Red Azalea Page 7

  I stood in the sunshine, feeling, feeling the rising of a hope.

  I moved in with Yan and six other platoon heads. Yan and I shared a bunk bed. I occupied the top. The decoration in Yan’s net was a display of Mao buttons, pinned on red-colored cloth, about a thousand different kinds of them, from different historical stages. I was impressed. Yan put them up during the day and took them down at night. The room was the same size as the room I had lived in before. It served as a bedroom, conference room and makeshift dining room. It was also a battlefront. Although Yan was officially in charge and Lu was her deputy, Lu wanted much more. She wanted Yan’s position. She was obsessed. She called meetings without agendas. We had to obey her. We had to sit through her meetings in our drowsiness. She liked to see people obey her. To feel powerful was a drug she needed. Only in meetings could she feel that she was as in control of other people’s lives as she was with her own. She made warnings and threats at the meetings. She enjoyed our fear. She aimed at all our possible mistakes. She waited, had been waiting, for a precise moment, to catch a mistake and beat it into submission. She had been trying to catch Yan. Her incorrectness. I could tell that she would have pushed Yan off a cliff if she had a chance.

  Lu’s full name was Ice Lu. She was the daughter of a revolutionary martyr. Her father was killed by the Nationalists in Taiwan. He was murdered when carrying out a secret assignment. Her mother suffered this loss to her death. She died three days after giving birth. It was a terrible winter. Strong wind, like scissors, cut through the skin. She named her baby Ice. Ice was raised under the Party’s special care. She grew up in an orphanage funded by the Party leaders. Like Yan, she was also a founder of the Red Guards. She had gone to visit Mao’s hometown in Hunan, where she had eaten leaves from the same tree Mao had eaten when besieged and pinned down in the valley by the Nationalists some thirty years ago.

  Lu showed me a skull she had discovered in the backyard of a house in Hunan. She said it was a Red Army martyr’s skull. She pointed to a hole on the forehead of the skull and told me that it was a bullet hole. She fondled the skull with her fingers, going in and out of the eyeholes, touching its jaws. The strange expression on her face caught my breath. She told me that an old village lady buried the martyr secretly. Twenty years later the skull had risen above the soil. The old lady dug it out and gave it to Lu when she learned that her father had been a martyr too. Lu often thought it could have been her own father’s skull.

  I stared at the skull, trying to comprehend its attractiveness to Lu. Maybe the threatening spirit? Maybe the coldness that only death could carry? Lu had a look that matched her name. Her look was chilly. Her enthusiasm did not feel warm. She spoke slowly, pronouncing each syllable clearly. She had a long face, the shape of a peanut. Her expression was determined and judgmental. Her features were located evenly on her face. Slanting eyes, icy, like a painted ancient beauty. But her beauty was ruined by her forever-correctness. Her half-moon-shaped eyes were no longer warm and sweet to the soldiers. Our respect for her was that of mice for a cat.

  Lu liked action. She did not know hesitation. She attacked and invaded. It was her style to catch and chop. Stand by, aim and shoot, as she always like to say. But that did not impress me. On the contrary, it distanced me. She had a fixed mind. A mind full of dead thoughts. She observed me. In coldness. In suspicion. It started the moment I moved in. Her smile carried warnings. She gave me a copy of her Mao study notes. Her handwriting was extremely square. I wished my calligraphy was like hers, but her writing bored me. Her mind was a propaganda machine. It had no engine of its own. I told her so when she asked me for an opinion. I did not say her mind was a propaganda machine, but I suggested she oil the engine of her mind. She said she liked my frankness. She said people had been telling her lies. She was lied to by a bunch of hypocrites. She hated hypocrites. She said the country was filled with hypocrites. The Party in many respects was run by hypocrites. She said it was her duty to fight against hypocrisy. She would spend the rest of her life correcting the incorrect. She asked me to join the battle. I did not fully understand what she meant, but I did not say so. I said, Yes, of course. Hypocrites were bad in any case. She asked, Do you smell hypocrites in our room?

  Our roommates came back after dining. They were singing and joking. They joked about how they punished those lazybones, the ones who refused to be content with their lives as peasants. The roommates quieted down when they heard Lu’s speaking about hypocrites. One after another, like fish, they shuttled into their own nets. There were sounds of groping. It reminded me of vampires in graves chewing human bodies.

  Lu continued speaking. It was like a theatrical performance. As a daughter of a revolution martyr, I’ll never forget how my forefathers shed their blood and laid down their lives for the victory of the revolution, said Lu. I’ll never fail to live up to their expectations. I hope that all of you, my comrades-in-arms, will supervise my behavior. I welcome any criticism you have for me in the future. The Party is my mother and you’re all my family.

  She tried to be a living opera heroine, but I would never see her that way.

  I had a hard time imagining how Lu could sleep nose-to-nose with that skull every night. I began to have nightmares after I figured out that the skull was right next to my bed, since my bed and Lu’s were connected to each other. I dared not complain. My instinct told me not to, because I was sure Lu would take my complaint as an insult. How could I afford to be quoted as someone who was afraid of a martyr’s skull?

  Lu watched everyone and recorded her observations in her red-plastic notebook. She made monthly reports to headquarters. I have learned my political skills from my family, she often said. Once she proudly told us about her family: Her adopted parents were Party secretaries in the military; her adopted sister and two brothers were Party secretaries at universities and factories. All her relatives had the honor of staying in private hospitals when they were sick. Their rooms were next to the prime minister’s.

  Lu made political dunce caps. She would always single out one person to wear it at meetings. She always had her way. Phrases from Red Flag magazine and the People’s Daily dropped out of her mouth like a waterfall. She reminded me of how it would be if sheep were living with a wolf. She told me one day that a mirror was a symbol of self-love—a bourgeois extra. I dared not argue back. I said, Of course, and hid my little mirror inside my pillow cover. I knew Lu could make me a reactionary if she wanted. She had already made a number of people reactionaries. She sent them to work at jobs like blasting a mountain to make rice paddies, or digging up earth to make an underground channel. She arranged for their lives to be forfeited. Those who survived resembled Little Green. No one escaped from paying the price if they talked back to Lu. I feared Lu so much.

  Strange enough, on the other hand, Lu tried hard to impress the soldiers by washing our clothes and sharpening our sickles and hoes. She visited each room every night, tucking in our blankets, making sure that no one left an arm or leg out to catch cold. She would send her entire salary anonymously to a comrade’s sick parents. She did that often. She was greatly praised. Lu liked to say, I don’t mind being the cloth used to wipe the greasiest corner of the kitchen for the Communist Party. She was good at saying things like that. We said we appreciated her caring. We had to. We put words of praise down on the monthly report to be sent to headquarters. That was what Lu wanted from us. The soldiers knew this by heart.

  She pointed out Yan’s incorrectness whenever possible. She said Yan was too soft on brain reformation, too loose on the company’s budget, too impatient in conducting the company’s Mao study seminar. Yan fought back angrily, but she was a poor mouth fighter. She was not Lu’s rival. She spoke incoherently. In desperation, she would curse. Swear word after swear word, all kinds—Spoiled rice shoot, pig ass, mating worm, etc. Lu enjoyed seeing Yan in awkward predicaments. She liked to push her into a verbal corner and beat her hard. She attacked her ruthlessly. She showed the company that Yan was uncivili
zed, only capable of swearing. She then would say, Why don’t we report the case upstairs and let them decide who’s right and who’s wrong? Always, Yan would give up, withdraw, because she did not want to ruin her image as a secretary of a “well-united Party branch,” as Lu well knew.

  Lu knew that I was a fan of operas. She used to ask me to sing a piece or two during field breaks. She said it soothed her addiction. I sang loudly. I called up my platoon to sing with me. Lu enjoyed it. We both did. But things changed after the Little Green incident. I could no longer sing anything. When Lu asked me to sing again, I could not put myself in the mood. I tried and my mind was full of Little Green’s voice singing “My Motherland.” My eyes would go to Little Green, who like a silent spirit floated in and out of the fields and rooms. The soldiers took turns taking care of her. We tried to hide the truth from her family. We imitated her handwriting and wrote to her grandmother. Our trick did not last. Her grandmother recognized the fake handwriting. She wrote to the Party committee of the company demanding to be told the truth. She said if she had not been restricted (she was put in a detention house where she was considered an enemy) she would have come to check Little Green out herself immediately. Yan took the time to write her back. I proofread the letter to polish Yan’s grammar and tone. It was a hard letter to write. Yan tried to explain what had happened. I could see Yan struggle through the writing. She did not really explain. She could not. She could not say we were the ones who had murdered her granddaughter. Yan said Little Green was very ill. She was suffering a mental distraction. But she was in good hands now. She had been taken care of. The farm had been looking for new medicine and treatment for her. It was a weak letter. It expressed nothing but guilt. It asked the grandmother to keep the big picture in mind, to see that it was just one incident. Hundreds and thousands of youths were assigned to the countryside by the Party. “Certain sacrifice is required when working with stamina for the prosperity of the country”—Yan ended the letter by quoting Mao.

  Yan looked exhausted. Blue ink was on her fingers and lips. I made a clean copy of her letter and gave it back to her. She went to the farm’s headquarters to get a stamp and mail it. That night she said to me, When I die, I will be sliced into pieces by the demons in hell. She said she could see it clearly now.

  Lu told me that I was a good sprout. Worthy enough to be selected as one of her “pillars of the state.” Her slogan-talk got on my nerves. I disliked it. Superficiality pervaded her speech. She tried to dominate everything. Many times she demonstrated her political and ideological expertise in meetings by giving long dissertations on the history of the Party. She wanted to be admired so much. She did it to remind Yan that Yan had none of the skills required of a leader. She succeeded in embarrassing her. I saw Yan’s awkwardness. She sat in the corner, rubbing her hands. Frustrated. I felt sorry for Yan. It made me like her more. I liked her awkwardness. I adored her clumsiness.

  Neither the headquarters heads nor the soldiers were responding to Lu’s exhibited leader’s skills. Seasons passed and Lu was still where she had always been. Although Lu did not like to deal with frustration, she was a good fighter. She picked more fights with Yan, pointed out her imperfections in front of the ranks. Yan became even more furious. She wanted to eat Lu up. It took me a half month to figure out the words Yan had muttered when insulted by Lu. She called Lu a mother of fart. When Lu wished to extend a meeting in order to sharpen the soldiers’ minds, Yan said, Let’s sharpen the hoes first. Lu said, You’re going to get crushed in a blind alley if you only pay attention to pushing your cart forward without watching which track you’re on. Yan said dryly, Let’s get crushed. Lu said, As you make your bed, so you must lie on it. Yan said, Damn. I should do something to sharpen my teeth.

  I often felt that Lu had more than two eyes when she watched or spoke with me. Lu once said that she would like to cultivate me to join her special advanced activist study team. I did not say that I was not interested, but I must have betrayed disinterest. She said she was greatly disappointed. I said I would do my best to stay close to her team. I promised to borrow her Mao study notes. She said she knew my reason for not joining her. She said it was bad to live under someone’s shadow. She said she would hate to leave a stone in her shoes. She said if one did not come to her political senses, one would lose her political future.

  Though it was important for me to look noble to my troops, I made my choice to ignore Lu’s warning. I felt that I must stand by Yan. By supporting Yan, I would cast myself as the lesser of two evils in a bad play. I never wanted to be a soldier at the Red Fire Farm. I felt like a slave. Yan was my reason, my faith to go on. Yan made me feel at least that we were achieving something, the impossible, as it now seemed, but it was still something.

  To make Yan proud, I assigned the hardest tasks to our platoon—applying manure, taking night shifts, digging canals. I told my soldiers that my ambition was to make the platoon well-known in the company so everyone would have the best chance to be considered for membership in the Communist Youth League. The soldiers believed in me. Orchid even quit her knitting. By the end of the year, my platoon was selected as the Vanguard Platoon and was given a citation at the entire farm meeting. I was accepted into the Communist Youth League.

  At the oath ceremony Yan walked onstage to congratulate me. She shook my hands and squeezed them in her carrotlike fingers. Laughing, she whispered that she could not wait to have me join the Party. She said that I must become a Party member. She said, I could make it happen to you next spring. She said she would like to see it happen very much. I was excited. I could not say a word. I squeezed her hands back, hard. For many nights afterward, before going to sleep, I replayed the ceremony in my head. I dreamt of Yan’s laughing. I realized how much I liked it.

  After the busy summer season ended, the soldiers were allowed a little time for themselves after dinner. The spare time made me feel empty in the heart. I missed Little Green terribly. I would comb her hair and wash her clothes, but although her body was getting back to its original shape—she was once again slim like a willow—her mind seemed to have gone forever. Nothing I tried made her respond to me. She still wore the shirt with the plum flowers on it—the one she had on the night she got caught—but it had holes under the armpits and elbows. The shirt reminded me of the night—I’ll never forget it—when I had my gun pointed at her. I did not know how other people were living with this guilt, if there was any guilt. No one talked about it. The company pretended it had never happened. Little Green was given light jobs working as a storage guard and was given coupons for sugar and meat. Yan was strange in the way she treated Little Green. She grabbed her and gazed into her eyes. She observed her anxiously. She tried to talk to Little Green when everyone else had quit a long time ago.

  Little Green had become dangerous to herself. Once I caught her swallowing tiny stones. Orchid also caught her eating worms. I reported the incidents to Yan. From then on I often saw Yan follow Little Green around the fields late in the evening. They were like two lost boats drifting over the sea in a dense fog.

  Yan still went to catch the poisonous snakes. And I still followed her. Her secretiveness and my curiosity became the melody of the farm’s night.

  I began to dislike going into my mosquito net. It was too quiet. I avoided my bed and walked on a narrow path through the reeds. As the daylight faded, I found myself at the farm’s brick factory. Thousands of ready-to-bake bricks were laid out in patterns. Some stacks were eight feet high, some leaning as if about to fall, and some had already fallen. I could hear the echo of my own steps. The place had the feel of ancient ruins.

  One day there was another sound among the bricks, like the noise of an erhu, a two-stringed banjo. I picked out the melody—“Liang and Zhu”—from a banned opera; my grandmother used to hum it. Liang and Zhu were two ancient lovers who committed suicide because of their unpermitted love. The music now playing described how the two lovers were transformed into butterflies and met in the spring
again. It surprised me to hear someone on the farm able to play it with such skill.

  I followed the sound. It stopped. I heard steps. A shadow ducked by the next lane. I tailed it and found the erhu on a brick stool. I looked around. No one. Wind whistled through the patterned bricks. I bent over to pick up the instrument, when my eyes were suddenly covered by a pair of hands from behind.

  I tried to remove the hands. Fingers combatted. The hands were forceful. I asked, Who is this? and there was no reply. I reached back to tickle. The body behind me giggled. A hot breath on my neck. Yan? I cried out.

  She stood in front of me, smiling. She held the erhu. You, was it you? You play erhu? I looked at her. She nodded, did not say anything. Though I still could not make my mind connect the image of the commander with the erhu player, I felt a sudden joy. The joy of a longing need met. A lonely feeling shared, and turned into inspiration. In my mind, I saw peach-colored petals descend like snow and bleach the landscape. Distant valleys and hills melted into one. Everything wrapped in purity.

  She sat down on the stool and motioned me to sit next to her. She kept smiling and said nothing. I wanted to tell her that I had not known she played erhu, to tell her how beautifully she played, but I was afraid to speak.

  She picked up the erhu and the bow, retuned the strings, bent her head toward the instrument and closed her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she stroked the instrument with the bow—she started to play “The River.”

  The music became a surging river in my head. I could hear it run through seas and mountains, urged on by the winds and clouds, tumbling over cliffs and waterfalls, gathered by rocks and streaming into the ocean. I was taken by her as she was taken by the music. I felt her true self through the erhu. I was awakened. By her. In a strange land, faced by a self I had not gotten to know and the self I was surprised, yet so glad, to meet.