by Liu Zhenyun
“Please don’t say that. You’ve given me more than enough help.”
They left the diner and began walking down Xingzheng Street. It was a clear, starry night. Xiong took a deep breath of the fresh air and said, “It’s been more than a decade since we visited Dazhai, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it has.”
“Life has its cycles. Time really does fly.”
“Don’t feel too bad, Mr. Xiong.”
Xiong laughed. “We’re still Communists and we should never forget that, no matter what.”
With his eyes on Xiong, Jin gave him an earnest nod.
Jin walked on, after saying good-bye to his old friend. It was getting late and he was the only one around. As emotions welled up in his mind, everything became clear: whoever wanted it could have the position of commissioner. He would be happy to be his deputy. His driver was fast asleep when he returned to the hotel. Jin got undressed and lay down on the bed, when his thoughts turned to his family. He hadn’t been back to see them for a while.
The driver asked him after they washed up and breakfasted the following morning, “What are our activities today?”
“We’re going back.”
“To the administrative office?”
“No, back to Chungong. I’m going home to see my family.”
Recruits
1
Lamb chops were our first meal as new recruits. The reddish meat looked fresh and tasty, but was stringy, some pieces even with blue veins. Everyone in the company came from Yanjin in Henan Province; having grown up in farming villages, we rarely got to eat meat at all, so we thought the lamb was done well. “The army’s lamb chops are delicious,” some were heard to say. Yet, being new recruits meant a change in status, so we knew we had to act with some dignity, which was why we pretended we couldn’t care less. None of us finished the meat, intentionally leaving a bone or two with bits of meat on our plates, everyone but the platoon leader, Song Chang, that is; he ate it all. A man in his late twenties, he was the one who had brought us from our hometowns to this distant place. When he finished, he walked around the dining room, arms behind his back, to check our plates.
“Had enough to eat?”
“Yes, sir,” we replied in unison.
“Then go take care of your internal affairs.”
That meant to put our barracks in order. With the exception of the platoon leader, who had a bed by the window, we slept on the floor. A recruit from my village and a former classmate, a guy we called “Fatty,” ran for a spot by the heater.
“I’m always cold, so this is for me.”
Recruits from different villages weren’t happy with that. “You’re not the only one who’s cold,” one of them grumbled.
The platoon leader stopped going through the dirty clothes he had changed on the road and shouted, “Li Sheng’er.” That was Fatty’s legal name.
“Sir!” He put his hands along the seams of his pants and stood at attention, something we’d learned on the train ride over.
“Go sleep by the door.”
“Not me,” he said with a sulky look. “It’s too drafty.”
“Too drafty for you? Than who do you think should sleep there? Come on, give me a name.”
Fatty couldn’t do that, because whoever he named would be offended.
“You can’t do that, so you should sleep there. Does that work for you?”
“Yes, it does, sir.” Fatty’s eyes reddened.
“Go on then, since you say it works for you.”
After the platoon leader walked off, Fatty spread his bedroll by the door.
“You’re a bunch of rats,” he complained. “We’re from the same area, so why pick on me in front of the platoon leader?”
We were having none of that. “Nobody’s picking on you. You’re the one who tried to grab the spot by the heater.”
That afternoon we were divided into squads to check the area. Fatty came up to me, eyes red.
“I’m finished, Banfu.” He used my title of assistant squad leader.
“What do you mean, finished? You haven’t even been here a full day.”
“The platoon leader hates me.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have peed on him,” said Wang Di, a fair-skinned young man who was walking ahead of us.
That had happened in the boxcar that brought us from our hometown. There were no chamber pots on the train, so we had to open the door a crack to pee out. Fatty, who had a problem peeing while we were moving, stood by the door for a long time but couldn’t go; others were waiting behind him.
“Move over if you can’t go.”
“I have to pee. I really have to, but I can’t while the train’s moving.”
When the platoon leader saw us standing there, he shouted for us to move away from the door. Then he came over to drag Fatty away. “Go on,” he said. “If you can’t pee, that means you don’t have to.”
When Fatty turned around, the dam broke and soaked the platoon leader’s pants.
“Now look what you’ve done, Li Sheng’er. You’ve left your mark on me.”
What Wang said touched Fatty’s sore spot, turning his eyes even redder.
“You worry too much. It was just a fluke, an accident.”
“Wang Di is such a suck-up,” Fatty whispered. “I saw him washing the platoon leader’s clothes around noontime.”
“Enough of that. No one told you not to do his laundry.”
A group of Mongolians rode by. They were in long robes and short jackets, with thick layers of grease on their collars. We’d never seen anything quite like that back in Henan, so we stopped talking to gawk.
“How come there are no women?” Wang Di blurted out.
“There’s one.” A man we called Chief pointed. “Over there, the one in the red kerchief.”
Sure enough, it was a woman with a kerchief over her head. But she was really ugly, with a dark, sunburned face.
“I guess a woman like that is good enough for the border regions,” Wang said as he adjusted his cap.
The Mongolians rode off, leaving us to the vast, boundless Gobi. Pointing at the pebble-strewn ground, Wang said that the Gobi was an ocean in primitive times, which, according to him, was why there were pebbles all over the barren spot, where not even a blade of grass grew.
“What do you meant, barren? See those trees? And the river over there?” Fatty objected.
We looked where he was pointing and, sure enough, there was a stand of dark trees, beside a river, with watery mist shimmering above it.
But there was nothing else around it.
“Ocean or not, this is a desolate place,” someone said.
“The platoon leader said he was once stationed in Lanzhou, but it turned out to be over five hundred miles from Lanzhou,” Wang said.
“And you did his laundry,” Fatty said.
“Says who?” Wang’s face reddened.
They squared off, so I went over and separated them, just as the squad leader shouted from the barracks for us to return for a meeting.
The squad leader, who was in charge of our military drill, was Liu Jun, a veteran soldier. We held the meeting in the barracks, where we sat on our bedrolls. Liu gave a speech about respecting our superiors, being loyal to our comrades, observing discipline, and training hard to defeat the enemy. Then he criticized us for wasting food at lunch, since we’d left pieces of bone, which were dumped into the swill bucket. Never do that again, he said. Finish what’s on your plates. Don’t take too much if you can’t finish it. We felt it was unfair for him to call us wasteful, because we hadn’t cleaned our plates in order to seem more civilized. At dinner that evening, we ate till we were about to burst, even licking the bottom of our plates. Chief wolfed down eight big steamed buns. It was as if the more we ate the less wasteful we’d appear.
Fatty made a fool of himself yet again. Dinner that evening was stewed cabbage with pork, mostly fatty slices with a little lean meat floating on the surface. That was still better
than what we ate at home, so we finished everything on our plates, all but for the platoon leader. With his plate still half full, he was picking up bits of bun and leisurely putting them in his mouth. Fatty, who thought the platoon leader wanted to savor his food slowly, dumped what he had been savoring onto the platoon leader’s plate, as a way to make up for his misstep earlier.
“This is for you, sir.”
He had no idea that the man hadn’t finished because he didn’t like fatty pork. He shook in rage at the sight of Fatty pouring the contents of his half-eaten plate into his.
“What—what do you think you’re doing?” He smashed his plate on the floor, sending mushy cabbage flying.
Fatty was in a funk that night, sighing as he tossed and turned. When I woke up in the middle of the night to relieve myself, he was still thrashing in his spot by the door, holding his head in his hands. He followed me out.
“Banfu, I meant well,” he said in a choking voice and spread his arms.
“I know you meant well, but what did that get you? Another tongue-lashing by the platoon leader.”
“I don’t mind that. What bothers me is Wang Di and the others sniggering when the platoon leader yelled at me.”
“After what you’ve done, you can’t stop them from laughing at you, can you?” I told him to go back to sleep.
“I need someone to talk to, Banfu.”
“It’s too late. Go back to bed. The drills start tomorrow morning.”
He sighed and walked back inside with me. A crescent moon was dipping to the West and all was quiet. Two sentries were parading in the distance under the moonlight.
2
Our training began. Each squad formed a drill unit as we practiced quick march, parade march, double-time march, dropping to the ground and crawling on our bellies. We weren’t allowed to use our feet, but were forced to pull ourselves forward with our arms.
The days were exhausting, but we had no peace at night either, with unannounced emergency musters. A shrill whistle would call for an emergency muster when we were fast asleep. The lights remained out, so we had to get dressed in ten minutes in the dark and muster with our backpacks and rifles on the parade ground. Training during the day was nothing compared with what happened at night. Mayhem reigned in the barracks during those dark ten minutes, as we snatched the wrong socks or put on someone’s pants, anxious to leave but unable to. In the meantime, the company commander and the political instructor, pistols in hand, were counting heads on the parade ground to see which squad showed up last.
“Enemy agents were spotted several kilometers away. Be there in twenty minutes,” one of them would say gruffly.
We’d then take off running with our rifles and return, panting and drenched in sweat, where they waited to see if our backpacks were intact or if we were dressed properly.
Each squad had at least one screw-up. In ours it was usually Fatty or Chief, a thin man with a serious face, who was taciturn and caught up in his own thoughts. He was forever screwing up one thing or another, putting his shoes on the wrong feet all the time. The company commander usually called him out and made him march in front of us. Mismatched shoes forced him to walk with his feet splayed like a lame duck, an uproarious sight. Once after we returned to the barracks, Wang Di said, “The company commander shouldn’t have criticized Chief. They call us out in the middle of the night in order to catch enemy spies, don’t they? His footprints will create confusion for them.”
We laughed and looked over at Chief, who hadn’t yet changed out of his shoes. He sat glumly, staring daggers at Wang.
Fatty’s problem was putting his pants on backward, leaving the opening in the back to expose his rear end. It was not a sight the company commander wanted to parade in front of us, so he simply announced that someone had put his pants on backward. “How can someone like that be expected to catch a spy?”
After we were dismissed, Fatty pulled the opening behind him together with a dejected look, as if it had been his fault that we failed to catch a spy.
In addition to the nighttime muster, we were also required to stand sentry at night. A team of two, an hour each, with an alarm clock passed from team to team. Only seventeen or eighteen at the time, we were at the age where we’d be sleeping on the threshing ground back home. So after a whole day of training, we were sleepy and hungry. We’d eaten our fill at dinner, stuffing our faces with steamed buns, and yet hunger pangs struck when we were standing sentry.
And it was bitterly cold. Late December in the Gobi Desert is unlike winter anywhere else, with temperatures plummeting to twenty below all the time. When it was my turn, my favorite place was the boiler room, manned by an old-timer named Li Shangjin. Unlike other veterans, Li never bullied the new recruits, even called me “Eighth Banfu,” deputy leader of the eighth squad. We got to know each other better as time went on. Working in the boiler room at night, he was entitled to an additional meal that consisted of seven or eight meaty buns he toasted on the boiler. He gave me a couple each time I showed up, before settling down on a bench and squinting as he watched me devour the buns. They were nicely toasted, brown and crisp on the outside, with a mouth-watering aroma. I never had enough, but knew better than to finish off his night snack. “That’s enough. I’m full,” I’d wipe my mouth and say, pushing back the buns he offered.
Li was given to smiling, guileless, friendly smiles.
“Have you applied for party membership?” he asked the first time we met.
“I just got here.” I shook my head. “Isn’t it too early?”
He gave his thigh a slap, displaying a sense of urgency. “Hurry up and apply. Do it as soon as you can. Tonight back in the barracks. Don’t end up like me. I was late applying. It’s been three years, and I’m still not a member.”
But when I asked other old-timers, I learned that applying early wasn’t the determining factor. The key was to have a heart-to-heart with someone in the organization section. Li’s application had been rejected not because he hadn’t turned it early but because there was a disciplinary action against him. Once, on a home visit, he had sneaked a bayonet along, for the sole purpose of impressing his wife-to-be. On the day he met her, he’d put on a brand-new army uniform, complete with a Sam Browne belt and a bayonet, cutting an awe-inspiring figure as he strode through the market with his parents. The girl was awed enough to marry him, but the army somehow learned about the bayonet, which was a black mark that affected his advancement.
“When will your application go through?” I asked the next time I saw him.
“Any day now, I think.” He was holding a poker in one hand and rubbing his stubble with the other.
“Why’s that?”
“They sent me here to work the boiler, didn’t they?”
I was confused. How would working the boiler lead to party membership?
“It’s a test.”
I got it, and I was happy for him. “Sooner or later it will be approved. I heard that some veterans were decommissioned without becoming a member.”
“That would be a great loss of face.”
The first two weeks passed, and we had gotten used to army life, to the point that we even walked like real soldiers. We all actively sought advancement, as we began writing our applications for party membership. We fought over the brooms in the morning, and tension built among us, since we couldn’t all become party members at the same time. Some would make it and some wouldn’t. We were all on edge, waking up before daybreak, intent on running for the broom at the sound of reveille.
Then came the selection of squad “key cadres,” who would shoulder more responsibilities, the first step in career advancement. Understandably, everyone coveted the title. But the company stipulated that each squad could have only three, thus complicating the matter. Take our squad for example. I was the banfu, the deputy squad leader, which logically gave me one of the slots. The second one was to be Wang Di, to which no one objected, since he was a talented painter and calligrapher who had
put out a wall newspaper and could sing to set pace for marches. The problem was with Chief and Fatty, two problematic candidates who had started out unfavorably but rectified their problems. For Chief, it was simply putting a brick on each shoe to avoid mixing them up in the middle of the night, while Fatty kept his pants on when he went to bed. With their problems solved, now they were usually the first to arrive on the parade ground and were standouts. They had both taken the initiative to carry out other “charitable acts.” Without telling anyone, Chief began cleaning the company toilets, while Fatty went for the broom every morning and even stood sentry all night once so the others could rest. They tried to outdo each other, but neither came out ahead.
The problem was solved for the squad leader when he thought about the lamp cord, which could only be touched by a key cadre. The cord hung over the door, where Fatty slept. Chief would have to switch with Fatty if he was to be chosen. The squad leader didn’t want to go through the trouble; besides, he was the one who had assigned Fatty the spot to begin with. In the end the squad leader said to me, “Just give it to Li Sheng’er.”
Which was how Fatty became a key cadre in charge of the lamp cord. He had benefitted from an earlier misfortune, and smiled for days, exposing his big yellow teeth. Chief was naturally disappointed, but he knew he had to hide his feelings; he wrote a pledge to the squad leader, in which he said he hadn’t worked hard enough, but vowed to learn from the key cadres and hoped to be selected next time. That started a trend, as the remaining soldiers in our squad all began to write their own pledge letters.
Company headquarters passed down an order for us to gather sheep droppings left in the wild by the nomadic Mongolians. We would cart the droppings back as fertilizer in the spring. Each squad was to send two soldiers to work a cart assigned to the squad by the company. Since it was a job for the company, each squad sent their key cadres. For us that was Wang Di and Fatty. But Wang had been working hard on the wall newspaper and I couldn’t get away, so the squad leader decided to send Chief along.