Red Azalea Read online

  There are girls like beautiful flowers,

  Boys with strong bodies and open minds.

  To build our new China,

  We are happily working and sweating together …

  I spent the night of my eighteenth birthday under the mosquito net. A nameless anxiety had invaded me. It felt like a sweating summer afternoon. Irritatingly hot. The air felt creamy. It was the ripeness of the body. It began to spoil. The body screamed inside trying to break the bondage. I was restless.

  The reeds were sprouting underneath my bed. I had to cut them because they pricked through my bamboo mat and scratched my cheek the night before. I had to stop them or they would hurt me. They had hurt me before. And I had weeded them by the roots. But the reeds were indestructible. They were excessive, saltproof. When I thought they were gone, they were back. They grew from nowhere. It must be the salt. The salt empowered the reeds, I thought. They worked hand in glove. They were the true Red Fire Farmers.

  I got down from the bed and squatted. I pulled the reeds out and broke each of them in two. I got back to my net, sealed the curtain, clapped to death three mosquitoes. I pinched them down and looked at the bloody spots on the net. The restlessness overtook me like the growing back of the reeds, from nowhere. It was the body. That must be it. Its youth, the salt. The body and the restlessness worked hand in glove. They were screaming in me, breaking me in two.

  I used a small mirror to examine my body, to examine the details of its private parts. I listened to my body carefully. I heard its trouble, its disturbance. It had been trying to capture something, a foreign touch, to soothe its anxiety, but in vain. The body demanded to break away from its ruler, the mind. It was angry. It drove me to where I did not want to go: I had begun having thoughts about men. I dreamed of being touched by many hands. I was disgusted with myself.

  It was violent. My body was in hunger. I could not make it collaborate with me. I tossed all night, loneliness wrapped me, anxiety distressed me. I lay on my back, as if stretched on prison bars. My hands all over my body, I did not know how to gain back peace. I could feel a monster growing inside, a monster of desire. It grew bigger each day, pushing my other organs aside. I was defenseless. I could see no way out. The mosquito net was a grave with a little spoiled air. Feeling wounded, I could not cry. I had to guard myself because no one else cried in the room. Had my roommates nothing in common with me? The mosquitoes bit me. I looked for them. They parked in the corners of the net. They were fat and clumsy after bloodsucking. I aimed, clapped. The mosquito flew away. I waited, chased, waited, aimed again and attacked. I clapped one. It lay flat in my hand, bloody and sticky. The mosquito’s blood. My blood. I chased mosquitoes every night. Pinched them all to death. Bloody spots on the net pronounced my success. I played with long-legged mosquitoes. I admired the creatures’ elegance. I would allow one to land on my knee and watch it as it bit me. I watched it insert its tiny strawlike mouth into my skin, feeling its bite. I let it suck, suck to its satisfaction. Then I pinched it with two fingers, firm, and watched its dark brown blood drip.

  The killing of mosquitoes didn’t put my mind to rest. My mind was no longer the mind I knew. It was no longer the perfect stainless mind. I began to have thoughts of those disgraced girls, the girls of my middle-school years. As a head of the class, I was assigned to sit by them for semesters to help them get on the right track. I was supposed to correct them and influence them. Though it was never explained to me what was wrong with them, it was known that they were called “La-Sai”—a slang word which indicated that the girls had done shameful things with men and were condemned by those who were moral. These girls had no self-respect. They were called “porcelain with scars.” No one wanted them. They looked forward to no future. They had no future. They were garbage. Placing them next to me showed the generosity of the Communist Party. The Party abandoned no sinners. The Party saved them. I represented the Party.

  Sitting next to these girls for seven years, I learned how their hearts were chewed by shame. I learned to never put myself in their position, to stay clear of men. I looked up to the model women the society praised. The heroines in the revolutionary operas had neither husbands nor lovers. The heroine in my life, Yan, did not seem to have anything to do with men either. Did she too feel restless? How did she feel about her body? Recently, she seemed more serious than before. She stopped giving speeches at the meetings. She put on a long face and it remained cloudy all week. I saw her trying to talk to Little Green. Little Green reacted weirdly. She played with reeds or the buttons on Yan’s uniform absentmindedly. She laughed hysterically. Yan looked painfully confused. She shook Little Green’s shoulders. She begged her to listen. But she was talking to a vegetable.

  Late in the evening after I finished sharpening my sickle, I went back to my room and sat by Little Green. My roommates were all busy. Like silkworms spinning silk, they were knitting sweaters, bags and scarfs. No one talked.

  I went to sit in my net and closed the curtain. I looked at the net ceilings. Loneliness penetrated me. I was no different from the cow I had been working with. I told myself to bear with life. Every day we were steamed by the sun, kneeling on the hard land, planting cottonseeds and cutting the reeds. It dulled me. My mind had become rusted. It seemed not to be functioning. It produced no thoughts when the body sweat hard. It floated in whiteness. The brain was shrinking in salt, drying under the sun.

  The cottonseeds we planted climbed out of the soil, like premature creatures with wild reeds all around them. When they first sprouted, they looked like little men with brown caps. They were cute in the early morning, but by noon they were devastated by the bare sunshine and many of them died in the evening before the fog brought them moisture. When they died or began to die, the brown caps fell on the ground and the little men bent sadly. The ones that survived stretched and grew taller. They struggled on for another day. In a week these caps came off and the little men’s heads split themselves in half. These were the first two leaves of the plants. At Red Fire Farm they never grew to be what was expected of them, because the crazy bully reeds sucked all the water and fertilizer. The reeds spread out their arms and took all the sunshine. The cotton plants would bend to the side; they lived in the shadow of the reeds. Their flowers were pitiful. They looked like pinkish-faced widows. The fruit—the cotton bolls they finally bore—were stiff nuts, thin, crooked, chewed by insects, hiding in the hearts of the plants. It was cotton of the lowest quality. Not even qualified to be rated. If some did qualify, the cotton was rated four. We would pick the bolls and put them into bags and ship them to a paper-making factory instead of a fabric-making factory.

  I felt as if I were one of those stiff nuts. Instead of growing, I was shrinking. I resisted the shrinking. I turned to Orchid. I was thirsty. Orchid was eager to make friends with me. She invited me to sit on her bed. She chatted about patterns for knitting. She talked nonstop. She told me that it was her fourth time knitting the same sweater. She showed me the details of the patterns and said once she finished it, she would take it apart and reknit it, using the same yarn over. She said knitting was her biggest pleasure in life. She must knit. Nothing else interested her. She fixed her eyes on the needles. She did not go beyond that. Her moving fingers reminded me of a cricket chewing grass. I stared at the yarn being eaten, inch by inch. I suggested we talk about something else—for example, opera. She refused to hear me. She kept talking while her hands were busy working on the sweater. The cricket chewed the yarn, inch by inch, hour after hour, day in, day out. I began to talk about the opera. I sang “Let’s Learn from the Green Pine Tree on Top of the Tai Mountain.” Orchid dozed off. She slid down into her net. She snored, loudly. She made me want to murder her. Imagining this was how I would have to live the rest of my life drowned me in madness.

  I saw Yan setting out alone for the fields in the late evenings carrying a jar. One day in heavy fog I decided to follow her. I waited in the sea of reeds. She came, carrying a brown-colored jar. Sh
e sought something at the root of the reeds. She was trying to catch poisonous water snakes. She was quick and nimble. She put the snakes in the jar. I followed her. Mile after mile. Led by the myths she radiated. I hid and smelled the reeds, the sea, the fog and the night. I followed her the next day. Miles in the reeds. My sleep got better. I was curious about Yan’s intention, her reason for risking her life to catch the snakes.

  It had poured all day. We were ordered to wait in the room until the sky cleared up. As I sat, I prayed to the god of weather to have the rain last as long as possible. Only when it rained were we allowed to rest. When it did rain, I would be so relieved. I would run out of the room, raise up my face, stretch my arms toward the sky to feel, to taste and to say thank you to the rain. I would let the rain pour on my face, sink into my hair, go down my neck, waist, legs, my toes.

  As I sat by the window, I got lost in my thoughts, staring at the willow tree. The rain turned to mao-mao-yu—“cow-hair rain,” as the peasants called it. I stared at a window opposite mine. It was the window of the room of the company heads. Yan’s window. The window intrigued me. I often wondered how the people lived behind that window. I knew them well in uniforms but not in their mosquito nets. What about their nights? Were any of their nights like mine?

  The opposite window opened. I backed myself into my net. I watched through the curtain. It was the commander. She stuck an arm out. She was feeling the rain. She raised her chin toward the gray sky. Her eyes shut. She held that pose. It was such a private pose. Between her and the sky. Was she feeling the same way I was feeling: lonely and depressed? After Little Green went mad, my worship for Yan had turned sour. My sorrow for Little Green had transformed itself into anger toward Yan. I decided that Yan was no longer worth my respect. She was the murderer, although so was I. But she did it intentionally, and that was unforgivable. I executed her decision. Yet there was a stubbornness that grew inside of me. I found myself refusing to think that Yan was not worthy of my respect. For some strange reason I felt that I still needed Yan to be my heroine. I must have a heroine to worship, to follow, to act as a mirror. It was how I was taught to live. I needed it the same way Orchid needed knitting, to survive, to get by.

  I developed a desire to conquer Yan. More truthfully, to conquer myself, because Yan symbolized my faith. I wanted her to tell me what it was that drove her to take such cruel action against Little Green; I wanted to tear away her Party secretary’s mask, to see what was inside her head. I wanted her to surrender. I was obsessed.

  She suddenly turned toward my direction and stopped. She saw me staring at her. She put a finger into her mouth and whistled, Yan, the commander, whistled to order everyone to get back to work in the fields. She whistled. She drove away my thoughts. She closed the window without a wave of her hand, a word, a nod, a hint of anything.

  The rain had stopped. The sky was loaded with heavy dark clouds. The clouds looked as if they were about to fall upon our heads. The clothes I put out to dry before going to bed were wet and muddy. I took them down from the string and put them on, then dragged myself to the field.

  We were transplanting rice shoots. We worked for three hours without a break. I was working the edge of the field and noticed a trace of blood in the muddy water. I tracked the blood and found Orchid down on her knees in the water, her pants bloody red. Orchid always had problems with her period. It could last for half a month, bleeding her to exhaustion. She told me that she hadn’t understood what her period was when it first came. She felt too ashamed to ask anyone for advice. She stuffed unsterilized clothes into her pants. The blood was blocked but she got an infection. I asked her why she hadn’t told her mother or a friend about it. She said her mother was in a labor camp and her friend knew even less than she. Her friend was not sure whether Chairman Mao was a man or a woman.

  I asked Orchid why she had not asked the platoon leader for a day off. She said she did. She was rejected. The head sent her to Lu, and Lu said that the transplanting had to be completed by midnight or we would lose the season. I told Orchid that I thought Lu was an armchair revolutionary who demanded other people be Marxists when she herself was a revisionist. Orchid disagreed. She said Lu was tough on herself too. She said that Lu had never taken a day off when her period came. Orchid said Lu had serious cramps every time. Orchid once saw Lu crying and twisting on the toilet because of the pain. I did not know what to say. I told Orchid that I would help her as soon as I finished with my own planting.

  The rain started again and got heavier. I worked fast so I could go to help Orchid. My arms and fingers were moving as if they were not mine. Standing to stretch my back, I noticed Yan a few plots away. She moved like a dancer: passing the rice shoots from left hand to right and inserting the shoots into the mud in perfect time with her steps backward. Her wet clothes were pasted to her body.

  I did my best to compete. Yan responded to the challenge. She toyed with me, like a cat does with mice. She sped up and I fell far behind; she then suddenly slowed down to allow me to catch up, before surging ahead again. She finished with one plot, then went to the next without turning her head.

  The sky turned darker. A loudspeaker broadcast Mao quotation songs. The soldiers were exhausted like plants whipped by a storm. Two huge bright lights were carried to the fields and steamed bread was brought out. The soldiers crawled toward the breadbaskets. Lu stopped us. She yelled, No dinner until the work is completed. Our stomachs had begun to chew themselves. But we dared not talk back to Lu, the deputy of the Party secretary. We feared her. Then there was the commander’s voice. A voice of thunder: What kind of fool are you? Doesn’t your common sense tell you that man is the engine when food is his fuel? Yan waved her arm as if to shovel us to the bread. Go now, she shouted. We ran like pigs to the trough.

  Orchid was in tears when I finally went to help her, and a long way behind. We chewed our bread while we planted the shoots. We finished at ten o’clock. Orchid thanked me, crying with relief. She said her mother would have wanted to kill herself if she had witnessed this. In frustration I told Orchid to shut up. I said if Yan could do this, so could we. We were not the only ones who were living this type of life. There were hundreds and thousands of youths in the same shoes. Orchid nodded. She used her sleeve to wipe off her tears. I was sorry for her. I did not like her pitifulness. As I dragged her out of the fields, a meeting was called.

  One of the lights was being moved to the plot where we had worked; millions of mosquitoes swarmed into its ray. Lu shouted for attention. She wanted to talk about the quality of the day’s work. She passed the loudspeaker to Yan. Yan was coated with mud. Only her eyes were sparkling. She ordered for the light to be moved to illuminate a particular spot where dozens of rice shoots were floating on the water. The work was poorly done all the way to the edge of the field. Someone did a nice job here, Yan said sarcastically. The shoots will all be dead before daybreak. She wanted us to look at the dying shoots. To look hard. She said the shoots were her babies.

  The soldiers began to survey the fields nervously. The word broke out that the section responsible for the careless planting was platoon number four—our territory. I knew it was the area I had worked as I tried to keep up with Yan.

  Lu ordered the person responsible to step out of rank and receive public criticism. Orchid sensed my fear and grabbed my hand tightly. Lu said, No one leaves until the mistake is admitted.

  As I gathered my courage and was about to step out, Yan suddenly said that she preferred to let the comrade correct his own mistake.

  The fields had become quiet in the moonlight. The drizzle had stopped and the air was still. The insects resumed their nightclub singing. The fragrance of the plants wafted over me. The moon moved out of the clouds. I planted my feet in the mud and began to redo the work. My feet were swelling. I sang a Mao quotation song to fight off sleep.

  I’ve made up my mind

  Not to fear death.

  Overcoming all the difficulties,

  I strive
for victory.

  I’ve made up my mind …

  The sky was piled with orange clouds when I awoke. The sun had yet to rise. I lay in the mud, joints sore, knowing I hadn’t finished the work. The thought of having to resume my work brought pain to my back. Leeches parked on my legs. I had no energy to pat them off. They sucked my blood until they were satisfied and fell off. I was in despair. Yet I knew there was no way to escape. I had to finish my work. I had no guts to face the Party’s abandonment. I feared being disgraced.

  I forced myself to sit up. I looked around and thought I was dreaming. My work had been done. It had been done all the way to the edges. I looked toward the sun. There was someone. Someone about thirty yards away, pacing the field.

  My tears welled up, because I saw Yan. She was pacing in the sun. She was the sun. My cold heart warmed.

  I stood up and walked toward her.

  She turned around, hearing me approach.

  I stopped in front of her. I could not say anything.

  She nodded at me, then bent down to finish the last few patches. She washed her hands in the irrigation channel. She saw the leeches on my legs and told me to pat them off. She said that Orchid came to her last night and told her everything. She said she was pleased that I stayed all night in the fields. She said I did what I was supposed to do. She unknotted her braids, bent and washed them in the channel. She squeezed the water from her hair and flung her head. She combed her hair with her fingers and braided it. She said when she had found me I looked like a big turtle. She thought I had fainted or something. She paused and said that I made her feel guilty, because I could have caught a disease like arthritis. It would be the Party’s loss if I did.

  I rubbed my eyes, trying to look fresh.

  She looked me in the eye, a thread of a smile on her face. She said she guessed that I was strong-willed. She said she liked strong-willed people. She looked at the sun for a while. She said, I want you to be the leader of platoon number four. She would arrange to move me to her room so that I could discuss problems with the company heads. She then walked quickly back toward the barracks.