Years of Red Dust

by Qiu Xiaolong

  Earlier in the afternoon, the Americans had come to the restaurant, which was celebrated for its Shanghai-style delicacies. President Nixon had been very satisfied, offering to shake hands with a young waitress who served at the table and describing her as “delicious” while still smacking his lips over a mini pork-and-crab-stuffed soup bun. The interpreter did an excellent job in translating the compliment. Such an epithet was a revelation, like a magic wand waving in a foreign fairy tale, shining over the waitress in her transparent crystallike plastic sandals. Several reporters rushed over to the one and only pay phone in the restaurant to share the latest news, which then spread quickly, especially among those security personnel with mobile communication equipment, with details being added or modified in quick succession. In one version, President Nixon forgot to bite into the soup bun at the sight of her. In another variation, he bit, but so forcibly that the soup spilled out, and his wife scowled beside him. In every version, the waitress was a graceful beauty beyond description.

  The moment the American president left the restaurant, people rushed over from all directions. The waitress was standing behind a large window, cutting crisp-skinned roast pork on a huge stump with a sharp knife. She looked flushed—possibly with the American’s praise, though unaware of its instant rippling effect throughout the city. People immediately had excuses for being at her window—to buy some cooked food to bring home after a day’s hard work. A queue soon formed outside the window, looking through the glass at this “delicious” girl. Commissar Liu arrived in a great hurry, but he still had to stand at the end of a long line, waiting for an hour before his turn to come to the window. The sun radiated patience in the afternoon as the line inched forward. A fungus appeared out of a wall cranny close to his left foot. Finally, he moved up to the small opening in the window. She was now cutting a Beijing roast duck with its fat still dripping from the stitched ass. An iridescent-eyed fly sucked the sticky duck sauce on her bare rounded toe, delicious as the scallop buns in the banquet in honor of the American president.

  A fire hydrant squatting outside the restaurant stared through the glass in outrage. The red armband crumbled in his pocket, Commissar Liu forgot us.

  We did not hear anything about the visit that afternoon, nor did we hear in the early evening. In fact, the notice about the return of the American president to the hotel did not come until after nine o’clock that night, when the neighborhood committee called the district government. The details of the incident did not come out until much later, when Comrade Liu (having lost the Commissar title due to his “unforgivable negligence in a political assignment”) was allowed to marry the waitress (no longer a “city goddess” once news arrived of the Watergate scandal) after the Cultural Revolution.

  By that time, I had started studying aviation science in college.

  Pill and Picture

  (1976)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1976. It was a year full of significant events for China. In January, Premier Zhou Enlai passed away, and more than a million people lined the main streets of the capital to express grief and pay tribute to him. At Chairman Mao’s suggestion, Hua Guofeng served as the acting premier. In April, people’s mourning of the beloved premier at Tiananmen Square was condemned as a “counterrevolutionary incident” and suppressed by force. Deng Xiaoping was removed from all his posts inside and outside the Party. In July, Zhu De, Chairman of NPC, died at the age of eighty-nine. The city of Tangshan was struck by an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, and more than 242,000 people were killed. In September, our great leader Mao Zedong, Chairman of CPC, also passed away. In October, the Party authorities took decisive measures, detaining the Gang of Four headed by Madam Mao. The CPC Central Committee appointed Hua Guofeng chairman of CPC Central Committee and Central Military Commission. China has finally turned over the page after ten years of the Cultural Revolution.

  On a summer afternoon in 1976, Peng Guoqiang had a long, drawn-out discussion with a group of his fellow Red Guards about a poem he had written in praise of Chairman Mao, but what he really was trying to achieve was to impress Jianyin, a pretty girl in the group. During those years, it was out of the question for young people to talk to each other (except about Mao and the Cultural Revolution), let alone date.

  The poem was a difficult one. Peng worked hard on the refrain, “a long life to Chairman Mao, a long, long life,” trying to rhyme “life” with “strife” and “rife,” but someone in the group objected, saying that the rhyming words did not appear proper—that they did not carry enough thematic respect for the organic tone of the poem. It was a tough question. To Peng’s surprise, Jianyin supported his effort, saying that the rhyming words did not have to carry reverential meaning in themselves. Her statement was like a cart of charcoal sent in the winter. Afterward, even more to his surprise, as she left the classroom, a small picture of hers fell out of her purse, a picture of a spirited Red Guard with her armband shining in the sunlight and a gold badge of Mao radiating on her youthful bosom. As he picked it up, he wondered whether it was a coincidence but decided not to bother with the question—at least, not while he tried to decide whether or not to return it to her.

  Instead of going back home to Red Dust Lane, he went to Bund Park by himself, sitting at a small café there, working and reworking the poem, smoking, stirring the black coffee with a spoon of “political correctness.” It was a hard job. He cudgeled his brains out searching for some other words to rhyme with “life,” thinking of Jianyin’s smile flashing in the sunlight. After he had downed three cups of coffee in quick succession, he was seized with an impulse to rhyme “life” with “die” and “expire,” as if possessed. The blasphemous counterrevolutionary lines kept rushing, irrepressibly, onto the tip of his tongue. Sweating all over, trembling like a fallen leaf in the wind, he nearly suffocated himself by stuffing a fist into his mouth, as if battling a terrible toothache.

  Running out of the park, he scurried home, skunklike, to a handful of sedatives from the medicine cabinet. Not counting the pills, he swallowed them and passed out.

  He awoke at midnight, still shaking like a scared scarecrow. The inexplicable impulse was gone—but what if the compulsion overwhelmed him again?

  He reached for the pills, recalling that the year before, a counterrevolutionary had been executed in the People’s Square for the crime of splashing a bottle of red ink on a statue of Chairman Mao, an accident that had appeared to the Red Guards as an atrocious crime of assassinating the great leader—symbolically.

  What if he did not have easy access to the pills the next time?

  He decided to carry, in a green plastic wallet, a packet of sedatives hidden behind Jianyin’s picture. It would appear natural for him to touch the picture time and again—to make sure of the tranquilizer still being there, available through her gaze.

  To his dismay, the picture soon turned yellow, either through some chemical reaction to the pills or from the constant touch of his sweaty hand. It seemed a portentous sign.

  He eventually began to recover, but he did not really regain any confidence—not until after the death of Mao later that year. No one in school mentioned the incomplete poem again. It would be too ironic to chant, “A long life to Mao, a long, long life.” He still carried the wallet with the hidden pills, though he no longer worried about a nervous breakdown. The picture turned increasingly yellow with time, looking almost like a remnant from another life, and he failed to bring himself closer to Jianyin in person. Nor could he admit to her that he had picked up the picture and still had it with him. Their relationship seemed to have been framed in the plastic picture pocket.

  Then one chilly winter day, the wallet was stolen. For weeks, Peng was devastated, until he found a cold comfort in a thought: to the pickpocket, the pills, long pulverized, must have looked like drying material, to protect a still precious picture.

  A Jing Dynasty Goat

  (1979)

 
This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1979, an important and eventful year for our country. In January, China established diplomatic relations with the United States. Comrade Deng Xiaoping visited the United States and held talks with President Carter. In February, Chinese frontier troops launched a counterattack against Vietnamese aggressors in the Guangxi and Yunnan frontier zones and won great victories. In April, with the goal of four modernizations of our country in mind, Deng Xiaoping enumerated the four cardinal principles: keeping to the socialist road, upholding the proletarian dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party, and upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought. The CPC Central Committee and the State Council ratified four special economic zones in Guangdong and Fujian. At the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Comrade Ye Jianying recalled the great achievements of the Chinese Party and people since liberation in 1949 and presented a self-criticism of the Party’s mistakes during the Cultural Revolution.

  After twenty-one years’ imprisonment, Jiang Xiaoming was suddenly released on a July morning.

  The Party secretary of the Shanghai No. 1 Prison, high-buttoned as usual, in a spic-and-span gray wool Mao suit, explained the higher authorities’ decision.

  “It is the right decision to release you in 1979, Comrade Jiang,” the Party secretary said, with all the imaginable sincerity in his official tone. “It was a mistake to put you into prison in 1957, during the anti-bourgeois-rightist movement, but you ought to be grateful to the Communist Party for its great policy. When we recognize a mistake, we correct it. Otherwise, you could have remained in that dark cell all your life. So, you start a new life today. Go back to your home in Red Dust Lane. We have contacted the neighborhood committee there, and the room is still there under your name, waiting for you.”

  In addition, the Party secretary gave Jiang five hundred yuan as a kind of compensation for these lost years in prison.

  As accustomed to being a rightist as a snail is to carrying its house on its back, Jiang was befuddled. In 1957, Mao had called on intellectuals to speak out like “a hundred flowers blossoming together,” and Jiang, a young teacher who had just published a history book, talked about the contingency of history in a department meeting. Then, all of a sudden, he was thrown in jail as a rightist, for the crime of denying the ultimate role of the proletariat in making history. He had since lost his ability to tell the difference between night and day, let alone analyze historical and social changes, having lived in a dark prison cell, like a lone bat.

  It was a hot, bright morning outside of the high walls. He blinked in the sunlight. The street looked so different. One block away, there was a fancy store with a dazzling display of summer fashions in its windows—a line of mannequins dressed in skinny-strap, tulip-cup necklines and brief-and-halter combinations . . . as if from a Hollywood movie scene. He rubbed his eyes.

  According to an old Chinese saying, “Seven days in a high mountain cave, and a thousand years has elapsed down in the mundane world.” Jiang shook his head. A red convertible sped by, from which a young girl in a yellow summer dress looked at him curiously, a pug dog sitting on her lap. It was another scene he had never before witnessed.

  After wandering about for two hours in a maze of traffic, floundering along the new roads and the old roads he could hardly recognize, making one wrong turn after another, finally he found himself approaching a used bookstore close to Red Dust Lane.

  He was not eager to go back to the lane. The attic room might still be there, but so much had changed. How much sorrow do you have? / Like the spring water of a long, long river flowing east! Some long-forgotten lines were coming back to him. The prospect of him, an ex-rightist, reporting to the neighborhood committee seemed anything but pleasant.

  So he stepped into the bookstore, which was tiny, yet impressively stacked with books. The store appeared to have been converted from a residential room. With the wear and tear of so many years, his memory failed to register whose room it could have been.

  He was surprised to see a bikini girl on a poster marked “For Sale” near the entrance. In his memory, such a poster would have been condemned as bourgeois decadence. “For Sale” was also a new term for him. Fixed prices were said to be one advantage of the socialist system. Even this bookstore was bewilderingly different.

  There were so many new books. He could not understand some of the titles—even those in the field he had taught. He searched around for a while without finding anything he wanted to read. Then he recognized a piece of melody that came rippling across the store, Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet no. 1. He also heard a baby’s babble behind a bamboo-bead curtain at the back.

  To his astonishment, he came upon three copies of his study on the contingency of history under the bikini girl poster.

  Taking a deep breath, he took them to the counter. A young man with a thick mustache, apparently the owner of the store, said with a scholarly air, “You surely have an eye for books, sir. They’ll be six hundred and thirty yuan.”

  “What?” Jiang gasped. “The original price is less than two yuan.”

  “It was criticized as a counterrevolutionary attack against the Party in the fifties,” the owner said. “Out of print for many years. A collectable item. We got hold of them through a special channel.”

  “How?”

  When Jiang had been snatched away from home, handcuffed, there were several copies of the book left behind. His wife had said that she would wait for his return, keeping all the books, though it was the books that had gotten him into the trouble.

  “You will not be able to find it in any other bookstores in Shanghai.” The owner did not answer his question directly. “A very special channel.”

  Jiang grasped the books. “Look, young man. I wrote this book. And I have just come out—”

  “Really?” The owner studied him for a long moment. “Oh, you must be Professor—all right, thirty, that’s the price we paid. Welcome back to Red Dust Lane. The poster is free for you.”

  Jiang took the books without accepting the additional offer. There was a small scar on the bikini girl’s bare shoulder, which reminded him of his wife. She had died during his “rightist” years.

  He started to leaf through the book as he continued on his way to Red Dust Lane, reading while walking being a habit he had formed in his pre-rightist years.

  Emperor Yan is bored by the screens of naked bodies. In 266 he founded the Jing Dynasty, which resembles the previous Wei Dynasty in that His Majesty wields absolute power. All the emperor’s men. And women too. There are so many imperial concubines that choosing is little better than a nightmare. He has a favorite goat. So he lets the goat amble before him through a sea of bedrooms. Wherever the goat stops, he takes it as Heaven’s will that he spend the night in that room. More often than not, he finds the goat halting in front of the 311th concubine’s pearl-curtained door. She is wrapped in a white cloud, naked beneath, in anticipation of the coming rain. She is not exactly beautiful, but when the candle is blown out, one body is not much different from another. She bears him a son who becomes Emperor Xing. Emperor Xing loses the country to barbarian aggressors through his thirst for a sea harbor. It is a long, complicated story, but the 311th concubine’s secret is simple. According to an imprisoned historian, it consists of her sprinkling saltwater on the doorsteps. The goat, pampered as it is in the palace, stoops to lick the salt there. The moral is clear: a goat is a goat.

  Uniform

  (1980)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1980. Our Party and our people have made great progress, recovering from the national disaster of ten years—the Cultural Revolution. China was admitted to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Fifth Session of the Eleventh CPC Central Committee elected Hu Yaobang general secretary of the Party, and then Zhao Ziyang replaced Hua Guofeng as premier. Deng Xiaoping and other revo
lutionaries of the older generation resigned due to age. The Gang of Four and several others were tried and convicted for their crimes during the Cultural Revolution. China joined the World Intellectual Property Organization as it ninetieth member.

  Sometimes, the beginning of a story is so wonderful that you may simply wish, “Oh that’s the story,” like Othello’s exclamation upon Desdemona’s arrival, but then the story goes on, in an unexpected direction. In retrospect, there is only one thing you can do: focus as much as possible on what you think of as the most memorable. And that’s the beginning, in the year of 1980.

  In 1980, like a Yellow River carp jumping through the Dragon Gate, I left Red Dust Lane in Shanghai and became a graduate student at Beijing Foreign Language University.

  I was disappointed, however, at the living conditions in the dorm room. Four students had to squeeze in a single room only fifteen square meters in size. With three bunk beds, two desks, and a bookshelf made of boards and bricks, there was hardly any space left to move around. But that was shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and people were full of hopes and passions for a new beginning. We studied hard for the “realization of four modernizations,” the four of us sweating in the small dorm room.

  That year, Qi, one of the four, started dating Mimi, a young army doctor stationed in Tong County. A delicious girl with a watermelon-seed-shaped face, almond-long eyes, and cherry lips, she spoke in a voice as sweet as freshly peeled lychee, bringing “a fresh breeze full of the orchard fragrance” to our stuffy room.

  “So fruity,” Little Zhao commented at night. “As Confucius says, so luscious you could devour.”