<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<text>
  <p id="1">
    <s id="1:1">Finally we were taken into custody and forced to write confessions for a long time.</s>
    <s id="1:2">At first I wrote the following: Chen Qingyang and I have an indecent relationship.</s>
    <s id="1:3">That was all.</s>
    <s id="1:4">But it came down from above that what I wrote was too simple, and they asked me to start over.</s>
    <s id="1:5">Later on I wrote that Chen Qingyang and I had an indecent relationship, and that I had screwed her many times, and she liked being screwed by me.</s>
    <s id="1:6">This time the opinions from above said it needed more detail.</s>
    <s id="1:7">So I added detail: The fortieth time that we made illegal love, the location was the thatched hut I secretly built on the mountain.</s>
    <s id="1:8">It was either the fifteenth or the sixteenth by the lunar calendar—whatever the date, the moon shone brightly.</s>
    <s id="1:9">Chen Qingyang sat on the bamboo bed, her body gleaming in the moonlight that shone through the door.</s>
    <s id="1:10">I stood on the ground, and she locked her legs around my waist.</s>
    <s id="1:11">We chatted for a while.</s>
    <s id="1:12">I told her that her breasts were not just full, but also shapely; her navel not only round, but shallow too.</s>
    <s id="1:13">All of this was very good.</s>
    <s id="1:14">She said, Really?</s>
    <s id="1:15">I had no idea.</s>
    <s id="1:16">After a while the moonlight moved away.</s>
    <s id="1:17">I lit a cigarette, but she took it from me after I finished half of it, taking several drags.</s>
    <s id="1:18">She pinched my nose, for the locals believed that a virgin's nose would be very hard, and a man dying of too much sex would have a soft nose.</s>
    <s id="1:19">On some of these occasions she lazed on the bed, leaning against the bamboo wall; other times she held me like a koala bear, blowing warm breath on my face.</s>
    <s id="1:20">At last the moonlight shone through the window opposite the door and we were separate by then.</s>
    <s id="1:21">However, I wrote these confessions not for the military deputy — he was no longer our military deputy, having been discharged from the army and gone back home.</s>
    <s id="1:22">It didn't matter whether he was our military deputy or not, we had to write confessions about our errors anyway.</s>
    <s id="1:23">Years later, I had a good relationship with the director of personnel at our school.</s>
    <s id="1:24">He told me that the great thing about the job was that you could read other people's confessions, which I believe included mine.</s>
    <s id="1:25">I thought of all the confessions mine would be the richest and most vivid.</s>
    <s id="1:26">That was because I wrote it in a hotel, with nothing else to do, like a professional writer.</s>
    <s id="1:27">In the evening I made my escape.</s>
    <s id="1:28">That morning, I asked the mess officer for a day off because I needed to go to Jingkan to buy toothpaste.</s>
    <s id="1:29">I worked under the mess officer, who also had the task of watching me.</s>
    <s id="1:30">He was supposed to keep an eye on me every minute, but I disappeared as soon as it got dark.</s>
    <s id="1:31">In the morning I brought him a lot of loquats, all very good.</s>
    <s id="1:32">The loquats growing on the plain aren't edible, because of the ant colonies in them.</s>
    <s id="1:33">Only the ones on the mountain don't have ants.</s>
    <s id="1:34">The mess officer said since we got along, and the military deputy wasn't around, he'd allow me to go buy toothpaste.</s>
    <s id="1:35">But he also said the military deputy might return any minute.</s>
    <s id="1:36">If I were not here by the time the military deputy returned, he couldn't cover for me.</s>
    <s id="1:37">I left my team and climbed to the fifteenth team's mountainside, holding a small piece of mirror to reflect light on Chen Qingyang's back window.</s>
    <s id="1:38">After a while, she came up the mountain and told me that since people had been keeping a close eye on her for the past two days, she hadn't been able to get out.</s>
    <s id="1:39">And right now she was having her period.</s>
    <s id="1:40">She said that shouldn't be a problem and we could still do it.</s>
    <s id="1:41">I said that wasn't going to work.</s>
    <s id="1:42">When we said goodbye to each other, she insisted on giving me two hundred yuan.</s>
    <s id="1:43">I refused at first, but then took it after a while.</s>
    <s id="1:44">Later Chen Qingyang told me that nobody had been keeping a close eye on her those two days, and she hadn't been having her period when she saw me.</s>
    <s id="1:45">In fact, people in the fifteenth team didn't pay attention to her at all.</s>
    <s id="1:46">People there were used to accusing the innocent of being damaged goods, but as for real damaged goods, they just let them do whatever they wanted.</s>
    <s id="1:47">The reason that she didn't come up the mountain and kept me waiting for nothing was because she began to feel tired of it.</s>
    <s id="1:48">She couldn't do it unless she was in the right mood; having sex wouldn't necessarily put her in a good mood.</s>
    <s id="1:49">Of course, after her deception she felt guilty.</s>
    <s id="1:50">That was why she gave me two hundred yuan.</s>
    <s id="1:51">I thought since she might have trouble spending the two hundred yuan, I wouldn't mind helping her.</s>
    <s id="1:52">So I brought the money with me to Jingkan and bought a double-barreled shotgun for myself.</s>
    <s id="1:53">Later when I wrote my confessions, the double-barreled shotgun was also an issue.</s>
    <s id="1:54">They suspected that I might want to kill someone with it.</s>
    <s id="1:55">Actually, if I'd wanted to kill someone, it wouldn't have made any difference whether I used a two hundred-yuan double-barreled shotgun or a forty-yuan bronze-barreled gun.</s>
    <s id="1:56">A bronze-barreled gun, normally used to shoot wild ducks by the water, was not practical at all in the mountains; besides, it was as heavy as a corpse.</s>
    <s id="1:57">When I got to the street in Jingkan that day, it was already afternoon, and since it wasn't a market day, there was just a deserted dirt road and a few deserted state-run stores.</s>
    <s id="1:58">Inside one store a saleswoman dozed while a swarm of flies circled around.</s>
    <s id="1:59">The shelf display read "aloomenum wokk" and "aloomenum kittel," and underneath were aluminum woks and aluminum kettles.</s>
    <s id="1:60">I chatted awhile with the saleswoman, who was from Shandong Province, and she let me go in their storeroom to look around myself.</s>
    <s id="1:61">In there I saw a shotgun made in Shanghai.</s>
    <s id="1:62">So I bought it even though it had sat there for nearly two years.</s>
    <s id="1:63">At dusk I tested it on the riverbank and killed a heron.</s>
    <s id="1:64">The military deputy happened to return from the farm headquarters right then and was shocked to see my shotgun.</s>
    <s id="1:65">He went on about how it was not right that everyone could have a gun, and that someone had to talk to the team leader and confiscate Wang Er's gun.</s>
    <s id="1:66">When I heard this, I felt the urge to fire at his belly.</s>
    <s id="1:67">If I had, it would probably have killed him.</s>
    <s id="1:68">Then most likely I wouldn't be around today.</s>
    <s id="1:69">On the way back from Jingkan that afternoon, I waded through the paddy field and stood among the rice seedlings for a while.</s>
    <s id="1:70">I saw leeches swimming out like fish and sticking to my legs.</s>
    <s id="1:71">I was naked to the waist then, because I had used my clothes to wrap brown sugar buns (the only kind of food sold in the town's restaurant), and with the buns in my hands and a gun slung over my back, I felt really loaded down.</s>
    <s id="1:72">So I ignored the leeches.</s>
    <s id="1:73">Only when I got up the bank did I start pulling them off one by one and burning them.</s>
    <s id="1:74">They turned soft and blistery in the fire.</s>
    <s id="1:75">All of a sudden, I felt very frustrated and tired, nothing like a twenty-one-year-old.</s>
    <s id="1:76">I realized I would get old quickly if things continued like this.</s>
    <s id="1:77">After a while, I ran into Le Du, who told me that they had caught all the fish at the fork of the rivers.</s>
    <s id="1:78">My share had been dried into stockfish and stored at his sister's place.</s>
    <s id="1:79">His sister wanted me to come get it.</s>
    <s id="1:80">I knew his sister very well; she was a dark, pretty girl.</s>
    <s id="1:81">I told him that I couldn't get there for a while.</s>
    <s id="1:82">I gave him all my brown sugar buns and asked him to take a message to the fifteenth team, telling Chen Qingyang that I'd bought a gun with her money.</s>
    <s id="1:83">Le Du went to the fifteenth team and told Chen Qingyang.</s>
    <s id="1:84">She was afraid that I might shoot the military deputy.</s>
    <s id="1:85">This concern was not completely unreasonable.</s>
    <s id="1:86">By the evening I really began to consider taking a shot at the military deputy.</s>
    <s id="1:87">At dusk, when I shot the heron by the river, I ran into the military deputy.</s>
    <s id="1:88">As usual, I stayed mute and he kept nagging at me.</s>
    <s id="1:89">I got really angry.</s>
    <s id="1:90">For more than two weeks, he had been holding forth on the same subject over and over, that I was a bad person and needed thought reform.</s>
    <s id="1:91">People shouldn't let up on me for a minute.</s>
    <s id="1:92">I'd been hearing that sort of thing all my life but never got angrier than that night.</s>
    <s id="1:93">After a while, he said he had wonderful good news to announce later that day, but wouldn't reveal what it was except that "the rotten whore" Chen Qingyang and I were going to have a really hard time from now on.</s>
    <s id="1:94">Infuriated by what he said, I was tempted to choke him right on the spot, but my curiosity about the great news got the better of me.</s>
    <s id="1:95">However, he went on talking nonsense to keep me guessing.</s>
    <s id="1:96">Not until we reached our team did he say, Come to the meeting tonight.</s>
    <s id="1:97">I'll announce the news at the meeting.</s>
    <s id="1:98">But I didn't go to the meeting that evening.</s>
    <s id="1:99">I packed my stuff, ready to flee back to the mountains.</s>
    <s id="1:100">I believed that some major event must have happened to give the military deputy a way to take care of Chen Qingyang and me.</s>
    <s id="1:101">As for what the event was, I couldn't figure it out—in those days anything could happen.</s>
    <s id="1:102">I even imagined that the emperor had been restored and the military deputy had become the local chief.</s>
    <s id="1:103">He could castrate me with a hammer and then take Chen Qingyang as his concubine.</s>
    <s id="1:104">By the time I finished my packing and was about to leave, I realized that things were not that bad.</s>
    <s id="1:105">People were shouting slogans at the meeting that I could hear even from my room.</s>
    <s id="1:106">It turned out that our state-run farm had been changed into an Army Production Corps, and the military deputy might be promoted to Regimental Commander.</s>
    <s id="1:107">At any rate, he couldn't castrate me, or take Chen Qingyang as his concubine.</s>
    <s id="1:108">After a few minutes' hesitation, I slung the pack on my back.</s>
    <s id="1:109">Then I hacked up everything in the place with a machete, found a piece of charcoal, and wrote "xxx (the military deputy's name), fuck your mother!" on the wall.</s>
    <s id="1:110">After that I left and headed up the mountain.</s>
    <s id="1:111">That was how I ran away from the fourteenth team.</s>
    <s id="1:112">I also included these things in my confessions.</s>
    <s id="1:113">To summarize, it went like this: The military deputy had a personal grudge against me, which was twofold.</s>
    <s id="1:114">Firstly, I told the relief delegation that I had been beaten unconscious, which made the military deputy lose face; secondly, he and I fought over a woman, which was why he was always trying to screw me.</s>
    <s id="1:115">So, when I learned he was about to become Regimental Commander, I felt that I couldn't take it anymore and fled into the mountains.</s>
    <s id="1:116">Even today I still believe that was the true reason for my escape.</s>
    <s id="1:117">But they said that the military deputy hadn't become Regimental Commander, so my explanation for running away wouldn't stand up.</s>
    <s id="1:118">So, they said my confessions were unconvincing.</s>
    <s id="1:119">A convincing confession would be that Chen Qingyang and I were having a love affair.</s>
    <s id="1:120">As the saying goes: For sex, a man would dare anything.</s>
    <s id="1:121">We would do anything for it — well, there's some truth to that.</s>
    <s id="1:122">But when I ran away from our team, I didn't plan to see Chen Qingyang, thinking that I could just leave without telling anyone.</s>
    <s id="1:123">When I reached the edge of the mountains I realized that after all Chen Qingyang was a friend of mine and I should go back to say goodbye to her.</s>
    <s id="1:124">I hadn't expected Chen Qingyang to say she wanted to run away with me.</s>
    <s id="1:125">She said if she didn't join me in such an adventure, we would throw our great friendship to the dogs.</s>
    <s id="1:126">So she packed some stuff in a hurry and took off with me.</s>
    <s id="1:127">Without her and what she packed, I would have gotten sick and died on the mountain for sure.</s>
    <s id="1:128">The supplies she packed included lots of malaria medicine, and plenty of jumbo-sized condoms.</s>
    <s id="1:129">After Chen Qingyang and I escaped to the mountains, the farm panicked for a while.</s>
    <s id="1:130">They believed we had run off to Burma.</s>
    <s id="1:131">It wouldn't have been good for any of us if that news had gotten out.</s>
    <s id="1:132">So they didn't report us, only issued a wanted poster on the farm.</s>
    <s id="1:133">Both Chen Qingyang and I were easily recognized, and, besides, the double-barreled shotgun we brought along was hard to hide.</s>
    <s id="1:134">But for some reason nobody found us until half a year later when each of us returned to our own teams.</s>
    <s id="1:135">And then after another month, the public security section summoned us to write our confessions.</s>
    <s id="1:136">It was our bad luck to be the victims of a new political campaign and have someone inform on us.</s>
    <s id="1:137">The office of public security was located at the entrance to our farm's headquarters.</s>
    <s id="1:138">It was a lonely mud-brick house.</s>
    <s id="1:139">You could see it from far off, because it was whitewashed and set on a hill.</s>
    <s id="1:140">When people went to the market at headquarters, they could see it from a distance.</s>
    <s id="1:141">A patch of sisal hemp, a perennial dark green in color, surrounded the house, but the clay underneath was red.</s>
    <s id="1:142">I confessed my errors there, making a clean breast of everything.</s>
    <s id="1:143">We went up the mountains, and first we planted some corn on the back slope of the fifteenth team.</s>
    <s id="1:144">The soil there was poor, and half the corn didn't grow.</s>
    <s id="1:145">And then we left, sleeping in the daytime and walking at night, looking for other places to settle.</s>
    <s id="1:146">Finally we remembered an abandoned mill on the mountain, where there was a large, deserted area of fertile ground.</s>
    <s id="1:147">Since an escapee from the leper colony, whom people called Grandpa Liu, lived there, no one visited except Chen Qingyang, prompted by her sense of duty as a doctor.</s>
    <s id="1:148">We finally went there for shelter, living in the valley behind the mill.</s>
    <s id="1:149">Chen Qingyang treated Grandpa Liu's leprosy, and I tended the land for him.</s>
    <s id="1:150">After a while, I traveled to the market in Qingping and ran into some classmates.</s>
    <s id="1:151">They told me that the military deputy had been transferred someplace else and nobody remembered our affair anymore.</s>
    <s id="1:152">So we came back.</s>
    <s id="1:153">That was how the whole business went.</s>
    <s id="1:154">I remained in the public security section for a long time.</s>
    <s id="1:155">For a while the atmosphere was not bad.</s>
    <s id="1:156">They said my problem was pretty clear and all I needed to do was to write confessions.</s>
    <s id="1:157">But after a while the situation turned more serious; they suspected that we had gone abroad, colluded with the enemy, and come back on a mission.</s>
    <s id="1:158">So they took Chen Qingyang to the office, interrogating her severely.</s>
    <s id="1:159">While they interrogated her, I looked out the window—the sky was filled with clouds.</s>
    <s id="1:160">They wanted me to confess how I had slipped across the border.</s>
    <s id="1:161">As far as border-crossing went, I wasn't completely innocent.</s>
    <s id="1:162">I did cross the border.</s>
    <s id="1:163">I disguised myself as a Thai to go to the market on the other side.</s>
    <s id="1:164">I bought a few boxes of matches and salt.</s>
    <s id="1:165">But it was unnecessary to tell them about this.</s>
    <s id="1:166">Things unnecessary to say shouldn't be said.</s>
    <s id="1:167">Later I led those security people to our place to investigate.</s>
    <s id="1:168">The thatched hut that I built on the back slope of the fifteenth team had leaks in the roof, the cornfield attracted many birds, and the heap of used condoms behind our hut supplied ironclad evidence of our former occupancy.</s>
    <s id="1:169">The locals didn't like to use condoms, holding that condoms block exchange between yin and yang and gradually weaken people.</s>
    <s id="1:170">Actually, those local condoms were better than any other ones I used later.</s>
    <s id="1:171">They were made of 100 percent natural rubber.</s>
    <s id="1:172">Afterward I refused to take them there again.</s>
    <s id="1:173">Anyway, I told them I had never crossed the border, and they didn't believe me;</s>
    <s id="1:174">I showed them the place, but they still didn't believe me.</s>
    <s id="1:175">Things unnecessary to do shouldn't be done.</s>
    <s id="1:176">I stayed mute all day long, and so did Chen Qingyang.</s>
    <s id="1:177">The investigators asked us questions at first, but got lazy after a while.</s>
    <s id="1:178">On market day, many Thais and Jingpos came by, carrying fresh fruits and vegetables on their backs, and our interrogators got fewer and fewer.</s>
    <s id="1:179">Finally there was only one person left.</s>
    <s id="1:180">He also wanted to go to the market, but it wasn't time to release us yet and leaving us unattended was against the rules.</s>
    <s id="1:181">So he went outside to call someone.</s>
    <s id="1:182">He ordered a few passing women to stop.</s>
    <s id="1:183">They didn't stop but sped up.</s>
    <s id="1:184">We smiled when we saw this.</s>
    <s id="1:185">The security comrade finally stopped a woman.</s>
    <s id="1:186">Chen Qingyang rose to her feet, smoothed out her hair, straightened the collar of her shirt, and then turned around, putting her hands behind her back.</s>
    <s id="1:187">The woman tied her up, starting from her hands and then running the rope over her neck and arms to make a knot.</s>
    <s id="1:188">She apologized, I'm just hopeless at tying people up.</s>
    <s id="1:189">The security comrade said, That's good enough.</s>
    <s id="1:190">Then he tied me up, sat us back-to-back in two separate chairs, and roped the whole thing together.</s>
    <s id="1:191">He locked the door and went to the market.</s>
    <s id="1:192">After a long time, he came back to get something from the office desk.</s>
    <s id="1:193">He asked, Want to go to the bathroom?</s>
    <s id="1:194">It's still early.</s>
    <s id="1:195">I'll come back after a while and then let you two leave.</s>
    <s id="1:196">Then he went out again.</s>
    <s id="1:197">When he finally came to set us free, Chen Qingyang wiggled her fingers, smoothed her hair, and brushed the dust from her clothes.</s>
    <s id="1:198">Then we returned to our hotel room.</s>
    <s id="1:199">We went to the public security section every day and would be tied up every market day.</s>
    <s id="1:200">Beyond that, we had to go to every team to accept public denouncement with other bad elements.</s>
    <s id="1:201">They threatened, more than once, to use other methods of the proletarian dictatorship on us—that was how our investigation went.</s>
    <s id="1:202">Later on they stopped suspecting we had gone abroad.</s>
    <s id="1:203">They began to deal with Chen Qingyang in a more civilized way, often asking her to go to the hospital and treat the prostatitis of the chief of staff.</s>
    <s id="1:204">At that time, our farm had admitted a large number of retired army cadres, many of whom suffered from prostatitis.</s>
    <s id="1:205">Through the investigation, they found that Chen Qingyang was the only one on our entire farm who knew there was such a thing as a prostate gland in a human.</s>
    <s id="1:206">The security comrades told us to confess our love affair.</s>
    <s id="1:207">I said, How do you know we had a love affair?</s>
    <s id="1:208">Did you see it?</s>
    <s id="1:209">They said, Then confess your speculation problem.</s>
    <s id="1:210">Again I asked, How do you know I had a speculation problem?</s>
    <s id="1:211">They said, A traitorship problem would do.</s>
    <s id="1:212">Anyway, you have to confess something.</s>
    <s id="1:213">As far as what specific problem you want to confess, that's up to you.</s>
    <s id="1:214">If you confess nothing, we won't release you.</s>
    <s id="1:215">After discussing it, Chen Qingyang and I decided to confess our love affair.</s>
    <s id="1:216">She said, Things we actually did we shouldn't be afraid to confess.</s>
    <s id="1:217">That was how I got started writing confessions like a writer.</s>
    <s id="1:218">The first thing I confessed was what happened the night we ran away.</s>
    <s id="1:219">After a few drafts, I finally wrote that Chen Qingyang looked like a koala bear.</s>
    <s id="1:220">She admitted that she was very excited that night and really felt like a koala bear.</s>
    <s id="1:221">She finally had a chance to fulfill her great friendship.</s>
    <s id="1:222">So she locked her legs around my waist, grabbed my shoulder with her hands, and imagining that I was a tall tree, tried to climb up several times.</s>
    <s id="1:223">When I saw Chen Qingyang again, it was already the nineties.</s>
    <s id="1:224">She told me that she had divorced her husband and was now living with her daughter in Shanghai.</s>
    <s id="1:225">She came to Beijing on a business trip.</s>
    <s id="1:226">As soon as she got to Beijing, she began to recall that Wang Er lived here and she might be able to see me.</s>
    <s id="1:227">Subsequently, she did run into me at Dragon-Lair Lake Temple Fair.</s>
    <s id="1:228">I had the same old look—deep wrinkles stretching toward my mouth, dark circles under my eyes, and I wore an old-fashioned cotton jacket.</s>
    <s id="1:229">Squatting on the ground, I was eating spiced giblets and baked pancakes that fancy places wouldn't serve.</s>
    <s id="1:230">The only difference was that my fingers had been burned yellow by nitric acid.</s>
    <s id="1:231">Chen Qingyang had changed a lot.</s>
    <s id="1:232">She wore a thin beige coat, a tweed skirt, high-heeled leather boots and a pair of goldrimmed glasses, like a public relations person in a big company.</s>
    <s id="1:233">If she hadn't called my name, I wouldn't have recognized her.</s>
    <s id="1:234">At that moment it dawned on me that everyone had his own essence, which would shine in the right setting.</s>
    <s id="1:235">I was essentially a rascal or bandit.</s>
    <s id="1:236">Now that I was a city dweller and a schoolteacher, mine didn't look quite right.</s>
    <s id="1:237">Chen Qingyang said her daughter had gone into her sophomore year at the university.</s>
    <s id="1:238">Recently she found out about our affair and wanted to meet me.</s>
    <s id="1:239">What occasioned this was: Her hospital wanted to promote Chen Qingyang, but they found this pile of confessions in her dossier.</s>
    <s id="1:240">After a discussion, the leaders decided they were persecutory materials from the Cultural Revolution and should be discarded.</s>
    <s id="1:241">So they sent someone to Yunnan to investigate her case, spent over ten thousand yuan on the trip, and finally removed all the confessions from the file.</s>
    <s id="1:242">Since she was the author, they returned them to her.</s>
    <s id="1:243">She brought them home and stashed them somewhere, and her daughter found them.</s>
    <s id="1:244">Her daughter said, Wow!</s>
    <s id="1:245">So that's how the two of you made me.</s>
    <s id="1:246">Actually, I had nothing to do with her daughter.</s>
    <s id="1:247">When her daughter was conceived, I had already left Yunnan.</s>
    <s id="1:248">Chen Qingyang explained things to her daughter that way, too.</s>
    <s id="1:249">But the girl said I could have put my sperm in a test tube and mailed it to Chen Qingyang, who was still in Yunnan at that time, for artificial insemination.</s>
    <s id="1:250">In her words, "There's nothing you pair of jerks wouldn't do."</s>
    <s id="1:251">The first night we escaped to the mountains, Chen Qingyang was very aroused.</s>
    <s id="1:252">When I finally got to sleep at daybreak, she woke me again.</s>
    <s id="1:253">At that time fog was pouring through the crack in the wall.</s>
    <s id="1:254">She wanted me to do it again, telling me not to wear the rubber thing.</s>
    <s id="1:255">She was going to have a brood of babies with me.</s>
    <s id="1:256">Let them hang down to here in a few years.</s>
    <s id="1:257">Meanwhile, she pulled her breasts down by the nipples to show me where they would reach.</s>
    <s id="1:258">But I didn't like the idea that her breasts would droop and said, Let's think of a way to keep them from drooping.</s>
    <s id="1:259">That was why I continued to wear the rubber thing.</s>
    <s id="1:260">After that she lost interest in making love to me.</s>
    <s id="1:261">When I saw Chen Qingyang all those years later, I asked, How are they?</s>
    <s id="1:262">Did they droop?</s>
    <s id="1:263">She said, You bet they did.</s>
    <s id="1:264">They're as droopy as hell.</s>
    <s id="1:265">Want to see the droop?</s>
    <s id="1:266">I got to see them shortly after—they weren't that bad.</s>
    <s id="1:267">But she said, They will be that bad sooner or later.</s>
    <s id="1:268">There's no way out.</s>
    <s id="1:269">When I turned in this confession, the leaders really liked it.</s>
    <s id="1:270">One big shot, either the chief of staff or the commissar, received us and praised our attitudes.</s>
    <s id="1:271">They believed that we hadn't thrown ourselves into the enemy's embrace and betrayed our country, and our task in the future was to confess our illicit love affair.</s>
    <s id="1:272">If we confessed well, they would allow us to get married.</s>
    <s id="1:273">But we didn't want to get married.</s>
    <s id="1:274">So later they said if we confessed well, they would let me go back to civilization, and Chen Qingyang would get to work in a bigger hospital.</s>
    <s id="1:275">So I stayed in my hotel room and wrote confessions for over a month.</s>
    <s id="1:276">Nothing interrupted me except the government business that I had to perform.</s>
    <s id="1:277">I used carbon copies; the originals I kept, the duplicates I gave to her.</s>
    <s id="1:278">We used exactly the same confessions.</s>
    <s id="1:279">After a while, the security comrades came to talk to me, telling me about the big denouncement meeting they were going to hold.</s>
    <s id="1:280">All the people who had been investigated by the public security section would have to attend, including speculators, grafters, and all kinds of bad elements.</s>
    <s id="1:281">We belonged in the group, but the regimental leaders said that since we were young people, and had good attitudes, we didn't have to go.</s>
    <s id="1:282">But people compared their situation with ours, and asked, if everyone who'd been investigated had to be there, why were we being let off?</s>
    <s id="1:283">The security comrades were in a fix.</s>
    <s id="1:284">So we would have to take part in the meeting.</s>
    <s id="1:285">Finally they decided to work on mobilizing us to take part.</s>
    <s id="1:286">They told us that public denouncing had an impact on a person's mind, which could prevent us from committing errors in the future.</s>
    <s id="1:287">Since there was such an advantage, how could we miss the opportunity?</s>
    <s id="1:288">When the meeting day came, several thousand people flooded in from the farm headquarters and the nearby production teams.</s>
    <s id="1:289">We stood on the stage with many others.</s>
    <s id="1:290">After waiting a long time and hearing quite a few articles of denouncement read, our turn, convicts Wang and Chen, finally came.</s>
    <s id="1:291">It turned out that we were loose in morals and corrupted in lifestyle, and what was more, in order to evade thought reform, we had fled into the mountains.</s>
    <s id="1:292">Only under the influence of our party's policy did we come down the mountain to abandon darkness for sunlight.</s>
    <s id="1:293">Hearing comments like this, our emotions were stirred up, too.</s>
    <s id="1:294">So we raised our arms and shouted out the slogans: Down with Wang Er!</s>
    <s id="1:295">Down with Chen Qingyang!</s>
    <s id="1:296">After this round of public denouncement, we thought we were done with it.</s>
    <s id="1:297">But we still had to write confessions because the leaders wanted to read them.</s>
    <s id="1:298">On the back slope of the fifteenth team, Chen Qingyang, seized with an impulse once, said she was going to bear a litter of young for me, but I wasn't interested.</s>
    <s id="1:299">Later I thought having babies wasn't a bad idea.</s>
    <s id="1:300">But when I mentioned it to her, she changed her mind.</s>
    <s id="1:301">And she always thought that it was me who wanted to have sex.</s>
    <s id="1:302">She said, If you feel like it, just do it.</s>
    <s id="1:303">I don't care.</s>
    <s id="1:304">I thought it would be too selfish if it were only for me.</s>
    <s id="1:305">So I rarely asked for it.</s>
    <s id="1:306">Besides, cultivating the wilderness was very tiring and I didn't have the energy for it.</s>
    <s id="1:307">What I could confess was that I fondled her breasts when we rested at the edge of the field.</s>
    <s id="1:308">When we cultivated the wilderness in the dry season, hot air was all around.</s>
    <s id="1:309">We didn't sweat at all, but our muscles felt dry and painful.</s>
    <s id="1:310">On the hottest days, we could only sleep under a tree, with heads pillowed on bamboo stalks and bodies lying on palmbark rain capes.</s>
    <s id="1:311">I wondered why nobody asked me to confess about the palm-bark rain cape, one of the labor-protection supplies for our farm, and very expensive.</s>
    <s id="1:312">I brought two along; one was mine, the other one I picked up conveniently from someone's doorway.</s>
    <s id="1:313">I returned neither of them to the farm.</s>
    <s id="1:314">Even when I left Yunnan, no one asked me to return the palm-bark rain capes.</s>
    <s id="1:315">During our break at the edge of the field, Chen Qingyang covered her face with a bamboo hat, opened her shirt collar, and immediately fell asleep.</s>
    <s id="1:316">I reached in, feeling the beautiful curves.</s>
    <s id="1:317">After a while, I unbuttoned a few more buttons, seeing that her skin was pink.</s>
    <s id="1:318">Even though she always worked with her clothes on, the sunshine still got through the thin fabric.</s>
    <s id="1:319">As for me, working bare to the waist, I had turned as black as a devil.</s>
    <s id="1:320">Chen Qingyang's breasts were two firm scoops, even when she lay back.</s>
    <s id="1:321">But the other parts of her body were very slender.</s>
    <s id="1:322">She hadn't changed much in twenty years, except that her nipples had grown a little bit bigger and darker.</s>
    <s id="1:323">She said the culprit was her daughter.</s>
    <s id="1:324">When the child was a newborn, she looked like a pink baby pig.</s>
    <s id="1:325">With eyes closed, she swooped down on her mother's nipples sucking with all her might, until her mother became an old woman and she a beautiful young woman, a young version of her mother.</s>
    <s id="1:326">An older woman now, Chen Qingyang had become more sensitive.</s>
    <s id="1:327">When we relived our old days in the hotel, she seemed nervous about such subjects.</s>
    <s id="1:328">She hadn't been that way before.</s>
    <s id="1:329">Back when I hesitated to mention her breasts in the confessions, she said, Just write it down.</s>
    <s id="1:330">I said, You'd be exposed then.</s>
    <s id="1:331">She said, Let me be exposed.</s>
    <s id="1:332">I don't care.</s>
    <s id="1:333">She also said her breasts were made this way.</s>
    <s id="1:334">It wasn't like she had done something to fake them.</s>
    <s id="1:335">As for what other people thought when they heard about them, it wasn't her problem.</s>
    <s id="1:336">After all those years, I just discovered that Chen Qingyang was actually my ex-wife.</s>
    <s id="1:337">After we finished our confessions, they wanted us to get married.</s>
    <s id="1:338">I thought it was unnecessary.</s>
    <s id="1:339">But the leaders said that not getting married would have a very bad influence and insisted that we register.</s>
    <s id="1:340">So we registered to get married in the morning and divorced in the afternoon.</s>
    <s id="1:341">I thought it hadn't counted.</s>
    <s id="1:342">In the confusion they forgot to take our marriage certificate back, and so Chen Qingyang kept one for herself.</s>
    <s id="1:343">We used this shabby certificate issued to us twenty years ago to get a double room.</s>
    <s id="1:344">Without this, we wouldn't be allowed to stay in the same room.</s>
    <s id="1:345">It was different twenty years ago.</s>
    <s id="1:346">Twenty years ago they let us stay in the same hotel room to write our confessions, and back then we didn't even have the marriage certificate.</s>
    <s id="1:347">I wrote about what we had done on the back slope.</s>
    <s id="1:348">But the regional leaders asked the security comrades to pass on a message to me, saying that I could skip over the irrelevant details.</s>
    <s id="1:349">Just move on to the next case.</s>
    <s id="1:350">Hearing this, I lost my stubborn-as-amule temper: The motherfuckers!</s>
    <s id="1:351">Is this a case?</s>
    <s id="1:352">Chen Qingyang tried to help me understand: How many people are there in the world?</s>
    <s id="1:353">How many times do people do it every day?</s>
    <s id="1:354">And how many of them are important enough to be called cases?</s>
    <s id="1:355">I said actually they were all cases.</s>
    <s id="1:356">It was just that the leaders couldn't check on them all.</s>
    <s id="1:357">She said, Well then, just confess.</s>
    <s id="1:358">So I confessed: That night, we left the back slope and returned to the scene of the crime.</s>
  </p>
</text>
