Years of Red Dust Read online

  I decided to try my luck in some less fancy areas, where people also wanted to leave but were without their own cars. I went to Xinle Road, which stretched out silent and nearly deserted almost to the end, where I saw a woman standing alone, in a white raincoat.

  She had a couple of purses in one hand and several bags and suitcases heaped on the curb, and she stood in her high-heeled sandals, waving her other hand frantically at any remote resemblance of a taxi—at the moment, the approaching tricycle of mine. As I had guessed, she was anxious to go to the airport. Perhaps in her mid-thirties, she had a willowy figure, fragile against the pile of luggage. There was an elusive quality about her, especially in her large eyes, something that reminded me of a blossoming pear tree, transparent in the late spring. She hesitantly murmured in a distinct Beijing accent that, after purchasing the airline ticket, she did not have much money left. That was possibly true. A ticket those days could have cost a fortune. The tricycle trunk should be enough for all her belongings, among which I noticed a blackboard with the names of Beijing operas written on it.

  Then recognition came. She was none other than Xiao Dong, a celebrated Beijing opera actress. I cannot say I’m a Beijing opera fan. Only once could I afford seeing her perform on the stage of the Heavenly Toad Theater. She played Yuhuan, a beautiful Tang imperial concubine, alone in her chamber, drunk, amorous with the fantasy of her lord enjoying rapturous cloud and rain with another imperial concubine. It was such a breathtaking performance, the flowers must have shamefacedly folded themselves before her graceful charm. Xiao was so much more than that. It’s hard to put into words. Well, you may have heard those Beijing opera terms—orchid fingers, water sleeves, wasp waist, and lotus blossom steps . . . Suffice it to say that she brought all of them to perfection. You would have to watch her perform to really understand the art of Beijing opera. Many people declared that they were willing to drown in “the autumn waves” of her eyes. I knew better than to have such dreams. Even one of those flower baskets presented to her after her performance cost more than I earned in a whole year.

  What’s more, she was said to have been pursued by Shen, a business tycoon connected to the Nationalist government as well as the Blue Triad. A couple of years earlier, when she had lost her voice, almost ending her career, Shen helped her, bringing in the best doctor from Germany. After her recovery, he proposed, but she did not consent, because he was a married man. It was not uncommon for such a man to have a second wife or concubine, and her resistance could have ended up like an egg thrown against a stone wall, but to everyone’s surprise, instead of using his Triad connections and resorting to force, he kept piling flower baskets against the stage she walked on, smiling and applauding like one under a spell. Then, however, the incredible story of the two was drowned in the headlines of the civil war. I had not heard anything about the pair for a while, and I had no clue how Xiao came to be standing here, all alone.

  “You are Xiao!”

  “You know me?”

  “Why are you leaving Shanghai?” It was none of my business, but I imagined few would enjoy Beijing opera in Taiwan, where most people spoke the Taiwan dialect.

  “I have no choice. Shen is dying in Hong Kong.” She added, “Sick, broke, his assets all gone because of the war. He’s nobody there, lying in a hospital with needles stuck all over his body. A dragon stranded in a shallow pool is being ridiculed by shrimps.”

  That sounded like a line from a Beijing opera, the name of which I’ve forgotten. I was not that thrilled with the quote: though not necessarily a shrimp, I was no dragon in her eyes. Still, her statement overwhelmed me.

  Xiao chose not to go to him when he was rich and powerful. Now that he was down and out, she was giving up everything, flying to him at the expense of her career. The city, gloomy with the spreading evening, appeared to be suddenly glistening in her large, lambent eyes.

  “Don’t worry about the fee. Put as much as you like into the tricycle,” I said. “I am your fan.”

  It was a heavy load, but I pedaled to the airport as if on wings. In the trunk that smelled of the fish she sat, pensive, without her makeup. People could have taken her for someone working for the food market, as her white raincoat, though expensive, looked like a uniform.

  At the airport, I attempted to help her check the luggage, but it was hard with so many people trying desperately to get all their belongings aboard. She looked at the blackboard, on which the written characters appeared to have faded, having possibly been worn off by rubbing against the other luggage. She handed the blackboard to me, heaving a deep sigh, in a pose I thought I had seen in a Beijing opera called Xizi Holding Her Heart.

  “It’s the blackboard program for my first day on stage. I have kept it ever since. You love Beijing opera, I know, so you keep this. I don’t think I will ever step on the stage again,” she said, as she produced her purse.

  I pushed back the money she offered me, my hand touching hers for a split second. “The blackboard more than covers the fee.”

  Standing outside, I gazed at her retreating figure and listened to the last clicking of her sandals as she disappeared into the somber gate, the sound like a helpless beat made by the night watchman in the Tang dynasty.

  My mind was blank until an old proverb occurred to me: a love affair that causes the fall of a city—in a different version, the fall of an empire. In that opera I had seen her perform, Emperor Xuan lost a great empire because of his infatuation with his favorite concubine, Yuhuan. Xiao and Shen reversed the order: it took the fall of Shanghai to finally bring them together.

  Humming the tune from the opera, I thought of a Chinese proverb. As a horse proves its strength by galloping a long distance, people get to know each other in times of disaster. And then another proverb came to mind: a beauty’s fate is as thin as a piece of paper. I tried to think of some lines of my own, but without success. It’s strange that those old sayings function like a retaining wall when the soil begins slipping from the slope.

  There’s such a lot I do not know about her, I kept telling myself. Why had she not consented earlier, for one thing, if she had cared for him that much? A lot of empty space, but from another perspective, that may be just as well. In a traditional Chinese landscape painting, empty space allows room for imagination. You may laugh at my maudlin sentimentality over a small personal drama during such an important historical time. But in the last analysis, where do we live? In our petty personal lives, not in a history textbook.

  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 newsletter
s 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 . . .

  When I Was Conceived

  (1952)

  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.