Years of Red Dust

by Qiu Xiaolong

  With the dramatic change in the political environment across the Taiwan strait, Xue thought about coming back for a visit. He approached the Shanghai city government, inquiring about the possibility and expressing his wish to do something for his home city. His request was instantly granted. It was no longer the time of Chairman Mao’s class struggle. China had now opened up to the world, and particularly to foreign capital coming in from anywhere. Besides, people now had some access to events in the outside world. For one thing, they read stories about Mitterrand, the French president who had been captured by the Germans during the Second World War, an experience that hadn’t cast a shadow over his political life. As for Xue’s decision to go to Taiwan, it was easily brushed aside as a matter of history. According to a popular Party slogan, people should look forward, not backward.

  The city government wanted the neighborhood committee of Red Dust Lane to do a good job welcoming Xue home. It was a political assignment, as it was an opportunity for the city to acquire outside investment capital, and it would help to propagandize the “new united front” as well. Xue was said to have a special attachment to the lane. Comrade Jun, the head of the neighborhood committee, ordered a clean-and-dress-up for the whole neighborhood. Several lane representatives were selected, including those old-timers who had known Xue before the Korean War.

  When Xue arrived in Shanghai, as expected, he signed an intention agreement with the local government about a joint venture in the Huangpu district that could potentially add at least two hundred jobs to the area. He also gave a large donation to the elementary school he had attended, and in return, the school renamed the library the Zhiming Library.

  The climax of Xue’s visit was going to take place during his visit to Red Dust Lane. He carried a large number of red envelopes in his briefcase, it was said, for the people in the lane.

  The neighborhood committee suggested a “wind-receiving” banquet for Xue in Xinya Restaurant, but Xue insisted on choosing a small restaurant on Fujian Road, close to the side entrance of the lane. It wasn’t too surprising. He must have had enough of dining in five-star restaurants.

  “It’s the lane in my dreams,” Xue said, the wine rippling in his cup.

  “In your dreams, it’s not just the lane, but the whole mainland too,” Comrade Jun said, raising his cup high. “We are all proud of you, Mr. Xue.”

  “It’s nothing—it’s just like the old Chinese saying,” Xue said. “In the end, a leaf falls back down to the tree’s root.”

  “To Red Dust Lane,” the people of the lane affirmed, raising their cups around the table, their many arms like a forest.

  After the first few rounds of toasts, Xue asked, “How is Bai Jie?”

  It was understandable that he was concerned, while in his cups, about a fellow POW, as he sat in a restaurant so close to the lane. Long, long ago, he might even have been one of her secret admirers.

  The lane representatives didn’t know how to answer him, looking at each other in embarrassment. Comrade Jun mumbled that Bai was sick, which was true. According to the latest information from her neighbors, she might even have early Alzheimer’s.

  Holding a piece of stewed bear paw with his chopsticks, Xue continued, emotionally, “For many years, I have thought of her constantly. What has happened to her, back in Red Dust Lane?”

  What had really happened to Bai? For all these years, she had lived in the lane, single, solitary, like a hermit crab forever staying within a borrowed shell, as all the political trouble loomed over her. Comrade Jun came up with the excuse that he didn’t start to work in the lane until the sixties, so he didn’t exactly know. Old Root, on the other hand, suggested that Xue start by telling them about what had happened to him during the years since he left.

  Draining the cup, Xue started to tell us about his experiences during the Korean War.

  He and Bai had been put in the same prison camp, where the Taiwanese agents tried hard to talk them into defecting to Taiwan. At first Xue was quite adamant in his refusal. What finally brought him around was a story told by one of the agents, whose uncle, a nuclear scientist at an American university, went back to mainland China, but couldn’t find a job in his field because no one trusted him. In the class system of socialist China, Xue’s father was a “small business owner,” and he wasn’t trusted in the new society either. It wasn’t difficult for Xue to conclude that, even if he returned to Red Dust Lane, he would always be under suspicion, and he dreaded such a prospect. The compensation offered by the Nationalist regime was, needless to say, another factor that influenced his decision. It was an amount equal to his total income for twenty years back at the snack shop he had worked in.

  “Right or wrong, it was a decision that weighed like a rock on my heart whenever I thought of her,” Xue said. “She was a young girl, but she had the guts to stand up for her principles. She said no to all the offers and ignored all the threats so that she could come back.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Mr. Xue,” Comrade Jun said. “It was long ago and things were complicated in those days. It wasn’t exactly your fault. History has turned over a new page and you have come back to the lane.”

  “We heard stories about the prison camps, stories of torture or branding of prisoners,” Old Root cut in unexpectedly. “Was that true?”

  “It’s possible, especially with Bai, who refused to cooperate at all with Taiwanese agents. As for branding, we heard stories of it in the camp too,” Xue said. He massaged his brows as if in pain before he went on. “They threatened to brand anticommunist slogans on us, I heard, so that it would be impossible for us to come back. To forestall such a dirty trick, Bai used a burning needle to engrave ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ on her left shoulder.”

  “Oh, she could have showed it to the Party authorities—” Comrade Jun cut himself short after a glance from Old Root.

  “I really admire her,” Xue said, his head low. “She never wavered. There was a wealthy Taiwanese officer who was mad for her. He later became a general and if she had consented . . .”

  It was obvious that Xue was still waiting for his old neighbors to tell him more about Bai, but they chose not to. No point dampening his spirits with a sad story, particularly as Bai might even have been the reason why he had left for the Korean War, as well as the reason he had come back after all these years. Knowledge that he had made the right decision—that if he had come back in the fifties, he would have ended up just like Bai, or even worse—might have given him some comfort, but it would be cold comfort.

  Finally, the host and the guests all got drunk.

  That night, Bai shut herself up in the small room, mumbling as always to the faded portrait of Mao on the wall. She never heard a word of what Xue said over at the banquet. Nor, if the rumor about her Alzheimer’s was true, would she have understood.

  Old Hunchback Fang

  (1995)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1995. Early this year, China tested missiles and held military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, showing its unwavering determination to fight for the unification of the country. New educational legislation now stipulates nine years of compulsory education. In September, the Central Party Committee adopted the proposition to further the economic reform through the transformation of the traditional state-planned economy to a socialist market economy. Our government took effective measures to curb inflation, which had reached seventeen percent.

  Let me make this point first, my old neighbors in Red Dust Lane. A story is never really independent of the storyteller. Say what you may, but someone has made the choice to tell this story, not that story. Why? Simply because this narrative has a specific meaning for the narrator. For instance, I’m going to talk about Old Hunchback Fang this evening. It has a lot to do with what has happened to me—directly or not that directly—through all the years. More than twenty years, to be exact.

  My second point: a story doesn’t come out of the blue, nor do
es it have a certain closure. Between Old Hunchback Fang and me, a real face-to-face encounter didn’t occur until this week, though things far more important to him, and to me—a lot of them related and interrelated—had happened years earlier.

  Now, I am not prejudiced against a man with deformities. My father was also crippled—during the Cultural Revolution. I simply don’t know Fang’s full name. As far as I remember, everybody here has always called him by that particular nickname. So did Fang himself. You object to it? Fine, I’ll call him Fang. If I have a slip of the tongue, it’s just because his hunchback seems to have special meaning, a symbolic correspondence to what I’m going to say.

  I first heard of Fang in the early sixties, when he was a worker just retired from the Shanghai No. 3 Textile Mill, and an honorable member of the neighborhood committee. An old man, short, bald, wearing a pair of old-fashioned glasses that looked like the bottoms of beer bottles, and with a hunchback like an upturned iron wok. The neighborhood committee seemed irrelevant to me as a kid. I simply saw it as an office for housewives to make petty family complaints or receive food ration coupons.

  The outbreak of the Cultural Revolution changed everything. The committee was now focused on mobilizing the people to “battle and campaign against the class enemies.” As Mao said, “We have to push the continuous revolution under the proletarian dictatorship to the end.” It pushed Fang to the fore, who gave a passionate speech about “Savoring the Present Sweetness and Recalling the Past Bitterness” at a neighborhood meeting.

  “What am I? A poor, pathetic hunchback. In the old society before 1949, I was looked down upon like trash. One day I slipped and fell in front of the lane, and several young hooligans came over and began kicking, spitting on me, and cursing, ‘What an old turtle has turned over.’ Comrades, it’s only under the socialist system that I began to lead a happy, wonderful life. Because of my deformity, I was allowed to retire at the age of forty-five with a full pension. Could I have ever dreamed of it before the liberation in 1949? No, no way. I owe everything to the Party, to Chairman Mao. Whoever dares to be against Chairman Mao, I will fight him to my last breath in the latest direction of the class struggle.”

  The speech was sincere, but too short. The example given was not that well-chosen, either. There are hooligans in the past and in the present, and it wasn’t the old society that caused Fang to be derided. As for the “latest direction of the class struggle,” Fang could hardly understand the ever-changing political terms in the newspapers—he simply recorded and repeated them like a machine.

  Shortly afterward, a neighborhood group was formed and named the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team, which consisted of a dozen retirees, a gigantic drum, several brass gongs and cymbals, and a pile of colorful paper posters. Fang held a bullhorn in one hand, clutching in his other a list of class enemies. With his red armband shining like an enflamed cloud in the morning, he led the team marching to the targeted houses of class enemies throughout the lane.

  In front of the first targeted house, his bullhorn would start booming: “Down with capitalist roader Zhang Shan. We must trample him underfoot thousands of times, so that he can’t turn over for the next hundred years.” Then at the next door: “Down with counterrevolutionary Li Si. For your antisocialism crime, you deserve to die thousands of times.” And then at the third door: “Down with rightist Huang Huizhong, you have to confess your crime to the people.”

  Fang had a loud voice, which had a metallic quality as a result of his malformed lung capacity. His eyes glared knives, his nostrils issued forth fire. For a split second, he loomed gigantic—the proletarian wrath incarnated.

  The revolutionary activities of the team were supposed to bring pressure against the class enemies. There was a popular slogan at the time: “The proletarian dictatorship must be carried into every corner of our socialist society.” Into every corner of Red Dust Lane, too.

  Consequently, Fang’s path and mine crossed for the first time. My father was a middle-ranking Party cadre who suddenly became a “capitalist roader” in 1966. Hence a class enemy too. Fang arrived dutifully at our door with his bullhorn: “Burn the stinking capitalist roader! Fry the rotten capitalist roader! Scalp the damned capitalist roader!”

  The revolutionary mass-criticism increased in its intensity. Soon the class enemies were marched onto a makeshift stage, bearing huge blackboards around their necks with their names written on them and crossed out. Old Hunchback Fang proved to be the most active, and creative too, in producing those blackboards, as if he had an inexhaustible supply of energy from his hunchback. The sight of him struck a new terror into the hearts of the people on the list clutched in his hand.

  “Don’t cry,” a young mother would hush her baby in the cradle, “or Old Hunchback Fang will come.” It was an apt adaptation from an old Chinese saying: Don’t cry, or the white-eyed wolf will come.

  I was young, yet not too young to tremble in my father’s shoes. It seemed to be a matter of time before he would step onto a mass-criticism stage, standing with a blackboard dangling around his neck. What was worse, his left leg was broken during a mass-criticism meeting at his factory, and during a similar neighborhood meeting I might have to support him like a crutch, standing with him on the stage. The image of me as a human crutch gave me continuous nightmares. One night, I was jolted out of bed by Fang’s voice thundering across the lane. “Capitalist roader Guohua, you are doomed!” Rubbing my sleepy eyes, I rushed downstairs, only to find no one there. I had heard his voice, I swore, but the neighborhood kids might have imitated it as a practical joke, as my father said, or I could have dreamed of it.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to become such a crutch for my father in a public humiliation. He was suddenly liberated from his “capitalist roader” status by another Red Guard organization which, in a surprising bid for power, declared my father an “educable revolutionary cadre” on their side.

  Little did I expect that Fang would come to cast a more direct shadow. In 1969, Mao launched forth the movement of sending educated youths to the countryside. In response, millions and millions of middle and high school graduates left home to “receive reeducation from the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.” A few were left behind, including me: I was a “waiting-for-assignment youth” left in the city, excused due to bronchitis.

  The Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team shifted focus to the new targets of the Cultural Revolution: the educated youths that remained in the city. Fang and his followers applied the same tactics of public humiliation and pressure with different slogans. “As our great leader Chairman Mao teaches us, it is necessary for the educated youths to go to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.” It was a long sentence, but Fang’s loud voice jumped out against a deafening clangor of gongs and drums. It worked like a formula. While marching from one house to another, he went through the names on his list. “Zhou Wu, you don’t listen to Chairman Mao. You must be responsible for the consequences!” “Chen Liu, you are against the movement of educated youths. You have to mend your ways!”

  There were actually two educated youths, Zhengming and I, in the same shikumen house. The only difference between us was that he didn’t have an excuse like bronchitis. So I was spared for the moment, but his name came loud and clear out of Fang’s bullhorn. “You have to go now, Zhengming, or, day and night, we will never give you a break.”

  Fang and his followers made their rounds three times a day: in the early morning, in the afternoon, and in the late evening, so that the maximum number of people could hear their message. It was an effective tactic, bringing not only pressure to the educated youths in the list but also annoyance to the neighbors, who couldn’t complain about the propaganda but could only vent their frustration against the young people.

  “You’d better go, Zhengming,” Granny Hua said to him in the common kitchen of our shikumen building, “or we will never have peace here.”

  Zhengming consulted
with me. He felt so guilty that he was ready to give in to the continuous nerve-wracking pressure. I didn’t offer him any advice. My father was sick with rheumatism, and I couldn’t afford to bring any additional problems home.

  “The moment my name comes out of Fang’s bullhorn,” I said lamely, “I may have to leave too.”

  So Zhengming left. In less than a year, he had lost three fingers in a tractor accident. It was said that he did it on purpose, so he would be able to return to the city—in accordance with a government policy concerning a handicapped educated youth. I knew little about it. I was too worried for myself. At the familiar sound of the drums and gongs, I would jump up and peek out from behind the curtain, trembling. The Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team was planning to find new targets among the educated youths left behind, and bronchitis wasn’t considered as good an excuse anymore.

  Again, as luck would have it, before my name came out of Fang’s bullhorn, the movement of educated youths came to an abrupt halt. Instead of transforming themselves into poor and lower-middle-class peasants in the countryside, most of the young people failed to keep the pot boiling in those faraway villages. Mao himself wrote a letter, admitting that there might be some problems with the movement.

  But Fang’s team had already started on another campaign. From my window, I could hear Fang shouting new slogans. During those years, there were so many political campaigns, Fang didn’t have to worry.

  After the end of the Cultural Revolution, I went to college in Beijing. To my surprise, in the midst of my studies there, I found myself thinking of Old Hunchback Fang quite a few times. According to my father, Fang started working for the neighborhood security committee after the dissolution of the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team. He was still patrolling the neighborhood market as a sort of watchdog, still wearing a red armband—though a different one, of course.