Years of Red Dust

by Qiu Xiaolong

  He knew he didn’t have to worry anymore about the housing assignment. He saw the conclusion in the eyes of his colleagues.

  But he suddenly felt something like a chilly current surging down his spine that summer morning as he thought to himself, once again, that it was all for the sake of a room.

  Still, it was a battle he had to win. He had to prove that he had the guts to fight to the end.

  So the battle went on, triumphantly, to the end that she had predicted—he got the shining room key from the housing committee.

  She was seven months pregnant by that time.

  She decided not to move in immediately. It was an old room vacated by another family instead of a new room. But a room of twelve square meters nonetheless meant a new world to them. She wanted to renovate it like new. It was out of the question, however, for her to come to his office anymore. So he had her staying temporarily in Red Dust Lane, where his mother would help to take care of her. Only Pingping could be stubborn: she busied herself in and out of the lane, her feet swollen and her face pale, supervising the renovation project, choosing and bargaining for the most inexpensive yet excellent material.

  Liang still slept in the office. He was getting used to it. He did not have to worry about the morning traffic, and he worked quite late at night, though no one knew exactly what he had been doing there.

  But there was another reason for staying at the office. He didn’t want to witness the constant bickering between Pingping and his mother, who believed that the younger woman had tricked him into marriage. After all, Pingping was several months older than he, another “aged female youth,” and it might have been her last chance to hook such a deal. He was inclined to agree with his mother, thinking about all the initiatives Pingping had taken, though he didn’t say anything to his pregnant wife. From the moment he had first raised the subject of housing, Pingping had never let him drop it—despite all her casual remarks and seeming lack of concern for herself.

  He also had no answer to his mother’s question, “What do you see in her?”

  That is, except the room that came with her. But it had been her room in all honesty, because it came to him through her effort and her sacrifice. He could not help wondering at the sight of this bloated woman, almost a stranger, nagging and bickering in the lane where he had grown up. There was hardly any trace of vivaciousness left in her, he observed with a twinge of conscience as she handed him a white towel, her face dust-covered and her hair disheveled from her renovation project.

  One night, waking up alone in the dark office, he shivered at the prospect of his married life in that room of twelve square feet, year after year, with his wife, his children, and perhaps his grandchildren too, all growing up under the same roof, just like in Red Dust Lane. There was no possibility of having a second room assigned to him by the institute.

  And his wife had not talked to him about his work at the institute for months, or about Balzac or Dickens, or such writers as she used to discuss with him in the bookstore. She’s too busy, he thought, an interpretation he tried to adhere to. And he didn’t bother to explain to her what he had been busy with, working late at the institute.

  He almost missed the expected date of his son’s birth.

  At the “first month celebration dinner” held for his son in the lane, he turned over his room key to his wife, declaring that he was going to start his own business in Shenzhen. It was a special economic zone, where with the new government policies, people could do things that were not yet possible in other parts of socialist China. There, people were capable of making more money as entrepreneurs and buying new apartments for themselves. He had made an intensive study of it and had come up with a business plan.

  “China is going to change,” he said simply. “I’m planning to buy a new apartment there for ourselves.”

  Iron Rice Bowl

  (1990)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1990. China successfully weathered the political storm of 1989. Martial law was lifted in Beijing. Hundreds of arrested student-movement participants, having confessed, were released. In April, the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC was adopted to ensure a fifty-year continuance of Hong Kong’s economic system.

  In the ongoing economic reform, the process of restructuring or closing state-owned enterprises was accelerated. The year also witnessed the rapid modernization of the People’s Liberation Army. “A clear sky after the rain,” we are full of confidence for the future of the socialist China.

  Dong Keqiang had always been considered one of the luckiest young men in Red Dust Lane. Since his grandfather’s generation, the Dongs had lived here, with a whole wing in a shikumen house for themselves. Unlike others in the lane, his grandfather, a skilled, well-paid technician before 1949, was capable of renting a wing consisting of a dining room, a living room, a bedroom, and a small dark room, which served as a bathroom. In the years afterward, those rooms gradually lost their original function as the family grew and the rooms had to accommodate more and more people. Still, Dong had a room all to himself, and as the only male heir, he would eventually inherit the wing.

  But his luck was more than just the wing. After 1949, his grandfather was classified in the new socialist class system as a worker, and so was his father. In the seventies, when Dong grew up, a proletarian family background still meant a lot. Dong himself became a Little Red Guard, a member of the Communist Youth League, and in time, a technician at Shanghai Telecommunication, a well-paid position at a profitable state-run company—an iron rice bowl.

  “An iron rice bowl” was a figure of speech that evolved from the time-honored tradition of eating rice from a bowl. When someone lost his job, it was often said that he lost or broke his rice bowl. In the state-run enterprise system established after 1949, employees never got laid off—no matter their work performance—but instead held their jobs until they retired with a pension and medical insurance. These were the benefits of the socialist system. So a job at a state-run company was called an “iron rice bowl” because job security was absolute—an iron rice bowl would never break in the equalitarianist system.

  In the economic reform in the mid-eighties, when some people began to run their own businesses, “iron rice bowl holders” didn’t take it as something to worry about. The possibility that those new “entrepreneurs” might earn a little more would be nothing compared to all the benefits of an iron rice bowl. Besides, no one could tell how those new things would work out in China.

  One afternoon, Auntie Jia, the celebrated matchmaker of Red Dust Lane, introduced Dong to Lili, a fashionable young girl. Lili had been reluctant to meet an ordinary technician, but Auntie Jia made a convincing point about Dong’s grandfather being in his eighties and about Dong inheriting the whole wing in the near future.

  Dong and Lili met at Bund Park, and Dong was smitten at first sight. They talked and laughed and walked in the park for a couple of hours. He then suggested they go to dinner at a restaurant that same evening. Looking across the street, she suggested a restaurant in the Peace Hotel, a five-star hotel he had never stepped in before, but he didn’t hesitate. He had enough money with him, he believed, for the evening.

  So they went up to the restaurant on the seventh floor and chose a table by the window overlooking the river. Instead of looking at the river, though, he kept gazing into the waves in her large eyes, which he imagined set the colorful vessels sailing along the river below them. She said she liked the atmosphere here.

  But he was shocked at the prices in the gold-printed menu. It was out of the question for him to try and impress her by choosing one of the expensive chef’s specials. So without turning over the menu to her, he started ordering like a pro: “Pork with Tree Ears, Imperial Concubine Chicken, Meat Ball of Four Happiness, Single Winter Bamboo Shoot Soup . . .” Each of the dishes he ordered cost less than a hundred yuan. Lili didn’t say anything; instead she kept looking out of the windo
w, absentmindedly.

  “What about fish and shrimp?” the waitress said, casting a casual glance at the menu in his hand.

  It was a question he had dreaded. An Australian lobster served three ways—raw slices, stir-fried with scallion and ginger, and watery rice of the lobster sauce—cost nine hundred yuan. He didn’t even bother to check the price for a large croaker fried in the shape of a squirrel. Not that he was tight-fisted, but he had only about eight hundred yuan with him. He glanced through the menu again. To his relief, he found something listed in the chef’s specials: “Live Yellow River Carp.”

  The carp was not considered, to the best of his knowledge, an expensive delicacy. In the food market at the back of the lane, a kilo of carp was no more than three or four yuan. A live carp could cost slightly more, but not that much. The chef’s special was marked with something called “unit price”: sixteen yuan. Whether “unit” meant kilo or jing—a standard Chinese measurement equivalent to half a kilo—the price appeared acceptable.

  “How about a carp about one to one and a half kilos?” the waitress suggested considerately, following his focus on the menu. “Anything smaller won’t have much meat, but a larger one won’t be tender.”

  “That sounds perfect.”

  Lili turned to him with spring waves rippling in her eyes—possibly rippling with the swimming carp.

  Soon their orders appeared on the table. In spite of all the delicacies, he feasted his eyes only on her. She started eating, dabbing at her lush lips with a pink napkin, smiling radiantly in the miraculous late sunshine streaming through the window.

  Then the live carp was served by another waitress, who was dressed in an indigo wax print, her bare feet in wooden slippers, and her shapely ankles silver-bangled, lighting up the red carpet. She placed before them the carp on a huge willow-patterned platter, saying with a dramatic flare, “Look!”

  The eyes of the fish on the platter were still turning. How the fish was cooked, he had no idea, but it was nothing short of a miracle. Lili chopsticked a slice of back meat onto his plate. It tasted extraordinary—delicious and fresh—and even more so with her intimate gesture. She sucked at the tender fish cheek with a sensual grace beyond his wildest dream, her slender fingers lightly touching her lips.

  Suddenly clumsy and jumpy, he plucked out one eye of the carp with the chopstick, splashing up the juice.

  “The meat surrounding the eye is the best,” she said with a reassuring smile. “In Hong Kong, there’s a special dish of fish eyes. Only eight orders per day.”

  The meat surrounding the carp eye tasted like fat tofu with a nondescript texture. He had never heard about the Hong Kong special dish. She might be a regular customer in fancy restaurants, he concluded. But she deserved it, because, as a proverb says, a smile on her lips was worth a thousand tons of gold.

  He wasn’t aware of time flowing away like the river in the gathering dusk.

  She finally sighed with content. The waitress came over to their table with the bill on a silver tray.

  It was a big shock—the bill was more than 2,500 yuan. He had done the calculation in his mind several times. The amount shouldn’t exceed six hundred, with his fish weighing about a kilo. So he summoned the waitress and asked her about it.

  “Oh, the unit price means a liang, equivalent to fifty grams.”

  “How can that possibly be?”

  “It’s a convention in five-star restaurants. You’ve never been to one before?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “Then you should have known about the unit price,” she said, turning to the last page of the menu. “Take a look. It states it clearly.”

  It was true—it was printed in tiny characters there, though he had never thought to check at the end of the menu. If he weren’t in Lili’s company, he might have admitted his ignorance, paid with whatever money he had with him, and then paid the remaining balance later. But he couldn’t afford to lose face like that. As an alternative, he tried to come off as a man fighting for principle, not for money. Only this way, he thought, would he stand a chance in her eyes, though it was difficult for him to define the principle or the fight for it.

  “Come on. The Shanghai newspapers are filled with stories about rip-offs like this,” he said. “My buddy works for the Wenhui Daily. He would jump on a story like this.”

  “What would the article possibly say?” the waitress asked sarcastically.

  “It’s no longer the days of Victor Sassoon,” Dong said, invoking the name of the Jewish tycoon who built the Peace Hotel with money exploited from Chinese people. “The fish costs more than two months of my salary as a state-run company worker. Do you think that’s socialist?”

  “So you are still holding onto an iron rice bowl,” she said. “You know what? The customers here are holding gold bowls and silver bowls. They have their own companies. Let me tell you—we are not a state-run restaurant. If you are so proud of your iron bowl, you don’t have to come here.”

  While he was arguing with the waitress, Lili stood up and left the table without a word. She might have gone to the restroom, he thought.

  But she didn’t come back.

  Then restaurant security came, took all the money he had, and dragged him out by the collar.

  Afterward, when he tried to contact Lili again, she said on the phone, “Perhaps you can afford to lose face like that, but I can’t.”

  Dong couldn’t afford to lose face like that either. So he quit his state-run company and left for Shenzhen with a business plan of his own.

  There he started manufacturing stainless-steel rice bowls, believing that the archetype of the iron rice bowl still held symbolic significance for people. It proved to be a brilliant idea, and they soon began selling all over the country.

  Return of POW II

  (1992)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Newsletter for the year 1992. In January, Comrade Deng Xiaoping made his strategic “southern tour” to Shenzhen and Zhuhai Special Economic Zones, pointing out that revolution is the liberation of production forces, that reform is also the liberation of production forces, and that development, instead of being either socialist or capitalist, is the one and only truth. His important talk gave a great boost to the open-door economic strategies and accelerated the market reform to establish a socialist market economy, with major Yangtze River and border cities opening to foreign investment. Internationally, China ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And this year, China’s GDP grew by twelve percent.

  Bai Jie’s story should have finished long, long ago.

  It almost did, in 1954, the year she returned to Red Dust Lane after being taken and released as a POW of the Korean War. Since then, she had led a quiet but hardly visible life in the lane.

  Her existence wasn’t written off, even though she was merely a shadow of her former self. What happened to her in the years after was of barely any interest to anybody in the lane. Still, she didn’t live in a vacuum. Whenever there was a new political movement, suspicions about her would come up again. And there were a number of new political movements during those years. It seemed quite possible that at some point the suspicions would bear fruit, but they never did.

  Those years were like short sentences punctuated by one political movement after another, and one individual’s story—not particularly tragic or dramatic in comparison to many others—couldn’t hold people’s attention for long. She had been brought up again only once in the evening talk of the lane. It was at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution: a radical young Red Guard branded the Chinese character “Loyalty” on her own shoulder to show her devotion to Mao, and someone brought up the topic of Bai.

  “What people put her through is a shame,” Old Root snapped. “Don’t even mention her again.”

  A lot had happened to the people who knew her story back in the early fifties. Some moved, some died, and some simply lost interest. The young and the middle-aged people who joined the evening talk of
the lane weren’t very interested in a withered, white-haired woman.

  The water flows, flowers fall, and the spring fades. / It’s a changed world.

  Bai had retired from the hospital a couple of years ago. Still single, she stayed at home—in her room of eleven square feet—most of the time. She had bought a hot plate, so instead of mixing with her neighbors in the common kitchen, she also cooked in her own room. Even the people who lived in the same building saw little of her. One of her next-door neighbors thought Bai might have some sort of mental disorder. Or she simply wanted to pass into oblivion.

  She might have succeeded, but for the unexpected return of Xue Zhiming, another prisoner of war, who appeared about forty years later, in 1992. His was a totally different story.

  Xue had been another of the Chinese People’s Volunteers marching proudly out of Red Dust Lane, leaving for the Korean War. A gawky young man, he was by no means as popular as Bai, and the lane paid little attention to the news about him being listed as having disappeared during the Korean War. Later on, there was some speculation about him being captured. Shortly after Bai’s return, a police officer visited his parents too. Their talk was behind closed doors, and no one ever learned the contents. No red paper flower ever appeared on the door, and even his parents hardly talked about him in the lane. When they passed away in the early seventies, there was no further news of Xue. It was believed that he must have died.

  It was not until the early nineties that a different story began to come out. Xue was alive—and prosperous, too—in Taiwan. As it turned out, he had been captured in the same battle as Bai and put into the same prison camp, but instead of returning home when released, he went over to Taiwan, where he was given a considerable sum from the Nationalist regime in exchange for his denouncement of the Communist regime. There, he started his own business and succeeded. By the early nineties, he was a billionaire with several large companies to his name. There was no news of him in Red Dust Lane for many years, and he didn’t contact home for fear of bringing punishment or trouble down on the people.