Years of Red Dust by Qiu Xiaolong Page A

statue by a magic spell. Small Bowl was the first to get his wits back, sprinting up to the wedding room, while the others remained standing there in the lane, too shocked and stupefied to react.
    Comrade Jun, the head of the neighborhood committee, arrived at the scene, and an outburst of voices rocketed up like firecrackers trying to explain. “A life for a firecracker!”
    Small Bowl ran back down again, shouting, “Wait! Big Bowl! Don’t go there!”
    Then Qian stumbled down, her hair disheveled, her clothes in terrible disarray, screaming, running barefoot. “Come back, Big Bowl!”
    The crowd gasped. “She’s—a ghost! Wait—she’s not dead.”
    But it was already too late.
    When the bride dashed into the police station, the bridegroom had already signed the statement saying that he had strangled his wife in a fit of fury. It was too humiliating that his father-in-law had made a scene on his wedding day, and that she, too, screamed like a fury in the wedding room. He had lost all face, and his faith too, in a marriage with such an ugly start. And he lost control of himself temporarily.
    Now, Big Bowl couldn’t be charged with homicide, since the victim was not dead, but nonetheless, it was an attempted homicide. The statement lay on the desk, signed, in black and white. Big Bowl was thrown into custody. It then became a matter of the uttermost urgency to prove that the statement made by Big Bowl was not true.
    Qian told a different story. According to her, it was not his fault at all. When they first heard the noise outside, he wanted her to stop her father. She didn’t want to. Instead,she started to scream and scratch at him like a fury. The fight in the wedding room only added fuel to the fire. He tried to keep her from making things worse by putting his hand over her mouth. She struggled so violently that she lost consciousness.
    The following morning, she further amended her statement by insisting that she fainted because she had been too exhausted by all the preparations for the wedding, including the purchase of all the firecrackers, which she had personally chosen at a market. It really had nothing to do with him at all.
    Whose side was credible—the bride’s or the bridegroom’s?
    How it had happened that night in the wedding room, we didn’t know, but we chose to believe her story. After all, it’s a bad firecracker’s luck.
    When the police came to the lane to investigate, Comrade Jun offered an interpretation from his own experience.
    â€œBig Bowl was drunk that night. You cannot take a drunken man’s word for it. As the head of the neighborhood committee, I’ve dealt with too many people who were in the cup. Do you know how many cups he drank that night? Now, I’m always against this kind of lavish wedding, but they didn’t listen to me. It is difficult for us to do the neighborhood work nowadays, comrades.”
    Those neighbors who had attended the banquet at the Guoji Hotel supported this by testifying that Big Bowl hadconsumed more than ten cups of sorghum liquor. Qian was more credible, they further argued, since she had hardly had a drop that night.
    Big Bowl’s company, too, put in a good word for him. He had been an honest, hardworking accountant. The fact that he had turned himself in spoke for itself. Even drunk, he remained a law-abiding citizen. The predicament of Qian was also brought up in the discussion. If anything happened to him, what would happen to her—waiting for him for so many years in Red Dust Lane, like the Beijing opera heroine Wang Baochuan?
    When Big Bowl was released in October, Qian was about three months pregnant.
    Red Dust Lane was once more abuzz with stories and speculations.
    Now, the time from the moment that Old Qian and Bamboo Chopsticks started fighting in the lane to the moment when Big Bowl ran out was about forty-five minutes. We calculated closely. What could