The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke

square, happily greeting everyone who passed by. The days were gradually becoming warmer, and after exercising he would soon be covered in sweat. He would remove his jacket, but rather than hang it from a nearby tree, he would instead make a point of walking past several graves to hang it on the same tree on which he had already hung the cage with the pair of mynah birds. He would then walk back over the same graves, would stomp several times on Zhu Qingfang’s grave mound, and only then would he return to his exercises.
    During that period, the air was brisk and there was a humid breeze. Every morning, Kong Dongde would walk back and forth over Zhu Qingfang’s grave. There was a path leading up to the grave, and the earth of the mound itself was packed down very hard. The new soil that had been deposited during the Qingming grave-sweeping holiday had already been stomped into the ground, to the point that the grave mound appeared quite low. One day, Kong Dongde decided that the MOST LOYAL OLD COMMUNIST inscription on Zhu Qingfang’s tombstone was displeasing, and therefore proceeded to plasterit with mud. Another day, he decided that the entire gravestone was displeasing, so he asked some villagers to knock it down—but before they had a chance to finish, he told them to stop.
    “Let’s just leave it like this. For better or worse, he did live and walk this earth, so let’s leave his gravestone as it is.” From that point on, the gravestone stood at a precarious angle, as though it were about to topple over. Kong Dongde felt that the grave and tombstone were somehow more acceptable this way, as though Zhu Qingfang was forever bowing down before him. It was as though Zhu Qingfang’s grave was abandoned. Every morning Kong Dongde would get up and go down to the village square to do these things—thinking about the good fortune his family had enjoyed. Kong Dongde’s eldest son was now a teacher and was now the assistant principal at an elementary school; his second son was the village chief and the emperor of the village; his third son was in the army, and, although not a general, he was nevertheless a security officer for his regiment, and sooner or later he would surely be promoted to cadre; and his fourth son was enrolled in high school in the city, receiving excellent grades, and would soon take the college admissions exams.
    With luck, he would be able to pass the exams easily.
    Kong Dongde had absolutely nothing to complain about. Had Zhu Qingfang’s daughter not gone into the city to earn money to buy a house, and had the town mayor (who was also someone who should have met with misfortune) not erected an enormous stele in front of the village, there would not have been a single thing in this life that would have given Kong Dongde any displeasure.
    Several months earlier, Mayor Hu Dajun had erected this enormous stele for Zhu Ying, the first line of which read, TO GET RICH, LEARN FROM EXPLOSION, while the second read, TAKE ZHU YING AS A MODEL. However, Zhu Ying was herself a resident of Explosion and therefore should be under the direction of the village chief—which is to say,Kong Dongde’s son, Kong Mingliang. But this made Kong Dongde feel as though there were a needle pricking his throat. He naturally couldn’t simply go knock down the stele the mayor had erected, and furthermore Mayor Hu could very well end up being promoted to county mayor. So Kong Dongde had no recourse but to blur out the inscription on the tombstone that had been erected in the name of the father of that whore, Zhu Ying. Moreover, he had to settle for blurring out the inscription on the nearly overturned tombstone of that whore’s father, because he naturally couldn’t blur out the inscription on the enormous stele the mayor had erected.
    In the end, Kong Dongde felt that everything was again as it should be, and it was as though that bone in his throat had been removed.
    He exercised in front of that grave, humming a tune while