by Chuck DeVore
Now initiated into the inner circle, Fu just nodded dumbly, still unable to speak.
The other dishes proved as hot as the first, and Fu picked his way gingerly through the rest of the meal. The Chairman ate heartily, belched to show his appreciation of the cuisine, and then got down to business.
“You found my Hunan hot peppers a little too hot for your taste,” he began with a smile. “Just so, some of my colleagues found your plan to invade Taiwan a little too hot for their taste.”
“Please forgive my stupidity,” Fu began apologizing. “I lack experience...”
The Chairman cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “Those of us seated at this table appreciate . . . no, we share . . . your breadth of vision. And although we can’t adopt your plan to launch a full-scale attack on Taiwan itself at this time, we will incorporate important elements of it in Operation Dragon Strike, the assault on Quemoy. Your proposed diversions in Korea, the Mideast, and East Timor will all be used to thin the American ranks.
“To show our appreciation we are appointing you Special Emissary of the CCP Central Committee to the Fuzhou Military Region, which has overall responsibility for Dragon Strike. You will be the Party’s eyes and ears in Fujian.”
Fu opened his mouth but found he was unable to speak. A broad, sunlit path of advancement had opened before him, dazzling him with hope and promise. His grandest ambitions were about to be realized.
“And there is one more thing, Zemin,” the Chairman said paternally, calling him by his given name for the first time. “In your capacity as Special Emissary you will report to me personally.”
The path led to the very top. “Yes, Mr. Chairman,” was all that Fu was finally able to say.
11
Only Son—Dusheng Dz
The road began to climb as soon as it left the suburbs of Amoy City. Chu Dugen, newly promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, bore down on the accelerator of the jeep he was driving. He zipped his parka up a little further against the February chill in the drafty four-by-four. Chu smiled in anticipation of the stir the jeep would cause in his native village. The vehicle leapt forward despite the grade, and he passed a slower-moving bus. Always before he had ridden such a bus back to the county seat, and then had to hitch a ride on a produce truck up the mountain to his village. Not this time. This time he would drive into the village in his own jeep, wearing the bright new stars of his new rank. “Dugen is now a Lieutenant Colonel!” the children would run about saying, “and he has his own jeep!”
Of course it wasn’t his jeep. Lieutenant Colonels didn’t have their own jeeps, at least not in PLA commando units. It was on loan from the commanding officer of his regiment, who had not wanted to give him leave just two days before his battalion was due to ship out. “Take my jeep, Dugen,” Colonel Lin had said finally, handing over the keys this morning. “It’ll save you time. But be back tomorrow night without fail. Jia Battalion’s orders are top priority—and top secret. Even I don’t know where you are going, or the special command to which you will be attached.”
Neither did Chu, of course, but he had wanted to see his parents before he left—and to show off his new rank. It would give his father face, and his mother pleasure.
At 178 centimeters, Chu was tall for a southern Chinese. He had inherited his father’s muscular frame and iron will. That, combined with his mother’s piercing eyes and quiet intelligence, had placed him first in every classroom test and field competition since he had graduated from the PLA academy thirteen years before—and unexpectedly given him an extra star two years before his classmates. This farmer’s son has beaten the general’s sons, he thought to himself, still astonished at his good fortune. Of course, a large part of your good fortune happens to be linked to Tiananmen Square and the fact that the platoon of southern farmers’ sons you led willingly felled so many elitist college students that day. Chu frowned as he usually did when thinking of the events in Tiananmen Square. . .
The road dipped into a familiar valley, the traffic began picking up again, and the outskirts of the Lipu City came into view. New two- and three-story shops closed in on both sides of the road, cutting off Chu’s view of the surrounding rice paddies. He came up behind a truck loaded dangerously high with bags of fertilizer and was forced to slow to a crawl before finding an opening in the oncoming traffic to pass. As always, he was amazed at how this once-poor mountain town had grown in the years he had been gone. He had gone to the Lipu Number One High School when the town had a population of perhaps 20,000, and the largest building was the Lipu County Communist Party headquarters. Then the main road had been narrow and dirty, noisy from dawn till dusk with the sound of peasants hawking produce, and often so crowded with foot traffic that bicyclists had to dismount.
In the past ten years the town had doubled in size. The main road had been widened and paved, and was lined with new construction. The hawkers had been relocated to an open-air farmer’s market. Pedestrians no longer reigned supreme, having been forced to the sides of the road by an arrogant stream of cars, trucks and motorcycles. The largest building was now a Taiwanese-owned factory that produced extruded plastic toys for the American market. The Party headquarters, by comparison, looked small and dowdy, as if the economic reform had left it behind. But that’s not true, Chu chided himself, remembering his political training. The Party is responsible for all this progress.
Chu accelerated again as he exited Lipu, anxious to make up for the time he had lost. The road left the valley and now began to climb in earnest. For a while rice terraces staggered up the hills after it, but then, as if exhausted by the climb, gave way to stands of broken corn stalks—harvest was long past—and the occasional orchard. Chu had the road largely to himself now. He enjoyed the challenge of following its twists and turns, accelerating as it dipped through narrow mountain valleys and then shifting down as it headed upward once more.
Chu’s stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. No matter. His mother knew that he was returning home for a visit. He had called before leaving his army camp in Amoy. By now she would have started preparing a welcome home feast in honor of her only son and his promotion. There would be seven dishes, he estimated, mentally ticking them off—lean pork, fried fish, steamed prawns, broiled chicken, scrambled eggs with diced green onions, mixed vegetables with pork cubes and peanuts, and winter bokchoi, all stir-fried to his taste with just the right amount of peanut oil and pork drippings. Plus a large plate of Lipu’s famous sweet oranges sliced into wedges for dessert. The thought of all this food brought another rumble from his stomach. Army food, even in the officers’ mess, had nothing to compare with his mother’s cooking.
And he had such good news for his parents! He had been selected for Lieutenant Colonel far ahead of his year group, and was being sent to a special command for intensive training.
The road became a series of switchbacks as it made the final climb to his village. This part of the road had been little more than a goat trail when Chu was growing up, but his father, the village head, had taken the lead in widening it two decades ago. “If we only have a real road,” he had told his fellow villagers, “we can get our crops to market.” Energized by his father’s vision, driven by his iron will, twenty sandal-shod, black-jacketed men had worked tirelessly through the slack months of winter with adzes and shovels. By spring a road wide enough for a walking tractor and a narrow trailer had been carved out of the mountainside.
Buried in the mountains to the northwest of Lipu, possessing no rice paddy at all, Chu’s village had been the poorest of a county of poor villages. But the road had transformed it, just as his father had promised it would. No longer limited to what a man could carry on his back, the villagers began sending trailerloads of produce to the Lipu market. His father and uncle, seeing that oranges grown at this altitude were sweet and without blemish, set about clearing additional land and planting trees. When the wisd
om of their actions became apparent after a couple of years, the other villagers had joined them planting orchards of their own. The road had been widened further, until a 2-1/2-ton truck could make the journey.
The road crested into a small plateau, covered as far as the eye could see with orange groves. The village sat in the middle of this green opulence, several dozen new homes and a few older ones surrounding the old church. Of course it hadn’t been a real church for decades. The Irish priest who had built it had been driven out by the Red Army, and the building itself had been “returned to the people.” From the fifties through the seventies it had served as the headquarters of the agricultural collective, until the commune system was abandoned in turn and the land it controlled was returned to the villagers. It now served as the headquarters of the village council and all-around meeting hall, but it was still called, despite everything, “the old church.” The Irish priest had built well, Chu reflected.
Chu pulled up in front of his father’s house, surprised to see a white Toyota Landcruiser with government plates already parked there. Several young boys from the village ran up and, playing soldier, saluted smartly as he exited the jeep. Chu returned the salute.
“Are you a general yet, Uncle Dugen?” one of the boys asked hopefully.
Chu recognized the face of his cousin’s son. “No, just a lowly Lieutenant Colonel,” he laughed, pointing at the two bright stars that adorned his yellow epaulet. The boys were appropriately awed at this insignia of rank and called out to their fellows to come see.
From inside the house came the sound of raised voices. Chu frowned. “Who’s come to visit?” he asked the boys, pointing at the government Toyota.
“Secretary Fu,” came the reply.
For as long as Chu could remember, Fu Mingjie had been the head of the Lipu Party Committee. He was an arrogant little man, originally from Shantung province in the north, who was widely detested for both his manner and his accent. Thirty years in Lipu, and he had never bothered to learn the Fukienese dialect of these parts. Instead, he demanded that everyone speak to him in Mandarin. In the opinion of the people, he was a corrupt Party official. Not that the opinion of the people mattered. Fu was said to be very well connected in the Party hierarchy.
The voices grew louder, and the door of the house opened.
“I would rethink your position if I were you,” he heard Secretary Fu say loudly in his tongue-twisting northern accent. “If you use our trucks, you won’t have to pay the road tax.”
“So now it’s the road tax, is it?” his father shouted back in his own rough approximation of standard Chinese. “Don’t forget who built the road in the first place!”
“All roads are the property of the people’s government . . .” Fu broke off in mid-sentence as he saw a tall, uniformed officer of the PLA walking up to him.
“You remember my son, Lieutenant Colonel Chu Dugen,” his father said, emphasizing Chu’s new rank.
If Secretary Fu was impressed he didn’t show it. “Since you have visitors, I’ll be going,” he said curtly, with the barest hint of a nod at Chu. “Think well on what I have said.”
“Bu song,” Chu’s father said, “I’ll see you on your way.” The traditional words of parting sounded distinctly unfriendly on his tongue.
Chu watched Fu drive away, then turned to his father with a quizzical glance. “What was all that about?”
“Mafan,” his father answered angrily. “Trouble. It’s always trouble when he comes around.” He fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one up.
Chu noticed that his father’s hands were shaking badly. “What kind of trouble?” he pursued.
His father took a deep drag on his cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds before exhaling. “It would be easier if he just came right out and asked for a bigger payoff,” he said, calmer now. “Instead, he has set up what he calls a shipping company—using county government trucks, mind you—and wants us to pay him for shipping our oranges to Amoy City.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong with that!?!” his father sputtered. “What’s wrong with that is that he wants to charge about five times the going rate for freight. We bought our own truck two years ago. We can ship our own fruit to market for the cost of diesel fuel and a driver.”
“So do it,” Chu said.
“I told him I intended to,” his father replied. “That’s when he imposed a new tax on shipments between villages. ‘A road tax’ he called it. Of course, if we use his trucks, we don’t have to pay. So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t!” He threw the half-smoked cigarette down and ground it into the dirt. “He’s a corrupt Party official, Dugen! A parasite on the working class!”
The conversation had veered onto dangerous ground, Chu thought. All Party bosses were corrupt to some degree. It went with the system. The Party had periodic campaigns to try and control corruption. Sometimes they kept it within manageable limits. More often not. “Surely it can’t be as bad as all that,” he said, trying to calm his father down. “You usually get along well with Secretary Fu.”
“I have never gotten along with Secretary Fu!” his father snorted. “Twenty years ago your uncle and I started clearing wasteland and planting citrus groves. Fu encouraged us, telling us that we would be exempt from taxes. It was backbreaking work, and before the trees were firmly rooted we had to haul water with buckets and carrying poles. Each year we expanded, until we now have 160 mou under cultivation. Then when the crops started coming in, and we began to make money, he began showing up and demanding a cut.”
This was news to Chu. “You mean taxes?”
“Taxes, dogshit!” his father burst out. “He wanted to line his own pocket. He demanded a payoff. If we didn’t pay up, he told us that he would declare that we had planted the trees illegally on public land. We were afraid that the orchards would be confiscated, so we paid up. Every year since have given him about a third of our profits. He keeps track of how many truckloads of oranges we take to market, and comes over after the harvest to demand what he calls ‘his share.’ His share! The bloodsucker has never done an honest day’s work in his life!” His voice took on a raw edge of anger. “He wants us to be his serfs again, just like under the commune system!”
“Father, Father, calm down,” Chu said uneasily, taken aback by his father’s unaccustomed vehemence. “Let’s go see the orchards. I need to stretch my legs.” And get you off this dangerous subject, he thought to himself.
A few strides took them into the nearest grove. This had been one of the earliest plantings, and the trees now towered twice as high as a man’s head. They walked in silence for a few minutes. The luxuriant green foliage had a calming effect, and Chu sensed that his father’s mood was beginning to shift.
His father began to talk, slowly at first, and then with increasing enthusiasm as they walked on. There was land to be cleared for another planting. There was next year’s harvest to be estimated. The cooperative—voluntary, his father stressed—was to be expanded to include a couple of neighboring villages. They came to the edge of the orchard. “We’ve come this far,” Chu’s father urged. “Let’s walk to the top of Turtle Knob. From there you can see the whole plateau. We’re planting another ten mou on the slopes this winter.”
Chu needed no convincing. From the time he was a little boy, he had always loved listening to his father describe his plans for the future. Each time his father had made his vision a reality. By strength of back and dint of will, his father had made a road, had planted an orchard, had prospered a village. His father was a man of his word, loved and trusted by all, and by no one more than his only son.
From the top of Turtle Knob, the orchards made an impressive sight, covering the entire plateau and running halfway up the gentle hills beyond. Someday, his father said, orange groves would run all the way to the top.
Chu had not the slightest doubt this would be the case. His father was a force of nature. H
e remembered a time when nothing but brush and scrub had covered these hills. He had spent hours walking their lower slopes, gathering grass, twigs, and anything that would burn for the cook stove in his mother’s old kitchen lean-to. Now, thanks to the muscular, determined man standing beside him, those same slopes were covered with neat lines of orange trees. Now his mother cooked with propane in a bright, new tiled kitchen. And she cooked very well.
The entire village was at the Chu’s that night. The men gathered around four circular tables that had been set up in the main room, the women retired to the kitchen to help with the last-minute preparations, while the children ran about, giggling and laughing, entertaining themselves.
As soon as the men were seated, Chu’s father and uncle opened the several liters of rice liquor that Chu had brought from the base commissary. The liquor went directly from the bottles into the rice bowls that sat in front of each man. The rice would not be served until they had finished this bowl and more.
Chu’s uncle then stood up, gestured for silence, and turned to face his nephew. “Wo jing Zhongxiao Tongzhi yi bei!” he said loudly, cupping his hands around his bowl in a posture of supplication, “I respectfully offer Comrade Lieutenant Colonel a toast.” His mock formality caused great guffaws of laughter.
Chu leapt to his feet. “Wo jing Bofu yi bei,” he replied, “I respectfully offer my father’s elder brother a toast.”
Chu and his uncle both raised their bowls high in a sign of mutual respect before bringing them to their lips. While Chu’s uncle downed a couple swallows of the fiery contents, Chu himself took only a small sip. He had been a guest of honor at a feast before. He knew what was coming. If he wanted to be on his feet at the end of the evening, he had to pace himself.
The room was boisterous with congratulations. Everyone insisted on toasting his promotion—one at a time. “Ganbei,” each of the men challenged him in their turn, holding his bowls high. “Bottoms up.”