Red Azalea (9 page)

Though it was important for me to look noble to my troops, I made my choice to ignore Lu’s warning. I felt that I must stand by Yan. By supporting Yan, I would cast myself as the lesser of two evils in a bad play. I never wanted to be a soldier at the Red Fire Farm. I felt like a slave. Yan was my reason, my faith to go on. Yan made me feel at least that we were achieving something, the impossible, as it now seemed, but it was still something.

To make Yan proud, I assigned the hardest tasks to our platoon—applying manure, taking night shifts, digging canals. I told my soldiers that my ambition was to make the platoon well-known in the company so everyone would have the best chance to be considered for membership in the Communist Youth League. The soldiers believed in me. Orchid even quit her knitting. By the end of the year, my platoon was selected as the Vanguard Platoon and was given a citation at the entire farm meeting. I was accepted into the Communist Youth League.

At the oath ceremony Yan walked onstage to congratulate me. She shook my hands and squeezed them in her carrotlike fingers. Laughing, she whispered that she could not wait to have me join the Party. She said that I must become a Party member. She said, I could make it happen to you next spring. She said she would like to see it happen very much. I was excited. I could not say a word. I squeezed her hands back, hard. For many nights afterward, before going to sleep, I replayed the ceremony in my head. I dreamt of Yan’s laughing. I realized how much I liked it.

After the busy summer season ended, the soldiers were allowed a little time for themselves after dinner. The spare time made me feel empty in the heart. I missed Little Green terribly. I would comb her hair and wash her clothes, but although her body was getting back to its original shape—she was once again slim like a willow—her mind seemed to have gone forever. Nothing I tried made her respond to me. She still wore the shirt with the plum flowers on it—the one she had on the night she got caught—but it had holes under the armpits and elbows. The shirt reminded me of the night—I’ll never forget it—when I had my gun pointed at her. I did not know how other people were living with this guilt, if there was any guilt. No one talked about it. The company pretended it had never happened. Little Green was given light jobs working as a storage guard and was given coupons for sugar and meat. Yan was strange in the way she treated Little Green. She grabbed her and gazed into her eyes. She observed her anxiously. She tried to talk to Little Green when everyone else had quit a long time ago.

Little Green had become dangerous to herself. Once I caught her swallowing tiny stones. Orchid also caught her eating worms. I reported the incidents to Yan. From then on I often saw Yan follow Little Green around the fields late in the evening. They were like two lost boats drifting over the sea in a dense fog.

Yan still went to catch the poisonous snakes. And I still followed her. Her secretiveness and my curiosity became the melody of the farm’s night.

I began to dislike going into my mosquito net. It was too quiet. I avoided my bed and walked on a narrow path through the reeds. As the daylight faded, I found myself at the farm’s brick factory. Thousands of ready-to-bake bricks were laid out in patterns. Some stacks were eight feet high, some leaning as if about to fall, and some had already fallen. I could hear the echo of my own steps. The place had the feel of ancient ruins.

One day there was another sound among the bricks, like the noise of an erhu, a two-stringed banjo. I picked out the melody—“Liang and Zhu”—from a banned opera; my grandmother used to hum it. Liang and Zhu were two ancient lovers who committed suicide because of their unpermitted love. The music now playing described how the two lovers were transformed into butterflies and met in the spring again. It surprised me to hear someone on the farm able to play it with such skill.

I followed the sound. It stopped. I heard steps. A shadow ducked by the next lane. I tailed it and found the erhu on a brick stool. I looked around. No one. Wind whistled through the patterned bricks. I bent over to pick up the instrument, when my eyes were suddenly covered by a pair of hands from behind.

I tried to remove the hands. Fingers combatted. The hands were forceful. I asked, Who is this? and there was no reply. I reached back to tickle. The body behind me giggled. A hot breath on my neck. Yan? I cried out.

She stood in front of me, smiling. She held the erhu. You, was it you? You play erhu? I looked at her. She nodded, did not say anything. Though I still could not make
my mind connect the image of the commander with the erhu player, I felt a sudden joy. The joy of a longing need met. A lonely feeling shared, and turned into inspiration. In my mind, I saw peach-colored petals descend like snow and bleach the landscape. Distant valleys and hills melted into one. Everything wrapped in purity.

She sat down on the stool and motioned me to sit next to her. She kept smiling and said nothing. I wanted to tell her that I had not known she played erhu, to tell her how beautifully she played, but I was afraid to speak.

She picked up the erhu and the bow, retuned the strings, bent her head toward the instrument and closed her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she stroked the instrument with the bow—she started to play “The River.”

The music became a surging river in my head. I could hear it run through seas and mountains, urged on by the winds and clouds, tumbling over cliffs and waterfalls, gathered by rocks and streaming into the ocean. I was taken by her as she was taken by the music. I felt her true self through the erhu. I was awakened. By her. In a strange land, faced by a self I had not gotten to know and the self I was surprised, yet so glad, to meet.

Her fingers ran up and down the strings, creating sounds like rain dropping on banana leaves. Then her fingers stopped, and she held her breath. Her fingertips touched and then stayed on the string. The bow pulled. A thread of notes was born, telling of an untold bitterness. Slowly, she vibrated the string. Fingers dipped out sad syllables. She stroked the bow after a pause, the notes were violent. She raised her head, eyes closed and chin tilted
up. The image before me became fragmented: the Party secretary, the heroine, the murderer, and the beautiful erhu player …

She played “Horse Racing,” “The Red Army Brother Is Coming Back,” and finally “Liang and Zhu” again.

We talked. A conversation I had never before had. We told each other our life stories. In our eagerness to express ourselves we overlapped each other’s sentences.

She said her parents were textile workers. Her mother had been honored as a Glory Mother in the fifties for producing nine children. Yan was the eighth. The family lived in the Long Peace district of Shanghai, where they shared one wood-framed room and shared a well with twenty other families. They had no toilet, only a nightstool. It was her responsibility to take the nightstool to a public sewage depot every morning and clean the stool. I told her that we lived in better conditions. We had a toilet, though we shared it with two other families, fourteen people. She said, Oh yes, I can imagine your morning traffic. We laughed.

I asked where she had learned to play erhu. She said her parents were fans of folk music. It was her family tradition that each member had to master at least one instrument. Everyone in her family had a specialty, in lute, erhu, sheng with reed pipes and trumpet. She was a thin girl when she was young, so she chose to learn erhu. She identified with its vertical lines. Her parents saved money and bought her the instrument for her tenth birthday. The family invited a retired erhu player to dinner every weekend
and asked him to drop a few comments on the erhu. The family hoped that Yan would one day become a famous erhu player.

She was fifteen years old when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. She joined the Red Guards and marched to Beijing to be inspected by Chairman Mao at Tienanmen Square. As the youngest Red Guard representative, she was invited to watch an opera, newly created by Madam Mao, Jiang Ching, at the People’s Great Hall. She liked the three-inch-wide belts the performers were wearing. She traded her best collection of Mao buttons for a belt. She showed me her belt. It was made of real leather and had a copper buckle. It was designed by Comrade Jiang Ching, my heroine, she said. Have you read Mao’s books? she asked. Yes, I did, I said, all of them. She said, That’s wonderful, because that’s what I did too. I memorized the Little Red Book and know every quotation song.

I told her that I was a Red Guard since elementary school, my experience much less glorious than hers, though I would not be fooled about how much one knew about Mao quotation songs. She smiled and asked me to give her a test. I asked if she could tell where I sang.

The Party runs its life by good policies …

Page seven, second paragraph! she said.

If the broom doesn’t come, the garbage won’t automatically go away …

Page ten, first paragraph!

We came from the countryside …

Page a hundred forty-six, third paragraph!

The world is yours …

Page two hundred sixty-three, first paragraph!

Studying Chairman Mao’s works, we must learn to be efficient. We should apply his teachings to our problems to ensure a fast result …

She joined my singing.

As when we erect a bamboo stick in the sunshine, we see the shadow right away …

Where are we? I shouted.

Vice Chairman Lin Biao’s Preface for Mao Quotations, second edition! she shouted back, and we laughed, so happily.

We were still talking when we reached the barracks. We stood in the dark, filled with incredible delight. Be careful, she said. I nodded and understood: avoid Lu’s attention. We took separate paths and went back to our room.

I could not sleep that night. The room and the mosquito net felt very different from yesterday. Yan did not speak to me in the room, but there was life and fresh air. I felt spring. The growth of the reeds underneath the bed for the first time became tolerable. I thought I would like the green in the room. Would Yan? She was in the bunk beneath me. There was so much that I wanted to share with her. But I dared not talk to her. Lu’s bed was next to ours. We, eight people, sleeping in one room, compartmented by mosquito nets.

Lu would be jealous of us, of our delight. I felt sorry for her. I wished I could be her friend. It was sad that the only thing she was close to was the skull. I felt sympathy for her for the first time. It was a funny feeling. What
made me care for Lu? Yan? Lu was two years older than Yan. She was twenty-five. She wanted so much. She wanted to control our lives. What was she doing with her youth? Wrinkles had climbed on her face. Soon she would be thirty, and forty, and she would still be at Red Fire Farm. She said she loved the farm and would never leave. I wondered how anyone could love this farm. A farm that produced nothing but weeds and reeds. A complete darkness. A hell. Lu spoke no truth. She did not know how. Did she have feelings? Feelings that Yan and I shared tonight? She must have. She was young and healthy. But who dared to be dear to her? Who truly cared for her besides flattering her for her power? Whom would she be sharing her feelings with? Would she marry? What a funny thought to think of Lu being married. Men in the company were afraid of her. They yielded to her, accepted her dominance. Men surrendered before they faced her. The shadow of her appearance chased men away. They treated her like a poster on a wall. They showed her their admiration but framed her on their mind’s wall. I saw loneliness in Lu’s eyes. The eyes that stared into fields on rainy days. The eyes of thirst.

Lu went to bed late. She sat on a wooden stool studying Mao’s works. Every night she practiced this ritual. She took about ten pages of notes each night. She was the last one to go to bed and the first to get up. She cleaned the room and the hall. I love to serve the people, she liked to say. She quoted Mao’s teaching when she was praised. She would say, I did only what the Chairman taught me.
She would recite, It is not hard for a person to do a couple of good things for others; it is hard for a person to spend his entire life doing good things for others.