Red Azalea (14 page)

When Lu asked Yan to give mobilization talks to the masses, Yan stepped in front of the ranks and said, Please repeat after me: Chairman Mao teaches us, “Trust the people.” She dismissed the meeting in less then one minute. Lu said, We can’t expect the studs to be straight if the beams are not. Yan said, What’s your problem? Tapping her pen on her notebook, Lu said, Comrade Secretary, I think you’ve got spiritual termites in the house of your mind. Yeah? Yan looked at Lu sideways. You know where I got those termites? From you. You’ve got termites fully packed in your head. You have no clean beams or studs in the house of your mind. They were eaten up a long time ago. And now your termites are hungry, they are
climbing out from your eyes, earholes, noseholes and asshole to eat up other people’s houses. Yan walked away, leaving Lu purple.

Although my excuses about the cold weather were becoming less convincing, I still slept with Yan, pretending it was out of habit. Lu became uncomfortable. She said it was not healthy for two people to dissociate themselves from everyone else. She pointed out at a Party members’ meeting that Yan had loosened her self-discipline and was developing a dangerous tendency toward revisionism. She criticized her for divorcing herself from the masses and forming a political faction. Yan told me to ignore Lu; she called her a political bug.

One afternoon I found my bed had been checked. Later that night I also noticed that Lu’s snoring had stopped; I wondered if she had been listening to us. The next day Lu came and said that she would like to have a talk with me. She asked me what I did with Yan at the brick factory. I said we practiced erhu. She said, Is that all? Her eyes told me she did not believe a bit of it. You know I’ve been receiving reports from the masses on you two. She always used “the masses” to state what she wanted to say. I said, I’m sorry, I don’t understand you. She said I’m sure you understand me perfectly. She smiled. I’ve noticed you two have been wearing each other’s clothes. It was true Yan and I had been paying attention to look our best. It was true that we wore each other’s clothes and I had worn her three-inch-wide belt. I asked Lu if it was a problem. Lu did not answer me. She
walked away with a we-will-see smile. The same night a new slogan appeared on the cafeteria wall. It said, “Be aware of the new patterns of the class struggle.” Lu gave a speech at the night’s meeting calling for attention to “hiding corrupters in the proletarian rank.” She emphasized that the company should not allow a tiny mouse shit to spoil a jar of porridge.

The same night Yan told me that Lu was secretly calling for approval from the upper Party committee for a midnight search in every mosquito net. She suggested that we stop sleeping together. You must obey me, Yan said seriously. I said, All right, but after tonight.

Yan held me in her arms. I felt as if her arms were about to break my ribs.

The next dawn I was awakened by an unfamiliar breath on my face. I cracked open my eyes. I saw a blurred head swaying in front of me. I was horrified: it was Lu. She was in our net watching us.

My heart screamed. I tried to stay in control. I closed my eyes, pretending that I was still sleeping. I began to tremble. If Lu lifted the blankets, Yan and I would be exposed naked. Lu could have us arrested immediately. I felt Lu’s breath harden. My fingers underneath the blankets were taking a firm hold on the sheet. I prayed—to what, I didn’t know. Just prayed. I felt Lu’s head getting closer and closer to my face. Her hand reached my neck and touched the end of the sheet.

Yan turned to the wall in sleep. Lu’s shadow ducked off. I was paralyzed. When I reopened my eyes, Lu was gone.

Lu stopped asking me questions. And I noticed that I was followed either by her or some of her trusted followers wherever I went. I had become Lu’s target to attack Yan.

It was hard not to be able to be close to Yan. The day became senseless. Yan acted tougher than before. She worked hard and showed no emotions. She dragged Lu to be her partner in carrying stones. To exhaust Lu, she took a full hod and walked as fast as she could. Although Lu curled like a shrimp when she was working with Yan, she never complained. As if she knew one day she would win, she bore the pain almost gracefully. A couple of times I saw her wiping off tears at night while taking her study notes.

You know, I really don’t mind having my body hung upside down or my buttocks pricked by a needle, Lu said to me, raising her head from her notebook with a ghastly smile. Faith is all that I need.

Three weeks later, one evening after work when there was no one in the room, I begged Yan to stop torturing Lu. I asked her to think about the consequences. I said, Don’t forget that a dog would jump over a wall if forced into a corner. Yan pulled me against the door and said, Lu wants the power, she wants to push me off of my position. It doesn’t matter whether I’m nice to her or not, she’s decided to be my enemy. She knows very well that by breaking you, she can break me. Yan then told me that two weeks ago when she nominated me to be a member of the Communist Party to the farm’s headquarters, Lu voted an
objection. She won’t allow a tiger to grow a pair of wings, Yan said to me. Do you understand? You are my wings!

I said I did not really care to join the Party anyway. But you need the Party membership, said Yan. It’s a weapon for your future. I said, What could you do about Lu’s objection? “If someone takes the initiative to hurt me, I will hurt him back,” Yan recited Mao’s quotation, and continued, I went to headquarters this afternoon. The chief wanted to talk about Lu’s promotion with me. I did the same thing to her that she had done to you. I picked some bones out of her fucking egg. It was successful. The chief dropped the proposal.

I asked what she was going to do with Lu’s hatred. She said she could care less as she herself was a dog pushed into the corner. We walked on a foggy path stepping on the dew. I said I was tired of life and I hated being a bullet lying in a rifle chamber. Yan said she felt the same way. But it’s better to fight than to be torn alive, she said. It must be fate that we were born at this time. If you can’t go back to your mother’s womb, you’d better learn to be a good fighter.

Spring Festival Holiday came. To set ourselves up as good examples for the soldiers, Yan and I volunteered to guard the company’s property over the holidays, so that we could spend time together. After the last soldier was gone, at dawn, Yan and I went to the fields to dig radishes and cauliflowers. We cooked delicious soup that night.

After dinner, late in the evening, Yan and I went for a long walk in the frosted field. I felt that I was completely
at peace, both in mind and body. I looked at Yan, her rigid features against the black sky. She was an iron goddess. I once again felt worshipful of her and it made me fall speechless. I walked shoulder-to-shoulder with her. She stared into the far distance, buried in thought. The cold air was brisk. I took deep breaths. Yan was thinking about her future and mine, I was sure. It depressed me to follow her thoughts. What control did we have over our own future? None. The life we were living was our assigned future, just like our parents’: one job for a lifetime—a screw fixed on the revolutionary running machine, not until broken down does it pass.

Yan took my hand and held it tight. We sat in the dark reeds, depressed and pleased at the same time.

When we got back to our room, Lu appeared unexpectedly. She said that she wanted to replace either Yan or me, so that one of us could have a vacation. We were greatly disappointed, but neither of us said a word.

The invisible battle between Lu and us was as tough as the frozen salty brown mud. Lu never stopped watching us. She became addicted to watching us. Yan and I lived around her traps. During the day, we rearranged the grain storage and selected the cotton. Yan and I remained silent most of the time. At night we each slept in our own nets and thought about each other. One afternoon I found Lu’s shadow hiding behind the door, listening to our conversation. After I signaled to Yan where Lu was hiding, Yan picked up a wood stick. Pretending she was chasing a rat, she knocked open the door and exposed Lu. Lu smiled
awkwardly; she said she was looking for some mosquitoes to clap. Yan was annoyed. One day when Lu was out in the fields, she took Lu’s skull and threw it into a manure pit. Lu turned purple when she got back and could not find the skull. Yan did not admit to the act. Lu did not say any more about the skull but carved the date on the door. When I looked at the dull but determined carving strokes, I could feel Lu’s choking strength. Strap it tight! Yes, tighter! Tighter! One night I heard Lu crying out in her sleep.

A
fter the Spring Festival, we went every day to hoe the cotton fields. The wind from the East China Sea mixed with sand and felt needle-sharp. It pricked our skin and cracked our lips. Frost damaged the buds. The soldiers were resentful. They swore when the water pipes were frozen in the morning. They picked fights over tiny things like who had more space on clothes strings. It was useless when Lu called for a “united and harmonious family.” Yan was busy looking for Lu’s faults. She wanted to kick Lu out of the company. Lu knew it and was doing the same thing to Yan.

Yan and I had long stopped meeting at the brick factory, because we could not tell where Lu would send her human watchdogs. Yan’s face was long. She started swearing again. There were executions of all types on the farm. Headquarters was frustrated at the soldiers’ faithlessness.
Posters of people being sentenced to death were often seen on the walls. It was called “Killing a chicken to shock the monkeys.”

Yan one day came to me and told me that Orchid had become Lu’s watchdog. She had been following us secretly. I disagreed. I said Orchid was a good human being. Yan said no one in this company was human anymore. We were dogs. We fought for other’s meat. Weren’t we willing to do anything to buy comfort? Lu’s been assigning light jobs to Orchid, and that is suspicious. I said to Yan, You see an enemy behind every tree. She said she did perhaps. It’s a madhouse. The Red Fire Farm.

One morning while I was hoeing in the cotton field with my platoon, a white van drove by and stopped on the path. A group of well-dressed people in green army coats got out and walked toward us. As they passed, they looked at us from head to feet with critical eyes. You—a man suddenly pointed his finger at me. I wiped the sweat off my face and said, Me? Yes, you. The man came closer and asked, How old are you? He was about forty years old. He spoke in standard dialect, like a broadcasting announcer’s Mandarin. I told him I was twenty. He asked me if I could give directions to the headquarters. A woman in the group was taking notes of our conversation. As I was giving them instructions, they encircled me, observing my profile, squatting on their heels, narrowing their eyes to measure my body length and features. The man asked me if I had blisters on my hands. I showed them the blisters on each of my hands, my shoulders and my knees. They studied
the blisters and took a close look at my nails, which were all dark brown because of working with the fungicide. I heard the man whisper to a woman. The woman wrote something down in her notebook. A few minutes later they went back to their van. They did not take the directions I had given them.

That night, during the study meeting, instead of dozing off, the soldiers were gossiping about who those people were and why they came. Finally, a girl whose aunt was working in the government’s cultural bureau explained the cause: Comrade Jiang Ching, Madam Mao, was reforming the movie industry and had sent a group of her associates to find correct-looking young men and women to train as China’s future film actors. The type of look which could convince the masses that if there were a pair of enemy bayonets set across his neck, he would not renounce his Communist beliefs in exchange for his life. The chosen few would be taught to play the leading roles in movies. As a political requirement, the candidates had to be outstanding workers, peasants or soldiers.

I told the news to Yan and she thought it was fantasy talking. Our faces were in no way close to beauty. We were brown potatoes. The chance of being chosen was like setting out to find a needle in an ocean.

Someone in my room hung a broken mirror next to the door the next day. Everyone began bending sideways to take a look at herself before leaving the room. At noon I saw Lu making faces at herself when I opened the door. After a few embarrassing moments, Lu told me to take the mirror down. I said it was not my mirror. She said, Do as I say. She added that she would hold a meeting tonight
on what we need to do to stand clear of bourgeois influence. I took the mirror down and gave it to Lu. Lu hung the mirror in front of the company bulletin board and painted a large slogan behind it as a reminder: “The collapse of a dam begins with an ant hole.” That night Lu lectured for two hours on how important it was to fight the invisible ideological enemies.

Lu’s lecture did not stop people’s movie-star fantasies. They wore their best clothes and made all kinds of excuses to go to headquarters to pass by the windows of these unusual guests. Orchid and I were assigned to go to the headquarters’ shops to buy preserved vegetables. We saw that headquarters was full of people. Everyone was discussing where the film-studio people would be and I heard someone say they would take the Red Heart Drive to come back.