The Explosion Chronicles (37 page)

Those four words,
Lost but found again,
warmed his heart like a fire on a winter day. He looked around, but apart from a car that drove past him there was no trace of movement. He tried to find the day he left school and returned home, and found two words written in small script: “Failed exam.” He found the day he went to town to work, and there was the single word: “Mistake.” He then turned to the day that he was appointed branch head, and there were two word: “Major mistake.” Finally, he turned to the day when his brother appointed him as the youngest bureau director in the entire city, and once again there was only a single word: “Resigned.”

Minghui stared in shock.

The almanac trembled slightly in his hand. It turned out that the first thing he encountered that night when he went out was actually not the cat but rather this almanac. It turned out that the cat had scurried across his path simply to alert him to the fact that there was a book beneath this tree on the side of the road. All these years, he had thought the first thing he encountered that night was the cat, and therefore he had tossed the book into the hole in the tree. The autumn sun was warm, but the old cypress that was originally a willow shaded him like a giant parasol. Now this book was back in his hands and upon quickly leafing through the volume he found that all of his previous events were carefully recorded inside. A mixture
of wonder and regret surged inside him, developing into a sense of unadulterated joy. He stood under the water-like shade of the tree for a while, warming up like a child, then hugged the book close to his chest, looked around, and rushed back home.

His footsteps flowed down the street, like a boat floating down a river.

3. CHRONICLE OF THE HISTORY OF THE HEART

I.

Minghui wanted to bring Cai Qinfang back from her mother’s house, so that she and Mingguang could be reunited. This was something that was clearly specified in the almanac. With that almanac, Minghui no longer needed to worry about what the future might bring. It turned out that someone had used a script as tiny as a fly’s legs to write all of the details of his past and future into this almanac. Unfortunately, after having sat in this hole in a tree for so many years, the almanac was now completely damp and its pages were stuck together, so that everyone’s fate was similarly stuck together. Every few pages, some of the tiny script had gotten wet and formed a blob. During that period, Minghui abandoned his job as bureau director, and instead remained at home locked in his room, where he attempted to peel apart each page from the almanac’s most recent sixty-year cycle and return all the pages to their original condition. In attempting to understand the almanac, he became fascinated by Chinese astrology, solar terms, and divination. He bought many books and used the explanations they provided to supplement the almanac’s incomplete entries and illegible characters. First, he tried putting the almanac in the sun to dry out, then he tried putting it under a light breeze. When neither of these approaches helped separate the stuck-together
pages, he placed a table in the courtyard in the middle of the night, put the almanac in the middle of the table, then sat down next to it to keep watch. As the night fog dampened the pages, he was able to carefully pull them apart. The pages that he separated each night he would then read the following day. He slowly separated one page after another, and by early winter he had succeeded in separating a third of the book’s pages. In a dense block of writing from the beginning of the fourth lunar month, he discovered two words that he recognized: “Go fetch … Sister-in-Law …”

Minghui therefore decided to go fetch Mingguang’s wife, Cai Qinfang, and bring her back.

First, he went to see Mingguang himself. Mingguang didn’t know why he had been appointed the deputy dean of the newly established Explosion City Normal College. He didn’t want to serve any longer, and instead simply wanted to be a good teacher who met with his students every day. But the higher-ups said that his wanting to be a good teacher was a noble aspiration and therefore insisted that he serve as deputy dean. The construction team and the trucks that hauled cement and bricks to the construction site ultimately left the site completely covered in dust and dirt. Mingguang was the school’s dean and was responsible for overseeing all of this. He pulled aside a driver at the construction site and began cursing him, saying that he was driving too fast and had run over a small pine tree and smashed the car’s windshield. “Although the windshield doesn’t feel any pain, the tree definitely does. You know?” Mingguang screamed at the driver, whose head was covered in blood, “Don’t you see that the tree is also bleeding, and that the white marrow is the tree’s bones?” The driver wiped the blood from his head, then squatted down like a child. At this point, Minghui appeared, and from a distance called out, “Brother! … Brother!” When Mingguang turned in Minghui’s direction, Minghui saw that his brother’s temples had turned gray.
He looked middle-aged, and his blue uniform was stained with dirt from the construction site and chalk dust from the classroom. The moment Mingguang looked at Minghui, the winter sun shone directly in his eyes. Standing next to the construction site, Minghui and Mingguang spoke for a while, as close to each other as the wind and the clouds. Minghui asked how it was that Mingguang’s hair had already turned gray, and Mingguang laughed and replied, “I’m a professor now, haven’t you heard?” Minghui observed that over the past several years Mingguang had spent all his time at the school and suggested that he should return home for a visit. Mingguang said, “You always wanted me to be the school principal, but all I wanted was just to be a teacher.” As Mingguang was saying this, he caressed the pine tree that had been run over, as the driver—holding his bloody head with one hand and the steering wheel with the other—dragged the car’s shattered windshield behind him, toward the construction site’s warehouse.

When the two brothers were the only ones left in the road next to the construction site, a winter wind blew in from the northwest and the yellow sun disappeared from the sky. In that cold wind, Minghui told his brother about finding the almanac, and how the almanac had told him to go to Cai Qinfang’s house and bring her home. As Mingguang was listening, he leaned over to pick up a fistful of soil from the ground and caked it onto the pine tree’s broken trunk. He also pulled up some plants and placed them around the tree like a tent, until the tree was completely protected from the cold wind. In this way, the tree began to sprout new growth from where the trunk had been broken. When he was done with the tree, Mingguang turned back to Minghui and continued listening. Minghui said,

“Brother, you can’t live alone for the rest of your life.

“… If Sister-in-Law returns, she could cook for you and help wash your clothes. She could take care of the housework, and might
even be able to give you a son or daughter. Your family would be the envy of everyone in Explosion.

“… I know Mother misses you,” Minghui continued. “You should definitely find time to return home and see her.”

He added, “The almanac says I need to fetch Sister-in-Law, so I will.”

Mingguang listened and gazed at Minghui’s face. He didn’t say a word and seemed to be deep in thought. But now, when he looked away from his brother, he noticed that the sun was coming out from behind the clouds. With this, all of Explosion, including the city’s east side, its high-rises, and its smokestacks, as well as its newly constructed cloverleaf intersection, all shone brightly. The new growth sprouting from the run-over tree was like a glass window in the warm winter sunlight, and the sunlight sparkled on the branches.

“You said you needed to bring Sister-in-Law home, but can’t I just focus on my research?” Mingguang asked his brother.

“I want to write a book,” Mingguang added with a laugh. “As soon as it is published, I’ll be the most accomplished professor on campus.”

As Minghui was preparing to leave Mingguang, he suddenly began to tear up. He had thought that the reason why Mingguang didn’t return home had to do with the divorce and Little Cui’s disappearance. He had assumed it was because of this that Mingguang had decided to remain at the school, living in solitude with his chalk, his blackboard, and his students. But now Mingguang was not in the classroom but rather on the construction site in his capacity as school principal, and Minghui was distraught not only at the sight of the truck’s broken windshield but even more so at the sight of the pine tree that had gotten run over. Even though it was winter as Minghui and his brother were separating, the new growth emerging from the pine tree’s broken trunk was already as tall as a chopstick, and
one by one the pine needles were turning from light to dark green, and black resin, which helped the tree resist the winter chill, had appeared on the pine needles. As the two brothers were bidding each other good-bye in front of those black-green branches, Mingguang happily told Minghui, “As construction site manager, I theoretically could embezzle a lot of money, but I actually don’t want any of it. All I want is to become a first-class teacher.”

Mingguang asked, “Aren’t you going to stay for lunch?”

He added, “Perhaps your sister-in-law has already established a new family.”

Then he exhorted Minghui, “You should go visit your sister-in-law on my behalf.”

With that, Minghui left Mingguang, leaving behind the construction site, the city’s east side, and all of Explosion. When he glanced back, it was as if he were looking at a dissipating cloud of smoke.

II.

Cai Qinfang’s family lived in the depths of the Balou Mountains, and in order to ship out the copper, iron, tin, and platinum ore from the mines, the mountain road had been widened to the point that it could accommodate four large trucks driving side by side. The road was made from a combination of crushed stone, cement, and steel rebars, and the day the new road was completed Mayor Kong cut the ceremonial ribbon. He took a large pair of scissors from a tray, and as he was cutting the red silk ribbon that had been extended across the road, countless gold bars and crystal beads, jade pendants and agate clasps all spilled out onto the road. Hundreds of earrings and bracelets rolled into the grass. From the site of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, there was torrential applause from the officials and city residents assembled there. Amid this applause, people scurried to
collect the gold, jade, and necklaces scattered along the road, but in the chaos some people were trampled to death. When Minghui saw this scene on television, he called Cheng Qing in the city government and, with her permission, was able to speak to his brother.

“People were trampled to death,” he told Mingliang.

Mingliang reflected for a moment, then replied, “The first phase of construction has yielded two hundred and thirty-two kilometers of road.”

Minghui exclaimed, “My god!”

“The second phase has now begun,” Mingliang added. “And in three years’ time we plan to transform all of the surrounding rural areas over which Explosion has jurisdiction into roadways, so that our people will be able to lead even better lives than the Americans and Europeans.”

Minghui discussed some family matters with his brother, then hung up the phone. By this point he was on the same stretch of mountain road where Mingliang had cut the ceremonial ribbon and all of the gems and jewelry had fallen to the ground. The cold, dry winter air covered the entire mountain range. The trees lining both sides of the road were crying out from the cold as wind tore through them. Minghui could easily have taken a car to the house of his sister-in-law’s mother. All he would have needed to do was pick up the phone and call someone up, and say that he was Mayor Kong’s younger brother, Kong Minghui, and immediately several sedans would come to meet him. But the almanac had said he must walk ten thousand
li
before everything would become clear, and therefore he decided to walk. Countless empty trucks drove past him, heading into the mountains. There were also many trucks full of coal driving down from the mountains, heading toward the smelting plants on the outskirts of Explosion. He walked along the side of the road and saw that the dust from the trucks had
completely buried a tree. He saw birds struggling to fly but falling to the ground because they were coughing so badly. On the side of the road he also saw a plot of wheat belonging to some village, but because the dust was so thick, the wheat seedlings had peeked out and then ducked back underground. He watched as the seedlings tried to dodge the cars, coal, and dust—as though they were playing hide-and-seek. Minghui stood for a long time next to that field, until the sun in the west looked like a fiery ball about to dip into a lake, and only then did he leave and proceed to quickly follow the road into the mountains.

He walked to the end of the paved road, like someone reaching the end of a stretched-out strip of cloth.

He walked to the end of the dirt road, like someone reaching the end of a piece of hand-woven cloth.

He reached the end of the path, like someone following a rope until it suddenly breaks off. Under the light of the setting sun, the fields, villages, and gullies were all peacefully arrayed along the mountain ridge. Because it was so quiet in the mountains, Minghui could hear the blood rushing in his ears. Along the road he asked several people for directions but still took a couple of wrong turns. Eventually, however, he reached Cai Qinfang’s home before nightfall. It was then that he saw the village, known as Zhang-Wang Village, sprawled out over the hillside. This was an old village with a combination of thatched-roof and tile-roof houses, and it looked much the way Explosion Village had looked years earlier. Qinfang’s house was the second one at the entrance to the village, and when Minghui arrived at her front door, he found her feeding her semi-paralyzed father. The setting sun cast a light yellow glow on her face, and each strand of white hair on her head resembled dried-up grass. Minghui had asked for directions at the first house in the village, but when he arrived at Qinfang’s house he was suddenly reminded of his elder
brother. As he remembered his brother, Minghui suddenly slowed down. When he was standing in front of Qinfang, he asked quietly,