Frog

When the air force announced that they were coming to our county’s Number One High School to recruit pilots, my eldest brother signed up excitedly. Our great granddad had worked as a landlord’s hired hand, was a tenant farmer, and served the People’s Liberation Army as a stretcher-bearer. He’d fought in the battle of Mengliang Mesa and was one of those who’d carried the body of Zhang Lingfu down the mountain. My maternal grandmother’s family was also dirt poor. Add to all that the fact that my great granddad was a revolutionary martyr, and our family background and social status were above reproach. One day my brother, who was a high school sports star, a discus thrower, came home for lunch and feasted on a fat lamb’s tail. Back at school that afternoon, he had energy to burn, so he picked up a discus and flung it over the school wall into the field beyond. It so happened that the farmer was ploughing his field at that moment, and the discus hit his water buffalo’s horn, slicing it off. All this is to say that my brother’s background was unimpeachable, his grades in school were excellent, he was especially fit, and his aunt was going to marry an air force pilot. Everyone naturally assumed that even if they only picked one candidate from our county, it would surely be him. He wasn’t chosen. The reason: a scar on his leg from a childhood boil. Our school cook told us that scars were immediate disqualifiers, because the pressure of high-altitude flying would cause them to rupture. Even a set of uneven nostrils would squelch one’s chances.

In sum, from the time my aunt began a romantic relationship with the pilot, we were alert to anything having to do with the air force. I’m now in my fifties, and still haven’t shaken off the essence of vanity or my penchant for showing off, someone who would blare all over town the news that he’d won a hundred yuan in the lottery. Just think, I was only in elementary school and had a future uncle who was an air force pilot. You can imagine how insufferable that made me.

The Jiaozhou airport was fifty li south of our village; the Gaomi airport was sixty li to the west of us. Aeroplanes flying in and out of the Jiaozhou airfield were big, black, and very slow — bombers according to what the adults told us. Aeroplanes that used the Gaomi airfield were swept-wing, silvery aircraft that left contrails and could make spectacular manoeuvres. Eldest Brother said they were Jian-5s, modelled after Soviet MIG-17s, elite fighter planes, the ones that shot the shit out of US jets during the Korean War. Needless to say, these were the planes our future uncle flew, at a time when war fever was at its peak, and training manoeuvres filled the skies over the Gaomi airfield every day. They swept over the township, opening up a site for dogfights. Three more planes arrived one moment, then six, one plane nipping at the tail of another. Suddenly one plane went into a steep dive, pulling up just before crashing into a pine tree at the head of our village and soaring back into the sky like a sparrow hawk. One day there was a thunderous explosion in the sky — Gugu told us she was assisting an older woman who was experiencing convulsions from anxiety, preparing to use her scalpel, when the explosion startled the woman, breaking her concentration; the convulsions stopped, and with one push, the child emerged. The explosion tore the paper window coverings in every house in the village. Shocked by the sound, we couldn’t move for a moment, until our teacher led us outside, where we looked up into a clear blue sky and saw several aeroplanes chasing one that was towing a tubular object. We saw puffs of white smoke emerge from the tubular object, followed by earsplitting explosions. But these bursts of cannon fire weren’t nearly as powerful as the blast that had pounded our eardrums just a moment before, the second most powerful explosion I’ve heard in my entire life. Not even a lightning strike powerful enough to split a willow tree in half made that much noise. It seemed as though the fliers did not want to bring the target down, since the puffs of white smoke appeared near but not on the tubular object. Even as it disappeared from view, it had not suffered a direct hit. Chen Bi rubbed his nose, which had earned him the affectionate title of ‘Little Russian’, and sneered: China’s flyboys can’t hit a damned thing. If those had been Soviet pilots, one burst would have brought that target down! I knew his comment stemmed from jealousy towards me. Born and reared in our village, he’d never seen a Soviet dog, let alone one of its air force’s top guns.