Years of Red Dust (21 page)

There were many things happening in Red Dust Lane. Wei's fantastic job, eating and drinking as a salesman, would not have made a story but for what happened one night several months later.

It was a September night, shortly after two
A.M
., and an ambulance came wailing into the lane. Wei was then seen being carried out of his home on a stretcher. His wife and daughter followed them to the lane entrance, weeping.

Wei had never complained of any health problems, except for having gained more weight of late. We were worried that it could have been a heart attack.

But it wasn't. Mei hemmed and hawed without telling us what went wrong. Two days later, Wei came back home from the hospital. A number of his colleagues hurried over with all kinds of presents. Dapei arrived too, carrying a basket of flowers. Afterward, Mei saw Dapei to the door,
and he appeared to be making a promise to her, patting his palm on his chest in the gathering dusk.

At the lane entrance, we stopped Dapei, who still recognized some of us. The following was what he told us:

“Last month, our factory finally had a chance to win a multimillion yuan contract, from an entrepreneur named Huang Weizhong. A lot of companies were competing for the contract. We don't have much of an advantage over our rivals. The usual PR efforts wouldn't have had an effect on him, since he knows the market like the back of his hand. He declared that he was fed up with those karaoke girls and Japanese massages, and it would be an insult to approach him like that. Nevertheless, he had a weak point, or in his own words, a strong point. He saw himself as unmatched at the dining table—so far unrivaled, swallowing like a wolf, devouring like a tiger. That's how he had got his nickname—Tiger Huang. So he had proposed a condition to his business associates as a sort of a joke: whoever could outdo him drinking and eating at a banquet would get the order. But I didn't take it as a joke. The contract was crucial for the survival of our factory—it was a battle we could not afford to lose. So everyone looked to Wei.

“The special banquet of twenty-four courses arranged by Wei was called the Complete Manchurian and Han. The name must have originated in the Qing dynasty, as the Manchurian emperor, eager to show his supreme rule over China, brought in delicacies from the different ethnic
groups all over the land and served them on one palace dinner table. Camel dome, bear paw, swallow nest, monkey brains . . . all the rarities imaginable under the sun. Wei also arranged for a bevy of singing girls, dressed in transparent gauze with cloudlike trails, dancing barefoot to ancient music, as if soaring miraculously out of the Dunhuang murals, as was supposed to be common at the palace.

“Tiger Huang came to the banquet and proved himself worthy of his nickname. He fell to with the fierceness of a tiger, but Wei showed no less ferocity. The camel domes, which looked like pure fat, disappeared under their chopsticks in two or three minutes. So did the bear paws stewed in rich gravy. Then the live monkey was brought to the table with its scalp shaved, staring up at the two gourmands with terror in its eyes. Without a blink, Huang signaled the waiter to go ahead with the task of crushing the monkey skull, and spooned out the white and red brain onto Wei's platter before he swallowed a mouthful. They finished three bottles of liquor before half of the courses were served. Huang started
huaquan,
flourishing his hand and shouting like mad. Wei smelled blood, throwing off his jacket and hacking at the table with the edge of his palm like an ax. It was appalling to witness the battle raging between the two, as if they had an irreconcilable hatred against each other.

“Others started slipping out of the banquet room in consternation. Huang and Wei dominated the scene with an oppressive, violent
qi
. Those dancing girls were ordered to
leave too. Huang had finally met his match, he proclaimed, and there was no need for the cheap stimulation. Transfixed, we stayed outside and looked in through the glass with bated breath. All of a sudden, Huang did something totally incomprehensible to us outside, for we couldn't hear what they were saying. Holding the cup, he had his arm crossed with Wei's. It was an intimate gesture, usually between man and woman in love, like a sign of a pledge. Then Huang started wiping his nose and eyes vigorously, gulping straight from a bottle of Maotai, as if there were no tomorrow. So did Wei.

“We waited outside for more than three hours. Finally, Wei helped Huang stagger out of the banquet room. Huang kept calling Wei ‘Elder Brother,' with his arm on Wei's shoulder. Huang still had enough wit about him to summon his secretary and, mumbling about the contract, the deal was sealed.

“Later that night, Wei was rushed to the hospital, his stomach hurting as if being pierced by a thousand knives.

“The second morning, while Wei was still in the hospital, another company contacted Huang, suggesting that Huang was the winner at the banquet because he had come out unscratched. In other words, he did not have to give the order to us. Huang said, shaking his head, ‘Wei risked his life keeping me company at the banquet. The least I can do is to keep my word.'

“So how can we not be grateful to Wei?” Dapei concluded. “We want him to take a good rest. After he has recovered,
there will be a lot of work for him in our factory.”

Sure enough, Tiger Huang kept his promise by sending the signed contract to the factory. He also sent to Red Dust Lane a bulging red envelope, the thickness of which—according to Four-Eyed Liu who saw Mei taking it from a carrier—suggested that a generous amount was enclosed.

“It's a changed world,” Four-Eyed Liu commented. “A wine sack and rice bag can be of some use too!”

“Do you think he can eat and drink as before?” Old Root raised a rhetorical question.

The doctor had given Wei a serious warning, as we heard, about his way of eating and drinking. If he didn't mend his ways, there would be nothing the doctor could do to help the next time Wei was sent to the hospital.

“But what else could Wei possibly do,” Old Root followed with another rhetorical question, “if he did not eat and drink as before?”

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 2005. Another year full of victories for our great country. The airplanes chartered for the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday made the first flights between China and Taiwan since 1949. China and Russia held their first joint military exercises. In October, China conducted its second manned space flight, with two astronauts circling the earth in the Shenzhou capsule. We're aware of the problems and challenges in the new era, of course. The explosion of the petrochemical plant in the Jilin province caused major pollution of the Songhua River, an incident that brought attention to the environmental issues in China, and our government took effective measures. This year, China's GDP grew by 9.9 percent.

In Red Dust Lane, quite a lot of things were taken for granted. Especially prone to doing so was Auntie Jia, the celebrated matchmaker of the lane, as she calculated the feasibility of two young people as a couple. That was how she had seen and determined Jin and Qing to be a possible couple years earlier.

Jin had an iron bowl of a job in a state-run factory. He was a good, honest man, but weak, diffident almost to a fault. Qing, an ex–educated youth and a single mother, though allegedly a knockout in her days, worked at an eel booth in the neighborhood food market and had a small room in the lane. They were both in their thirties. So on Auntie Jia's matchmaking scale, they were almost equal.

“What makes a couple happy?” Auntie Jia answered her own question. “Not beauty. Not money. But balance. Once the scale tips, trouble comes.”

Based on such a realistic calculation, Jin and Qing were married. Neither of them was perfect, so each wouldn't expect too much of the other. As Auntie Jia had predicted, they got along quite well. On summer evenings, people could see Qing chopsticking a piece of pork into Jin's bowl, and his waving the rattan fan for her. Her son from a previous marriage in the countryside took to Jin too. Ordinary, but just like most people in the lane, they were supposed to live their lives ordinarily ever after.

But nothing can be taken for granted in this world. In China's economic reform, Jin's state-run factory lost steam, and his pay suffered a drastic cut. He didn't see himself being
in a position to protest, but it was an increasingly unbearable fact that he earned less than his eel-preparing wife.

Hers was not an easy job, for the rice paddy eels had to be prepared alive—it made a world of difference in taste. Shanghai housewives would never buy the eels already prepared by the peddlers. So starting in the early morning, Qing stood at the booth near the back exit of the lane, preparing the slippery and struggling eels for the customers who demanded that the process be completed before their eyes. For her service, they paid little and sometimes nothing. It was conventional, however, that they leave the bones and offal for her. She made her money by selling the bones to a restaurant known for its special eel bone soup noodles or to her cat-keeping neighbors, who would cook eel-flavored rice as an occasional treat for their rat-catching cats. She was a capable wife, using whatever was left over for meals at home, making a delicious soup, creamy with a handful of chopped green onions, that was supposedly quite nutritious too.

According to a proverb, when the roof leaks, it rains all night. At the same time Jin had his salary cut at his factory, Qing's eel-preparing business also started going downhill. The noodle restaurant lost customers due to a rumor about the eels being fed hormones. And for some mysterious reason, the number of rats also decreased in the neighborhood, while some young people spoke out against feeding cats fish or eel bones, claiming it was a sort of pet
abuse. She had no choice but to work harder and longer at the half-deserted booth, sometimes until seven or eight in the evening.

Eventually, she turned into an inveterately nagging wife, complaining in the lane about her “incapable husband.” But for his incompetence, she wouldn't have to toil and moil like that, her hands covered in eel blood all day long.

There was something to her argument, Jin admitted to himself. He felt guilty at the sight of her collapsing when back home, unwashed, after slaving for more than twelve hours at the eel booth. How could he ever talk back? He was worried sick, growing even thinner. In the summer evening, he sat out alone, stripped to his waist, his emaciated chest looking like a wooden washboard, worn out by all the dirty laundry of the time. After all, however delicious the eel bone soup might have been, no one could live on it alone.

What made things worse for the couple in the lane was the fact that things got better for a number of their neighbors. In China's reform, a lot of people enjoyed tremendous material improvement. The sharp contrast between them and their neighbors fueled Qing's indignant frustration.

“With a pathetic man like you, what can I expect?”

In desperation, Jin started buying lottery tickets, at first in secret, with the money he got from occasional carpentry jobs after his factory work. He saved every penny from
these jobs for the lottery, but since he gave her all his factory salary, she never suspected that he was doing anything behind her back. But other people in the lane bought lottery too, and eventually someone mentioned it to her.

“He's penniless, and luckless too,” she said, sitting outside, shaking her head, and resting her eel-blood-covered bare feet on a bamboo stool. She hadn't washed yet after a long day's work because inside the single tiny room, her son was doing his homework, with which Jin was supposed to help. “Like a tombstone-crushed turtle, it can never turn.”

One evening, Qing was sitting outside like that, waiting for her turn to wash after her son finished his homework, when Jin rushed out, wearing only one plastic slipper, shouting, “Lottery! I have won the lottery. The jackpot.”

“What?” She looked up, her hand clutching the back of the bamboo chair like a wriggling eel. “You're joking!”

But he did not appear to be. In fact, he hadn't joked with her for years. There was something different in his voice. A light flashed out of his eyes as he set off in a trot toward the lane entrance, waving a torn page of the newspaper in his hand.

“The jackpot,” he repeated, his mouth covered in white foam like a stranded crab in the food market.

Before she could react, he was out of sight. The neighbors gathered around. Some of them had heard about him buying a lottery ticket the week before. No one could be
sure, however, that he had really won the lottery. To be sure, they had to see the lottery ticket, and whether he had it with him or where he kept it, Qing had no idea.

To the neighbors' surprise, Jin returned from the back entrance of the lane, as if the lane made up the entire world of his existence.

There was no lottery ticket in his hand, only that torn newspaper, which Four-Eyed Liu snatched from him. Stripped to his waist, Jin had on only a pair of short pants with no pockets—he clearly did not have the ticket on his person. He kept running, without pausing, heading to the front entrance again. No one could stop him: he seemed not to hear or see anyone.