Years of Red Dust Page 5

  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.

  When President Nixon First Visited China

  (1972)

  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.

  During the previous year, we had heard of the “stinking-for-thousands-of-years” death of Vice Chairman Lin Biao, Chairman Mao’s hand-picked successor, who perished and was condemned as “a heap of dog poop” after an unsuccessful coup attempt. Lin was said to have been against the visit of the American president. Then early this year, Confucius, having been dead for more than two thousand years, was dragged out of the grave as a target for revolutionary mass-criticism. Confucius too had been against foreign barbarians. We figured that all this might have something to do with the change in attitude about Americans.

  The neighborhood committee believed it necessary to explain the historical and political significance of the visit to the lane residents. After a two-hour meeting, we remained lost in clouds and mists as before. However, understanding or not, we had to follow any strategic decision made by our great leader Chairman Mao.

  Red Dust Lane was listed as one of the highest alert areas during the visit of President Nixon, since it was possible he would pass by here on his way to the Bund or to the City God Temple Market. Security measures had been studied and restudied by the city government.

  First of all, each and every potential troublemaker was to be removed. To keep the most vigilant watch over the class enemies, or the “five black classes of people”—landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists—as well as the capitalists, the neighborhood committee put them together like straw-bound crabs in the back room of the neighborhood committee office. They were not allowed out of sight for one single minute until the official dismissal notice was given. Of course, that measure alone was by no means enough. At such a crucial juncture of the Cultural Revolution, many could turn into agents for the KGB or CIA, intent on sabotage. Comrade Jun and Comrade Yin, two full-time Party cadres of the committee, would patrol the lane like a couple of wound-up toy soldiers, watching out for any suspicious strangers skulking in or out of the lane. The lane was further divided into four sections, each of which was supervised by a part-time c
ommittee member, with Old Hunchback Fang guarding the main lane entrance like Zhongkui, the fierce spirit portrayed as jumping out of the traditional door sign.

  But the political responsibilities confronting the lane could be far more complicated. For one thing, troublemakers were not necessarily limited to the class enemies. Curious, people could surge out like human waves looking to get a glimpse of the Americans—which was potentially a diplomatic disaster, interpretable as a sign of China’s intense interest in the West. It would be a serious loss of face, to put it in the common language. So the lane residents were ordered not to leave the lane during the day unless it was approved by the neighborhood committee.

  President Nixon was supposed to see a clean, beautiful, prosperous city of Shanghai—“in the normal way.” Which did not mean that things were to be left as they were, needless to say. Some things were to be left alone, and some were not. For instance, the beggars on the streets had to be made invisible. So would be the dripping clothes on the bamboo poles outside the shikumen houses, as well as the peeling big-character posters on the walls and the spiraling smoke from the woks. In addition, the district government demanded that runny-nosed kids, who could unexpectedly run into traffic, be kept off the streets as well.

  In short, the order of the day was to follow the Party authorities’ instruction to the letter: “China should show the best of the proletarian during the first American president’s visit.”

  To ensure the visit’s success, the district government assigned Commissar Liu as a mobile coordinator for several adjoining neighborhoods, including Red Dust Lane. Newly discharged from the army, where he was a reconnaissance platoon head along the China-Vietnam border, Liu appeared to be the most qualified man for the job. Starting at nine o’clock on the morning of the visit, Liu would come equipped with a walkie-talkie and a shining red armband, patrolling every lane and sublane in the area, checking with security people stationed here and there, and passing the latest information around. He was responsible for coordinating with the metropolitan police force and the city authorities and for keeping the neighborhood committees informed of progress during the day or of any change in the schedule. By three o’clock in the afternoon, when the Americans would have returned to the hotel, Liu would come over to announce the lifting of the high security alert.

  Still, all this would not have had too much of an impact on us but for a suggestion made by Commissar Liu. He argued that not only preschool kids but also grade school students like us could unexpectedly lead to problematic situations. Schoolteachers might not successfully keep those Little Red Guard students quiet and still in the classrooms. So an urgent notice was given to parents that they were responsible for their children under the age of ten and must either stay with them at home or put them under the collective surveillance of the neighborhood committee. Consequently, a group of the kids from Sublane 3, including me, were gathered together at Lulu’s home under the supervision of her grandmother. A decision made on the grounds that her son was a Party cadre.

  But Lulu’s place was not large. A room of fifteen square meters, with three beds squeezed in for the three generations that lived under the same roof, along with the furniture and odds and ends. For the day, there were nine of us packed in there like sardines. I noticed a transistor radio on the nightstand, but Granny was under special orders not to make any noise. So Qiang and I started a game of army chess on a slip of floor between two of the beds. Lulu made an exquisite red paper cutout of the Chinese character of loyalty, and she danced with the character held high, in front of the portrait of Chairman Mao. Intent on showing her loyalty, she jumped up, missed her footing, and stamped the chess pieces under her feet. Granny suggested that we read our textbooks instead, without knowing that our one and only textbook was Quotations of Chairman Mao, most of which we had memorized. I recited to her an appropriate quote for the occasion: “Be determined and not afraid of any sacrifice. Overcome all the difficulties and win the victory.”

  The victory in question would come around three o’clock, we calculated. Long before noon, however, time started to weigh heavily on us, like the blackboards hung around the necks of the class enemies. For lunch, each of us had a steamed white-flour bun with minced pork and vegetable stuffing, as a delicious incentive from the neighborhood committee. But it did not change the fact that we were stuck for so long in a small, stuffy room with the windows closed. Pig Head Jin started coughing, pressing a fist against his mouth. Little Monkey Xu suffered from bad hiccups. To cover up the unwelcome chorus, Granny sealed the windows with tape and drew the curtain too, which made the room even more like a steamer.

  In the semidarkness, the curtain hung motionless like a movie screen, upon which we began to project our imagined images of the outside world. Not far from the lane, Yan’an Road would be becoming a hustle bustle as a part of the anticipated route. Some people would be stationed there, probably not a lot, but at least as many as in a normal day. It would not do for the Americans to see a deserted street. The people chosen would be wearing their spic-and-span Mao jackets, as would the plainclothes cops stationed at each and every corner. Pig Head Jin and I started arguing about one particular detail. He declared that he had once seen a Red Flag limousine during the Romanian president’s visit to China. The limousine was made of special bulletproof steel, shining like a black dragon in the sun. Jin thought the American president must be riding around in the same limousine. I differed, saying that the American president and Chinese premier must have come in a convertible, waving their hands to the Chinese people, so that the American people could see it on their TVs across the ocean. TV was said to be something common in the United States, even though there was not a single TV set in our lane yet. We could only stay in the room like caged cats, curiosity-crazed.

  Liming then fell to studying the water stains up on the ceiling. The stains appeared to be miraculously connected into dotted lines, merging into a contour of the Rocky Mountains, he maintained in earnest, having recently caught a glance of the mountains in an old textbook map at a recycling center. Qiao, a freckled girl from next door, busied herself hiding-and-seeking among a sweep of drying socks, which Granny had to air inside the room for the day. Qiao developed a Dacron allergy, and she began rubbing her eyes and nose as if suddenly lost to a world of unfriendly, American pollen. (I have heard that she was dumped, years later, because of her incessant sneezing, which caused her then ex-lover to suffer severe insomnia.) As for me, I imagined myself in an airplane on a successful espionage mission unreported in the official newspapers. But my paper airplane knocked itself down against the bare wall of Lulu’s room.

  What made things even worse was an inconvenience totally unanticipated. There was not a single private bathroom in the lane, as was the case with many other neighborhoods, so at home, people used chamber pots, or went out of the lane to a public bathroom, which was now totally out of the question. In Lulu’s place, there was a small cabinet partition made for this purpose, but I found it too hard to excuse myself while in a room packed with several girls my age.

  Finally, it was almost two in the afternoon. Granny mumbled to herself. Commissar Liu would soon come to the lane, briefing the neighborhood committee on the status of the tour. If the Americans had passed by, the security alert would be reduced to a less intense level. She stretched her neck out of the window, only to see Old Hunchback Fang crouched at the lane entrance, motionless, more like a disabled cat in the distance.

  Granny began to be worried. She had heard a story told by Pony Ba about the assassination of another American president. How true the story was, we did not know. Pony Ba’s father was a Bad Element—and was locked in together with other class enemies in the neighborhood committee office at this very moment—who had gotten into trouble for listening to the Voice of America. The tension was building up in the room, and now in the lane too. Soon the uncertainty grew to be almost unbearable.

  Still, not a chicken was flying, nor a baby crying, nor a ca
t jumping. Red Dust Lane held its breath, as if awaiting resurrection. Some wondered whether Commissar Liu could have lost his way, but others brushed aside the possibility. Commissar Liu was a reliable, experienced Party cadre.

  As the old clock’s hand moved to three thirty, Granny became panicky. Something must have happened. Lulu turned on the radio. No special news. Normally, news about a distinguished foreign guest’s visit to the city would not be broadcast until seven o’clock in the evening. She volunteered to go to the neighborhood committee for the latest information, but Granny could not let her go. Every move had to wait until Commissar Liu’s arrival, though according to the schedule, the whole thing should have been finished half an hour ago.

  Granny was no longer able to contain her anxieties. She had another responsibility: to cook dinner for the family. A punctual soul, she had to start preparing around four, or her day would be totally derailed. She was also seized with an asthma attack, possibly induced by the deteriorating air quality in the room or by her frustration over the impossible dinner. Her lips livid, she desperately needed to breathe fresh air, but her political responsibility demanded she stay shut up in the room. To our surprise, she produced a clay Buddha image hidden in the closet, and she started hugging the image in earnest: Come back, Commissar Liu, oh Buddha, please allow us to cook, to cough, and to cope.

  Miles away from Red Dust Lane, Commissar Liu did not hear any of those desperate messages. At that moment, he was catching a glimpse of a waitress becoming a legend in Green Waves, a restaurant located by the nine-turn bridge in the City God Temple Market.