Years of Red Dust

by Qiu Xiaolong

  What kind of people do what kind of things.

  What kind of classes speak what kind of languages.

  The poem brought even larger credit to Bao. More significantly, in the poem he moved beyond the central image of tofu—an important shift, since his neighbors had doubted Bao’s ability to make poetry like tofu. The wife basked in the glory of the husband.

  People now supposed that Bao was going to move to a better area as a result of his elevated status. But he didn’t, and his wife joked about his fondness for the feng shui of their tingzijian room. After all, it was here that Bao had enjoyed his turn of luck. So Bao, as a nationally known worker poet, was assigned an additional room on the second floor in the same shikumen house, through a special arrangement, which his wife declared he deserved.

  The neighbors started to call him Worker Poet Bao. He answered to it with a prompt smile and with a new song that the radio played during our evening talk. It was entitled “The Working Class Are Strong-Backboned”:

  We the working class are strong-backboned.

  Following Chairman Mao, we march forward,

  With the country and the world in our heart,

  We do not stop on the road of the revolution.

  Self-reliant and working hard,

  We do not stop along the road of the construction.

  Holding the red flags high, we move on courageously.

  We’re the locomotive of the new era.

  “As in an old Chinese saying, when fortune comes your way, there’s no stopping it,” Old Root commented.

  “Room, wife, and fame—what a metamorphosis through a stroke of fortune!” Four-Eyed Liu joined in. “All because of tofu.”

  “Tofu or no tofu, there’s no pushing away your fortune,” Old Root followed with a more profound comment, “but how fortune eventually works out, you never know.”

  Chinese Chess

  (1964)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1964. Having weathered the “three years of natural disasters,” China has made new, gigantic progress in the socialist revolution and socialist construction. As Chairman Mao pointed out, over the past fifteen years, literature and art associations and their publications have failed to carry out Party politics, having actually slid to the brink of revisionism in recent years. So it is necessary to talk about class struggle every year, every month, every day. In October, China successfully exploded its first atom bomb, and the Chinese government proposed to convene an international conference to discuss the prohibition and destruction of nuclear weapons. On the international front, Premier Zhou Enlai set forth the basic principles for China’s support to the other countries.

  In 1964, Lihua failed the college entrance examination.

  To be fair to him, his scores were not that bad—they were even slightly higher than the enrollment acceptance level—but he suffered from a disadvantage. In the “class status” column of the college application form, he had to put his father down as a clerk “with historical problems,” because the older man had been an activist in a student organization associated with the Nationalist government before 1949. It was a political stain that, though not serious enough to put the old man on the blacklist of the new society, cast a shadow on Lihua’s horizon. Melong, another student from Red Dust Lane, entered Shanghai Teachers College with a score actually lower than Lihua’s, because of his worker family background. There was a Party policy frequently quoted in the newspapers: Family background counts, but not absolutely. What counts more is young people’s own political performance. The second sentence was generally regarded, however, as no more than a decorative veneer.

  Still, Lihua’s parents wanted him to have another try the following year. Or, as an alternative, to start working in a small eatery through the early retirement arrangement of his father, who had worked there for more than twenty years, standing by a concrete sink in a pair of black rubber shoes, washing dishes from morning to evening. Lihua was not eager to get into his father’s shoes, which the old man would kick off the first thing when he arrived back home, revealing water-soaked feet as pallid as salted fat pork. So Lihua made a halfhearted attempt to review the test books, not believing that the second time would make any difference. Instead, he started to play Chinese chess in earnest, trying to bury his head like an ostrich in the world of chess—at least for a while.

  Spending four or five hours daily at the chessboard, Lihua soon found himself turning into a top player in Red Dust Lane. At a tournament outside the lane, he was “discovered” by Zhu Shujian, a white-haired chess master who had retired from the Shanghai City Chess Team. Zhu saw great potential in Lihua. Though not ready to acknowledge him as a student yet, Zhu started to take him to competitions among the higher-level players. Unexpectedly, Lihua saw a career option far more tempting than his father’s, if he could become a member of the Shanghai City Chess Team. The chessboard presented the possibility of a different world to him, one in which he did not have to worry about his family background, so long as he calculated every move on the board, like with a math problem.

  On a July morning, Lihua followed Zhu to a cobble-covered street in the old city section, where Wan Liang was going to play against several challengers in a wheellike succession. A member of the Shanghai City Chess team in the fifties and a runner-up in a national tournament several years ago, Wan had suddenly disappeared from the scene a while back. Lihua was thrilled at the prospect of meeting this legendary figure.

  The game had been set up in front of a dingy hot-water shop near the end of the street. Normally, such a game would be held inside the shop, where people could smoke, drink, and sometimes eat as well. The decision to have it outside was probably due to Wan’s name, which would draw a larger audience. There were five or six thermos bottles lined up along the curb, and the owner of the hot-water shop, a plump man surnamed Han, an enthusiastic amateur chess player, was rubbing his hands, beaming with pride.

  Wan Liang was a gaunt, grizzle-haired man with a constant smile revealing his tea-and-cigarette-stained teeth. He straddled one end of a wooden bench, while his opponent perched on the other end and the chessboard sat between them. There was a tall, worn bamboo broom leaning against the wall behind Wan like an exclamation mark. Stripped to the waist in his black homespun shorts and wooden slippers, Wan appeared sallow, malnourished, his ribs visible like a board in the glaring daylight. They looked like frets on a stringed instrument, and they reminded Lihua of a Shanghai expression: it’s possible to play the pipa on his ribs.

  Wan was unquestionably a master of the chessboard, but his manner was surprising. He kept lifting one bare foot, and then another, onto the bench. Clasping the yellow sole of his foot in one hand, he held a huge sticky rice ball in the other, unaware of the grain stuck on his nose tip.

  What’s more, Wan applauded his own moves and criticized his opponent’s loudly. With the audience talking, cursing, laughing alongside, Wan seemed to build ever-increasing momentum on the chessboard, peppering the game with sarcastic remarks, making it hard for his opponent to concentrate.

  “My horse, it is really galloping in the skies, but the stinking positioning of your soldier really reeks like a dog shit,” Wan said, busy nodding or munching at his rice ball. “The way you move your piece—exactly the way a blind man rides a blind horse along a steep cliff on a dark, stormy night. Your head must have been stuffed with straw.”

  Lihua was growing more and more uncomfortable. After years, if he had the potential and studied hard, he might be able to play a masterful hand like Wan—maybe even as a member of the City Chess Team. But then what?

  Wan was like a down-and-out Don Quixote, an old man stripped of his shining armor, holding a broken lance, fighting one absurd battle after another with imagined dignity. Still, Wan was a powerful player, and his tactics, which were not aboveboard, also helped. His tactics of distraction brought unbearable pressure on his opponent, who was befuddled into making one blunder after anot
her. The third game that morning was finished in less than ten minutes.

  Lihua didn’t know exactly how the challenge matches were arranged. It appeared that each of the challengers had the opportunity to play one or two games with Wan, while at the other end of the bench a line of new challengers waited. Soon, however, there was only one left, a sturdy middle-aged man surnamed Pan, with a bald head, bushy eyebrows, and a determined expression in his beady eyes. Pan played slowly, stubbornly, thinking long and hard before making a single move, in a sharp contrast to Wan’s carefree style. Wan started to show his impatience through a variety of new gestures—tapping his fingers at the edge of the board, breathing audibly into the cup, turning to examine the clock inside the hot-water shop . . .

  As Pan was holding a cannon piece in the air, debating with himself for several minutes about where to fire, Wan commented with a sardonic smile, “Charge forward, Amier.” It was a witty reference to the movie The Visitor from the Ice Mountains and the character Amier, a young naïve man too shy to express his love. The audience burst out laughing. Pan’s face went scarlet, and he put the cannon down in a surprising position, making a fatal threat to Wan.

  Abruptly Wan stood up and left, carrying the bamboo broom, uttering a fragmented sentence—“Got to go”—and hurrying across the street.

  No one seemed to be puzzled by this except Lihua. It was not polite, to say the least, for Wan to leave in the middle of the game. Was it possible that he, too, had to think long and hard about his countermove in this critical situation? Could it have been a face-saving trick?

  Wan came back in about twenty minutes, throwing down the bamboo broom like a broken lance and, as if without thinking, pushing his castle to the bottom line. It was a brilliant counterstroke, immediately turning the table. Pan perspired profusely, his face flushing and his fingers trembling.

  “What’s that?” Wan said, sniffing vigorously. “It smells like a fermented winter melon.”

  Lihua did not smell anything. Looking around, he noticed one of the onlookers holding a bowl of watery rice in his hand, but he did not see any fermented winter melon in the bowl. “Winter melon?” he mumbled, recalling that it was something like a special pickle for Ningbonese, but the others broke out in guffaws. Lihua realized it was another insulting remark in reference to Pan’s skill.

  That proved to be the last straw for Pan. “What are you, Wan? Don’t forget your class status as a Bad Element! An enemy to the socialist society, you can only sweep the lane like a dog with its tail tucked in. How dare you still be so cocky after two years in prison?”

  Wan turned pale, trembling like a leaf torn from the tree.

  “Come on, Pan,” Zhu intervened. “A game is just a game. Don’t talk like that.”

  “Pee and see if the reflection of your own stinking ass is clean. You played chess for a warlord before the liberation in 1949,” Pan snapped, with a couple of blood vessels on his temples standing out, wriggling like nightcrawlers. “You think we revolutionary people don’t know that? It’s the age of the proletarian dictatorship.”

  Zhu was speechless with rage. Han, the owner of the hot-water shop, came over to Pan, holding a cup of fresh, hot tea. “Give me face, Pan. After all, the game is in front of my shop.”

  “What face do you have? A face of a small-business owner! Your own class status is just one shade less black than Wan’s. Mind your damned hot-water business!”

  “You’re biting like a mad dog today. Have I ever charged you for the tea you’ve drunk for so many years? Even a dog knows how to shake its tail in appreciation.” Han was furious as well, dashing the cup against the concrete curb. “What’s wrong with my class status? My son is a PLA soldier!”

  Pan was beside himself, throwing the chessboard to the ground with a forcible sweep of his arm. All the pieces rolled about like soldiers falling downhill in the disastrous retreat of the Qin army in the ancient Feishui battle . . .

  Lihua did not see how the fiasco ended, and he left alone, in no mood to reexamine the chess game, step by step, as he usually did.

  That night, he decided not to take the college entrance test again, and he took over his father’s job, washing dishes in the small eatery.

  Shoes of the Cultural Revolution

  (1966)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1966. In this year, our supreme leader Chairman Mao launched forth the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to seize back the power from the revisionists in the Party, like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The Central Cultural Revolution Group, directly under Mao, took over control of People’s Daily and published an editorial entitled “Sweep away All Monsters.” Mao wrote to the Red Guards, the new student organizations all over the country, supporting their rebellion against the reactionaries. On eight occasions, at Tiananmen Square, Mao reviewed Red Guards, groups whose number has now reached more than thirteen million. In response, Red Guards have relentlessly subjected the class enemies to mass-criticism and crushed the old establishments. In the midst of the slogans of the Cultural Revolution, China tested its first guided missile carrying a nuclear warhead.

  The Cultural Revolution hung

  a halter of ragged shoes

  around her neck: heels,

  mules, slings, boots, sandals,

  her bare feet bleeding . . .

  “Why those ragged shoes?” a boy asked his grandfather in the midst of the spectators that lined the lane like tree ear fungi.

  “Symbolic,” his grandfather said. “Heaven alone knows how many men might have had her.”

  “Like those dirty shoes,” his father said, “she must have been worn out by such a number of them. She was a famous actress before 1949!”

  “But that was almost twenty years ago,” the boy said.

  “Twenty years ago,” his uncle cut in, “you could not have touched her little toes for thousands of yuan. Today, I have placed a wreath of shoes around her neck.”

  “So those are your own shoes.” The boy nodded in enlightenment, staring at people’s spittle shining on her face and at the red line of footprints drying behind her.

  Her mad song to the ragged shoes:

  Shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes

  of the Cultural Revolution;

  shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo,

  barefoot is the solution.

  Cricket Fighting

  (1969)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1969. In this year, our Party and people have achieved great victories in the course of the Cultural Revolution. In the Ninth CPC National Congress held under the presidency of Chairman Mao, Lin Biao, Mao’s close comrade-in-arms and successor, delivered the political report confirming the theory and practice of the Cultural Revolution. A new Political Bureau was formed. China successfully conducted its first underground nuclear test.

  In the summer of 1969, evenings began hilariously with cricket fighting in a corner close to the end of Red Dust Lane, where people brought out their clay cricket pots, squatted in a circle, and watched their crickets fight against one another. After a fierce battle, the winning cricket would sing loudly by scratching its wings in the pot, while the defeated would run for its life, circling the pot or jumping out. The cricket owners and onlookers would join in by shouting or shooing, as if the fate of the whole world depended on the outcome in the small pot.

  As an elementary school student, I was glued to the corner, though too young to own a cricket. There was no possibility my parents would allow me to go cricket catching in the countryside. In the days before the Cultural Revolution, some people had gambled on cricket fighting, and my parents did not like the association. But they acquiesced to my watching the nightly fights, as long as it kept me in the lane.

  One evening that summer, Cousin Min gave me a cricket he had caught in a graveyard in Qingpu. It was nicknamed Big General, and it was not exactly big but it was pitch black, with one third of its head made of two gigantic teeth, gla
ring like a pair of axes in the sun. At the time, people believed in the spirit of the earth, and whatever grew up in the graveyard, they declared, must have acquired its yin spirit. So it was a hell of a cricket, and I wondered why Min wanted to give it to me.

  “There is no time,” he said simply. “We have to fight for Chairman Mao.”

  It was the fourth year of the Cultural Revolution. With the old government system demolished, Red Guard organizations found themselves in power, and then they found their interests in conflict. Each faction claimed to be the most loyal to Chairman Mao and denounced the other as the most treacherous. Fights among different organizations broke out, initially with words, then with stones or knives, and finally with guns.

  I understood so little of it. Nor did I care. It was the first time that I owned a cricket. Oh, what a grown-up’s prestige came with such a valuable possession! In the corner, people talked to me like an equal, even going out of their way to be nice, especially when they wanted Big General to fight their crickets. I learned such a lot about cricket fighting, like how to choose the feed, how to make a temporary bamboo container, how to improve the housing, how to trim a cricket-goading rush stem, and how to keep the pot warm in cold weather.

  Of course, what really made it a brave new world for me in the lane was the Big General. Having absorbed the infernal spirit of the graveyard, the cricket attacked its opponents like hell—leg-ripping, jaw-cutting, and belly-slitting—in the purple arena of the clay pot. The first day I put it in to fight in the pot, it defeated five crickets in a row, breaking the record of Red Dust Lane.

  It kept winning enthusiastic applause for itself, and for me. Beneath its left wing, there was a tiny orange dot shaped much like the mole on Mao’s chin, though I knew better than to mention it to others. A cricket, I thought to myself, could be the most inscrutable creature in the world, behaving as if born for the purpose of fighting against another—and for its master, I added. I gave it a longer nickname: Invincible Big General Li Yuanba, the number one hero in the Romance of the Sui and Tang Dynasties—small, swarthy, wielding two axes like gigantic mountains. Once, when enraged, Li Yuanba tore a mighty opponent into two, thus making a great contribution to the Tang empire. My Big General would do exactly that for me.