by Yu Hua
“Of course,” I said. “You’re playing Go.”
“Wrong! It’s Chinese chess.”
They then asked me the following question at the same time: “Now what are we playing?”
“If it’s not Go, it’s got to be Chinese chess.”
“Wrong again!” they said. “Now we’re playing Five in a Row.”
They heaved with laughter, each of them making exactly the same gestures, pressing one hand against his own midriff and the other hand on the other’s shoulder. The two skeletons shook with laughter, like withered trees whose intersecting branches tremble together in the wind.
Afterward the two skeletons continued their game, but before long they were in an argument once more, because of yet another retracted move. It seemed to me that they were playing these games just in order to be able to argue, with each of them taking his turn to denounce the other’s record of retracting moves. I stood there listening to the history of their happy chess playing and the history of their happy arguments. Gleefully each fulminated against the other’s vile record of retracted moves, and when their respective surveys of past offenses finally went back as far as seven years earlier, I lost patience, knowing there were another seven or eight years of retracted moves still to be accounted for.
“Which of you is Zhang Gang?” I asked. I hesitated a moment, realizing suddenly the inappropriateness of referring to the other man as “the male surnamed Li,” as the newspapers at the time put it. “And which of you is Mr. Li?”
“Mr. Li?”
They looked at each other, then burst into gales of laughter.
“Why don’t you guess?” they both said.
I studied them carefully, and to me the two skeletons looked exactly alike. “I’ve no idea,” I told them. “You could be twins, as far as I can tell.”
“Twins?” Again they burst into laughter. Then, once more, they resumed their game in the most cordial of moods. The tempestuous argument of a moment earlier had vanished into thin air after my interruption.
Soon they were back to their old tricks, asking me, “Do you know what game we’re playing?”
“Chinese chess, Go, Five in a Row.” I recited all the possibilities.
“Wrong!” they chortled. “We’re playing Chinese checkers.”
Once again they burst out laughing and again I saw each of them gripping his midriff with one hand and clapping the other hand on his adversary’s shoulder. The two skeletons shook with a tidy rhythm.
I laughed too. More than ten years ago, the two of them had come here, six months apart. The grudge between them had not crossed the frontier between life and death. Enmity had been sealed off in that departed world.
My search continued endlessly, like the hands on a clock that go round and round but can never leave the dial. My father was nowhere to be found.
Several times I ran into a crowd of skeletons, dozens of them. They were not like the other skeletons that sometimes gathered together and sometimes separated—this crowd stayed consistently together as they walked, a little like the moon’s reflection on water, which keeps floating in a discrete shape no matter how the waves tug.
The fourth time I ran into this bunch, I came to a halt and so did they. We sized each other up. Their hands were linked and their bodies leaned on each other, and they grouped together like a flourishing tree whose branches spread high and low. I knew that among them there were men and women, old and young. I smiled and greeted them.
“Hello!” they responded in unison, a chorus of male and female voices, hoarse old voices and tender young voices, and I saw a cheerful outlook in their empty eyes.
“How many of you are there?” I asked.
“Thirty-eight,” they answered.
“Why are you always together?”
“We arrived at the same time,” a man’s voice answered.
“We’re all one family,” a woman’s voice added.
Then I heard a boy’s voice. “Why are you on your own?”
“I’m not entirely on my own.” I looked down at the black armband on my left arm. “I’m looking for my father. He’s wearing a railroad uniform.”
Another voice piped up from among the skeletons in front of me. “We haven’t seen anyone in a railroad uniform.”
“He may have changed his clothes before coming here,” I said.
The crisp voice of a little girl rang out. “Daddy, is he new here?”
“Yes,” the male voices said.
“Mom, is he new here?”
“That’s right,” the female voices said.
“Are they all your moms and dads?” I asked the little girl.
“That’s right,” she said. “In the past I just had one mom and one dad, but now I’ve got lots of moms and lots of dads.”
“How did you get here?” the boy who’d addressed me earlier asked.
“I think it was a fire,” I said.
“How come he’s not burned?” he asked the skeletons next to him.
I could feel their silent, rapt gaze. “After I saw the fire,” I told them, “I heard an explosion and the building must have collapsed.”
“Were you crushed to death?” the little girl asked.
“I think that’s maybe what happened, yes.”
“His face has been altered,” the little boy said.
“You’re right.”
“Are we pretty?” the little girl asked.
I looked awkwardly at the thirty-eight skeletons arrayed in front of me, unsure how to respond to the girl’s blunt inquiry.
“Everyone here says I keep getting prettier,” the little girl said.
“That’s true,” the boy said. “They say everyone who comes here just gets uglier, and we’re the only ones who get prettier.”
I hesitated for a moment. “I wouldn’t know,” I answered in the end.
The voice of an elderly person sounded among them. “We were so charred in the fire that when we got here we were like thirty-eight knots of charcoal. Later, the burned bits peeled off, leaving us as we are now. That’s why people say this.”
He recounted their story as the other thirty-seven listened silently. Now I knew their history, how, on the day of my father’s disappearance, that department store half a mile from my little shop caught on fire and was reduced to a pile of blackened ruins. The city government had reported that seven had died and twenty-one were injured, of whom two were in critical condition. On the Internet some said over fifty had perished, and some even claimed the death toll topped one hundred. I looked at the thirty-eight skeletons in front of me: they were the deleted dead. But what about their relatives?
“Why did your families not make a fuss?”
“They received threats, and they accepted hush money as well,” the old one answered. “We’re already dead, and just so long as our relatives can go on living an undisturbed life, we’ll be content.”
“But the children? Won’t their parents—”
“We’re the kids’ parents now,” the old man interrupted me.
Holding hands, one next to the other, they silently slipped past me and went on their way. They moved on in a tight throng, and even the strongest wind could not have blown them apart.
In the far distance I spotted a couple, still fully fleshed, emerging from a lush stand of mulberry trees. They were dressed very skimpily, in garments that looked more like simple coverings than real apparel. As they came nearer, I realized that the woman was dressed in only a black bra and panties and the man in blue underpants. The woman wore a shocked expression and walked with a slight crouch, her hands folded across her thighs as if to screen them from view. The man bent down and put his arm around her protectively.
As they arrived in front of me, they scanned me carefully, as though searching for a familiar face. Disappointment gradually registered on their features, for they had decided they did not recognize me.
“Are you a new arrival?” the man asked.
I nodded. “And you are, t
oo? Husband and wife, I take it?”
They nodded simultaneously.
“Did you see our daughter?” the woman asked pathetically.
I shook my head. “There’s such a multitude of people over there,” I said, “I don’t know which of them is your daughter.”
The woman bowed her head in distress. The man patted her on the shoulder. “There will be other new arrivals,” he comforted her.
“Yes, but there’s such a multitude of people over there,” the woman answered, repeating what I’d just said.
“There’s bound to be someone who has seen Xiaomin,” the man said.
Xiaomin? I seemed to have heard this name before. “How did you come to be here?” I asked.
A wisp of fear crossed their faces as the shadow of their ordeal in that departed world projected into this one. Their eyes evaded my glance—or perhaps it was their tears that made them appear to do so.
Then the man began to recount their terrifying experience that morning on Amity Street. The city had been determined to demolish the three apartment buildings, but the residents had refused to move out, resisting all pressure for a good three months, until forcible demolition was authorized. The couple came home early one morning after getting off the night shift, woke up their daughter, and prepared breakfast for her. She went off to school, her satchel on her back, while they went to bed and fell asleep. In their dreams they heard a loudspeaker outside delivering one warning after another, but they were just too tired to wake up properly. In the past they had heard other such warnings and seen bulldozers lined up in combat readiness, but after the confrontation with the residents, the loudspeakers and bulldozers had retreated. So they thought this was simply another round of intimidation and went on sleeping. They were shaken awake only when the building began to sway violently amid a clamorous din. The man jumped out of bed, tugging his wife by the hand, and ran toward the door. Just as he opened it, she ran over to the sofa to collect her jacket. He dashed back to pull her away—and the building collapsed with a crash.
His account came to an abrupt halt, and she began to weep.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t say that.”
“I shouldn’t have tried to get my jacket—”
“We didn’t have enough time anyway. Even if you hadn’t gone back, we wouldn’t have had time to escape.”
“If I hadn’t tried to pick up the jacket, you would have got out alive.”
“Even if I’d got out, where would that have left you?”
“Well, at least Xiaomin would have a father.”
I realized now who their daughter was—the little girl in the red down jacket who sat amid the chaos of steel and concrete, doing her homework in the cold wind as she waited for her parents to come home.
“I’ve seen your daughter,” I told them. “Her name is Zheng Xiaomin.”
“Yes!” they cried together. “That’s her name.”
“She’s in fourth grade.”
“That’s right. How do you know?” they asked.
“We’ve talked on the phone,” I told the man. “I’m the one who promised to do the tutoring.”
“You’re Teacher Yang?”
“Yes, I’m Yang Fei.”
The man turned to the woman. “This is Teacher Yang. I told him we didn’t make much money and he immediately lowered his fee to thirty yuan an hour.”
“That was kind of you,” the woman said.
To hear thanks in this context made me smile wanly.
“How is it you’re here too?” the man asked.
“I was sitting in a restaurant when the kitchen caught fire, and then there was an explosion. I arrived on the same day as you, just a few hours later. I called you from the restaurant, but you didn’t pick up.”
“I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“You were buried in the ruins then.”
“You’re right.” The man looked at his wife. “The phone was probably crushed.”
“How was Xiaomin?” she asked impatiently.
“We had arranged that I would come to your apartment at four p.m. When I got there, the three buildings were no longer standing….”
I hesitated for a moment, and decided not to tell them how their deaths had been hushed up. A story would be concocted about how the two of them had died. Their daughter would receive an urn in which other people’s ashes had been placed, and would grow up believing in a beautiful lie.
“How is Xiaomin?” the woman asked again.
“She’s well,” I said. “She’s the most levelheaded girl I’ve ever met. You don’t need to worry about her. She knows how to take care of herself.”
“She’s only eleven,” the girl’s mother moaned. “Every time she leaves the house to go to school, she’ll stop after a few yards and call, ‘Dad,’ and ‘Mom,’ and wait for us to respond. Then she’ll say, ‘I’m off now,’ and head off to school.”
“What did she tell you?” the father asked.
I remembered how she told me she was cold and how I suggested she do her homework in the KFC nearby and how she shook her head, saying that her mom and dad wouldn’t know where she was when they came home.
After hesitating once more, I decided I should tell these things to her parents, adding, “She was sitting right above you.”
Tears flowed silently down their faces, and I knew that theirs was a wellspring of grief that would never dry. My eyes misted up too as I went on my way. After I had gone some distance, the wailing behind me pursued me like a tidal surge. Just the two of them wept as much as a whole crowd might. In my mind’s eye the tide carried the girl in the red down jacket and tossed her onto a beach, and when the waters retreated she was left all alone, there in the human world.
I saw what a feast was like here. In a land of scented grasses and babbling streams, there were thriving vegetables and trees laden with fruit. The dead sat around in circles on the grass, as though seated around the multiple tables of a banquet hall. Their movements were infinitely varied: some ate rapidly and with great determination, some savored things slowly, some chatted away, some smoked and drank, some raised glasses in a toast, some rubbed their bellies when full….I saw several people with flesh and others just with bones shuttling back and forth, and they were making the motions of carrying dishes and pouring wine, so I knew these were serving staff.
When I approached, a skeleton greeted me. “Welcome to the Tan Family Eatery.”
This name, rendered in a young woman’s dulcet tones, gave me a start. Then I heard an unfamiliar voice call my name: “Yang Fei.”
I turned my head and there was Tan Jiaxin making his way toward me with a limp. His right hand looked as though a plate rested on top of it. I saw a happy expression on his face, an expression I had never seen in that departed world, where his smile had always been forced.
He came up to me. “Yang Fei, when did you get here?”
“Yesterday.”
“We’ve been here four days.”
As he spoke, he held up his right hand as though carrying a dish. He turned around and called his wife and daughter, and then his son-in-law, conveying his happiness to them. “Yang Fei’s here!”
Soon the rest of the family came over, all holding plates and carrying bottles. Tan Jiaxin hailed them as they approached. “Yang Fei made it for the opening.”
They came to me and looked me up and down, beaming and chuckling. “You look thinner,” Tan Jiaxin’s wife said.
“We’re thinner, too,” Tan said cheerfully. “Everyone who comes here is bound to lose some weight. Everyone here has a fine figure.”
“How come you’re here too?” his daughter asked.
“I have no burial plot. How about you?”
Tan’s face darkened. “Our relatives are all in Guangdong,” he said. “They maybe don’t know what happened to us.”
“But the four of us are all here,” Tan’s wife pointed out.
A happy expression returned to
Tan’s face. “That’s right,” he said. “Our family’s all together.”
“You broke your leg?” I asked.
“With a broken leg I can walk all the more quickly.” He gave a ringing laugh.
A cry rose up from one of the groups of diners. “Hey, what about our dishes? And our drinks?”
Tan turned and responded with a shout. “Be right there!”
He moved off quickly, limping heavily, his right hand appearing to hold a plate. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law rushed off to attend to the diners, looking as though they were holding plates and carrying bottles of spirits.
Tan Jiaxin looked back over his shoulder. “What will you have?”
“The usual bowl of noodles,” I said.
“You got it.”
I found a place, and when I sat down on the grass I felt as though I were sitting on a chair. Opposite me sat a skeleton, and his only gesture was that of putting a glass to his lips, with no effort to pick up food with chopsticks and put things in his mouth. His vacant eyes gazed at the black armband on my arm.
His outfit looked strange to me. His black clothes hung very loosely, but they lacked sleeves, revealing the skeleton’s arms and shoulders, and their dark color seemed to indicate they had undergone months and years of exposure to the elements. There was a raw edge where the shoulders of his garment would have met the arms; it looked as though the sleeves had been torn off.
We looked at each other. He was the first to speak. “What day did you come over?”
“It’s my fifth day,” I said. “I got here yesterday.”
He raised his glass and gulped down the contents. Then he set his glass on the ground and went through the motions of refilling it. “All on your own, I see.” He sighed.
I bowed my head in acknowledgment, glancing at the black gauze on my arm.
“At least you knew to wear an armband for yourself,” he said. “Some lonely madcaps arrive here without any armband, and they get so envious when they see others with them that they come and hassle me to tear off a piece of sleeve.”
I looked at the skeletal arm and shoulder that were exposed to view and couldn’t help but smile.
He made a gesture of raising his glass, downing the shot, and setting the glass back on the ground. “The sleeves were very long originally, reaching below my fingers. But now look at them—both shoulders are exposed.” He used his hands to make his point.
