Years of Red Dust

by Qiu Xiaolong

  I didn’t have a clear picture of Fang’s new revolutionary activity until I came back to Shanghai in the early eighties and began working as a journalist for the Wenhui Daily newspaper. In those days, the Party authorities had already started the economic reform in Shenzhen, but in Shanghai and other large cities, the presence of private peddlers at a state-run neighborhood market was still considered a threat in the eyes of the orthodox. So Fang’s job consisted of forcibly confiscating the peddlers’ bamboo baskets and stomping on them vigorously. He must have derived a big kick from it, imagining himself as a staunch pillar of socialism whenever he drove away a weeping country wench.

  It wasn’t too much of a surprise to see Old Hunchback Fang looming in the market, patrolling energetically as if with steel springs under his feet, but I was surprised at the ferocity he showed toward those peddlers. After all, they were not class enemies, not like in the old days, and I happened to notice that the Party newspapers were talking about the coexistence of different ownerships in China’s new economy.

  “That old bastard’s out of his mind,” Zhengming cursed, binding a live river crab he had just bought from a private vendor.

  I didn’t have a personal grudge against Fang. What prompted me to confront him was another stroke of misplaced yin and yang. I had no idea at all—not at the time—that it would come to influence both of our lives, though in different ways.

  Now in those days, my job in the Wenhui office kept me quite busy. One Saturday afternoon, I hurried back to the lane to make dinner for my father. In the nearby food market, I saw a middle-aged woman preparing a bucket of rice-paddy eels by a public sink. What caught my attention, I could not tell, but I found myself slowing to a halt and watching. She was whipping an eel against the concrete curb, fixing its head on a thick nail at the end of a wooden bench, drawing the eel tight, cutting through its belly, pulling out its bones and insides, chopping off its head, and slicing its body delicately. Her hands and arms were covered in eel blood, and her bare feet too. She made a few pennies by selling the bones and entrails to restaurants, which used them to make special noodle soups.

  Then recognition came. She was Qing, the “queen” in my high school, who left for the countryside with the first group of educated youths in 1970. I had heard stories of her tragic life in the countryside. Now a single mother with a kid, she looked at least fifteen years older than her real age. The chopped-off heads of the eels were scattered at her feet, about the size of her bare toes, their eyes still staring. She didn’t recognize me.

  On an impulse, I decided to buy a kilo of live eels to make a Shanghai-flavored dish of fried eel slices for my father. I was reaching for my wallet when a commotion broke out in the market. Old Hunchback Fang was rushing over, surprisingly swift like a hawk, and he clutched Qing’s collar. I was too startled to react, catching only a glimpse of her being dragged away in the direction of the neighborhood committee.

  Then I became furious. For all these years, he had been like a curse. First to my father, then to me, now to her. But she was so pitiable, an ex–educated youth, jobless and skill-less, with a family relying on her eel-blood-covered hands. She did not really sell anything of her own in the market. How much could she possibly earn for those eel bones?

  So I decided to do something. That night I gathered together a bunch of the latest Party documents regarding the reform of the socialist ownership system. After having made a thorough study of them, I had a long talk with Comrade Jun, the head of the neighborhood committee.

  “It’s no longer an era when people put the issue of class struggle above everything,” I pointed out to him. “According to the People’s Daily, such an overemphasis is not helpful to the reform. The times have changed, and a free, private market has become a necessary supplement to the socialist state market. It’s wrong for Fang to treat the peddlers like that.”

  Comrade Jun kept nodding throughout my lecture, without attempting to interrupt.

  “So you have to take away his red armband, I’m afraid,” I concluded. “People could say or write something about it. That might do a lot of harm to the image of Red Dust Lane.”

  It must have sounded like a serious threat to Comrade Jun, who promised to do something about it.

  Sure enough, there was no sign of Fang patrolling around during my next visit to the market. It was said that he trembled like a fallen leaf when he was turning over his red armband. I didn’t see Qing there, either. That might have been just as well. My memory of her seemed to have been sullied by the eel blood.

  In the developing economic reform, I saw an opportunity to start my own business. Actually, I first got the idea when studying the documents that night to drive Fang out of the market. So I left Shanghai for Guangzhou, and then Guangzhou for Hong Kong. What happened afterward was, to put it simply, one business deal after another. Suffice it to say that I have been quite lucky so far.

  A business trip brought me back to Shanghai a few days ago. So much had changed in the neighborhood of Red Dust Lane that I could hardly believe my eyes.

  A number of snack booths had mushroomed up here. Close to the entrance of the lane, there was also a lunch-box booth consisting of two or three wooden tables, seven or eight benches, and a big coal-burning stove in an open kitchen. It was convenient to the residents of the lane, and to the employees of nearby companies too.

  I was shocked to see Old Hunchback Fang there. He looked different—though not surprisingly so—from what I remembered from the days of his bullhorn and red armband. He had shrunken into himself, become almost a dwarf, and his hunchback was even more pronounced. His head hung low, cutting almost a ninety degree angle to the bottom of his spine. What flabbergasted me, however, was that he was working as a busboy there, having to stand on tiptoe to reach the plates on the high shelf.

  I sat down at a table and ordered a bowl of noodles with fried pork and pickles. He came over. Believe it or not, it was the first actual face-to-face encounter between us—his face at the same level as mine. The old man didn’t recognize me as I took the bowl from the tray that he was holding head-high.

  It was a privately run snack place, something he had so long fought against. The owner of the lunch booth turned out to be no other than Zhengming. I asked him to sit with me.

  According to Zhengming, the economic reform had hit several pensioners in the lane hard. In the past, whether a state-run company was profitable or not, retirees had always received the pension and medical benefits from the state. Now it was up to the company itself, and Fang’s state-run textile mill had fallen into terrible shape. He couldn’t get even half of his original pension. With rising inflation, it was common for retired people to have to find a second job after retirement.

  “He had a little extra income when he was working with the neighborhood committee,” Zhengming said, “but several years ago, he was fired for some reason. I took pity on him and I pay him two hundred yuan a month, in addition to free meals.”

  I didn’t tell Zhengming that I was the reason for Fang’s dismissal from the neighborhood committee. From a different perspective, it was another stroke of irony: Fang might have been the catalyst for my venture into the business world.

  I looked around. No one was leaving tips. Tipping was still “politically incorrect” in socialist China. Still, I left a ten yuan bill on the table when I left.

  (Tofu) Worker Poet Bao II

  (1996)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1996. It was another great year in China’s unprecedented economic and social reform. China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan held a landmark summit in Shanghai. The so-called Shanghai Five all agreed to reduce military forces along their shared borders. In the economic front, China successfully reduced inflation to six percent, while its GDP grew ten percent.

  Worker Poet Bao’s Tofu—that small tofu booth of his standing in front of Red Dust Lane was more than a nine-day wonder.

  The ne
w businesses in the nineties generally had one thing in common: their short life. According to statistics in the People’s Daily, several hundred companies went out of business every day. Now, the tofu booth in question barely qualified as a business entity, since it consisted of a small stone mill to grind soybeans, a couple of wooden pails, and a shelf on which the tofu products for sale were displayed. But the business had lasted for months and showed no sign of faltering.

  At his booth, Bao developed and displayed a colorful array of homemade soybean products—white tofu, soft and hard tofu, frozen tofu for hot pot, golden tofu skin, gray tofu dredges, milky soybean drink, brown vegetable chicken, yellow fried gluten—all of which were far more delicious than those sold in the state-run market. In the afternoon, Bao also started selling stinking tofu, which was fried in a wok over a tiny stove. A stick of three golden pieces with a lot of red pepper sauce over them sold for only twenty cents. Soon it wasn’t only customers from the lane who flocked to the booth, as its reputation spread.

  According to Bao, he had learned a number of secret recipes from that Ningbo tofu shop back in the fifties, prior to his arrival in Shanghai. That made his tofu really different. However, there was another reason for the extraordinarily brisk business. As it was pointed out in a local newspaper, some of the customers came out of curiosity to see how a famous worker poet came to sell tofu. It was a metamorphosis beyond their imagining.

  “They would never be able to understand the real story,” Four-Eyed Liu observed during the evening talk of the lane, holding a paper bowl of almond tofu in his hand. “Only the people in the lane have witnessed the gradual change. Alas, Bao would never be able sell his poetry like he does tofu. He’s still a member of the Writers’ Association, isn’t he?”

  “As Lao-tzu says, fortune begets misfortune. There’s no telling how things come around in this world—starting from a small piece of tofu,” Old Root said, tapping his fingers meditatively on the edge of the bamboo chair. It was a sign that there would be another intriguing story told from his special perspective, and several young audience members gathered around. “Like so many stories in China, the story can be traced back to the Cultural Revolution.”

  The Cultural Revolution affected Bao like it did everybody else, though less than his fellow writers. For the first two or three years, the activities of the Writers’ Association were suspended, with most of the professional writers being cast as “evil monsters” for having advocated the feudalist, the capitalist, and the revisionist in their writings. Thanks to Bao’s working-class background, though, he was able to successfully declare that he had remained a red-hearted worker, in spite of his exposure to bourgeois influence. He joined a Red Guard organization and denounced the capitalist road cadres as well as the counterrevolutionary writers, including Xin, the head of the Writers’ Association, who had brought Bao into the institution.

  Bao continued to produce new poems, one of which was made into a popular song in the seventies:

  The fish cannot swim without water.

  The flower cannot blossom without sunlight.

  And to make revolution,

  We cannot go without Mao Zedong Thought.

  However, Bao wrote less than before, partly because of his busy revolutionary activities, and partly because of the unpredictable political weather. In those days, anybody could become a counterrevolutionary over something as small as a couple of lines. In the early seventies, he tried to compose a poem about Mao standing together with his close comrade-in-arms and successor Lin on Tiananmen Gate, but Lin was suddenly killed—according to a red-headlined Party document—after a diabolic attempt to assassinate Mao. It was a sheer stroke of luck that the poem did not get into print: the editor had fallen sick, and Bao was able to retrieve the poem at the last minute. In the mid-seventies, however, Bao had an opportunity to concentrate on his writing without having to worry about the changing political tides. Comrade Zhang Chunqiao, then a most powerful politburo member, published an important article which criticized, among other things, bourgeoisie intellectuals by denouncing a popular saying that compared intellectuals to stinking tofu—i.e., stinking in smell, but superb in taste. The article, approved by Chairman Mao, became an important Party document of the Cultural Revolution that people all over the country studied. The stinking tofu metaphor in Zhang’s article was inspired, as it was said, by something Bao had written years earlier, though Bao himself could hardly recall it. Bao was selected by the Shanghai City Revolutionary Committee, along with several others, to produce a long poem eulogizing the Cultural Revolution. Bao and his fellow poets were put in a villa on Huaihai Road—all expenses paid—while he worked on the political assignment. This time, things couldn’t go wrong, Bao believed, and, despite its poor sales in bookstores, he was very proud of the result, a revolutionary epic of more than two thousand lines.

  After the Cultural Revolution, things began to change again. Xin, rehabilitated as the head of the Writers’ Association, couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive Bao. It was easy to denounce Bao for his close ties to the Gang of Four, and the revolutionary epic poem was pointed to as the undeniable evidence. Bao had to turn in self-criticisms even longer than the poem. He turned out to be “tofu-spined,” pleading guilty to the accusations in tears. Once again, he was spared because of his working-class status. The Party authorities didn’t want to make him a target when so many workers had begun to complain about the loss of their political glory.

  When he was allowed to write again, however, a group of young poets called Misties appeared on the scene. They wrote in a different fashion, with obscure images that Bao denounced as “too difficult for the working-class people to understand.” Contrary to his prediction, however, the Misties turned out to be increasingly popular. Bao himself managed to hammer out one or two new poems condemning the Cultural Revolution, but no magazine would look at them.

  So instead of resuming his status as a professional writer, Bao started to work as a research fellow in the Shanghai Institute of Literature Studies. In the early eighties, Mao’s emphasis on the reliance of the proletarian writers still had some resonance. It was an easy job for Bao, who went to the institute only twice a week. According to his wife, it was an academic position equal to that of a university professor. He was collecting poems by workers, she explained, in the libraries and factories, though people saw him sitting by the window, hardly working.

  Bao started to look less and less like a renowned poet. He frequently joined in the evening talk of the lane, sitting on an old rattan chair, waving a cattail-leaf fan, and picking his teeth with a match. He never talked about his poetry project, nor decked his speech with those literary terms.

  Nor did his wife follow him around like a shadow, with a notebook and pen in hand. There was no point collecting his remarks, she declared: “They are nothing but repeated clichés.” In addition to her day job teaching at a high school, in the evening she was a much-demanded private tutor for kids studying to pass the college entrance examination. In the fast-changing society, a good college education meant a lot for the future of young people, and their parents spared no expense. As a result, the combined income from her state and private employment was five or six times more than Bao’s. In the market economy, it had become a matter of course for people’s value to increase or decrease in relation to their income. The room once used as Bao’s study became a private classroom for Mrs. Bao.

  Bao’s job at the institute turned out to be no “iron rice bowl” either. A new regulation was instituted, and to keep his position as a research fellow, he had to meet an annual quota of publishing more than ten thousand characters of literary criticism. No publisher, however, would consider his proposal for Shanghai Workers’ Poems. Like other companies, publishing houses now had to look to their own balance sheets.

  Perhaps that was why his wife had to teach so many students, his neighbors said. One morning, they awoke to see Bao preparing a duck in the lane sink, plucking the duck hair wi
th a pair of steel tweezers. “She works so hard,” Bao explained with a smile. “I’m going to make an old duck soup for her.” He appeared to be quite handy, adding white tofu and green onion to the soup, the pleasant flavor of which soon came floating out of the common kitchen area of the shikumen house. That night, he served her the soup as well as a platter of duck in oyster sauce that was said to be better than the special at Xinya Restaurant. For all their years together, he simply hadn’t had any opportunity to demonstrate the considerate husband in him.

  Still, things between the couple began to deteriorate. Shortly after the duck dinner, she was heard to say that she was going to dump him once he was dumped by the institute of literature. She told him, “You should have stayed in Ningbo, making your tofu.”

  “He could have committed suicide by ramming his head against tofu,” Four-Eyed Liu observed sarcastically in the evening talk.

  “A couple is like two birds. When disaster comes, they have to fly in different directions,” Old Root said, quoting a line from the Dream of the Red Chamber. “By becoming a poet, he got his position, his room, and his wife, but because of it, he’s losing everything he has got . . .”

  What if Bao had remained at the tofu shop in the Ningbo countryside? That was the question hovering over the lane.

  So when Bao actually started his tofu business at the front of the lane, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. No one bothered to ask him about his job at the institute of literature; suffice it to say that he no longer worked there. There was no point in rubbing the humiliation in. Besides, people like someone who can face adversity by grinning and bearing it.