Why I never walk through a Chinese park during Spring Festival
by Tom Bradley
[ places - october 03 ]
"In China, it's impossible to become a man." - Lu Xun
The civic authorities have drained the artificial lake, and thousands of handcarts are purging the bed of five centuries' accumulation of mucus, slopping it everywhere ankle-deep. They are late for Spring Festival for the first time in a few thousand years of recorded history, demonstrating the relative merits of emperors and politburos.
This being the post-Liberation period, everybody in the city has to take a turn manning a shovel, unless he or she can afford, with discretion, to hire and exploit a substitute. Abusing my exalted position as a "foreign expert", I terrorized one of my tubercular grad students into taking my place; but, even so, I wear high-topped, laced-up Red Wing boots, after the manner of first-world proles.
I'm afraid of accidentally dragging even one booted toe in the residue that covers the street. According to my physician back home, who admittedly diagnosed himself with hypercautionary Sinophobia, the mud throughout communist-held territory in Asia is infested with hideous snails that are, in turn, infested with microscopic wormlets that burrow into the pads of your feet and slither up through your legs and pelvis, up, up, till they get to your liver and turn it to smelly gristle.
I've been invited to banquets with important provincial cadres where trenchers full of such gastropods were brought out, and I've grabbed chopsticks out of Long Marchers' hands, screaming, "Wait a second! You're not even supposed to step on those little cocksuckers!" But almost nobody heeded my warning, and nobody died. So I assume it's a matter of building up immunities over the millennia.
Spread nastily before me today in the middle of the park is a mythical quagmire. Mushed deep inside, under the more recent top layer of discarded scum-bags (three sizes, one color), verminous creatures guard a treasure. There are stories around town of snail-resistant people finding ancient perforated coins and jade bracelets. Someone was shot for trying to smuggle out a rotten skull with ruby-inlaid porcelain teeth. The periphery is crawling with Peoples' Liberation Army men.
Beyond that periphery, just out of those PLA men's eyeshot, tucked behind South China foliage in a quadrant of jungle where, incredibly, humanity's pullulation thins out for a brief space, a certain former Red Guard used to camp out. He still squats there among the shadows, for all I know, foursquare in his formidable integrity. We don't exactly keep in touch. I was a friend of his family, in a manner of speaking, and I admired him, but he never returned the compliment.
His name was Bu Yu, and he resented my large alien presence in the Flowery Middle Kingdom. He took it into his head to re-start the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, at least to the limited extent necessary to dislodge me, one way or another. His objective was to deliver the local university students, merchants, civil servants and party apparatchiks out from under my Red Wing boot, which he, perhaps not altogether unfairly, considered to be planted square in the middle of everyone's faces.
To suggest that Bu Yu was mentally unbalanced would be less than sporting; but it's fair to say that he didn't have his mental finger set firmly on the political pulse of his fellow townsmen. They were just as delighted as any other southern Chinamen when Deng Xiaoping gave them permission to get back in touch with those petty entrepreneurial instincts which had, since time immemorial, defined their tribe. It would have been easier for Bu Yu to foment socialist rebellion in Beverly Hills. The snack hawkers in particular loved having me stalk their sidewalks, a ringer for Santa Claus, the very embodiment of acquisitiveness and bourgeois self-indulgence.
Bu Yu had recoiled from the sight of me, and had gone into self-imposed exile at a street boys' secret forest-encampment, located on the bank of the stream that fed the periodically drained lake. He spent his nights sleeping like a Mongolian on clay, surrounded by yellow industrial suds that caked up on the riverbank, and he passed his days growing a beard that was supposed to convince the more superstitious street boys that he was an ancient and wise man.
I do, however, know of at least one youngster, a bright daisy-colored comrade, who saw in the beard nothing more than facial hair - sparse at that, particularly compared to the dazzling array of stawberry-blond nipple-ticklers that hung off the jutting jaw of his role-model, hero, and god on earth - namely, me. I suborned the little sycophant to serve as my eyes and ears on the riverbank, and fetch me weekly reports on the babblings of Bu Yu, my mortal adversary - and my own hero, in many ways. I hope that doesn't sound too other-embracingly white and liberal. Or maybe masochistic.
Once in a while indigenous water people appeared before Bu Yu's eyes, floating among crackling bubbles on their tiny bamboo houseboats as they'd done since prehistoric times, the only members of the non-criminal classes in China who'd been assigned to no particular work unit. They wore a new expression on their faces for the first time in twenty thousand years: one of bewilderment over the increasing skimpiness and somatic strangeness of the fish they caught.
"Do we eat this extra fin or worship it?" they seemed to ask each other in the unwritten language that nobody but the few dwindling dozen of them understood. For all his political theory, Bu Yu was unable to offer advice, and so would remain speechless till they drifted out of sight.
When dirty magazines from Hong Kong appeared for the first time under the pile of banana leaves that constituted the boys' secret assembly hall, Bu Yu had waded out to purge them, to fling them far across the face of the waters. The froth had stung his feet, tough as they'd become on his shoeless meanderings during the Ten Years' Chaos. He decided at that moment to sleep henceforth with his lower extremities immersed, the pain seeping up and up into his brain and increasing the ardor of the bad-element anarchist who'd been usurping control of his dreams ever since the "opening of the doors" to outlanders like me.
Finally a kind of emery paper formed on his soles and insteps, a reptile skin composed ambiguously of Bu Yu himself and some foreign material. He became wedded to a sensation such as I imagine the desert peoples of Wulumuqi felt in their purification rites, back in the days before the light of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought was brought to bear on their backward mentalities. They performed week-long geothermal ablutions to undermine the structural integrity of the epidermis, then coated themselves with a pepper sauce, not unlike the stuff rich Sichuanese put in their capitalist-class food by way of condiment. But the Wulumuqi sauce was poison outright, a body lotion that reamed out the skin pores and induced pathological ecstasy.
Occasionally he even used the suds in the mornings to wash those few parts of his face unobscured by hair. Bu Yu flung himself on his belly in the glutinous sand and submerged that part of him which takes the place of a conscience in the Oriental constitution. It was a display of raw fearlessness calculated to impress children, whose nerve endings remain so much more tenderly attached than our own. And it inspired even higher levels of astonishment than he'd expected.
Perhaps the sallow spume took some visual effect upon Bu Yu's flesh that was awesome. He had no way of ascertaining for sure, as mirrors were never brought to the no-girls-allowed encampment, and the river was too adulterated with opaque substances to be reflective, even at its frequent sluggish moments. Nevertheless, if witnessing Bu Yu perform his morning toilet inspired the majority of his followers to respect and fear him more, my own precocious spy was merely put off by what I'd tutored him to regard as demagogic exhibitionism. I made sure there was always at least one sour puss in the bunch.
Having failed to muster his former comrades-in-arms (they'd all sunk into premature middle age and become beauticians or career TV-university students), Bu Yu was forced to lower his sights. He was surrounded by a kindergarten full of children instead of an army of seasoned Red Guards who struggled, and maimed while struggling. The excessive zealot, the tooth-gritting, gore-gushing fanatic soldier of a decade ago, had been reincarnated on the riverbank as a whacker of flowers with thorn switches, a marksman with rubber band-powered, pebble-loaded slingshots: not a rebellion-maker, but an aimless vandal, a future candidate for the triad gangs if somebody didn't take him in hand.
But Bu Yu sensed that maturity didn't matter at this point, if the boys could be directed firmly away from their inherited bad-element leanings and toward political consciousness in his newly instituted Hong Xiaoxue program, his outdoor Red Elementary School.
He had tried at first, through incentives such as free fish-fries, to up the membership, to "cook" as many lads as possible and cement their loyalty. In a momentary confusion brought on by dismay over the moral decay of this town's latest generation, he'd lost sight of the original plan and become convinced that his presence on the river could be justified only by large numbers of converts. As though he were some Jesus-possessed missionary, Bu Yu had wanted to redeem children like pawned possessions, revealing more about his own upbringing than I'm sure he would have liked.
But soon enough he returned to his senses, and was even forced to take contrary measures to limit membership. For, like all well-planned organizations, this one had to be arranged along auspicious numerological lines. The inner circle could number neither more nor less than thirty-five, seven times five, threescore and ten divided by two, which happened to be the exact age of both Bu Yu and the adversary, who lived in somewhat plusher quarters among actual grown-ups in town.
That would be me, of course, but Bu Yu had chosen not to specify as much, just yet, at least not in the ears of the more babyish infantrymen, for fear of frightening them off altogether. Though a sweet man, and ludicrously out of shape - a jolly old elf, in fact - I am half again as tall, and three times as heavy, as the average Chi-com, with devil-colored eyes that seem especially to trouble children on the street when I'm in a certain mood. Bu Yu was right to be reluctant to introduce my specifications into the camp dialectic. But my spy made sure that plenty of unauthorized scuttlebutt regarding "the adversary's" identity seeped down into the awareness of the lowliest grunts in the trenches, causing a good number of them to go AWOL.
Eventually Bu Yu would be obliged to begin setting up the infrastructure of offices and commands that would provide a solid backbone for his miniature army. Once the members had mellowed a bit and the real business of class struggle could commence, there'd need to be a secretariat, along with teams in charge of materials and propaganda, liaison and external affairs, finance and logistics, plus a special task force for armed combat and its preparations.
All this would be based on fond memories of the brave rebellion-making force he'd belonged to during the best years of his life. I sometimes wonder, looking back, if it was symptomatic of encroaching age when this commie hero of mine spent a greater amount of his free time imagining bureaucratic maneuvers than planning specific skirmishes to come.
Before Bu Yu could bore these congenital anarchists with the dry realities of organized class war, he had to make the encampment seem like an esoteric fraternity, to appeal to their primitive instincts. He remembered the entertaining lies about old gangster societies that the peasants had poured into his own preadolescent ears during the forced rustications, and he applied them here at the twig and tendril fort: the freemasonry borrowed from protestant missionaries; the qi gong spells and formulaic gyrations; the time-telling from observing the dilations of cats' eyes--all the rudimentary psychological and physiological magic that would soon lead up to the more correct Red Book-wielding loyalty dances.
At the same time he tried to avoid corrupting these green brains with the more metaphysical superstitions which he and his middle-school classmates had combatted so hard in the short-lived Four Olds Movement. Those belief systems slithered out of one's guts, up and up, transgressed beyond simple magic, and approached the insidious pathology called religion. But he had a suspicion that his scrupulosity was wasted on many of the thinner, more raggedy recruits, who'd been saturated already with such poison by their toothless grannies at bedtime, judging from the Daoistic way they scampered home as soon as the sun began to sink and the river turned blood-red.
Whenever the mauled carcass of a large fanged monkey washed downstream from the mountaintops, Bu Yu had to shout reality back into their ears before they could bolt: "Of course wild pigs are strong enough to rip their heads in half like that!" Then, allowing the dialectical materialist in him to get the better of the youth recruiter, he would incautiously add a rhetorical question: "What other creature up there could do it?"
The children had a whole bestiary of other creatures, most possessing three or four eyes and combustible breath, or, more terrifying still, two eyes, two legs, language and self-consciousness.
It was exactly their fear of violent death that made the substance of blood wield power over their small imaginations. So Bu Yu had risked later revolutionary historians' accusing him of feudalistic tendencies, and had introduced blood oaths of secrecy into the riverside ceremonial. This flattered his followers into believing that he valued their confidence and that he assumed somebody in their lives, a teacher, parent, or even a neighborhood committeewoman, would care enough to listen if they revealed their new uncle's unregistered presence outside the city walls.
The blood was derived from depriving oneself of the first layer of skin on the barest tip of the fifth finger of the right hand, or the left, whichever seemed more profound and symbolical to the particular bleeder, instead of removing the whole first joint, which had been the method of dynastic bandits. A generation of sons returning home each night lacking body parts might call attention to their enclave.
As for me, I wouldn't be willing to bet foreign exchange currency that such dismemberment would cause much of a stir in the degenerate small-time hawker households many of the more unfortunate little soldiers came from. It was, after all, a city of shopkeepers. Confronted with surgical stitches across their offspring's torso, these fine burghers would just ask for a percentage of the price the missing organs had fetched on the overseas black market.
Even the less deprived boys tended to be elementary school dropouts, alienated already from their papas, those traitors to the cause of socialism, outright royalists and opportunistic glommers-on to the line of the old saboteur Deng Xiaoping. It was small cause to wonder that such fathers had failed to maintain even twelve years' worth of filial piety from their sons, and no surprise that such sons should have established a secret family of their own, with a home base made of sticks and straw that doubled as a mock fortification in their daddy-annihilating army games.
At least it would not be necessary to drive one traditional weakness from the hearts of the Hong Xiaoxue enrollees. None of them could be said to suffer from feudal familism, the central flaw that had held China back from achieving true proletarian dictatorship all these millennia. Bu Yu himself had set a fine example by breaking with his own clan, effecting a final and cleanly split--except for one sweet, lovely pink propinquity that nobody (least of all I) could blame him for clinging to, in his private heart.
* * * *
The charter members had stumbled onto this more or less secluded spot by deciphering fifteen-year-old inscriptions scratched on rocks and banyan trees by their uncles, the local Red Guards, on their junior long marches and on-foot linkups. Upon hearing that Bu Yu had been around during that remote and legendary antiquity, the boys had agreed by informal consensus to put him up, a black-skinned jester for their kingless court.
But, ever so gradually, he could sense it now, they were developing an interest not only in his eccentricities of speech and personal hygiene, but also in what he had to say about the great world beyond the ferns and fronds that shaded them here. Bu Yu was able to recapture a portion of his former rhetorical fervor, and his Hong Xiaoxue was beginning to take shape, as were the embryonic political consciousnesses of the lads. The family was developing a proper daddy.
He knew full well that encouraging children to stay away from their mothers' breakfasts and their schools' lunches was illegal. But Liu Shao Qi's organizing the An Yuan miners in 1927 was also illegal, in the extreme, and he was expelled from the politburo as a rightist. That did not hinder him, and the result was the glorious Autumn Harvest Uprising--an inspirational story Bu Yu was saving to tell the children after he'd laid a bit more theoretical groundwork in their heads.
At the school sessions disguised as impoverished fish-fries, he began his first formal attempts to instruct his charges in the principles of Red combat maneuverability and the Lo Ming line of guerilla tactics. This was seen by them as absurd at first, ensconced as they were in a leafy lean-to fortress they deemed impregnable by natural means.
"It's impregnable only in the sense that your sole enemies at this point are your fat-assed fathers who are too lazy and too bourgeois to muddy their feet by following you out here and dragging you back home to your school books."
"But, Teacher," said one of the few cooperative students (my personal mole-boy, in fact, who'd been instructed to feed lines to the commandant, and memorize any responses), "why do our fathers refuse to muddy their feet? For fear of the liver worms?"
"The what? No. Of course not. It's because muddy feet will make them look like peasants, and they would rather lose their sons than slip down a single notch on their topsy-turvy scale of class stratifications. Their social-climbing affectations deprive them of heirs, and yet they believe that those latch-keys strung about your necks will somehow prevent your love from drying up like a pig turd on a suburban sidewalk."
Very few of them had been listening, but several ears perked up at the mention of pig turds. Bu Yu had to remind himself not to allow the juvenile's traditional love of pig turd jokes to adulterate his style of public speaking on a permanent basis; for someday he hoped to address grown-ups again.
He continued. "But when there is a real enemy to be struggled, and when that enemy is fatter and taller and nastier than you, and his arrogance is only exceeded by his contemptuous lack of concern for you, then you must leave your little fort and go to him rather than wait for his siege engines to pull up to the gate. Then the Lo Ming line of guerilla tactics is the best method not only of survival but of prevailing. Chairman Mao exhorts us never to fight an unprepared war. Allow me to demonstrate."
And he would squat and draw, in the greasy sediment underfoot, battle schematics from recent and remote revolutionary history, while the boys who were interested gathered around, some without thought resting little hands on his shoulders.
"You Hong Xiaoxue tongshimen are looking for a road and a line to take," he said in a more tender voice, "though many of you don't even know it now. I will provide you with a road and a line, and an enemy to annihilate."
One effeminate tag-along child, from a family of low-level municipal clerks, thoroughly out of place, was just unvigorous enough to have sat still and listened to Bu Yu's hints, and just bright enough to have divined that there was a specific personage against whom they were to mobilize. He raised his reedy voice high enough to be heard over the general babble, and pleaded lenience, incredibly enough, on behalf of this as-yet-officially-unspecified enemy.
"But, Teacher, he has a wife. And a child, too. At least I've seen him spending a lot of time with a young girl in the park. Is it dialectical materialism to interfere with someone's papa?"
After a gasp and a terrifying dive deep into his own infantile memory (a certain female face leered up at him from the murk), Bu Yu's innermost guts recognized this sissy-boy's strange sense of anonymous mercy, as sure as if it had been his own weakness in a previous incarnation.
Mercy was the womanish characteristic that would one day make life on earth surpass the sweetest feudal fantasy of Heaven. But not until the revolution was complete and true proletarian dictatorship had been achieved all over the world. And, until that remote moment, this compassion, so generalized, so indiscriminate and so pointless in a materialistic universe, would be nothing less than a purulent ulcer on the side of his rebellion-making youth corps. Bu Yu must suture this wound shut before any ideological pus could slosh into the other boys' brains.
"You, child," he hissed, "are adopting the Chen Tu-Hsiu line of right-opportunist reconciliationism that brought catastrophe to our party in the spring of 1928."
The words were unimportant at this point. But Bu Yu's voice and face were filled with jeering contempt which caused the simpler individuals to laugh and ridicule the weakling among them. Their scorn was free of the murderous indignation that must come in later purges, but it served its purpose. The runt ran home sobbing through suds and mud, into the arms of his no doubt love-bloated Christian-convert maternal relative.
The worst kind. The kind you love and admire. That brings death. The best are those toward whom you can feel a tender condescension as they fetch you bowls of rice. But it were better to have one who physically tortured you, taught you early the meaning of the dislocated joint, the twisted bowel, the spoon-gouged eye, than gorged you on the syrup of her mammalian love. How well Bu Yu knew this.
I knew it too, from introducing myself to his family (loving females included) in the city park before the snail cataclysm. And he was right to have split from them: the Bu family was a bunch of grinning, feeble saps, standard self-loathing third-world types. They were giddy at the honor of a big Caucasoid condescending to be a "friend of the family" (so to speak), yet ashamed and apologetic about a certain camped-out relative of theirs--a stalwart who, in spite of his murderous feelings toward me, I wouldn't have hesitated to claim, in a loud voice, as my own twin brother.
I had even fewer compunctions about claiming his little sister as one of my own. She was Bu Yu's tender pride and hopeful joy, the compact personification of everything pure and dialectically materialistic in his heart's deep scarlet chambers. This was, after all, the People's Republic, with an emphasis on the possessive, and female comrades were to be valued as nowhere else in all of the extreme orient.
With Big Brother gone among the revolutionists, the child needed firm male guidance, which I felt it my duty to provide, as I was the cause of the fraternal vacancy in her darling existence. Nearly twenty years younger than us both, making her jailbait outright in any civilized country, she was the most lascivious little trough of slop I'll ever make a swine of myself over. My Red Wing may have been planted on everyone else's face during the day, but I shrink from telling you what sweet red thing was planted on mine in the early evenings--at least until mud-snails rendered our special cranny in the park inaccessible. (That Big Brother was not supposed to know should be obvious, but I emphasized it with warmth to my spy, anyway.)
Hence the merciful Christian-convert boy's innocent misapprehension that I was "someone's papa." From the moment he fled in the face of Bu Yu's sarcasm until he came back pleading for readmission, kowtowing his forehead audibly on the riverbank, this weeping weenie was tailed by his coevals on the streets as a security risk. But readmitted he was, for he would have constituted something of a loss. At least he was useful as an attention-getter. When not expelling or re-embracing him, the recruits were interested only in talking about food.
Bu Yu had so far been unable to provide them with much to eat besides deformed river vermin. He'd taught them a few of the old partisan tricks, like luring out, capturing and consuming live the frogs from under rocks in stagnant pools. While not exactly tasty or filling, they were supposed to make you clever, devious and slippery as an amphibian, just as gouts of sap made you tall as the tree they oozed from. These qualities presumably compensated for the strength you lacked from chewing on frogs and sap instead of the fat sides of town pigs. And, on market days, it was possible to glean a few vitamins from vegetable garbage floating by--but sand-scrub the diesel off or die.
As for the youngsters who, thanks to their innately superior class consciousness, or maybe just abusive parents, had already come under his sway and cooperativized themselves permanently at his side on the riverbank, Bu Yu could only try to supplement their diets with pilfered rice hay from the hillside paddy terraces, made more substantial with a healthy smearing of mineral-rich jungle clay.
There was the festival that had survived the Four Olds Movement, where the tea farmers upstream threw zongzi of glutinous rice and sweet red beans into the water, ghost confections which Commander Bu Yu retrieved and rationed for weeks afterward. He tried to convince the ungrateful boys that the farmers were not to be considered especially backward just because they didn't gobble these rice cakes themselves, as had become the custom in recent centuries among townsmen who'd finally learned to scoff correctly at spirits.
"Superstitious, yes. But there is a certain progressiveness about the farmers' admiration of the poet/hero whose waterlogged spirit those zongzi are intended to placate. He was a true proto-revolutionary who scorned the advances of the emperor, though his writings are not entirely free from reactionary characteristics."
But this politicization of the semi-dissolved rice cakes failed to get their minds off food. In those increasingly rare times when Bu Yu could get them to talk about the objective of their struggle, even that got twisted in a culinary direction.
One boy stood and said, "I've heard that when a Chinese gets no vegetables or fruit for ten years, his hair will turn the foreigners' color, the color of northern Shaanxi pine tree ears, or a fine Mandarin orange after you've peeled it, and you're about to take a bite." (A flattering image for my ginger mop; but I'll take it.)
"You don't mean it!" snarled the most theatrically inclined of them all, a big-eyed and -eared boy who'd been designated this tribe's Master of the Games before Bu Yu's sport-spoiling arrival. "You don't mean the very same color of the beard that hangs from the jaw of the baby-eating devil, Doctor San Mu Ai De Wen?"
"Oh, no! Hide!"
The usual Nanjing-style soldier's riot followed hard on the mention of that weird name. Bu Yu's living forces reverted to the savage condition to which they, in their extreme youth, lived in such close proximity. They commenced indulging in a strange apotropaic ritual, a primitive monster game or drama with assigned roles and memorized lines, featuring a bad spirit that Bu Yu did not recall from his own brainless baby years--but then, he'd been raised in a more enlightened time, the Great Leap Forward, when such feudal shades had been briefly banished from the land.
"I'm Doctor San Mu Ai De Wen!" screamed one boy, looming large while the others feigned terror. "That means I have three mothers, and I help spread the plague wherever I go! I'm going to tear the front of your father's house down!"
"It's Three-Mothers-Aids-the-Plague! Hide!"
The sillier and younger ones squealed like girls and ran to conceal their minuscule maidenheads in the bushes, so as not to be caught and eaten by a figment of their collective imagination that resembled me.
Back in town, their commandant had recoiled from my physical presence too quickly to have memorized enough of my external characteristics to make the connection himself. And, for all his talk of "propaganda" and "liaison" and "external affairs" and "logistics," Bu Yu had never mastered my name, barbarian monikers being the wrong shape to sit comfortably in any but the most youthful and flexible Chinese mind. That's why the boys had so charmingly transliterated "Dr. Samuel Edwine" into their gutter idiom, together with that wry literal rendering of the Sinicized syllables.
Bu Yu's brain, which, like mine, had been calcified to the normal extent after languishing half a lifetime on this earth, remained mystified as to the who-and-what of this lecture-disrupting bugbear, this contagious San Mu-Whatever, who, unique among dynastic demons, possessed not only a trio of loving moms, but a doctorate (mail-ordered from the back pages of Hustler, by the way). My spy was not about to enlighten him.
The boys who were hiding from me in the bushes forgot their hunger only until bulbs of vegetable matter depending from various twigs reminded them again.
"If that's the color of the Doctor's hair," said someone, who remained in the character of a cowering little girl and dreamily licked a lascivious red blossom, "does it mean that all barbarian intelligentsia don't get enough vitamins?"
"Of course they do. Foreigners eat more than two jin of meat for lunch."
"And jiaozi dumplings, two jin, for their supper."
Bu Yu decided to let this conversation run its course. If the troops would rather discuss victuals than ideology, so be it. Correctness grows directly from the judicious satisfaction of such needs. They had to be fed, he knew. But not as much as adolescents or full-grown men.
And there was another advantage, among the countless disadvantages, of working with children. While wringing one's hands over their diet, at least one didn't need to worry about procuring camp followers for them as well. They were too young to know, first of all, that they needed copulation, and, second, that they didn't need it at all.
Sitting and staring at all these sets of ribs, naked and horizontal under the shimmering trees, Bu Yu was reminded in a terrible way of the Venetian blinds, western-style Hong Kong imports, that he'd once ripped from a certain high provincial cadre's office in late 1964. "Other comrades work by sunlight and burn themselves black to feed the revolution," young Bu Yu had sneered, "while you prefer the twilight of the feudal opium den!"
"What have you to hide, Bad Element Lao Ren?" the Red Guards had screamed at the old man in the glorious struggle session later that afternoon, when blood vessels exploded in his wife's saggy temples and reduced her to a lopsided, drooling burden that had to be shot for her own good, as soon as they were able to liberate a working AK-47 from the army.
In those days the busy youth of China had to be reminded, even persuaded, to swallow a few grains of rice once in a while. But now hear their successors whine.
The next boy to speak was the son of a black-class merchant. He declaimed an invisible inventory across the face of the ruined river.
"Foreigners have the biggest blood peaches, and all the immortality noodles they can swallow, plus safety eggs, boiled just right, not too tough, even when it's not their birthday."
Feeling like a joyless schoolmarm tromping on a forty-points game with both big feet, just to join in on the fun (for there were fun moments when he was young, weren't there?), Bu Yu decided to step in and provide some cultural background that he hoped was innocuous and not too feudal. Perhaps, directed toward the allegorical, the boys could be gradually steered away from the gastronomical and toward the political.
"Yes," he grinned, "and do you comrades know why our ancient great-great-great grannies from time gone by called them immortality noodles? It's because noodles are long and thin, like the number one, and safety eggs are round, like the number zero, and together they make one hundred, the best age we could wish to attain on our birthdays, and--"
Someone scoffed loudly at this point. It was a brazen boy (guess who), older than the others, almost a youth, on the borderline of not belonging here. He was strong and, I'm pleased to affirm, well-fed: clearly it wasn't necessity but curiosity which brought him to the encampment (or maybe he was just running an errand for someone large and pale and evil, a great blond beast who lurked nearby). In one of the more recent mumbo-jumbo ceremonies, Bu Yu, smelling this kid's talent, but not his treachery, had hastily pronounced him Commissar, hoping to co-opt his aggressiveness with the flattery of a title.
This commissar had received a superior education by local standards, reactionary though it was, at the local key school, where he'd actually paid attention. He was aware, and tried to impress upon the few kiddies who might be persuaded to care, that their self-proclaimed commander had virtually no formal schooling, like most of his generation, who'd made rebellion, not term papers.
Our bright commissar now announced to the others that Bu Yu's immortality noodle "nonsense" was a pathetic example of the midget sense of history the Red Guards had developed between rampages during the Ten Years' Chaos. And no wonder "Mao's little generals" were so easily duped into throwing themselves into a short-lived movement that all of China had rejected in hindsight.
Bu Yu almost howled with horror and indignation.
The commissar ignored him and continued. "We only began to use western digits like one and zero after Liberation. And birthdays are recent also, at least among mainstream Han Chinese. What's your ethnicity, Commander? Up until the very late Qing Dynasty most people simply added to their ages every New Years' Day. How 'ancient,' then, can your stupid immortality noodle tradition be, Commander? Besides, I thought immortality was a feudal superstition, and that when we die our bodies turn into minerals useful for production and so on."
In the stunned hush that followed such a cheeky utterance, someone started a rumor which was to remain in brisk circulation long after this Hong Xiaoxue was disbanded, each twig and tendril of its fortifications washed downstream to clog the artificial lake: the commissar was believed to be a thirty-year-old genius dwarf party member, a trained expert ideological saboteur planted in the ranks by the very high provincial cadre whose wife and Venetian blinds Bu Yu had destroyed back in '64. And that wasn't too wide of the mark. He was indeed planted, but not by any old Chinaman. He was my protege, my handiwork--also younger sibling, coincidentally, to the tubercular grad student who was obliging enough to be scooping a certain foreigner's quota of lake mucus at that very moment.
It was high time for this small cooperative's second political purge. Bu Yu would try to nail my boy on class composition: his father was no doubt intelligentsia with foreign leanings, his mother a black class cur, his older brother a craven mud-scraping toady to the enemy.
But in the meantime it was essential to remain as calm as possible in front of one's inferiors. Bu Yu maintained his dignity--or that part of it which hadn't just been sand-blasted away. He considered not even making an immediate reply. But to say nothing at all would be to lose even more face. So he took a breath and murmured something like, "From what Guomindang rightist pamphlet, smuggled by which fishing boat, across which quadrant of the Taiwan Straits, did you, with your typical petite-bourgeois schoolboy's memory, plagiarize that, Comrade Commissar?"
"Huh?" said more than one of the others.
Bu Yu lost no time in labeling my mole a putschist. He forced him to undergo thought-remolding in the deep jungle alongside another boy, also a putschist. Bu Yu deliberately lumped together the two most dissimilar, yet most dangerous individuals. This would serve to confuse and distract the others from the counterrevolutionary content of their respective lines.
The other putschist liked to be called The Horseman, in honor of his favorite group activity: circle-jerking (which, like scissors-paper-rock and so many other cultural advances, originated in China). "Riding the Horse" signifies jacking off in gutter Mandarin; and, in this sense, The Horseman played Master Bates to the commissar's Artful Dodger. He even had the irritatingly ready laugh that characterizes his guild of specialists.
He was a Li Lisan-type neo-Bolshevik adventurist who wanted to kidnap my wife and send bits of her body in the mail to various places. He didn't care where, and wasn't worried about the postage. He considered that part a mere detail, a concern of the pencil pushers in the liaison office that Bu Yu had yet to establish.
This sordid self-abusing creature happened to have a little sister of his own, just like Bu Yu, and he had once offered to bring her to the encampment for everybody to "enter her meat" (literal translation), including Bu Yu, if "the commander used only the back garden and some soybean oil," which he offered to furnish in a plastic bag for a small extra charge.
In trying to get his fellows to give him a few fen in advance, The Horseman explained, "My father has intended to turn her out since she was born. From the time she could walk till now, ten years later, he has never allowed Little Sister to wear any clothes on the lower half of her body when she plays in the streets, not even in winter. And she must relieve herself openly on the sidewalk, like a baby, so she will grow accustomed to thinking of herself as public property. Socialistic, eh?"
When Bu Yu reacted with violent revulsion, the faceless rodent shrugged and said, "It beats slashing her throat at birth, which is what my uncles do to daughters. She has no civil existence, anyway, because she was born in violation of the one-child policy."
This little monster had once flung a stone and brained a Honda-riding boar hunter from a fire-watch brigade situated in the hills above them, and had stolen, or "requisitioned," as he put it, an extremely rare thing these days: a privately owned rifle. It was an ancient wide-bore dynastic make, a regular artifact, weighing at least twenty jin. The one time it was fired the roar was loud enough to produce waves on the surface of the river and bring shapeless, pale things up from the bottom. The Horseman had vowed to climb up on a park bench and discharge his artillery straight into one of my eye sockets. Fortunately he was not finding it easy, even with his sister's intercession, to procure more ammunition.
"That's all right," he leered, exposing his chafed self. "I'll just shoot my spare cannon in the strugglee's eye instead."
Elder sibling, himself, to a sweet pepper sprout of girl who had just managed to squeeze into existence under the one-child wire, Bu Yu found it difficult not to purge this evil brat on the spot, using a big rock. But he restrained himself. The Horseman was the ideal sort of maniac to class with the dangerous commissar, in order to discredit the latter in the eyes of the few circumspect youngsters.
Bu Yu might chain the commissar to such filth for thought-remolding, but rejected the idea of purging my boy completely. He was, after all, one of the few campers aware of something besides his own digestive tract. He had imagination, I'm proud to say, and even rudimentary socialist sensibilities--at least to the extent that I was able to coach him on such cobwebby relics of outmoded historico-political woolgathering.
For example, he'd been the only one not to scoff at Bu Yu's suggestion that they recruit some actual peasant-class boys into their small cooperative, some tea farmers' sons perhaps, in order to combat Stalinist/Comintern urban elitism among the ranks. And the commissar was willing, in spite of his professed contempt for Bu Yu, to bring useful bits of information from town, such as news about the ill-advised and naive student democracy demonstrations and their fascinating effect on the local power structure. (I'm afraid, however, that any intelligence he delivered concerning me was of the disinformative sort.)
"So, let him rebut me and try to humiliate me at political study sessions," Bu Yu was overheard mumbling to himself. "Nobody ever listens anyway."
* * * *
One afternoon, as this old Red Guard surveyed the ranks, such as they were, of the first fighting force he'd been associated with since the treacherous suppression and back-to-school order of March, 1967, he felt his heart swell. Hoping his sudden access of ardor would catch their attention and maybe even hold onto it for a while, he delivered what might be called his first bona-fide Hong Xiaoxue speech. It was a short one, but otherwise almost comparable to the soul-stirrers of his youth.
"We must run the foreigner out," he said, "but in these early stages of our movement we need to use the conservative dialectical method of 'being split in two.' We mustn't make the short-sighted blunder of the Boxers before us. We have a moral responsibility to struggle the foreigner first and awaken his class consciousness so he can return to his homeland, just as the imperialist-tool American P.O.W.'s returned from the conflict in Korea, to export the world proletarian revolt. We must at least make such an attempt or risk being classified forever as mere hooligans. Always remember, comrades, you are Mao's little yellow buffaloes, opening furrows wherever you go for the seeds of his thought to take root!"
Yawns. Mumbled observations on Mao's being dead for quite a while, and not producing much thought at all these days, as far as anybody could ascertain.
Bu Yu had thrown in too many four-character words at once, too soon. He had gotten carried away into garrulousness. He tried to win them back and to redeem the speech by introducing a little material that would strike closer to home.
"You little brothers want to talk about dead figures of national veneration? Well, I happen to know that several of your mothers keep photos and paintings of the late premier Zhou Enlai in the your hovels. But did you know that, back in 1966, he took the blatantly revisionist line of protecting the big-noses on Beijing's embassy lane from the righteous wrath of the Red Guards?"
"Ho-hum. Was anybody even born yet?" jeered somebody who squatted on the rear layer of fronds - another putschist-snake wanting a purge.
The troops lost interest again. The meeting degenerated even past the point of gastronomic babble, and sank down into the childishness of sport.
Some of the older ones scattered away into the woods after crickets to pit against each other in prizefighting bouts on flattened river bed rocks. The foolhardy ones stripped and tried to submerge themselves for a swim among crispy dead fish.
Bu Yu saw that the first outright rule of comportment he'd have to enact would be a moratorium on badminton. Aside from being an effeminate game invented by British imperialists to keep their wives' lubricious thighs off the shoulders of strapping colonial serfs, the racquets and shuttlecocks themselves were distracting, a perpetual incitement to shrieking babyish chaos.
The puzzling monster game was starting up again on the quadrant of riverbank closest to his nest. The bugbear with the doctorate reappeared, who so often distracted the Hong Xiaoxue tongshimen from the real work of revolution. Bu Yu grabbed the nearest screamer and demanded to know, once and for all, who or what this Doctor San Mu Ai De Wen was supposed to be.
Before he submerged his hungry self into his role, the boy looked at Bu Yu with a fair measure of the old scorn for the blackened court jester returning to his eyes.
"How ignorant can you be at your age, Uncle? Everybody knows Three-Mothers-Aids-the-Plague. He's a giant demon, the color of Mandarin oranges after you peel them, and he'll tear the front of your father's house down and steal your baby sisters from the hammock."
"A child's imaginary villain," sniffed Bu Yu, fighting scorn with scorn. "Unreal nightmare stuff for babies only, like the adversaries of Monkey King. Not as interesting as real flesh and blood class enemies, don't you think?"
"Oh, but he is real. He spends his spare time dickering with peasants over extra girl babies for his breakfast."
"Yes," added another little comrade. "And he has a familiar fox spirit, pretty but poisonous, who rides his giant nose like a peasant straddling a water buffalo. And, in the evening, she makes scary rhythmic shrieky noises behind the bushes in the park."
They bounded off, leaving their commander with a large but blurry qualm looming in the back of his head.
* * * *
Oddly enough, it was to our commissar alone that Bu Yu wound up revealing the fullness of his intentions.
It was during one sunset, the hour when most of his living forces began to sneak off for supper with their families, leaving Bu Yu alone at the encampment with the literal waifs--little animals, uninteresting and malnourished, all staring eyes, empty bellies and emptier heads, who hung on mostly from fear of the dark.
As he made gestures toward feeding himself and them with the few mouth-stinging grey carp that floated in on the chemical foam, bloated bellies up, he tried to encourage everyone with the words his faction had always cheerfully bandied about in times of physical privation.
"This is like Soviet Russia in 1917, and look what became of them!"
The waifs were not responding. They certainly had no clue as to who or what the word "soviet" signified; and, looking into their glazed eyes, Bu Yu came to the intestine-freezing realization that they didn't even know what 1917 meant. How many is such a big number, and how many rice husks can it count into your mouth?
On this night our commissar had been assigned to stay on later than usual, ostensibly to give his commander a little companionship among these infant ghouls. With that possibility in mind, Bu Yu just started speaking in mid-thought, disburdening himself into a receptive ear for the first time since pitching camp here.
"We must make life so unpleasant for the big-nose that he leaves the Motherland and takes as many of his own kind with him as possible, and--"
Before he could take a second breath, the commissar, my ever-smooth and handy creature, interrupted Bu Yu with an almost verbatim anticipation of what he'd planned to say next. He began to express things in bright teen talk that seemed to border on something higher--but perhaps, Bu Yu, in his agitated state of mind those days, read more into the words than was really there.
Through a yawn my boy pointed out that the leave-taking itself shouldn't be too difficult to induce, as foreigners were extremely mobile and irresponsible. They had little sense of contractual honor and low tolerance for discomfort or inconvenience.
"That's exactly right," marveled Bu Yu.
After his attempts to slog into the muddled awareness of the others, Bu Yu was overwhelmed by the clarity of this youngster's brain. He deluded himself that such a brain might conceive some sympathy for him.
Trying to keep his voice from trembling with excitement, Bu Yu said, "From what I've heard, this big-nose is typical of his kind. It would mean as little to him to pack up and leave before his job is done as it apparently would to destroy the honor of one of China's pure little plum blossoms--"
Bu Yu's heart swelled at the mention of the last phrase, and he added, not thinking of the potential consequences, "Corrupting Little Sister is nothing but a five-minute's prank to this imperialist."
(I resent that - sometimes it took the better part of a quarter of an hour.)
The commissar leaned forward, eyes brightening. Bu Yu understood too late that he'd said way too much.
"And what does China's, um, little sister think of all this?" The key word was carefully enunciated to make sure this bit of intelligence had definitely passed between them.
Something inside Bu Yu, maybe simple self-loathing, now made him confess his second dirtiest secret to his second worst enemy, the one person who could do him the most damage at this point. He told our hungry-eared commissar (and therefore me) the secret he'd never considered revealing to anyone. Bu Yu had unravelled the thread of his fate to the point where beardless, ballless boys were all he had left as comrades and confessors. He hadn't intended to mention his little love; but now that he had, he couldn't prevent himself from going on. Pacing the bank, kicking the smaller urchins aside, Bu Yu pretended to be preoccupied with some serious adult matter and to be exposing his fatal secret in an offhanded manner, as though it were merely a source of minor irritation.
"As a matter of fact, I have no idea what she thinks. I haven't seen her since she was in split pants, peeing on the cobblestones. I don't want her to see what I look like now. I'm scared my whiskers will make her laugh at me in a mean way."
And that was it.
I can vouch for there being something irresistible about the amoral openness of our commissar's little face. Never mind the reason for his attentiveness: to gather ammunition to destroy Bu Yu in the only place where he'd managed to go undestroyed.
Without blinking an eye, my dwarf spy said, "Wouldn't it be my responsibility, as Commissar, to tell the others that we're mobilizing in order to resolve your personal family problem? Wasn't a war once fought in Asia Minor for such a shaky reason?"
He looked in Bu Yu's eyes and paused just long enough to extract fathomless agonies. Then he smiled and whispered, "This is a picnic for them. Why spoil it?"
Just as he was rising to go home and have supper with his family, my apt pupil turned around and, almost as an afterthought, tacked on the last of many lies he'd brought to this doomed encampment, but the first explicit untruth to exit his mouth: "I promise, on my word of socialistic honor, Commander Bu Yu, that I won't tell a soul."
* * * *
Meanwhile, downriver, at the municipal park, I'm all hunched over, trying to be debonair enough not to gag and puke at the terrible things my boots are being put through. I do my utmost to take a jaunty promenade on the elbow of the cutest and naughtiest China doll south of the Yangtze.
One slight strip of ground has been kept relatively unmuddied for the purposes of rehearsing an anemic lunar new year's celebration, or something like that. I see serried ranks of six-year-olds - those whose class consciousness Bu Yu failed to raise against me - prancing around in Year of the Rat costumes, pre-theory of subconscious-style. Glittering, scaly tails penetrate plump cheeks like child molesters' dream-penises, wiggling with coached seductiveness in time to a pirated Hong Kong disco tape.
Behind these gyrate a range of individuals gotten up to resemble an even younger brand of meat. They wear giant plastic infant heads on their shoulders. Flesh-tone body stockings make them appear bare-naked except for the traditional short aprons that keep the genders of these sham toddlers just ambiguous enough to be, one would suppose, fascinating - at least to a certain type of park-frequenting person.
Such aprons can be seen on pairs of bronze baby-statues in some of the crasser northeastern Buddhist temples. The idea is to reach under and pinch whatever slippery little lump you find. If it's a scrotum, you'll be blessed with a son. If labia - well, that unfortunate contingency can always be dealt with by other provisions in the Flowery Middle Kingdom's rich cultural heritage, usually involving a jagged implement and a patch of good earth. A shameful waste, from which my very taste buds recoil like snails from grain spirits.
The ruling party has so far failed to provide a new socialist system of esthetics to replace the more or less satisfactory pre-Liberation one they liquidated; so now the commies seem to be trying out a kind of sentimental pedophilia as part of their "bold, unprecedented modernization experiment." It's as close as their collective imagination can come to a western democratic style of public celebration. Building a culture from ashes, they expect in a few decades to cough up an emotionally nutritious set of rituals, and this is what they get: large-scale pederasty, and a painful demonstration of what Lu Xun meant when he said that it's impossible to become a man in China.
I trust Bu Yu arrived at that wisdom not long after I did.
