Village Lunatics

Abstract

One day at noon, on our way back from the town market, my mother and I spotted a woman walking down the street. It was a scorching hot day, and there were no trees nearby to provide shade. The woman, in her sixties, wore a thick jacket but no sun hat. My mother said she was a mentally ill woman from the neighboring village. Although she had mothered a few children, she had always been a little “off.” Nobody in her family cared anymore—they just let her be. A few days ago, my mother added, this woman suffered from sunstroke on the street. Thanks to a passerby, she was saved by a bottle of water. See, now that she's recovered, she's come back out. Several days later, I heard the woman fell at a crosswalk on her way home. By the time the villagers found her, she had already stopped breathing. Her dead hand held a piece of watermelon with a few bites taken. Nobody knew who gave it to her. After hearing these stories, I had the idea to write about these people around me—the ones who are forgotten, who live like wild grass. Facing the weight of these lives, I feel powerless, but I cannot turn a blind eye to them. Because I am unable to help them, I feel as though I owe them something. As a way of repaying them, I've jotted down the marks they've made on this world.One day Auntie Liu told me that Zhiyin's wife, Madwoman Yang, had entered a mental hospital.I asked, she's been crazy for half of her life—how come she's only now been sent for treatment?Auntie Liu explained that ever since Madwoman Yang had come to our village, everyone knew she had problems, so nobody cared to argue with her over trivial things such as sneaking home her neighbors’ outdoor brooms and mops or pilfering other people's doormats. But recently she started to stay up all night and keep swearing loudly, driving her neighbors up the wall. One after another, they all went and complained to her husband. Seeing no other way, her husband called her older sister. After discussing things over, they agreed that it was the safest to send her to a mental hospital.A moment from twenty years ago came to mind—it was Zhiyin's wedding day, and I'd gone to drink at his wedding feast. I asked my mother, where did the bride come from? Mother replied, she came from a village ten miles away. She was married before and even had a daughter. Her man divorced her when he made a fortune. Zhiyin had a cousin in the same village, who introduced this girl to him. When he first heard that the girl's mind was a little “disturbed,” Zhiyin immediately said no. But everyone around him clamored to get a word in, urging him to say yes. Some said, you're pushing thirty and still single—do you really think you have a choice? Others said, you don't have any special skill or family fortune—how can you be so picky? Be careful, or you'll never get a wife.Zhiyin was a quiet person. After hearing all this, he dropped his head all the way down to his crotch, waiting a long while before he lifted it back up. And the marriage was settled.They chose a wedding day, and the bride was brought over. She was of medium build, with short hair reaching her earlobes, dark skin, double eyelids, and a large, square face.Half a year later, nobody called her by her real name Yang Chunrong anymore. Instead, they called her Madwoman Yang. It turned out that, not long after their wedding, she showed her true madwoman face. One night, when Zhiyin was falling asleep in their bed, instead of sleeping, Madwoman Yang stood in front of the bed and talked garrulously to him. When Zhiyin woke up and opened his eyes, the sky was already gleaming with light, but his wife still stood in the same position, immersed in talking to herself. The following night, Zhiyin dared not sleep in his wedding bed, so he huddled in his younger brother's bed. At midnight, Zhiyin's poor brother woke up, only to find a blurry human figure standing at the bed holding a kitchen knife. The young man was so frightened that he fell out of bed and ran away.After the Spring Festival, Zhiyin went to a big city to look for a job. When the rice ripened, he returned home to help with the harvest. One day when he was wielding a sickle in the rice field, Madwoman Yang, wearing a red top and green pants, stood on the ridge of the field and started yelling at him: “Look at you, city man, who do you think you are? How dare you touch my rice? I broke my back to grow these crops, and now you get to harvest them? Have you asked for my permission?”Without looking up, Zhiyin kept tolling away in the field, but she took her cursing to the next level: “Shame on you, you're nothing but a robber . . . ” Zhiyin couldn't take it anymore—he stepped on the ridge and struck her back with the handle of the sickle, then left without looking behind him.Madwoman Yang even hurt someone last year. The story goes: a woman in our village named Zhenlan discovered that the vegetables in her field had been stolen and suspected that Madwoman Yang was the thief, so she went to Yang's house to question her. Remembering the madwoman kept a dog, she brought a stick for self-defense. When Zhenlan got there, not only did the madwoman deny any wrongdoing, she also started yelling at her: “My son is becoming a man. When you accuse me of stealing things, are you deliberately trashing my reputation so that he won't find a wife?” Zhenlan replied, “You're crazy, I'm not messing with you—it's my bad luck to meet you!” After saying this, she turned around and was about to walk away. Yang chased after her with a brick in hand. As soon as the brick hit Zhenlan's head, blood gushed out. Zhenlan was stunned by the sudden attack. Losing her balance, she fell to the ground. Madwoman Yang, acting as if it had nothing to do with her, went back home and locked the door. In the end, Zhiyin's younger brother couldn't bear the scene and sent Zhenlan to the hospital. Of course, Zhiyin paid the medical bill.Zhiyin had a trash-recycling business in the city. After a few years of work, he was able to afford a car to drive himself home. He also came to resemble a boss: in the past, he was bony with dark skin and never trimmed his mustache. Now that he had money, he'd ballooned up, pale and plump. He even learned to dress like a businessman. As the saying goes, clothes make the man.Zhiyin brought Madwoman Yang to the city. She referred to all the men with whom Zhiyin came into contact as liars who wanted to cheat him out of his money; she claimed that all the women whom Zhiyin had ever met were having an “inappropriate relationship” with him. When Zhiyin returned home after a full day of work, she blocked the door and declared, “Want in? Give me money!” At night, while Zhiyin was asleep, she scraped every penny out of his pocket. If Zhiyin asked her for the money, she'd start cursing. At his wit's end, Zhiyin sent the madwoman back home and demanded a divorce. He argued they'd never been in love in the first place and had only gotten together because there were no other options—at first, he thought he'd just put up with it, but who knew she'd turn out to be such a lunatic?Rumor had it that although Madwoman Yang had an ill fate, she was actually a “lucky woman!” Whoever married her would become successful. Her ex-husband used to run a mediocre tofu business from home. One day when her then-husband was selling tofu, a fortune teller passing through the villages recommended that he head south, where he was guaranteed to find wealth. And so he traveled with a construction team to Guangzhou. Who would have thought that he indeed would have a breakthrough: the man made his way from a brick mover to the contractor of an entire construction team. Later, he landed the contract for a concrete mixing plant that served several major construction sites in the city. With the mixer blending cement day and night, his fortune accumulated like a rolling snowball. As soon as his assets reached ten million, he kicked out Madwoman Yang. Now she was married to Zhiyin, a man who previously only had a few pennies rattling in his pocket, but made a fortune in just a few years. At first, he started a recycling station, then he invested in a plastic factory with a few dozen workers, and the business quickly boomed. No joke: after this rumor spread, quite a few bachelors in the village were lining up to marry her.After Zhiyin filed for divorce, the court sent an investigator to their home. Madwoman Yang said to Zhiyin, “Don't waste your time at home. Your business out there is more important. Leave it to me, I can handle it.” Other villagers laughed at her, “You really are crazy! This isn't family planning. Who needs you to ‘handle’ it? That man is trying to divorce you.”Some said the divorce wasn't happening. Madwoman Yang had powerful family connections, so it wouldn't be so easy to divorce her. She had relatives in the township government and in the county. And indeed, after a few days, Zhiyin left the village in his car.I have learned two versions of the story about how Madwoman Yang went mad. The first one goes like this: her father was an educated man working for the government during the Cultural Revolution, but he picked the wrong side and was defamed as a rightist. Every day her father was taken to the street and humiliated. When he couldn't bear it anymore, he took his daughter, who was four or five at the time, and ran away. They didn't dare to run during the day, so they sneaked out at night and headed deep into the forest until heavy rain caught them halfway. The father then carried the girl on his shoulders to climb over mountains and swim across rivers. A few days later, the father's body was discovered in a river. When the girl was found in the mountains, she'd already been scared to madness. Nobody knew what she'd gone through in those days. Another version goes that when her ex-husband made a fortune and divorced her, she couldn't accept reality and lost her mind. There's no way for me to find out which one is true.Dumboy's home was only one ridge away from mine. In my childhood, when my father called me home from playing outside, Dumboy, sitting on a hill nearby, would trail along: “Lin'er . . . ” And I'd answer: “Here!” When Dumboy heard me, he would get so excited that he'd shout my name again, followed by a string of giggles. Dumboy spoke in a special way: he couldn't say long sentences but would only pop out two words at a time. This was our game: every time he called to me, I answered. When he laughed, I laughed. Seeing me laugh, he laughed even harder. The next day, he would have forgotten my name. If there was someone calling me, he'd follow and call me, but if there was nobody calling me, he wouldn't know how to call me.Till this day, I remember how Dumboy, half the height of an adult, still wore split-crotch pants and loved to sit on the ground. His clothes were all filthy. He had a pile of messy hair on top of his head and two strings of snot dripping from his face. When he rubbed them with sleeves, the snot spread all over his face, so his cheeks always looked dirty. On his feet he wore one rain boot and one slipper.I heard from Chunxia, a girl from my class who lived next door to Dumboy, that on the day he was born, a dog came to his house. Had he been named Puppy or Doggo, he would probably not have become so dumb. But his father and mother gave him a fashionable name—Mingxing, “Brightstar.” When he grew older, his mother realized he was an idiot and wanted to drown him, only to be stopped by his father, who said, “It runs in the family. Every generation has an idiot, and now it's his turn. Since fate brought him to us, we'd better not go against it. Let's feed him simple food, dress him in rags, and just bring him up.”On the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, Dumboy's family was eating sweet rice balls. His mother served him a bowl of steaming hot rice balls fresh out of the pot, which he hungrily gobbled down. But one ball got stuck in his throat. Choking, Dumboy relentlessly shook his head left and right—in no time, his eyes rolled back. Startled, his father immediately dropped the bowl and pulled him up by the feet, forcing the rice ball to fall out. Dumboy was finally able to breathe again.He had done stupider things than this. On cold winter days, every household had an electrical heater to keep the room warm. Back in those days, the electrical heater was very simple: a burning red wire lying in a ceramic slot. Once, while the family was gathering around the heater, as he stared deeply into the heated wire, Dumboy suddenly reached out to grab that flaming red iron wire. Family members quickly knocked the wire off, but it was too late—his hands were already covered with blisters.He lived in his own world, simple but happy. He wore whatever was given to him and ate whatever was served to him. He never complained and always giggled in his foolish way. Nor did he ever worry about his livelihood, like a child who never grew up. But when he reached the age of seventeen or eighteen, some busybody in the village pointed him to a road to fortune—sitting in the middle of the main road leading to town and asking for a “road toll.” Some drivers would give him a few cents. Taking the money, he would slowly move to the side of the road. Others gave him an unfinished cigarette butt, which he would also gladly accept and smoke with great joy. If he ran into a grumpy driver who yelled at him: “Are you robbing me in the middle of the day? Get away!” Dumboy would still reach his hands out and mumble, “Money . . . money . . . ” I witnessed with my own eyes when the dark-skinned, bulky Dumboy blocked the way like a pile of mud, and some angry driver beat him up until he was bleeding and rolling on the ground.A few years ago, I returned to the village from Beijing. I heard from my mother that Dumboy's father had fallen ill and passed away. His mother also developed esophageal cancer. I started to worry about Dumboy's future.One day, on my way home, I ran into Dumboy's mother. I asked if she had recovered.“I've had my surgery already. The doctor said if I'm lucky, I still have a few more years to live, but the cancer could come back at any time.”“Then what'll you do with Dumboy?”“Even if I didn't have cancer, I couldn't live longer than him. I'll figure out something for him when the day comes,” his mother replied.“What do you mean?”“I'll cook his favorite dish and mix in some poison.”Hearing this, I was shocked, unable to utter a word for a long time.Last August, Dumboy suddenly went missing. He hadn't come home in a few days, and his mother called her two older sons working in the city to come back and help. They put up Missing Person notices everywhere and knocked at every door in the village. They even went to the local TV station to make an announcement. A week passed, but there was still no clue. The villagers speculated that, on a moonless night, when it was completely dark, Dumboy had been walking by himself on the road when suddenly a car with bright headlights shining from far away pulled over him. Out came two big men who dragged Dumboy into the car, each man carrying one of the boy's arms. But then someone raised a question: What did they need an idiot for? He couldn't do anything. They'd have to give him food and drink. To this, someone replied, it's true that the idiot is dumb, but his organs aren't dumb. His heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys should still work, no? His corneas can work, right? People gave free rein to their imagination and concluded that organ traffickers had kidnapped Dumboy in order to make a fortune.One afternoon not long after that, I was walking with my mother after we'd finished harvesting sweet potatoes. My mother was walking ahead of me and kept turning back to hurry me home. I was confused: it wasn't dark yet, what was she afraid of? A ghost? Hesitating for a second, my mother pointed at a field nearby and told me that was where Dumboy's body had been discovered.“How'd he die?”“He fell into the mud and suffocated.”There was an abandoned dirt road. After the cement road was built, nobody used it anymore. Dumboy got up before dawn, walking on this dirt road by himself. When he went past the reed field, he plunged into the mud face down and didn't stand up again. He was discovered with his head stuck in the field, about to rot away. Dumboy's mother went to see the body: it was really him, and he had on the same clothes he'd been wearing that day. And so, she called her two older sons back again to help carry the body to the mountain. I thought, now she must be relieved. She no longer had to worry about what to do with Dumboy.In the country, the death of an idiot is as trivial as the death of an ant.Mumi was, in fact, not that dumb. She was just a bit simpleminded. People said it was because her mother had a difficult pregnancy that trapped the baby in her belly for too long and deprived her of oxygen. As a result, Mumi was a little slower than normal people.Mumi was a big, tall, muscular girl with short hair and a large round face. She had single eyelids and thick lips, which made her look a little dull, but in fact, she had an outgoing personality: she was always chatty and giggly. When she got excited, she would clap her hands and stomp her feet.My nephew Qiyan was a bright young man who worked as a carpenter and plasterer. The only downside was that he had a “crooked neck.” People said that not long after he was born, his mother put him on the bed and went to cook in the kitchen, where she suddenly heard a loud cry. When she ran back to take a look, she found nothing out of the ordinary. However, after that, Qiyan had what was called a “crooked neck.” Old superstitious people in the village believed it was a mark left by the Kidnapping Fairy who tried to steal the boy but accidentally dropped him.When Qiyan turned twenty-two, he was working at a brick kiln, where he met a girl from the neighboring town. The two liked each other and started dating. Qiyan even brought the girl home to live with him. Not long afterward, the girl became pregnant, so Qiyan asked his parents to plan a wedding ceremony. Since the girl was already pregnant, his mother was not willing to squander money on the wedding. The girl's family asked for a dowry of four thousand bucks. Qiyan's mother refused their demand, thinking, How dare they ask for money when she was already carrying a child? It turned out, however, that the girl's family was rather proud. They took her to the hospital for an abortion and then married her off to another man.Although he resented his parents for their stinginess, Qiyan couldn't do anything about it. Disheartened, when someone introduced Mumi to him, Qiyan immediately agreed to the arrangement. This was how Mumi married into our village and became my niece-in-law.Not long after their wedding, Mumi became pregnant. Most people had morning sickness for about three months, but Mumi was different. She started vomiting right after she got pregnant. She spat out everything she took in, including water. She vomited until the day she was about to go into labor. When her due date was near, she went to the hospital for a checkup, only to find that she was experiencing a molar pregnancy. She stayed at the hospital for about ten days and almost lost her life.A year later, she became pregnant again. This time she had a girl via C-section. When the girl, named Lianlian, turned about three or four years old, she still could not say “mama” or “papa.” Needless to say, she could not speak. She peed and pooped in her pants. Qiyan took her to the hospital and was told his daughter was an idiot.Strangely, that winter, Lianlian went missing. There were rumors that she had been abandoned. Her family said she accidentally fell and drowned in a pond. One day not long after that, scattered snowflakes started to fall from the sky. Qiyan, wearing a black woolen hat on his crooked head, visited every family in the village and asked them to put a stamp on a piece of paper as a proof for Lianlian's death, which he could use to apply for a permission to have another child.A year later, Mumi became pregnant for a third time. This time she grew incredibly skinny. When she walked, she looked like a shivering lamp in the wind. My mother once brought her two bananas. Before Mumi even started eating them, she vomited. Startled, we immediately sent her home to lie down and rest. This time, she had another C-section and delivered a boy. Her mother-in-law took care for the child right after he was born, not allowing Mumi to get close to him. She also refused Mumi's breast milk, worrying that it would turn the boy into an idiot as well. Luckily, the boy was healthy and bright. The whole family regarded him as a treasure and named him Dabao, meaning “Big Treasure.”When Dabao turned three, Mumi gave him a little sister, Lingli. After all her miseries, Mumi finally had both a boy and a girl. Once their daughter was born, as though he had fulfilled the task of extending the family line, Qiyan went to find work in faraway cities and rarely came back home.In 2004, I was pregnant and living in my mother's house. When I was sitting and knitting for my baby, Mumi came in and said to me admiringly: “If only I knew how to knit, I'd love to knit a sweater for my Qiyan!” Hearing this, I was almost moved to tears: in her simple world there was still room for love. So I said to her, “Here, take this yarn, I'll teach you. I guarantee you'll learn how to do it.”Mumi greeted everyone she encountered. Every time she saw someone in the street, she would shout cheerfully from far away. Even my uncle complimented her manners, saying, “Mumi is the most polite woman among all the daughters-in-law and granddaughters-in-law in the Li family.” But some others disagreed, “Do you want all of them to be like Mumi? Then the Li family will be done for! Your men would worry themselves to death.” I knew what they meant. Some villager once saw Mumi coming out of a bachelor's house in a nearby village. So he warned her, “If you keep doing this, I'll tell your mother-in-law.” Mumi replied calmly, “I don't care if you tell on me. If my man Qiyan was home, I wouldn't come here.” This reaction surprised the villager—was she really an idiot? These were not the words of an idiot.A few autumns ago, Mumi went to the mountains to cut firewood. When she came back, she realized her sickle was missing. And so, her father-in-law took her to the mountain to look for it. When they got back, it was already dark. As soon as they stepped inside, her mother-in-law raised her voice, “Looking for sickles? Looking for sickles? So you two fell asleep in the mountain while looking for sickles?” Screaming, the old woman began to scratch and hit Mumi.After that, her mother-in-law insisted on splitting up the household. She would take care of her grandson and granddaughter, and Mumi would live on her own. Mumi didn't know how to cook rice—she could never figure out how much water to use. The rice turned out either too dry or too wet. Needless to say, she knew nothing about preparing meat or vegetables. As such, she ate noodles everyday. She'd always buy a handful of noodles when she went out.As time flew by, Mumi's mother-in-law grew older and increasingly deaf. People had to yell at her even when talking face-to-face. Knowing that her mother-in-law couldn't hear her, Mumi became more daring. Quite often, she swore at her: “Hey, deaf one. How can you still loathe me for all these years? If it weren't for me, you'd never have a grandson your whole life.” Her mother-in-law saw her lips moving but couldn't make out the words, so she asked: “Mumi, are you talking badly about me?” “No, I'm singing!” She then started singing in a garbled voice, leaving the mother-in-law unable to do anything but stare at her.After years of working in the city, Qiyan had finally saved enough money to buy an apartment in the county and send his son and daughter to school there. He kept his mother in the new apartment to take care of the children but refused to allow Mumi to live with them.The last time I saw Mumi was when she was harvesting rice in the field with her father-in-law. Her mother-in-law had completely given up, just letting them be. Mumi's parents couldn't help her either. A married daughter was like spilled water. Her parents couldn't take her back home because they themselves were growing old and needed other people's care. They preferred to keep her out of sight, out of mind. When will Mumi, like a little boat floating in an ocean of people, find her harbor? All I can hope is for her children to grow up soon and take her into their homes so that Mumi can enjoy some love and care from her son and daughter in her twilight years.