by Hua Bai
I struck a match as I was walking to light the cigarette dangling from my lips. I dared not pull hard but had to puff cautiously. As soon as the smoke entered my mouth, I spit it out. Awful! Maybe it took a big mouthful to get the right taste. So I took a deep drag. When the smoke rushed into my throat, a peppery sensation made me cough. It took a
while to suppress the cough. I found it hard to understand why so many people in the world smoke this sort of thing, using their mouths and noses as chimneys. I tossed the cigarette from my mouth into a ditch and pocketed the other
nineteen.
Not a single random soul was wandering about; my feet
alone engaged in a tedious dialogue with the long, long
street. After walking and walking, finally I saw a man
standing like a statue. Under a street lamp on the verge of falling as it rattled in the wind, the small old man was attentively reading the newspaper he held in his hands. As 2 9 6
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the source of light came from above, his face was not clearly illuminated. His forehead blocked the light from his eyes; his nose blocked it from his mouth, and his shoulders
blocked it from his torso. Only his white hair received the full light, like a blazing torch. The whole image of the man was distorted. At my approach, he laid down his paper and glanced at me. Then he quickly covered his face with the paper. I knew he had seen me clearly because I was facing the light. After a while, his eyes peeked over the top of the paper. I halted right in front of him. Again he covered his face with the paper. Seeing he was a rare being like me in the street, I felt the common link of birds in a flock and had a natural desire to communicate with him. Yet he shunned me. Partitioned merely by a sheet of paper, he and I stood silent for ninety seconds. He couldn’t take it any longer.
Folding his paper, he ran away. With that motion, the light on him changed radically. The angle of the cone of light expanded and its luminosity weakened, but the contour
of the man became clear. When the angle reached thirty
degrees, I recognized him: Gui Renzhong! Old turtle egg!
My blood started boiling. I sprang on him, strangling him with my plierlike hands. He was unable to make a sound;
his face turned from white to red, his hands holding the newspaper fluttered in the air, and his eyes pleaded with me in fright. When the soul’s light flickering in his pupils was about to die out, my heart contracted in pain and my fingers relaxed. In the twinkling of an eye, his eyes shaped into a smile, that naive, childlike, and trustful smile I had seen before. My hands moved to his bony back, embracing him
tightly. I kissed his icy cheeks. As he pressed his old lips together, tears showered from his hazy eyes. Like a woman, he wept in my arms, his body gradually sliding down till he was kneeling in front of me. With the strength given me by eight bowls of wonton and eight baked cakes, I jerked him to his feet and said, “Old man, what’s the use of crying? If blood is worthless, how much money can tears be worth?
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How are things now? Are you all right? I’m asking about
your present, not your past. Why are you reading a newspaper alone in the street at midnight? Something important?”
No reply. Where to start? He simply passed the paper to
me. I saw the front page was filled with Hua Guofeng’s corpulent face and a speech.
“Ai!” I gave a loud sigh, tearing the paper to shreds.
Gui Renzhong said nervously, “It carries the portrait of Chairman Hua and his latest instructions. Don’t you know, Chairman Mao told him before he passed away, ‘With you in charge, I am at ease.’”
“I care for nothing at the moment. I want only to know
where I can find a nest and have a good sleep.”
“Come to my house,” he offered immediately. “I have
many rooms.”
“Many rooms? Then why do you read the paper under the
streetlight at midnight?”
“The old lady is too mean. She doesn’t give me a mo-
ment’s peace.”
“Old lady? Did you marry again?”
“Same woman, same house.”
“So, another American friend of yours is visiting you, is that right?”
“Not one, but several groups already.”
“Because they come now and then, you don’t need to
move in and out any more.”
“That’s right. Okay, let’s go. With you there, I bet that woman will behave better.”
“Can I step into the Gui residence in rags like this?”
“Stop kidding me, little Liang. Let’s go.” We left, our
arms around each other’s shoulders.
At the entrance to the Gui residence Gui Renzhong took
a key out of his pants pocket and opened the gate, turning on the yard light. The door was unlocked and opened with a gentle push. He turned on all the lights in the sitting room, and the room brightened magnificently. Instantly, Xie Li 2 9 8
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roared from upstairs, “You aren’t blind yet, so why turn on so many lights?”
“We have a guest,” said Gui timidly.
“What guest? The American president? They installed a
new electric meter, and we have to pay the bill ourselves.
Did you know that, dirty pig?”
“Yes, I knew – ” He was going to turn off the lights when I stopped him.
Hurried footsteps resounded on the stairs. In less than a second, the raging Xie Li appeared before us. A blue-striped bathrobe hung from her shoulders, and her brassiere and
briefs and garter belt for stockings of an unknown age
showed. With curlers all over her head, she looked like an angry Pekingese. Looking me over from head to foot, she
howled and stamped her feet. “Beasts! You are nothing but selfish animals!”
Old Gui hid behind me. “What’s the matter?” I asked
calmly.
“Do you need to ask? Look at your feet, they’re pig’s feet.
How could you set them on the carpet of our house?!” Raising her eyebrows and glaring at me with her apricot eyes, she looked as if she were about to tear me to pieces.
I stared at her and said softly: “Don’t you remember?
‘Without cow dung on your feet, you cannot be called a revolutionary.’ Do not soil your own face.”
“Who are you?” She was obviously irritated at the truth
in my words.
“He is – ” Old Gui was about to introduce me, but I
stopped him.
“Who are you?” Obviously she didn’t remember me.
They say it’s hard for a person who has made his fortune to remember his old acquaintances. The dark shadow of two
years’ imprisonment also had changed me enormously, and
we had met only once before.
“You don’t know me?”
“No.”
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“But I know you.”
“You know me?”
“Of course, I know you. You’re Xie Li, whose grand name
was linked to important titles in the first, second, and third Headquarters of the East-Is-Red Red Guards’ Rebellion, the Headquarters of the Workers Rebelling to the End, the
Regiment of the Lord’s Whip, the Writers’ Association Defending Jiang Qing, and militant groups such as the Magic Club and the Ambitious Men, and the propaganda team of
the Great Union.… Shall I continue?”
“You!” Her voice quaked. “You – want to persecute me?”
“I want you to know that I am in possession of all your
records.”
“All of them?”
“All of them, including some things
only one or two peo-
ple know.”
“Let’s open the window and be frank. What do you
want?”
“For now, I want to sleep. You can wait and see my next
move.”
“Sleep, fine. I can tidy up a room for you.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll share a bed with old Gui tonight. Let’s go, old Gui. Upstairs.” I dragged him upstairs to the large master bedroom. Xie Li, following me nervously, took her clothes and sneaked downstairs.
I shut the bedroom door. “Look, old Gui. I’ve harnessed
her, haven’t I? One has to use the devil’s tricks against a devil. She has a mean face, so your face has to be even
meaner. Old Gui, look at yourself!” Suddenly feeling my
weariness, I said, “I must take a bath.”
“Fine, there’s the hot water. That woman heats water for her bath every day. Take it in the bathroom. I’ll find some clean clothes for you.”
I went into the bathroom and filled the tub with hot
water, and then soaked off a pound of oily dirt. When I
emerged from the bath, old Gui jumped with joy. “Old
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brother, you look really refreshed. Quick, get under the quilt, warmed by that woman’s body.”
I got under the warm quilt. By the time old Gui came to
bed, I was utterly exhausted. He asked, “Old brother, you need some plans. What’s your first step, a job or – ?”
“No. My first step is to help you get rid of that tigress – ”
Those were my last words before falling asleep.
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The interstate bus was crawling along the
desolate mountain road. I rested my forehead on the back of the seat before me. The bus looked like a remodeled liberation truck of the fifties. A piston in its engine was already loose. Going uphill, its body trembled and the engine
coughed like an old asthmatic. I was afraid it would break down at any moment. The seats were close together and my legs were doubled up miserably.
This was supposed to be the last day of my journey: three days by train, with two transfers, plus four days by bus. If I didn’t reach my destination soon, my legs would break.
Raising my head from the seat back, I saw that all the other passengers were dozing. The early summer sun heated the
bus roof like the lid of a steamer. The national minority passengers, in heavy clothing, looked especially hot. Then there were the women of the Li nationality with their long, wide, ruffled skirts, and the Tibetan men in leather coats. Seeing those passengers reminded me that I was already near China’s southwestern border.
How did I get here? Released from prison, then losing
the love of the cocoon…eight bowls of wonton and eight
baked cakes…running into old Gui in the street…my first
sound sleep outside prison…a month’s thorough investiga-
tion to expose all of Xie Li’s activities during the Cultural Revolution. We bombarded her with all the evidence and
asked her to choose official or private settlement.
She asked, “What do you mean, official or private? ”
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“By official, we mean we will submit all your material to the Office of Investigation, Examination, and Sentencing; by private, we mean you simply hand us the marriage certificate – a forged document anyway. It, too, is proof of your illegal activity.”
After thinking it over for a day and a night, the woman
handed over the marriage certificate. I burned it in front of old Gui. Xie Li took her bedroll and left the Gui residence submissively. Having the tigress driven away would give
old Gui a better chance of survival. The victory built up my self-confidence, so I went to the party committee of the Institute of Fine Arts, demanding a reversal of my verdict, restitution of my financial loss, and a job. After an investigation, the committee concluded, “Your imprisonment was
an error. Because there was no verdict, there is nothing to reverse. During the ten years of turmoil, more than ten
thousand people have suffered financial loss. We hope you understand the hard times the party and the state are facing.
Assigning you a job is routine work. Although you have not completed your studies, we can still give you a diploma. As to the place of occupation, you must make a request first.
Then the institute will try its best to accommodate your choice. But it is hard to stay in Beijing or Shanghai because control of the residence registrations for these two cities is in the hands of higher departments.”
To my amusement, when I told them my choice – to
work in the most remote, most primitive place, better still a place in a prehistoric state – they thought I had gone mad.
“Are you showing your anger?”
“No. I’m quite calm.”
“You suffered a nervous breakdown when you were
wronged.”
“No, I’m not crazy. You may ask a doctor from the men-
tal hospital to give me a checkup.”
“If we approve your choice, you will accuse us of finding a new way to persecute you.”
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“I’ll write my choice down.”
“You’ll live to regret it.”
“It’s too late for regrets. A person like me should never have been born.”
“Don’t talk like that. We’d still like you to think it over carefully.”
“I’ve been thinking it over for ten years. Some people say the ten years passed in vain. I don’t agree. Wisdom comes from setbacks. After so many setbacks, shouldn’t I have
gained some true wisdom? I’ve made up my mind.”
“So this is a rational decision.”
“Right. It would be impossible for me to make a purely
emotional decision, even if you wanted it that way, because my feelings have dried up.”
The other procedures went smoothly. In China going
down, like a flowing river, is much easier than climbing up.
All men want to go upstream; men like me, who prefer to
go downstream, are nearly extinct. So all the officials and passengers I met on my descent were astonished and found me incomprehensible. In fact, I was quite easy to comprehend. Being tired of noise, one simply wants a quiet place; after turning somersaults all one’s life, one longs for a place to stand up; after being scorched by fire, one wants to roll in the snow. I was no odd fish, just an ordinary man.
The lofty mountain peaks outside the window had
become a paper-cut silhouette. A sliver of sun from between the mountains cast a shaft of hazy redness eastward. The bus, as if stricken by a heart attack, collapsed to a stop. All the passengers fought to get out – all but me. Let them all out, and I would become conspicuous. I had been told that a county representative would meet me at the bus station. I tried to get rid of the dust blocking my vision by blowing upward along my nose. Then I held my straw hat and baggage and got off the bus. The other passengers, welcomed by their friends and relatives, gradually dispersed. The sta-3 0 4
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tion was deserted. I looked around to view my new world. It seemed to be taking my measure, too. What was I like in
the eye of this world – of a so-called town with a single dimly lit intersection? The sky looked very high. I thought the stars here would be bigger; actually they looked about the same, although perhaps brighter. Had no one come to
meet me? No matter, since I had little baggage and the
town was tiny. I could search for my work unit.
“Are you Liang Rui?” A man in
a faded army cap sud-
denly stood before me, as if he had popped out of the
ground. He was not tall, and looked like a low-ranking
cadre.
“Yes. And you?”
“I am Luo Ren, head of the County Cultural Bureau.” He
neither shook my hand nor helped me with my baggage.
“Come with me.”
I followed the bureau chief into the town. He was a quiet man. The town was a quiet place where people tuck in early.
A street lamp on a short post shone at the intersection and an old granny squatted on the ground, selling rice noodle soup.
We stopped at the gate beneath a sign that said County
Cultural Bureau. Perhaps inspired by the photos in a pictorial spread, the architect had designed the gate in a mock-European style. The bureau chief groped for his key and
opened the gate. We entered the beaten-earth yard. He
pushed open a door on the western wing and flicked on the light. The light was dim and shaky, perhaps because of the generator’s throbbing. Actually, it was only half a room; the other half was shut off by a wall of sun-dried bricks. The half room was about seven meters square. On a board supported by two benches were heaped some cracked tongs,
drums with holes in them, and instruments with broken
strings. On the floor there was a coverless wooden trunk stuffed with old flags. One thing among them was new – a 3 0 5
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color picture of Hua Guofeng’s corpulent face. By the window stood a drawerless desk.
He asked me to sit, but I did not know where. Aware of
my problem, he wiped the board with his sleeve and all the instruments tumbled to the ground in a loud chorus. They sounded cheerful, as if they had seldom had a chance like this to show their existence. I put my straw hat, baggage, and bottom on the board. He seated himself on the edge of the coverless trunk.
“Hungry?” He asked me kindly.
“Past the peak of hunger, I guess.”
“It’s hard to find food and boiled water at this hour of the night. All the shops are closed.”
“I’m not thirsty.” I licked my chapped lips.
Either because he dared not ask more questions or be-
cause he was not a man of words, he was silent for five minutes before taking out a wrinkled cigarette packet. “Have a smoke.”
