by Ma Jian
‘Dream-talking again! We could never afford one of those flash apartments with the pittance you’re offering us. I warn you, if you don’t stop harassing us, I’ll get on a bus and set fire to myself like that guy did the other day.’ Guan Dalin is referring to a farmer from a neighbouring village who committed self-immolation on a crowded public bus to protest against the seizure of his land.
‘Tell the demolition team I’ve brought a bucket of diesel, and if they dare enter my house, I’ll set fire to myself as well.’ This middle-aged man dressed in an army camouflage uniform has a pair of binoculars around his neck and is holding a Labrador on a lead.
‘That man got bashed in the head last time,’ the informer whispers to Director Ma, removing his red baseball cap and wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘The car you’re standing on belongs to him.’
A group of men walk out from the concrete house, singing: ‘“This is our native land. Every grain of its soil belongs to us. If an enemy tries to seize it, we will fight them to the death …”’ Everyone knows these Cultural Revolution songs now that they are played on the radio again all the time. Ma Daode remembers singing this same song, standing on the high balcony of the Drum Tower in Ziyang, waving an East is Red flag. His scalp was sweating then as much as it is now. ‘Listen to me, fellow countrymen,’ he shouts. ‘Two units of armed police equipped with live ammunition will storm the village today, with urban-management officers and assistants. You’ll stand no chance against them. “An arm can never defeat a leg”, as the saying goes. Surrender now, and trust that the government has your best interests at heart.’
‘Enough of that shit!’ says Dingguo, grabbing a spade. ‘Nothing you say will change our minds. We’re ready to die for our village. We’ve pledged that if anyone is killed today, the rest of us will take care of the children they leave behind. You’re lucky you have ties to this place, or we would’ve beaten you up. So just bugger off now, and tell your bosses we will never surrender.’
Ma Daode knows from Liu Qi that Dingguo’s brother was also arrested during the last assault. He takes a gulp from the bottle of water Hu passes him, and says: ‘The Buddha Light Temple and Ancestral Hall won’t be touched – I promise. Only the cemetery and the old houses will be torn down. Then we’ll move the village over there, and you can start your lives anew. Fellow countrymen, seize this opportunity! To those who abandon doubt, new paths will open; to those who relinquish cares, eternal spring awaits!’
‘See this kitchen knife?’ says a young woman with a huge cold sore as she steps out from the concrete house. ‘If Commander Zhao dares to come near me, I’ll hack off his dick!’
From the roof, Genzai shouts: ‘And what will you do with it when you take it home?’ Everyone sniggers, and the dogs start barking as well.
Ma Daode remembers dragging Secretary Meng to the village square for a denunciation meeting. A fellow sent-down youth put a spittoon on Meng’s head and the villagers roared with laughter. He can see the same grins plastered on the faces surrounding him now. He tries to return to the present, but his memories are like footballs on a pond: the harder he pushes them down, the higher they bounce up again. ‘Fellow compatriots!’ he yells at the top of his voice. ‘To safeguard the achievements of the revolution, your garrison must be dismantled. Anyone who opposes Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line will be eliminated.’
Suddenly he remembers standing outside the Million Bold Warriors headquarters in the last days of the violent struggle. The facade was daubed with Mao’s favourite quote from Dream of the Red Chamber: ONLY HE WHO IS NOT AFRAID OF DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS CAN DARE UNHORSE THE EMPEROR, which he himself had painted there the previous year. On the hemp-sack barricade before him lay the three hundred bullets his faction had just surrendered. His heart filled with the anguish of defeat. During his first month in Yaobang, where he was sent a few weeks later, it felt so strange for him to sleep without a weapon in his hand that he would often wake in the middle of the night in a panic and be unable to doze off again.
‘What do you mean, “Chairman Mao’s line”?’ Liu Youcai says with disdain. ‘This is President Xi’s empire now!’
‘Yes, sorry, I mean President Xi’s China Dream will bring joy to the entire nation!’ Unsure whether he is using words from the right era, Director Ma jumps off the crushed car in a fluster and hands the loudspeaker to Hu. Then he checks his phone and sees there are only ten minutes left before midday. Already in the distance he can hear the rumble of advancing trucks and bulldozers. The noise evokes a memory of a Million Bold Warriors platoon marching down Victory Road, rifles aloft, rounding up everyone in sight: boys handing out leaflets, passers-by, class enemies digging ditches in the ground, and herding them into the public square below the Drum Tower, while another unit stood on the roof of the general post office, pointing their guns down at the crowd.
From the high balcony of the Drum Tower the commander of the Million Bold Warriors shouted: ‘You dared attack us, you East is Red bastards? If you don’t surrender now, we’ll round up the whole lot of you.’ He was wearing a heavy army coat with a pistol thrust in the belt. As he was the only Red Guard in Ziyang to have attended one of Mao’s mass rallies in Beijing, and his father was an army general, he was the obvious choice for leader.
Cross-eyed Chun was standing next to me in the square. He held up a pamphlet and yelled, ‘You conservative Red Guard enemies, East is Red will never surrender. We will defend Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line to the death!’ A second later, two loud gunshots rang out, his knees buckled and he toppled to the ground. Inside my pocket, I was still clutching the pack of cards he’d just given me that was missing a King of Clubs. He looked up at me and said: ‘Am I going to die?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I’m going to become a corpse, I can feel it,’ he mumbled, his voice growing faint. ‘Don’t bury me in the earth. Don’t …’ He tried to keep blinking his eyes, until he opened them one last time and could not close them again.
To break his train of thought, Director Ma looks over to the Buddha Light Temple. It is an ancient grey-brick building with a tall yellow-tiled roof. A hundred years ago, it housed the embalmed corpse of a Liu ancestor who achieved the status of Bodhisattva.
As the bulldozers draw close, the earth shakes and the villagers scatter. The young men climb to the roof of the concrete house, while the women and children retreat to find shelter in the lanes.
Director Ma’s phone vibrates. READ THIS ONE, MY AGED SWEETHEART: MAN SEES AN ADVERT THAT SAYS ‘NO NEED TO GO UNDER THE KNIFE. FOR A LONGER, THICKER PENIS, SEND US A CHEQUE ASAP.’ SO HE SENDS ONE OFF. A FEW DAYS LATER HE RECEIVES A PARCEL, OPENS IT, AND FINDS … A MAGNIFYING GLASS!! Before Director Ma has time to smile, he hears Liu Youcai yell at him: ‘If Ma Lei could see you betraying us like this, he would turn in his grave!’ As Director Ma hurriedly deletes the text, he sees his father’s face twisted into a morbid grimace. He remembers how he always wore a black quilted jacket in the winter and a long white robe in the summer. After he was condemned as a Rightist in 1959 for blaming the collective farming system of Mao’s Great Leap Forward for the famine ravaging most of China, he was removed from the post of Ziyang County Chief and sent to Yaobang to audit the production and distribution of grain. Instead of buckling under, he continued to criticise the system, and wrote an article revealing that Yaobang’s annual yields of maize had halved since its farms were collectivised. The villagers admired his honesty and bravery, so although they had been ordered to persecute him, they left him in peace. Eight years later, when Ma Daode was due to be sent to the countryside for re-education, he was able to use his father’s connections to secure a position in Yaobang. As it is the closest village to Ziyang, every Red Guard in the city hoped to be exiled there.
The roar of the approaching bulldozers makes Ma Daode judder. Behind them he sees truck after truck of armed police and urban-management officers advance in clouds of dust.
‘Let’s get out of here, Hu,’ he says. ‘I tried to help t
hem, but kindness is never rewarded.’ Hu dashes out in front and beckons their driver. As the Land Cruiser turns round, Ma Daode sees, reflected on the windscreen, the gruesome blood-spewing face that has haunted his dreams. The day after Cross-eyed Chun was shot on the square below the Drum Tower, we drove a steel-plated truck into the general post office. I stood on the truck’s open back and hurled hand grenades and lances at the Red Guards on the roof.
Director Ma looks over to the bridge being built across the Fenshui River and thinks of the bodies buried on the other bank, where the wild grove used to be. One morning we had three boys from the Million Bold Warriors tied up at the back of the truck, beside the bodies of our six dead comrades. The tallest was a big bully I knew from primary school. Our East is Red anthem was blaring through the loudspeakers: ‘They thrust a blood-soaked knife into our throat and assume that we are dead. But we will never die! The East is Red flag will wave on for ever in the sour wind and crimson rain …’ The boy who wrote the lyrics to this song had died in battle the previous week. At the wild grove, we untied our three captives and forced them to dig a grave for the bodies, then we buried them alive inside it. No – that’s not exactly true. Before we shovelled the earth back into the pit, we stabbed two of the captives first. We were going to stab the big bully as well, but were afraid he would shout ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ as the knife entered his chest, so we stuffed his mouth with twigs and buried him alive with the eight corpses.
IF YOU WERE A TEAR IN MY EYE, I WOULD NEVER CRY AGAIN, IN CASE I MIGHT LOSE YOU … Director Ma ignores this latest text, and on the phone he is holding in his other hand types: MAYOR CHEN, DESPITE MY BEST EFFORTS TO PERSUADE THEM, THE VILLAGERS REFUSE TO EVACUATE. As he sends it, he notices the signal is fading, so quickly texts the estate agent, Wendi: I’LL VISIT YOU TONIGHT AND FUCK YOU TO DEATH, followed by a line of scowling emojis.
A brick crashes onto the roof of the Land Cruiser. At least it didn’t break the windscreen.
From beyond a mud wall a makeshift cannon fires chicken bones and condoms filled with cement powder. The armed police raise their plastic shields to protect themselves, then lower them again. Young urban-management thugs in black T-shirts lift their wooden batons and gleefully lash out at the crowd. Director Ma is now trapped between two police vans and an ambulance.
He looks up at the flat roof of the concrete house and sees Genzai unfurl a huge portrait of President Xi Jinping. ‘That’s as big as the poster you’ve commissioned for the Golden Anniversary Dream,’ Hu remarks. ‘Must have cost them a fortune to laminate.’ When he joined the East is Red suicide squad to attack the general post office, Director Ma’s comrades took one look at the words LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO on the huge banner hung over the entrance and froze. I too was afraid to touch that sacred red slogan, but I told them that if we didn’t attack we would be killed. So we crawled beneath the banner on our stomachs. As soon as we came out the other side, one of our squad was bludgeoned with a brick and died on the spot.
‘Don’t attack the concrete house yet,’ Ma Daode calls out to the men in the bulldozers. ‘Let’s bring Xi Jinping down first.’ He is relieved to discover that the thoughts in his head now correspond with the words leaving his mouth. An odour of decay that seems to come from both the past and the present flows down into his lungs. The sales manager Guan Dalin is standing next to Genzai on the flat roof, waving the national flag. Some young men who’ve returned from factory jobs in the cities have climbed onto the barricades at the entrance to the village and are filming the scene on their mobile phones.
‘Remember, our goal is to evacuate the village without bloodshed,’ shouts the head of the urban-management team. ‘We must move fast this time, and not repeat the mistakes we made in Xiaozhai Village last week.’ The fashionable Mohican haircut he gave himself this morning doesn’t match his official uniform. His team have donned yellow safety helmets and their black Alsatians are barking at the village dogs. Although the battle has not yet started, Director Ma sees broken chair legs caught in branches and the streets of Ziyang strewn with bricks and dead bodies after another attack on the Million Bold Warriors. We carried our dead comrades to the riverbank, washed the blood from our hands, changed into clean uniforms and held a memorial for them below the Drum Tower. Corpses of our enemies lay all around us. In the hot June sun, they swelled and let off a foul stench. One dead girl had flies all over her face and an ice-lolly wrapper stuck to her hair. After today’s clash, there will be no corpses left on the road. There are ambulances with body bags ready to take them away, and even cages for any orphaned pets.
Dingguo is dragged out of the concrete house and pinned to the ground. ‘Fuck off to Siberia, you mother-fucker!’ he yells at the field officers. ‘May your daughter freeze to death with the fucking polar bears.’
‘Handcuff that wanker and shove him in the van,’ says the urban-management leader, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
The young woman who threatened to hack off Commander Zhao’s penis is also pinned down and handcuffed. Trying to break free, she cranes her head back and sinks her teeth into the officer’s arm, but is punched back down again. ‘You dog-fucker,’ she shouts. Seeing the big wound on his arm, the officer yells: ‘You dare bite me, you filthy slut? Just wait until I get my own back on you tonight …’
‘Well, you just wait till I strap your mother to an electric fan and make her spin to death …’ Her shirt buttons have been ripped off, and her exposed breasts quiver as she howls.
‘Fling that cunt into the van!’ the team leader barks. A band of riot police rush over and bundle her inside.
An officer trying to detach the Xi Jinping poster is struck by a petrol can. The President’s face is splashed with fuel and instantly goes up in flames. While the villagers on the street stand paralysed by fear, armed police officers brave the fire and drag people out from the concrete house. A front-loader truck advances. The elderly postman runs out and strikes an urban-management officer with an iron pick. As blood spurts from the officer’s neck, an armed policeman with a shield digs an electric baton into the postman’s back and kicks him to the ground.
Director Ma recalls the day East is Red attacked a hospital occupied by the Million Bold Warriors. When we ran out of bullets, we hid behind a stack of propaganda hoardings, waited until the Million Bold Warriors had used all their hand grenades and petrol bombs, then we charged out and attacked them with farming tools. We battled all day and night, making our way up from the basement to the fourth floor. Everywhere rang with the clatter of lances, shovels and hoes. Yao Jian’s square face was slashed right open along one side. He leapt on top of me and we wrestled each other to the ground. Two years before, when my classmates and I were messing about in the school corridor, Yao Jian had tried to trip me up, so I shoved him onto his back and the marbles in his pocket scattered over the concrete floor. This time, in the hospital corridor, I raised a metal hoe in the air and prepared to strike him, but he kicked it from my hands, jumped up, grabbed me by the hair, yanked my head back, pulled out a pair of scissors and pressed them against my face. I swung my fist round and punched him hard in the jaw, then wrenched the scissors from him, and with one single thrust, plunged the sharp blades into his neck. The blood that spewed from his mouth and splashed all over my face felt disgustingly warm.
The villagers shout: ‘Long live President Xi!’ and then hurl petrol bombs and rocks. The demolition workers in yellow helmets begin to advance towards the village behind a line of armed police. Assistants with dogs and pitchforks rush out ahead and pursue the fleeing villagers. An elderly couple who have fallen to the ground shout: ‘Long live Chairman Mao!’ as they are dragged away by two female officers.
A petrol bomb strikes the red banner emblazoned: MAKE THE CHINA DREAM COME TRUE, FIGHT TO THE BITTER END TO DEFEND OUR HOMELAND! Ma Daode smells the heady petrol fumes. The East is Red Headquarters reeked of diesel, printing ink and garlic. There were a hundred of us dossing there. When the Million Bold Warriors
received a cannon from their supporters in the People’s Liberation Army, they launched another attack on us. A hundred of them surrounded our headquarters, then charged up to the top floor, shouting: ‘Surrender and your life will be spared!’ When they reached the big room at the top, a Red Guard grabbed a boy called Cui Degen, who was standing right next to me, slammed him onto the ground, handcuffed him and struck him in the head again and again with a hand grenade until his eyes rolled back and his legs convulsed. I reached for a metal pike and rammed it into the murderer. Two other Red Guards then pounced on me and we fought with our fists until one of them stabbed me in the chest three times and I collapsed on the floor. Then Sun Tao, a boy in the year below me at school, stepped out from the gang of Million Bold Warriors, slapped my face and shouted: ‘Son of Rightist dog!’
‘We’ll defend President Xi with our lives!’ Genzai yells to the line of shield-bearing armed police. ‘Attack us, if you’re not afraid to die!’ A bulldozer rams into the concrete house, shattering a chunk of the facade. Afraid that the wobbling structure is about to collapse, the people on the roof drop onto their stomachs. But the sales manager Guan Dalin keeps standing, calmly strikes a match and sets himself on fire. For a few seconds he hops madly in the ball of flames, then he leaps off the roof, lands on the bulldozer and rolls onto the road. Firefighters spray him with extinguishers, and as he thrashes about in the white foam he howls: ‘Long Live President Xi Jinping.’ … One of the Million Bold Warriors boys was hit by a petrol bomb in our headquarters. We stood and watched as he jumped around in the orange flames then slowly crumpled to the ground. When his comrade went over and tried to drag his corpse outside, I raised my gun and shot him in the head.
The bulldozer revs up again, spewing clouds of diesel smoke, and with another loud thud rams into the concrete house. ‘Look over there, the construction workers are leaving the bridge and are coming over to help the villagers,’ cries Commander Zhao, his face dripping in sweat.
