Years of Red Dust

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “What do you mean?” Aiguo’s daughter-in-law responded. “Gengbao is a Big Buck nowadays. Your ancestors must have burned tall incense for you to have taught such a successful student.”

  If there was any cold comfort for Aiguo of late, it was that he was able to talk about Confucius openly again. But, being retired, he could only give his lecture to his grandson, Xiaoguo, an elementary school student. The array of the mysterious crab shells on the kitchen wall seemed to appeal more to Xiaoguo, who had never tasted a crab before.

  “You have taught me so many things about Confucius. But what does a crab taste like, Grandpa?”

  That was an impossible question for the retired teacher to answer. There is no way to taste a crab without putting it into the mouth. Aiguo adored his grandson, and as Confucius says, “You have to try to do what you should do, even though it’s impossible to do so.” Finally, he managed to demonstrate—to an extent—how delicious a crab could possibly be by concocting the special crab sauce of black vinegar, sugar, ginger slice, and soy sauce.

  “It’s somewhat like that,” Aiguo said, letting Xiaoguo dip a chopstick into the sauce and suck the tip of the chopstick, “but much better, Xiaoguo.”

  Unexpectedly, from there Aiguo began to obsess over finding a way to satisfy his crab craving; all the crab-rich memories had come back to him the moment the sauce on the chopstick tip touched his tongue. He experimented further by stir-frying the egg yolk and white separately in a wok and then mixing them with the special sauce. The result was something redolent of the celebrated fried crab meat at Wangbaohe Restaurant. To his greater surprise, even small shrimp or dried tofu dipped in the special sauce could occasionally produce a similar effect. On those days when he could not find anything in the refrigerator, which was under the surveillance of his daughter-in-law, he would simply dip the chopsticks in and out of the special sauce, sip at his yellow wine, and chew the ginger slices.

  Needless to say, all the experiments merely added to the curiosity of the close-observing Xiaoguo, who kept asking crab-related questions of Aiguo.

  “Living in a poor lane, and dipping in nothing but crab sauce, one can still enjoy life,” Aiguo, seemingly lost in Confucius again, said to his bewildered grandson, “Confucius says something very close to that about one of his best students . . .”

  That afternoon, suffocating from those memories, Aiguo was shuffling within sight of the shikumen house in Red Dust Lane when, even at a distance, he smelled something like trouble. Stepping in, he saw his grandson Xiaoguo washing his hat in the sink in the common kitchen—and to Aiguo’s consternation, a red crab shell nailed on the white wall. So he started questioning Xiaoguo.

  As it turned out, that morning, Xiaoguo passed by a new house with the door open and caught sight of people busily preparing a huge banquet of sacrifice to their ancestors. It must have been a rich family, as there were so many luxurious cars parked in front, and there were also scripture-chanting monks hired from a Buddhist temple. He couldn’t help taking a closer look. To his surprise, he saw a crab scurrying out of the front door and to the sidewalk. It must have escaped from the kitchen in the midst of all of the confusion. So like a streak of lightning, Xiaoguo took off his hat and picked up the vicious-looking crab. Instead of going to school, he ran back home and prepared the special sauce, after a fashion, and boiled the crab. After devouring it without really tasting it, he painted a multicolored face on the crab shell with a Chinese character beneath it—“Swear.” Then he hung the shell like a primitive mask on the wall.

  “How can you skip school for a crab?” Aiguo snapped, and he slapped his grandson in fury. “And a stray crab from others’ offering to their ancestors too! That’s against the Confucian rites. What’s more, you put the crab in your hat. Now, in accordance to the rites, one of Confucius’s students had to straighten up his hat before dying.”

  “I don’t want to die, Grandpa.”

  Aiguo softened as Xiaoguo wept so bitterly, almost incoherently. “Study hard, Xiaoguo. When you enter the college, I’ll buy crabs for you.”

  “What’s the point?” Xiaoguo said, sobbing and smacking his lips. “Both you and Father studied at college, but you can’t afford crabs.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “I’ll be a Big Buck, and then I’ll buy crabs for you. Tons of crabs, I swear. That’s why I pledged on the crab shell.”

  “Confucius says—”

  “Crap!”

  Eating and Drinking Salesman

  (2003)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 2003. Early in the year, the NPC elected Hu Jintao president, replacing Jiang Zemin, who stepped down after ten years in the post. China and Hong Kong were hit by the pneumonia-like SARS: the Party government imposed strict quarantine measures to stop the disease from spreading, and the Chinese people successfully stood the test. In June, the sluice gates on Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower project, were closed to allow the reservoir to fill up. This year, China also launched its first manned spacecraft into orbit with astronaut Yang Liwei.

  Wei has never been a role model in Red Dust Lane, even less so at the beginning of the new century.

  Look at his potbelly, and the answer looks back at you. It’s a product of excessive eating and drinking.

  According to his self-justification, he overindulges because he was born in 1960, in the middle of the so-called three years of natural disasters, which spanned 1959 to 1961. It’s an open secret now that during that period, more than thirty million people died of starvation—not because of any flood or drought, as was claimed in the Party newspapers, but because the Three Red Flags movement launched by Chairman Mao wrecked the national economy. Without getting into the historic details, Wei declared that, as a result of having starved inhumanly in his mother’s belly, he was born with a wolfish appetite. Indeed, he was different, capable of devouring five bowls of rice with a piece of pickled cabbage, all the while dreaming of delicacies for his supersensitive palate. In short, he is a born gourmand and gourmet on top of being a glutton.

  People have long concluded that he was born in the wrong time, and to the wrong family. Both his parents were ordinary workers, and for many years it remained out of the question for him to be able to satisfy his epicurean needs. Eventually, he grew up to be an ordinary worker too.

  Still, Wei managed to enjoy eating and drinking in his way, or in whatever way affordable. On a summer evening, he would pull out a bamboo chair and sit on the doorstep with the chair in front serving as a dining table. He would forget all his worries over a bowl of steaming rice. Slices of pork ears or a couple of chicken feet made it a wonderful evening for him, and a smoked carp head and a bottle of beer, a blissful weekend. When out of money, he could wolf down three bowls of white rice with a pinch of fried rice.

  As for his sealike drinking capacity, that was more of a mystery. His parents didn’t drink, absolutely not during the year of his conception. At five or six months old, Wei had already started licking at the Shaoxin yellow rice wine on the tip of his uncle’s chopstick. Upon graduation from high school, he ranked number one among the drinkers in the lane, even though he was never drunk. He established himself as such during a bet with Fatty Peng. He finished twelve bottles of Qingdao beer in one sitting, winning the bet hands down without belching once or his face changing color.

  He also liked to join in the evening talk of the lane. It was a good audience, even if he was not a good narrator, and he invariably turned to his favorite subject: food and drink. Confucius says, to eat and mate is human nature, so one cannot be too fastidious about food—or talking about food. What he talked about, however, was hardly exciting enough to make a story. After all, he had little real gourmet experience to draw upon. One evening, he suddenly came up with some surprising details about legendary dishes, such as the Beggar’s Chicken or the Imperial Concubine’s Duck. Since he couldn’t have possibly been able to afford them, we r
ealized he had picked up the tidbits from books. He had to assuage his hunger and curiosity by reading.

  Anyway, after eating and drinking for thirty years, he summed up his philosophy with a handful of roasted sunflower seeds.

  “My philosophy is simple: there’re things I don’t do, and things I do. I don’t gamble. Those mahjong players lose everything, including their own pants. I don’t sleep around. Those suckers throw their money into bottomless holes, and sometimes their lives as well. If I have money, I eat and drink. Life is short. Enjoy it the most practical way you can. You dress for others to see, but you eat for yourself to be. Anyway, you do not let your stomach down. Some eat to live, I live to eat. For me, that’s what life is all about.”

  “What a wine sack and a rice bag!” Four-Eyed Liu commented, quoting a Chinese proverb about a man good at nothing except eating and drinking.

  Whatever others might have thought, Wei then met Mei, a young girl who liked him—his potbelly was half its current size at the time—and they got married.

  In due time, they had a daughter named Lei, whose arrival began to bring changes into his life. To start with, people no longer saw any meat or fish on top of his rice. If occasionally he still had beer, it was the cheap watery liquid from a side-street eatery that pumped air bubbles into the barrel.

  The daughter was both like, yet not like, the father. While still a toddler, Lei developed an extraordinary passion for food, but only for non-Chinese food. Born in a different time, with Western supermarkets and fast-food restaurants popping up like mushrooms everywhere in the city, she took an inexplicable liking to McDonald’s. At the age of four, she could gulp down two Big Macs with an extra large French fries for lunch, plus a tall cup of Coca-Cola. She refused to touch rice or steamed buns, the common homely stuff in Red Dust Lane. A Big Mac cost almost a day’s wage for Wei, whose company kept cutting the employee’s pay because of fierce market competition. To do him justice, he was a good father who never grumbled about the expense of raising Lei, which was ever-increasing as she grew into a plump teenager with engaging dimples.

  But Mei couldn’t help grumbling. After all those years in the factory, Wei was still a worker at the lowest level, making one third less than others who had started working about the same time. Nevertheless, Wei considered himself lucky: the director of the factory was Dapei, who, having lived in the neighborhood for quite a few years, was an elementary schoolmate of Wei’s. Otherwise, Wei could have been laid off long ago.

  “All you know how to do is to eat and drink,” Mei complained bitterly out in the lane, “with the mountain turning barren and the river running dry. And I have the two of you on my hands—like father, like daughter.”

  According to Karl Marx, the superstructure is dependent on the economic basis. A wife who displays the virtue of making no complaint may well be construed as part of the superstructure, so there was nothing Wei could do about it. But things went from bad to worse. A considerable number of state-run companies slipped to the brink of bankruptcy. People had to find new jobs elsewhere. Wei, with no special skills or education on his resume, worried like an ant crawling around a hot wok on the fire.

  Then, to the surprise of the lane, Wei managed to obtain a new position at the factory—as a salesman. All of a sudden, we began to see him leave the house in a three-piece suit tailored for his job, his moussed hair shining, and then come back home in a taxi at the end of the day, his face red like General Guan in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

  Wei had never worked as a salesman before, and everyone was curious about his qualifications. He might be talkative amidst his neighbors, but he was far from persuasive in public. One evening, we caught Wei stepping out of a taxi smelling of liquor, and we asked him.

  “Well, it is a story you wouldn’t have imagined,” Wei started, loosening his floral silk tie as he finished a chunk of dark chocolate. “In the economic reform, our state-run factory has been losing ground to those private-run ones. Those entrepreneurs are capable of anything. So Dapei decided that we had to double our PR effort to increase sales.”

  “What’s so special about PR?” Four-Eyed Liu said, imitating a character in a movie. “‘Have a cigarette, I insist. I’ll have one of yours later. Raise your glass and forget about the rules. Once the chopsticks start dipping into the dishes, everything’s discussable—on the table and under it, too.’ ”

  “That movie must have been made some time ago,” Wei said with a broad grin. “Or the director doesn’t know anything about doing business today. Now, the ‘feast of socialist business expense’ might have appealed to some customers several years ago, but soon they began to complain about it—too much to eat and drink.”

  “What else?” Four-Eyed Liu went on doggedly. “PR girls, karaoke girls, three-accompaniment girls—whatever names you want to call them? So you must be arranging for these girls, ‘Come to the private room, treat my customer from head to foot, collect your money afterwards.’ ”

  “That’s something you don’t understand. PR girls aren’t like tiger-bone plasters, one size fits all. Some of our customers are sophisticated Big Bugs and Big Bucks, self-conscious about their public images. If they want girls, they can easily arrange for them without having a third party in the middle.”

  “What the hell do you do then, Wei?”

  “I eat and drink with them.”

  “That’s what I have just said—nothing but chicken, duck, fish, and meat in your potbelly.”

  “No, there are more things in heaven and earth than in your imagination in Red Dust Lane. Really, for me it started in a most unexpected way. Our factory had to invite a crucial customer to dinner. The sales manager was worried sick. Dapei thought it was necessary to have someone presentable at the table, someone knowledgeable about eating and drinking. So he thought of me. You make fun of my big belly, but for a middle-aged man like me, it’s not only symbolic of success, but full of expertise too. While it is important to order an expensive dinner, that’s only the first step. Far more important is to convince the customers that they are special to you, to make them eat and drink in a way they have never experienced before. Only then can the business connection be developed. For such a banquet, snakes or cats are way too common, so you have to choose an Australian wild cat or an African poisonous snake. Believe it or not, last week I arranged an insect feast that a customer loved. It was a meal of fried cicada skins and silkworm cocoons, among other things. You have to be really creative. A tiny dish of wild shepherd’s purse blossom can make a world of difference in the midst of all the meat and fish. And a Tang dynasty anecdote about the chef’s special will help a lot too. But first and foremost, you yourself have to eat and drink, talking and entertaining from the beginning to the end.”

  “It’s a job made for you,” Old Root commented, raising his teacup like he was proposing a toast. “As Li Bai said in one of his poems, a man is born into the world with talents to be discovered and used.”

  “Let me tell you something about drinking as a salesman.” Wei appeared to be in no hurry to finish, taking a sip from Old Root’s teacup. “It’s not as simple as raising your cup. Customers, especially those from the Northern provinces, take a hell of a lot of pride in their drinking. The more cups, the more guts. They see it as a huge loss of face if you refuse to drink. It’s a time-honored tradition, you know. It’s proper and right for Chinese people at the dinner table to coax or coerce each other into their cups. Dapei’s face flushes like a coxswain with the first cup, and his legs wobble like a limp goose with the second. So it’s up to me to sit there, drinking like an ox, playing huaquan—the hand game—for wine. You know huaquan, don’t you? Two, two good brothers. Four, fortune for four seasons. You drain the cup if you lose. More often than not, I have to lose, bottom up, so the customers will be happy. Guess how I can drink like that? I eat a lot beforehand. So the alcohol is absorbed into the food in my stomach. When the customers chuckle in their cups, and the connection is established, the contrac
t becomes something like a small dish.”

  Luck had truly fallen into Wei’s lap. His specialties were finally appreciated and, more importantly, paid for too. We were all happy for him.

  Mei did not appear to be too happy, though, at least not as much as we supposed she would be. “It’s a hell of a job,” she said, eating alone in the lane. “He comes back so late every night, and totally beaten, like a pile of dog dung.”

  We were puzzled. It might be common for wives to complain about their husbands coming home late. It could be an understandable concern, especially if the husband was a successful entrepreneur, with all the young pretty girls available in “the socialist business world of China’s characteristics.” But Mei did not have to worry about Wei, who was nothing but a salesman whose only value lay in eating and drinking—he was big-bellied but empty-pocketed. No girl could possibly fall for him. So she was asked for an explanation.

  “I would rather have him here holding a bowl of watery rice in the lane—a simple meal with us, without all the pressure.”

  But her explanation sounded not persuasive. It wasn’t easy to find a job, let alone such a mouthwatering one. She was nagging too much.

  There were many things happening in Red Dust Lane. Wei’s fantastic job, eating and drinking as a salesman, would not have made a story but for what happened one night several months later.

  It was a September night, shortly after two A.M., and an ambulance came wailing into the lane. Wei was then seen being carried out of his home on a stretcher. His wife and daughter followed them to the lane entrance, weeping.