Authors: Yan Lianke
There was one particular volume amid that enormous pile of books, like a leaf in the middle of a forest. This was a volume that Yingque’s foster father had pulled out from the pile and placed on top, so that it now stuck out. Needless to say, the majority of books in the room were by Mao Zedong and included the four-volume set of his
Collected Works,
together with his
Collected Sayings,
also known as his “Little Red Book,” of which there were at the very least several hundred, or even several thousand, copies. Chairman Mao’s books alone took up three of the eight tables in the room and were arranged into piles, with each progressively higher pile being only an inch behind the preceding one, such that the final pile nearly touched the ceiling.
Of course, if the books had been merely arranged into piles then Teacher Liu, who had spent half his life teaching in a soc-school and the other half working in the fields, could hardly have claimed that this represented the sum of his life’s achievements. Yingque looked over the first table, and saw that the books in the first pile were all by Marx, those in the second pile were all by Engels, and those in the third were all by Lenin. The fourth pile was all by Stalin, the fifth all by Mao Zedong, the sixth all by Dimitrov, the seventh all by Ho Chi Minh, the eighth all by Tito, and after that there were books by Hegel, Kant, and Feuerbach. He noticed that following this order, between the pages of the book at the top of each pile, there was a sheet of paper. He removed the paper from the volume at the top of the pile of Marx’s books, and saw that it contained a drawing of a pile of books, each of which carried a caption.
The caption on the first row read: Marx was born in the
wuyin
Year of the Tiger, in the Prussian city of Trier.
The second row read: In the
gengyin
year of the Tiger, when Marx was eleven, he and his family moved to Trier’s Wilhelm Center.
The third row read: In the
yiwei
Year of the Goat, when Marx was seventeen, he enrolled in law school at the University of Bonn, and joined the Hegelian “Doctoral Club.”
The fourth row read: In the
renyin
Year of the Tiger, when Marx turned twenty-three, he wrote his first thesis, “On Prussian Censorship,” and became the editor of the
Rheinische Post.
The following year, he married Jenny von Westphalen.
The seventh row read: In the
yisi
Year of the Serpent, when Marx was twenty-seven, he was expelled from France and relocated to Brussels.
The seventeenth row read: In the
renxu
Year of the Dog, when Marx was forty-three, he began writing
Capital
.
The thirtieth row read: In the
guiwei
Year of the Goat, when Marx was seventy-three, he passed away between the second and third solar terms, having become one of the great leaders of the world proletarian revolution.
Yingque removed the sheet of paper from the pile of Engels’s books.
He removed the sheet from the pile of Stalin’s books.
He removed the sheet from the pile of Chairman Mao’s books. . . .
Yingque noticed that in the first stack of books from Engels’s pile, there was a sheet of paper that said Engels was born in the
guichen
Year of the Dragon to a small capitalist family in Barmen, on the Rhine. Below this, there was a line drawn in red pencil.
He noticed that in the first stack of Lenin’s books there was a sheet of paper saying that Lenin was born in the
gengwu
Year of the Horse to an ordinary working-class family; below this there was a red line. He noticed that the paper from the thirty-fifth stack said that in the
dingsi
Year of the Serpent, the Soviet Union’s October Revolution succeeded and the forty-seven-year-old Lenin became the general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party; below this there appeared two red lines.
Yingque noticed that at the bottom of the Stalin pile, there was a sheet of paper that said that in the
jimao
Year of the Hare, Stalin was born to a poor family in Georgia. His parents were both serfs, and the entire family relied on income from the father’s work as a cobbler. Below this there were three red lines. On the top level of the pile, it said that in the
jiazi
Year of the Rat, which is to say in the thirteenth Year of the Republic, Lenin passed away from illness, and Stalin become the general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. Below this there were three red lines.
Yingque noticed that in the bottom level of the Mao Zedong pile, there was a sheet of paper that said that in the
guisi
Year of the Serpent, Chairman Mao was born to a peasant family in Shaoshan. Below this there were two red lines. On the ninth level, it said that in the
dingmao
Year of the Hare, Chiang Kai-Shek initiated a counterrevolutionary coup d’état, and the entire country was engulfed in a White Terror. The Communist Party held its First Party Congress in Hankou, where Mao Zedong was elected as an alternate member of the Central Political Bureau. Below this there were two red lines. On the tenth level the paper contained the two words “Autumn Uprising,” below which there were three red lines. In the
yiyou
year, Chairman Mao had just turned fifty-one, and at the Zunyi Conference he confirmed his status as the key leader. Below this, there were five red lines. From the top level the paper said that in the
renzi
year Mao was named chairman of the Party, chairman of the nation, and chairman of the armed forces. Below this, there were nine red lines.
The final pile contained works by a variety of authors. From the top stack Yingque removed another sheet of paper, on which there also appeared several dozen rows. These rows, however, didn’t contain the names and birth dates of important figures, as did the other papers, but rather had been left blank—as barren as a field after the autumn harvest. Yingque didn’t know what his foster father had been planning to put in these empty rows. The entries in each row were fairly unremarkable, with the first containing only the innocuous words “commune messenger.”
The second row said “soc-school employee.”
The third row said “national cadre,” the fifth said “commune secretary,” the eighth said “deputy county chief,” and the ninth said “county chief.” Below this were merely empty rows without any text. In particular, there didn’t appear a row for district commissioner or for provincial chief. Perhaps Yingque’s foster father thought the county chief was an almost celestial position, and if you were appointed county chief, that was all you needed. Perhaps he thought the county chief was already like an emperor and there wasn’t any need to continue moving up the chain of command, and this was why the lines after that of the county chief were left blank. Yingque counted carefully, and found that there were an additional nineteen blank rows. The nineteenth was the final one, and it should have contained a title such as “chairman of the Party,” “chair of the nation,” or “chair of the armed forces,” but instead it was simply blank. Although these nineteen rows were not filled in, each nevertheless had one or more red lines beneath it, and the final row contained so many red lines that it became a solid block of red.
What else did he see in that room? Nothing. Only books, piles of books, and sheets of paper wedged into those piles. Each sheet was marked with graph squares, in which were written the birth date and accomplishments of a famous leader. There were also the red underlinings, which were more numerous when the person in question had humble origins, and were particularly numerous when underscoring the extraordinary achievements he would subsequently come to attain.
What else did Yingque discover? There really wasn’t anything else. As he gazed at those piles of books, and at those sheets of papers filled with the biographies of important leaders, it was as if he already knew about those books, those people, and those events—as if he had already heard about all of them in the soc-school classroom. The only thing that came as a surprise to him was that such a great man as Engels came from a capitalist family. He hadn’t expected that the child of a capitalist family would dedicate his life to speaking and working on behalf of poor workers. He also hadn’t expected that Lenin would have come from an ordinary working family, nor that the family of such a great man would be as ordinary as a solitary tree in a mountain forest. He was surprised to learn that Stalin came from a family of serfs, and that his father was a cobbler. He was surprised to learn that the son of a cobbler would go on to become someone whom the entire world would view with amazement. He was further surprised to learn that Chairman Mao, who ultimately became greater than everyone else, came from a family of peasants who worked in the fields for a living.
Yingque sat quietly in that room, as sunlight shone in through the door and windows, and for the longest time he gazed silently at those piles of books and at the biographies and red lines on those sheets of paper. It was if he had finally realized what his foster father had meant when he said that once Yingque saw this, he would strive for greatness. At the same time, however, it was also as if he hadn’t discovered anything at all, but instead had just felt a breeze blowing past his face—which would disappear without a trace. He struggled to remember what he had gained from that breeze, and quietly pondered this until he heard a dull thud coming from the school courtyard.
It was like a dead tree suddenly toppling over.
It was like a large sack of cotton or bran falling to the ground
Yingque paused for a moment, then ran out of the room. He flew across the quiet courtyard, not stopping until he arrived in front of the main gate.
It was his foster father who had fallen out of bed.
His father had died.
Before dying, he had gripped the front of his own shirt tightly with both hands.
Yingque’s foster father was the school’s oldest teacher, and even the county chief and the secretary had studied under him at the soc-school. The day Yingque buried his foster father, the county chief came and said that three days earlier he had received a letter from him, saying that Teacher Liu had struggled his entire life to instill Marxist-Leninist theory in all of the county’s cadres and Party members, and now was asking the county chief to help his daughter finish her studies, and to help his son, Liu Yingque, secure a job, ideally in his old home in the Boshuzi commune. But Yingque was still young, so perhaps it would be best to appoint him as a messenger, the letter added, so that in another couple of years he could go to the countryside to carry out socialist education. If he did well, he could then be made a cadre.
The county therefore arranged to have him sent to the Boshuzi commune, to work as a messenger.
At that point, the young Liu Yingque finally understood why his foster father had drawn those charts without titles—it had been in order to plan out a chart of Yingque’s own future. His father had been so optimistic about Yingque’s prospects that he’d placed Yingque’s life chart alongside those of great men. He had used those red lines to remind Yingque that great men started out as ordinary people, and that as long as he worked hard and struggled, he could become a great man like them.
The day that Yingque left the soc-school and went to the Boshuzi commune, he returned to that book room and pulled out all of those sheets of paper wedged between those piles of books. He took particular note of the sheet that had “commune messenger” on its bottom row, while the second row said “soc-school member,” the fifth row said “commune secretary,” the ninth said “county chief,” and the tenth through the nineteenth rows had all been left blank.
As he gazed at that chart, his heart began to pound. He felt a surge of energy coursing from the soles of his feet up though his bones and his viscera. At that instant, the memory of his foster father’s death swept over him; it was as if the sun had suddenly emerged and shone on everything before him, making him feel as though he had now grown up, as if sixteen was even older than twenty-six. He felt that his foster father’s death had opened up a door for him, and that as he walked out through that door, he was stepping onto a road leading directly to heaven.
So, he went to work in the Boshuzi commune as a messenger boy, delivering newspapers and mail, boiling water, and sweeping the grounds.
Ten years later, the day that he was appointed commune secretary, when he felt as powerful as an emperor, he requested an extra room in the commune guest house and proceeded to set it up as a precise replica of the book room his foster father had created in the commune. On the wall, he hung portraits of the ten great international leaders, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung, and below them he hung portraits of ten great Chinese military leaders: Zhu De, Chen Yi, Jia Long, Liu Bocheng, Lin Biao, Peng Dehuai, Yi Jianying, Xu Xiangqian, Luo Ronghuan, and Nie Rongzhen. Below those portraits there were charts containing the biographies and professional accomplishments of each individual. On the wall in front of this double row of twenty portraits, there was an enlarged and framed portrait of his foster father. Right next to the frame there was a sheet of graph paper as big as the frame and with nineteen rows. The bottom row was filled with writing: Liu Yingque, born in Shuanghuai county in the
gengzi
year of the famine. When he was one year old, his parents abandoned him in a field. His foster father was a teacher at the Shuanghuai county soc-school. Yingque was bright and precocious, and could already read a newspaper and write a letter before even having started school. He even had a general grasp of Marxist-Leninist theory.