by Ma Jian
Over the years, Ma Daode’s eyes have narrowed and his nose and mouth have broadened, but when he opens his eyes wide, his pupils sparkle like glass beads, making him look youthful and full of life. His first and oldest mistress, a woman called Li Wei, likes to push his lids further apart with her fingers and tell him to look her straight in the eye.
WHAT ARE YOU UP TO? ARE YOU IN THE OFFICE? The icon after this message is of a cartoon girl with hennaed hair.
GETTING READY FOR AN IMPORTANT MEETING, Ma Daode types back on his Three Star phone, which has a larger screen than the other two in his drawer.
In reply he receives: I’M FEELING HORNY. COME AND GIVE ME SOME … followed by a cartoon emoji of a blonde woman with large breasts juddering up and down.
RUB YOURSELF THEN, he types, working out at last that the sender of these texts is an estate agent called Wendi. When she wears her tight, pale grey suit she looks like the prim secretaries in Japanese adult videos. Earlier this month, Ma Daode included her in his list of top twelve mistresses, whom he names the Twelve Golden Hairpins after the beautiful maidens in the Qing Dynasty novel, Dream of the Red Chamber.
IF ONLY YOU COULD COME TO MY OFFICE AND KISS ME … After Director Ma reads this message, he draws a deep breath into his lungs and happily contemplates the evening delights that await him. Tonight he will choose her to be his companion. His other phone buzzes. GOOD AFTERNOON DIRECTOR MA. THIS JUST APPEARED IN THE COMMENT SECTION OF THE CHINA DREAM WEBSITE: ‘IN THE MORNING MEETING, THEY SNORE; AT LUNCH, THEY BELCH; IN THE AFTERNOON, THEY YAWN; DURING OVERTIME, THEY GAMBLE; IN THE EVENING, THEY SLEEP WITH WHORES; AT NIGHT, THEY GO HOME AND BEAT UP THEIR WIVES …’ SEEMS LIKE A DIG AT CORRUPT OFFICIALS. SHOULD I DELETE IT? PLEASE ADVISE.
‘A cup of Guanyin tea, Director?’ asks his secretary, Hu. ‘You’ll need to set off shortly.’ When Hu removes his glasses, his eyes look even more glazed and motionless. The China Dream Bureau has convened a Party meeting at two o’clock entitled ‘China Dream Goes Global’. It will be held in the Round Office on the ground floor, and Mayor Chen and Propaganda Chief Ding will attend.
‘No, get me some coffee,’ Director Ma replies. He hates coffee, but hopes that if he drinks some now, it might help clear his mind. Besides, he wants to acquire the taste for it, as his oldest mistress Li Wei and youngest mistress Changyan are both coffee addicts and often make fun of his outmoded preference for tea. He first met Li Wei ten years ago, in a coffee bar she had opened in the former general post office. After the post office was demolished, she moved the cafe to the new commercial district, then negotiated a lease to manage the Drum Tower, a thirty-metre-high building built in the Yuan Dynasty that recently gained the status of protected monument. She renovated the red-brick exterior, crenellated stone balcony and glazed roof, and repaired the vast drum housed at the top which used to be struck at sunset to announce the end of the day. When the restoration was complete, she opened the tower to the public. For 10 yuan, visitors can climb the steep wooden stairs to the balcony, touch the ancient drum and enjoy the panoramic view of the city. In recognition of her enterprising spirit and service to the community, she has been selected to join the Municipal People’s Congress.
As Director Ma inhales the steam rising from his coffee, he sees in his mind’s eye streets ablaze with red banners and slogans … Everything is red – even the paper debris of exploded firecrackers scattered over the ground. For a second, all I saw was a red so deep it was almost black. Clutching a pamphlet announcing that Chairman Mao would greet Red Guards at a mass rally in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square the next day, I slung a water bottle over my back and sneaked off to the station hoping to catch the next train to the capital, but my mother ran after me and sent me home. As I walked down Drum Tower Street, I saw elderly men and women smashing rocks against the ground under the steely gaze of teenage Red Guards. Among the sweat-drenched faces caked in dust, I saw my father looking up at me. Then I saw him, head bowed, glance up at me again as I walked past. His face was so filthy it looked as though he had just been dragged out from the earth. Only where the sweat trickled down could I see the colour of his bare skin … Although Ma Daode hates being pulled back to the past in this way, some small details that return to him leave an aftertaste as bitter-sweet as the five-spiced broad beans he likes to munch before dinner.
Director Ma grabs the document folder from his desk and follows Hu out of the door. He hears the vast building whir into action: shoes shuffling along marble floors as staff pour in from the streets outside, jostle and collide in the grand lobby and make their way to offices and meeting rooms. He sees his mistress Yuyu walk past. When she clitter-clatters past his office door in her high-heeled shoes, she always leans back to check if he’s in, flashes him a flirtatious smile, then swirls round again and disappears.
In the lift down to the lobby, he has to endure Song Bin’s tedious chatter. ‘You must come and see the rehearsals of our new ballet, The Qingfeng Dumpling Store. It’s a re-enactment of President Xi’s visit to the dumpling eatery in Beijing. Remember – it was in all the papers? He queued up himself, ordered six steamed dumplings and ate them at a communal table. A real man of the people! The store has been packed every day since, with crowds desperate to taste the “Xi dumplings”. New branches are opening all over the capital. So the ballet’s bound to be a hit. Better than anything your China Dream Bureau will come up with, that’s for sure!’
Song Bin still lives round the corner from Ma Daode. When their class of fifteen-year-olds went to help farmers harvest peanuts during the summer half term of 1966, he and Song Bin shared the same bed and blanket. During their two-week absence, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Claiming that revisionist forces had infiltrated the Party and were about to derail the dictatorship of the proletariat, he urged the nation’s youth to purge bourgeois elements from politics, society and culture, and ‘destroy the old world so that the new world can be born’. By the time Ma Daode’s class returned, the older students had renamed their technical school Red Sun Secondary School and were dragging teachers to public struggle sessions to condemn them as ‘stinking intellectuals’. Eager to join the movement, Song Bin and Ma Daode founded the Fear Neither Heaven Nor Earth Combat Team in their classroom with a friend nicknamed Cross-eyed Chun. As Chun came from a ‘poor peasant’ background, he was naturally elected leader. The three of them made Teacher Wu and Teacher Huang wear each other’s skirts on their heads, then paraded them half-naked around the school. The following month, they turned on Ma Daode’s father, Ma Lei, hauled him up before a crowd and branded him an unreformed Rightist, a member of the ‘five black categories’ of people whom Mao considered enemies of the revolution.
In August, inspired by groups of self-proclaimed Red Guards that had sprung up in Beijing universities vowing to enforce Mao’s every instruction, the Fear Neither Heaven Nor Earth Combat Team joined other secondary-school children from around the county to form the Red Guard Regiment in Defence of Mao Zedong Thought. But when the class crimes of his parents were fully exposed, Ma Daode was stripped of his red armbands and expelled. In October, the regiment united with local factory workers to form a larger Red Guard battalion named the Million Bold Warriors. Students and workers whose class backgrounds excluded them from membership promptly formed a rival faction called East is Red, claiming that they were the true defenders of Mao Zedong Thought and that the Million Bold Warriors were merely privileged, reactionary supporters of the status quo. As soon as he was accepted into their ranks, Ma Daode trekked to his school, now occupied by the Million Bold Warriors, to warn Song Bin and a stocky little friend called Yao Jian that East is Red was planning an attack the following day. He hoped this information would convince them to switch sides, but when he arrived at the school and saw four heavy machine guns set up below a huge MILLION BOLD WARRIORS banner, and rifle muzzles jutting out from above sandbags in every window, he knew there was no chance they would defect. He wandered quietly through the school buildin
g. Yao Jian had been placed in charge of daggers and spears, and his square, muscular face was already suffused with murderous zeal. The classrooms that had remained empty since June were now filled with the sleeping bodies of students who had travelled from outlying counties to offer support. Baskets of hot dumplings were stacked on the desks, ready for them to eat when they woke up. East is Red members were never given hot meals, and only got to touch one of the two battered Japanese rifles when it was their turn to stand guard. They were no match for the Million Bold Warriors.
Although Ma Daode and Song Bin both survived the Cultural Revolution, they didn’t speak to each other again for decades. Last year, however, when the Ziyang Municipal Party Committee and municipal government moved into this new headquarters together, they began to bump into each other and finally said hello. Then at a school reunion, they had a chat over a few beers. Now, Song Bin’s wife spends all day playing mah-jong with Ma Daode’s wife and, sticking to her like a limpet, even goes with her to the park every evening to practise fan dancing.
When the lift reaches the ground floor, Ma Daode pushes past Song Bin and strides out, his fingers impatiently tapping the mobile phone in his pocket.
The Round Office smells of citrus-scented cleaning fluid. The front half of this massive headquarters is a replica of the White House in Washington DC while the back half is a reproduction of the imperial Gate of Heavenly Peace which stands at the north end of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. It is as though each of the original iconic buildings has been sliced in two and stuck back to back. The White House section accommodates the municipal government and the Gate of Heavenly Peace houses the Municipal Party Committee, but the two are interconnected. Locals have dubbed the building ‘White Heaven’. Director Ma has never visited the real White House in America, but has seen photographs online of various presidents seated in the Oval Office, and considers his own office on the fifth floor to be no less impressive. And although, at forty-two square metres, it is ten square metres smaller than Mayor Chen’s office on the sixth floor, from the window he can see all the way to the water tower of the Industrial Park near Yaobang Village, where at seventeen he was banished for re-education through labour, and where nine years before that, his family lived for six months after his father was purged from high office.
Propaganda Chief Ding is chairing today’s Party meeting. Despite the heat, he is wearing a tightly knotted grey tie like the one President Xi Jinping wore on television recently. He rises to address the eight department leaders seated at the long conference table covered in dark blue cloth, and the two hundred or so Party members in the rows behind. Under his able leadership, incidents of social unrest, including recent protests against forced demolitions, have been spun into positive news stories or suppressed completely, and no bad news from the province has reached the ears of Beijing. With his advanced diploma from the Central Communist Party School, he is destined for promotion to provincial leadership. Mayor Chen, who is seated beside him, used to head the Provincial Party Committee, but was demoted to Ziyang last year by the Beijing authorities after two villagers travelled to the capital to lodge complaints against corrupt local officials. ‘China Dream Goes Global’ is the most high-profile campaign he has overseen since taking up his new position.
Chief Ding prepares to read out Document Number Nine, issued by the General Office of China’s Communist Party, pointing out first that it is a confidential, internal communiqué for Party members only, and that no one should record him or take notes. The document bans from television, print and online media any mention of universal values, civil society, civil rights or judicial independence. ‘And freedom of the press, of course,’ Chief Ding stresses, discreetly adjusting his black toupee. ‘These subversive, Western concepts are used by foreigners to undermine our socialist system. From now on, Document Nine will guide our management of the ideological realm.’ His eyes widening with fervour, he adds: ‘Tonight, each department must assign staff to eliminate these dangerous ideas from our websites.’
Director Ma thinks how, once his China Dream Device is manufactured, such meetings will become unnecessary: just one click of a button and government directives will be transferred wirelessly into the brains of every Party member in the country. His proposal to set up a China Dream Research Centre in Yaobang Industrial Park to develop the device is lying on his desk. He pulls out his vibrating phone and, shielding the screen with his hand, reads a new message: THE WINE IS POURED, OUR MINDS ARE AT PEACE. IN THE CLOUDS, WE LIVE IN A DRUNKEN HAZE. IF YOU LONG TO TRAVEL, IF YOU YEARN FOR HAPPINESS, DON’T ENVY THE IMMORTALS, ENVY US … With a pained smirk, he returns the phone to his pocket, then scans the Party members and sees his mistress Yuyu, the captivating author of this message, standing out from the dull ranks of men like a cherry on a cake.
‘This is the Chinese Century!’ continues Chief Ding, jabbing the document with his finger. ‘Before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, we suffered a hundred years of humiliation: from the burning of the Summer Palace to the Rape of Nanjing we were battered, bullied and slaughtered by foreign imperialists. Then Chairman Mao seized power and proclaimed that the Chinese people had stood up. Now, after sixty years of Communist rule, the Chinese people have raced ahead. Xi Jinping’s dream is that by the 2021 centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, our society will be moderately prosperous, and that by the 2049 centenary of our Republic, our economy will have overtaken America’s and China will regain its central place on the world stage. During this crucial, transitional period, the ruling party of China must become the ruling party of humanity. Only then will President Xi Jinping’s dream of national resurgence be realised. Only then will his China Dream go global. Only then will the Chinese people be able to go out into the world, take control and achieve the great unification of mankind …’
‘So you want to wage a bloody Third World War now, do you?’ Director Ma mumbles. ‘Hitler only got as far east as Russia, but you want to take over the globe! Isn’t picking fights with little Japan enough for you?’ He resents the fact that Chief Ding has risen from a modest university post to such high political rank, and regrets giving him his first government job in the County Propaganda Department he once headed. When Ziyang was promoted from a county town to a municipal city, Ding jumped three ranks in one go to become a major leader of the Municipal Party Committee. Mayor Chen is seated between Ding and Director Ma. He is a plump, affable man with lightly permed hair. His breath smells of tobacco and Coca-Cola. Director Ma likes him. Thanks to connections which he made while securing a Master’s in America, Ziyang is now twinned with San Diego.
Chief Ding is still speaking: ‘If we meld traditional Chinese values with Marxist ideology, the China Dream will be embraced by every nation. Then the world unity so desired by Genghis Khan will be accomplished by our generation of Party leaders. The United Nations will move their general headquarters to Beijing and we will establish communism throughout the world …’ Realising he has spoken for too long, he takes a sip of water and says: ‘Now, let’s ask Director Ma to discuss the China Dream projects in more detail.’ He leans back into his chair and the cool breeze from the air conditioner wafts up to his shoulders, lifting the hairs at the back of his toupee.
Director Ma smiles at Chief Ding, Mayor Chen, and at the rows of heads behind them, and concedes that coffee is indeed better at clearing the mind than green tea. ‘I have sixteen projects here, proposed by various districts of Ziyang,’ he begins. ‘First, let’s discuss the “Golden Anniversary Dream” that Peace District is organising. Fifty elderly couples have already signed up. The grand ceremony will be held at Yaobang Industrial Park. Foreign businessmen based there are keen to sponsor the event, as long as Mayor Chen cuts the ribbon. I suggest we should aim to get a hundred couples, and schedule the ceremony to coincide with our first of October National Day celebrations. The title will be: “Golden Anniversary Dream, colon, China Dream”.’
‘Great idea! Other cities have had mass wedding
s, but I’ve never heard of a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration before. I’d be happy to cut the ribbon.’ Mayor Chen smiles and strokes his phone with his pale, plump hand.
‘Stay off the booze this time, or you’ll end up snoring again,’ quips Chief Ding, nodding in his customary way. A wave of chuckles ripples through the rows of Party members.
‘Always teasing me, aren’t you?’ Mayor Chen smiles. Last week, at the opening ceremony of Yaobang Industrial Park’s Garden Square, he drank so much rice wine he fell asleep on the podium while he was waiting to give his speech.
‘You really think we can find fifty more couples in this city who have been married for fifty years?’ asks Commander Zhao of the Demolition Bureau from his seat in the front row. When the general post office was being torn down, Director Ma begged him to save it, but he wouldn’t change his mind.
‘There are always lots of old people dancing in the riverside park every evening,’ replies Director Ma. ‘If we can’t find enough there, we can rope some in from neighbouring counties.’ In a flash he sees the high perimeter wall of his old secondary school … If I climbed to the top and crawled along to the right, I could see the pond in the school’s forecourt with the miniature rockery mountain in the centre. When we pushed Teacher Li into the pond during a struggle session, the pink water lilies were stained black by the ink we had poured over her head … Afraid that his adolescent self is resurfacing again, Director Ma quickly swallows a sip of water and focuses on the black characters printed on the sheet of paper on his lap.
‘What about all the widows and widowers? Won’t be much fun for them having to watch all the old couples stroll past hand in hand while their own spouses are lying dead in their graves.’ The chair of the Women’s Division has a thick rural accent. She used to work as a gynaecologist for the county Family Planning Office, and was awarded the title of Advanced Worker for performing sixty-four abortions in one day.