Brothers

by Yu Hua

  This young woman then started demonstrating outside the main gate of Baldy Li's company headquarters. Every day she would sit there, holding her baby, sobbing as she told everyone who would listen how Baldy Li's sense of compassion had been snatched by a dog, eaten by a wolf, chewed by a tiger, and shat out by a lion. Several days later, another woman arrived with a baby, claiming that it was Baldy Li's daughter. She tearfully recounted how Baldy Li had tricked her into bed and had gotten her pregnant. Crying even more tragically than the first, she sobbed that when she gave birth, Baldy Li didn't even come to see her. Then a third woman arrived, with a four- or five-year-old boy in tow. She was calmer than the previous two and didn't cry as she sternly accused Baldy Li of going back on his word—claiming that it was only after he had sworn they would marry and live happily ever after that she had agreed to go to bed with him. She pointed to her son and said that, based on his age, he would be Baldy Li's firstborn and heir. As soon as she finished, a fourth woman appeared with a seven- or eight-year-old boy and insisted that her son was Baldy Li's firstborn and rightful heir.

  Women claiming to have slept with Baldy Li kept arriving with their children, until finally there were more than thirty of them, all crowded into the street in front of Baldy Li's company headquarters. Day in and day out, they would cry and complain about Baldy Li's philandering. They chattered noisily amongst themselves, transforming the street in front of Baldy Li's headquarters into a small marketplace. They would get into spectacular fights jockeying for position, spitting and pulling one another's hair, scratching one another's faces, and clawing at one another's clothes. From dawn till dusk, the street was full of women's curses and babies’ cries.

  There were so many women protesting outside that Baldy Li's employees couldn't make it in to work, and enormous traffic jams developed in the street outside his headquarters. The director of the local branch of China's Women's Federation and all her underlings appeared in full force to exhort the women to go home and trust that the government would work out an equitable solution to their disputes with Badly Li. The women, however, adamantly refused to budge and instead entreated the federation director to have the Women's Federation come and force Baldy Li to marry them. The director didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this, reminding them that the law only permitted a man to have a single wife and therefore there was no way for Baldy Li to marry them all.

  The county's director of transportation called up Baldy Li and said that the county's most important street had been completely blocked for more than a month, and as a result the county's economy had taken a huge hit. County Governor Tao Qing also called him up, saying that Baldy Li was now the most influential person in the county and that if this matter was not resolved satisfactorily, not only would it be a blow to Baldy Li's image but, furthermore, the entire county's reputation would be severely impacted. Baldy Li chuckled on the other end of the line and said to just let them continue demonstrating. Tao Qing argued that already more than thirty women were demonstrating, and if they didn't act now, there soon could be even more. Baldy Li replied, "The more the better. As they say, the more fleas you have, the less you are afraid of being bitten."

  Among the protestors were some who had indeed slept with Baldy Li, some who knew him but hadn't slept with him, and others who had never even met him. Among the women who had slept with him were some who genuinely believed that he was the father of their children, and they were naturally bolder than the others. They discussed matters among themselves and decided that, rather than being tired, thirsty, and hungry demonstrating outside all day, they might as well take Baldy Li to court.

  Once Baldy Li was named as a defendant, a vast crowd congregated inside and outside the courthouse. He appeared in court wearing a suit and patent-leather shoes, with a little red flower pinned to his lapel, since he was just coming from the opening ceremony of one of his new companies. Beaming like a groom, he made his way through the crowds into the courthouse and then proceeded to the defendants seat as though he were about to present a report. He sat in court listening to the women testify, as attentive as a child listening to a story. When they tearfully described their beautiful experiences with him, he blushed and repeatedly asked in astonishment, "Really? Was it really like that?"

  After about two hours he began to grow weary. The testimony was becoming increasingly repetitious, and the majority of the women hadn't even testified yet. Baldy Li decided that he had had enough and requested permission to speak. After the judge acknowledged him, Baldy Li reached into his breast pocket and very carefully pulled out his trump card: the hospital record of his vasectomy from more than a decade earlier.

  He handed the vasectomy report to the judge, who read it and then proceeded to laugh uncontrollably for more than two full minutes. Finally regaining his composure, he announced that Baldy Li was innocent, explaining that Baldy Li had had a vasectomy more than a decade earlier and therefore could not possibly have fathered any of these children. Everyone in the courthouse fell into stunned silence, but after a few minutes they exploded into laughter as well. The thirty original plaintiffs stood there in shock, looking at one another with expressions of astonishment. When the judge informed Baldy Li that he could countersue the women for slander and fraud, a dozen or so of them turned pale, a couple fainted, four burst into tears, and three tried to sneak out but were promptly nabbed by the crowds and brought back. Meanwhile, the women who had actually slept with Baldy Li declared that they would challenge the judge s decision and would continue to press their cases on the ground that, even if Baldy Li hadn't fathered their children, he had still slept with them and destroyed their hymens, which were more valuable to them than life itself. If they didn't succeed in the city's middle court, they would appeal to the upper court. If they still didn't prevail, they would appeal all the way to the Supreme Court in Beijing. If they didn't succeed there, they would take their case all the way to the World Court in The Hague.

  The crowds retorted, "If you sue Baldy Li for having slept with you, Baldy Li could also sue you for having slept with him. If you want him to compensate you for your lost hymens, he could demand that you compensate him for his lost virginity."

  The courtroom became as cacophonous as a chicken farm, with the crowds siding with Baldy Li and taunting the female swindlers, asking the judge to arrest the lot of them. No matter how hard the judge pounded his gavel and how loudly he shouted for order, it was of no use. It was only after Baldy Li got up and bowed respectfully to the crowd that they finally began to calm down. He said, "Fellow townspeople, thank you, thank you…"

  Baldy Li emotionally dabbed at his eyes and then continued, "The fact that I have my current career is due entirely to your support. Today I want to speak to you from my heart. It is true that I, Baldy Li, have slept with a great number of women, but the truth of the matter is that I am actually quite miserable, insofar as I've never come across a single hymen in all these years."

  The townspeople burst into riotous laughter, slapping their bellies and shouting, "Excellent!" Baldy Li gestured for them to quiet down, then continued: "The reason I decided to have a vasectomy was because the woman I loved decided to marry someone else. From that point on, I fell into despair and lost all scruples, or why else would I have slept with so many women? If a man chooses to sleep around, all the women he comes across will of course also be loose. Today I have reached an epiphany and realized, to put it coarsely, that not until you've slept with a woman with her hymen intact can you say that you've really slept with a woman. Or, to put it more elegantly, it is only after you have slept with a woman who genuinely loves you that you can be said to have really slept with a woman. The sad truth of the matter is that there hasn't been a single woman who has genuinely loved me. And so it doesn't matter how many women I've slept with. I might as well have been sleeping with myself."

  The townspeople were now laughing so hard they couldn't catch their breath, and the sound of their delirious gasps and guffaws resonated thr
oughout the courtroom. Displeased, Baldy Li cried out, "I'm not joking!"

  After everyone had quieted down, Baldy Li patted his chest earnestly and said, "I am speaking from my heart." He dabbed at his eyes and then continued to share his heartfelt sorrows. "To tell the truth, I am no longer able to court a woman. I once tried courting a few young women, but it didn't work out. Why? Because I am already debauched."

  He tried to explain. "In courtship, women are always likely to get emotional, and sometimes they'll throw a minor tantrum or two. Whenever that happens, I can't help cursing and shouting at them, ‘Damn it, what kind of attitude is this?’ After I shout out a few times, the nice ones always run away!"

  Baldy Li paused, then smiled bitterly. "Why? Because I have already become used to paying for sex. Naturally, women who are sleeping with me because I have paid them have better attitudes. For me, sleeping with women is like doing business and has nothing at all to do with love. I am no longer able to respect women, and since I can't respect them, I therefore can't court them. That is my tragedy!"

  Amid the laughter of the townspeople, Baldy Li concluded his speech. After wiping his eyes, he then pointed to the thirty plaintiffs and said magnanimously, "This hasn't been easy for them either—they protested in front of my company for an entire month." He turned to one of his underlings. "Tell my CFO to pay each of them one thousand yuan, and we will treat it as one month's wages."

  The townspeople shouted their approval. The former plaintiffs each relaxed and put aside their anger, thinking that although they hadn't succeeded in stealing a chicken, at least they hadn't lost a fistful of rice in the process, and furthermore, they did come away with enough money to buy another fistful. Amid everyone's shouts of approval, Baldy Li walked out of the courthouse, beaming with satisfaction. Before stepping into his Santana sedan, he turned around and waved to the cheering crowd; after getting into the car, he rolled down his window and continued waving at them, even after the car had driven off.

  After this incident Baldy Li viewed the medical record of his vasec-tomy operation as a great treasure and thought it was truly fortunate that he had decided, in a fit of anger, to have the operation. He had never imagined that it would save him so much trouble. He carefully tore the page documenting his vasectomy out of the booklet, had a framer mount it, then hung it right between his masterpieces by Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian.

  The townspeople agreed that Baldy Li's decision to have a vasectomy had been a stroke of genius. Just think, if he hadn't had the vasectomy, then who knows how many little Baldy Lis might be running around in every street and alley, including perhaps a few big-nosed, blond-haired, and blue-eyed ones?

  Then everyone let their imaginations go wild as they invented a prehistory for Baldy Li's operation, transforming into something truly legendary the tale of his decision to have the vasectomy after having had his heart broken. They told how he had taken a rope and tied it around his neck and tried to hang himself from a tree branch, but how neither the rope nor the branch held, and consequently he fell to the ground and ended up with a mouthful of mud. Next they described how he tried to drown himself in the river, but after jumping in, he remembered that he actually did know how to swim and therefore wasn't able to drown himself. They imagined him climbing out of the river and cursing, "I can't seem to fucking kill myself!" So he returned home and removed his pants, took out his penis and placed it on the cutting board, picked up the cleaver, and was about to lop it off when he suddenly had to take a piss. When he returned from the bathroom, he discovered that he couldn't bear to part with his penis after all. Therefore, he went to look for a razor blade to slice off his balls, but he discovered that they were so terrified they had shrunken up. Baldy Li therefore felt sorry for them and couldn't bring himself to slice them off. It was only then that he went to the hospital to have the vasectomy.

  Now that Baldy Li's vasectomy from a decade earlier was brought to light, the people of Liu once again started paying attention to Lin Hong. Many would point, feeling sorry for her, shaking their heads at her fate. Some of the women of Liu liked to gloat over other people's misfortunes, and they sniffed that Lin Hong might appear clever but was actually quite stupid, while others sighed that this was just another instance of beauty being often cursed with a harsh fate. But some of the men of Liu Town tried to defend her, saying that no one could have anticipated what would happen, and even a fortune-teller can only predict other people's futures but not his own. They said that if everyone could predict the future, the emperors of the past would never have lost their mandate of power, and Lin Hong would never have given up Baldy Li.

  CHAPTER 57

  WRITER LIU, one of Liu Towns two Men of Talent, had attended the hearing at the courthouse, where he saw firsthand that hilarious scene and heard with his own ears Baldy Li's heartfelt speech. Writer Liu was so excited that night that he couldn't sleep, feeling that he had stumbled across a once-in-a-lifetime story. Therefore, he climbed out of bed, got dressed, and proceeded to spend the entire night writing a lengthy article entitled "Millionaire Crying Out for Love." In his article, Writer Liu deployed the Lofty, Expansive, and Thorough rhetorical precepts to embellish Baldy Li's story. He prettified Baldy Li's having slept with hundreds of women into his having had his heart broken by hundreds of women. He wrote that Baldy Li had fervently sought his romantic ideal in each of these encounters, but each time he found himself entangled not with a virgin but, rather, with a slut.

  Writer Liu also sought to trace the source of Baldy Li's woes to his traumatic childhood—transforming the adventures of a fourteen-year-old Baldy Li peeping at bare bottoms in the public toilet into a tale of tragic victimhood. He recounted how the young Baldy Li had entered the latrine, squatted down, and grunted a couple of times; and how, before he had even started to defecate, his key accidentally slid out of his pants pocket and fell into the cesspool below. As he was leaning down to look for it, a certain Mr. Zhao came in and, ignoring Baldy Li's protests, grabbed him and accused him of being a Peeping Tom, then paraded him up and down the streets and alleys of Liu. Under Writer Liu's pen, Liu Town's other Man of Talent, Poet Zhao, was transformed into an anonymous Mr. Zhao, a hopelessly confused fellow who couldn't tell his ass from a hole in the ground. Writer Liu movingly described how a pure youth thereby became besmirched by false accusations, and how that youth unexpectedly didn't fall into depravity but, rather, from an early age simply bit his lip, endured the unjust humiliation, and grew up to exert himself for the sake of others, finally succeeding in building a vast business empire.

  This article was initially published in the city's evening paper. When Baldy Li read it, he was very satisfied, especially with the part describing how his key had fallen out of his pocket and how he had leaned over to try to fish it out of the cesspool. Baldy Li repeatedly praised the article, pounding the table with his left hand as he waved the newspaper with his right hand and shouting, "That bastard Writer Liu is truly talented. With this key, he has single-handedly redressed Liu Towns most notorious false accusation!" Grinning, Baldy Li proclaimed, "When it comes to history, the truth will always win out."

  Baldy Li did have one small complaint about the title of the article. He held up five fingers and said that he had at least fifty million yuan in personal assets, so how was it that Writer Liu described him as being a mere millionaire? However, he didn't make a big deal about this and reasoned to one of his underlings, "For someone who has never seen much money, its impressive that he should even be able to write the word million."

  Within two months Writer Liu's article had been reprinted in several hundred local papers and tabloids throughout the country. With each reprinting it continued to evolve, and the title was changed to "Multimillionaire Crying Out for Love." When Baldy Li read this, from a small town hundreds of li away from Liu, he was even more pleased with the new title and declared, "This article was written with an attention to pursuing truth from facts."

  After Writer Liu's article had circul
ated throughout the entire nation, it finally returned to Liu, appearing in a provincial paper, though this time the headline had been upgraded to "Billionaire Crying Out for Love." When Baldy Li read this, he laughed modestly. "That is a bit of an exaggeration."

  Writer Liu had never imagined that his article would be reprinted so many times—the number of newspapers it had appeared in was almost as large as the number of women Baldy Li had slept with. After all these years Writer Liu finally became famous and was finally able to vent his long-standing frustration at having no one know who he was. With a broad smile he walked down the main street of Liu Town waving a money order and telling everyone he met, "Every day I receive a money order and have to go to the post office." Then he sighed loudly. "It's exhausting being a celebrity."

  After the article made Writer Liu famous, Poet Zhao regretted that he hadn't also gone to the courthouse to observe the proceedings and that he hadn't been the one to write an article about Baldy Li. Poet Zhao pointed to the part of the article describing the young Baldy Li in the public toilet and resentfully told the townspeople, "That was my story to tell! Writer Liu stole it from me."

  Liu's two Men of Talent were bound to run into each other eventually and they finally did at the opening ceremony of Blacksmith Tongs supermarket. By that point, Blacksmith Tong already owned three stores, but seeing newfangled stores known as supermarkets pop up all over China like bamboo shoots after a spring shower, he advanced with the times and opened a 32,000-square-foot supermarket of his own. He then set about orchestrating a truly extravagant opening ceremony. Unable to persuade County Governor Tao Qing to appear in person, he instead settled for the county governors secretary; and similarly unable to persuade the bureau directors, he instead settled for inviting the section chiefs. Baldy Li, who was occupied with his business and interviews, was also unable to come, but he sent an enormous floral arrangement. Yanker Yu was aboard the Eurostar train en route from Milan to Paris at the time, but when he crossed the Swiss border, he sent a congratulatory telegram, asking Popsicle Wang to read it aloud at the grand opening. Wang, however, discovered that he wasn't able to read it, since two lines of text were in a foreign language, and he didn't even know whether it was Italian or French. Blacksmith Tong excitedly took the note from him and waved it to the crowd, saying, "Even foreign friends have sent congratulatory telegrams!"