I Live in the Slums

by Can Xue

  I kept thinking of what Lan had said. Where did she say one couldn’t go? Certainly, this dark place hid frightening things. I’d have to be very cautious. The incident with the ants was a good lesson. To avoid disaster, I’d better just sit and not move. This newly excavated hole was my home. Just when I was thinking of this, the person carried the wooden basin of foot-washing water over here. He yelled, “Watch out!” as he threw the water into my hole. Once again, flustered and exasperated, I jumped out. All the hair on one side of my body was wet. He kept picking on me. Was he in charge of all the little animals down here? In this hole, I could hear Lan talking, but now he had made it impossible to stay in my hole. If I went elsewhere, it was hard to say if I’d still be able to hear Lan. If I couldn’t, I’d be very lonely. The flying squirrel flew over again, rubbed my nose, and flew away. He let out a really stinky fart. I wanted to break away from this person, because he never let me rest. I felt he was intentionally malicious. Maybe he even hoped I would die: his actions implied it. Couldn’t I try to escape?

  I had to escape. I couldn’t be sure where I could go and where I shouldn’t. I just moved ahead and let nature take its course. Oh, there was a fence here. Oh, could there be a vegetable garden inside the fence? I could hear even more little animals inside it. Sniffing as I walked along the fence, I soon discovered a break in it. I went through the hole and came to an even more exciting place. But it was an even worse place to stay. Every passerby shoved me, a sign that I was unwelcome. After a short while, I discovered the difference: none of the little animals here was digging holes. Sometimes they moved; sometimes they were still. When they were still, a whistle sounded in the distance. On hearing the whistle, they all rushed in that direction. When they were running, the whistling stopped and so they began hesitating and finally stopped again. Then they listened attentively once more. Before long, the whistling resumed from a different direction, and so they once again rushed in that direction. Before long, they stopped again. I was among them and felt keyed up. It was both chaotic and orderly here. Everything was decided by that bizarre sound coming from an unknown place. No, I couldn’t adapt. They ran so fast, and while they were running they shoved me down on the ground and stepped on me as they went past. So the next time they were waiting for the whistle to sound, I fumbled my way back to the break in the fence where I had come in. I wanted to get out. I had just leaned out from the fence when that person punched me in the nose and roared, “Are you looking for death?” This was a really strong blow, and I nearly fainted from it. I sat on the ground and heard him say, “Try to escape! Just keep trying. I’d like to find out if your skull is made of iron. Huh!” Naturally, I didn’t dare try again. Now all I could do was act as wild as these other guys inside, because I couldn’t just sit here without moving. If I did, they would stampede me to death. Hey, they were starting to run again. Even though my nose still hurt, I ran along with them. But they stopped after just a few steps. I didn’t react in time and kept running. So I stumbled against one of them. He was a big one with long sharp protruding teeth. He sniffed at my belly with his long snout for a long time. I closed my eyes, waiting for death. Luckily, just then, the whistling started again. He threw me down and ran. I lay on my stomach on the ground, while lots of them stepped on my back to move ahead. I was afraid they would make mincemeat of me, but after a while they stopped stepping on me and detoured around me instead. Somehow, I unintentionally touched the fence once again. There was another break in it. Should I sneak out through it? Was that person standing guard outside? No, he wasn’t here. I emerged. It was quiet all around. Was this the wilderness? I saw a house with a kerosene lamp in front of the window! How could this exist underground?

  As I walked toward the house, I thought of the words that man had just spoken, “looking for death.” Was this what I was doing now? What would be in the house? Ha! A child was brushing his teeth in the doorway. He spat water all over my face! “Let him in if that’s what he wants,” someone inside said. This was the very master who had fed me poisonous mushrooms, wasn’t it? I went in. Hey, this really was his home! Great. This was great, I had returned to the slums. Just now on the road, I had noticed some indistinct houses, but hadn’t dared believe my eyes. When I climbed up to the stove, I sensed gratefully that I was home again. The master took out a bowl, filled it with food, and placed it in front of me. I saw at once that it was poisonous mushrooms—three of them in the rice. Although my belly was rumbling with hunger, I hesitated. Did I really want to die? No, I didn’t! I didn’t want to die! The master was staring at me. “Are you going to eat? If not, I’ll take it away.” He seemed to be chuckling. I immediately buried my head in the food and began eating. Without even tasting it, I ate it all. My mind went blank. I heard the person clap twice and say, “Great! Great!” What was so “great”? It must be night, but he said, “I’m going to repair the road.” He went out with a hoe. It was so dark, and yet he was going to repair the road! I jumped down from the stove and inspected the house. It was the same as before, and so was the furniture. The child was sitting under the table playing with a top. The spinning top was buzzing loudly. This made me uptight. So it couldn’t be night, because everyone was going about regular daily activities. But it was dark, and the lamp had been lit. How could they see? The child stopped the metal top with one hand and said to me, “Rat—oh, Rat, why have you come to my home? Dad has gone out to the back to dig a grave. He’ll be back soon. Let’s spin the top together. As long as the top doesn’t stop, Dad won’t kill you.” With all his strength he started the top spinning again, and it spun at lightning speed. The buzzing gave me a splitting headache. That person came in, set the hoe down, and looked in both directions. He was probably looking for me. I heard him take my empty bowl from the stove and wash it. He was cursing something. Next to me, the child said, “Dad is very afraid of tops.” He let the top stop and asked me to try it. I had barely gotten the hang of it when it began spinning—it even left the floor. The child said, “You’re really good at this.”

  But I still couldn’t stand the sound made by the spinning top. I even tried to run away several times, but after running two steps I went back under the table, because the child shouted at me, “Do you want to die!!” It was weird: his voice sounded the same as the voice of the man washing his feet in the wooden basin of water. Then the child put the top in his pocket and said, “I have to make things harder for Dad.” He asked me to sleep under the table with him. The master came in and stood in the middle of the room nervously stamping his feet. He shouted, “Tusheng! Tusheng!” He was calling his son. Couldn’t he see that we were under the table? “Tusheng!!” he began snarling, and all of a sudden he bumped into the wall. The dry cow pies pasted onto the bamboo wall fell to the floor. Tusheng hugged me tightly because he was snickering and his whole body was shaking. I was shaking, too, but it was because I was afraid of Tusheng. If this kid could handle his father like this, wouldn’t it have been an easy matter for him to kill me if he wanted to? The master’s face was bleeding. He climbed up from the floor and dejectedly went back to the stove and continued tidying up the dishes. He was really afraid of his son.

  Tusheng wanted me to sleep under the table with him after this. “We can play with the top whenever we want to.” He took the top out of his pocket and told me to polish it with my face. Each time I did that, I heard a roar in my head and saw stars. Although this was hard on me, I was in a much better mood. “Okay, okay now,” Tusheng said. “From now on, our domain is under this table. Don’t go back to the stove.” When he said this, I thought of his dad. His dad was a nice person, quite kind to me. I actually doubted that he wanted to poison me. I wanted to express my remorse to the master. I heard him crying. Maybe he thought his son was lost. Tusheng didn’t let me take a step. He said that when his dad cried, one shouldn’t bother him. I heard a noise at the door, and someone came in. Tusheng made a face, pulled out the top, and set it spinning. The person screamed and ran off. As for me, I was
getting sort of used to the top. It no longer bothered me so much. Could this little thing be making Tusheng and me invisible? Why couldn’t his dad see us? A magical top! Magical! How could there be such a rarity?

  “Tusheng! Tusheng! I can’t see you. I know you can see me. Answer me.”

  This sounded familiar. Who had I heard say this? He sadly picked up his basket and went out to buy groceries. I felt as if my heart had been pressed down by a rock.

  Tusheng told me to sleep holding the top. He said something good would happen. In my dreams, I was sleeping on a huge top disk. I could see everything: the flowers and grass, trees, rocks, little animals, and other things. They were all levitating. The sun, by contrast, was descending and rolling back and forth in front of me. It was as though I could touch it with my claws. Someone anxiously shouted under the disk, “Can you see me? Hey? Can you see me?”

  I settled down in this home. The slums were my home. I was born here and grew up here. I don’t remember how old I am, but I do remember things that happened a long time ago. Back then, the houses in the lowlands had just been built and weren’t really like houses. They were more like temporary work sheds. After the houses had been built, the sun withdrew. It could shine only on the fence. The children fell to the ground and slept. In the early morning frost, their faces were frozen purple. I remember all of this.

  Part Three

  My tangled relationship with people was probably the main reason I continued staying in the slums. When I was little and had only a thin layer of hair, I was placed on a family’s stove. Did Mama give birth to me there, or did this family mercifully take me in? I stayed inside a pottery bowl with fragments of cloth in the bottom of it. If the fire was too hot, the bowl would be scalding, and if I wasn’t careful, it would burn me. My body was blotched with scars for a long time. As for food, the family served me a spicy brown porridge in a small dish. Maybe that porridge was a soporific, too, for I would sleep all day after eating it. It relieved the pain from being scalded. But because I was asleep, I rolled around inside the bowl and was left with even more extensive burns. Most of my body was affected, and I was in constant pain. I considered escaping from this bowl, but the blisters on my feet had broken and ulcerated. How could I jump out? Sometimes I heard the man and woman of the house talking about me, “Will the little thing die?” “No way. It’s a born survivor.” Were they hurting me on purpose or didn’t they know what I was going through?

  Despite all of my injuries, I gradually grew up. One day, their child overturned the pottery bowl, and I fell out. I saw the bowl suspended on the edge of the stovetop. On an impulse, I bumped the bowl with my head, and it fell down and broke into several pieces. I looked at the room again and saw all those strange things that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know what they were. Not until later did I figure them out. There was one thing I never understood until I finally grew up. This was a framed portrait of an old man with a white beard hanging on the wall. I thought it was a real person because the husband and wife talked to the old man. When they went out, they said, “Dad, I’m leaving.” And when they returned, they said, “Dad, I’m back.” If they had done something out there, they would ask, “Dad, did I handle this right?” When they spoke, the frame rocked and made a ding-dong sound as if answering them.

  I recovered from my injuries soon, and before long I could jump down from the stove. I jumped to the top of the table, stood on my hind legs, leaned on the wall with my front legs, and tried hard to get close to that white-bearded old man. All of a sudden, I was whacked on the back of my head, and I lost consciousness.

  I awakened at the side of the road, and so I knew there were streets outside the house. It was such a large slum. I gradually recovered my memories of the slums and the city up there. Before the day ended, I became familiar with the entire slum, for I realized that each of its nooks and crannies had always been stored in my memory. At night, I returned to the family’s stove to sleep. They seemed to welcome me, even preparing food for me. The boy said, “He was out all day and now he’s back.” But I wasn’t out for the day by choice. Someone had placed me out there next to the road. Who? I glanced involuntarily at the old man on the wall. Ah, in the lamplight his face was invisible. I saw only the two flames shooting from his eyes. In my fear, I had shrieked and dashed to the door. The master and his wife came out, caught me singlehandedly, and patted me on the back. They said repeatedly, “Rat, oh Rat, calm down! Come back!” I stopped struggling. I was shivering on the stove. I had concluded that it was the old man on the wall who had clubbed me and caused me to faint, and then had thrown me outside. Later the master had blocked the door and windows so that I couldn’t open them. Now they went to sleep. So did I, but I felt a burning gaze fixed on me. No matter what, I couldn’t fall asleep. Flames filled my mind. I forced my gaze away from that wall and looked instead at a dark corner. I remembered the city. It was so big, but it was uninhabited. The glass houses were empty, and the people lived in the slums down there. How sad. I remembered the glass houses next to each other. I decided that one day I would go up there and look around. The master had said there were people up there. Some hid in wooden casks, garbage cans, and dumpsters. When the sun set behind the mountain, they emerged and raced out to the deserted streets and made a commotion.

  I let my imagination run wild and like a thief hid myself here and there in the house. Then I realized that no matter where I hid, I couldn’t escape that gaze. I couldn’t figure it out: Why didn’t this old guy walk out of the frame? Had he hidden himself behind the glass or had his family done this to him? In the inky darkness late at night, the master and his wife embraced tightly in bed. Now and then, they cried out softly, “Ghost!” Steeped in nightmares, they couldn’t intervene in what I was doing. I could sleep in the rice barrel or in the big cupboard. They had no idea. Naturally, if I shed hair in the rice, they grumbled about it when they ate. They didn’t blame me; they were terrible at making logical connections. Once I even slept in their big, wide bed. Hiding in a corner against the wall, I listened to their conversation up close. One said, “You think Dad can’t see us, don’t you?” The other said, “I can at least hide in my dreams, can’t I?” It was odd. When they spoke, I looked at the wall again. The fiery gaze had vanished. I was surprised and thought to myself, Have I entered these two people’s dreams? But just then the woman shrieked, “Ghost!” And then the fiery gaze shot across again. The man said, “Dad, oh Dad. Dad, oh Dad.” The husband and wife burrowed under the quilt, which then stuck up like a hill. I was afraid and slipped out of bed. I screwed up my courage and looked outside. Under the dim streetlight, someone was squatting and slaughtering a white cat. The noise made me retreat a few steps, and I quickly closed the door with my head. Oh! Compared with the terror outside, the house was a refuge. The moonlight shone in. The hill of the quilt was hazy. I remembered the pasture where my ancestors lived. It was big: you couldn’t see across it. Back then, our clan members rushed back and forth there. They were hiding from something, too, much like the two people in this house. They often scuttled over to the pool in the center of the pasture. They couldn’t swim, and the next day their corpses floated in the pool. I was lost in memories, trying to figure out what my ancestors were hiding from.

  One day the couple went out, and their son Woody got into big trouble—he shattered the glass in the frame with his slingshot, and the shards of glass ruined the old man’s face. Woody ran outside to hide. By nighttime, he still hadn’t returned. The couple were silent about this. They threw the ruined frame, along with the old man, into an old trunk and then paid no more attention to it. Every day, I was troubled by a question: Was the old man still alive? I’d learned my lesson earlier, so I didn’t dare open the trunk. The old man was no longer a threat, but the atmosphere in the house remained tense. It was even scarier in the silence. Had Woody’s disappearance made his parents numb? I wanted to go out and look for Woody—help them out a little. But out of self-respect, I didn’t want to go o
ut in the daytime. My appearance wasn’t very elegant—it was sort of like either a rat or a rabbit, but not quite. (I remembered what these two animals looked like.) I would surely attract attention. I didn’t want to be surrounded and stared at by people. I opened the door twice during the night. Each time, I saw the same person squatting under the streetlight killing cats. Once, it was a black cat, once a calico one. The cats’ screeching almost made me faint. The husband and wife were no longer hiding under the quilt. They didn’t even undress but just dozed on the edge of the bed against the wall. I slowly came out from under their bed. I heard a series of sighs from the trunk. The old man must have been badly hurt. This couple had been absolutely obedient to him in the past, so I couldn’t understand why they didn’t show even minimal filial piety. They just ignored him after stuffing him into the old trunk. They were still clothed as they sat on the bed: Were they waiting for something to happen? They didn’t seem to notice the sighs in the room, because they were snoring lightly. I quietly slipped over to the trunk and placed my ear on it. I heard glass exploding inside. I was really scared. Suddenly, the man spoke up: “Where’s the new frame? Don’t forget to hang it tomorrow.” His wife giggled abruptly.