A Gambler’s Written Guarantee
There is a thing in this world called mahjong.
When you still haven’t made as much money as that guy called Bill Gates and are still living by mooching food and drink, you absolutely cannot casually sit down and play a round with people who are just as poor as you, because they say poverty breeds viciousness. And for a suave, romantic, youthful, elegant, amorous genius like me, playing mahjong by the rules set by those vicious wretches who insist on turning two doubles into four, or knocking four doubles down to three and then self-drawing with a kong-on-the-wall, and who always end things with a long-term mahjong win, is no different from forcefully opening the password lock on your own wife’s safe with TNT, an AK47, and the Farmer Mountain-brand super-concentrated sulfuric acid specially developed over 456 days by Team Three, Division Nine of the FBI to deal with those supposedly indestructible inward-latching anti-theft bathroom locks provided by capitalists and especially useful when you’re desperate to pee—then respectfully offering both hands and handing over a tip of love. They call this kind of behavior “the price of love,” or else “having a lump on the brain.”
Everyone has times when life doesn’t go their way. For example, when my wife stubbornly refuses to wash the little underpants I’ve worn for two weeks straight, the ones the black dog raised by the old gatekeeper has repeatedly tried to claim as a treasured object. And every time life doesn’t go my way, I go play mahjong, because mahjong is intense exercise. It’s like the junkie at the alley entrance whose addiction hits hard and then gets satisfied: it can thoroughly steam all the moisture out of your body, making me less likely to cry. How could I cry? In my wife’s heart, I’m a very cool handsome man.
As far as I’m concerned, mahjong is a noble gambling sport, just like joining the mountain-climbing prize competition run by the Huashan Travel Company. Everyone knows it’s a miserable job: constantly facing long hours, heavy load, and huge workloads, enduring hunger, a bursting bladder, stomach sagging, violent duodenal diarrhea, severe swelling and inflammation of the finger joints leading to kidney failure, and so on and so on—yet you still have to drag your weak thighs and slowly move forward on those huge stinking feet, so engorged with blood and overnourished that they’re trying to squeeze out through the skylight at the front of your shoes for some air (even though you’re getting farther and farther from the starting point).
They say I can sleep without a pillow and just lay my head flat, without worrying that it’ll fall off the bed, because they say my head is square (I don’t know if that’s what people call a blockhead).
Half a year ago, I mastered the basic skills of playing mahjong. Actually, at the time I thought I was already amazing. I could nimbly judge that when Old Lin across from me discarded the 4 circles he might be fishing for the golden 30,000 in my hand; that when Old Zhang on my right punged the 5 bamboo he might want to discard a 7 bamboo and get ready; that when Old Li on my left looked at me confidently, maybe he wasn’t ready at all and just wanted me to feed him a 1 circle. And without the slightest effort I could follow Old Lin’s drifting play and see that at most he couldn’t get ready, but might have to pay for the player across from him getting an all-chow hand, for the player on the left getting terminals, and for the player on the right getting a concealed seven pairs. I was full of lofty ambition, determined to accomplish something big, drag every mahjong master down from his horse and step on him three more times, make them weep bitterly and swear to their wives never to touch mahjong again, and throw out everything in the house with the character “mahjong” in it, including the face of a wife with a few little dots on it. But by the laws of nature, they grew ever more cunning. In the first few months I gained nothing. Anxiously I searched, traveling dozens of li around. At this age, my fellow men were still in their cozy little nests enjoying life’s gifts, at most honing their skills on their own turf. But I had already gone through every hardship, with the marks of life’s weariness written too early across my face.
Whenever I got closest to success, the distance between me and them was often only 0.01 centimeters. Then an hour later, I would die at the hands of this group of butchers. This is a fixed procedure.
I don’t know if it counts as a record, but late that night I lost my entire private stash, leaving me with only two worn paper notes called Renminbi, with Three Gorges scenery on the back and a father-and-daughter minority ethnic portrait on the front, their corners nearly falling off because I hadn’t kept them well. And my wife was still clamoring to eat stir-fried river snails, stir-fried prawns, stir-fried loaches, stir-fried chicken giblets, twice-cooked pork, steak, stir-fried melon seeds, stir-fried tropical fish, and a bowl of clear chicken-giblet noodles, three liang, with just a little chili. Luckily my wife doesn’t like eating elephants, black bears, lions, tigers, or hunting dogs, otherwise I’d definitely have been finished. And the owner selling the above-mentioned stuff happened to be the fellow villager of the second brother of the aunt of the little son of the mother of the girlfriend of the friend of the colleague of the mother of the girlfriend of Ergouzi next door’s friend’s friend’s friend. He brought me that bowl of noodles, packed with chicken giblets but containing at most only fifty or sixty or seventy or eighty or ninety strands while pretending to be three liang, and having forgotten to add salt, MSG, or sesame oil. He set it in front of me and, with that greasy face on which even a fly would need to put on a seat belt, gave me the most mysterious pile-up of a grin imaginable (far more mysterious than the Mona Lisa), and then confiscated my only two banknotes. At that moment, I was speechless.
The next day, my wife had nonstop diarrhea. The doctor said he’d introduce us to a Guinness record certifier and hoped the duration of the diarrhea could be entered into the history books.
And that was that—I know that for me, playing mahjong is like jumping off a cliff: incredibly thrilling, but there’s no guarantee you won’t pay the price in the form of broken legs, mangled arms, split-open guts, crushed toe bones, a withered hairstyle, ringing ears, dizziness, or the unexpected loss of sexual function. Last night I jumped off again. The reason was that I muttered that several of my mahjong buddies didn’t play as well as the old granny next door, and they thought that was called arrogance. I told them if you people have no education and can’t use idioms properly, then don’t misuse them. When it comes to culture, what place do you have in it? When did I learn to write eight-legged essays? When did I get to know you people? After I explained clearly what “arrogance” meant, those butchers started acting up. When acting up didn’t work, they abducted me, rushed me out the door, and headed straight for the cliff. You can see that truth must not be spoken. Of course they don’t play as well as the old granny—that’s a fact, universally acknowledged. Just look at her skill, and then look at yours. But when I said that to them, they hit even harder, so much so that I began to suspect they might be spies of the capitalist reactionaries who had deliberately infiltrated the people to persecute handsome truth-seeking men like me who dare to tell the truth.
As a result, I broke my thigh, my calf, my stomach, my duodenum, and also my proudest possession: the eyeballs filled with longing and pursuit for victory, truth, and beautiful women.
This morning, with the sunrise, a voice came from inside me—more specifically from somewhere inside the ribs on the left side of my stomach and duodenum, in a place about the size of a fist—and through a high-speed communications network formed by chains of nerves, far faster than telecom mobile phone transmission, it reached my ears and gently said to me: “You handsome idiot pig who ought to quit gambling.” Because of that one sentence, I will always remember this voice, and remember this day. If memory were a pig’s head, I hope this pig’s head would not be forgetful. And if I absolutely had to put a time limit on it, I hope it would be “ten thousand years.”
我完全同意设想建立DOS组织“DOS联盟” ，也就是说和Wengier、以及“起步”站长莫老师等DOS战友一起来建立这个“DOS联盟”，以发展我国自主OS（操作系统）的高度去完成我们共同的愿望。
------党委书记
