by Bi Feiyu
Little donkeys. The expression on the face of Professor Diamond Jin, our Deputy Head, and his gestures, differ hardly at all from the little donkeys’. He looks so lovable up there behind the rostrum, hands flying, body twisting. He was saying, ‘My relationship with liquor goes back forty years. Forty years ago, the founding of our People’s Republic, such a joyous month for us all, a time when I was just taking root in my mother’s womb. Prior to that, according to my findings, my parents were no different than anyone else-frenzied to the point of folly, and all pleasures that followed sank into a state of wild ecstasy, as exaggerated as if flowers had fallen from heaven. So I am a product, or maybe a by-product, of ecstasy. Students, we all know the relationship between ecstasy and liquor. It matters not if carnivals coincide with celebrations of the wine god, and it matters not if Nietzsche was born on the festival of the wine god. What matters is that the union of my father’s ecstasy sperm and my mother’s ecstasy egg predetermined my long association with liquor.’
He unfolded a slip of paper handed up to him and read it. ‘I am an ideological worker for the party,’ he announced with tolerance and magnanimity, ‘so how could I be a spokesman for idealism? I am a materialist, through and through. I will always and forever hold high the banner of “Material goods first, spiritual concerns second”, the words embroidered in golden threads. Even though it is a result of ecstasy, sperm is material; so, using this logic, is not the egg of ecstasy material as well? Or, from a different angle: is it possible for people in a state of ecstasy to abandon their own flesh and bone and be transformed into purely spiritual beings flying off in all directions? And so, my dear students, time is precious, time is money, time is life itself, and we must not let this simplest of issues have us running around in circles. At noon today I am going to open the first annual Ape Liquor Festival for benefactors, including Chinese-Americans and our brethren from Hong Kong and Macao. They deserve the best.’
From where I was standing at the rear of the hall, I saw the deltoid muscles below the neck of my mother-in-law’s husband grow taut and turn red when Diamond Jin mentioned the words Ape Liquor. The old fellow had been salivating for most of his adult life over thoughts of the supremely wondrous liquor of legend. For the two million inhabitants of Liquorland, turning the legend of Ape Liquor into a container of liquid fact would be a dream come true. A task force had been formed, with extraordinary funding from the municipal coffers, headed up by the old fellow himself, so whose deltoids would tense up, if not his? I couldn’t see his face, but I believe I know what it looked like at that moment.
‘Dear students, let the following sacred image take form before our eyes: a school of ecstatic sperm, lithe tails flapping behind them, like an army of bold warriors storming a fortress. Oh, they may be wildly ecstatic, but their movements are sprightly yet gentle. The Fascist ringleader Hitler wanted the youth of Germany to be quick and nimble as ferocious hunting dogs, tough and pliable as leather, and hard and unyielding as Krupp steel. Now, even though Hitler’s idealised German youth may be somewhat analogous to the school of sperm wriggling before our eyes-one of which is my very own nucleus-no metaphor, no matter how apt, is worthy of being repeated, especially when the creator of that metaphor was among the most evil men who ever walked the face of the earth. Better that we use domestic clichés than the best the foreigners have to offer. It’s a matter of principle, nothing to take for granted. Comrade leaders at all levels, take heed, do not be slapdash in this regard, not ever. In medical books, sperm cells are described as tadpoles, so let’s set those tadpoles a-swimming. A cloud of tadpoles, one carrying my origins with it, swims upstream in my mother’s warm currents. It is a race. The winner’s trophy is a juicy, tender white grape. Sometimes, of course, there is a dead heat between two of the competitors. In cases like this, if there are two white grapes, each competitor is awarded one; however, if there is only one white grape, then they must share the sweet nectar. But what if three, or four, or even more competitors arrive at the finish line at the same time? This is a unique case, a particularly rare occurrence, and scientific principles are abstracted from general conditions, not unique cases, which require special debate. At any rate, in this particular race, I reached the finish line ahead of all the others, and was swallowed up by the white grape, becoming part of it and letting it become part of me. That’s right, the most vivid metaphor imaginable is still inferior-Lenin said that. Without metaphor there can be no literature. That’s Tolstoy. We frequently use liquor as a metaphor for a beautiful woman, and people often use a beautiful woman as a metaphor for liquor; by so doing, we show that liquor and a beautiful woman share common properties, but are individuated by distinctive properties within those common properties, and that the common properties within the distinctive properties are what deindividuate a beautiful woman and liquor. Seldom does one gain true understanding of the tenderness of a beautiful woman by drinking liquor-that is as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns. By the same token, it is difficult for one to gain a true understanding of the qualities of liquor via the tenderness of a beautiful woman-that is as rare as unicorn horns and phoenix feathers.’
His oration that day had us dumbstruck, we shallow college students and slightly less shallow graduate students. He had consumed more liquor than we had drunk water.
‘Genuine knowledge comes from practice, my dear students. A marksman feeds on bullets; a drinking star is steeped in alcohol. There are no shortcuts on the road to success, and only those fearless people who have the courage to keep climbing on a rugged mountain path have any hope of reaching the glorious summit!’
Truth’s glory shone down upon us, and we responded with thunderous applause.
‘Students, I had a miserable childhood.’ Great people struggle their way out of the sea of misery, and he was no exception. ‘I yearned for liquor, but there was none.’ Deputy Head Jin related to us how, under highly adverse circumstances, he substituted industrial alcohol for sorghum liquor in order to toughen his internal organs, and I want to use pure literature to portray this extraordinary experience. I took a drink and clinked my glass down on the lacquer tray. It was getting dark, and Diamond Jin stood somewhere between Deputy Head and ecstatic sperm. He waved to me. He was wearing a tattered lined jacket as he led me to his hometown.
A cold winter night, a crescent moon and a sky full of stars illuminated the streets and houses, the dry, withered branches and leaves of willow trees, and the plum blossoms of Diamond Jin’s village. Not long after a recent heavy snowfall, the sun had come out twice, melting the snow and forming icicles that hung from eaves and gave off a faint glow of their own under the natural light from above. The accumulated snow on rooftops and tips of branches glowed as well. Based upon Deputy Head Jin’s description, it was not a particularly windy winter night, as the ice on the river cracked and split under the onslaught of the astonishing cold. The cracks sounded like explosions in the late night air. Then the night grew quieter and quieter. The village was fast asleep, that village in our Liquorland suburbs, and one day we may very well take a ride in Deputy Head Jin’s VW Santana to admire the sacred spots and visit the sites of relics; every mountain, every river and lake, every blade of grass, and every tree can only increase our reverence for Deputy Head Jin, and what intimate feelings they will be! Just think, born in an impoverished, ramshackle village, he climbed slowly into the sky until he shone down over all of Liquorland, a resplendent star of liquor, his radiance dazzling our eyes and filling them with tears, causing an upsurge of emotions. A broken-down cradle is still a cradle, nothing can replace it, and every indication points to the likelihood that a limitless future stretches out ahead of Deputy Head Jin. When we follow in his footsteps, he who has entered the top ranks of leadership, wandering through the streets and byways of his Diamond Village, when we linger on the edges of his murmuring streams, when we stroll along the high, tree-lined banks of the rivers, when we amble past his cattle pens and stables, . . . when the sorrows and ecsta
sies of his childhood, his loves and his dreams; . . . flood his heart ad nauseam like floating clouds and flowing water, how can we gauge his state of mind? How does he walk? What is his expression like? When he walks, does he start with his left foot or his right? What is his left arm doing when he strides forward with his right foot? What about his right arm when he strides with his left foot? How does his breath smell? What’s his blood pressure? His heart rate? Do his teeth show when he smiles? Does his nose crinkle when he weeps? So much cries out for description, yet there are so few words in my lexicon. I can only raise my glass.
‘Out in the yard, snow-laden dead branches cracked and splintered; ice on a distant pond was three inches thick; dried-out ice covered clumps of reeds; geese, wild and domestic, roosting for the night, were startled out of their dreams and honked crisply, the sound carrying through the clean, chilled air all the way to the eastern room of the home of Seventh Uncle. He says he went to his seventh uncle’s house every evening, and stayed till late at night. The walls were jet-black. A kerosene lamp stood atop an old three-drawer table against the east wall. Seventh Aunt and Seventh Uncle sat on the brick bed platform the little stove repairman, Big Man Liu, Fang Nine, and storekeeper Zhang all sat on the edge of the platform, killing time through the long night just like me. They came every night; not even stormy weather could keep them away. They reported on what they’d done that day and passed on news they’d picked up in villages and hamlets in rich, vivid detail, full of wit and humour, painting a vast canvas of village life and customs. A life rich with literary appeal. The cold was like a wildcat that crept in through cracks and gnawed at my feet. He was just a child who couldn’t afford a pair of socks, and had to curl his blackened, chapped feet in woven rush sandals, icy drops of sweat coating his soles and the spaces between his toes. The kerosene lamp seemed to blaze in the dark room, making the white paper over the window sparkle, the freezing air streaming in through its rips and tears; sooty smoke from the kerosene flame wisped toward the ceiling in neat coils. Seventh Aunt and Seventh Uncle’s two children were asleep in a comer of the brick bed; the girl’s breathing was even, the boy’s was laboured, high one moment, low the next, mingled with nightmare babble that sounded like a dream brawl with a gang of ruffians. Seventh Aunt, a bright-eyed, educated woman with a nervous stomach, was hiccupping audibly. Seventh Uncle gave every appearance of being a muddle-headed man whose nondescript face had no distinctive curves or angles, like a slab of gooey rice cake. His clouded eyes were forever fixed dully on the lighted lamp.
‘Actually, Seventh Uncle was a shrewd man who had schemed and plotted to trick the educated Seventh Aunt, ten years his junior, into marrying him. It was a convoluted campaign that would take far too long to recount here. Seventh Uncle was an amateur veterinarian who could puncture a vein in a sow’s ear and inject penicillin intravenously, and who also knew how to castrate hogs, dogs, and donkeys. Like all men in the village, he liked to drink, but now the bottles were empty; all the fermentable grains had been used up, and food had become their biggest concern. He said, We suffered through the long winter nights with growling stomachs, and at the time no one dreamed that I’d ever make it to this day. I don’t deny that my nose is keenly sensitive where alcohol is concerned, especially in rural villages where the air is unpolluted. On cold nights in rural villages, threads of a variety of smells come through clear and distinct, and if someone is drinking liquor anywhere within a radius of several hundred meters, I can smell it.
‘As the night deepened, I detected the aroma of liquor off to the northeast, an intimate, seductive smell, even though there was a wall between it and me, and it had to soar across one snow-covered roof after another, pierce the armour of ice-clad trees, and pass down roads, intoxicating chickens, ducks, geese, and dogs along the way. The barking of those dogs was rounded like liquor bottles, exuberantly drunk; the aroma intoxicated constellations, which winked happily and swayed in the sky, like little urchins on swings. Intoxicated fish in the river hid among lithe water-weeds and spat out sticky, richly mellow air bubbles. To be sure, birds braving the cold night air drank in the aroma of liquor as they flew overhead, including two densely feathered owls and even some field voles chomping grass in their underground dens. On this spot of land, full of life in spite of the cold, many sentient beings shared in the enjoyment of man’s contribution, and sacred feelings were thus born. “The popularity of liquor begins with the sage kings, though some say Yi Di and others Du Kang.” Liquor flows among the gods. Why do we offer it as a sacrifice to our ancestors and to release the imprisoned souls of the dead? That night I understood. It was the moment of my initiation. On that night a spirit sleeping within me awakened, and I was in touch with a mystery of the universe, one that transcends the power of words to describe, beautiful and gentle, tender and kind, moving and sorrowful, moist and redolent . . . do you all understand?’
He stretched his arms out to the audience, as they craned their necks toward him. We sat there bug-eyed, our mouths open, as if we wanted to go up to see, then eat, a miraculous potion lying in the palm of his hands, which were, in fact, empty.
The colours emanating from your eyes are incredibly moving. Only people who speak to God can create colours like that. You see sights we cannot see, you hear sounds we cannot hear, you smell odours we cannot smell. What grief we feel! When speech streams from that organ called your mouth, it is like a melody, a rounded, flat rivet, a silken thread from the rear end of a spider waving gossamer-like in the air, the size of a chicken’s egg, just as smooth and glossy, and every bit as wholesome. We are intoxicated by that music, we drift in that river, we dance on that silken spider thread, we see God. But before we see Him, we watch our own corpses float down the river . . .
‘Why were the owls’ screeches so gentle that night, like the pillow talk of lovers? Because there was liquor in the air. Why were geese, wild and domestic, coupling in the freezing night, when it wasn’t even the mating season? Again, because there was liquor in the air. My nose twitched spiritedly, and Fang Nine asked in a soft, muffled voice, “Why are you scrunching up your nose like that? Going to sneeze?”
“Liquor,” I said. “I smell liquor!”
They scrunched up their noses, too. Seventh Uncle’s nose was a mass of wrinkles.
“I don’t smell liquor,” he said. “Where is it?” My thoughts were galloping. “Sniff the air,” I said, “sniff it.”
Their eyes darted all around the room, searching every corner.
Seventh Uncle picked up the grass mat covering the brick bed, to which Seventh Aunt reacted angrily. “What are you looking for? You think there’s liquor here in bed? You amaze me!”
Seventh Aunt was an intellectual, as I said earlier, so she was ‘amazed’. Back when she was still a newlywed, she critiqued my mother for washing the rice so hard she scrubbed away all the vitamins. “Vitamins” had my mother gaping in stupefaction.
The smell of liquor includes protein, ethers, acids, and phenols, as well as calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, potassium, chlorine, sulfur, iron, copper, manganese, zinc, iodine, and cobalt, plus vitamins A, B, C, D, E, H, and some other materials-but look at me, listing the ingredients of liquor for you people, when your professor, Yuan Shuangyu, knows them better than anyone.’
My father-in-law’s neck deltoids had reddened over being praised by Deputy Head Diamond Jin. I couldn’t see the excitement in his face-though basically I could, or nearly so-but there is a pervasive something in the smell of liquor that transcends the material, and that is a spirit, a belief, a sacred belief, one that can be sensed but not articulated. Language is so clumsy, metaphors so inferior. It seeps into my heart and makes me shudder.
‘Comrades, students, is it possible that we still need to demonstrate whether liquor is a harmful insect or a beneficial one? No way, no way at all. Liquor is a swallow, it’s a frog, it’s a red-eyed wasp, it’s a seven-star ladybug, it’s a living pesticide!’ His spirits soared, and he waved his arms fervent
ly, lost in the exuberance of the moment. The atmosphere in the lecture hall was white-hot; he stood there looking like Hitler.
He said, ‘“Seventh Uncle, just look, the smell of liquor seeps in through the window, settles in through the ceiling, enters wherever there’s a hole or a crack . . . ”
“The boy is losing his mind,” Fang Nine said as he sniffed the air. “Do smells have colour? Can you see them? This is lunacy . . . ”
Doubt clouded their eyes; they looked at me the way they’d look at a child who had truly lost his mind. But to hell with them. On flying feet, I crossed a bridge of colours paved with the smell of liquor, feet flying. And then a miracle occurred, my dear students, a miracle occurred.’
His head sagged from the weight of his emotions. Then, standing at the podium in the General Education Lecture Hall at the Brewer’s College, he intoned in a hoarse but extraordinarily infectious voice:
‘The picture of a glorious banquet on a snow-swept night formed in my mind’s eye: a bright gas lamp. An old-fashioned square table. A bowl sits on the table, steam rising from within. Four people sit around the table, each holding a small bowl of liquor, as if cupping a rosy sunset. Their faces are kind of blurred . . . Aiie! They’ve cleared up, and I know who they are: the Branch Secretary, the Brigade Accountant, the Militia Commander, the Head of the Women’s League. They’re holding stewed legs of lamb, dipping them into garlic paste laced with soy sauce and sesame oil. Pointing my finger, I was talking to Seventh Uncle and the others, like an announcer, but my eyes were blurred, and I couldn’t see their faces clearly. Yet I didn’t dare strain too hard for fear that the picture would dissolve. Seventh Uncle grabbed my hand and shook it hard.
