Years of Red Dust (11 page)

Finally, in the middle of the chaos, Big Bowl came rushing out, pushing his way through the crowd, striding toward the lane exit, shouting with both arms raised above his head.

“You all can shut up now. Everything is finished. I've killed her. Now I'm turning myself in to the police bureau.”

People were stunned into silence. It did not look like he was making a joke—a very bad one—but no one could believe it. Old Qian was transfixed with his fist banging at the air, as if turned into a stone statue by a magic spell. Small Bowl was the first to get his wits back, sprinting up to the wedding room, while the others remained standing there in the lane, too shocked and stupefied to react.

Comrade Jun, the head of the neighborhood committee, arrived at the scene, and an outburst of voices rocketed up like firecrackers trying to explain. “A life for a firecracker!”

Small Bowl ran back down again, shouting, “Wait! Big Bowl! Don't go there!”

Then Qian stumbled down, her hair disheveled, her clothes in terrible disarray, screaming, running barefoot. “Come back, Big Bowl!”

The crowd gasped. “She's—a ghost! Wait—she's not dead.”

But it was already too late.

When the bride dashed into the police station, the bridegroom had already signed the statement saying that he had strangled his wife in a fit of fury. It was too humiliating that his father-in-law had made a scene on his wedding day, and that she, too, screamed like a fury in the wedding room. He had lost all face, and his faith too, in a marriage with such an ugly start. And he lost control of himself temporarily.

Now, Big Bowl couldn't be charged with homicide, since the victim was not dead, but nonetheless, it was an attempted homicide. The statement lay on the desk, signed, in black and white. Big Bowl was thrown into custody. It then became a matter of the uttermost urgency to prove that the statement made by Big Bowl was not true.

Qian told a different story. According to her, it was not his fault at all. When they first heard the noise outside, he wanted her to stop her father. She didn't want to. Instead,
she started to scream and scratch at him like a fury. The fight in the wedding room only added fuel to the fire. He tried to keep her from making things worse by putting his hand over her mouth. She struggled so violently that she lost consciousness.

The following morning, she further amended her statement by insisting that she fainted because she had been too exhausted by all the preparations for the wedding, including the purchase of all the firecrackers, which she had personally chosen at a market. It really had nothing to do with him at all.

Whose side was credible—the bride's or the bridegroom's?

How it had happened that night in the wedding room, we didn't know, but we chose to believe her story. After all, it's a bad firecracker's luck.

When the police came to the lane to investigate, Comrade Jun offered an interpretation from his own experience.

“Big Bowl was drunk that night. You cannot take a drunken man's word for it. As the head of the neighborhood committee, I've dealt with too many people who were in the cup. Do you know how many cups he drank that night? Now, I'm always against this kind of lavish wedding, but they didn't listen to me. It is difficult for us to do the neighborhood work nowadays, comrades.”

Those neighbors who had attended the banquet at the Guoji Hotel supported this by testifying that Big Bowl had
consumed more than ten cups of sorghum liquor. Qian was more credible, they further argued, since she had hardly had a drop that night.

Big Bowl's company, too, put in a good word for him. He had been an honest, hardworking accountant. The fact that he had turned himself in spoke for itself. Even drunk, he remained a law-abiding citizen. The predicament of Qian was also brought up in the discussion. If anything happened to him, what would happen to her—waiting for him for so many years in Red Dust Lane, like the Beijing opera heroine Wang Baochuan?

When Big Bowl was released in October, Qian was about three months pregnant.

Red Dust Lane was once more abuzz with stories and speculations.

Now, the time from the moment that Old Qian and Bamboo Chopsticks started fighting in the lane to the moment when Big Bowl ran out was about forty-five minutes. We calculated closely. What could the bride and bridegroom have done during the forty-five minutes when they were alone in the wedding room? All the details—that she came out barefoot, her hair disheveled, her clothes in disarray—spoke for themselves. But others had different versions. The young couple must have heard the fight outside from the very beginning. How could they have been in the mood? So it must have happened before the wedding.

The humiliation of having fought with his wife and turned himself in for a false murder on his wedding day,
plus gossip in the lane about the circumstance of Qian's pregnancy, proved to be too much.

Once again Big Bowl hung his head low, as if he were suffering from a broken neck, just the way he had when he had first moved in and buried his face in a big bowl.

Fortunately, his uncle had mailed a large sum from the United States, Bamboo Chopsticks announced proudly in the lane. According to the new policy, overseas Chinese could buy their apartments in the city with foreign currency. So the young couple was soon going to move out of Red Dust Lane to a new apartment.

There, we hoped, they would be able to start a new life.

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1987. In the beginning of the year, the Party authorities launched the campaign to fight against bourgeois liberalism under Western influence and accepted Hu Yaobang's resignation from the post of general secretary of the Party Central Committee. In October, in the CPC National Congress, Zhao Ziyang gave the report “Advance along the Road of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” stating that the basic role of the Party during the primary stage of socialism is to lead people in an effort to turn China into a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and modern socialist country by making economic development the Party's central task while adhering to the four cardinal principles and persevering in reform and open policy. With such an important document to guide China's reform, the Chinese people are full of confidence for the great future of the
country. Of course, there can be twists and turns in our advances; of this we are well aware, and the Party authorities took decisive and effective measures against widespread corruption in the system. This year, an agreement between China and Portugal was signed calling for the return of Macao to China in 1999.

 

Twenty years had passed like a snapping of one's fingers, Fu Guodong thought, standing hatless, shivering in the cold wind outside the university conference hall. However, he had never thought about buying himself a hat, since that winter night in 1966.

That long-ago night, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he had witnessed his sick father wearing a tall white paper hat bearing big Chinese characters:
Down with the black bourgeois authority, American secret agent
. The old man was a college professor who had studied in the United States and had come back in the fifties as an authority in physics, and he was turned into a black target for the Red Guards in the sixties. A young boy, Fu himself was turned into a “black puppy,” having to support his sick father as he stood on the mass-criticism stage near the entrance of Red Dust Lane. There he saw the tall paper hat on his father's head trembling in the howling wind as some sort of pale sign from the underworld.

His father passed away shortly afterward, though his “political hat” still cast a shadow over the family, particularly
Fu. It was a shadow not removed until several years after the Cultural Revolution, when Fu became a college student at the university where his father had taught. Four years later, as if through another stroke of ironic causality of misplaced yin and yang, he started teaching there too.

He did not dream of becoming an authority like his father.
Once bitten by a snake, a man turns panicky at the sight of a coiled black rope.
With that evening wind still howling in his memory, he seemed incapable of “warming up.” And his subject happened to be a “cold” one too: comparative linguistics, with a focus on the etymology of the Chinese language. Still, in the lane, a college teacher was somebody, and everyone expected that, sooner or later, he would move out.

But Fu was a contented man, with a stable income and occasional extra money from his academic publications, so he had no immediate plans to move. He kept a low profile in the lane. Whenever addressed as Professor, he would insist that he was still a lecturer. In the one single room inherited from his father, he piled up books—he was indeed a bookworm, about whom there was nothing too surprising. His continuous celibacy in his mid-thirties, for instance, was easily attributed to his bookishness. He copied out a couplet by Zhuge Liang on a long silk scroll, which he then hung on the wall:
It is enough for a man to survive in an age of troubles; it is vain to seek one's name among the glorious
.

However low his profile, he worked diligently and published copiously in his field. In time, his name spread beyond
the college and outside the country as well. As in the proverb, a red apricot tree could not help blossoming over the wall.

Now, on the present winter evening in the late eighties, as he stood outside of the university conference hall thinking back on the scene twenty years earlier, he was hit with a weird sense of déjà vu. He had just delivered a talk at an international culture conference on campus. The session on comparative linguistics had been attended by a number of well-known Western scholars: there had been a recent revival of interest worldwide in the Chinese language as a system of ideograms, and Chinese characters had become so fashionable that they were appearing on T-shirts and as tattoos. Fu's speech focused on Ezra Pound's deconstruction of ancient Chinese characters into poetic images, and Fu demonstrated his groundbreaking insight into the subject. His talk was well received, and afterward, Professor Allen, from an American university, and Professor Hornbeck, from a German university, insisted on treating him to dinner.

While out with the two, Fu kept shivering, even though he was sandwiched between the Western scholars in a taxi. It was a chilly rainy evening.

The two foreigners exchanged glances, then had the taxi pull onto West Nanjing Road and dragged him into a brand-named store, where they proposed to pick out a cap for him. They recommended a brown wool flat cap, which was made in London and had a staggering price tag.
Professor Hornbeck commented that its color suited his black hair perfectly. Professor Allen raved about its quality. Fu concurred, feeling he had no choice, even though the price was way beyond his ordinary budget. It would never do, he knew, for his Western colleagues to look down on their Chinese counterparts.

Wearing the cap, he went to the restaurant with them for a wonderful dinner of eight courses. The two foreigners kept raising their cups to his academic achievement. Halfway through the meal, he excused himself, and in the bathroom, he could not help studying his flushing face reflected in the mirror—a total stranger with an exotic British cap on his head.

The next morning, when he woke up, his first thoughts were about the cap. It was overcast outside. He wondered if it was feasible to wear it on campus. Considering the price he had paid for it, it would be a waste, he concluded, not to do so.

When he arrived on campus, he became aware that people were taking an extra look at him—or at the cap, which must have seemed out of character for the middle-aged, low-profile intellectual. No one could say, however, there was anything improper or wrong about it.

“You look like a person of authority,” one of his female colleagues said, flashing him an ambiguous smile, “with such a cap on your head.”

“Well, he is a person of authority,” another colleague said as he arrived at Fu's side. “No question about it.”

That was what the two Western scholars had said about him, Fu remembered, when they recommended the cap to him: they called him an authority in the field. After all, he had published more academic papers in international journals than most of his colleagues.

Anyway, it was a good, comfortable cap, providing a sort of warmth he had not experienced before. Soon, people got used to the sight of an oriental scholar on comparative linguistics walking around wearing an occidental cap. It was a cap that became him, a conclusion reached not only by his colleagues but by his neighbors in the lane too.

The following month, he spent a considerable sum for a pair of gold-rimmed glasses—to go with the cap.

And then, a new wool suit.

For all those years, he had spent little and saved enough that he could afford to go on a small-scale shopping spree.

Eventually, he became aware of the difference in himself—with the cap atop his head.

Spring came a couple of months later, and with it, the academic position discussion in the department at the university. Wearing the cap at the department office, he made a short yet surprising speech.

“In the last three years, I have published twenty-two papers in international journals. Among them, six have been quoted and mentioned by other scholars. If anyone in our department has published more in the field, he or she should be advanced to the full professorship. But if not, I
should be the one,” he concluded emphatically. “Several universities have contacted me.”

The department heads gave serious thought to his statement. In the university ranking system recently introduced in China, the number of papers published abroad was one of the important considerations. Not only was he unmatched in publications, Fu was a good and hardworking teacher. Also, they were impressed by the unprecedented assertive tone in his speech, and they had to consider the possibility of his going to another university. They agreed unanimously to grant him full professorship.