Authors: Ha Jin
To him the five words looked strenuous and elegant, each as big as a brick. Finished with the work, he couldn’t help appreciating his own calligraphy with squinting eyes. His wife and daughter meanwhile were sleeping in the bed near the southern window; Meilan was snoring a little, her face pale and flabby and her nostrils slightly swollen. She was twenty-eight, but already had wrinkles on her forehead and temples. A yellow towel wrapped
her permed hair, to keep the curls from being crushed in her sleep. One of her legs stretched out from under the flowery quilt, displaying bluish veins beneath the skin; her foot was shapely, but the toes had ringworm nails. On her sole there was a curved cut, about an inch long, inflicted by a piece of broken glass two days before. The cut seemed to have festered, so Bin moved to the tiny medical cabinet on their oak chest and took out a vial of merbromin. With a cotton ball held at the tips of the scissors, he dabbed the red solution on her wound. The moment he was done, she kicked her foot, moaning faintly, and withdrew her leg under the quilt.
Having returned the vial to the cabinet, he resumed watching his wife and child, whose chubby face was chapped by cold wind. He heaved a sigh and felt ashamed. Logically speaking, with such handsome calligraphy, he should have been a distinguished man, at least in this town. He asked himself, Why am I still a worker if these hands are cut out for brushwork? Why on earth can’t a man like me get a decent place for his family to live? Look at this room, it’s a doghouse, a snail shell.
The more he thought, the worse he felt. I swear, he said to himself, I shall get a good apartment for my family sooner or later! There will be no end of bothering them if they don’t give me one.
Early the next morning, after telling Meilan that he was going to the County Administration to see the designs of
some propaganda posters, and that he wouldn’t be late for the second shift, Bin set out for the train station. He cycled with his right hand gripping the handlebar and his left holding the placard, which was wrapped in red paper, so that people might take it to be a framed portrait or a mirror. At the train station, he locked his bicycle to a railing bar on the wooden fence; then he bought a ticket for the eight o’clock train.
Gold County was twenty miles to the west, only an hour’s trip. It’s a remarkable town, with historic and military importance, because it borders on the Yellow Sea and to the south there is a bay which has been used as a navy base for more than a hundred years. The Russians and the Japanese had fought over it, and in turn their fleets had occupied it.
The sun was warm, though it was a chilly day. Trees had shed their leaves, standing naked around the large plaza before Gold County Train Station. On the east, beyond rows of poplars, perched a column of Russian-made self-propelled guns, which apparently had just rolled off a train. Soldiers were sitting on them, eating breakfast and drinking water from canteens. Once in a while, dark smoke was ejected from the rear of one of those guns; the air smelled of diesel. On the north, near the entrance to a boulevard, a crowd gathered at the bus stop, men shouldering parcels and trussed fowls and piglets, and women carrying babies and baskets full of fruits, eggs, and vegetables. Bin went across to join the
crowd. Then a bus came. After a good deal of pushing and shoving, he got aboard.
The election had just started when he arrived at the County Administration. The guards at the door of the conference hall didn’t suspect anything when they saw Bin, who looked scholarly, walking in a meditative manner and carrying the placard with his little finger. They thought he must have been on the organizing staff or worked as an assistant to one of the candidates. The object wrapped in red paper must have been a slogan or a picture.
But once in the hall Bin turned into another man. He hastened to the stage, where Secretary Yang, a middle-aged woman, and an old man like a peasant were sitting at a long table. Behind them, in the middle of a lavender screen, hung a giant portrait of Chairman Mao; four pairs of red flags stretched upward from the Great Leader’s shoulders, as though he wore gorgeous wings.
Yang had on a blue Mao suit and a black cap covering his bald crown. He was a beardless man, over fifty, and his soft skin betrayed his career as a civil official who had been well sheltered from the elements. Also on the stage stood a tall young man in wire-framed glasses, presiding over the election. With a microphone in his hand, he was explaining the rules and procedures to the voters, while the hall was still bustling with spitting, chitchatting, sniffling, and the cracking of sunflower seeds.
As he was climbing the short stairs on the right side of
the stage, Bin turned to the three hundred people sitting below. He stopped at the edge of the stage, ripped off the red paper, and raised the placard to the audience. All at once the hall was thrown into a turmoil. Many people stood up, some pushing forward to look at the words closely.
“Beautiful handwriting!” one woman said.
“He looks like a scholar, he can’t be a liar.”
“Wow!”
“Who could tell Yang Chen is a demon!”
“Shameless, Yang shouldn’t be there,” a young peasant shouted with both hands around his mouth.
“Get down, Yang Chen!”
“Yang is disqualified.”
On the stage, from where they sat, the three candidates couldn’t see the contents of the placard, so they got up and went over to look. At the sight of the words the woman and the old man smirked, shaking their heads and withdrawing to their seats. But Yang bellowed, “I don’t know this man! It’s slander, pure invention! I swear I don’t know who he is.” His big head jerked about as he stamped his feet; the loudspeakers in the back corners of the hall were broadcasting the thumps made by his white plastic soles.
It was true Yang didn’t know Bin. Naturally, he was protesting that this was a dirty trick some people had devised against him. “I’m framed, framed for nothing!” he
kept blustering, his broad mouth twitching and his nose congested. Time and again he glared at the other two candidates.
Bin interrupted him. “I know you. You don’t know me? Didn’t you forward my accusation letter to the leaders of the Harvest Fertilizer Plant? Didn’t you overtly support them to suppress different opinions and persecute those who criticized them? I’d know your bones if you shed your skin!”
“Who are you? What the devil are you talking about?” Yang threw up his right hand.
“I am Shao Bin. Why are you so forgetful?”
Still Yang couldn’t recall what wrong he had done to this man. He shouted, “I don’t know you. I swear by my Communist Party membership, I don’t know what hole you jumped out of!” Turning to the other candidates, he said, “Damn it, I want an investigation of this.” His fleshy cheeks turned pink as he wheezed.
Two guards ran over and hauled Bin off the stage. They clutched his arms and dragged him to the exit while another man holding the placard followed behind. Meanwhile the audience was whooping, laughing, coughing, and chattering. It seems most of them didn’t believe what Yang said, and many had changed their minds about his candidacy. He had been transferred to this county three years before; people did not yet know him well enough to doubt Bin’s accusation.
In fact Yang had never heard of the name Shao Bin. He hadn’t seen the letter of accusation either. He had merely been informed by his aide, Dong Cai, that a troublesome worker had sent him a lengthy report on the fertilizer plant’s leaders. The letter had been transferred to Liu and Ma after Dong Cai had glanced through it and decided it had been written mainly out of jealousy. Of course Yang, having committed himself to other more important matters, didn’t ask further about it and put it out of his mind completely. Who could expect that out of a few pages of obscure writing would jump such an extraordinary election buster? Now, Yang’s candidacy was ruined, and his ambition to become the chairman of the County People’s Congress in the near future was shattered.
Because of Bin’s intrusion, Yang didn’t get enough votes for the position. The woman, who was elected, had outrun him by thirty-four votes. In Yang’s chest hatred was flaming. The moment he returned to the Commune Administration, he called the fertilizer plant. Liu answered the phone and was shaken by his superior’s rage. He tried to convince Yang that Bin was merely a madman, who was fond of painting and writing indeed, but nobody would take his words seriously.
“He pretends to be a fool,” Yang said huskily, “but he’s smarter than both of you. The timing, the word choice, the calligraphy, and even the way he raised the placard, damn it, who can do it better?”
“Yes, Secretary Yang, he’s a capable troublemaker.”
“Send me a report on this man. I must know more about him.”
“Yes, we’ll do that immediately.”
Liu was stunned, because Yang was by nature an affable man and seldom showed his temper. Without delay, he admitted his fault in not having kept closer watch on Bin and having caused such a disturbance to his superior. He promised that from now on the plant would make every effort to control this crazy man. If a similar thing happened again, he would accept any disciplinary action against himself.
Hanging up, Liu explained to Ma what had happened. For half a minute Ma was too shocked to say anything. Who would imagine a toad could grow wings and soar into the sky!
The two leaders talked about how to handle Bin this time; both of them agreed that they should remain calm and do nothing to provoke him at the moment. In their hearts, they were frightened. This mad dog Shao Bin was simply unpredictable. He was too bold and too imaginative and would do anything he took a fancy to. Unlike those puny intellectuals — the college graduates in the plant — whose faces would turn pale and sweaty and who would correct their faults the moment the leaders criticized them, this pseudo-scholar wasn’t afraid of anybody. What could you do if a man feared nothing? Even the devil didn’t know how to daunt a fearless man. In addition, Bin wrote and painted exceptionally well, his
blasted brush always busy at night. Every now and then he had something published in a magazine or a newspaper. How, how could you stop him?
To a degree, Liu and Ma regretted that they hadn’t assigned Bin an apartment. If they had done that in the beginning, they wouldn’t have turned him into such a relentless enemy. But it was too late now; all they could do was adopt a quiet approach, leaving him alone for the moment, as though they hadn’t heard of the election. But this didn’t mean they would let him get away with it. No, they would square the account when it was the right time.
Presently they had Dongfang, the secretary of the Youth League, start a thorough investigation of Bin’s family background and his activities in the past five years so as to prepare the report to Secretary Yang and also accumulate material against Bin. If they tackled him again, they would finish him off with one blow.
T
HE WORKERS HEARD
of Bin’s disrupting the election, and they were impressed. They had taken him for a mere bookworm, but all of a sudden he had emerged as a man of both strategy and action. Naturally some young workers shook hands with him.
“Brother Shao, well done,” one said.
“Bin,” another chimed in, “you did it for us. We must show them that we workers are the masters here.”
Their words moved Bin and boosted his confidence. For days he felt lighthearted and was convinced that Liu and Ma’s silence meant they were shaken by what had happened at the election. Indeed, if he had undone their boss, he could ruin them easily.
Emboldened by his fellow workers’ compliments, Bin decided to pursue the tottering enemy. He started pondering how to compose another cartoon about the two
leaders; since the Spring Festival was around the corner, he didn’t want them to have a peaceful holiday. Besides, it was the time when officials throughout China were busy raking in new perks, receiving gifts, and bribing their superiors and related powers. As a good citizen, Bin regarded it as his duty to sound a timely alarm against corruption.
After his wife and baby went to sleep, Bin ate two raw eggs directly from the shells and drank a large mug of hot malted milk. Then he began to grind the ink stick and wet a brush. Spreading a sheet of paper on the desk, he set about painting.
He drew two human figures in motion and made sure they resembled Liu and Ma. To identify them as cadres, a copy of
Handbook for Party Secretaries
, marked with the emblem of a hammer and a sickle, was inserted under Liu’s arm, and a lumpy official seal was attached to Ma’s broad waistband. They each had a garland of giant garlic around the neck and carried a bottle of Maotai liquor in a trouser pocket. Two packsacks full of pineapples and oranges were on their backs, and to a belt of each sack were tied a pair of fluttering roosters, upside down and with their claws bound. Around each man’s knees, four large carp were twirling and gasping in a string bag, whose mouth was grasped in the man’s left hand, while his right held two cartons of Great China cigarettes. In every one of their breast pockets was stuck a bundle of
ten-yuan bills. The gifts were so heavy that both men dropped beads of sweat and walked with bandy legs. Yet they smiled ecstatically, the corners of their mouths reaching their ears.
Done with the drawing, Bin paused for a moment. Absently he dipped a smaller brush, made of weasel’s whiskers, into the ink. What title should I give it? he wondered. “Gifts for the Spring Festival”? No, that’s too flat. “On the Way Home”? No, a good title must cut to the quick, able to spur the reader and bite the enemy.
After several minutes’ thinking, he wrote these words at the top of the paper: “So Hard to Celebrate a Holiday!”
The next afternoon he mailed the cartoon to
The Workers’ Daily
in Beijing, a union newspaper that didn’t have a large circulation but was read throughout China.
The work accomplished, Bin felt joyful. Soon his joy was replaced by ecstasy. In his mind Chairman Mao’s instruction began reverberating: “The boundless joy in fighting Heaven, the boundless joy in fighting Earth, the boundless joy in fighting Man!” Those words, representing the mettle of the proletariat, warmed Bin’s heart and invigorated his blood; he felt younger, as though he had eaten a lot of ginseng or deer antler. Yes, with his brush, he was ready to engage any enemy.