Years of Red Dust (15 page)

It was obvious that Xue was still waiting for his old
neighbors to tell him more about Bai, but they chose not to. No point dampening his spirits with a sad story, particularly as Bai might even have been the reason why he had left for the Korean War, as well as the reason he had come back after all these years. Knowledge that he had made the right decision—that if he had come back in the fifties, he would have ended up just like Bai, or even worse—might have given him some comfort, but it would be cold comfort.

Finally, the host and the guests all got drunk.

That night, Bai shut herself up in the small room, mumbling as always to the faded portrait of Mao on the wall. She never heard a word of what Xue said over at the banquet. Nor, if the rumor about her Alzheimer's was true, would she have understood.

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1995. Early this year, China tested missiles and held military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, showing its unwavering determination to fight for the unification of the country. New educational legislation now stipulates nine years of compulsory education. In September, the Central Party Committee adopted the proposition to further the economic reform through the transformation of the traditional state-planned economy to a socialist market economy. Our government took effective measures to curb inflation, which had reached seventeen percent.

 

Let me make this point first, my old neighbors in Red Dust Lane. A story is never really independent of the storyteller. Say what you may, but someone has made the choice to
tell this story, not that story. Why? Simply because this narrative has a specific meaning for the narrator. For instance, I'm going to talk about Old Hunchback Fang this evening. It has a lot to do with what has happened to me—directly or not that directly—through all the years. More than twenty years, to be exact.

My second point: a story doesn't come out of the blue, nor does it have a certain closure. Between Old Hunchback Fang and me, a real face-to-face encounter didn't occur until this week, though things far more important to him, and to me—a lot of them related and interrelated—had happened years earlier.

Now, I am not prejudiced against a man with deformities. My father was also crippled—during the Cultural Revolution. I simply don't know Fang's full name. As far as I remember, everybody here has always called him by that particular nickname. So did Fang himself. You object to it? Fine, I'll call him Fang. If I have a slip of the tongue, it's just because his hunchback seems to have special meaning, a symbolic correspondence to what I'm going to say.

I first heard of Fang in the early sixties, when he was a worker just retired from the Shanghai No. 3 Textile Mill, and an honorable member of the neighborhood committee. An old man, short, bald, wearing a pair of old-fashioned glasses that looked like the bottoms of beer bottles, and with a hunchback like an upturned iron wok. The neighborhood committee seemed irrelevant to me as a kid. I
simply saw it as an office for housewives to make petty family complaints or receive food ration coupons.

The outbreak of the Cultural Revolution changed everything. The committee was now focused on mobilizing the people to “battle and campaign against the class enemies.” As Mao said, “We have to push the continuous revolution under the proletarian dictatorship to the end.” It pushed Fang to the fore, who gave a passionate speech about “Savoring the Present Sweetness and Recalling the Past Bitterness” at a neighborhood meeting.

“What am I? A poor, pathetic hunchback. In the old society before 1949, I was looked down upon like trash. One day I slipped and fell in front of the lane, and several young hooligans came over and began kicking, spitting on me, and cursing, ‘What an old turtle has turned over.' Comrades, it's only under the socialist system that I began to lead a happy, wonderful life. Because of my deformity, I was allowed to retire at the age of forty-five with a full pension. Could I have ever dreamed of it before the liberation in 1949? No, no way. I owe everything to the Party, to Chairman Mao. Whoever dares to be against Chairman Mao, I will fight him to my last breath in the latest direction of the class struggle.”

The speech was sincere, but too short. The example given was not that well-chosen, either. There are hooligans in the past and in the present, and it wasn't the old society that caused Fang to be derided. As for the “latest direction
of the class struggle,” Fang could hardly understand the ever-changing political terms in the newspapers—he simply recorded and repeated them like a machine.

Shortly afterward, a neighborhood group was formed and named the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team, which consisted of a dozen retirees, a gigantic drum, several brass gongs and cymbals, and a pile of colorful paper posters. Fang held a bullhorn in one hand, clutching in his other a list of class enemies. With his red armband shining like an enflamed cloud in the morning, he led the team marching to the targeted houses of class enemies throughout the lane.

In front of the first targeted house, his bullhorn would start booming: “Down with capitalist roader Zhang Shan. We must trample him underfoot thousands of times, so that he can't turn over for the next hundred years.” Then at the next door: “Down with counterrevolutionary Li Si. For your antisocialism crime, you deserve to die thousands of times.” And then at the third door: “Down with rightist Huang Huizhong, you have to confess your crime to the people.”

Fang had a loud voice, which had a metallic quality as a result of his malformed lung capacity. His eyes glared knives, his nostrils issued forth fire. For a split second, he loomed gigantic—the proletarian wrath incarnated.

The revolutionary activities of the team were supposed to bring pressure against the class enemies. There was a popular slogan at the time: “The proletarian dictatorship
must be carried into every corner of our socialist society.” Into every corner of Red Dust Lane, too.

Consequently, Fang's path and mine crossed for the first time. My father was a middle-ranking Party cadre who suddenly became a “capitalist roader” in 1966. Hence a class enemy too. Fang arrived dutifully at our door with his bullhorn: “Burn the stinking capitalist roader! Fry the rotten capitalist roader! Scalp the damned capitalist roader!”

The revolutionary mass-criticism increased in its intensity. Soon the class enemies were marched onto a makeshift stage, bearing huge blackboards around their necks with their names written on them and crossed out. Old Hunchback Fang proved to be the most active, and creative too, in producing those blackboards, as if he had an inexhaustible supply of energy from his hunchback. The sight of him struck a new terror into the hearts of the people on the list clutched in his hand.

“Don't cry,” a young mother would hush her baby in the cradle, “or Old Hunchback Fang will come.” It was an apt adaptation from an old Chinese saying:
Don't cry, or the white-eyed wolf will come.

I was young, yet not too young to tremble in my father's shoes. It seemed to be a matter of time before he would step onto a mass-criticism stage, standing with a blackboard dangling around his neck. What was worse, his left leg was broken during a mass-criticism meeting at his factory, and during a similar neighborhood meeting I might have to support him like a crutch, standing with
him on the stage. The image of me as a human crutch gave me continuous nightmares. One night, I was jolted out of bed by Fang's voice thundering across the lane. “Capitalist roader Guohua, you are doomed!” Rubbing my sleepy eyes, I rushed downstairs, only to find no one there. I had heard his voice, I swore, but the neighborhood kids might have imitated it as a practical joke, as my father said, or I could have dreamed of it.

Fortunately, I didn't have to become such a crutch for my father in a public humiliation. He was suddenly liberated from his “capitalist roader” status by another Red Guard organization which, in a surprising bid for power, declared my father an “educable revolutionary cadre” on their side.

Little did I expect that Fang would come to cast a more direct shadow. In 1969, Mao launched forth the movement of sending educated youths to the countryside. In response, millions and millions of middle and high school graduates left home to “receive reeducation from the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.” A few were left behind, including me: I was a “waiting-for-assignment youth” left in the city, excused due to bronchitis.

The Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team shifted focus to the new targets of the Cultural Revolution: the educated youths that remained in the city. Fang and his followers applied the same tactics of public humiliation and pressure with different slogans. “As our great leader Chairman Mao teaches us, it is necessary for the educated youths
to go to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.” It was a long sentence, but Fang's loud voice jumped out against a deafening clangor of gongs and drums. It worked like a formula. While marching from one house to another, he went through the names on his list. “Zhou Wu, you don't listen to Chairman Mao. You must be responsible for the consequences!” “Chen Liu, you are against the movement of educated youths. You have to mend your ways!”

There were actually two educated youths, Zhengming and I, in the same
shikumen
house. The only difference between us was that he didn't have an excuse like bronchitis. So I was spared for the moment, but his name came loud and clear out of Fang's bullhorn. “You have to go now, Zhengming, or, day and night, we will never give you a break.”

Fang and his followers made their rounds three times a day: in the early morning, in the afternoon, and in the late evening, so that the maximum number of people could hear their message. It was an effective tactic, bringing not only pressure to the educated youths in the list but also annoyance to the neighbors, who couldn't complain about the propaganda but could only vent their frustration against the young people.

“You'd better go, Zhengming,” Granny Hua said to him in the common kitchen of our
shikumen
building, “or we will never have peace here.”

Zhengming consulted with me. He felt so guilty that
he was ready to give in to the continuous nerve-wracking pressure. I didn't offer him any advice. My father was sick with rheumatism, and I couldn't afford to bring any additional problems home.

“The moment my name comes out of Fang's bullhorn,” I said lamely, “I may have to leave too.”

So Zhengming left. In less than a year, he had lost three fingers in a tractor accident. It was said that he did it on purpose, so he would be able to return to the city—in accordance with a government policy concerning a handicapped educated youth. I knew little about it. I was too worried for myself. At the familiar sound of the drums and gongs, I would jump up and peek out from behind the curtain, trembling. The Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team was planning to find new targets among the educated youths left behind, and bronchitis wasn't considered as good an excuse anymore.

Again, as luck would have it, before my name came out of Fang's bullhorn, the movement of educated youths came to an abrupt halt. Instead of transforming themselves into poor and lower-middle-class peasants in the countryside, most of the young people failed to keep the pot boiling in those faraway villages. Mao himself wrote a letter, admitting that there might be some problems with the movement.

But Fang's team had already started on another campaign. From my window, I could hear Fang shouting new
slogans. During those years, there were so many political campaigns, Fang didn't have to worry.

After the end of the Cultural Revolution, I went to college in Beijing. To my surprise, in the midst of my studies there, I found myself thinking of Old Hunchback Fang quite a few times. According to my father, Fang started working for the neighborhood security committee after the dissolution of the Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team. He was still patrolling the neighborhood market as a sort of watchdog, still wearing a red armband—though a different one, of course.

I didn't have a clear picture of Fang's new revolutionary activity until I came back to Shanghai in the early eighties and began working as a journalist for the
Wenhui Daily
newspaper. In those days, the Party authorities had already started the economic reform in Shenzhen, but in Shanghai and other large cities, the presence of private peddlers at a state-run neighborhood market was still considered a threat in the eyes of the orthodox. So Fang's job consisted of forcibly confiscating the peddlers' bamboo baskets and stomping on them vigorously. He must have derived a big kick from it, imagining himself as a staunch pillar of socialism whenever he drove away a weeping country wench.

It wasn't too much of a surprise to see Old Hunchback Fang looming in the market, patrolling energetically as if with steel springs under his feet, but I was surprised at the ferocity he showed toward those peddlers. After all, they
were not class enemies, not like in the old days, and I happened to notice that the Party newspapers were talking about the coexistence of different ownerships in China's new economy.

“That old bastard's out of his mind,” Zhengming cursed, binding a live river crab he had just bought from a private vendor.

I didn't have a personal grudge against Fang. What prompted me to confront him was another stroke of misplaced yin and yang. I had no idea at all—not at the time—that it would come to influence both of our lives, though in different ways.

Now in those days, my job in the
Wenhui
office kept me quite busy. One Saturday afternoon, I hurried back to the lane to make dinner for my father. In the nearby food market, I saw a middle-aged woman preparing a bucket of rice-paddy eels by a public sink. What caught my attention, I could not tell, but I found myself slowing to a halt and watching. She was whipping an eel against the concrete curb, fixing its head on a thick nail at the end of a wooden bench, drawing the eel tight, cutting through its belly, pulling out its bones and insides, chopping off its head, and slicing its body delicately. Her hands and arms were covered in eel blood, and her bare feet too. She made a few pennies by selling the bones and entrails to restaurants, which used them to make special noodle soups.