Authors: Yan Lianke
The second level had two rows of text: In the
yimao
Year of the Hare, when Liu Yingque was sixteen, his foster father passed away. Yingque’s life plans thus became difficult, and he began working for the Revolution, working as a messenger for the Boshuzi commune.
The third level said: In the
gengshen
Year of the Monkey, when Liu Yingque turned twenty-one, he officially became a national cadre, and was named the most advanced soc-school worker in the county.
The fifth level said: In the
wuchen
Year of the Dragon, when Liu Yingque turned twenty-nine, he was appointed Party secretary of Liulin township, and was the top fund-raiser in the county.
Beginning with the sixth level, up to the top, all of the rows had been left blank, waiting for the future.
In this room decorated with the portraits of great men and charts detailing their biographies and accomplishments, there was also his foster father’s portrait, together with a chart detailing Liu Yingque’s biography. This room had followed Liu Yingque throughout his various promotions, as he was relocated from the township to the town, and from the town to this pair of rooms on the south side of the courtyard of the Shuanghuai county committee and county government building. This pair of rooms was very solemn and sacred, and therefore Liu Yingque, in his heart, regarded it as a Hall of Devotion.
Further, Further Reading:
1)
Divine.
Sacred and dignified.
3)
Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher (1770–1831).
5)
Kant.
Immanuel Kant, German philosopher, founder of philosophical idealism (1724–1804).
7)
Feuerbach.
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, German materialist philosopher (1804–1872).
9)
Saint-Simon.
Henri de Saint-Simon, French socialist visionary (1760–1825).
11)
Fourier.
François Marie Charles Fourier, French socialist visionary (1772–1837).
13)
Ho Chi Minh.
Chairman of the People’s Republic of Vietnam (1890–1969).
15)
Dimitrov.
Georgi Dimitrov, Communist secretary and chairman of the Council of Ministers of Socialist Bulgaria (1882–1949).
17)
Tito.
Josip Broz Tito, Premier of the Communist Party of Socialist Yugoslavia (1892–1980).
19)
Kim Il Sung.
Premier of the Communist Party of Socialist Democratic North Korea (1912–1994).
21)
Holbach.
Paul Holbach, French materialist philosopher and atheist (1723–1789).
23)
Locke.
John Locke, English philosopher and political theorist (1632–1704).
25)
Adam Smith.
English capitalist economist, and the founder of the discipline of traditional political economy (1723–1790).
C
HAPTER 11:
F
ACING A ROW OF GREAT MEN’S PORTRAITS, AND WITH THE PORTRAIT OF HIS FOSTER FATHER BEHIND HIM
Whenever Chief Liu had a major success, he naturally wanted to retreat to his Hall of Devotion.
The night had already begun to enter its darkest hour. The moon was gone, the stars were barely visible, and clouds enveloped the county seat like fog. It seemed as if it was about to rain. The dense humidity surrounded Chief Liu like a wall of moisture. A few of the streetlights were lit, but most of them were dark—either because the bulbs were burned out or because the electrical line had been cut. Although the Shuanghuai county seat was bigger than before, and although Chief Liu, after assuming office, borrowed a bit of money from his Lenin Fund to expand some of the roads and add some more intersections, the city still appeared as run-down and dilapidated as before. Only the new road in front of the entrance to the county committee and county government building had all its streetlights illuminated.
Chief Liu, however, didn’t want to walk along that new street, as there were likely to be many old people and children out enjoying the evening. Of those people, there wouldn’t be any who wouldn’t recognize their county chief, just as after the Cultural Revolution broke out in the
bingwu
Year of the Horse everyone throughout the land knew who Chairman Mao was. Ever since Liu Yingque was appointed Shuanghuai county chief, and resolved to purchase Lenin’s corpse and establish the Spirit Mountain Forest Park and Lenin Mausoleum—from that point on there wasn’t a single child in the city’s back alleyways who didn’t know what he looked like. As he said in a document that he wrote out by hand and sent to all eight hundred and ten thousand residents of the county, as long as he was able to purchase Lenin’s corpse and install it on Spirit Mountain, Shuanghuai county would become so rich that its peasants wouldn’t need to pay to see the doctor or to get on the bus to go the market in town, children wouldn’t need to pay for books, and city-dwellers wouldn’t need to pay for their electricity or water. He said that within two years of the opening of the memorial hall, he would give every family in the county its own house.
Copies of this document rained down into every courtyard of every house in the county, and entered the heart of every resident. Naturally, everyone began to regard Chief Liu as a deity, and even peasants in the countryside somehow managed to buy copies of his photograph and hang it up on their walls. They hung his photograph alongside the pictures of the bodhisattvas, the stove god, and Chairman Mao. In the county seat, there were even some people who, when they posted pictures of door gods on New Year’s, would post a picture of Lord Guan on one side and of Chief Liu on the other, or they would post a picture of Chief Liu on one side and a painting by Zhao Ziyun on the other.
Once when Chief Liu went down to the countryside and came across a small restaurant called Sojourner’s Home, he wrote an inscription, and business immediately took off and the restaurant had a constant stream of customers. Another time, Chief Liu spent half the night in a roadside inn, and afterward the innkeeper collected the face basin, washcloth, and soap box that Chief Liu had used, wrapped them in red cloth, and placed them in a box to serve as relics.
1
The innkeeper hung a wooden placard above the room where Chief Liu had slept, on which it said that on such-and-such month of such-and-such year, County Chief Liu Yingque spent the night here. The innkeeper had previously rented that room for twelve yuan a night, but now he increased the rent to twenty yuan, and whereas previously he didn’t have many guests, after Chief Liu’s visit he found he had a constant stream of customers who all wanted to lie in the bed where Chief Liu had slept and sit in the chair where Chief Liu had sat. Truck drivers in the middle of long hauls would go hundreds of
li
out of their way to spend the night at the inn where Chief Liu had stayed.
In Shuanghuai, Chief Liu was regarded as an extraordinary figure, comparable to the legendary Qing dynasty emperors Qianlong and Kangxi, or the founders of the Ming and Song dynasties, emperors Zhu Yuanzhang and Song Taizu.
Chief Liu couldn’t walk casually down the street, because whenever he appeared people would immediately crowd around, trying to ask him questions and shake his hand. They would pass him their babies and get him to kiss them, then would parade their offspring about telling everyone that on such-and-such month and such-and-such day, the county chief kissed my baby.
By now, everyone knew that the Liven troupe was raking in money as easily as it might rake autumn leaves, and that Lenin’s corpse would soon be purchased and brought back to Shuanghuai, so the good days could not be far off. Chief Liu was already regarded as a divinity in Shuanghuai, and was worshiped by each of the county’s eight hundred and ten thousand residents. Naturally, he couldn’t walk alone through the streets. Fortunately, however, on this particular night the sky was completely dark, and when Chief Liu, bearing a heavy emotional load, made his way back to the residential compound of the county government, he wasn’t detained by anyone or anything.
This residential compound was inside a courtyard to the north of the county government building, and Chief Liu’s Hall of Devotion was located in that courtyard. His family lived in a building in the innermost area of the courtyard, and his Hall of Devotion was in a large three-room building in the southernmost section of the compound. That building had originally been a conference hall for one of the county offices, but after that office moved out Chief Liu had appropriated the room for his Hall of Devotion. By this point the night had reached its darkest hour, and people who were out getting some fresh air had already begun making their way back home. When Chief Liu walked in through the main gate of the residential compound, the sixty-three-year-old gatekeeper hadn’t yet gone to sleep, and when he saw Chief Liu through the window he quickly rushed out and bowed to him.
Chief Liu asked him, “You haven’t gone to bed?”
The old man replied, “After I heard the talk you gave in the county committee building, I became so excited by the thought that we are about to enter a period of having more money than we’ll be able to spend that I found myself unable to sleep.”
With a broad smile, the county chief nodded to the old man, and added a few words of encouragement. Then, he turned and headed toward the southernmost building, the sound of his footsteps echoing through the quiet night. When he arrived at the door, he looked around, then pulled a key out from a crevice in the door frame. He opened the door, walked in, and closed it behind him. Then, he flipped on the light switch.
Instantly, the room became as bright as windswept snow. The three fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling bathed the three-room building in bright light. The walls were whitewashed, and the door and windows were tightly sealed, so that not even a speck of dust could make its way into the room. Apart from a table and a chair, there wasn’t any other furniture. If you looked up at the walls, however, you would see the portraits of great men hanging there. The top row had ten portraits of great leaders, including Mao, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung, while the bottom row had portraits of ten of China’s great military leaders. But in this bottom row there were actually eleven portraits, with the eleventh being that of County Chief Liu Yingque himself. As for the wall behind him, there was only one portrait, which was that of his foster father, and below it there was an inscription by Chief Liu:
Shuanghuai county’s disseminator of Marxist Leninism.
Below each portrait frame, there were captions detailing the men’s biographies and accomplishments, including the ages at which they had assumed their respective positions. Chief Liu had underlined the important points in red, just as his foster father had done. For instance, Lin Biao had just turned twenty-three when he was appointed corps commander; Jia Long was only thirty-one when he was appointed army commander; Zhu De was nineteen when, in the
yisi
Year of the Serpent, he participated in an uprising protesting Yuan Shikai’s rule, and in the
bingwu
Year of the Horse he participated in the National Protection War opposing the warlord Duan Qirui; and so forth. These details were all underlined in red.
This underlining was intended to serve as a caution for Chief Liu, so that every time he entered the Hall of Devotion he would feel even more reverential toward the great men whose portraits hung on the wall, and would therefore strive even harder for excellence in his own life. Every time he saw the caption explaining that when Lin Biao had just turned twenty-three he successfully organized the shocking military victory at Pingxing Pass, Chief Liu was reminded of how he himself was appointed soc-school teacher in the Boshuzi commune at the age of twenty-one, and every year he would go down to the countryside to help wake up the peasants and encourage them to read newspaper articles and urge them to sharpen their sickles at harvest- time and to plow the fields at sowing time.
He would feel a bit sorrowful even as a surge of energy would spring up from his feet, such that he would always be willing to work harder. Not only could he help them bring the grain into the warehouse before the summer rains, but in winter he could get the sprouts out of the ground before the first frost. He would let the peasants know that in Beijing in such-and-such year and such-and-such month there was such-and-such meeting that was being held. He would report which official documents were being sent down, and even cite the important points in each one. Some people in the village had relatives in Taiwan and Singapore, and Chief Liu would help them stay in touch and do everything he could to encourage their relatives to visit their hometowns. When those Overseas Chinese returned to Shuanghuai, they would arrive with broad smiles on their faces, but would immediately start crying their eyes out and have no choice but to donate their entire life savings to their hometowns, to help pave the roads, erect electrical lines, and build factories.