans were discussing how to proceed, Kong Mingliang returned from the city, and before his car had even come to a stop, he jumped out and went up to the American investors.
“If I don’t use the law to restrain these disruptive people, then I’ll have to resign as county mayor!
“… You can believe that Explosion has hooligans, but you can’t doubt the fact that Explosion would offer you the very best investment environment.
“… Give me these urns full of bone ash. I need to deal with these disruptive hooligans, as well as also investigate those residents of Explosion who are selling people’s corpses to the hooligans.
“… Can you believe what I’m telling you? If you don’t, I can arrange for all of the residents of Explosion to kneel down before you to apologize and offer self-criticism.”
From the garden on the former site of the crematorium to the American investors’ villa complex, and from the villa complex to the conference room in the villa’s guildhall, every time Kong Mingliang said something, a different flower would wilt. As he apologized to the Americans, the leaves of the bamboo plants on the side of the road dried up. There were a pair of potted pines in the entranceway to the guildhall, but under the sound of his cursing the pots cracked and the soil and plants spilled onto the ground. This continued until he and the Americans were all seated on couches in the guildhall, and attendants brought them coffee, beer, and red wine. The Americans accepted and drank the coffee, beer, and wine, and with a sigh of relief they told him that their investments spanned the entire globe. They had personally investigated more than a quarter of the world’s countries, but there was not a single country or a single people capable of doing something as amusing as what the people of Explosion had just done. They said that they had gone to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hainan, but none of these places was able to rival Explosion’s democracy and freedom, permitting people to assemble and demonstrate in this way, and permitting them to burn the entire First
Family in effigy. The Americans added that the fact they had come to Explosion to invest was not only a result of their wisdom and good fortune, but also a gift from God. They claimed that not only had they come to Explosion to invest and do business, they also wanted to mobilize their fellow countries in Europe and around the world to come to Explosion as well.
When the Americans finished saying this, the twelve funeral urns that had been placed on the table in the conference room began broadcasting, as though they were loudspeakers, a deafening sound of applause.
CHAPTER 14
Geographic Transformation (2)
When US and Japanese automobile manufacturers decided to relocate to Explosion in the Balou Mountains, they were joined by Singaporean construction companies and South Korean electronics and handicrafts factories, together with Australian mining companies; French clothing and service sector companies; German road, rail, and bridge transportation companies; Italian clothing and briefcase factories; Spanish sports equipment factories; and companies specializing in carved black wooden statues from Kenya and grilled meat, coffee, and olive oil from Brazil. The city was divided into an east side, a west side, an old city district, and a new development zone. A highway linking this city to others was built overnight. Whereas previously a train would pass by every half hour, now one would come rumbling through every three minutes. The train station located more the twenty li outside the city was expanded so that it could accommodate up to eighteen trains at once, making it a hub station capable of receiving the tens of thousands of passengers surging into Explosion. In a valley about fifty kilometers to the south, the railroad company constructed a station for freight trains traveling north to south. Meanwhile, following official orders, sewage and toxic materials from the factories and manufacturing plants were dumped into wells up to a thousand meters deep, from which they would flow into underground rivers leading who knows where.
Explosion continued to expand day by day, and it was as if there were countless zippers on the ground that could be repeatedly opened and closed, lifted up and buried, permitting the city to undergo an unprecedented open heart surgery. In the city’s central zone, there was a street reserved for foreign businessmen engaging in sightseeing, negotiating, flirting, and bullshitting. In imitation of small European towns, the citizens built coffeehouses, beer halls, food stalls, and souvenir shops. There were also foot-washing stalls, massage halls, hair salons, and back-massage booths reserved for foreigners. Exotic enterprises ranged from Thai transsexuals to Arab teahouses and China’s very first Indian roti shop—no one even knew when they all arrived and set up shop in Explosion. Every day, all sorts of foreign music could be heard in the streets, which were also filled with the sound of English, German, French, and all sorts of strange languages, not to mention Chinese and the local Balou dialect.
The foreigners always had more money than they could spend. It was as if they lived in order to drink coffee and beer, listen to music, and flirt with women. They would sign contracts, transfer funds into bank accounts around the world, and then return to their riverside villas outside Explosion for the night, and the next day they would return to this same street. The people of Explosion didn’t know what exactly had happened, but they felt that all of a sudden the city had been dramatically transformed. Buildings that had been constructed only a few years earlier were demolished to make room for even newer ones, and the public square where people had just been singing and dancing was now roped off, since the brick-and-cement pavement had to be removed and replaced with granite imported from Australia. The city’s orderly chaos resembled a spinning flywheel, as the people gradually came to feel that the Explosion they had known no longer existed and that it now belonged to others—to foreigners. It reached the point where the government specified that the county’s development should serve as a model for the entire country, and when high-level officials came from Beijing to observe Explosion they each personally toasted the county mayor three times in a row, saying that they wanted to have Explosion quickly promoted from a county to a city, and to have Kong Mingliang promoted from county mayor to city mayor. The Kong family and the people of Explosion were no longer amazed by this news, and instead treated it as an eventuality they had long expected.
Meanwhile, on the street that had been dubbed Kong Street, which had been set aside for foreigners to drink coffee and beer, listen to music, flirt, and conduct business negotiations—when they heard that Explosion was going to be promoted to a city, all the foreigners and foreign-owned businesses hung red lanterns in their doorways and when the foreigners went outside they each carried a little red flag. The walls on both sides of the street, the sidewalks, the street itself, and even the sewers were decorated with roses, camellias, and all sorts of red, yellow, and purple flowers from China and abroad. The result was that the entire world was filled with the sound of laughter and toasts extolling these extraordinary blossoms.
In this way, the city of Explosion was established, as though in a dream. The day it was announced that Explosion was being redesignated from a county to a city, the city hosted an extravagant celebration, and Zhu Ying locked herself in her room to drink and smoke away her sorrows. She was first surprised and then infuriated by the fact that her husband, Kong Mingliang—in the space of three years and without her assistance or knowledge—had transformed the county into a city and managed to be promoted from county mayor to city mayor. As a result, she locked herself away at home and, after night fell and everyone grew quiet, she cried up to the heavens,
“Kong Mingliang, you’ll regret this!
“… Kong Mingliang, I’ll make you regret this!”
She had never expected that Explosion would be promoted so quickly from a county to a city. It was as easy as a car rolling downhill, which needed only a tap on the gas pedal to take off.
That night, she drank alone until she was half drunk. Then she went to look at her son, who was sound asleep in his bed. She lightly slapped his cheek, and cursed, “It’s all your fault, you little beast. It’s because of you that your father never returned to this household and stopped talking to me!” She waited until her son woke up, stretched, and started bawling, then took him out to the courtyard. She sat there with him until the moon set and the stars faded, and after he fell back asleep she finally was able to calm down. It was at that point that she began muttering to herself, “I’ll make you regret this! I’ll make you regret this!” She took her son inside, and after putting him to bed, she headed to the women’s vocational school she had established a year earlier. She wanted to convene an urgent meeting to recruit and train some specialized girls, in preparation for another battle with the men.
CHAPTER 15
Culture, Cultural Relics, and History
1. REALISTIC CULTURE HISTORY
Mingyao didn’t know how he ended up as the director of the town’s civil administration bureau, nor how he ended up as the leader of the county’s civil affairs section, or even how he ended up as the director of the city’s development bureau. The day he was appointed bureau director, thousands of Balou residents all wanted to have their peasant household registrations reassigned as urban ones, resulting in a line that stretched from the development bureau downtown all the way to the outskirts of the city. They brought their original household registration booklets, which identified them as peasants, and they also brought a variety of local specialties to serve as gifts, including peanuts, walnuts, and mushrooms and other edible fungi. They were smiling appreciatively as they waited for the office workers to collect their peasant household registration booklets and issue them new urban ones as well as ID cards with their photographs printed on them.
“With this, do we now become urbanites?” They walked out of the civil administration bureau carrying their new household registration booklets. They looked at the new booklets with their dark red covers and said to each other, “From now on, we’re no longer fucking peasants.” They laughed and lifted these booklets into the air to show t
hose who were still waiting in line to receive theirs, then they stepped into a restaurant to eat and drink.
To celebrate, they all got drunk.
There was even someone who, upon becoming reassigned as an urbanite, suddenly had a heart attack and died before even making it to the hospital. After the county was redesignated as a city, the civil affairs bureau spent half a month replacing thousands of peasant household registration booklets with urban ones. An ambulance from the hospital was even parked in the bureau’s courtyard to treat people suffering heart attacks and strokes as a result of the excitement, and even though seventeen people still ended up dying, the medical workers were nevertheless able to save a hundred and twenty-eight others. After changing their household registration they thereby became urbanites. They placed the gifts they had brought next to the desk of the department official responsible for reassigning their residence permits, or else handed them directly to the workers responsible for filling out, approving, and stamping the forms.
“How can you not accept our gifts?” the peasants asked. “We have now become urbanites, and this is an enormous accomplishment.
“Will you accept them?” they asked. “If you don’t accept our presents, we’ll simply smash them on the ground.”
So the bureau workers had no choice but to accept the gifts.
These presents piled up everywhere—on tables, behind doors, inside rooms, and out in the courtyard. Several professional moving companies worked continuously to transfer all of the cigarettes and wine from the civil affairs bureau’s main office to its warehouse. Some people had even added cash to those packages of cigarettes and wine, wanting to take advantage of this opportunity to register the children they had over the official one-child limit. Others, who wanted to help their relatives in the distant mountains transfer their residency permits to the city, stuffed rings, necklaces, and pendants directly into the pockets of the people in charge of residency permits, while saying things like Here’s a peanut! or Here are some sunflower seeds you can shell after you return home.
