Read Chronicle of a Blood Merchant for Free Online

like He Xiaoyong every day.
    When these rumors reached Xu Sanguan’s ears, he called Yile before him and began to carefully inspect his face. Yile was only nine years old at the time. After Xu Sanguan looked him over for several minutes, he was still unable to make up his mind, so he went to fetch the family mirror.
    It was the mirror he had bought when they got married. Xu Yulan had always kept it on the windowsill, and when she awoke in the morning, she would stand by the window, glance at the trees outside, and then gaze at herself in the mirror as she combed her hair and rubbed a layer of intensely fragrant Snowflower cream over her face. Later Yile had gotten taller, tall enough that he could reach up and grab the mirror on the sill. The mirror was still sitting on the sill when Sanle grew tall enough to reach up and knock it over. The biggest fragment was a triangle the size of an egg. Xu Yulan had picked this triangular piece off the floor and propped it right back on the windowsill.
    Xu Sanguan held the triangular shard of mirror in his hand. He held it in front of his eyes and looked at himself. Then he looked at Yile’s eyes. They didn’t seem too different from his own. He held the mirror up to his own nose. Then he looked at Yile’s nose. They didn’t seem all that different either. Xu Sanguan thought to himself,
They say he doesn’t look like me, but I
think he looks a little like me.
    Yile watched his father staring woodenly toward him. “Dad, you keep looking at yourself and then looking at me. What are you looking at?”
    Xu Sanguan said, “I’m trying to see if you look like me or not.”
    “I heard some people saying,” Yile reported, “that I look like someone named He Xiaoyong who works at the machine tools factory.”
    Xu Sanguan said, “Yile, go get Erle and Sanle for me.”
    Xu Sanguan’s three sons came inside. He asked them to sit in a row on the bed, then sat down on a stool opposite them. He scrutinized Yile’s, Erle’s, and Sanle’s features in turn. This first inspection being inconclusive, he went back down the line, inspecting Sanle, Erle, and finally Yile.
    The three brothers giggled, and when Xu Sanguan saw them laughing, he realized that they looked more alike that way. “Keep laughing,” he said as his own body started to sway, “laugh as hard as you can.”
    When his sons saw the funny way he was rocking back and forth on the stool, they burst into loud guffaws. Xu Sanguan began to laugh along with them. “The more you kids laugh, the more you look alike.”
    Xu Sanguan said to himself,
They say Yile doesn’t look like me,
but Yile looks just like Erle and Sanle. If he can’t look like me, at
least he looks like his brothers. No one ever said Erle and Sanle
don’t look like my sons. Doesn’t matter if Yile doesn’t look like
me, as long as he looks like his little brothers.
    Xu Sanguan said to his sons, “Yile has heard of He Xiaoyong over at the machine tools factory. How about you, Erle? Sanle? Don’t worry about it if you haven’t. He’s the one Yile was talking about, lives on Old Post Office Lane on the west side, always wears a duck’s bill cap. Now listen closely. His name is He Xiaoyong. Got it? Let me hear Erle and Sanle say it back to me. . . . Okay, good. Now listen to me again. He Xiaoyong is a bad man. Understand? Why is he a bad man? Let me tell you. A long time ago, before any of you were around, before your mother gave birth to you, He Xiaoyong was always hanging around your grandpa’s place. And what was he doing there? He was drinking with your grandpa because back then your mom wasn’t married to me yet. He’d go there every day, and every other day he’d bring a bottle of wine for your grandpa. But later on, after your mom had married me, he kept on going there almost every day. But he never brought any more wine for your grandpa. Instead, he ended up drinking more than ten bottles of your grandpa’s wine. So one day, when your grandpa