by Song Ying
“The mutton tastes great!” Zhong dipped a string of fatty mutton in his sauce and put it in his mouth.
Ding Lan just looked at him and smiled. “You have no table manners.”
“You think so?”
The diners at the next table, young men who looked like migrant workers, were talking and smacking their lips loudly as they ate, oblivious of others and their own table manners. Crab shells and legs were piled high on their plates.
“Did you see your aunt when you were in Sichuan?”
“I did. She’s in poor health.”
“Who else did you see?”
“Our middle-school class supervisor.”
“Oh, Euclid.”
The class supervisor, surnamed Ou, was a former soldier who had been transferred to teach plane geometry. The students gave her the nickname “Euclid,” partly because her name sort of sounded like that, but also because of her subject.
“You still remember her? Her hair has turned completely gray.”
“How time flies. I remember how fashionable she was, wearing a red sweater under a faded yellow army jacket. And she permed her hair.”
“Her memory is as sharp as ever. She can still name just about everyone in the class.”
“Really?”
“Some members of our class look her up when they go back to Sichuan.”
“Did she give you any news of Xia Yuhong?” Ding couldn’t hold back.
“I asked about her.” Zhong smiled. “She gave me her e-mail address.”
He was told that Xia Yuhong was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, where she had become a well-known sociology professor. She’d returned to Sichuan to see her family last spring. She was still single.
“Did you contact her?”
“I did.” Zhong told her that he was surprised to receive her e-mail reply from the States. Xia did not bring up their zhiqing days, but she did say she hoped to see him.
“The two of you are finally back in touch,” Ding said, her expression a mixture of happiness for Zhong and envy.
“It’ll never be the way it was before,” Zhong said calmly.
“When will you leave?”
“I’m waiting for a visa. It’s a North American Tour, stopping in Canada first.”
“You should leave as soon as possible.”
“I know. How about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“Still, you have to be careful. And take care of yourself.”
“Please give Yuhong my best,” Ding said teary-eyed.
— 2 —
Nie Feng walked out of the Kunming Airport with his duffel bag.
He’d taken a morning flight from Shenzhen, arriving in Yunnan at 9:05.
“Long time no see, Springtown!” He stopped to look around; on the tarmac a giant billboard displayed a string of numbers:
07/24/MONDAY, 9:25 A.M.
It’s been a month since Hu Guohao’s death, he thought to himself.
He’d made an online reservation for a room at the Sunshine Holiday Hotel. To save time, he decided to take a taxi to the hotel, check in, and headed to the flower show. He planned to use three rolls of films and write up a story of about five thousand words, which he estimated would take a day and a night to complete.
The following afternoon, his work on the flower show behind him, he made a series of visits to offices connected to the Yunnan Construction Corps. Zhong Tao and the zhiqing past occupied his mind the whole time.
The one-time farms of the Corps were now under the jurisdiction of the Provincial Land Reclamation Bureau. He checked with the statistics and data department of the Bureau, where a Ms. Pang, a former zhiqing herself, told him that all the files from before 1995 had been transferred to the Yunnan Archives by government order. There a guard checked his ID before letting him enter the building, where he immediately felt the weight of history. A relief mural of national people’s customs adorned the wall facing the entrance, while the wall next to the staircase was filled with old photos of Yunnan’s minorities taken by foreign visitors in the waning days of the Qing dynasty.
The third-floor restricted-material reading room was a large, quiet room, with thirty or more wooden desks, and five computers on a table against one wall, two of which were being used by an elderly, scholarly-looking man in a striped T-shirt and a young woman with long hair. Three female staff members sat behind the glass window of the circulation desk.
“My name is Nie Feng,” he told them. “I’m a reporter from Western Sunshine magazine. I’d like to check out some zhiqing files.”
“Oh, we’re sorry,” one of them, a short-haired woman in glasses, said, “but we’re in the process of reorganizing the documents. Why don’t you come back the day after tomorrow?”
“The day after tomorrow?” Nie hesitated before asking politely, “I made a special trip and am on a tight schedule. Could you possibly make an exception and let me look at them now?”
“I’ll have to check with our section chief.” The woman turned and walked to the back.
She came back in a moment and said to Nie, “The old files are being moved to a new storage site, so it really can’t be done today.”
“Well, thanks anyway.”
After leaving the Yunnan Archives, Nie decided to make a trip to the border region. At the Yunnan Land Reclamation Bureau, he asked for directions to the site of the Lanjiang Farm, where the 2nd Production Team, formerly the 2nd Regiment, was located. Directions in hand, he took a taxi to the Southgate Railroad Station to buy a ticket from Kunming to a place called Guangtong. He had been given three phone numbers: the farm office, the farm political department, and the farm director; this last number would change everything for Nie in his search for the truth.
The bus terminal was next to the train station, and an abrupt change of heart had him opting for a long-distance bus ride to Lanjiang County. At the ticket window, he asked the uniformed ticket seller how long it would take to get there by bus. “No idea,” she replied with an inscrutable look, as if she were selling a space shuttle ticket to the moon. Nie could only shake his head and make the best of things.
— 3 —
At seven o’clock that evening, the yellow bus set out. The bland interior had rows of double bunks furnished with patterned bedding and pads, all thirty-two of the tiny spaces occupied. The driver, a trim, middle-aged man, told him they’d be in Lanjiang the following morning, making it a twelve- to thirteen-hour bus ride. Nie’s bunk, number eight, was in the middle, next to the window. As soon as they left the city, the beds began to jolt and swing, so he tightened the soiled, green safety belt around his waist, prepared to die with the bus if it happened to roll over.
Nie decided that the two TV sets—one in the front and another in the back—were there purely for decoration, since they were not turned on even once during the trip.
As they left the city, he rested his head against the pillow and watched the scenery pass outside the window—dark mountains, stands of trees, a starry sky, and lights, all imbued with a romantic aura, particularly the sparkling stars and the Milky Way. He had thought he’d fall asleep and wake up in Lanjiang, but the bus swayed too much for him to sleep soundly. His nightglow watch showed 1:00 A.M. when he awoke the first time, and 3:30 the second time. Amid the constant swaying and the unreal sense of movement, he could not escape a feeling that the bus would just keep going and he’d never reach his destination. It was almost as if they were orbiting a giant oval track, going round and round.
At five in the morning, when the world outside was still shrouded in a dark fog, the bus passed an open market, where old men whose heads were wrapped in kerchiefs had taken positions in front of cloth sacks. There were also a few people who had come to sell young livestock. But it was too dark to see their faces.
The bus continued its jolting journey. When he opened his eyes again, the sky had lightened to a grayish blue. He looked up at a hazy half moon peeking out fro
m behind dark clouds. He fell back to sleep, and the next time he woke up, the sky was a fish-belly gray. Finally, at 6:30, they reached Baoshan, where the bus stopped and the driver turned on the interior lights.
“Baoshan,” the driver shouted, “this is Baoshan. Anyone getting off?”
No one made a sound, so he started off again.
Dawn came at 7:00. He looked out the window as the bus wound its way cautiously along a circuitous mountain road. When they passed a craggy ridge, he saw a dam down below with murky yellow water oozing its way along. He assumed they’d be in Lanjiang soon, but the bus driver told him they still had far to go. They rode and rode for a long time until the bus stopped at a little shop with no name, where the driver woke up a passenger who was supposed to have gotten off at Baoshan.
They set off again and passed a turn on a switchback, where he spotted tiny diners with signs advertising local specials such as “Tengchong Snacks” and “Braised Chicken.” We must have entered the Tengchong region, he thought as he sank into a slumber. The bus windows were speckled with raindrops when he woke up again; it was drizzling outside.
On and on they went; the bus now seemed to be penetrating low-hanging clouds. The rain was falling in sheets as he checked his watch: 9:30. “We’ll be in Lanjiang around noon,” the young man in the next bunk said. Nie realized that he shouldn’t have believed the driver.
He gazed out the window at the local vegetation: trees whose names he didn’t know, banana groves (maybe plantain, hard to tell), corn, sugarcane, and rice paddies on embankments. The houses were mostly rammed-earth, some with redbrick walls and green roof tiles; firewood was stacked in front and in back. Here and there he spotted a dish for satellite TV on a rooftop.
They reached the city of Tengchong at 9:50, where they spent forty minutes idling at the stop, for no obvious reason. He wondered if the bus needed water, but the driver offered no explanation. They set off again, but were kicked off the bus before they even left the city center. The five passengers who had remained on the bus were “sold” like livestock to the driver of another bus (later Nie heard they each netted fifteen yuan for the driver). Finally they resumed their westward journey. The second bus was even shabbier than the first and so crowded he found himself suffocating. The speakers blared revolutionary oldies such as “Nights at the Military Port,” “Ode to Coral,” and “Red Lilies Blooming in Crimson.” Luckily the window could be slid back and forth, so he cracked it open to breathe in cool, pleasant mountain air that carried the rich fragrance of ripening rice.
The young man was right, it would be noon before they reached Lanjiang Farm. So he called ahead on his cell, but no one answered at the office and the political department line was busy. He tried the farm director’s office; it went through and a Miss Yang picked it up.
“Hello, this is Nie Feng, a reporter from Western Sunshine. I’ll be in Lanjiang at noon today and would like to travel to Squad Two. Would I be able to get back to town by five this afternoon?”
“No problem. It’s not even twenty kilometers.” Miss Yang added that he could catch a minibus in town, a convenient choice.
“Just tell the minibus driver you’re going to Squad Two. Everybody knows it. When you get there, go see Squad Leader Xi.”
“Thank you very much.” Now he felt better.
The day began to clear up about then, the blue sky decorated with puffy white clouds. Groves of bamboo seemed to have overtaken the mountains, painting the hills a lush green. Yunnan bamboo grew as high as a three- or four-story building, much taller than the bamboo in Western Sichuan.
At 11:30 they were in Mangxi, followed by more mountain roads.
It was 1:30 in the afternoon when they finally arrived at Lanjiang Bus Terminal.
The first order of business was to buy a return ticket. But he was told that the 7:00 air-conditioned bus was sold out. His other option was a 4:30 bus, with no air-conditioning. There was only one ticket left, but he had to pass since it would make his schedule too tight.
The streets of Lanjiang were underdeveloped, but alive with taxis, driven mostly by women. Being on a tight schedule, he skipped lunch (breakfast also, actually) and hailed a taxi. The charge was five yuan to go anywhere in the city. They reached an intersection where some minibuses were parked, but none of them knew exactly where the farm site was. Flustered, he hailed a light green Geely taxi and negotiated a fare of seventy yuan for a round-trip; it was a rocky road and tough going.
The driver, a young woman with single-fold eyes, was dressed in a sleeveless tank top. A fuzzy toy bear hung from her rearview mirror. When she heard where Nie was going, she said with a sigh, “That was so horrible. Seven youngsters killed in a fire.”
“No, there were ten who burned to death, and seven who suffered serious burns,” Nie corrected her. Twenty-eight years later, and people were still talking about the tragedy.
After leaving town through the western gate, passing over a section of paved road, and crossing a bridge (over the Lan River), the taxi was soon bumping along the “rocky highway.” Potholes and small rocks had the taxi jolting and rumbling along, raising a column of dust. He learned from the driver that she was originally from the farm area, where both her parents worked; but she had not been back for a long time. She got on her cell phone to ask a friend where to turn. Then she asked where the ten zhiqing women were buried, and Nie thought he heard the other person say “on the side of the road.”
The Lan River embankments were planted with rice, bamboo, and sugarcane. In the distance, green mountains were set against a backdrop of white clouds. The driver told him that the farmers who worked the embankments were locals who were relatively well off. According to her parents, the zhiqing had opened up farmlands on the mountains through backbreaking work.
The sun came out, a sweltering ball of fire. He felt the top of the car heat up. After seven or eight kilometers, the taxi turned off the highway onto a road that was barely wide enough to accommodate the car. The sides of the road were overgrown with shrubbery with tiny scarlet flowers in dense clusters and an unusual fragrance.
“They’re called lantana; we plant them on the roadside as fences.”
“Why aren’t there any rubber trees?” Nie asked.
“The rubber trees are off in the remote mountain areas.” She pointed into the distance.
When they approached a trio of locals, two old and one young, the driver asked for directions. “You took the wrong turn,” the young man told her. “You should have taken the next turn up the road.” So she backed up, returned to the rocky highway, and continued on, crossing a small concrete bridge. But that didn’t seem right to her, thinking they should have kept going on the earlier route. So she asked some women working in the field, who gave her the right directions. They backed up, turned down the former path, and kept at it for a quarter of an hour, when the road curved to the left. It didn’t take long to reach a hill where the road abruptly turned steep. The driver stopped to ask a bare-chested man who was chopping wood by the road if this was the 2nd Company site. He nodded wordlessly.
They continued rumbling along a road that was now red soil dotted with broad leaf shrubs.
Nie fell quiet, as he recalled the inscriptions on the blue curtain and experienced the solemn feelings of a man on a pilgrimage.
This was where it had all happened.
I’ve cursed, but mostly I find the past unforgettable.
The rubber trees will never forget.
Youth has no regrets, but the cost was too high.
The taxi continued uphill.
“We’ll be there soon. The mountain in back is called Lan’que Ridge,” the driver said.
“Blue Sparrow Ridge, that’s a pretty name.”
Soon they spotted houses, five or six brick houses with green tiled roofs and rammed-earth walls. Old timers sitting in their doorways looked at them curiously. “They’re farm owners. They enjoy a much better life than the farmworkers.”
The taxi was b
arely crawling when they reached a fork in the road. She stopped to let him out, backed the taxi up, and parked. “I can’t turn the car around up there.”
So they started walking and, a dozen meters later, were abreast of a towering banyan tree with a trunk so thick it would have taken five adults linking arms to encircle it. The locals called it ‘the big green tree.’ Nie trailed behind the driver as they followed the winding path past the big green tree. Scattered along the slope were a few old brick houses with wide eaves and clothes on lines drying in the sun. Trash trees grew in front and behind the houses, mixed with bamboo and a few banana trees. He heard a dog barking somewhere.
Outside a house with a bamboo fence they met an old man dressed in dark green clothes with his pant legs rolled up. They walked in to greet him. He was short and almost skeletal, with a blind left eye on a wrinkly face, but he looked friendly and approachable.
When they told him why they were there, he said that Squad Leader Xi was out, but he’d take them to visit the graves of the ten zhiqing.
“They’re on Lan’que Ridge,” he said.
Nie asked him if he knew any other old staff workers at the farm.
“Old Fu was one of them.”
The old man said he’d arrived a year after the fire, but Old Fu had been there since the early days of the farm, so he’d be the one to talk to about the fire.
“Could I see him later?”
“Sure.”
The old man led them out of the village, down a small path. The 2nd Company lived and worked on the slope, beyond which were the deep mountains. Rain from the day before had muddied the path, and it didn’t take long for Nie’s sneakers to be coated in slippery mud. Lantana bloomed all around them, like drops of blood. An old man leading two water buffaloes came up the path and stood aside for them to pass. In addition to the lantana, the path was flanked by bamboo and banana groves, as well as sugarcane that was taller than an adult. After trudging along the winding path for a quarter of an hour, the old man stopped. Shrubbery and a sparse rubber tree grove stood to the left; towering sugarcane to the right.