Years of Red Dust (13 page)

His colleagues were too astonished to say anything, looking at one another like stupefied chickens. Embarrassed, they stood up in a hurry to get out of the office.

“No, you don't have to leave. I'm just leaving things here. And I won't come to join Liang until after your office hours in the evening. Sorry, we don't have any choice; for a married couple, you know, we have to have a room for ourselves.”

She went on to pass small red envelopes of marriage candy to his colleagues, who all murmured congratulations. Liang actually got a red envelope too, which bore a large
character of double happiness in shining gold, like the marriage certificate.

The candy he had picked out tasted as hard as a pebble, and it rolled around on his tongue for a long while without melting. Looking up, he noticed a black bat flickering about outside the window. Was it the same one he saw earlier when Pingping had told him about playing the last card?

When the evening fell, they were left alone in the office room.

It was a warm summer night. They found it hard to fall asleep, keenly aware that they were now married. The sofa was not long enough. She had to rest her bare feet on the sofa arm. The old desk was far more uncomfortable and groaned under his weight. They couldn't help gazing at each other in the dark. The occasional footsteps in the building had long since died out. It was getting hot in the office room with the windows closed and the door locked. She moved over to his desk, sat on the edge of it, and, without a word unbuttoned her blouse.

 

Waves of the moonlight fading,
A jade handle of the Dipper lowering,
We calculate with our fingers
When the west wind will come,
Unaware of time flowing away like a river in the dark.

 

Afterward, they lay in silence with their legs entangled, pools of sweat on the hard desk on which he had worked
since his first day as a research assistant at the institute. It was almost like a challenge to the system—a call to arms, he thought, remembering the title of a short story collection by Lu Xun, before losing himself in a dreamless blackness.

Early in the morning light, he opened his eyes to see Pingping moving about in her pajamas, pattering barefoot in and out, carrying back a thermos bottle of hot water. Before he could wash himself with the new towel she handed to him, she was opening the door to greet his colleagues like a hostess, her laugh reverberating along the corridor like a silver bell.

He knew he didn't have to worry anymore about the housing assignment. He saw the conclusion in the eyes of his colleagues.

But he suddenly felt something like a chilly current surging down his spine that summer morning as he thought to himself, once again, that it was all for the sake of a room.

Still, it was a battle he had to win. He had to prove that he had the guts to fight to the end.

So the battle went on, triumphantly, to the end that she had predicted—he got the shining room key from the housing committee.

She was seven months pregnant by that time.

She decided not to move in immediately. It was an old room vacated by another family instead of a new room. But a room of twelve square meters nonetheless meant a new world to them. She wanted to renovate it like new. It was out of the question, however, for her to come to his office
anymore. So he had her staying temporarily in Red Dust Lane, where his mother would help to take care of her. Only Pingping could be stubborn: she busied herself in and out of the lane, her feet swollen and her face pale, supervising the renovation project, choosing and bargaining for the most inexpensive yet excellent material.

Liang still slept in the office. He was getting used to it. He did not have to worry about the morning traffic, and he worked quite late at night, though no one knew exactly what he had been doing there.

But there was another reason for staying at the office. He didn't want to witness the constant bickering between Pingping and his mother, who believed that the younger woman had tricked him into marriage. After all, Pingping was several months older than he, another “aged female youth,” and it might have been her last chance to hook such a deal. He was inclined to agree with his mother, thinking about all the initiatives Pingping had taken, though he didn't say anything to his pregnant wife. From the moment he had first raised the subject of housing, Pingping had never let him drop it—despite all her casual remarks and seeming lack of concern for herself.

He also had no answer to his mother's question, “What do you see in her?”

That is, except the room that came with her. But it had been her room in all honesty, because it came to him through her effort and her sacrifice. He could not help
wondering at the sight of this bloated woman, almost a stranger, nagging and bickering in the lane where he had grown up. There was hardly any trace of vivaciousness left in her, he observed with a twinge of conscience as she handed him a white towel, her face dust-covered and her hair disheveled from her renovation project.

One night, waking up alone in the dark office, he shivered at the prospect of his married life in that room of twelve square feet, year after year, with his wife, his children, and perhaps his grandchildren too, all growing up under the same roof, just like in Red Dust Lane. There was no possibility of having a second room assigned to him by the institute.

And his wife had not talked to him about his work at the institute for months, or about Balzac or Dickens, or such writers as she used to discuss with him in the bookstore. She's too busy, he thought, an interpretation he tried to adhere to. And he didn't bother to explain to her what he had been busy with, working late at the institute.

He almost missed the expected date of his son's birth.

At the “first month celebration dinner” held for his son in the lane, he turned over his room key to his wife, declaring that he was going to start his own business in Shenzhen. It was a special economic zone, where with the new government policies, people could do things that were not yet possible in other parts of socialist China. There, people were capable of making more money as entrepreneurs
and buying new apartments for themselves. He had made an intensive study of it and had come up with a business plan.

“China is going to change,” he said simply. “I'm planning to buy a new apartment there for ourselves.”

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1990. China successfully weathered the political storm of 1989. Martial law was lifted in Beijing. Hundreds of arrested student-movement participants, having confessed, were released. In April, the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC was adopted to ensure a fifty-year continuance of Hong Kong's economic system.

In the ongoing economic reform, the process of restructuring or closing state-owned enterprises was accelerated. The year also witnessed the rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army. “A clear sky after the rain,” we are full of confidence for the future of the socialist China.

 

Dong Keqiang had always been considered one of the luckiest young men in Red Dust Lane. Since his grandfather's
generation, the Dongs had lived here, with a whole wing in a
shikumen
house for themselves. Unlike others in the lane, his grandfather, a skilled, well-paid technician before 1949, was capable of renting a wing consisting of a dining room, a living room, a bedroom, and a small dark room, which served as a bathroom. In the years afterward, those rooms gradually lost their original function as the family grew and the rooms had to accommodate more and more people. Still, Dong had a room all to himself, and as the only male heir, he would eventually inherit the wing.

But his luck was more than just the wing. After 1949, his grandfather was classified in the new socialist class system as a worker, and so was his father. In the seventies, when Dong grew up, a proletarian family background still meant a lot. Dong himself became a Little Red Guard, a member of the Communist Youth League, and in time, a technician at Shanghai Telecommunication, a well-paid position at a profitable state-run company—an iron rice bowl.

“An iron rice bowl” was a figure of speech that evolved from the time-honored tradition of eating rice from a bowl. When someone lost his job, it was often said that he lost or broke his rice bowl. In the state-run enterprise system established after 1949, employees never got laid off—no matter their work performance—but instead held their jobs until they retired with a pension and medical insurance. These were the benefits of the socialist system.
So a job at a state-run company was called an “iron rice bowl” because job security was absolute—an iron rice bowl would never break in the equalitarianist system.

In the economic reform in the mid-eighties, when some people began to run their own businesses, “iron rice bowl holders” didn't take it as something to worry about. The possibility that those new “entrepreneurs” might earn a little more would be nothing compared to all the benefits of an iron rice bowl. Besides, no one could tell how those new things would work out in China.

One afternoon, Auntie Jia, the celebrated matchmaker of Red Dust Lane, introduced Dong to Lili, a fashionable young girl. Lili had been reluctant to meet an ordinary technician, but Auntie Jia made a convincing point about Dong's grandfather being in his eighties and about Dong inheriting the whole wing in the near future.

Dong and Lili met at Bund Park, and Dong was smitten at first sight. They talked and laughed and walked in the park for a couple of hours. He then suggested they go to dinner at a restaurant that same evening. Looking across the street, she suggested a restaurant in the Peace Hotel, a five-star hotel he had never stepped in before, but he didn't hesitate. He had enough money with him, he believed, for the evening.

So they went up to the restaurant on the seventh floor and chose a table by the window overlooking the river. Instead of looking at the river, though, he kept gazing into the
waves in her large eyes, which he imagined set the colorful vessels sailing along the river below them. She said she liked the atmosphere here.

But he was shocked at the prices in the gold-printed menu. It was out of the question for him to try and impress her by choosing one of the expensive chef's specials. So without turning over the menu to her, he started ordering like a pro: “Pork with Tree Ears, Imperial Concubine Chicken, Meat Ball of Four Happiness, Single Winter Bamboo Shoot Soup . . .” Each of the dishes he ordered cost less than a hundred yuan. Lili didn't say anything; instead she kept looking out of the window, absentmindedly.

“What about fish and shrimp?” the waitress said, casting a casual glance at the menu in his hand.

It was a question he had dreaded. An Australian lobster served three ways—raw slices, stir-fried with scallion and ginger, and watery rice of the lobster sauce—cost nine hundred yuan. He didn't even bother to check the price for a large croaker fried in the shape of a squirrel. Not that he was tight-fisted, but he had only about eight hundred yuan with him. He glanced through the menu again. To his relief, he found something listed in the chef's specials: “Live Yellow River Carp.”

The carp was not considered, to the best of his knowledge, an expensive delicacy. In the food market at the back of the lane, a kilo of carp was no more than three or four yuan. A live carp could cost slightly more, but not that much. The chef's special was marked with something called
“unit price”: sixteen yuan. Whether “unit” meant kilo or
jing
—a standard Chinese measurement equivalent to half a kilo—the price appeared acceptable.

“How about a carp about one to one and a half kilos?” the waitress suggested considerately, following his focus on the menu. “Anything smaller won't have much meat, but a larger one won't be tender.”

“That sounds perfect.”

Lili turned to him with spring waves rippling in her eyes—possibly rippling with the swimming carp.

Soon their orders appeared on the table. In spite of all the delicacies, he feasted his eyes only on her. She started eating, dabbing at her lush lips with a pink napkin, smiling radiantly in the miraculous late sunshine streaming through the window.

Then the live carp was served by another waitress, who was dressed in an indigo wax print, her bare feet in wooden slippers, and her shapely ankles silver-bangled, lighting up the red carpet. She placed before them the carp on a huge willow-patterned platter, saying with a dramatic flare, “Look!”

The eyes of the fish on the platter were still turning. How the fish was cooked, he had no idea, but it was nothing short of a miracle. Lili chopsticked a slice of back meat onto his plate. It tasted extraordinary—delicious and fresh—and even more so with her intimate gesture. She sucked at the tender fish cheek with a sensual grace beyond his wildest dream, her slender fingers lightly touching her lips.

Suddenly clumsy and jumpy, he plucked out one eye of the carp with the chopstick, splashing up the juice.

“The meat surrounding the eye is the best,” she said with a reassuring smile. “In Hong Kong, there's a special dish of fish eyes. Only eight orders per day.”

The meat surrounding the carp eye tasted like fat tofu with a nondescript texture. He had never heard about the Hong Kong special dish. She might be a regular customer in fancy restaurants, he concluded. But she deserved it, because, as a proverb says, a smile on her lips was worth a thousand tons of gold.

He wasn't aware of time flowing away like the river in the gathering dusk.

She finally sighed with content. The waitress came over to their table with the bill on a silver tray.

It was a big shock—the bill was more than 2,500 yuan. He had done the calculation in his mind several times. The amount shouldn't exceed six hundred, with his fish weighing about a kilo. So he summoned the waitress and asked her about it.