Years of Red Dust (6 page)

That proved to be the last straw for Pan. “What are you, Wan? Don't forget your class status as a Bad Element! An enemy to the socialist society, you can only sweep the lane like a dog with its tail tucked in. How dare you still be so cocky after two years in prison?”

Wan turned pale, trembling like a leaf torn from the tree.

“Come on, Pan,” Zhu intervened. “A game is just a game. Don't talk like that.”

“Pee and see if the reflection of your own stinking ass is clean. You played chess for a warlord before the liberation in 1949,” Pan snapped, with a couple of blood vessels on his temples standing out, wriggling like nightcrawlers. “You think we revolutionary people don't know that? It's the age of the proletarian dictatorship.”

Zhu was speechless with rage. Han, the owner of the
hot-water shop, came over to Pan, holding a cup of fresh, hot tea. “Give me face, Pan. After all, the game is in front of my shop.”

“What face do you have? A face of a small-business owner! Your own class status is just one shade less black than Wan's. Mind your damned hot-water business!”

“You're biting like a mad dog today. Have I ever charged you for the tea you've drunk for so many years? Even a dog knows how to shake its tail in appreciation.” Han was furious as well, dashing the cup against the concrete curb. “What's wrong with my class status? My son is a PLA soldier!”

Pan was beside himself, throwing the chessboard to the ground with a forcible sweep of his arm. All the pieces rolled about like soldiers falling downhill in the disastrous retreat of the Qin army in the ancient Feishui battle . . .

Lihua did not see how the fiasco ended, and he left alone, in no mood to reexamine the chess game, step by step, as he usually did.

That night, he decided not to take the college entrance test again, and he took over his father's job, washing dishes in the small eatery.

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1966. In this year, our supreme leader Chairman Mao launched forth the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to seize back the power from the revisionists in the Party, like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The Central Cultural Revolution Group, directly under Mao, took over control of
People's Daily
and published an editorial entitled “Sweep away All Monsters.” Mao wrote to the Red Guards, the new student organizations all over the country, supporting their rebellion against the reactionaries. On eight occasions, at Tiananmen Square, Mao reviewed Red Guards, groups whose number has now reached more than thirteen million. In response, Red Guards have relentlessly subjected the class enemies to mass-criticism and crushed the old establishments. In the midst of the slogans of the Cultural Revolution, China tested its first guided missile carrying a nuclear warhead.

 

The Cultural Revolution hung
a halter of ragged shoes
around her neck: heels,
mules, slings, boots, sandals,
her bare feet bleeding . . .

 

“Why those ragged shoes?” a boy asked his grandfather in the midst of the spectators that lined the lane like tree ear fungi.

“Symbolic,” his grandfather said. “Heaven alone knows how many men might have had her.”

“Like those dirty shoes,” his father said, “she must have been worn out by such a number of them. She was a famous actress before 1949!”

“But that was almost twenty years ago,” the boy said.

“Twenty years ago,” his uncle cut in, “you could not have touched her little toes for thousands of yuan. Today, I have placed a wreath of shoes around her neck.”

“So those are your own shoes.” The boy nodded in enlightenment, staring at people's spittle shining on her face and at the red line of footprints drying behind her.

Her mad song to the ragged shoes:

 

Shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes
of the Cultural Revolution;
shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo,
barefoot is the solution.

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1969. In this year, our Party and people have achieved great victories in the course of the Cultural Revolution. In the Ninth CPC National Congress held under the presidency of Chairman Mao, Lin Biao, Mao's close comrade-in-arms and successor, delivered the political report confirming the theory and practice of the Cultural Revolution. A new Political Bureau was formed. China successfully conducted its first underground nuclear test.

 

In the summer of 1969, evenings began hilariously with cricket fighting in a corner close to the end of Red Dust Lane, where people brought out their clay cricket pots, squatted in a circle, and watched their crickets fight against one another. After a fierce battle, the winning cricket would sing loudly by scratching its wings in the pot, while the
defeated would run for its life, circling the pot or jumping out. The cricket owners and onlookers would join in by shouting or shooing, as if the fate of the whole world depended on the outcome in the small pot.

As an elementary school student, I was glued to the corner, though too young to own a cricket. There was no possibility my parents would allow me to go cricket catching in the countryside. In the days before the Cultural Revolution, some people had gambled on cricket fighting, and my parents did not like the association. But they acquiesced to my watching the nightly fights, as long as it kept me in the lane.

One evening that summer, Cousin Min gave me a cricket he had caught in a graveyard in Qingpu. It was nicknamed Big General, and it was not exactly big but it was pitch black, with one third of its head made of two gigantic teeth, glaring like a pair of axes in the sun. At the time, people believed in the spirit of the earth, and whatever grew up in the graveyard, they declared, must have acquired its yin spirit. So it was a hell of a cricket, and I wondered why Min wanted to give it to me.

“There is no time,” he said simply. “We have to fight for Chairman Mao.”

It was the fourth year of the Cultural Revolution. With the old government system demolished, Red Guard organizations found themselves in power, and then they found their interests in conflict. Each faction claimed to be the most loyal to Chairman Mao and denounced the other as
the most treacherous. Fights among different organizations broke out, initially with words, then with stones or knives, and finally with guns.

I understood so little of it. Nor did I care. It was the first time that I owned a cricket. Oh, what a grown-up's prestige came with such a valuable possession! In the corner, people talked to me like an equal, even going out of their way to be nice, especially when they wanted Big General to fight their crickets. I learned such a lot about cricket fighting, like how to choose the feed, how to make a temporary bamboo container, how to improve the housing, how to trim a cricket-goading rush stem, and how to keep the pot warm in cold weather.

Of course, what really made it a brave new world for me in the lane was the Big General. Having absorbed the infernal spirit of the graveyard, the cricket attacked its opponents like hell—leg-ripping, jaw-cutting, and belly-slitting—in the purple arena of the clay pot. The first day I put it in to fight in the pot, it defeated five crickets in a row, breaking the record of Red Dust Lane.

It kept winning enthusiastic applause for itself, and for me. Beneath its left wing, there was a tiny orange dot shaped much like the mole on Mao's chin, though I knew better than to mention it to others. A cricket, I thought to myself, could be the most inscrutable creature in the world, behaving as if born for the purpose of fighting against another—and for its master, I added. I gave it a longer nickname: Invincible Big General Li Yuanba, the number one
hero in the
Romance of the Sui and Tang Dynasties
—small, swarthy, wielding two axes like gigantic mountains. Once, when enraged, Li Yuanba tore a mighty opponent into two, thus making a great contribution to the Tang empire. My Big General would do exactly that for me.

Soon, having conquered all its rivals in Red Dust Lane, it began to draw challenges from other well-known crickets outside the neighborhood. Big General's name began spreading far and wide. One of the celebrated veteran cricket fighters came all the way from Yangpu district to take a look at the cricket.

I was eager to report all these victories to Min, of course. I went to his home, but Aunt Xiuxiu told me that Min had to stay in the school. The headquarters of his Red Guard organization, Revolution Thunderstorm, was faced with an armed attack by a rival Red Guard organization, Dispelling Tigers and Leopards, which enjoyed support from a local rebel police organization. So I asked Aunt Xiuxiu to tell Min that the Big General was doing great.

The day after my visit to Min's home, however, the Big General lost a battle to an unknown cricket jumping out of a cheap bamboo container, which, unlike a clay pot, was used only for a second- or third-class cricket. It was utterly inexplicable.

A Chinese proverb says, it's common for a general to win and to lose. Most crickets could resume fighting in a couple of hours, but that was not the case with mine. No matter how I tried to stimulate it with the golden rush
stem, it would not throw itself into a fight again. In the pot, to my shamed surprise, it would simply walk away from any approaching opponent, without so much as showing its teeth. If cornered, it jumped out of the pot like a miserable coward.

Soon Big General was booed by all the cricket fighters, and I found myself turning back into an insignificant kid. Fewer and fewer grown-ups in the lane talked to me anymore. In desperation, I consulted with a cricket guru, who gave me several suggestions.

Following his suggestions, I tried to starve the cricket first. The rationale was simple. When hungry, one would fight for food—anything edible or imaginably so. Cannibalism applies to crickets too. It did not work, though. The moment I put the Big General into an opponent's pot, it started feeding itself on the remaining rice like a beggar before fleeing for life. I then tried the pepper-diet experiment. Red pepper was supposed to make its teeth sharp and make the cricket burn to sink them into its enemy. It didn't help, either. Finally, I resorted to the “resurrection” technique. I drowned the cricket in a bowl of water and pulled it out to dry up in the sun until it gradually came back to life. I repeated the drowning and resurrecting process several times. This desperate treatment was supposed to wash the defeatist memory out of its brain, like the River Styx. At one point, I let the cricket stay under the water a bit too long. When I pulled it up, its belly appeared swollen. Still, the Big General managed to come back to life.

While I was bent over at the corner of Red Dust Lane, Aunt Xiuxiu came looking for me. She was worried about Min. His school was surrounded by the Dispelling Tigers and Leopards, with the telephone line cut. Min was still holding out in the headquarters with several loyal comrades, but she had had no news of him for several days. I tried my best to comfort her before I hurried to the cricket fight scheduled that afternoon.

After I repeated the resurrection one more time, the Big General still showed no spirit to fight. In desperation, I tossed it up high into the air. It was a shock technique similar to the resurrection technique: according to my cricket guru, it could concuss a cowardly head into a hellish helmet. To my astonishment, the Big General jumped wildly out of the pot again. In a hurry to grab and recover it, my finger cut off a tiny piece of its leg.

“Great, he's really mad now,” my guru observed.

Sure enough, the Big General started to pounce on its opponent as if charging at it from another world. It snapped off half the head of its foe in the first round. It tore off a leg from another. It cut the third fighter's jaw in the same pot. Applause rose from all around, but I began to worry. The Big General was at a disadvantage. Days of starvation, pepper-diet, and resurrection treatments all seemed to be taking a toll. When engaged with Black Devil, the fifth opponent in a row, Big General wobbled on its legs. One of its broken legs might have been bleeding all this time, though it was invisible in the pot. Limping, it hung on doggedly.
I was at the point of quitting on its behalf, but that was against the rules. With their teeth entangled, the Black Devil threw the Big General to its back. Before my cricket recovered its feet, the Black Devil sunk its teeth into its belly. Twitching, the Big General opened and closed its teeth in a valiant effort before it breathed its last breath.

An empty pot in my hand, alone in the corner, I wept when I saw a tiny black spot limping in the sinking sun that evening.

A couple of hours later, I learned that Min had been killed in an attack launched by the Dispelling Tigers and Leopards. He was the last to fall, fighting to the end with a steel cleaver. Disemboweled, he died still clutching a red, shining
Quotations of Chairman Mao
in his mutilated hand.

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1972. It has been another year full of great victories during the Cultural Revolution. In February, United States President Nixon visited China. He met with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou. China and the United States issued the Shanghai Communiqué, declaring that there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China. In September, Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka also visited China. The Chinese and Japanese governments released a joint statement declaring the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. We now have friends all over the world.

 

Nineteen seventy-two started with some major political events hardly comprehensible to Red Dust Lane, particularly to elementary school students like us. Among them
was the visit and welcoming of the American President Richard Nixon. In our school textbooks, we had never learned anything positive about American imperialists—they were always the number one enemy to China. How did this change overnight? We asked our parents, who turned out to be just as confounded. Indeed, many things that had happened during the Cultural Revolution were beyond their comprehension.