Years of Red Dust (18 page)

He barely nodded, not knowing what to say or do. Without taking off her own clothes, she pulled down his pants, leaned over, and started licking and sucking before taking him into her mouth.

She must have gargled with a magic liquid, for her mouth became warm, almost hot as she increased her tempo. It was more than he could humanly endure. He was exploding into her mouth, when several cops burst into the cubicle, catching him in the act of engaging in this illegal service.

What happened in the next few hours was like a nightmare, one in which he was totally paralyzed, unable to speak or act. He was aware of being held in custody for the night at a nearby police station, but it was as if it were happening to another man, like a fast rewinding of a broken videotape in the dark.

The next morning he was released, because of his lack of any previous criminal history, but the police dutifully passed the information on to the neighborhood committee of Red Dust Lane. It was then up to the committee to decide on the proper punishment, which could come in the form of a neighborhood criticism meeting, where Ding would have to make a confession with all the vivid details. But Comrade Jun, the head of the committee, hesitated and hurried over to discuss it with Old Root.

“What rotten luck. To be caught the first time!” the old man said. “Still, it may be a timely lesson for him.”

“But what are we going to do?”

“If the story comes out, it will mean a big loss of face for him, but there might be some positive effect. At least, he will prove himself to be a man, and in the neighborhood, all the stories about him might disappear overnight. But what if word got out of the neighborhood?”

“That's the question.” Comrade Jun said, nodding. “That's why I wanted to consult you.”

“His service depends on people's belief in the rumors. Once the word got around, his career would be over.”

“Exactly. And there are already so many unemployed
in the neighborhood, that it's becoming an increasing liability to the committee. But there has to be some punishment. I have to report back to the district police station.”

“Wasn't there a campaign against bourgeois liberalism a couple of years ago? What about punishing him in the name of it?” Old Root said. “Make it about all his fancy new clothes—the baggy pants with so many pockets. I've heard that it's part of a new American style, hip-hop.”

“Great idea, Old Root. You're a genius. ‘Bourgeois liberalism' is really a perfect umbrella word. Never outdated, and proper and right for Ding.”

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 2000. China successfully launched the Chinasat-22 communication satellites. With the introduction of the Internet into our daily life, the government has consolidated the Internet regulations. President Jiang Zemin delivered his important talk about the “Three Represents” as the guideline for Party work. Our Party authorities intensified the crackdown on official corruption with the execution of a former deputy chairman of the National People's Congress for bribe-taking. This year also witnessed the beginning of the population resettlement required for the Three Gorges Dam project. China's GDP grew by eight percent for the year.

 

“Look at the picture. He's still so young, with his Young Pioneer's Red Scarf shining in the golden sunlight of
socialist China,” Comrade Kang said with difficulty, coughing with a fist pressed against his mouth. He sat as stiff as a bamboo stick at the entrance of Red Dust Lane, turning over a page in the old photo album.

Why Comrade Kang insisted on coming out and showing us the picture that evening in spite of his poor health was something we thought we knew. It was because his son, Big Buck Kang, had turned out the opposite of what his father expected of him—he didn't become “a worthy successor to the great cause of communism.” Comrade Kang was devastated, not just by his son, but by the way things were developing in the country too. He simply wanted to go over these years one more time, in another attempt to justify his own lifelong pursuit. Given his deteriorating health, he probably would not have too many more evenings like that with us. So we sat around him, waving our cattail-leaf fans to the rhythm of the evening talk.

Comrade Kang joined the Communist Party in 1948, one year before the liberation of Shanghai. In the early fifties, he was assigned to work as the director of a large textile factory. He devoted himself to the work—to the transformation of the factory into a state-run one with all the benefits of socialism (job security and medical benefits for the employees) and to increasing production in accordance to the state plan. As a midlevel Party cadre, in the early sixties, he could have moved out of Red Dust Lane to a larger
apartment, but he insisted on modeling himself after the selfless Comrade Lei Feng and gave the opportunity to somebody else. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, however, overnight he was turned into a “capitalist roader” and made to wear around his neck a huge blackboard with his name crossed out. He was then sent to a “cadre school,” to reform him through hard labor. His wife died the second year, leaving their only son alone in the city. Comrade Kang didn't return home until almost the end of the Cultural Revolution, a shrunken shadow of the former Bolshevik, dragging a crippled leg, and a total stranger to his son, who had grown up on his own.

“In the long history of humankind, socialism as a new system could not avoid experiencing some bumps along the way,” Comrade Kang said sincerely to his son, quoting verbatim from the
People's Daily
. “We should never lose faith in our Party, in our system.”

He had barely been rehabilitated as the factory director, however, when, in the mid-eighties, the new cadre retirement policy came into practice. He stepped down, making no attempt to hang on to his position. He also made a point of not going back to the factory frequently. He knew better than to interfere with the new director's work, though he couldn't help worrying about the new problems there.

In short, he had lived up to his ideal of a loyal Party member all those years. In his opinion, there was only one exception: he agreed to accept monetary compensation
for his loss during the Cultural Revolution. He took the money to purchase a plane ticket for his son, who, in the mid-eighties, wanted to go to a language school in Japan. Comrade Kang didn't like the idea, but his son said he had lost the opportunity to go to school here—because Comrade Kang had been labeled a “capitalist roader” in the seventies.

The father had felt guilty about what had happened to the son. What really upset Comrade Kang, however, was the change in his son after the young man's return from Japan.

The son turned out to be totally different from his father. In Japan, instead of taking the required classes, he worked at any kind of odd job he could find, saving his money like an old miser. While many people were leaving China in the late eighties, he came back to China with a small amount of capital, declaring that he saw great opportunities there for his business.

“In Japan, their business regulations are firmly established, with no large loopholes that allow one to maneuver. But things are quite different here, with opportunities for men with money to invest,” he said. “The Chinese government is now encouraging private business as a supplement to the state economy. Everything is new.” So he started his business, a huge seafood restaurant in the Qibao suburb. In those years, there weren't many restaurants in the city, and the state-run restaurants hadn't changed their menus for over twenty years. He introduced a new service.

In his restaurant, live seafood was displayed in glass cages like in a market—fishes, shrimps, lobsters, crabs—and the customers could choose for themselves. Their choices would be weighed, prepared, and cooked in accordance to their specific requests. This gave the customers the impression that they were getting seafood of better quality and, overall, a better bargain. Practical Shanghainese started to swarm his restaurant, and soon they had to take a number and wait in line to be seated.

“Come to my restaurant. Fifty percent discount,” Big Buck Kang offered expansively one night during the evening talk in front of the lane.

“But then how could you make money?”

“I don't need to make money off of you, my old neighbors. Now it's the age of ‘socialist business expense.' It is fashionable and politically correct for Party cadres to spend their company's money dining and entertaining in the name of socialist business expense—and all for their personal benefit. Since it is not their own money, they can afford to throw it away like water. They are the customers that are my gold mines. I have quite a few private rooms set aside for socialist business expense customers.” He added, “Good, honest people like my father are becoming fewer and fewer. He has dedicated his life to the Party, but for what? Well, don't say anything to the old man—about socialist business expense or anything else.”

We didn't. We later learned that, for his socialist business expense customers, Big Buck Kang had special receipts
in addition to special rooms. For an eight hundred yuan meal, they could get a receipt adding up to three thousand. So his restaurant customers continued to snowball. How much he was really making, we had no clue. Soon he moved to a fancy apartment in the Upper Corner of the city. He tried to talk his father into moving with him, but the old man said no.

When other private restaurants with similar practices began opening, Big Buck Kang, to the surprise of the lane, shifted to the karaoke business.

“Karaoke is a very popular entertainment in Japan,” he explained. “You sing along to the music with captions for the words running on the TV screen.”

“Come on, Big Buck Kang. Do you really think Shanghainese will pay to sing a song?” one of his former neighbors asked. “We can sing to our hearts' content at home or in the evening at the front of the lane, without having to pay a penny.”

“For one thing, whether Japanese or Chinese, Asian people don't let go of their inhibitions so easily. Karaoke provides a sort of social convention, allowing them to do whatever they are normally too inhibited to do.” Big Buck Kang added with a mysterious smile, “Besides, a karaoke club may meet the needs of people in a number of ways.”

People didn't believe in his theory, but he believed in himself. He lost no time converting an old building into a karaoke hall with a number of private rooms. It proved to be another huge hit. Evidently, Chinese people were no
longer satisfied simply with a meal, no matter how expensive or fabulous. As a Confucian sage said two thousand years ago, “When you are well fed and clad, your mind goes astray.” Karaoke became a trend, a “must” in the city, especially for those who had “become rich first,” as Comrade Deng Xiaoping phrased it.

Customers went there not just for karaoke, but for something else under the cover of karaoke. Hotels still required a marriage certificate for a couple to check in together, so the private karaoke rooms with their locked doors met the understood yet unstated needs of the city. Soon, “karaoke girls” appeared, supposedly to sing for the customers. When the door was locked, however, whatever other services they might provide could be easily imagined.

Inevitably, stories about those karaoke girls reached the lane—and Comrade Kang flew into a rage.

“Don't worry about it, Father,” the son said. “Our business is law-abiding. The Jin'an Police Station is located only five minutes away. If we allowed anything improper, they would come rushing over.”

But that was only partially true. The police chief of Jin'an district was a regular of the karaoke club. To be fair to Big Buck Kang, he was a filial son, trying hard to appease the old man. He said to us in the lane, “What's the point in arguing with your father? It's like arguing with history.”

Another reason for him not to argue with his father was that the old man's health was declining. The reform of
the state medical insurance didn't help. In the past, retirees of state-run companies had enjoyed full medical coverage; now the coverage had been drastically cut. His annual coverage now was capped at eight hundred yuan, which barely covered his heart medicine for three months. Instead of accepting the money offered by his son, he tried to cut down his medical expense.

Because of his extraordinary karaoke business, Big Buck Kang couldn't come back to the lane as often as he would have liked. So he asked us for our help in taking care of the old man. To show his appreciation, he invited some of us to his club, where we were treated like princes, with the karaoke girls singing and dancing to our hearts' content. At the hourly price of three hundred yuan for an evening in a high-class private room, plus all the food and drink, the bill would normally have been staggering. People in the lane calculated that bill and talked about that evening for days. Since most of the clients there were upstart entrepreneurs or government cadres, they could be liberal in their spending, and the club's nightly revenue could be as high as six figures. That was even without including all the other gray money—such as the percentage those karaoke girls kicked back from their “private service fee.”

As China's economic reform progressed, Big Buck Kang made another business decision that confounded all of us in the lane, except for Comrade Kang, who was now in the hospital. The decision was about the very textile
factory for which the old man had worked for more than thirty years.

The factory had been in terrible shape for a long time. In the old state-economy system, the factory simply manufactured whatever was required in accordance to the government orders, regardless of any profit or loss. Now the factory had to compete for survival in the open market and was fully responsible for the workers' pay and benefits. Director Fei, the director after Comrade Kang, turned out to be clueless as to handling the problems now besieging the factory. Their products were substandard and were no longer marketable, let alone profitable. The workers, having been “iron rice bowl holders” for so many years, could do little to help. The large number of pensioners on their books became an increasingly unbearable burden. Fei was becoming as desperate as an ant crawling on a hot wok.