by Liu Zhenyun
“We’re out of coal briquettes, and you’re thinking about watching a game at midnight?” She threw her apron on the table. “I guess you’re not so tired. Well, you can watch at midnight if you can get Maradona to bring us some coal briquettes.”
He lost interest.
“Forget it then. I won’t watch, okay? I’ll go get coal briquettes tomorrow.”
He stopped what he was doing and sat down on the bed to stare blankly, like his wife did when she had trouble at work. He couldn’t sleep that night. When she woke up at midnight, she was alarmed by the look on his face.
“Go ahead and watch the match if you really want to. Just don’t forget the coal tomorrow.”
But he’d lost interest in the match. Ignoring her concession, he snapped:
“Did I say I want to watch it? First you wouldn’t let me watch, and now you won’t even let me lie here and think.”
The next morning, he took half a day off to cart briquettes, then went to the office that afternoon. When the new college graduate asked him what he thought about the game the night before, Lin spat out:
“It’s just some shitty game. What’s there to see? I never watch soccer.”
He began flipping through the newspaper so truculently he frightened the college grad.
When she got home that night, his wife experienced guilt feelings when she saw the coal in the kitchen and the unhappy look on her husband’s face. So she busied herself with housework and the child, watching his face when she spoke to him. That in turn bothered him enough to vent a bit of anger.
The lame old meter reader showed up just as they were about to eat dinner. It wasn’t the regular day for reading the meter but he was there and they had to stop to let him check their meter. In addition to the wrench in his hand, the old man also carried a large backpack, which must have been heavy, since his face was prickled with sweat. The large backpack put Lin on alert, wondering what the old man had in mind this time. Sure enough, after reading the meter, he sat down on their bed without saying anything. Standing in front of the old man, Lin wondered what he wanted to talk about, feeding horses as a youngster or stealing water. Neither. Instead, the old man smiled broadly and said to Lin:
“I have a favor to ask.”
“What do you mean, a favor?” Lin was taken aback. “I’m the one who’s always asking for favors.”
“I need your help. You work in the ministry section where an out-of-town report is being held up, I think.”
Lin seemed to recall a document in his section, probably held up by Peng, who had been too busy learning qigong at the Sun Temple Park to take care of it.
“You may be right.”
“I knew it!” The old man clapped. “That’s my hometown. They’re in such a hurry to get an approval that the county party secretary came to me for help.”
Lin was astounded that a party secretary would ask a meter man for help when he came to Beijing. But then, the old man had been a big shot’s stable hand, so no surprise there.
“What help could I give him?” the old man said. “I could only advise him to find out where it was being held up, and he did. Imagine my surprise when I heard it was your office. So I thought that since we know each other, I might as well come to you for help. Could you do something?”
Having worked at the government office for more than five years, Lin knew how things worked. It could be easily accomplished. He could talk to Peng, and it would take only the time she needed to put on some lipstick for the document to be released. But it could also be hard. If he went to see her about a stranger’s document while she was doing her qigong or when she was in a bad mood, it was hard to say what would happen. She might find problems with the document and troop out all sorts of government rules and regulations to show how she could not give her stamp of approval. She could even convince you that she was right. It all depended on Lin. If he was willing to help, the approval would be released the day after, but if not, then it would be held up for a few more days. But the meter man wasn’t just any old timer; he was in charge of their meter, so Lin had to lend a hand. But he was a different person now, more sensible and levelheaded. If this had been in the past, he’d have agreed to help right off if he thought he could; that was a naïve approach. A mature Lin would say he couldn’t help even though he could, and he’d tell the man it was a challenge even if it wasn’t, which would ensure gratitude from the meter man once it was done. If he agreed right off, but a problem arose and he failed to carry it through, he’d earn nothing but complaints. So he put his hands behind his head and leaned back against the blanket.
“It’s not going to be easy. There is one such document waiting for approval, but I’ve heard it has problems and might not be approved right away.”
Many years had gone by since the old man had fed the horses and now, as a meter man, he was clueless about the ins and outs of office politics. He could only give Lin an ingratiating smile.
“That’s true. I told the party secretary the same thing. Things are done differently here in the capital and rules are strictly followed. But no matter what, you have to help us out.”
Lin’s wife sensed there was something more to this, so she said:
“Gramps, he’s only good for stealing water. He can’t help you with this.”
“That was a misunderstanding.” The old man seemed embarrassed. “Just a misunderstanding. I shouldn’t have listened to unfounded accusations. Water is so cheap, who would bother to steal it?”
He took out a large cardboard box from his backpack and said, “A small token of my gratitude. Please take it.”
Then he got up, and, with a wink to Lin, limped his way out. The moment the man was gone, his wife said, “I have a feeling our life will improve.”
“What do you mean?”
“See that?” she pointed at the box. “We’re getting gifts now!”
She opened the box and what she took out stunned them. It was a small microwave oven, something that would cost seven or eight hundred Yuan.
“This is highly inappropriate. We could accept a cloth doll but not something worth seven or eight hundred. I’m giving it back to him tomorrow.”
His wife concurred, and they finished their dinner with a heavy heart.
“Let me ask,” she said at bedtime. “Can that document be approved easily?”
“It’s not hard. I’ll talk to Peng tomorrow, and try to get it approved.”
She clapped and said, “Then I’m keeping the microwave.”
“Are you sure?” He was concerned. “A microwave oven for getting an approval. Won’t it look like I’m exploiting my office for personal gain? Besides, that would give the old man something on us.”
“What could he say if you got it done for him? And what do you mean, personal gain? Have you seen anything happen to officials who pocket tens of thousand of RMB? A microwave oven is nothing compared to that.”
He had to agree with her, so he stopped objecting. She plugged in the microwave oven and put in a few pieces of sweet potatoes to try it out. The aroma of baked sweet potatoes permeated the room within minutes. They opened the oven door to reveal steamy hot sweet potatoes. They dug in, all three of them, baring their teeth and smacking their lips. Delighted, his wife told him the microwave oven had many uses other than baking sweet potatoes, including baking cakes, toasting buns, and roasting chickens and ducks. Lin happily ate his sweet potato, inspired by the revelation that an improvement in life was not beyond their reach. All he had to do was be part of the system. That night the couple enjoyed more intimacy; the microwave oven made her more passionate and diminished the impact of the soccer incident from the night before.
Lin talked to Peng the next day and, sure enough, they chatted amiably until she approved the document.
Something was up with their daughter after they’d enjoyed using the microwave oven two weeks. She’d gotten used to going to school and stopped crying at drop-off and pickup; sometimes she even bounded into the place.
But for two days straight she cried in the morning, refusing to go, claiming a bellyache or needing a bathroom visit, though she produced nothing when they gave her a bedpan. When they scolded her and forced her to leave the house, she stopped crying along the way, but had a dazed look. Lin and his wife suspected that something had happened at school; either she was being bullied by another child or one of the nannies had picked on her, making her stand in the corner or look bad in front of other kids, so injuring the child’s self-esteem she was afraid to see the nanny again. When they asked her what happened, she started crying again.
“I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong.”
So they asked around when they picked her up that afternoon and discovered that they were the cause; they’d been neglectful over New Year’s. Before the holiday, every other parent had sent gifts to the nannies, big or small, as a token of appreciation, all but Lin and his wife. The consequence of their carelessness was manifested in the child.
“What’s the matter with you? You can’t even remember New Year’s now that our daughter is in preschool? Who knows how much the nannies laughed at us? They were probably all saying we’re cheapskates, poor slobs, even.”
“You’re right. We should have paid more attention. But after our gifts were rejected, I’ve been so afraid of giving gifts I forgot when it was time to send one.”
They talked about how to make up for their mistake, but they had trouble coming up with an appropriate gift. It would be too miserly to give a New Year’s card or a wall calendar, not to mention the fact that the holiday had passed. Blankets or clothes were too lavish for the women to accept.
“Should we ask our daughter?” Lin said.
“What for? What does she know?”
But Lin called the child over anyway to ask her what other parents had given to her teachers. She actually knew and answered crisply:
“Charcoal.”
Lin was flabbergasted. “Charcoal? Why charcoal? What do the teachers need charcoal for?”
So his wife conducted another round of inquiry the next day. The girl was telling the truth; many parents had given the teachers charcoal for the new year, a good gift during Beijing’s winter, when everyone enjoyed mutton hot pots.
“That’s easy. Since everyone else gave charcoal, we’ll do the same.”
But when they set out to buy charcoal, they found that there was none for sale in Beijing. Stumped for a solution, Lin said to his wife that they should give something else, particularly because the other parents all sent charcoal and what charcoal they could manage to find would be superfluous. But the word charcoal had stuck with the child, who asked every morning as soon as she woke up:
“Papa, did you buy some charcoal for my teachers?”
Despite his annoyance, he had to laugh when his three-year-old girl insisted upon giving charcoal. He patted the edge of the bed and told her:
“It’s only charcoal, so I’ll get some if I have to search every corner of the city.”
At last he bought some charcoal at a tiny, out-of-the-way shop in a suburb; he had to pay an exorbitant price for it, but at least he got what they needed. He told his wife to take it along to the school, and sure enough, their daughter returned to her normal self the next day and went back with a smile. When the girl was happy, the whole family was happy. For dinner that night, his wife roasted half a chicken in the microwave oven and even got a bottle of beer for Lin. The beer made him dizzy and, seemingly, get bigger.
“Actually everything under the sun is easy,” he said to his wife. “You just have to understand the logic and follow it. Then life will go smoothly day after day like flowing water. There’s nothing wrong with that. When the world runs smoothly, the globe turns on its axis.”
Knowing he was getting tipsy, she snatched the beer bottle from him. He was giddy even without the beer and slept like a log that night. He dreamed about sleeping under a blanket of chicken feathers on a mattress of human dandruff. It was soft and comfortable, and a year passed in a single day. Then he dreamed of a vast crowd surging forward before changing into thickets of ants praying for rain. It was daybreak when he awoke, but he could no longer recall his dreams in any detail. His wife woke up and told him to go line up for tofu, when she saw his dreamy look. That cleared his head. Pushing his dreams aside, he jumped out of bed to line up for tofu, after which he went to work.
A letter was waiting for him at the office. It was from the son of his former teacher, who had come to visit him. The son told Lin that his father had passed away three months after they returned from his visit to the hospital in Beijing. Before his father died, the old teacher told his son to write to Lin and express his gratitude for Lin’s hospitality during their visit. Lin felt bad all day after reading the letter. He had failed to find a hospital for his teacher when he came to Beijing, and now he was dead. He hadn’t even managed to get his teacher to wash up, while his teacher had given him his own padded jacket back when he’d fallen through the ice in elementary school. But his sadness lasted only a day. By the time he boarded the commuter bus, his thoughts had turned to the cabbages. They would be heating up, so he had to go home to air them out by dividing them into smaller piles. Soon the teacher’s death was pushed aside; what was the point of thinking about the dead anyway? In the meantime, the living had cabbages to worry about. Once that was taken care of, he said to himself, if his wife would roast a chicken and let him drink another bottle of beer, he’d have everything he could want in life.
College
1
I was discharged from the army and returned home nine years ago. In my father’s words, I wasted the four years away from home, since I hadn’t managed to join the Communist party or get promoted as a cadre. Except for the stubble on my cheeks, I showed no visible change from the day I’d left home. On the other hand, not much had changed at home either, except for my two younger brothers, who were now as tall as me, whose faces were covered with acne, and who reeked like young horses. At night I heard my father sighing in his room. All three of his sons had grown to six feet tall and reached the age of needing a wife, enough worries for him to drown himself in a pot of liquor. That was 1978, the second year after the college entrance examinations resumed. I wanted to try my luck, but father disagreed.
“You weren’t much of a soldier, so what makes you think you’ll pass the entrance exam? Besides …”
Besides, it would cost a hundred yuan to enroll in the review sessions at the middle school in town. My mother supported me. “But if he …”
“How much separation pay did you get?” Father asked.
“A hundred fifty.”
“Go ahead and do what you want, it’s your money.” He spat a thick gob of phlegm onto the door frame. “We don’t want your money, but won’t give you any either. If you pass, you’re in luck; if you fail, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.”
And that was how I showed up at the middle school in town, where I enrolled in review sessions to prepare for the college entrance exam.
The sessions were offered specifically for older adults who had missed the opportunity to go to college because of the Cultural Revolution. I took a look at the students in the class, and saw many familiar faces, some of whom were my high-school friends from four years earlier. We were back together after a period of dislocation and hardship, which instantly brought us closer. There were a few younger ones too, those who had failed the exam the year before upon graduation from high school. The teacher called us over to the athletic field, where we squatted down for a brief meeting. He checked our bedrolls and sacks of steamed buns before announcing the formal opening of the review session. When it came time to select a class leader, a banzhang, to collect homework and enforce rules, the teacher’s eye fell on me. He said I should be the class leader since I’d been a deputy squad leader in the army. I hastened to explain that I had been in a feeding squad in charge of fattening up pigs. He waved me off. “We’ll make do, won’t we?”
Next came dorm
assignments, men in one large room and women in another. There was a small room for the banzhang, but so many people had showed up for the review session that three more students were put in the room with me. Then we went to the production brigade drying ground for some dried wheat stalks to put on the floor before spreading out our bedrolls. An argument erupted in the men’s dorm over the corner spot. But not in the small room, where the other three let me take the corner, since I was the banzhang. We were good friends by bedtime. Thirty-something Wang Quan was my classmate in middle school; back then he’d been the dumbest kid in the class, always at the bottom. I had no idea what had gotten into him to get him to show up here. My second roommate, a short fellow nicknamed “Mozhuo” (a localism for a short person), wore a wide belt. My third roommate, nicknamed “Haozi” (rat), was quite good looking.
We got into bed but were too excited to sleep, so we told each other our motivation for enrolling. Wang said he hadn’t planned to enroll, since he was married with two kids, and shouldn’t be thinking about going back to school. But the local society was rife with problems, with corrupt officials taking advantage of the powerless, and he thought he’d join the review so he could punish those officials if he passed the exam, got into college, and became a county magistrate or something like that. Mozhuo said he had no ambition to be an official; he just didn’t want to stay on the farm harvesting wheat under a scorching sun that would end up killing him. Haozi, who was reading a filthy book with curled edges under the kerosene lamp, told us he was the son of a cadre (his father was a commune civil administrator). He loved literature, hated math and science. His father had forced him to come, but he didn’t mind, since the girl he was chasing, Yueyue (the prettiest in the class, with a bow tied to her braids), had turned up here. He didn’t care if he passed the exam, but he had to win the girl’s heart. When it was my turn, I told them I wouldn’t be here if I were married, like Wang Quan, nor would I have shown up if I’d been in love with a girl. I only came because I had nothing to show for my years on earth.