Years of Red Dust Read online

  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.

  Return of POW I

  (1954)

  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.

  The news of Bai Jie’s death in the Korean War came to Red Dust Lane in early 1953. A young nurse in the Chinese People’s Volunteers, she was barely twenty that year. According to her comrades-in-arms, Bai was hit by a stray bullet during a disorderly retreat. There was no possibility of recovering her body under the circumstances.

  Her picture appeared in the city newspapers. Her noble deeds were lauded on the radios. She was awarded, posthumously, the Second Class Merit Citation. Her family became a Revolutionary Martyr’s Family, sporting a red paper flower on their door. Her parents, though inconsolable, shone with tear-glistening pride as a glittering statue was presented to them during a neighborhood meeting. They were invited everywhere to talk about their heroic daughter. More and more people came to learn about her short, glorious life.

  When Bai left for the Korean War, she had just finished nursing school and had started working in a hospital. Her former schoolmates remembered her as a bright, hardworking student who got straight A’s in every subject, was active in political movements, and was pretty too—her long plaits fluttering on her bosom like soft willow shoots on a spring morning and her cheeks reflecting the peach blossoms in a vernal breeze. She had many secret admirers at school and in the neighborhood too. She was truly like the first dazzling ray of the sunlight that lit up the moss-covered common concrete sink in the lane.

  For days, brokenhearted young men appeared in Red Dust Lane. Bai was honored even in the lane’s evening talk, with the “Battle Song of the Chinese People’s Volunteers” playing solemnly on the radio, and old and young joining to observe a minute of silence.

  In great spirits, with vigorous strides,

  We march across the Yalu River!

  To protect peace, to defend the land,

  It is to guard our home.

  Good sons and daughters of China

  Are united closely

  To resist America, to aid Korea,

  And to beat the ambitious US wolves.

  Everybody was bursting with hatred toward the American aggressors. The loss of such a young, beautiful life made the slogan resonant and meaningful to all of us: “Down with American imperialism!”

  However, Bai came back, to the consternation of the lane, in the middle of 1954. It was like a bolt out of the clear blue sky. As it turned out, she had been wounded, captured, put into a prisoner camp, and finally sent home. There was something like a shroud cast over her family, over the lane, and over those who had known her.

  No one knew what she had experienced while in the American prison camp, but in the lane it was whispered that she was now on the list of “Internal Control.” No longer a revolutionary martyr, but under suspicion from the Party authorities. After all, anything could have happened to her in the POW camp. Taiwanese and American secret agents had been sent there, as was reported in the People’s Daily, with mind-boggling offers to induce the captured Volunteers to secretly betray the People’s Republic. No one could guarantee that she had not been brainwashed or bought off. With the UN embargo weighing down the economy, the Nationalist troops sulking across the Taiwan strait, and the American imperialists patrolling the Korean borders, the Party government had to be suspicious of someone who had spent more than a year in the company of the Americans.

  Initially, Bai managed to greet us as before. It did not take long, however, for her to realize that people were trying to avoid her. The neighborhood committee was at a loss about what to do with her. There was no welcome meeting held for her in the lane or at the hospital. The red flower disappeared from her door. Then her smile disappeared too, after the secret police came to visit her. We did not know what they discussed behind her family’s closed door.

  She changed overnight, like a frost-damaged flower.

  Indeed, she put us in an embarrassing situation. People knew she must have suffered in the war, but they did not want to get into trouble by associating with someone who was “politically untrustworthy or suspicious.” In the light of Chairman Mao’s theory of struggle against enemies everywhere, her unexpected and unexplained return bespoke, to say the least, of political unreliability. And people could not be too careful.

  Bai resumed her work at the hospital, but no longer as the head of the political study group there. Nor did she serve in the operating room. The hospital boss was worried about sabotage by class enemies, especially when high-ranking Party cadres were on the operating table. So she was reassigned to cleaning the hospital, working as more of a janitor than anything else. In Mao’s discourse, all the changes made no difference so long as the goal was to “serve the people.” But people knew there was a difference. Bai might not be classified as a class enemy, nor persecuted or tormented, but she was politically written off.

  She was too clever a girl not to be aware of all this, but what could she possibly do, except hang her head low, like one with a sign on her forehead? She no longer talked to her neighbors, instead hurrying in and out of the lane as if she had wrapped herself up in a cocoon.

  She was, in fact, literally wrapped up. In the early fifties, people dressed pretty much the same all year round. Still, they would loosen up a little in the lane, in the summer, leaving a couple of buttons undone. Bai, on the contrary, always wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned up to her chin and long pants covering her feet, even on a hot summer day.

  This, too, seemed to support a whispered speculation that something had happened to her in the POW camp. People had read and heard graphic stories of what Japanese soldiers had done to Chinese women during the Second World War. The Ame
rican barbarians could not have been that different.

  One evening, Young Hu joined the evening talk, waving a magazine in his hand. “Guess why Bai keeps herself wrapped up all the time?” Hu went on without waiting for a response. “Here’s an article about prisoners being raped and branded in Japanese prison camps. There is no question about it now. Branded!”

  “You’re sick,” Old Root snapped. “How can you talk like that? Everyone listen, anyone bringing up the subject again will not share the same sky with me.”

  A refusal to “share the same sky” was a strongly worded expression. No one had expected such a reaction from Old Root, who was just one of her neighbors, though an avuncular one. After his unexpected interference, the gossip about her unrevealed secret subsided.

  At the end of the year, Bai looked like a totally changed woman—like a stuffed scarecrow, gesticulating in the wind, trembling amidst the crows of terror as darkness came falling over the field. It was hard to believe that her beauty could have been shed so quickly, like pear blossom petals after a storm.

  “The white petals stamped over and over on the wet, black ground,” Old Root commented. “Resurrection is terrible.”

  (Tofu) Worker Poet Bao I

  (1958)

  This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 1958. It has been another victorious year for China in the socialist revolution and socialist construction. In January, the CPC Central Committee convened a conference to discuss the prospects for the Second Five-Year Plan. In April, the first rural people’s commune was founded in Henan province. In May, the CPC adopted the general line of “going all out, aiming high, and achieving greater, faster, better, and more economical results to build socialism.” Then the CPC Political Bureau decided to double the steel production of the previous year. All these sparked “the Great Leap Forward” movement. Across rural China, 90.4 percent of all households were incorporated into people’s communes.

  It was in the mid-fifties that Bao Hong moved into Red Dust Lane from Ningbo, where he had been a young apprentice in the local tofu shop. Confident of his tofu-making skill, he had intended to pursue the same profession in Shanghai. In 1958, following Chairman Mao’s call for unprecedented development of the steel industry in “the Great Leap Forward,” Bao got a job in Shanghai No. 3 Steel Plant instead.

  That year witnessed, among other political movements, a nationwide campaign called Red Flag Folk Songs, which was aimed at pushing workers and peasants to the forefront as writers and artists. For Chairman Mao, this was not an impulsive decision. As early as 1942, in a talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, he had already set forth his theory that literature and art should serve politics. So it was now a matter of necessity that a large team of worker and peasant writers play a dominant role in the construction of the new socialist China.

  On an early spring morning, a senior editor of Liberation Daily came to the steel plant. Bao happened to be taking a lunch break, wiping the sweat from his forehead, digging into a bowl of rice with fried tofu. As the white-haired editor explained the purpose of his visit to the steelworker, Bao laughed, shaking his head like a rattle-tambourine. “You’re kidding. I’ve only studied for three years in elementary school. If you want me to make a piece of tofu, no problem—you’ll have one as white as jade in no time. But how can I write a poem for your magazine?”

  “But I’m looking for a worker poet for our magazine,” the editor persisted.

  “What can I say?” Bao responded. “Look at this piece of tofu. It tastes like rice glue. What’s wrong? The soybean. Indeed, what kind of soybean makes what kind of tofu. And the same with the water, which has produced the dull color of this tofu. The peddler’s such a lousy one that I’ll never buy from him again. Anyway, what an uneducated worker says will never interest an intellectual like you. No, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Hold on. That’s fantastic, Comrade Bao. The soybean and the tofu. That’s dialectic. It’s brilliant. And the water too. Thank you so much.”

  “What?” Bao was totally lost.

  “I will contact you,” the editor said, rising, scribbling several lines in his notebook in a hurry. “I definitely will call you, Worker Master Bao.”

  A couple of days later, the editor called Bao: there was a short poem on the front page of the Liberation Daily.

  What kind of soybean makes what kind of tofu.

  What kind of water generates what kind of color.

  What kind of skill produces what kind of product.

  What kind of class speaks what kind of language.

  The name of the poet, printed in a larger type, was none other than Bao Hong. There was a short editorial note underneath his name saying, “In his simple and vivid language, the emerging worker poet Bao has eloquently spoken the truth: the class struggle is everywhere in our socialist society. While the class enemies will never change the color of their nature, we, the working-class people, will prove our true selves in whatever we choose to do and say. The first two lines are hidden metaphors in parallel, juxtaposing the images with the following statement. The technique is called xing in the Book of Songs.”

  As Bao held the newspaper in his hand, his face turned white as a piece of tofu.

  “In our socialist revolution and construction so full of miracles, a piece of tofu can be magical too,” one of his fellow workers commented by way of a joke. “A tofu worker poet indeed.”

  “I’m not a tofu worker,” Bao protested, his face suddenly scarlet, as if spread with too much red pepper sauce.

  However, it was a huge success, that short poem of his, and it was reprinted in the People’s Daily and several other newspapers. It became one of the most anthologized poems that year.

  Soon, a large number of worker-and-peasant poets appeared, like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Everywhere people could be heard reading and reciting revolutionary poems singing the praise of the Three Red Flags. A poetry competition was staged in the People’s Square in the center of the city, and Bao sat at the rostrum as a judge.

  Bao himself came up with a couple of heroic lines:

  A shout from our Chinese steelworkers,

  And the earth has to tremble three times.

  After the poetry competition, the mayor of Shanghai shook hands with him at the Second Shanghai Literature and Art Conference. The radio interviewed him. The magazines covered him. The rush of invitations from companies and schools inundated him.

  Bao then became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, which supported a limited number of “professional writers” by providing them with a salary equivalent to the amount they had made from their previous work units. This program was created in the interest of furthering socialist literature and art, Bao declared proudly in the lane, so that a revolutionary worker like him could concentrate on writing at home instead of having to work from eight to five in the steel plant. Xin, the head of the Writers’ Association—as well as a veteran Party writer who had attended the Yan’an Forum Talk in 1942—had personally recommended Bao for membership.

  Now Bao wrote full-time in his tingzijian room, which had a curtained window above one of the lane’s common sinks. While washing in the sink, the housewives in the lane could not help standing on tiptoe and peering in. He was seen reading seriously with a pair of glasses, making notes, thumbing through a large dictionary half the size of the table in his room. He came less and less to our evening talk at the lane entrance. When he did, he began speaking like a man of letters, flashing out new terms like “revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary romanticism,” which scintillated like his new silver tooth. Soon there were several other poems in the newspapers. In one poem, he said that “we proletariat cannot be tofu-hearted toward the class enemy,” which became an instant catchphrase. Another poem written in angry denouncement of the bourgeois intellectuals made its way into textbooks.

  They’re no stinking tofu—

  Stinking not only in smell
,

  Rotten in taste too.

  Oh, nothing but poop.

  At a subsequent lecture given at a college, Bao met a young student fan of his poems, who then married him. All this happened so fast, so magically, as if with a drop of the chemical coagulant in the soybean liquid, tofu was made.

  The lane had hardly registered her first visit when she started cooking in the common kitchen as Mrs. Bao. But such speed was not too surprising that year, when Mao said that one day is equivalent to twenty years in China’s socialist revolution and construction. When in Bao’s company, she made a point of having a black notebook and a red pen with her. The moment he said something unusual, she would write it down. On several occasions, it was said, she succeeded in turning his random remarks into poems and having them published as the latest masterpieces.

  One summer evening, the newlyweds were sitting out in the lane, sharing a large piece of watermelon. Like other wives there, Mrs. Bao was trying to collect the watermelon seeds, which could later be fried as a tasty snack, but Bao stopped her.

  “Look at the watermelon,” he said, spitting the rind into his palm. “Not sweet at all, so dead pale in color, and look at the watermelon seeds too, so small, so deformed. Such a seed can only grow into such a tiny, pathetic watermelon.”

  “Look at your face,” she said sweetly, by way of a joke. “All your pimples stand out like the watermelon seeds.”

  It did not take long, however, for her to produce under his name a new poem, which was apparently modeled after the first poem he had composed while still working in the steel plant.

  What kind of seeds grow what kind of melons.

  What kind of vines produce what kind of flowers.