Years of Red Dust

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “The grapes are sweetly ripe in Tulufan . . .” I hummed, echoing a then-popular song.

  “Apple blossom blazing transparent in a dream,” Old Ke said, swallowing a handful of sleeping pills. Ke was the only roommate who was married. His wife worked in Jiangsu province, about five hundred miles away from Beijing.

  Qi smiled in response. The lights were out, so we could not see his smile, but we knew. After a long day’s work, sleep did not come easily in our dorm room. To unwind, we would talk in the dark, and one of the most rewarding topics was Mimi. All those “fruity” epithets were the combined product of our evening conversation, partially in reference to her family origin, as her parents worked in a state-run orchard, but more in recognition of the freshness that she infused into our lives.

  It was hot that year. She came wearing her summer clothes, each time a different blaze of colors, mostly in a style called Bulajie, sometimes sleeveless, sometimes with thin straps.

  Minutes after her arrival, we would head out of the dorm and to the library, leaving Qi and Mimi alone.

  One afternoon, she stopped us. “I’ve made something for all of you.” She kicked off her shoes, climbed on to the long desk, and put a new pillow cover on my pillow on the upper bunk. Standing on the desk, she appeared tall, slender, her scarlet-painted toes prettier than rose petals in the sunlight. She did the same on Qi’s bed. As she stepped down, Old Ke took the next pillow cover from her and spread it himself. Little Zhao hastened to do the same.

  Before leaving the room, Little Zhao whispered to me that he couldn’t help taking an extra look or two at her in her summer dress—her pink face as fresh as the hibiscus out of water, her legs as white as the lotus root in the lake, her toes as round as peeled longan . . . A delicious heart as well as a dazzling body, we all agreed.

  Qi seemed to think differently, however, as he said with frost in his voice, “I told you to come in your army uniform. How could you have forgotten again?”

  We were puzzled. How could Qi be that grouchy? A glance at Mimi in the summer was like ice cream to us—but to our eyes only.

  “What’s the matter with you, Qi?” Little Zhao asked during the night talk in our dorm room. “You must be so old-fashioned. You would be happy seeing her wrapped head to foot like a mummy, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, you are wrong,” Qi replied. “She is far more beautiful in her uniform.”

  “You are sick, Qi.” I took Little Zhao’s side. “How could that possibly be?”

  “It’s so hot.” Old Ke put in one of his rare comments.

  Not that we had any objection, political or otherwise, to the sight of people wearing their uniforms. We simply failed to imagine anything attractive about Mimi in her uniform: baggy pants, baggy jacket, drab green color from head to foot, and her curves all lost in the overall shapelessness.

  The next Saturday, she came in her uniform as Qi had requested. It was a sweltering day. With no air-conditioning or electric fan in our room, she perspired profusely. The uniform was stuck to her back and front, crumpled out of shape. She had traveled all the way in an overcrowded bus, her black hair falling limp out of her red-starred cap.

  “I could not take a seat on the bus,” she said, fanning herself with a literature magazine, “because of my uniform.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Whenever someone old or small gets on the bus,” she said, “you’re supposed to give your seat away—as a PLA soldier.”

  The image of Comrade Lei Feng, a selfless Communist soldier in the sixties, still remained fresh in people’s memory in the early eighties.

  “It is such a scorching hot day,” Little Zhao observed, shaking his head, “for you to wear your stuffy uniform.”

  “But you look so beautiful today,” Qi said, his face glowing with infatuation.

  We were all confused and enraged as we walked out of the dorm room.

  One night the following week, Qi went to a concert with Mimi in her uniform. To punish him, I used his hair growth medicine to fuel an alcohol stove to make scrambled eggs. To my surprise, they were the best scrambled eggs I had ever tasted. Little Zhao then came up with more practical jokes, and they began to unsettle Qi. About a week later, by way of explanation, Qi told us a story about himself.

  “In the early seventies, it was my dream to be a PLA solider, a dream like the high floating moon, upon which I hung my hopes. It was like being politically gold-plated in socialist China.”

  “That’s true,” Old Ke cut in. “Once enlisted, young people did not have to worry about being caught up in the movement of the educated youths going to the countryside. Military service would also secure them state-run company jobs after their discharge.”

  Though I was Qi’s junior by three or four years, I understood. The status of a PLA soldier spoke volumes during the Cultural Revolution. It was like a shining stamp of political reliability, sending one far into the promising future.

  “As soon as I turned eighteen, I turned in my application,” Qi went on. “I was disqualified, however, because of my family background. My parents were professors—‘black monsters’ during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, my schoolmates treated me like trash—like a ‘black puppy.’ A green army uniform was like an unreachable oasis in my dreams.”

  “So it’s a sort of substitution or compensation,” I observed after Qi left the room to go to the dorm phone in the corridor. “Qi is fulfilling his dream by having Mimi walk beside him in her uniform, arm in arm. In those moments, all the humiliation of those years vanish.”

  “It’s perhaps more than that,” Little Zhao said, trying to be profound. “It is the contrast between her military appearance and her submissive reality. As Confucius says, a woman makes herself beautiful for the man who has fallen for her—in her uniform or not.”

  Old Ke raised a question instead: “Would he have fallen for her—if she was not in her uniform?”

  But we were too busy to worry about hypothetical questions. Time flowed like water; soon we were overwhelmed by our preparations for our dissertations, and then for the defense. We moved out of the dorm, going our different ways after graduation. I got a job in Shanghai. Old Ke became an executive at one of the earliest American-Chinese joint ventures. Little Zhao was offered a position at a research institute. Qi remained at the university.

  Qi wrote me that he had married Mimi, enclosing a picture taken in the Summer Palace: Qi in his Polo T-shirt, Mimi in her sweat-soaked uniform. There was one short sentence at the back of the picture:

  “My Polo is fake, but her uniform is genuine.”

  Shortly afterward, Qi went to the United States to further his studies, and Mimi followed. They had a son there. We wrote less and less to each other although we always spoke of visiting. I, too, got married, though not to someone in the army. It no longer seemed so desirable or fashionable for a young woman to be seen in her uniform. The economic reform launched by Deng Xiaoping in the mid-eighties began to offer a lot of new opportunities for people.

  After a couple more years, I made up my mind to study at an American university. Once I arrived in the United States, I got in touch with Qi again, who had been teaching in a small college in the east.

  During my spring break, I decided to visit Qi for the reunion much anticipated in our correspondence. It was not until two days before the trip, however, that I learned Qi had divorced.

  “Mimi is no longer with me,” Qi mumbled over the phone.

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you more when you get here, OK?”

  The trip took longer than I had expected. I got lost several times on the way. My wife did a lot of complaining, along with the sputtering engine of the fifteen-year-old Mazda, before we finally pulled up to the bleak old house Qi had bought.

  “It’s so easy to be judgmental, but not everything in this world works out as we planned,” Qi said, shaking his head over the Oolong tea, in a subtle reference to his divorce.

  “I understand,” I s
aid, chewing a tea leaf, not as eager to judge as in those years back in Beijing. “As an ancient sage says, ‘Eight or nine out of ten times, things go wrong in this world of ours.’”

  In the late afternoon, Qi prepared a barbeque for us in his backyard. The ribs sizzled deliciously over the grill made from an antique tank. After a short while, my wife went back into the living room with a platter of meat to watch her favorite TV program. Qi and I remained sitting outside in a corner overgrown with weeds and enveloped in smoke. Cicadas started chirping, distantly, and different from those in Beijing. Against the rugged mountain lines, the sun on the back of a wild goose seemed to be coloring a corner of the enflamed sky.

  “It’s a long story,” Qi said, turning a rib over on the grill with a pair of mahogany chopsticks. “I considered myself lucky to get a job in this small town, but there was no job for her here. Her command of English was not good enough to pass the medical license test. In fact, she couldn’t even disclose her army experience, as it would be a disadvantage in applying for jobs here. Her temper gradually soured and she finally snapped like a frostbitten twig. She’s no longer the one we knew in Beijing.”

  No longer the one in the uniform—like “a fresh breeze full of the orchard fragrance.” The half-forgotten phrase almost jumped to my tongue, but I did not say it. Nor could I bring myself to ask him any specific questions about their divorce.

  After the ribs, we shared a wooden bowl of peeled longan in syrup, which was supposed to benefit both yin and yang in the human body. It was a rarity here, even though no longer fresh.

  Instead, I asked if he had some recent pictures of her. He hesitated before taking out a photo album. Among the pictures was one of Mimi working in a Chinese restaurant. She was still handsome, though I detected fatigue in the lines around her eyes. She wore a scarlet silk restaurant uniform—a sleeveless mandarin dress with high slits revealing her shapely legs and ivory thighs. An oriental attraction among the Western customers, presumably.

  “In Boston,” he said in a subdued voice. “She found a job in a Chinese restaurant. My son brought the picture back.”

  “By the wine urn, the girl is like the moon, / her white wrists like frost, like snow.” On impulse, I quoted a couplet from Wei Zhuang’s “Reminiscence of the South.” I immediately regretted the exuberance, which sounded totally out of time and place.

  “Except we are no longer young,” he responded, referencing the last two lines of that famous poem: Still young, I am not going back home, / or I’ll have a broken heart.

  Sighing, he took off his wig. To my astonishment, he was completely bald, his skull shining in the afternoon sunlight, like a cooked egg. I suddenly recalled the practical joke in the Beijing dorm room—the hair growth medicine and the scrambled eggs . . . It was as though all that had happened in another world, the weakening flames of memory burning in the tiny alcohol stove.

  It was not the reunion I had imagined. We lost touch again, though I knew he still taught there.

  Last night, I was awakened by a sound like a black night bird flapping violently against the window in Red Dust Lane. It turned out to be an unexpected call from Little Zhao in Beijing.

  “Mimi came back to Beijing. She had a hard time finding a job there, with no competitive skills in the tough job market of the late nineties. A middle-aged woman, her face sunk like a dried orange, she looks as thin as a bamboo stick in an old-fashioned padded army coat that few would wear nowadays. She went to Old Ke, who is now a Big Buck in Beijing, but he offered no help.”

  Disoriented at this eerie hour, I knew I could not fall asleep again. So I got up and searched through the shelves before coming upon a volume of W. B. Yeats, remembering something the poet once said about a tattered coat upon a stick. Instead, I found a couple of different lines in “Easter 1916,” in which the poet lamented, “Being certain that they and I / But lived where motley is worn.”

  It may be the clothes that make us what we are, and not the other way around, whether motley or uniform.

  Still, I tried to focus on the memory, in that far away summer, when Qi in his fake Polo T-shirt and Mimi in her sweat-soaked uniform smiled together in the zoom lens of somebody’s camera.

  Big Bowl and Firecracker

  (1984)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1984. It has been a year of great success and achievement for our country. In January, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang visited the United States, and then American President Ronald Reagan visited China in April. The Party authorities stressed two major tasks for the country in the new period: restructuring the economy and opening the country to the outside world. Deng Xiaoping made the solemn promise that Hong Kong’s socioeconomic system would remain the same after its return to China: “One country, two systems.” In December, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Premier Zhao signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the return of Hong Kong in 1997.

  Xie Zhengmin had got his nickname—Big Bowl—when his family moved from Jin’an district into Red Dust Lane in 1967, the second year of the Cultural Revolution. He was then only ten.

  He immediately learned about the culture of the lane. Most families had no air-conditioning or electric fans at home, and in the summer, it was almost unbearable to have a hot meal inside. There was no traffic in the lane, and a pleasant, fitful breeze rippled through, so people came out holding their rice bowls, eating heartily in the open. It was a sort of social occasion for the lane. Talking and laughing, one would put a piece of soy sauce–braised lamb into his friend’s bowl in return for half of a smoked fish head. Such exchanges were particularly common among kids.

  So Xie Zhengmin also chose to eat outside. His nickname might have originated from the extraordinarily big bowl in his hands. There were those who thought there was more to it, though. Instead of mixing with the other kids, he stood aloof in a corner, as if burying his face in that big bowl. What was the point of eating outside if you were going to eat like that? The nickname could have been a reference to that puzzle.

  Whatever the origin, the nickname stuck. Big Bowl’s younger brother got his by association—Small Bowl—and then their parents got nicknames too. The mother was called Bamboo Chopsticks, because she was so thin, and the father was Steamed Bun, because he looked a little fermented.

  In the evening talk of the lane, people didn’t care so much about those nicknames, but there was something suspicious about the Xies. In the city of Shanghai, location mattered a lot. Red Dust Lane, though at the center of Huangpu district, was not considered an upper-class area. The shikumen houses here had been built with neither gas nor bathroom facilities, so early in the morning, the housewives had to start a fire in their coal briquette stoves by waving palm leaf fans like robots and had to carry out the chamber pots with sleepy eyes. In contrast, Jin’an district was a higher-class area. That the Xies had moved from there to a pathetic two-room combination here—an attic and a tingzijian cubicle over the kitchen—was too much of a bad bargain not to arouse comment.

  It wasn’t long before the answer came. Steamed Bun had become a target for the neighborhood criticism meeting in Jin’an district, and he had been forced to wear around his neck a blackboard that showed his class status: Stinking Capitalist. As a capitalist, he and his family members were viewed as “black”—politically unreliable—and subject to revolutionary discrimination in the neighborhood.

  But it was useless for them to move. The Red Guards from Steamed Bun’s company followed them over to Red Dust Lane, putting a bunch of slogan papers and posters on their door and windows: Down with stinking capitalist.

  Indeed, the proletarian dictatorship was everywhere. The neighborhood committee of Red Dust Lane, too, held a mass-criticism meeting against the Xies.

  The Xies did not move anymore. Big Bowl hung his head lower in the lane, with or without the bowl. “No face,” an elderly neighbor said, pointing out the symbolic meaning of the gesture. “That’s why the boy has been
hiding his face in the big bowl since his arrival.”

  Face or no face, Big Bowl grew up like others. In the late seventies, the Cultural Revolution was officially declared a national disaster, and the class system was practically shelved. Big Bowl started to greet his neighbors amiably, holding his head high. There were other changes in the lane too. People did not eat outside as much, since more and more families bought electric fans.

  Big Bowl became a young accountant for a state-run company. According to Bamboo Chopsticks, he took evening college courses, turned in his application for Party membership, and went to Beijing several times as a representative of the company. In short, he was a young man with a promising future.

  Soon we saw him bringing a young girl surnamed Qian into the lane. She worked at the same company, though it was said that their relationship faced challenges. In the once popular class system, Qian’s father was a worker, and their families did not match, politically. While it was difficult to tell what Qian saw in Big Bowl, it was not so difficult to understand the reverse. Qian was very pretty, and Big Bowl went out of his way to introduce her to his neighbors.

  The class difference was no longer considered that important, not like it was back in the days when Big Bowl had first acquired his nickname. Things had changed in China, the way colorful balls rotate through a juggler’s hands. Now people actually found there were benefits to a black family background. Some of those families got compensation for their losses during the Cultural Revolution. Some were able to reestablish contact with relatives overseas, which often meant a sizable amount of money coming to them from abroad. Big Bowl, it turned out, had a rich uncle in the United States.

  In the second year of their relationship, the young couple began discussing their marriage plans, but Bamboo Chopsticks started to complain in the lane. “Qian’s family has nothing. The revolutionary proletariat indeed. We have to pay for everything.”