China Dream

by Ma Jian

  ‘All right, then. And there are a few episodes from this year I’d like to forget as well.’ Ma Daode feels his shirt collar sticking to his neck.

  ‘Girlfriend trouble?’ Master Wang asks, wiggling his bare toes. ‘That’s easy to sort out. I’ll just invite your mistresses here and write a spell that will remove you from their minds for ever.’

  ‘What a relief that would be!’ Director Ma throws his head right back and stares up at the ceiling, mouth ajar, just the way he does in the evenings after he has drunk too much. His mistress Li Wei loves it when he sits like that: she thinks it makes him look sad and lost. After he slept with her for the first time, he wrote her a solemn promise, swearing on the flag of the Chinese Communist Party that the following year he would divorce his wife and marry her. But he knows that ten years later, she is still waiting for him to honour the pledge.

  Director Ma’s phone vibrates again. He presses it to his ear and hears a voice whisper: ‘Would you like another service from me, Director Ma?’ He immediately hangs up. ‘I don’t believe it!” he says to Master Wang. ‘That was a call I got ten years ago, when I was lying in a Shenzhen hotel room after a long conference. I really am being haunted by the spirits of the dead!’ He feels as though a pair of hands is tightening around his throat.

  ‘Men and ghosts are intricately entwined. That woman on the phone died two days ago. She just wanted to pay you a visit.’ Master Wang falls into silent reverie and slowly passes the beads of his rosary through his fingers. ‘Come back here tomorrow evening,’ he says at last. ‘I will go to the Bridge of Helplessness and get the recipe from Old Lady Dream. As soon as she hands it to me, it will appear to you on a piece of spirit paper that will vanish the moment you read it.’

  ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ Director Ma says, nodding appreciatively. He feels ghostly fingers smothering his face now, and his tongue grow stiff and numb.

  After another visit to Master Wang’s house the following evening, Ma Daode walks home, reciting Old Lady Dream’s recipe into his phone for the third time. Once he’s back in his apartment, he transcribes the three recordings, deletes any repetitions and comes up with what he hopes to be the correct recipe:

  1 DROP MOTHER’S MENSTRUAL BLOOD

  2 DROPS FATHER’S TEARS

  1 BITTER GOURD

  1 TEASPOON RICE VINEGAR

  1 PINCH SEA SALT

  2 DATES

  1 DASH YIN ESSENCE

  1 DASH YANG ESSENCE

  2 GHOST SOULS

  METHOD:

  WHEN THE MOON REACHES ITS APEX IN THE NIGHT SKY, TURN OFF THE LIGHTS, EMPTY THE INGREDIENTS INTO A PAN AND SIMMER GENTLY UNTIL THE FIFTH WATCH. IMBIBE IN THE MORNING FOR THREE CONSECUTIVE DAYS.

  The original recipe appeared to him on a thin piece of paper the size of a playing card. Ma Daode was not able to decipher the netherworld script, so Master Wang read it out to him, and as soon as he came to the end, the paper disappeared in a ball of blue flames.

  Ma Daode scratches his head. Were there not two chillies as well? He replays the first recording, then the second. It is only on the third that chillies are mentioned, but for some reason the voice he hears belongs not to him but to his father. Ma Daode knows it will be difficult to source all the ingredients. Perhaps I can replace my mother’s menstrual blood with my wife’s? No – she has already gone through the menopause. And my father’s tears? Maybe I can use my own instead. But where can I find ghost souls, and how could I add them to the soup? This will be more difficult than developing a microchip that can upload the China Dream into the human brain.

  Daunted by the task, Ma Daode takes two swigs from a bottle of vintage Xijiu and listens to the fridge huffing noisily like a runner panting for breath. It’s almost nine o’clock. Why is Juan not back from her fan dancing yet? He peeps into the sitting room to see if she’s there, then goes to his office. Since he filled it with bookshelves, he has rarely ventured inside. He ordered the books online, put them straight on the shelves and hasn’t taken one down since. ‘One key opens a thousand locks. Armed with Mao Zedong Thought, I will grip my gun for eternity …’ Ma Daode tries to stop himself singing out loud the song playing in his mind. He is fed up of his adolescent self intruding on his thoughts. It has caused him the loss of his chauffeur-driven car and the suspension from his job. If I don’t destroy my past self, I will lose everything.

  He takes out his phone, dials a number and says: ‘Sorry to be calling you so late, Master Wang, it’s just I’ve studied the recipe again. From what I can tell, the soup is a harmonious combination of sweet, sour, hot and bitter. When it is imbibed, all the joys and sorrows of life will flood into the body with such force that every trace of the past will be flushed out. Am I right? My mother’s menstrual blood would help keep memories of familial love, I presume, and my father’s tears would remind me what gender I am. But my parents are dead, so how will I find those ingredients? And as for the two ghost souls – where on earth can I get hold of those? Without them, though, I’m afraid the soup will be no better than a medicinal potion, with no power to help me start my life anew. Have I understood everything correctly? And what can I use instead of my parents’ blood and tears?’

  Although annoyed to be disturbed so late at night, Master Wang replies patiently: ‘You’ve examined the recipe in great depth, Director Ma, and have grasped the essentials. I cannot change Old Lady Dream’s recipe, I’m afraid, but feel free to make some tweaks of your own. Why not use your parents’ ashes instead of their blood and tears?’

  ‘Great idea! Yes – I’ll try that,’ says Ma Daode, his heart beating faster. ‘And the ghost souls?’

  ‘Yes, those will be harder to find. Gathering ghost souls can be deadly dangerous. I tell you what, I’ll give you a recipe another client used and you can adjust the proportions to suit your needs. I must go now. We’ll talk later.’ At this, Master Wang hangs up.

  Ma Daode flies into a rage. Who do you think you are? he mutters internally with a cold sneer. One word from me, and you’ll rot in jail for the rest of your life. What kind of Master are you, anyway, if you don’t know where to find a ghost soul? And if I knew where my parents’ ashes were, I wouldn’t have come to you in the first place. You want more money? Fine. Here’s another 100,000 yuan. Let’s see if you refuse to help me now! He remembers a few years ago paying some men to dig up the ground near the ancient willow tree. They unearthed many bones, but didn’t find a pair of skeletons lying side by side. He told the men to look out for a red plastic cover, as his sister had placed their parents’ copy of the Little Red Book on the plywood coffin before shovelling the earth on top. In the end, they found two skeletons quite close to each other beside the red plastic cover of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, but when Ma Daode saw the long hair attached to the female skull and the Red Guard military belt looped around the male spine, he knew that they were not his parents. He paid the men 10,000 yuan each and told them to return the bones to their grave.

  How many battles did I fight in? Why wasn’t I shot and buried like all those other kids? I remember the day we tried to rescue a rebel faction that had been surrounded in the air-compressor plant – the one below Wolf Tooth Mountain that is now a retirement home for corrupt officials. The Million Bold Warriors had set up two heavy machine guns on a concrete water tank. Our only weapons were staves and rods. Within minutes, the valley was filled with corpses and the piercing cries of the wounded. A boy called Sun Liang who was running by my side got hit in the chest. He reached for my hand, shuddered, then dropped down dead.

  Ma Daode opens a drawer and takes out a print of the family photograph his sister emailed to him. Through the magnifying glass he can see that his mother is smiling, although he can’t remember her ever smiling in real life. Her eyebrows look strange as well. He remembers them being arched like his father’s, but in this photograph they are straight. Her curly hair is just how he remembers it, though. She often had her hair in rollers when she made rice congee for breakfast, and wou
ld take them out and leave them on the windowsill before she went off to work. Father’s face looks as broad as I remember it. What a pity he shaved that morning – he looks like me when I was County Propaganda Chief. And that fountain pen clipped to his shirt pocket – I remember him saying he stole it from a British prisoner-of-war in Korea. It broke after a couple of years, but he still liked to keep it on his pocket. My sister is standing next to my mother. On our way to the photographer’s studio, I stepped in a puddle and splashed water onto her skirt. The photographer wiped it off and put a potted plant in front of us to hide our muddy shoes.

  Ma Daode shakes his head. How tall were my parents? How long would their skeletons be? If I set up a China Dream Research Centre in Garden Square, I’d be able to dig up the ground and search for their bones again. He stares into his father’s eyes and says: ‘I remember the milk ice lolly you bought me once when we were waiting for a bus. How delicious it was!’ Then he looks at his mother more closely through the magnifying glass and sees the wrinkle running from her mouth to her chin, the two small dots of her nostrils and even the faint creases of her upper eyelids. The comment he hated most as a child was: ‘Your eyes are just like your mother’s.’ But as he looks at her now, face to face, he is happy that they share a resemblance. ‘I am your son,’ he tells her. ‘I wish you hadn’t left this world so soon. I miss you. When my hands were cold you used to press them against your stomach to warm them up …’

  A tear falls from his eye and lands on her face. She reaches up from the photograph, strokes his cheek and says: ‘What a good son you are. Don’t worry, it won’t be hard to find us. I’ll put out a bone to mark the spot. Just dig into the earth beneath and pull us out. And ask your sister to bring us two pairs of socks. They’re inside the chest you sit on at mealtimes. Our feet get so cold at night.’

  ‘Of course, I will do as you ask,’ he replies. ‘I don’t want to forget you or Father. I just want to erase all the crimes I committed and the atrocities I witnessed. It made me so sad the other day to see all those people celebrating their parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary.’

  ‘Your father doesn’t blame you. He knows you were just—’

  Ma Daode’s phone vibrates. It’s a message from Master Wang: 1 SLICE GINGER, SUCKED BY A CORPSE; 9 TEASPOONS BLOOD FROM 9 BLACK CATS; 8 TEARS FROM YOUR OWN EYES; 14 DROPS YELLOW SPRING WATER; 1 SPRIG GREEN CORAL; 1 WOLF HEART … Before he reaches the end, Director Ma glances up and sees that his mother has returned to the photograph. She wants her old socks? How could she think we’d keep those filthy rags? Still, I wish I didn’t have to lose my last memories of her. If only I could get rid of selected episodes. The first one I’d delete would be my fight with Yao Jian. Actually, that fight wasn’t just between me and him. A factory worker joined in too. When he raised his hoe to strike me, I shouted: ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’, assuming I was about to die, but he lost his balance and fell at my feet. I also want to erase the time I told my classmates that my father owned an English fountain pen, and we hauled him up in front of a crowd and I yelled at him: ‘Confess your crimes to Chairman Mao!’ Yes, those dreadful memories must go … This new recipe Master Wang has texted me – I’ll need to travel to the netherworld to fetch Yellow Spring water, but the rest of the ingredients should be easy to find.

  Ma Daode opens the search engine on his phone and types BLACK CAT. He learns that the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote a short story called ‘The Black Cat’, and that ACCORDING TO CHINESE MYTHOLOGY, BLACK CATS WARD OFF EVIL. KEEP A BLACK CAT BY YOUR FRONT DOOR, AND YOU, YOUR SONS AND GRANDSONS WILL NEVER COME TO HARM. So black cats banish evil spirits? With nine drops of their blood, I’ll be able to fetch water from the netherworld without coming to harm. I must buy nine black cats immediately.

  But after scrutinising the revised recipe again, he decides the female ‘yin’ elements are too strong, so he deletes the cat blood and replaces the green coral with red. That should do it. Now all he needs is water from the Yellow Springs. He leans back in his leather chair, gazes at the photograph on his desk and wonders what would happen if, after drinking his Old Lady Dream’s Broth, he forgets who he is. He looks at himself in the photograph, standing in front of his mother in a white vest and shorts, and feels a tide of love wash over him. I’ll bore wells into the ground to extract Yellow Spring water, like companies that drill for oil. Then I’ll set up a China Dream Pharmaceutical Plant to manufacture Old Lady Dream’s Broth, and my name will go down in history. I’ll serve the first batch to a volunteer and see what happens, then others can decide how much to drink, depending on how much they want to forget. I’ll make Yuyu drink the first bowl. She’s plotting my downfall, I’m sure.

  Director Ma pulls out his Fragrant Beauties Register in which he has written all the names of the women he has slept with, and begins to draw up a list of guinea pigs for his Old Lady Dream’s Broth. But the names on the page become obscured suddenly by an image of Pan Hua standing in a street of Ziyang, silhouetted against a big character poster … No, she wasn’t standing outside. It was raining that day, so all the posters had been washed off and were soaking in puddles on the pavements. Only in the Drum Tower stairwell were posters still stuck to the walls. Yes, it was inside the Tower that I saw her silhouette. Her gaze swept down my body like a bolt of lightning, arousing me so deeply I couldn’t move.

  When Ma Daode arrived in Yaobang Village as a sent-down youth, he was afraid to visit the wild grove in case he was accused of not drawing a clear line between himself and his Rightist parents. It was not until a year later, when the military took control and quelled the violent struggle for good, that he and his sister went to look for their grave. But by then so many other graves had been dug there, it was impossible to locate it. In 1976, after Mao had died and the Cultural Revolution came to an end, many families returned to the wild grove, unearthed their relatives’ skeletons, cremated them and took the ashes home. That was when Pan Hua’s bones were removed. In the 1990s, the government imposed a ban on ground burials, and the grove was used again as a secret cemetery by families wanting to avoid the cost of mandatory state cremations. When the Yaobang Industrial Park was being built in 2006, Ma Daode often visited the construction site with the Hong Kong investors, and was always conscious that he was treading on his parents’ lost bones.

  The line of a song suddenly enters his mind: ‘The Party is as dear to me as my own mother. My mother gave birth to my body, but the Party’s glory lights up my heart.’ Sometimes the fragments from the past that return to my mind are trivial and mundane. But this song holds a special significance to Juan and me. During the first few months in Yaobang, I often heard her sing: ‘The Party’s glory lights up my heart.’ Then one night, I turned off the lights and whispered in her ear: ‘I am the Party, so watch my glory light up your heart,’ and then we kissed and she screeched with joy.

  That bloody Golden Anniversary Dream! Remembering how he disgraced himself on the podium that day with his deranged ramblings, he slams his cup of tea onto the side table, smashing it to pieces that scatter over the crate of books below. He remembers smashing a bowl in the same way, many years ago, when he glared angrily at his father and shouted: ‘All you do every day is write, write, write! You’ve been denounced for it countless times, but you still won’t stop. And because of your stupid stubbornness, I’ve been kicked out of the Red Guards!’

  Director Ma flicks through the notebooks he has filled with records of his illicit affairs. There is a book for each year up until he bought his first mobile phone. He finds a copy of the contract he drew up with Yuyu, in which he confessed to their relationship and pledged to pay her 100,000 yuan for her lost virginity, which she would use to fund her studies abroad. Last month, she resigned from her job and had an abortion, as agreed in the contract. Director Ma stares wistfully at their red thumbprints that lie nestled together at the bottom of the page like two tiny Easter eggs.

  Why is this young generation never satisfied? Only people of my age,
who grew up with nothing, know how to be content with their lot. I remember on the way to the village school one morning, when my family was living in Yaobang during the Great Famine, I tricked a little girl into giving me her last baked goose dropping. I wanted to save it for my mother, but on my way home that afternoon, I was so starving I ate it myself. It tasted like dried fish. I’d wanted my mother to try it, because she had told me that before she married she had worked for an English family and had acquired a taste for pungent-smelling Western food. Sometimes, when she was making new soles for our shoes, she’d bring out old magazines to use for the patterns, and we’d glimpse photographs of foreign gardens and fountains and blonde women in floral dresses. She told us she had once knitted a jumper for young Henry. After the Red Guards discovered she had worked for a foreign family, they dragged her to a struggle meeting and thrashed her face with a leather shoe. When she came home, her cheeks were red and swollen and the corner of her mouth was bleeding. She had always looked youthful and elegant, dressing in well-fitting clothes, her black hair pinned back with white clips. But after that night, she suddenly looked old.

  IF I CAN’T SEE YOU, MY EYES WILL LOSE THEIR SPARK. IF I CAN’T HOLD YOU, MY HANDS WILL LOSE THEIR WARMTH. I’VE PAID THE 10,000 YUAN DEPOSIT. PLEASE SEND ME ANOTHER 150,000 YUAN TOMORROW, OR THE DEAL WILL FALL THROUGH. This text from Number 8, the hostess from the Red Guard Nightclub, flatters and then angers Ma Daode. That fake Pan Hua! First she asks me to pay for nose and genital piercings. Now she wants me to buy her the beauty salon below her apartment. Money – that’s all these young women care about!

  His wife Juan arrives home at last and says: ‘So you’re a social media star now, apparently! Auntie Shu’s daughter follows you on Weibo, and would like a signed copy of your book.’ Auntie Shu walks up behind her, catching her breath. She’s wearing red, high-heeled shoes and a flamenco dress and is holding a large silk fan. ‘Yes, my daughter’s a huge admirer of yours, Director Ma,’ she says. ‘You’re a celebrated author!’