DOGS

The dogs ran downhill in packs, in pursuit of mates. Spring had arrived.

When a group of male dogs chased after a female, the locals called it ‘mounting the trellis’.

The males darted this way and that, forgetting food and drink in their single-minded frenzy for females, running around in the chaos of battle.

The earth had thawed, and their paws were thick with mud.

They clawed and bit each other, fighting over a bitch. As soon as one male had the upper hand, the pack abruptly stopped moving. The losers reluctantly shuffled aside and slunk away.

The rutting dogs spent a long time stuck together.

This was the moment that the educated youths chose to come running, shouting with their sticks raised, chasing after the fleeing dogs as if they were a man and woman engaged in improper behaviour, until the dogs uncoupled.

I sat at the entrance to our tent, scraping mud off my shoes with a stone, listening to the cries of men and dogs.

‘It’s springtime! Just like that, taken over by heat and madness . . .’

RABBITS

In the sixties and seventies, high-school students from cities across China were rounded up, labelled ‘educated youths’, and sent to desolate farmlands in the border regions to be reformed through labour. Over 2,000 educated youths gathered at the reservoir and a pair of rabbits (as gay men were known in the local slang) were hauled up onstage, bound hand and foot. When one of them struggled, he was knocked to the ground with a hoe, and didn’t stand again.

From the audience came thunderous cries of ‘Beat the wicked! Down with this nastiness!’

Whether it was a man and a woman, two men, two women, two dogs or two cats, as long as there was a whiff of sex in the air, everyone got incredibly worked up and started screaming attack slogans.

Qiao had been pent up for too long. He assaulted other people to release his feelings. He told me once that the whole time, he was mentally beating himself up. ‘Hey, keep a hold of yourself. If you think about that sort of thing, you’ll end up getting attacked too.

‘You have to keep it in. Endure, endure. Don’t let anything happen, or you’ll end up dead.

‘Beat them, go on, beat them to death. Harder!’

In springtime, there was blood everywhere.

WORKPLACE INJURY

The Harbin educated youth Big Eyes stood at the doorway of the barber shop, pointing at the upper bunk in the back room and quietly telling everyone who passed by, ‘Xu Dahuan is in there nursing a “workplace injury”. Ha! She was doing it with the Third Brigade Leader on a desk at the primary school, and they got caught in the act. Goddamn it! Of all places, the primary school! Kids go there!’

He was full of glee, using ‘workplace injury’ to refer to such an act.

The Third Brigade Leader was a local. In the days after he was caught, his wife cooked three meals a day and brought them to him. When they saw each other, she didn’t utter one word against him, but kept cursing her love rival as a nasty little vixen. Being female, it was better for her to rebuke the other woman.

The two of them were locked up for a few days, then they were released and that was that.

At the next assembly, the Branch Leader was obliged to say a few words to the young people from the cities. ‘Before you educated youths arrived, we had quite a few of these incidents. Just a squabble between two families, no big deal.

‘It’s forty below in the winter, really harsh, the sun goes down so early, and there’s no electricity. Two people hear each other breathe, groping through the dark to speak . . . You know? Do you know what I mean?’