Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused – Fiction From Today by Howard Goldblatt (Editor) Page A

Street. The neighbors were sensitive, alert people but not particularly adept at digging beneath the surface to get to the heart of a matter. When Shu Nong's destructive tendencies first began to manifest themselves, the people were too tied up in their belief that he was still fourteen and still wet the bed to spot the differences.
    Shu Nong had stopped wetting the bed at the age of fourteen, but no one would believe it. Or better put, people found Shu Nong's bed-wetting interesting, but not the cessation of his bed-wetting. Take Shu Nong's mortal enemy, Hanzhen, for instance: she chanted the following when she jumped rope:
    One four seven, two five eight,
    Shu Nong bed-wets at a nightly rate.
    Hanli, who rarely spoke to her mother, told a schoolmate, "My mother's a slut, and I despise her."
    Folks assumed that Hanli was aware of her bloodline. Since half the women on Fragrant Cedar Street feuded with Qiu Yumei, any one of them would have happily let her in on the secret. But more to the point was Hanli's precociousness. She didn't need to be told what was what. You can't wrap a fire in paper, after all.
    Hanli had not spoken to Old Shu for years. He bought her a scarf for her seventeenth birthday, but deaf to his entreaties, she cut him dead at the foot of the stairs. So he gave the scarf to Qiu Yumei, who tried to drape it around Hanli's shoulders. Hanli tore it out of her hands and flung it to the ground, then spit on it. "Who needs it? Who knows what you're up to?"
    "Old Shu gave it to you only because he likes you. Don't be an ingrate."
    "Who asked him to like me? Who knows what you're up to?"
    "What do you mean by 'what we're up to'?"
    "You know what I'm talking about."
    "No, I
don't
. You tell me."
    "I'm ashamed to." Suddenly burying her face in her hands, Hanli burst out crying. Then, with tears still streaming down her face, she began combing her hair before the mirror. In the reflection, she saw her mother bend over to pick up the scarf, her face frightfully pale. Hanli wished her mother would rush up and pull her hair so they could have a real fight and get some of that hatred out of their systems. But Qiu Yumei just stood there, wordlessly twisting the scarf around her fingers. Threads of pity settled over Hanli, who said through her sobs, "I don't want it. Give it to Hanzhen."
    So Qiu Yumei took back the scarf, and the next day she wore it outside. Eventually it was Hanzhen who went to school with Old Shu's scarf draped around her shoulders. When asked, she said her mother had ordered it from Shanghai and that her mother loved her and not Hanli.
    It was a different matter with Old Lin, whom Hanli treated with fatherly respect. In fact, this alone was the source of at least half the praise Hanli received on Fragrant Cedar Street. Whenever Old Lin was in the middle of a neighborhood chess game, she brought him food and tea, and back home she drew his bathwater. She even trimmed his nails for him. Qiu Yumei told people Hanli was trying to be an elder sister to Old Lin, treating him like a little boy.
    "And what about you?" they would ask. "How does that make you feel?"
    "It's fine with me," Qiu Yumei would say. "It makes my life easier."
    Let's say it's a blustery day and that the rain is pounding the sheet-metal roof of number 18, turning everything wet and forsaken at dusk. A frustrated Old Lin is searching for an umbrella beneath the stairs. He never knows where the family umbrella is kept. He opens Hanli's door. "Where's the umbrella?" Hanli looks at him but says nothing, so he tosses things around until he finds an umbrella with broken ribs and torn oil paper, which he can't open, no matter how hard he tries.
    "Chess," Hanli says. "That's all you think about even when it's pouring rain. Don't come running to me if you catch your death of cold."
    Old Lin flings the broken umbrella to the floor. "Don't tell me there isn't a working umbrella anywhere in the house!"
    "There is," Hanli says, "but she took it when