by Qiu Xiaolong
Qian’s family, it was said, was not happy either. The issue of family background aside, where was the “wedding room” for the young couple? Big Bowl’s family remained huddled together in that two-room combination—an attic and a cubicle above the kitchen—and in the best scenario, the young couple would get one of the two.
“To marry into such a capitalist family,” Old Qian, the young girl’s father, admonished her, “is like having the smell of the fish, but not getting any of the meat.”
“Some people simply cannot resist the smell!” Bamboo Chopsticks declared at the lane entrance when she heard, stamping her feet as though in a loyal character dance.
But it was no longer the time of arranged marriages. The two young people remained adamant, and the parents on both sides could do little to change their minds.
So the wedding was scheduled for the summer. Most of the neighbors in the lane got small bags of happiness candies, including two chocolate coins wrapped in gold paper. Some also received a wedding invitation. Big Bowl’s parents had reserved more than thirty tables at the Guoji Hotel, one of the top restaurants in Shanghai. At the rate of eight hundred yuan per table, it would cost about twenty-five thousand yuan—more than Old Qian’s income for ten years—not to mention the other expenses. But the lane had another way to calculate the cost. In China’s time of economic reform, the most practical and popular wedding presents came in the form of cash in a red envelope. The current standard gift was a hundred yuan per person, and some honored guests—those at the table with the bride and bridegroom—could pay up to five hundred yuan. With ten to twelve people per table, if each and every guest was as decent as expected, such a grand wedding might even turn a profit. No one could be sure, though. Some cheap guys might put in only twenty yuan in a red envelope.
“It’s a capitalist wedding,” Old Qian grumbled. He was an ex-member of the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team, who still flourished a couple of political terms like his metal tooth. “Nothing but exploitation.”
“It’s a wedding,” Bamboo Chopsticks countered, spitting out the husk of a watermelon seed. “If they don’t need face, we have to have ours.”
It seemed like a sound argument in the changed times. During the Cultural Revolution, people had simple, cost-effective weddings based on the principle of following the Party’s tradition of hard work and a simple life. Nowadays such a practice would make laughingstocks of the young couple.
A tough negotiation was staged between the two families. Conventionally, the two sides would share the cost, but Old Qian had recently suffered a pay cut at his factory. It was finally agreed that the groom’s family would be responsible for all costs and, in exchange, only two banquet tables would be allocated to the bride’s family and friends.
“It’s an unbelievable bargain for them,” Bamboo Chopsticks concluded with a chuckle. “They can pocket the red envelopes from those two tables. A huge profit out of the thin air.”
Her continuous “news conference” kept the lane informed of all the progress up to the day of the wedding. When that day arrived, the lane held its breath in excitement. Cameras flashed at the dowry of twelve silk quilts piled high in front of the door, at the red paper cut designs put on the windows, and at the Red Flag limousine at the lane entrance, a special automobile that had allegedly chauffeured Chairman Mao in the sixties.
We wondered what the wedding at the celebrated Guoji Hotel would be like, and we waited eagerly to hear. Before the banquet was finished, Small Bowl hurried back to the lane, to prepare for the young couple’s homecoming. His face flushed the color of a red cloth, he declared that it was an unprecedented wedding.
“Eight cold dishes. Eight hot dishes. Four big platters. The whole duck. The whole chicken. The whole fish. The whole Jinhua ham. Two soups. Not to mention four desserts. The banquet lasted more than three hours. The bride and bridegroom had to walk around to each and every table, with cups in their hands. The guests kept toasting to their happiness, and the young couple, especially the bridegroom, had to drink to their toasts or the guests would lose face. So I had to act as the wine guard, drinking on his behalf. It would be a shame for the bridegroom to get drunk tonight. Indeed, one minute in the wedding room is worth tons of gold.”
Small Bowl then brought out a pile of firecrackers, arranging for some to be set off at the lane entrance; some, at the center of the lane; and the rest to be set off by himself in front of the shikumen door. It was considered auspicious for the couple, and the more firecrackers, the better luck.
Upon the Red Flag limousine’s arrival, the whole lane was overwhelmed by a joyful outburst of firecrackers.
Now, there’s no story without coincidence.
As the bride was stepping into the house, the long bunch of firecrackers in Small Bowl’s hand failed to explode.
“This one is rotten,” Small Bowl grumbled in the awkward silence that instantly shrouded the air. “Let’s start a new one.”
“What? What do you mean?” Old Qian exploded. “You cannot be humiliating us like that.”
“Come on. It is only a bad firecracker. You know the quality of those products nowadays.”
“A bad firecracker at the moment my daughter steps into your home as the bride? It’s not just humiliating, but downright unlucky too.”
“How can you say that today?” Bamboo Chopsticks shot up like a firecracker herself. “Your mouth needs to be cleaned thoroughly with a chamber pot broom!”
“Damn you, you black-hearted-and-black-lunged capitalist wife,” Old Qian shouted, as if miraculously transported back to the days of the Cultural Revolution, a white-haired working-class rebel cursing in front of a door decorated with red signs of happiness. “You are good at nothing except exploiting people. How much have you made from the red envelopes? We working class are still the leading class in socialist China. Don’t you forget that!”
“What have you done, you old idiot?” Small Bowl was furious. “You have not paid a single penny out of your own pocket. You are the cheapest dirt.”
“Nobody did it on purpose,” Steamed Bun said. “It was only because of the quality of the firecrackers.”
“The quality?” Old Qian went on relentlessly. “Couldn’t you have chosen something better? You have money, don’t you? How dare you to treat my daughter like dirt! Yes, we are working-class people, but we won’t save money on the firecrackers for the wedding.”
Now all the neighbors poured out to watch the scene. They tried to calm down both sides, but without success. Apparently, the firecracker was only the fuse that finally set off the long pent-up feud between the two sides. It was clear that nobody—except perhaps the bride and bridegroom, who had already evaporated into their room—would be able to put an end to the fight.
But the couple did not come out.
They might not have heard it at first, but when no one followed them into the wedding room, the couple should have noticed. It was a time-honored convention that the guests would “celebrate by turning the wedding room upside down.” No one in the street, however, paid any attention to the ritual, what with the increasingly intense drama of the brawl.
Finally, in the middle of the chaos, Big Bowl came rushing out, pushing his way through the crowd, striding toward the lane exit, shouting with both arms raised above his head.
“You all can shut up now. Everything is finished. I’ve killed her. Now I’m turning myself in to the police bureau.”
People were stunned into silence. It did not look like he was making a joke—a very bad one—but no one could believe it. Old Qian was transfixed with his fist banging at the air, as if turned into a stone statue by a magic spell. Small Bowl was the first to get his wits back, sprinting up to the wedding room, while the others remained standing there in the lane, too shocked and stupefied to react.
Comrade Jun, the head of the neighborhood committee, arrived at the scene, and an outburst of voices rocketed up like firecrackers trying to explain. “A life for a firecracker!�
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Small Bowl ran back down again, shouting, “Wait! Big Bowl! Don’t go there!”
Then Qian stumbled down, her hair disheveled, her clothes in terrible disarray, screaming, running barefoot. “Come back, Big Bowl!”
The crowd gasped. “She’s—a ghost! Wait—she’s not dead.”
But it was already too late.
When the bride dashed into the police station, the bridegroom had already signed the statement saying that he had strangled his wife in a fit of fury. It was too humiliating that his father-in-law had made a scene on his wedding day, and that she, too, screamed like a fury in the wedding room. He had lost all face, and his faith too, in a marriage with such an ugly start. And he lost control of himself temporarily.
Now, Big Bowl couldn’t be charged with homicide, since the victim was not dead, but nonetheless, it was an attempted homicide. The statement lay on the desk, signed, in black and white. Big Bowl was thrown into custody. It then became a matter of the uttermost urgency to prove that the statement made by Big Bowl was not true.
Qian told a different story. According to her, it was not his fault at all. When they first heard the noise outside, he wanted her to stop her father. She didn’t want to. Instead, she started to scream and scratch at him like a fury. The fight in the wedding room only added fuel to the fire. He tried to keep her from making things worse by putting his hand over her mouth. She struggled so violently that she lost consciousness.
The following morning, she further amended her statement by insisting that she fainted because she had been too exhausted by all the preparations for the wedding, including the purchase of all the firecrackers, which she had personally chosen at a market. It really had nothing to do with him at all.
Whose side was credible—the bride’s or the bridegroom’s?
How it had happened that night in the wedding room, we didn’t know, but we chose to believe her story. After all, it’s a bad firecracker’s luck.
When the police came to the lane to investigate, Comrade Jun offered an interpretation from his own experience.
“Big Bowl was drunk that night. You cannot take a drunken man’s word for it. As the head of the neighborhood committee, I’ve dealt with too many people who were in the cup. Do you know how many cups he drank that night? Now, I’m always against this kind of lavish wedding, but they didn’t listen to me. It is difficult for us to do the neighborhood work nowadays, comrades.”
Those neighbors who had attended the banquet at the Guoji Hotel supported this by testifying that Big Bowl had consumed more than ten cups of sorghum liquor. Qian was more credible, they further argued, since she had hardly had a drop that night.
Big Bowl’s company, too, put in a good word for him. He had been an honest, hardworking accountant. The fact that he had turned himself in spoke for itself. Even drunk, he remained a law-abiding citizen. The predicament of Qian was also brought up in the discussion. If anything happened to him, what would happen to her—waiting for him for so many years in Red Dust Lane, like the Beijing opera heroine Wang Baochuan?
When Big Bowl was released in October, Qian was about three months pregnant.
Red Dust Lane was once more abuzz with stories and speculations.
Now, the time from the moment that Old Qian and Bamboo Chopsticks started fighting in the lane to the moment when Big Bowl ran out was about forty-five minutes. We calculated closely. What could the bride and bridegroom have done during the forty-five minutes when they were alone in the wedding room? All the details—that she came out barefoot, her hair disheveled, her clothes in disarray—spoke for themselves. But others had different versions. The young couple must have heard the fight outside from the very beginning. How could they have been in the mood? So it must have happened before the wedding.
The humiliation of having fought with his wife and turned himself in for a false murder on his wedding day, plus gossip in the lane about the circumstance of Qian’s pregnancy, proved to be too much.
Once again Big Bowl hung his head low, as if he were suffering from a broken neck, just the way he had when he had first moved in and buried his face in a big bowl.
Fortunately, his uncle had mailed a large sum from the United States, Bamboo Chopsticks announced proudly in the lane. According to the new policy, overseas Chinese could buy their apartments in the city with foreign currency. So the young couple was soon going to move out of Red Dust Lane to a new apartment.
There, we hoped, they would be able to start a new life.
A Confidence Cap
(1987)
This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1987. In the beginning of the year, the Party authorities launched the campaign to fight against bourgeois liberalism under Western influence and accepted Hu Yaobang’s resignation from the post of general secretary of the Party Central Committee. In October, in the CPC National Congress, Zhao Ziyang gave the report “Advance along the Road of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” stating that the basic role of the Party during the primary stage of socialism is to lead people in an effort to turn China into a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and modern socialist country by making economic development the Party’s central task while adhering to the four cardinal principles and persevering in reform and open policy. With such an important document to guide China’s reform, the Chinese people are full of confidence for the great future of the country. Of course, there can be twists and turns in our advances; of this we are well aware, and the Party authorities took decisive and effective measures against widespread corruption in the system. This year, an agreement between China and Portugal was signed calling for the return of Macao to China in 1999.
Twenty years had passed like a snapping of one’s fingers, Fu Guodong thought, standing hatless, shivering in the cold wind outside the university conference hall. However, he had never thought about buying himself a hat, since that winter night in 1966.
That long-ago night, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he had witnessed his sick father wearing a tall white paper hat bearing big Chinese characters: Down with the black bourgeois authority, American secret agent. The old man was a college professor who had studied in the United States and had come back in the fifties as an authority in physics, and he was turned into a black target for the Red Guards in the sixties. A young boy, Fu himself was turned into a “black puppy,” having to support his sick father as he stood on the mass-criticism stage near the entrance of Red Dust Lane. There he saw the tall paper hat on his father’s head trembling in the howling wind as some sort of pale sign from the underworld.
His father passed away shortly afterward, though his “political hat” still cast a shadow over the family, particularly Fu. It was a shadow not removed until several years after the Cultural Revolution, when Fu became a college student at the university where his father had taught. Four years later, as if through another stroke of ironic causality of misplaced yin and yang, he started teaching there too.
He did not dream of becoming an authority like his father. Once bitten by a snake, a man turns panicky at the sight of a coiled black rope. With that evening wind still howling in his memory, he seemed incapable of “warming up.” And his subject happened to be a “cold” one too: comparative linguistics, with a focus on the etymology of the Chinese language. Still, in the lane, a college teacher was somebody, and everyone expected that, sooner or later, he would move out.
But Fu was a contented man, with a stable income and occasional extra money from his academic publications, so he had no immediate plans to move. He kept a low profile in the lane. Whenever addressed as Professor, he would insist that he was still a lecturer. In the one single room inherited from his father, he piled up books—he was indeed a bookworm, about whom there was nothing too surprising. His continuous celibacy in his mid-thirties, for instance, was easily attributed to his bookishness. He copied out a couplet by Zhuge Liang on a long silk scroll, which he then hung on the wall: It i
s enough for a man to survive in an age of troubles; it is vain to seek one’s name among the glorious.
However low his profile, he worked diligently and published copiously in his field. In time, his name spread beyond the college and outside the country as well. As in the proverb, a red apricot tree could not help blossoming over the wall.
Now, on the present winter evening in the late eighties, as he stood outside of the university conference hall thinking back on the scene twenty years earlier, he was hit with a weird sense of déjà vu. He had just delivered a talk at an international culture conference on campus. The session on comparative linguistics had been attended by a number of well-known Western scholars: there had been a recent revival of interest worldwide in the Chinese language as a system of ideograms, and Chinese characters had become so fashionable that they were appearing on T-shirts and as tattoos. Fu’s speech focused on Ezra Pound’s deconstruction of ancient Chinese characters into poetic images, and Fu demonstrated his groundbreaking insight into the subject. His talk was well received, and afterward, Professor Allen, from an American university, and Professor Hornbeck, from a German university, insisted on treating him to dinner.
While out with the two, Fu kept shivering, even though he was sandwiched between the Western scholars in a taxi. It was a chilly rainy evening.
The two foreigners exchanged glances, then had the taxi pull onto West Nanjing Road and dragged him into a brand-named store, where they proposed to pick out a cap for him. They recommended a brown wool flat cap, which was made in London and had a staggering price tag. Professor Hornbeck commented that its color suited his black hair perfectly. Professor Allen raved about its quality. Fu concurred, feeling he had no choice, even though the price was way beyond his ordinary budget. It would never do, he knew, for his Western colleagues to look down on their Chinese counterparts.
Wearing the cap, he went to the restaurant with them for a wonderful dinner of eight courses. The two foreigners kept raising their cups to his academic achievement. Halfway through the meal, he excused himself, and in the bathroom, he could not help studying his flushing face reflected in the mirror—a total stranger with an exotic British cap on his head.