The Shaanxi Opera by Jia Pingwa EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Jia Pingwa
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Sagas
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
There’s no question: Snow Bai was the girl I loved.
I wasn’t the only one. The men of Freshwind followed her like a pack
of wolves. I watched her and I watched them watching her. If someone gave
her a little gift—a hairpin or a pear—or talked to her too long or said
anything bad about her, I’d take a knife and girdle the persimmon tree in
their yard, and the tree would wither and die. But she’d never know that I’d
done it for her. When she still lived in the village, she used to go down to
the cornfield to cut fodder for the pigs, and I’d follow her, stepping barefoot
in her footprints. Once I followed her footprints to a puddle of piss. I stood
and stared at it for so long that when I looked back, the footprints had
dandelions growing in them.
Back behind her family’s shithouse, there was a mulberry tree that I
used to climb every day around sunset. All I wanted to do was to view the
yard, but Snow Bai’s mother thought I was stealing fruit and spread shit on
the trunk; even that couldn’t stop me. One time I fell out and landed on my
head, but I didn’t give a damn. Nobody in the village understood my love
for Snow Bai; they thought I was greedy for the fruit. They had no idea
what was going on in my head.
“I’ll tell you this—there aren’t many girls like Snow Bai around here,”
Shifty said one day when I went to see him at his brickyard. He was
perched on a stone roller, slurping noodles. “In the old days, a woman like
that . . . I’d have snatched her up, like a bandit.”
I didn’t like hearing anyone talking about Snow Bai like that, so I
picked up a clod of mud and crumbled it over his noodles. Shifty grabbed
me and we clinched up. He gave me a cut on the cheek, ate my noodles, and
threatened to smash the bowl.
One of the men watching finally stepped in. “That’s enough,” he said.
“Tell Spark to bring you a flatbread tomorrow. At least this big.” He traced
a big circle in the air.
Shifty stormed off, cursing me as he went.
I stood up. “I don’t owe him a thing,” I said. “Why’d you say I’d bring
him a flatbread that fucking big? Nobody talks about Snow Bai like that. He
can eat his mother’s cunt.”
“Spark, you’re fuckin’ crazy,” the man said.
I’m not crazy. Never have been.
I picked up a handful of chicken feathers off the street and pressed
them to my cheek.
From the doorway of his pharmacy, Big-Noise Zhao called to me,
“Where are you going in such a hurry?”
“Nowhere,” I said.
“You look like you’ve got wings with those feathers stuck on you. So I
figured you must be in a hurry. Come over here and look in the mirror.”
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