Years of Red Dust (3 page)

I pedaled back home late that night. The sky was occasionally lit up with shells and searchlights. I did not fall asleep at once, instead turning and tossing on the bed. Some time around midnight, the sound of machine-gun fire broke out, seemingly close to the lane. On impulse, I rolled off and crawled under the bed, where I started thinking what I had never thought before, listening to a lone insect chirping at that unlikely hour. After a while, I sneaked out for a look, then came back in to sleep. The night was once again shrouded in silence. I dreamed of a white petrel taking off the runway, soaring over the boundless oceans.

Early in the morning I turned on the radio and heard that Shanghai had been liberated the previous night—the night of May 25, 1949. The Nationalist government collapsed not with a bang, but with an insect's screech. History passed by as I huddled under the bed like a bamboo-leaf-wrapped Zongzi dumpling. The woman announcer on the radio declared proudly, “The city has turned to a new page.”

So that is why I'm bringing the blackboard to the evening talk of the lane. Ordinary folks we are, but we must keep ourselves abreast of all the changes happening around us. In this world of ours, things change dramatically as from azure oceans into mulberry fields. So I have a suggestion. Let's start something like a blackboard newsletter. I read about it in a Russian novel—a Soviet novel, I should say—where people post the big events on the blackboard as part of the socialist education. Our people here may not all be able to read newspapers or listen to radios, but from the blackboard newsletters at least we'll have some basic idea of what is happening around us.

 

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1949. In September, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), exercising the power of the National People's Congress (NPC), adopted the name People's Republic of China for the new state. It is to be a people's democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class, based on the alliance of workers and peasants and in unity with all of China's democratic parties and nationalities. It has decided upon Beijing for the country's capital, the five-star red flag for the national flag, and “March of the Volunteers” for the national anthem. On October 1, 1949, on top of the Tiananmen Gate, our great leader, Chairman Mao, declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. Long live the People's Republic of China! Long live
Chairman Mao. The Chinese people are happily bathed in the sunlight of liberation. Here is the new song entitled “The Sky of the Liberated Area Is Bright”:

 

Bright is the sky of the liberated area,
Happy are the people of the liberated area.
The Democratic government loves the people.
Countless are the good deeds of the Communist Party.
Hu hu hu hu hei,
Hu hu hu hu hei . . .

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1952. It has been another successful year for our young socialist China. In January, Chairman Mao called on the Chinese people to launch a nationwide campaign against corruption, waste, and bureaucracy. The Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee issued the directive for a campaign against the “Five Evils,” with the focus on the owners of private enterprises. Land reform being triumphantly carried out across the country, around 47 million hectares of farmland owned by landlords have been distributed to 300 million formerly landless peasants. A “study movement of ideological remolding” bore great fruit in educational, intellectual, literary, and art circles. In the ongoing Korean War, the Chinese People's Volunteers won one victory after another. China has raised its international image by signing on to the Geneva War Conventions. At
the end of the year, we can say proudly that great progress has been made on the task of restoring the national economy.

 

It was a dinner that Father and Mother could not put off anymore, having promised early last year, though they were still in no mood for it.

Father, the owner of a hat workshop, had just learned of the necessity of identifying himself as a “capitalist,” a word that was crossed out in the new class system formulated by Mao. It might be unwise to invite other capitalists—birds of the same black feather—for a dinner party. Possibly another example of the so-called decadent bourgeois lifestyle. In the year 1952, when young socialist China was said to be surrounded by class enemies, the working-class people of Red Dust Lane watched, on high alert.

Bu Xie, one of their close friends, was leaving for Hong Kong, and they knew why. The campaign of land reform had been in full swing throughout the country, and one of Xie's relatives, a landlord in Zhenghai, had been executed because of his mumbled complaint about turning over the land certificate. What would the campaign of socialist transformation of private enterprises be like in the city? Xie was pessimistic about it, and much of his capital already had been transferred to Hong Kong. Father and Mother wondered when they would ever see him again. Arranging this “seeing-off” dinner party was the least they could do.

In spite of the short notice, Mother had prepared everything. The table was an impressive sight. Chopsticks, spoons, and plates lay neatly aligned with folded napkins. The small brass hammer shone among the blue and white saucers. A glass bowl of water stood in the middle.

Father was touched by the sight of her working like a thousand-armed Guanyin in the kitchen, her white short-sleeved shirt molded to her sweating body. It was not an easy job for her to produce such a meal all by herself. Squatting at the foot of a granite sink, Mother was binding a live Yangchen River crab with straw. Several other crabs were crawling noisily on the sesame-covered bottom of a wooden pail.

“You have to bind a crab like this,” Mother explained, in response to the puzzled look on his face, “or it will shed its legs in the steamer.”

“But why all the sesame on the bottom of the pail?”

“To keep the crabs from losing weight, they have to be provided with enough nutrition before they are cooked. I bought the crabs early in the morning.”

“You've really put in a lot of work.”

“No need to be so tense all the time, husband. We should have fun tonight.”

When she finished concocting the special crab sauce of vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, and ginger slices, their guests started to arrive, one after another.

They, too, immediately fell to talking about the crabs, as if those doomed crawlers were the one and only topic
for the day, while Mother hustled and bustled in the kitchen and Father poured out one cup of tea after another. No one mentioned Xie's coming trip to Hong Kong.

On the cloth-covered table, the crabs soon appeared, rounded, red, and white, in golden bamboo steamers. The nicely warmed yellow rice wine shone amber under the soft light. On the windowsill, a glass vase held a bouquet of chrysanthemums perhaps two or three days old, thinner, but still exquisite.

“It's almost like an illustration torn from the
Dream of the Red Chamber
,” Bookworm Cheng said.

None of their other guests, Father reflected, seemed interested in the poetic image depicted in the classic novel. Like him, they were oppressed by the unbearable heaviness of being capitalists in the new socialist China, in spite of Mother's effort to cheer them up.

“Remember what Su Dongpo said about crabs?” Xie responded. “‘O that I could have crabs without a wine supervisor sitting beside me.'”

“Don't worry. It's a family meal. There's no wine supervisor here,” Mother said, smiling.

Their dialogue failed to spark any response from the other guests. Cheng alone went on. “Remember what Granny Liu says about the crab feast in the
Dream of the Red Chamber
?”

“About the cost of a crab feast—more than half a year's income for a poor farmer?” Zhou, the owner of a small
perfume factory, said with a touch of irritation. “How long does the Jia family keep that up in the novel?”

“Eat the crab,” Father said, recalling that in the novel, the Jia family soon went to ruin after the crab dinner. “Don't talk about it.”

The conversation at the table then drifted in dissimilar directions, among which each and every family had, as it turned out, a difficult script to read.

The Zhous knit their brows into two deep dead knots. In addition to the Party-led union issues in the factory, they faced a crisis at home. Their only son had tried to join the Communist Party by denouncing his parents. An irrevocable breakup, conceivably. “It cannot be helped,” Mrs. Zhou sighed, breaking a crab leg.

Mr. Liu's pharmaceutical business was booming because of the Korean War, but still the man worried. He was upset about his third concubine, who was taking a political economy class at an evening school. “She came back in a jeep late last night. In whose jeep—can you imagine?” Mr. Liu continued without waiting for an answer. “The army representative of the city government assigned to my company.”

“The People's Liberation Army representative with the red star on his cap?” Shen cut in. “Well, you don't have to worry. The army representative will bring in more business for you. “

“There's no free silver falling from the sky.” Liu crushed
a crab shell with his fist instead of the brass hammer. “It's a world turned upside down. Is there ever a cat that will not steal fish?”

Having finished the digestive glands of a female crab, Cheng turned its entrails inside out. They looked like a tiny monk sitting in meditation on his palm. “In the Legend of the White Snake, a meddlesome monk has to hide somewhere after ruining the happiness of a couple. Finally he gets himself into a crab shell. It's useless. Look, there's no escape.”

No one appreciated his crab story, which he had told at the wrong place and time. It was a reminder of what they were trying not to think about. Bookworm Cheng took a sip in silent embarrassment while Mother turned on the radio.

“The Chinese People's Volunteers are fighting against the American troops in Korea, in the hardest trench warfare.” The woman announcer's voice had a ring of pride. “Our heroic soldiers are overcoming unimaginable hardship, some going without a bite of food for days, and only urine to drink.”

From the end of the street came, as if in response, the boom of the drums and gongs celebrating a new national campaign against the Five Evils—bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts, and stealing economic information—all directed against the “black capitalists.” A neighborhood committee had been formed recently, focusing on struggle against the class
enemies. The neighborhood activists were out celebrating and propagandizing one political campaign after another. Amidst the drums and gongs, they were singing a new song entitled “Socialism Is Good.”

 

Socialism is good, socialism is good.
People enjoy high status in a socialist country.
With the reactionaries knocked down,
The imperialists fled with their tails tucked in.
The people of the whole country are united,
Bringing a high wave of the socialist construction.

 

Father felt the drums and gongs beating on his heart. So did his guests, perhaps. Father cut his thumb in a crab cracker. An ominous sign. It could be the last crab feast for them. According to a Chinese proverb, the walls have ears. One of their neighbors in the lane—or even one of them in this dining room—could report them to the police bureau or to the neighborhood committee. It would not take much for the Party authorities to conclude that they were capitalists gathering in a conspiracy against the Party.

The Oolong tea leaves floated in Xie's cup, black, untouched. He left abruptly, without staying over for a game of mahjong or doing justice to Mother's dessert—miniature buns with crabmeat stuffing. Other guests followed, making one excuse or another.

Soon Father and Mother were left alone in the silent room, except for several live crabs still crawling cacophonously
on the sesame-covered bottom of a wooden pail close to the door.

“
Drunk and desolate, they're going to part. / The parting moon sinks in the vast river,
” Father murmured to himself. They were lines from the poet Bai Juyi, which he had refrained from quoting to Xie.

The table suddenly looked like a battlefield deserted by the Nationalist troops in 1949—broken legs, crushed shells, scarlet and golden ovaries scattered here and there—with confused sounds of struggle and flight into the night. Father suggested that Mother leave the table alone.

They sat on two chairs drawn next to the window. He did not start speaking immediately. She reached out to smooth his jaw and picked a bit of crab from his teeth. He held her hand in his for an extra moment.

The sight of a leaf falling in a swirl outside caught their glance. Silently, they rose and moved upstairs to the bedroom. There was nothing else for them to do, or to say. They had nothing but each other.

They made love, earlier than usual, that night.

In the silence afterward, Father did not fall asleep. There was a faint sound creeping over from a corner near the door. He lay listening nervously for a long while before he remembered that several live crabs remained un-steamed in the wooden pail. Worn out, they were hardly crawling on the sesame-covered bottom of the pail. What he heard was the bubbles of crab froth, bubbles with which they moistened each other in the dark.

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1954. It has been a year full of significant events for the young republic. The First National People's Congress of China adopted the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Mao Zedong was elected Chairman of the People's Republic of China. In April, a Chinese delegation headed by Premier Zhou Enlai attended the Geneva conference on a peaceful solution to the Korean question and the restoration of peace to Indochina. A new socialist construction project, the Xikang-Tibet Highway linking Yann with Lhasa and the Qinghai-Tibet Highway linking Xining and Lhasa, triumphantly opened to traffic.