Translated from the Chinese by Freya Tong
At sixteen, I was the fastest runner in all of Dayi River County.
Every year, when July hits, rain pours from the sky, torrential enough to pummel toddlers taking their first steps outside the herders’ tents and send them straight into the ground. The first rain of the year, it turns the world into a giant TV set that has lost its signal, engulfing everything in a deafening sea of chaotic static and filling your eyes with blinding white.
I tore through the thick curtain of rain. The wall surrounding the winter feed depot was about to start spitting fish, and I wanted to be the first there.
Through the downpour, I could just barely make out the wall, which stood at almost twice my height. As I stumbled towards it, I fell and scrambled back up on the slippery grass too many times to count. Gradually, finally, it came into focus.
Draped under sheets of rain, the long wall appeared endless, starting at one edge of my field of vision and vanishing at the other. Across the wall, countless mouths were cracking open and spitting out streams of dark brown fish. This is what I had come here for. As the mouths slowly closed again in the pounding rain, new ones yawned open around them. Reddish-brown mists, the colour of the soil in the Dayi River area, fanned out from the rain- washed wall into the grassy flats, making the wall look as bloody and raw as a towering, freshly flayed body. Tens of thousands of mouths moved in the wind and rain, as if they were silently reciting the sutras of another world.
Utterly overwhelmed by what I saw, I could no longer control my inner volcano of emotions that was threatening to erupt any second. I galloped back and forth along the wall in the ceaseless rain, screaming and hurling abuse without end at the apocalyptic vision even as my shaking voice broke. The
rain and the tinny ringing that filled my ears eventually wiped out all sound, but nothing could interrupt what was taking place in front of me, as though it was all dictated by some stern and sweeping mandate from above.
Dayi River begins to dry up once autumn arrives. Our town lies at the bottom of a valley, and it is here that the last drop of water always evaporates. In the damp riverbed, you can find countless fish of an unknown breed, which the locals have dubbed ‘catfish’, trapped in a small, shrinking patch of wetness of no more than a dozen or so square metres.
‘Water’ isn’t the right word for the wet mass. It would be more accurate to call it an admixture of water, tens of thousands of catfish, and their bodily fluids–a teeming mass that inches along the riverbed like lava as it solidifies, incalculable bodies writhing, lurching, and wriggling. Many smaller catfish never make it to the wetter core of the mass; their fate is death by desiccation. As the gargantuan brownish-black cluster crawls up and down the riverbed, the squelches it lets out can sound like millions of feet churning up just as many bucketfuls of cow guts.
No one eats the fish. Local Tibetans sometimes have water burials, and the moment they drop a body into the river, the catfish swarm it with such frenzy that it becomes impossible to catch even a glimpse of the human body underneath. The fish leap and slap against the water, twisting and spinning the body every which way as they try to tear off another mouthful of flesh. Sometimes, as the seething, brown-black human-shaped thing travels downstream, shrieks emerge from the tall grasses along the banks, followed by half-naked couples flying out in alarm.
At the height of the dry season, these fish burrow into the riverbed, trying to preserve moisture by creating cocoons out of their own sticky saliva. That same riverbed mud is the only building material that this region has had since time immemorial, since all soil within a 50-kilometre radius is extremely shallow, and any attempts at digging yield only a few shovelfuls of dirt before hitting thick layers of rock.
That leaves only the river. It has built up a solid and fertile riverbed over thousands of kilometres, providing a prime source of raw material for houses of rammed earth. During the dry season, people rush here from all directions. They hammer a frame, nailed together from wooden slats, into the mud under the lamas’ guidance. Then, they tether one edge of the frame and tug the rest out of the ground, the men grunting and panting and their horses neighing, until they manage to pry loose a large block of mud from the riverbed.
The muddy patch where the catfish lie dormant is left till last. The only purpose it is fit for is as the wall surrounding the winter feed depot–if you used it for homes, the buildings would simply collapse. The depot stores hay for cows and sheep to munch on in winter, hay which will have long been devoured by the time the wet season arrives. The wall can crumble for all anyone cares–a new one can always be built next autumn. The depot has traditionally sat next to the river: the grasses on the riverbanks are juicy and thick, and once the fish find themselves in water, they can migrate more easily. But the year I turned sixteen, unlike all other years since the dawn of time, the fish did not live to see the source of the river fulfil its promise. No water came from the riverhead, and every fish shrivelled and dried out, lying dead on their sides under a sky so blue as to be almost black in the aftermath of the last rainstorm. Their one visible eye stared upwards, shrunken and hollow. In the wake of this massacre, flies the size of human thumbs swarmed in a thick,
black tar-like cloud, hovering and roiling like dark waves overhead.
Eventually the news reached our isolated town: the prefectural government was building a dam. I climbed to the top of the unnamed mountain on the outskirts of town, and I saw something had been erected at the source of the river. It was wide at the top, tapered at the bottom, and looked like an ancient, forbidding mask with indecipherable features. By the time I reached the mountaintop, a hideous lama was already there, sitting cross-legged, rapidly hurling a torrent of words in the direction of the river. His incantations grew faster and faster until they were almost a roar, and I felt a headache coming on.
Weak strands of morning light skimmed over the dirty, worn loudspeaker on the square in front of the prefectural government building. On top of the dented and rusty sheet of iron that the loudspeaker was made from, there perched an ancient bird that looked just as worthless, wearing a look of extreme dejection. As I walked, the soles of my cloth shoes rubbed against the ground, making a sound so extraordinarily noisy that it didn’t seem real. ‘La! La! La!’ The fucking loudspeaker started blasting all of a sudden, eliciting grunts and mumbles from the Tibetan men who lay passed out on the square in their chubas after drinking too much the night before. The men shifted their heads away from the source of the sound and tried to get back
to sleep.
‘The sun is a golden shuttle / The moon is a silver shuttle / Gold and silver threads warp and weft / Reminding us how swiftly time passes, how little is
left.’ The loudspeaker blasted the hit song with utter relentlessness, sounding old, off-key, wobbly, and loud as fuck. Every single song ended up sounding like it came from the voice box of a thirty-metre-tall mashup of Peking-Opera- Crone-Clown-Tibetan-Girl-Dolma. Before long, the chuba-clad Tibetans had to surrender to Madame Godzilla Dolma and pull themselves up from the ground with extreme effort, patting themselves all over to check if their rings, necklaces, knives, and hats were intact. The ones whose gear and accessories had survived the night started heading home, laughing among themselves, while the ones who had lost something stamped the ground and cursed in exasperation.
The next year would be the third year of the National College Entrance Exam since it was reinstated in 1977, after the end of the Cultural Revolution. My family didn’t think I stood much of a chance, but they felt that I should at least try my luck by buying a test prep book and studying for the next six months. When I got to the town bookstore, which was part of the nationwide New China Bookstore franchise, a long queue had already formed outside. Over a thousand people had signed up for the Exam in our town alone, not counting the surrounding villages, but the store could only manage to get approval for 500 books at most. The Exam was the one and only fast track for leaving our town, and maybe even Qinghai Province if you dared to dream. Small surprise, then, that almost every young person in town showed up, alongside a contingent of middle-aged people, while those who were really serious about taking the Exam had arrived at sunset the day before to join the queue.
A tattered sheet of paper hung in the window of the New China Bookstore: ‘COMRADE! YOUR ALBANIAN-CHINESE DICTIONARY HAS ARRIVED’
The story went like this: right after the Exam was reinstated, there was an extremely vain idiot who used to stroll into the bookstore all the time, and who would inquire in the kind of bright, ringing voice that one only hears with actors in dubbed foreign films from the Shanghai Film Translation Studio,
‘Excuse me, Comrade, might you have… an Albanian-Chinese Dictionary available here?’
The way in which he enunciated the word ‘Albanian’ was particularly touching. Everyone who heard him found themselves reminded of the young, handsome guerilla fighters in classic revolutionary films, and they all gazed at him adoringly. The manager, a Battalion-Commander-turned-bookseller,
was left feeling extremely apologetic. These young comrades are so eager to arm themselves with knowledge, but how can I hope to assist them in their revolution if I can’t even get them an Albanian-Chinese Dictionary?
The Commander, haunted by his would-be customer’s recurring inquiry, grew increasingly agitated. He wrote missive after missive to the New China Bookstore’s regional headquarters in Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, until he finally obtained a complete, multi-volume set of _An Albanian-Chinese Dictionary_from the Commercial Press of China, a time-honoured publishing house. On the very day it arrived, he laid out a large, blank sheet of paper and wrote ‘COMRADE! YOUR ALBANIAN-CHINESE DICTIONARY HAS
ARRIVED’ in fat block characters. But our comrade turned out to be just as traitorous as Nikolai Bukharin, and never showed his face again.
Thus it was that in the year 1977 AD, the New China Bookstore of Dayi River County came into its own complete set of An Albanian-Chinese Dictionary. Now the bookstore doors swung open, revealing the Commander stationed behind a table draped with red cloth and piled high with books. It looked
exactly like some long-anticipated book launch.
As people came up to him, cash in hand, the Commander exchanged a few brief words with them, apologising for the shortage of the books. As the pile shrank, so the anxiety of the remaining people in the queue grew.
If you lived in a major town, you might have hopes of borrowing someone else’s copy and transcribing the contents, but what if you came from a minor town or village? What if you were the only person taking the Exam in your far-flung town, or if nobody in your hamlet could get a copy?
When he reached the last books in the pile, the Commander rose to his feet, ‘Any of you Comrades came from Daotang River?’
‘Here!’ Someone at the end of the line piped up immediately.
‘Take hold of this book and spread the word when you get back, you hear?’ ‘Yessir!’
‘Any of you Comrades came from Longyang Gorge?’ ‘Here!’
‘You take hold of this one! Pass it around to everybody needing it, all right?’ ‘Any of you Comrades from Heima River?’
And on it went.
The Commander finished dividing his last few books among the remote villages and towns. He had reached the limits of what he could do. He bowed deeply to everyone else still queuing in the cold and unsympathetic morning
air, lowering his head because he could not bear to look at all the disappointed faces in front of him.
The queue started dissolving like a line of defence that had failed, and the crowd dispersed haphazardly in all directions. People passed in front of me, but I stood where I was, my eyes on the Commander, who remained seated behind his table bedecked with the bright red tablecloth. He sat stock-still, wordless and resigned, his head hanging, as though he were a bridegroom who had been betrayed on his wedding day.
The scandal involving one of the most senior local Tulkus, Chotso, made the officials in our prefecture the laughing stocks of Qinghai Province.
One early morning last year, my uncle dragged me out of bed. There was a Criticism Session at the town monastery to lambast in absentia a certain lama who needed no introduction–_that_lama, who had fled to India two decades ago. Tulkus and Tibetan townspeople alike were to partake in denouncing him, and the organisers wanted students like me to attend and observe.
Uncle ransacked the house for the red neckerchief worn by every primary schoolchild to mark them as a member of the Young Pioneers.
‘Put ‘er on!’
‘Uncle, I’m sixteen. I’m not a Pioneer anymore.’
‘What’s all this nonsense? Did the Youth League agree to take you yet?’ He fumbled around, in a hurry to shove me out of the house.
‘GO!’ he yelled.
I had no choice but to bolt, my feet barely touching the ground. I heard him fall back into bed with a thud, the old wooden bed releasing a sharp, appealing creak under his weight.
My uncle and I lived in the weather station on the mountain. The mountain had no formal name, but everyone in town called it ‘Observatory Mountain’. I galloped downhill towards town, my feet grinding into the damp morning grass.
As the most senior reincarnation of all the Tulkus at Tuo’Er Monastery, Chotso Tulku had long been an extremely respected figure in the Amdo Region. He also held the distinction of being one of the few older Tulkus who had survived the labour camps in the Cultural Revolution. It was only recently, in the late ’70s, with the restoration of the Buddhist monasteries, that the reincarnation system was formally reinstated, giving rise to a generation of younger Tulkus who were all roughly the same age.
In fact, after the death of each of the old Tulkus, the High Lama serving as their Regent had worked in secret to calculate which homes the newly reincarnated little Tulkus would be born into. Every so often, when he checked in on them, he felt a hidden pain at the sight of the little Tulkus going hungry and throwing up bile. And so, he dispatched subordinates in the area. In the middle of the night, one of his burly men would lift the tent flaps of a family unknowingly related to a little Tulku and drop an entire leg of lamb inside with a gigantic thunk. The startled members of the family would then light the gas lamp and put their heads together, trying to figure out when they might have had a run-in with someone who wasn’t quite right in the head.
Now that the official policy had changed, the Tulkus were invited to reclaim their rightful places in the monasteries, and these little Tulkus, who by now were teenage Tulkus, found themselves being shaken awake at dawn. One of them thought it was time to get up and tend the production brigade’s sheep again. He even started groping around for his shoes when a voice stopped him in his tracks.
‘Come with me, your Holiness.’
‘… Who?’ The boy had confusion written all over his face. ‘You, your Holiness. You are a Tulku, a living Buddha!’
And so, in those days, a boy with no idea of what was going on would find himself sitting stiffly on a throne with a sea of local Tibetans prostrated before him. From time to time, he would sent the High Lama a pleading glance, but seeing the latter shake his head, he would sigh and force himself to stay in position and look alert.
By the time I made it to the main courtyard of Tuo’Er Monastery, it was already packed with Tibetans being herded by cops trying to cram them all into the monastery. Recognising me, Officer Jia escorted me all the way to the throne.
‘When the reporters start snapping pictures, put an angry look on your face, you hear me?’ he ordered, straightening my red scarf.
The cops carted Chotso Tulku out for the denunciation. He pleaded softly with them at first, but soon it sank in that he would have to let this play out no matter what. He stroked the cops’ green uniform jackets mournfully, and asked,
‘Would _you_have the guts to denounce Chairman Mao while wearing this?’ He patted his own maroon robe.
‘I cannot insult the Dalai Lama while wearing these. Give me a minute.’
The Tulku went back to his quarters and changed into the civilian clothes he had worn as a beggar after he was forced to go back to secular life during the Cultural Revolution. He came back out and stared out into the dense sea of Tibetans before him. They stared right back.
He took a deep breath, and the world went absolutely still. ‘Dalai Lama… Fuck your mama!’
That voice, which had famously recited Buddhist scriptures and exorcised demons, launched into a vehement flood of impromptu cursing based on the three pillars of local obscenities: ‘You’re my spawn’, ‘A cow ploughed over your ma’, and ‘Your sister’s so ugly she paid people to fuck her’.
The Tibetans’ faces darkened progressively with each new epithet, clenching their jaws so tightly you could almost hear teeth shattering.
The colourful language was not completely unexpected: the Tulku had probably picked it up during his time in the streets. What no one had seen coming, though, was how he was able to transform casual swearing into a grand, sweeping narrative with highs and lows, twists and turns, delivered with the undulating lyricism of someone singing the Epic of King Gesar.
Some of the younger Tibetan men stalked out without a second glance. They had had enough. One of the younger cops made to stop them, but Officer Jia pulled him back.
‘Let them go. They’re heartbroken enough. Might start a fight if you force them to stay.’
The crowd dispersed with time, but the Tulku remained onstage, ranting and banging ceremonial objects together. Singing, dancing, cursing.
After that, the Tulku was as good as dead to the townsfolk, and he was fine with it. He went to dogfights, clutching cash from town officials, with a young cop trailing after him. What money he didn’t fritter away on dogs, he drank. His breakout performance made him an esteemed guest of senior officials in the province, and he travelled around the country attending all kinds of Criticism Sessions, where he became a complete clown, drinking, making things up and telling dirty jokes by the truckload. Often, he would get sozzled in some Hui Muslim’s barbeque tent while the serious young cop stood guard outside. Staggering out drunk, the Tulku would thrust a fistful of lamb skewers at his guard, who, humiliated, binned the skewers every time. The Tulku would then bow at him nonstop until he threw up all over the man’s shoes.
The Tulku reached the point where there wasn’t a man or dog who didn’t look down on him. The town officials gradually came to feel that he was too useless to deserve security, and they reassigned his guard. Only a few days later, the Tulku crossed the border and made his way to India.
The province called our local officials directly. ‘Where’s your Chotso Tulku gone?’
Realising they hadn’t seen him in days, and grasping at straws, our officials made a guess:
‘Uh, isn’t he, uh, in Xining for a conference?’ ‘Conference my arse! He’s made a run for it!’ Damn it.
And that was how the local leadership learned that the Tulku was already making his eloquent opinions known on the Voice of America. Summoned to the provincial capital, they found themselves subjected to an unending hailstorm of verbal abuse from senior officials whose boots they couldn’t ordinarily get close enough to to lick.
‘You’re my spawn!’
‘A cow ploughed over your ma!’
‘Your sister’s so ugly she paid people to fuck her!’
The Tulku published several papers within a month of getting to India, citing sources that the Red Guards had witnessed him burn during the Cultural Revolution. Years later, I saw a photo of him. He was wearing glasses again. When many of the older townsfolk saw that photo, they suddenly remembered that, yes, the Tulku used to wear glasses, a very long time ago.
The incident with Chotso Tulku made our little town immensely anxious. Just because the bigwigs in the province hadn’t taken it out on anyone yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t tomorrow. The level of media exposure the Tulku was enjoying was bound to push them over the edge and land our town in trouble. It was only a matter of when, not if.
Lungtok, the governor of our prefecture, his heart in his mouth, hatched a bold plan. When Beijing summoned officials from ethnic minorities for a banquet, he seized his chance and grabbed the sleeve of a passing high-ranking leader in the central government. His brazenness made the delegation leaders for the province jump in their seats, but Lungtok, capitalising on his Tibetan minority status, simply played dumb and ploughed ahead, toasting the Big Man in all his glory and throwing in a
drinking song for good measure. Even his usually fluent Mandarin took on a heavier Tibetan accent all of a sudden.
The Big Man was pleased by this demonstration of love from the minorities. The loyalty and humility of the Tibetan official took him back to the ancient days of imperial China. Ah, those prosperous, peaceful times when all nations came to pay their respects, he mused, and happily downed a few extra drinks. While the Big Man was in high spirits, Lungtok invited him to visit him during the next provincial inspection and stop by his tent. The ‘tent’ was a flat-out lie. The governor of a prefecture, living in a tent? But Lungtok had managed to find out well beforehand about the upcoming inspection and knew that if he could convince the Big Man to pay him a personal visit, and if he could make an impression, the connection would shield him against any
future harm.
The Big Man, who was known for his effusive personality, accepted Lungtok’s invitation in a heartbeat. He gave Lungtok his word that they would meet again next spring, ‘when the grasses grow thick and the birds sing’. To express his abundance of feeling for his newfound Tibetan friend, he even broke into Mongolian folksong.
‘Lo, behold the full moon rising in the sky, on the fifteenth of the Lunar Month…!’
Having set the date for their happy reunion, the Big Man bid Lungtok an emotional farewell. When Lungtok turned back to face the senior members of his delegation, he spoke with a new confidence.
‘You all saw that? The Big Man is _my_guest.’ He raised the cup that the Big Man had been using and drained it in one gulp. ‘Now that I have his wine safe in me, I can stomach anything else.’
He pinned the provincial leaders with a provocative stare, as though he had just downed an elixir distilled from the lifelong training of a martial arts grandmaster.
Dayi River County, as the centre of our prefecture, housed its only institution for higher learning: Dayi River Teachers’ College for Ethnic Minorities. My uncle regularly brought me there, per the express instructions in my parents’ letters. Ma and Pa wanted to motivate and inspire me by giving me a sense of what college life could look like, and were hopeful that the frequent contact might make the magic of learning rub off on me.
I resisted these campus visits with all my being. That is, until my uncle pierced my defences at their most vulnerable point by handing me a meal ticket for the Teachers’ College canteen.
‘At least go for the food. If you can’t get that into your head, a college education will be wasted on you.’
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, of course. In exchange for the aforementioned food, I would have to deputise for my uncle and offer my hard labour to the Planning Committee for the Big Man’s visit.
Clutching my meal ticket, I stood outside the college with countless husbands and wives of students who were bursting with impatience and fervour, babes in arms and lunchboxes in tow, while we waited for the gates to open at noon.
Among those who took the College Entrance Exam when it was reinstated in 1977, two years ago, were a lot of married locals. Before long, they had ditched their partners and gotten hitched to their new classmates. These incidents occurred frequently enough to spread concern among the stay-at- home spouses. Now, at every lunchtime and at the end of the day, the spouses trooped to the college gates, armed with homecooked lunches and any children they happened to have, intent on asserting sovereignty over their territory.
‘How can you have no kids yet?’ One of the men waiting was telling off a shy young wife. ‘That’s a problem! Before you know it, he’ll be talking to all the girls in his literature class about those, those… Noddernists and streams of con–conscienceness. He’ll be leaving you for one of them before long!’
‘No! Help me, Brother, tell me what to do!’ The young wife was sufficiently terrified.
‘I’m telling you, get a baby in your belly and you’re all s–‘ Just as the man was busy explaining, the gates swung open, and the students streamed out. Spotting his wife, he swam forward in the crowd, cradling his infant son. He hoisted the boy high in the air, thrusting him in his wife’s direction as if to exorcise all men in her immediate vicinity.
‘Go on, say "ma"! That’s your ma!’
At his father’s invocation, the baby, who looked all of two months old, sleepily cracked his eyes open, his tired gaze sweeping over the masses in front of him as though he were Baby Simba.
*
After that day’s lunch, I boarded a pickup truck with students from the Teachers’ College, and we set off to prepare for the Big Man’s visit, driving down local roads that were so bumpy my feet were flying off the ground for half the journey.
The truck drove around a bend, and suddenly, all around, I saw white horses, flooding the hills and plains like a sign from the heavens.
After a hunt throughout not just our prefecture and the entire province, but the neighbouring regions of Inner Mongolia _and_Tibet, Governor Lungtok had managed to scrape together 2000 white horses. In his vision, the Big Man’s motorcade would be flanked by a team of Mongolian and Tibetan shepherds on horseback, allowing our VIP to feast his eyes on the spectacle of white horses framed against snowy peaks, the first of the many majestic sights that the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau would have to offer.
There was one problem: not all the horses were white, so our task today was to coat the speckled ones with white paint.
Horses were led towards us, and in groups of three we surrounded each, scanning the animal for any non-white spots before applying paintbrushes to its body. The results were disappointing. Paint back then was extremely viscous. It simply wouldn’t spread, so we often had to apply several coats before making any visible headway. Some solvent would have helped, but because the solvent smells of booze, almost all of it had been siphoned from the bucket before we got there.
A shepherd came running. His horse had blended into the herd and now he couldn’t find it.
‘Anyone seen it? It has a yellow patch on its belly…’
‘How on earth are we supposed to look for it now? Maybe try shouting. If one of them responds, assume it’s yours.’
The sun drooped low on the western horizon as the horses prepared to rest. The last strand of red-gold sunlight climbed over the mountaintops and ignited their manes. A gentle stroke of their muzzles would have them trembling in pleasure. The spicy-sweet smell of paint permeated the air, and darkness began to seep from the root of the mountains. The old shepherd wove between the countless white horses, whistling with his fingers for his lost horse, but no response came. The horses were brooding, extending their long necks and lowering their heads to the ground, as if steeling themselves for the reprimands of darkness. The wrangler, too, lowered his gaze and turned his attention to carefully nurturing the small bloom of fire that would see him through the night.
After we finished the job, I stood and stared at the white paint flecks all over me, at a loss for what to do.
‘Kid, aren’t you heading home?’ The middle-aged student who had led the task asked me from the bed of the truck.
‘How am I supposed to go home with paint all over me?’ I retorted. He gave me a once-over and reached out to pull me up.
‘Where are you taking me?’ I asked.
‘To the waterfall! We’re taking a shower.’
Only after we got there did I realise that by ‘waterfall’, he meant the dam. Water oozed, trickled and streamed from a long crack that widened towards the top of the dam into a giant gash from which a huge jet spurted, rainbows bobbing in the air around it.
A pool had collected at the bottom, no longer shallow but not yet too deep, where half-naked boys were splashing around. Anyone who swam under the spurting stream and managed to stand upright despite the pressure of the pounding water drew a cheer from the crowd.
We vaulted out of the truck bed and ran towards the pool. I was a little awestruck by the sight. He was right, I thought. I’ve never seen a real waterfall, but it can’t be more beautiful than this.
‘Amazing, huh?’ the old-timer asked me.
‘It is amazing,’ I said. ‘But can’t they let all the water out and just get the dam fixed? This seems like such a waste.’
‘You mean release the water from the dam?’ he replied. ‘They can’t do it now. Governor Lungtok wants the Big Man to see blue skies, blue waters, white horses running across green grass. What’s there to look at if the water’s gone? They can fix it once the inspection’s over.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
‘You live on Observatory Mountain, right? I saw you at the bookstore the other day. Are you also trying to get into college?’
‘I guess I’ll try. My folks won’t shut up otherwise.’
‘If you run into any problems with the practice tests, I can explain the answers to you. You should give it your best shot. You may have to spend a year, or two at most, grinding away at the Exam, but after you get in, you’re set for life. It’s worth it.’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll try.’
I was getting tired of his yammering, so I hurried towards the pool.
*
When daytime came, the town was abuzz with a nervous energy as people worked every which way to build the set of our own Truman Show. Vegetables, too many to count, had been carted into town all the way from the provincial capital, Xining. They lay displayed in the marketplace as proof that we had no shortage of food. They all had bedding draped over them, though, since our town was dry and cold, and the bok choy might not feel themselves here. Governor Lungtok did multiple dry runs of the Big Man’s motorcade in his official car, instructing the townspeople on either side of the road to stay still until thirty seconds before he arrived.
In between runs, there was only endless waiting for the actors. Shoppers and stall owners looked at one another in silence. Children tasked with playing jump rope stood, motionless, legs apart, feet planted amidst loops of elastic. Everyone came to intimately know their scripts–how they should walk, how they need to swarm the motorcade to express their welcome and reverence–as the scene was reset again and again and they found themselves sent back to square one.
I was poking around when Officer Jia grabbed me by the collar and dragged me in front of Governor Lungtok’s car.
‘This kid?’ The governor didn’t so much as look at me. He spoke only to Officer Jia.
‘Yessir, Governor, that’s him. He can run. Lives up on Observatory Mountain. How long does it take you to run to school?’ Officer Jia asked me.
‘An hour an–‘
‘Half an hour!’ Officer Jia cut me off and eagerly reported. ‘Sure, let’s go with him.’
And with a flick of the gubernatorial hand, I was whisked away to an appropriate distance.
Lungtok had realised he needed a way to coordinate people’s responses with the Big Man’s arrival. If the waiting dragged on, people’s smiles would start to look frozen on their faces. But without time to warm up before their performance, the townspeople might end up giving a lukewarm welcome. His solution was for me to run ahead of the motorcade and alert people to give them more time. My appearance would be their cue to start moving.
By the time I was told the plan, it had already been announced to every last actor in the show.
‘This is a huge honour. Don’t you dare mess it up. Treat it like your life depends on it!’ Officer Jia gave me a friendly reminder.
‘When you see this kid, you’re seeing the Central Committee of the fucking Party! Remember to act like it and move your arses, you motherfuckers!’ He started waving his baton and yelling at the unit production managers, who went back to the respective stretches of the route they were coordinating and faithfully passed these orders down the chain of command.
I was finding it hard to breathe under the overwhelming weight that had just been dumped on my shoulders. The entire town stretched out in front of me, its winding roads tracing the contours of the valley. Officer Jia stood on a balcony, peering through a pair of binoculars. The air was so heavy it was almost solid. And then suddenly, he barked:
‘ACTION!’
I raced forward as fast as my legs would carry me.
All the townspeople were waiting. For a long, long time their lives had been nothing but silent suffering. Now, at last, it was their time to celebrate– to celebrate on command.
The ‘Central Committee of the fucking Party’ burst onto the scene, and the people lining the streets went wild in designated waves. They leapt into the air, shrieking, frantically brandishing the paper flags at me.
I was sixteen; it felt like the most glorious day of my life.
Countless hands stretched out towards me, clapping as hard as they could. Two young Tibetan men darted forward, lifted me onto their shoulders, and raced on. Some of the coordinators swore and shouted at them, so they had to put me down, making sure to give me a vigorous parting shove before they beat a retreat. I hurtled on amidst the cheers, and I felt I could go on running forever without growing tired. My rubber soles pounded the ground with dull, rapid slaps. That sound, mingled with the cheers, would foreshadow my nightmares for endless nights to come.
The Big Man’s inspection went without a single hitch. Our distinguished guest was extremely satisfied with what he saw. The galloping white horses and the deep blue waves of Dayi River left a strong impression on him. So did the evening’s torchlight parade, which saw the entire town pulling out all the stops with exuberant song-and-dance routines. Before he left, the Big Man laid it on thick, showering Lungtok with praise, and Lungtok reciprocated with every fibre of his gubernatorial being. The rockstar Cui Jian could have been singing about their bittersweet parting when he later wrote, ‘You say I’m the strongest man around, / I say you’re the nicest girl in town.’
*
I woke up early one morning a few days after the inspection and walked out from the weather station, my coat draped around my shoulders, gazing down at the now utterly silent town. I was holding a cigarette stolen from my uncle, and I tapped the butt against the back of my hand to tamp the tobacco. It was a pretty meaningless habit, but I felt that it might help make the cigarette taste just that little bit richer. A sulphur match lit my cigarette amid swirls of yellow smoke, and I tilted my head, peering into the distance through the haze. The morning mists trickled down from the mountaintop; from afar, the sun was plotting its rebirth.
I took a deep drag, and then I heard the faintest cracking sound. It was the kind you would hear if you accidentally stepped on a bird’s egg on the grassy flats. On this violet morning at the top of the mountain, it was enough to draw my attention and make me look towards the source.
The dam had broken.
The floodwaters, wearing a yellowish headdress of foam, hurtled along the riverbed towards the town. It should have been a deafening roar, but I could hear nothing. The mountain was too far away from it all. I watched as Dayi River quietly scythed the roads, the bridges, the houses, the streets. This must be a nightmare. I felt the urge to open my eyes wider. If I concentrate hard enough I could rip this world apart and see nothing but my patchy bedroom ceiling staring back at me.
But I couldn’t.
The river surged through the valley, swirling all the houses in one place and pushing them forward. From a distance, the motions even looked somewhat gentle.
I collapsed onto the ground and puked my guts out.
For weeks afterwards, I did nothing but stare at the muddy ruins and study for the Exam. The dam had been used to store a vast quantity of giant logs, and when it burst, they had rushed downstream like battering rams, destroying everything in their path. According to my uncle, the official death toll was three hundred and something. But how could that possibly be? What about all the teams panning for gold along the river, digging up the river mud and trying to scrape a living? Each team would have had at least two or three hundred men, and there were at least five or six teams.
Days passed. Then, one night, from the mountaintop, I saw what looked like a blazing marketplace.
The families of those who had died–the workers and those who lived along the river–flocked to our town from far and wide to mourn their dead, because it had been impossible to salvage any bodies to send home. The dried riverbed was lined with bamboo stands, from which hung sheets of yellow paper that the mourners lit as an offering to their dead. I watched Dayi River burn before my eyes, silent and blazing, like lava erupting from the mouth of a volcano.
The corpses had been washed downstream, ending up in an enormous reservoir used for breeding Soviet salmon. That year’s catch was impossibly fat and juicy–they feed on meat. Since provincial authorities underreported the geographical scope and impact of the disaster, there was nothing to prevent these salmon from being dispatched as usual–to banquet halls and high-class restaurants for the exclusive enjoyment of Beijing officials. As for the lowly plebs who had once tasted happiness and had tried so hard to change their fate? Their flesh and dreams were ground to pulp inside the masticating mouths of bureaucrats, before finally turning to shit and being flushed through sewage pipes towards far-flung destinations.
I took the College Entrance Exam in the neighbouring county. Red posters were pasted on the walls, announcing each town’s top scorers and results, Dayi River’s among them.
The only name on that piece of red paper was mine.
At seventeen, I was number one in all of Dayi River County.