I Live in the Slums

by Can Xue

  Outside, the frogs were croaking. Was it going to rain?

  3.

  Recently, the queen really did come to Wang Village—and often. You could see this from some people’s expressions. The village chief arose early and set out to collect manure. As soon as he went out, he ran into the young, neatly dressed oil peddler.

  “You’re out so early. Who will buy sesame oil at this hour?” the village chief teased.

  “I came out early for people’s convenience, for pleasure, or because I had a happy encounter last night. These are all possible reasons. It doesn’t have to be for business,” the young oil vendor said.

  “Ha-ha! A happy encounter! Can you talk about it? I’d love to hear it.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “I wish you happy encounters every day!”

  The village chief—this old fox—had guessed what the young oil vendor’s encounter was because he had run into similar occurrences many times. He knew that the queen honored the village with her presence. Although she did so at midnight and although no one had really seen her, who else could it have been? Look at Woman Ji, who sat beside the road at twilight combing her hair. The left side of her face was reflected in the setting sun: she looked splendid and magnificent in profile! That’s right: the village chief liked describing her with these words.

  “Hi, Ji, the matchmaker’s coming for you,” the village chief said, to please her.

  “Who cares? After she came, I got the magic wand that makes me pretty! Chief, take a look at me. Do I still need a matchmaker?” She approached the chief aggressively.

  The village chief backtracked. He grumbled to himself, I shouldn’t have crossed the line.

  As he was thinking to himself, the village chief picked up pig manure and dog poop. He intended to go home. The moment he turned around, he saw the black-garbed queen standing right in the middle of the road. How had she changed into a headless queen? The village chief wanted to detour around her. He veered left, and the black-garbed headless person blocked the left side; he veered right, and she blocked the right side.

  “You’re really, you’re really active . . . ,” the village chief stammered. “We—you and I—let’s dance!”

  He didn’t know where his courage came from. He threw the basket of manure to the roadside, and extended his rough hand to the queen. As soon as the headless queen held his hand, the village chief felt that he was spinning like a windmill. He heard himself shout, “Save me,” but where could he stop? He was being continuously tossed into midair. He waved his arms in the air. Then he heard someone say, “Now I see this old guy’s nature.”

  At that, the village chief fell down. He sat in the mud, his butt sore from the fall. The person who had just spoken asked, “Why did you stop dancing?”

  The village chief asked if he had seen the queen.

  “The queen?” The person stared. “I think that is Death!”

  “Could be. I felt so good just now. Too bad she left.”

  “If she hadn’t gone, could you be here? She’s not interested in you. You’re a lousy dancer.”

  The village chief picked up his basket and headed for home. He tried hard to recall his dancing just now: he didn’t feel at all inferior and he was sure it had been the queen.

  “I danced with the queen today,” he told his wife as soon as he got home.

  “My God. I saw this long ago. You’ve become another person,” his wife said.

  “The queen played the role of Death; I played the role of Death’s son.”

  “That’s so exciting,” his wife said.

  He held his hand out to his wife, and the two of them began twirling like a windmill. Oh, what happiness! While in midair, he thought of something and became a little worried. “The manure, manure . . . ,” he kept saying. After he fell to the ground, his wife asked him what he had muttered while he was dancing.

  The village chief’s vision blurred, and he answered, “I left the manure outside the door. Did you and the queen talk with each other last night?”

  His wife pointed outside.

  The village chief pushed the door open, and saw the crown on the ground.

  “It isn’t appropriate, is it, to put the crown at the entrance to an ordinary family’s home?” The village chief stooped and picked up the crown. He sized it up in the sunlight.

  “Why isn’t it? It would look good on you.”

  His wife smiled surreptitiously. Her expression inspired him, leading him to remember his morning encounter on the road. He realized that the queen had been pervading their lives. She wasn’t a visitor; there’s no way she would stay in Wang Village. Still, there was no way she would leave, either. This was so intriguing. Before the old king died, he had also pervaded their lives one time, but the Wang villagers no longer remembered this. The village chief’s mother had told him, “On a night like that, the stars are dark, and the earth burns from within its crust . . .” Because no real disaster occurred, everyone adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

  After the village chief put the crown into a large cabinet, the cabinet sparkled with sound. “Look! She trusts us so much!” his wife whispered to him. “After all, she’s our queen!” he whispered back.

  They were both a little deranged, pacing back and forth in front of the cabinet, loath to leave.

  “Chief! Chief . . . ,” someone shouted outside. He was around thirty.

  The chief pulled a long face and went out.

  “Why are you still here? You promised to leave.”

  “I promised to disappear from Wang Village . . . but last night . . .”

  “Stop!” the village chief interrupted, “What do you want now?”

  “Give me a job.”

  “Clean the manure out of our pigpen. Don’t stop until you’re stinking with sweat!”

  “Sure thing!”

  The village chief went inside and closed the door. His wife was staring at him, rebuking him coquettishly.

  “What? He’s young, but he’s been a pessimist for eleven years. What a disgrace.”

  After taking a long time to make the decision, the queen really did arrive at Wang Village. She came to the long-established Wang Village, but she didn’t like the villagers to recognize her and consider her one of them. She felt that would be awkward for her, lacking in style. As the queen hesitated, the unusual connections between her and the villagers took shape. Someone felt that he had a direct connection with the queen because he argued with her every day and the result of the argument would guide him in his actions. His life would be unbearably dull if he missed even a day of this kind of argument. When people asked him where he and the queen argued, he led a bunch of people into the kitchen, and, pointing at the iron pot of congee, he said, “This is she. We always argue in the kitchen.” At first, everyone looked blank, and then they sort of understood. They gave him a thumbs-up and said, “You’re a lucky man.”

  The queen knew that she had a huge group of supporters whom she would never see. They had all kinds of disabilities, but they were strongly determined. Her relationship with them was indirect. “Sometimes indirect influence is greater,” she proclaimed in the palace. The moment she made this proclamation, she recalled Woman Jiao. Jiao had only one leg; she would turn eighty-five next year. She had lived alone all her life in the house next to the tofu workshop. People said that she used to be good at making tofu, but now she was old and infirm and could no longer do that. One day, when the queen was returning from the market, the throngs lining the street to welcome her included the one-legged Woman Jiao. The queen had seen her out of the corner of her eye much earlier: the old woman had stood on tiptoe in order to be seen. She wanted to get the queen’s attention. The queen was greeting many people, but she didn’t speak with Jiao. When she passed by the old woman, the queen glanced at her sharply and then immediately looked away. But in this lightning-quick exchange, the two women formed a long-term friendship. After this, the queen now and then heard fragmentary news of Woman Jiao from
analyzing the local atmosphere. For instance, she knew that the old woman had resumed working in the tofu workshop. This gratifying news allowed the queen to see the contours of the palace in the village.

  “Grandma Jiao, did you see the queen at night?” asked the little girl Binghua.

  “Yes. At the time, the village sky was really bright!”

  “Is the queen pretty?”

  “I never got a good look at her.”

  Grandma Jiao had never seen the queen clearly—she had cataracts. What she had seen was a moon with many defects. Since she had cataracts, how had she been able to use her gaze to forge an exchange with the queen on the road? When Binghua asked her this, Grandma Jiao answered a little testily, “It was an out-of-body experience.”

  The young guy who had previously rushed impetuously into the queen’s home was Yueyue. His situation was the same as Woman Jiao’s. The queen valued his courage, and she kept nurturing him in secret. She believed that he would play a pivotal role in Wang Village in the future. Since the first time that Yueyue had taken the tragic risk and retreated from the palace with its rarefied air, the seeds of curiosity and uneasiness were sown in his heart. Thanks to his great enthusiasm and vague memory, he later made three more attempts to charge into the palace. He bungled each attempt. In his last try, he couldn’t find even a trace of the palace or the queen. Some yurts appeared on the plains. No matter which yurt he entered, the people welcomed him with the same sneer. But now Yueyue was more mature than before: he no longer feared grotesque faces; he was just a little embarrassed. He saluted these people and then withdrew. The queen, hiding in a secret place, took all of this in and was very pleased.

  Yueyue wondered whether his previous impression had changed and led him to a fork in the road. Or could it be that the queen’s palace had disintegrated and turned into these yurts and pigpens? Either of these possibilities would make him even more curious, for after all he was a local villager. “Queen, palace . . . ,” Yueyue chattered. From behind, he heard a woman’s voice respond, “Yueyue, Yueyue . . .” Yueyue figured that the person responding to him must be the queen. He decided to make a fourth attempt.

  He ran wildly around the desert, reaching the middle of the pebbles. The sky was gloomy; a light rain made the pebbles slippery. The pebbles looked dark and dull. Yueyue said to himself, This is the last time. He would not cower. Limping on the pebbled desert, he tried his best to proceed.

  “Yueyue, are you exercising your legs?” Auntie Mao hailed him.

  Yueyue looked up and saw the village trail.

  “Don’t run around blindly,” Auntie Mao said wryly. “The thing you’re looking for is in your home. Search in all the nooks and crannies.”

  Auntie Mao had a reputation in the village. What she said often came true.

  Yueyue didn’t search the hiding places in his home. Instead, he bought a few bolts of black cloth and covered all the windows in his home. Then he sat there recalling how the queen’s palace looked. Each day he remembered one detail, and gradually the palace became vivid in his mind. The last two props that he remembered were a golden cane and the coal lamp. The coal lamp was placed on the long table in the palace dining room, and the golden cane was next to the door of an inner room in the palace. Yueyue carefully moved the golden cane and slowly pushed the door open. In one step, he strode outside. Across from him was his family’s pigpen. The pigs were wailing in hunger. Yueyue shouted as he ran, “Queen! Queen . . .” He charged into his kitchen and began chopping vegetables for pig feed. Beads of sweat rose on his young face. This was great! He wished he could have such an adventure every day. Look, hadn’t the queen hung candles from the palace on the wood-smoke-blackened wall of his kitchen? He—Yueyue—was an ordinary country boy, but the queen had kept looking after him. He started boiling the pig feed. Surprisingly, he brandished the spatula as if he were royalty.

  “Yueyue, Yueyue!” a woman called softly from somewhere in the room.

  Yueyue’s eyes were beaming like a rainbow.

  VENUS

  Qiu Yiping, a thirteen-year-old middle school student, was secretly in love with her thirty-five-year-old cousin with the whimsical name Xuwu. An orphan whose parents had died long ago, he was a scientist researching hot-air balloons. Qiu Yiping hadn’t seen him in the past, but in the previous year Xuwu had often visited her village to test hot-air balloons and had become close to Qiu Yiping’s family.

  Whenever her cousin came to the village, Qiu Yiping grew so excited that she couldn’t concentrate on her classes. As soon as school was out, she rushed home and went to the mountain to the east to look for her cousin. He was tall, wore glasses, was a little hunchbacked, and walked a bit sluggishly. He didn’t look at all bright.

  The mountain on the east was called Tomb Mountain; it was more than a thousand meters above sea level. Generally, Xuwu launched his hot-air balloons from the middle of the mountain and let them float along the contours of the mountain: they floated above Yiping’s village. Everyone in the village would come out to watch this rare sight. Each time, Yiping swelled with pride.

  Her cousin had stayed overnight with her family only twice—both times because it was raining hard. Ordinarily he slept in the wicker basket below the hot-air balloon, where he kept the things he needed for daily use. Day and night, Yiping yearned to soar into the sky in the hot-air balloon with her cousin, but he had never invited her to go along. He said, “It’s dangerous.” She didn’t believe him. She thought he looked down on her and was weary of her pestering him.

  On the mountain, her cousin sometimes took off his coat and wore only a sailor shirt. He curled up like a shrimp and repaired the hot-air balloon’s heater. Sometimes, he did nothing, but just sat there looking at the sky. No matter what her cousin was doing, Yiping liked to be beside him; she would even like to be with him for a lifetime.

  The hot-air balloon was red, the color of the sun setting at twilight. Many times, Yiping thought that her cousin looked at the hot-air balloon as though he were looking at his sweetheart. Yiping had heard her parents say that he hadn’t married and that he didn’t have a girlfriend, either. Could it be that the hot-air balloon was his girlfriend? When Yiping pondered this in the middle of the night, her eyes glinted in the dark, and she felt warm all over. She made up many stories about girlfriends her cousin had had in the past: she was sure he had had girlfriends in the past. She yearned to be with him at night on the mountain, viewing the moon and stars. But that was impossible, for her parents and the neighbors would all say she was shameless.

  It was Sunday. Qiu Yiping had gotten up early and hastily done the housework—washed and dried the clothes, prepared food for the pigs, fed the chickens, swept the courtyard, and cooked the breakfast. Then she had gulped down two stewed potatoes and slipped out of the courtyard. She started running toward Tomb Mountain, because she was afraid her family would stop her.

  When she had climbed halfway up the mountain, she saw that her cousin was still asleep in the wicker basket. He had covered one side of his face with a quilt, and he looked very funny. The sound of Yiping’s footsteps awakened him, and he suddenly sat up, hastily reaching out for his glasses.

  “Oh, I overslept. I was really exhausted before daylight,” he said, embarrassed. “You can’t imagine, Yiping. I ascended to the top of the mountain and then even higher. Even higher! All of a sudden, I saw her. She was flying past like a big bird. My God!”

  “Who? Who was flying—flying past like—like a big bird?” Yiping began stammering.

  “You don’t understand. You don’t get it.” Her cousin waved his hand, revealing his annoyance.

  “Let’s not talk about it anymore,” he added.

  He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped sailor shirt as he stood at one side and washed his face and brushed his teeth. He looked like a bittern. After he had cleaned up, he took some bread out of the basket and cut it into several small pieces, dipped them in catsup, and ate slowly. He offered some to Yiping, but she turned
him down. She didn’t want to make a pig of herself!

  Seeing that her cousin’s mind was elsewhere, Yiping thought he had pretty much forgotten her existence.

  “Cousin, let me ride in the hot-air balloon just once! Just once!” Yiping begged.

  “How could I do that?” He was immediately on his guard. “If your parents found out, they would break my neck! And what would the other villagers say? . . . Don’t be silly.”

  “We could keep them from seeing. I could run out quietly in the middle of the night. No one would know. Didn’t you say just now that when the big bird flew past, you didn’t get a good look at it? If you teach me how to operate the hot-air balloon, I can take care of it and you can get a good look at the bird!”

  When Yiping said this, she really had no idea how her cousin would respond, but she was desperate, so she chanced it.

  Her cousin seemed touched by what she had said. He stared at her and asked, “Do you really think so? What the hell. Is this possible?”

  “Sure it is! Of course! Really!” Yiping shouted.

  Her cousin carefully folded the bread wrapper and put it away. He looked at the chestnut tree next to him as if he had something on his mind. Then he said very slowly: “Yiping, sit down.”

  Yiping sat down nervously on the rock. She was blushing.

  “Do you know about Venus?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’ve seen her at twilight.” Yiping relaxed.

  “She’s what I saw before daylight! At that time, it was dark in all directions, but she was radiant. She seemed to be green colored. I reached out my hand and I could almost touch her, but a force pulled me away, and so I was separated from her. I really regret that. Why didn’t I jump over to her then? At worst, I would have died! It was a great opportunity that not everyone can have—and I missed it. What’s wrong with me? When I landed here, it was almost dawn. I suddenly felt weary of the world and fell asleep. I was completely out. Did you come to help me, Yiping?”