After that hurried parting beside the flooded river, several more days passed without another chance to see each other.
Shaotang’s unit had assembled and returned to camp that same day. After two days of rest, they apparently headed out again to nearby towns such as Caijiapo to help salvage the harvest and carry out disaster relief. Every day, trucks packed with officers and soldiers rumbled in and out through the military gates, throwing dust into the air.
For several days, both Meng father and son were unusually quiet, each carrying a bellyful of thoughts.
Meng Jianmin kept thinking back to the confrontation at the factory gate, when the farmers had been brandishing machetes. He had been in an extremely bad state that day, devastated by the news he had just heard. He had simply abandoned He Shaotang and turned away, which had been inconsiderate and impolite. Looking back now, he regretted not paying more attention to Shaotang. At the time he had not even had the presence of mind to check him over. Only now did he remember that Shaotang’s shirt had been covered in blood, and that it looked as though someone had slashed him across the back of the shoulder.
No matter how cultivated a gentleman and scholar Meng Jianmin might be, he still had ordinary human weaknesses. Years of pent-up frustration had made him sensitive and melancholy. He had always considered himself a talented, handsome young man who ought to have had a promising future, yet for all these years he had been trapped in a poor, remote mountain valley, watching ten years of his youth go to waste, frustrated and unable to fulfill his ambitions. Faced with He Shaotang and Duan Hongyu, two cadre sons with powerful family backgrounds, and with the enormous gulf in status that seemed impossible to cross, there had been one brief moment when Meng Jianmin could not find any balance in his heart. There had even been resentment…
Two or three months had already passed before he finally remembered the injury. The man had saved his son, after all! Meng Jianmin was fundamentally a decent man, but he was also indecisive and prone to thinking things over again and again. Now the matter began weighing on him. He genuinely wanted to slap himself. Shaotang spent his days going through wind, rain, and floodwater. Who knew whether the wound on his back had even healed?
Meng Xiaobei, the king of the children in the family compound, was equally listless and distracted. Even his little “fight-the-Japanese” death-defying squad had collectively fallen into decline from lack of leadership.
A group of children gathered around their leader. The chubby boy closest to Xiaobei was named Shen Dawei. “Xiaobei, that PLA soldier the other day—how could he be that cool?! He was insanely cool! We saw the whole thing from upstairs!”
Meng Xiaobei sat atop a red-brick wall, one leg drawn up while the other hung down and swung carelessly. “You just haven’t seen anyone really cool before.”
The clownish Shen Dawei entertained the others by vividly reenacting the scene from that day: how the crowd had stretched into a long human chain to haul Squad Leader He out of the muddy floodwater, and how Shaotang had emerged from the whirlpool with his head tilted sideways, carrying the crate.
Meng Xiaobei said, “Shen Dawei, look at yourself. Does my Uncle Shaotang look anything like that ridiculous mess?”
The double layer of flesh beneath Shen Dawei’s chin quivered. “Don’t I look like a PLA soldier?!”
Meng Xiaobei gave him a sidelong look. “Stick on two little strips of mustache and you’d look like Zuo Shandiao.”
Elio’s Notes: Zuo Shandiao (座山雕) is the notorious bandit chief from the popular revolutionary story Tracks in the Snowy Forest and its adaptations, including Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Xiaobei is telling his chubby friend that, with a mustache, he would look more like the villain than a heroic PLA soldier.
Shen Dawei shouted, “Meng Xiaobei! You little bastard!”
Meng Xiaobei said, “Shaotang coming out of the water looked like a dragon rising from the river. If you fell in, you’d look like a fat pig coming out of the water. Nobody could haul you up. I sure wouldn’t go in after you.”
Shen Dawei sputtered, “Meng Xiaobei, you—you—you!!!”
Meng Xiaobei narrowed his already narrow eyes and snickered. “I wouldn’t need to rescue you anyway. You’re basically an inflated buoy. You’d definitely float all by yourself in the whirlpool.”
As the aunties in the compound liked to put it, Meng Xiaobei had a nasty little mouth whenever he dealt with outsiders and the sort of face that practically begged to be smacked. That child was enough to give anyone a headache.
Meng Xiaobei could not have cared less whether the aunties and uncles in the compound liked him. He could hardly be bothered greeting outsiders in the first place. He never buttered up the aunties, never flattered anyone, and had no interest in making himself agreeable.
The shirt he was wearing had once belonged to Shaotang, one of the old garments Shaotang had passed on to their family. In those days, children in nearly every household wore old clothes cut down from an adult’s things. Few families could afford new clothes, and even if they had the money, good fabric was difficult to obtain. Military-uniform cloth was considered some of the best. Shaotang’s pale-green long-sleeved shirt had been washed until it was worn soft, and a huge tear had opened along the hem, too large even to patch. He had saved it for Meng Xiaobei instead. Ma Baochun cut away the torn section, took in the shoulders, shortened the shirt, and made it fit him perfectly.
Meng Xiaobei was delighted with it and wore that pale-green shirt every day, because it seemed to be the only piece of clothing in their entire household that everyone acknowledged belonged completely and exclusively to the eldest son. He did not have to fight his brother for it, take turns, or trade back and forth. That dummy Meng Xiaojing did not understand the style or sheer superiority of military clothing anyway!
Even at his young age, Meng Xiaojing had already developed a streak of vanity. He was naturally pretty, with long eyelashes, and every day he secretly smeared some of Ma Baochun’s clam-shell skin cream on his face in the washroom, leaving his entire neck reeking of cheap, greasy fragrance. Meng Xiaobei had no such interests. Quite the opposite: once he got carried away playing, he could barely be bothered to wash his face. Skin cream? What was that supposed to be?
Elio’s Notes: Clam-shell cream (蛤蜊油) was an inexpensive moisturizing skin cream traditionally sold in small clam-shaped or actual shell containers. The name refers to its characteristic packaging rather than cream made from clams.
Ma Baochun taught both boys that they were supposed to brush their teeth after waking up and again before bed. Xiaobei was lazy, so he economized by turning two brushings into one: he brushed in the morning.
Ma Baochun said, “You have to brush before you go to sleep too!”
Meng Xiaobei said, “I don’t see anybody while I’m asleep. In the morning I have to see my teacher and my friends. I only need to brush when my breath smells.”
Ma Baochun did not know whether to laugh or cry. “You silly, silly child! Brushing before bed is even more important. It protects your teeth!”
Meng Xiaobei immediately bared a neat row of spotless white teeth for his mother to inspect and argued, “Tsk. Who in this family has the whitest, best-looking teeth?!”
…
A few days later, Squad Leader He finally came to visit in uniform.
He Shaotang had just come out of the hospital next door, carrying a plastic bag of medicine in one hand and something for the Meng family in the other.
When Meng Jianmin opened the door and saw Shaotang standing there, he froze and nearly lost the ability to speak.
Shaotang had become even darker and thinner. Sharp angles now showed clearly along his cheeks and jaw, while his slightly sunken eyes remained bright and alert. He always left the top collar button of his uniform shirt undone, exposing his collarbones. Just from how prominently those bones now stood out, Meng Jianmin could tell that in years plagued by natural disasters and man-made calamities like these, the army really worked its young soldiers like draft animals rather than human beings.
Shaotang did not bother with pleasantries. “Where’s Xiaobei?”
Meng Jianmin said, “Playing with a bunch of children behind the compound. They may have gone over to the coal pile. Want me to call him back?”
Shaotang said, “Oh… forget it. No need. I came to see you anyway.”
He Shaotang straightforwardly held out what he was carrying. “This is for your Xiaobei.”
Meng Jianmin already knew what it was and spoke sincerely. “Absolutely not, Shaotang. Keep the good stuff for yourself. You don’t need to give it to that child.”
The two men pushed the package back and forth at the doorway and argued over it for a long while. He Shaotang insisted that he had brought it especially for their child. Meng Jianmin protested that the little menace did not even deserve anything so expensive. “You don’t have to spoil him like this!”
Shaotang’s dark eyes showed that he meant every word. “Meng Xiaobei’s still growing. Doesn’t he like milk? He hardly ever gets any. Your cooperative store doesn’t even sell this milk powder and malted milk powder.”
Meng Jianmin said, “And you don’t need the extra nutrition yourself? Take it back.”
Shaotang suddenly became serious and said evenly, “Jianmin, I’ll tell you the truth. I ate plenty of this stuff when I was little. I’ve never gone without.”
Meng Jianmin fell silent.
A moment later, Shaotang relaxed and laughed again. “Besides, I’m already a grown man. I’m not getting any taller. It’s fucking too late to start loading me up with calcium now!”
“Give it to Xiaobei. Look at that little runt!”
“He spends all day acting like the boss of every kid in the compound too. Dumb little shit—out of that whole pack of bald-headed brats, he—is—the—shortest!”
Shaotang’s hearty laughter echoed through the stairwell. He turned, waved, and was already bounding downstairs and gone before his voice had completely faded…
When Meng Xiaobei came home and learned he had missed Shaotang’s visit, he immediately became agitated and started shouting at his father.
Meng Xiaobei said, “Uncle Shaotang came to our house and you didn’t come get me, Dad?”
Meng Jianmin looked at him. “You expected your father to go all the way over to the coal pile looking for you?”
Meng Xiaobei demanded, “Did Uncle Shaotang come here to see you or to see me?”
Meng Jianmin said, “Is he your dad, or am I your dad?”
Meng Xiaobei muttered, “That’s different…”
Then Meng Xiaobei ran off to the military compound and asked to visit the barracks. The young soldiers standing guard at the gate all knew him by now. If an adult had shown up and tried to wander inside, there was no chance they would have allowed it. But when they saw it was this kid, they bent the rules a little, wrote down his name, and let him through.
Meng Xiaobei knew the place like the back of his hand. He trotted straight toward the company barracks, and someone in the corridor immediately yelled, “Tangtang, get your ass up! Your son came to visit you!”
He Shaotang was tucked into bed reading, his face slightly flushed.
Meng Xiaobei had been sick more times than he could count since childhood and was thoroughly accustomed to it. But this was the first time he had ever seen Shaotang sick!
When grown men fell ill, it seemed much more dramatic than when children did, especially men who were normally strong and healthy. When sickness came, it flattened them like a collapsing mountain. Shaotang had still managed to walk over to the Meng home and deliver the things earlier, but as soon as he returned, he had completely given out and taken to bed with a fever.
Shaotang slept on the lower bunk. Meng Xiaobei did not stand on ceremony. He slipped straight onto the bed and squirmed inside the mosquito netting, perched there like a monkey riding in a sedan chair, then dropped his backside directly onto Shaotang’s thighs through the quilt as though those legs had been put there specifically to serve as his seat.
Shaotang said, “Careful. I’ll infect you.”
Meng Xiaobei said, “I’ve got immunity. I’m indestructible.”
Shaotang laughed and turned Xiaobei’s face toward him. “Let me see all that immunity written across your face.”
When Xiaobei smiled, his eyes narrowed until they practically vanished, while two ridiculously funny little creases appeared in his cheeks. Without thinking, He Shaotang began counting the tiny chickenpox scars on the boy’s nose.
It was rare for He Shaotang to fall ill. His normally solid chest felt unexpectedly soft when leaned against, his voice was quieter than usual, and there was a faint huskiness in his throat.
Even a man made of iron could not withstand several consecutive days of fighting floodwaters. Shaotang had literally worked himself sick. Both legs had been soaked raw from wading through muddy wheat fields for days; ointment had been applied to the damaged skin and the worst patches wrapped in gauze.
One of his roommates teased him, “Well, if it isn’t He Daiyu. Haven’t gotten out of bed all day, have you? Look at you, all delicate and sickly, coughing and panting away.”
Xiao Bin, who slept on the upper bunk, immediately joined in. “Clutching his little handkerchief, blowing that enormous nose of his—before Meng Xiaobei showed up, I could hear this bastard under the quilt making pretty little breathy moans! Now that his son’s here to visit, suddenly he’s putting on the big tough daddy act again!”
He Shaotang punched the underside of the upper bunk. “Fuck off.”
Meng Xiaobei pulled his wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket, offered it to him, and announced loudly, “Tangtang, I want to hear your pretty little moans.”
The entire room exploded with laughter.
He Shaotang shoved at him with one foot and cursed through a grin, “Pretty little moans, my ass!”
Meng Xiaobei, driven by his strong thirst for knowledge and scientific curiosity, began poking through the pills on the table.
Shaotang stuck his head out from beneath the quilt. “Hey. Don’t eat those.”
“You rotten kid, Xiaobei. Spit that out! You’re even eating my medicine now?”
Shaotang snatched the large medicinal pill out of Meng Xiaobei’s mouth, broke it into two halves, chewed them up himself, and swallowed. After taking the traditional medicine, every breath from his mouth carried a faintly bitter, faintly fragrant herbal smell.
A string of forceful footsteps sounded in the corridor.
The soldier whose bunk stood nearest the door whispered, “Hey, Platoon Leader’s coming!”
The entire squad immediately dragged the table and stools into place, sat down around them, opened their books, and pretended to be hard at work. It was time for their evening political-study session.
Meng Xiaobei’s clever little eyes darted sideways just as Shaotang lifted the quilt. The two understood each other without needing a word. Meng Xiaobei immediately burrowed beneath the covers and pulled them over his head…
A pair of army-green rubber shoes paced back and forth beside Shaotang’s bed for quite some time. Through the mosquito netting, the platoon leader peered around inside.
Xiaobei was nearly suffocating under the covers. Why the hell won’t this guy leave already?!
The platoon leader slowly lowered his head, looked directly at He Shaotang, and gave a cold laugh. “Still hiding him?”
“Let’s see how long you two plan to keep hiding!”
“Little bastard, get out here!”
The platoon leader suddenly yanked open the mosquito-net curtain, and a wolf cub came tumbling wildly out of the quilt, arms and legs flailing…
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