Years of Red Dust (17 page)

Perhaps that was why his wife had to teach so many students, his neighbors said. One morning, they awoke to see Bao preparing a duck in the lane sink, plucking the duck hair with a pair of steel tweezers. “She works so hard,” Bao explained with a smile. “I'm going to make an old duck soup for her.” He appeared to be quite handy, adding white tofu and green onion to the soup, the pleasant flavor of which soon came floating out of the common kitchen area of the
shikumen
house. That night, he served her the soup as well as a platter of duck in oyster sauce that was said to be better than the special at Xinya Restaurant. For all their years together, he simply hadn't had any opportunity to demonstrate the considerate husband in him.

Still, things between the couple began to deteriorate. Shortly after the duck dinner, she was heard to say that she was going to dump him once he was dumped by the institute of literature. She told him, “You should have stayed in Ningbo, making your tofu.”

“He could have committed suicide by ramming his head against tofu,” Four-Eyed Liu observed sarcastically in the evening talk.

“A couple is like two birds. When disaster comes, they have to fly in different directions,” Old Root said, quoting a line from the
Dream of the Red Chamber
. “By becoming a poet, he got his position, his room, and his wife, but because of it, he's losing everything he has got . . .”

What if Bao had remained at the tofu shop in the Ningbo countryside? That was the question hovering over the lane.

So when Bao actually started his tofu business at the front of the lane, it didn't come as much of a surprise. No one bothered to ask him about his job at the institute of literature; suffice it to say that he no longer worked there. There was no point in rubbing the humiliation in. Besides, people like someone who can face adversity by grinning and bearing it.

Guo, a young student in the audience, listened to the story with great interest and launched into a harangue about a so-called dried-tofu-shaped poem: a sort of short poem
with each and every line containing the same number of Chinese characters, so it looked like a piece of dried tofu. He improvised a doggerel there and then, starting, “What kind of man make what kind of tofu—”

“No, don't make fun,” Old Root said, stopping Guo before he finished. “It has really come full circle, the end coming back to meet the beginning. Bao might well change the sign for his booth to read: Tofu Poet Bao's.”

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1998. In March, Comrade Zhu Rongji succeeded Comrade Li Peng as premier and actively sought for China's membership in the World Trade Organization. In June, American President Clinton visited China. China suffered flooding along the Yangtze and other rivers in the summer, but under the great leadership of our Party government, the Chinese people achieved victory fighting against the natural disaster. Later this year, a financial crisis broke out in Asia, and China won world respect for its economic role in the midst of it.

 

Black-Haired Ding's luck changed dramatically that year, as if on a roller coaster in the newly built Jingjiang Theme Park. Like everything else in the world, the turn of fortune was the result of a long chain of cause and effect. As
a Buddhist maxim says, something as small as a peck or a sip must have been predetermined, and is then determining too.

The beginnings were all the way back in the late seventies, when White-Haired Ding, an old bachelor of Red Dust Lane, retired from the Yangtze Bathhouse and gave his job, as well as the
tingzijian
room, to his nephew, Black-Haired Ding, who was then still a young boy farming in the countryside of Jiangbei, north of the Yangtze River. It was a special arrangement made in consideration of the old man's status as a national model worker, one who had been received by Chairman Mao in the sixties. Before going back to the countryside, the old man told his nephew only one thing.

“You can do a good job in any profession.”

A bathhouse job was not considered desirable, not even in socialist China. In the pre-1949 era, bathhouse workers had been mostly from Jiangbei, an impoverished, backward area that had a derogatory connotation to the Shanghainese. Black-Haired Ding's job was that of a foot masseur by the large pool. In Mao's day, with his political doctrine of serving the people regardless of profession, it had been through that job that White-Haired Ding had been promoted to the status of a national model worker.

The young man still considered himself lucky to be working at a state-run bathhouse in Shanghai, with all sorts of job benefits, instead of farming in the countryside. Among other things, he didn't have to worry about hot
water and could bathe to his heart's content all year round, a luxury even the well-off lane residents couldn't afford. He didn't have to worry about cooking or eating at home, either. There was a large stove in the bathhouse, where employees warmed or steamed their rice, from breakfast to dinner. Last but not least, he didn't have to worry much about clothing. The moment he stepped into the bathhouse, he stripped himself naked, took a shower, and wrapped himself in a towel, which was his working uniform. It was a matter of necessity, since he spent the day massaging and sweating by the hot pool. The result was that he hardly had to buy any new clothes, and the Mao suit he had inherited from his uncle still appeared quite new after several years.

He had inherited his skill as a foot masseur from his uncle as well. It didn't take long for him to win a name for himself in the circle. Like his uncle, he seemed to develop a real passion for the job. In time, he settled into the lane, though he was still regarded as a “Jiangbeinese,” because of his strong dialect.

Eventually, like others in the lane, it was time for him to think about finding a girlfriend. Through the help of Auntie Jia, he met with Linlin, a young girl working in a collective-run soy sauce shop. On the matchmaking scale of Auntie Jia, a collective-run company employee with less pay would prove to be equal to him, employee of a state-run bathhouse. Soon, Linlin was seen visiting him in the lane. Since he had a room to himself, his neighbors began
holding their breath on those occasions, pricking up their ears to listen for any suspicious sound from behind the closed door of his room. The neighborhood committee also kept itself on high alert. But suddenly, Linlin didn't come anymore.

Black-Haired Ding wouldn't talk about her abrupt evaporation. Some said it was because of a mistake he made. As the story went, one afternoon she brought some fruit to his bathhouse, where, too excited by her visit, he ran out wearing nothing but a towel. She was more than embarrassed. A different version, to the surprise of the lane, also began to circulate, a story to the effect that he had a sexual orientation problem, through his long exposure to naked male bodies at the bathhouse. The fact that White-Haired Ding, too, had remained a bachelor all his life added credibility to the story.

Black-Haired Ding didn't seem to care too much about losing his girlfriend. Nor did he try to refute the interpretations of his continuing celibacy. He went to the bathhouse as before, working hard, wearing the same Mao jacket.

Time flows away like the dirty water in the bathhouse.

In the years of the Cultural Revolution, there were many things far more important than speculations about Ding's possible personal problem. People in the lane didn't talk about it anymore, though it did seem to be confirmed that it was a problem.

The Cultural Revolution started with a bang and ended
with a whimper. After the passing of our great leader Chairman Mao and the stepping down of our wise leader Chairman Hua, it was our veteran leader Chairman Deng Xiaoping that started the economic reform in China. By then Black-Haired Ding had reached his thirties, having lost most of his Jiangbei accent, half of his black hair, and, as a result, his nickname too. It might have been just as well. He had long been the one and only Ding in the neighborhood. According to his occasional comments during the evening talk of the lane, he had his worries like everyone else, but all of them seemed to wash away in the hot-water pool of the bathhouse.

“After all, what's the difference between people when everyone is naked? What's the difference in the dirty bathwater?”

But in the course of the economic reform, a difference did begin to show up at the state-run bathhouse. The service at the bathhouse was now considered too low-end to be desirable by the newly rich, who preferred the “special service” performed by the young female masseuses at the privately run bathhouses. On the other hand, the state-run bathhouse was now too expensive for the newly poor, and its business went downhill. Ding was laid off with one-third pay as part of a “waiting-for-retirement program.” According to the new policy, people in the program could still look for other jobs, but unlike others, Ding's skill was totally useless outside of the bathhouse.

He thought about going back to Jiangbei village, where
he might be able to eke out a living on his waiting-for-retirement pay. But after he learned that his childhood friends there were all now married with children, he changed his mind. He even began to wonder whether his uncle had really done him a favor by bringing him to the city.

But there is no predicting when someone's luck will change in this world. One of his former clients, a man who was now a Big Buck owning several companies, had infuriated his wife by enjoying himself too much in those new bathhouses. He swore to her that he was only getting foot massages, and he suggested she get her own foot massages from Ding. The Big Buck, who must have heard the rumors about Ding's sexual orientation, made him a lucrative offer.

“Prove to my wife the miraculous effects of foot massage. You may come to our house to do this.”

So Ding went. It was a grand new mansion, and the Big Buck's wife was like a goddess wrapped in a white robe, coming from the bathroom, her footprints lotus-flower-like on the hardwood floor. Why the Big Buck would fool around with such a wife at home, Ding couldn't imagine. But what occupied him right then was something else, something more immediate and intimate. Her bare feet were so perfect it was as if they were carved out of soft white jade, and her toenails so like petals trembling in his lap that he could barely hold the manicuring knife steady. Some people would have paid a bundle of money just to touch her little toe, so glistening, soft, and white, like peeled
fresh lychee. Still, he managed to do a good job with the massage, and she tipped him handsomely.

And she requested that he come back and provide foot massages again, and again. Afterward, he could occasionally enjoy a free shower while she fell asleep on the sofa, her feet thoroughly massaged and looking like white jade on red velvet. It was almost like the good old days when he first came to Shanghai, except for one difference—the shower he took was a quick, cold one, which he used to dampen his excitement.

Soon his name spread among a widening group of rich ladies. With the rumors about his sexual orientation taken for granted, they welcomed him into their homes—like a eunuch into the royal palace. One insisted on enjoying Ding's massage while in the bedroom, stretching her feet out against the dower pillow while talking on the phone; another actually summoned him into the bathroom, luxuriating in the bathtub while placing her toes like rose petals into his hands. From time to time, the sultry, sweating scenes became too much for him. But he knew he had to control himself.

He also had to dress properly now. He wore some special baggy pants, which seemed exotic to the people in the lane, but he couldn't tell anyone the real reason for it. He was worried that his secret would be discovered by those ladies, and he couldn't afford any mistakes.

But other than that, he considered himself the luckiest SOB under the sun. He made good money, bringing home
in a couple of evenings more than his former monthly salary at the state-run bathhouse. It was an easy and fantastic job, his eyes feasting on the sight of those naked or half-naked women, their dainty toes wriggling in his grasp, their shapely soles like soft dough to be kneaded to his heart's content.

The neighbors in the lane began to notice some conspicuous changes about him and began to ask questions.

“Have you made a fortune, Ding?”

“Do you have a girlfriend, Ding?”

The first question was rhetorical, and the second, not as much. But if he'd had a girlfriend, he would have brought her to the lane. So, eventually, people went back to the old assumptions about his sexual orientation.

According to a new Chinese saying, money burns a man. With all the money that he now had in his pocket, Ding was burning with desire, and the constant parade of naked beauties didn't help.

He thought about finding a girlfriend, but with his dubious reputation, no one wanted to introduce any girls to him. Nor could he try the new “personals” column in the
Wenhui Daily
. If news of that were to get out, he could lose all his customers.

Then he remembered the stories about the foot massage service in those private bathhouses. He was curious about it, wondering how those young girls could do their jobs without any training. Anyway, he could well afford it, he thought, as long as he didn't go too far.

So one afternoon he went to a new bathhouse. According to the service menu on the wall, foot massage alone was not that expensive.

A tall man with a big beard approached him at the entrance. “A girl?”

Ding simply nodded.

“Double expense?”

He did not really understand what that meant, but he nodded again, deciding not to say too much lest he reveal how inexperienced he was.

A young skinny girl led him to a cubicle, where he was told to lie down on a narrow bed. She removed his shoes, pulled his feet into a basin of hot water, and massaged his feet. She didn't have much skill, but her soft fingers made the difference, especially when she started scratching and scraping the callous on his heel with her bare nails. In his professional experience, that was something to be done with a special file. He was touched, and his mind was still wandering when she said, “Pull down your pants?”