Red Azalea Read online

  Her fingers ran up and down the strings, creating sounds like rain dropping on banana leaves. Then her fingers stopped, and she held her breath. Her fingertips touched and then stayed on the string. The bow pulled. A thread of notes was born, telling of an untold bitterness. Slowly, she vibrated the string. Fingers dipped out sad syllables. She stroked the bow after a pause, the notes were violent. She raised her head, eyes closed and chin tilted up. The image before me became fragmented: the Party secretary, the heroine, the murderer, and the beautiful erhu player …

  She played “Horse Racing,” “The Red Army Brother Is Coming Back,” and finally “Liang and Zhu” again.

  We talked. A conversation I had never before had. We told each other our life stories. In our eagerness to express ourselves we overlapped each other’s sentences.

  She said her parents were textile workers. Her mother had been honored as a Glory Mother in the fifties for producing nine children. Yan was the eighth. The family lived in the Long Peace district of Shanghai, where they shared one wood-framed room and shared a well with twenty other families. They had no toilet, only a nightstool. It was her responsibility to take the nightstool to a public sewage depot every morning and clean the stool. I told her that we lived in better conditions. We had a toilet, though we shared it with two other families, fourteen people. She said, Oh yes, I can imagine your morning traffic. We laughed.

  I asked where she had learned to play erhu. She said her parents were fans of folk music. It was her family tradition that each member had to master at least one instrument. Everyone in her family had a specialty, in lute, erhu, sheng with reed pipes and trumpet. She was a thin girl when she was young, so she chose to learn erhu. She identified with its vertical lines. Her parents saved money and bought her the instrument for her tenth birthday. The family invited a retired erhu player to dinner every weekend and asked him to drop a few comments on the erhu. The family hoped that Yan would one day become a famous erhu player.

  She was fifteen years old when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. She joined the Red Guards and marched to Beijing to be inspected by Chairman Mao at Tienanmen Square. As the youngest Red Guard representative, she was invited to watch an opera, newly created by Madam Mao, Jiang Ching, at the People’s Great Hall. She liked the three-inch-wide belts the performers were wearing. She traded her best collection of Mao buttons for a belt. She showed me her belt. It was made of real leather and had a copper buckle. It was designed by Comrade Jiang Ching, my heroine, she said. Have you read Mao’s books? she asked. Yes, I did, I said, all of them. She said, That’s wonderful, because that’s what I did too. I memorized the Little Red Book and know every quotation song.

  I told her that I was a Red Guard since elementary school, my experience much less glorious than hers, though I would not be fooled about how much one knew about Mao quotation songs. She smiled and asked me to give her a test. I asked if she could tell where I sang.

  The Party runs its life by good policies …

  Page seven, second paragraph! she said.

  If the broom doesn’t come, the garbage won’t automatically go away …

  Page ten, first paragraph!

  We came from the countryside …

  Page a hundred forty-six, third paragraph!

  The world is yours …

  Page two hundred sixty-three, first paragraph!

  Studying Chairman Mao’s works, we must learn to be efficient. We should apply his teachings to our problems to ensure a fast result …

  She joined my singing.

  As when we erect a bamboo stick in the sunshine, we see the shadow right away …

  Where are we? I shouted.

  Vice Chairman Lin Biao’s Preface for Mao Quotations, second edition! she shouted back, and we laughed, so happily.

  We were still talking when we reached the barracks. We stood in the dark, filled with incredible delight. Be careful, she said. I nodded and understood: avoid Lu’s attention. We took separate paths and went back to our room.

  I could not sleep that night. The room and the mosquito net felt very different from yesterday. Yan did not speak to me in the room, but there was life and fresh air. I felt spring. The growth of the reeds underneath the bed for the first time became tolerable. I thought I would like the green in the room. Would Yan? She was in the bunk beneath me. There was so much that I wanted to share with her. But I dared not talk to her. Lu’s bed was next to ours. We, eight people, sleeping in one room, compartmented by mosquito nets.

  Lu would be jealous of us, of our delight. I felt sorry for her. I wished I could be her friend. It was sad that the only thing she was close to was the skull. I felt sympathy for her for the first time. It was a funny feeling. What made me care for Lu? Yan? Lu was two years older than Yan. She was twenty-five. She wanted so much. She wanted to control our lives. What was she doing with her youth? Wrinkles had climbed on her face. Soon she would be thirty, and forty, and she would still be at Red Fire Farm. She said she loved the farm and would never leave. I wondered how anyone could love this farm. A farm that produced nothing but weeds and reeds. A complete darkness. A hell. Lu spoke no truth. She did not know how. Did she have feelings? Feelings that Yan and I shared tonight? She must have. She was young and healthy. But who dared to be dear to her? Who truly cared for her besides flattering her for her power? Whom would she be sharing her feelings with? Would she marry? What a funny thought to think of Lu being married. Men in the company were afraid of her. They yielded to her, accepted her dominance. Men surrendered before they faced her. The shadow of her appearance chased men away. They treated her like a poster on a wall. They showed her their admiration but framed her on their mind’s wall. I saw loneliness in Lu’s eyes. The eyes that stared into fields on rainy days. The eyes of thirst.

  Lu went to bed late. She sat on a wooden stool studying Mao’s works. Every night she practiced this ritual. She took about ten pages of notes each night. She was the last one to go to bed and the first to get up. She cleaned the room and the hall. I love to serve the people, she liked to say. She quoted Mao’s teaching when she was praised. She would say, I did only what the Chairman taught me. She would recite, It is not hard for a person to do a couple of good things for others; it is hard for a person to spend his entire life doing good things for others.

  I found Lu’s behavior frightening. Her rigidness exposed her single-minded ambition for power. I became more careful, more polite toward her. I selected words carefully when I spoke with her. We talked around each other. She tried to grasp the core of my mind. She knew that neither of us could control the other. She was displeased. Lu sensed my intimacy with Yan immediately, like a dog to a smell. She came to me one day after work and said, I know why you have been looking excited, you are such a thief. I said, I don’t understand what you mean. She smiled and nodded. She told me to go on duty to inspect the soldiers’ suitcases room by room. She went with me. She told me to rummage about the articles to look for obscenity. As we were walking back to our room after duty, she said suddenly, Do you remember what you said last night? I almost stumbled over a rock. She hit my guilty conscience. I said, How would I know whether I had said anything? I was sleeping—how could I know? But you know, I just heard it, she said with an insidious smile. Just heard it, she repeated. Her words felt like bugs climbing up my back.

  Lu opened the door to let me in first, then she followed in and closed the door. Tell me, what’s been on your mind? She looked at me as if I were a fly and she were a spider, as if we fought in the net she weaved. I said, I’ve got to go wash my clothes. I haven’t had clean clothes to wear for a week. I must hurry because I have a platoon meeting to hold. She looked at me, my dirty clothes, my bare feet. She said, I thought you were a sincere person. I said, I am a sincere person. She said, But not to me. I want you to be aware of your growing sophistication. You’re losing your purity. The purity which I saw when I first picked you in Shanghai. Remember what I told you about what I liked about you? Remember, I
had asked you to keep what’s good in you? I said I had been keeping the goodness and would keep that but now I had to wash my clothes. She stepped back to let me walk through the door. Don’t pretend that you don’t understand me, she said. If you sincerely want to become a member of our Party, it won’t do you any good if you refuse to be honest with me.

  As I washed my clothes, I thought about how easily Lu could destroy me by making false reports and dropping ambiguous words into my dossier, which only the Party bosses had access to. Words that could bury me alive. Words that once in the dossier would never be changed. They would follow me even after death. The dossier determines who I am and who I will be. It would be the only image of me the Party considered real and trustworthy.

  As the Party secretary, Yan had the power to do the same as Lu, to manipulate people. But Yan never liked to play tricks. She believed in justice, no matter how unjust her justice was to me. She tried not to give expression to a personal grudge—a principle Mao had set for every Party member. She tried not to do that to Lu, though she wanted to very much. She never added extra salt or vinegar in her reports to the headquarters. I was moved by this when I read her reports as I copied them for her. It brought me closer to her. I saw no such quality in Lu. Lu often volunteered to work longer hours in the fields doing all the good things anyone could think of, but she would never forgive anyone who had stepped on her toes by disagreeing with her at meetings or disobeying her orders. I’ll pinch him like pinching a bug if anyone has the guts to make a fool of me, she said to our faces. I’d be glad to give the enemy a taste of the iron fist of the proletarian dictatorship.

  Lu brought back a dog from the headquarters. His name was 409. 409 was a military-trained German shepherd. It was said that he could do anything. 409’s mission was to watch a pig named Tricky Head. Tricky Head, a male pig weighing almost two hundred pounds, was the company’s big headache. He was the trickiest of his group. The company did not have enough fine animal feed. The pigs were given half fine feed and half coarse grain. One day the farmhands found that a few of the bags of fine feed were gone—one of the pigs must have eaten them, but they could not figure out which one. Two days later another few bags of fine feed were gone. This time the farmhands noticed that the pigs were eating the undigested shit of Tricky Head. They suspected that Tricky Head was the thief. They targeted him and caught him in the middle of his theft. The strange thing about Tricky Head was that he had the face of a dog and he acted like a dog. He could jump out of the pen and into the grain storage and afterward, when he had enough fine feed, he would run back to the pen and pretend nothing had happened. He did not eat any less at the last feeding of the day. He was bigger than the others.

  Lu adored 409. She spent all her savings and bought the dog dry meat. She trained him and rewarded him. 409 soon became very attached to her. They would take a walk by the sea every night. Lu became more pleasant than she used to be. 409 was mean to everybody but Lu. Lu was proud of 409’s loyalty. She encouraged his meanness. She often recited one particular Mao quotation to 409. She ordered 409 to sit by her feet, then she would say, Isn’t it a key question that one must learn to be able to tell who is his friend and who is not? 409 would bark a yes to her. And he would be rewarded with a piece of dry meat. Then Lu would go on, Is it not a capital question that one must answer as a true revolutionary: Who is the people’s friend and who is not? 409 would bark again and receive another piece of meat.

  When 409 stood on his feet, he was as tall as Lu. Lu often had him walk on his back legs while he put his front legs on her shoulders. One day when Lu was out at headquarters for a meeting, 409 wailed all day. It sounded like an old woman crying. By noon he began to hit himself against the wall. Two male soldiers shut him in a pigpen and he hurled himself into the bars until they broke in half. No one could stop him until Lu got back. Seeing that the dog could not do without her, Lu broke into tears.

  409 was a terrible watchdog. The soldiers said that he must have had a past-life relationship with Tricky Head—the two animals got along the moment they met. They stared at each other uncertainly, then went to smell each other and they accepted each other. Was it because Tricky Head had the face of a dog? They sat by each other like brothers. When it came to stealing the fine feed, not only did 409 not stop Tricky Head; he helped him rake out the feed from the bags so Tricky Head could eat faster. They played in the pigpen. 409 was always excited about the sawdust. When the farmhands came, 409 put on a sincere face as if he had fought to guard the feed but failed. Yan did not like 409. She called him a traitor. She kicked him and suggested that Lu send him back to the headquarters. Lu reluctantly said yes. As if knowing Lu’s feelings, 409 went up to her and put his tongue all over her face.

  Lu begged Yan to let 409 stay. She showed Yan the dog’s file. It said that 409 had good credit in his war records. She said, Give me two weeks to train him to watch Tricky Head. I promise he’ll be as good as he was promised to be. Yan said that the fine feed was running short. The company could not afford to lose one more bag. The other pigs were going to starve. Lu took night shifts to watch the animals. 409 was still the same. Lu could not get him to behave correctly. Yan was upset and ordered Lu to send 409 away. The same day, the day when 409 was supposed to be sent, Lu caught Tricky Head stealing the fine feed. She went to Yan and said that sending the dog away was not going to stop Tricky Head. Why don’t we kill Tricky Head instead of sending the dog away? She was permitted.

  Lu had the pig killed for supper. Tricky Head was in everyone’s bowl. 409 chewed the pig bones, and afterward he went to look for Tricky Head everywhere. He smelled Tricky Head’s pen and stayed in the sawdust until Lu called him out. Lu was happy; she combed 409’s back hair with her fingers. Lu spent hours with 409, putting her whole hand in his mouth and making him do all kinds of tricks.

  Lu took 409 to local villages where he could mate. 409 was nice to the female dogs but mean to their owners. It was said that he would mate with the female dog and afterward, in expressing his pleasure, would tear the owner’s pants. He would jump on the owners, stand on his back legs, and bark. The villagers said that he woke up the dead. The villagers told Lu never to bring 409 around again. Lu just laughed. She did not know just how serious the villagers were.

  Early one evening when Lu brought 409 back from a nearby village, 409’s face was turning green. He vomited and vomited. Lu tried to feed him water and porridge, but 409 could take nothing in. I was sharpening the hoes when Yan came to me with the news. Yan said, Lu is singing an opera. I went to the grain storage where 409 usually slept. Before I saw 409, I heard Lu’s sobbing. 409 was lying in Lu’s bosom, dead. Lu sobbed like a village widow. A vet was standing next to them. Yan came and passed Lu a wet towel. As Lu wiped her face, Yan asked the vet about the poisoning. The vet said that it was in a steamed bread. The villagers did it, said Lu. They are reactionaries, she added, clenching her teeth. We must make them pay for it. Yan did not respond to her at first. After dinner when she noticed Lu was still sitting by 409, Yan said, If I were you, I wouldn’t have taken him to mate so much.

  Lu buried 409 by the river. When our platoon went to work hoeing the fields the next dawn, Lu was already at work. She had swollen eyes. I asked her if she slept well last night, and she said that she had sat by the grave the whole night. At break time she asked me to accompany her to the grave to visit 409. I went with her. I was moved by her sadness. I did not know Lu was capable of being sad. She kneeled in the mud and planted wildflowers on top of the grave. She sobbed as she was doing so. I took her up by the arms and she leaned on my shoulders. She thanked me. I wished that I could do more for her. She looked at me and said, I’ve lost my only friend, my best friend. What am I going to do? Her tone scared me. I dared not say a word. I looked at her. She stared into the fields. The wind blew her hair up from its roots. She murmured to herself, I will, I will. You will have new friends, I said. She looked at me suspiciously. You see, 409 never lied to me, she said.

&nbs
p; Lu knew I was not really saying what I meant. She knew I did not want to be her friend. I could not tell her that I was afraid of her being too capable. She had the quality of a murderer, and that was what kept me away.

  Lu and I worked shoulder-to-shoulder all day. We exchanged few words. I was thinking of Yan, her hearty laughter. Lu was quick at work. Her slim figure moved like a mountain goat on a cliff, her every move was precise and sufficient. Like a mountain goat, she had thin ankles and thin wrists. It enabled her to run faster and bend quicker. She was an ardent worker. She was a hard-liner. But to me she was like a stage light: she was bright in the dark. But when the sun rose, she lost her brightness. She faded in the sunshine, and Yan was the sun.

  Yan and I betrayed no intimacy in public. We silently washed each other’s clothes and took trips to fill hot-water containers for each other. We became accustomed to each other’s eye signals. Every couple of days we would go separately to meet at the brick factory. Yan would make excuses such as checking the quality of the day’s work. I would take the thickest Mao book and my notebook and pretend to find a place to study by myself. We shuttled through the reeds, hand in hand. She taught me how to make whistles with reeds. She would roll up a piece of reed to make a green trumpet. She told me to blow when she blew hers. We made music of the reeds, of the evening. We messed with each other’s tones and laughed when the tone sounded like the cough of an old man.

  Even when winter came, we continued to meet. Sitting by the bricks, Yan would practice her erhu; I would just lie back and listen. We began to talk about everything, including that most forbidden subject—men.