Red Azalea Read online

  Yan said that according to her mother, who hated her father, most men were evil. Mother said that she wouldn’t ever have produced nine children with my father if she had not wanted to respond to the Party’s call, “More population means more power.” Men take pleasure in seducing and raping women, she concluded.

  I remembered how Yan had taken off her belt that night and ordered the male soldiers to beat the bookish man. I understood where her hatred for men had come from. I said her father did not represent every man. Yan insisted he did. She then told me about her five brothers, all in their twenties, all tall and strong. They talked obscenely at midnight while the whole family of eleven slept in the same room. Her elder brother talked about tricking a neighbor girl to come into the room, seducing her on the bed while his four brothers watched through a door slit. I asked how her parents reacted to this. Yan said they refused to believe it. They accused Yan of misreporting. The brothers beat her up and her parents watched and thought they did the right thing. That was the main reason she left her family for the Red Fire Farm.

  Yan asked me about how I felt about men. I said, If you want to hear the truth, you might be shocked. She said she was ready and promised to continue to be my friend no matter what I told her. I told her a story. A story I had never told anyone. It happened during a Red Guards’ meeting when I was sixteen. There had been a power failure and as we were waiting in the dark, a hand touched my back. Trembling, it slowly moved around my side to touch my breast. I was shocked but allowed the hand to stay for about a minute and then stood up and moved to another seat. When the lights came back on, I turned. I saw three boys sitting behind me, all about my age. One of them looked nervous and pale. I knew him—a straight-A student, a popular calligrapher who had a girlish face.

  I thought that I had lost my purity. I was ashamed of myself.

  Why didn’t you yell? Why didn’t you push his hand away? Yan asked. I told her I didn’t know why myself. I told her that actually my body felt good. She was stunned. She sat in silence for a long time. She put her face in her palms.

  The reeds swayed like the sound of whispering. Sah-sah-sah, sah-sah-sah. I watched Yan, the way she gathered her courage. She asked whether I knew the difference between the sexual organ of a grown man and a boy. I had seen a picture of it in an acupuncture book. It was drawn as an upside-down teapot. Yan nodded and said that was good enough. She sat for a while longer. Blushing, she told me that she had something to confess. I waited. She said, Never mind. I said, You don’t trust me. It’s not that, she said. I said, What is it? She took a breath and said that she really couldn’t. She couldn’t make herself say it. She rested her forehead on her knees. I said she could take all the time she needed to get ready. She said that she would never be. Like a snail shrinking its head into the shell, she wouldn’t come out. I begged. I said I had closet-thoughts too. She said that’s different. Hers was a monster. I poked apart her knees and lifted her chin with my fingers. I looked at her and said I almost can tell what that might be. She said I wouldn’t be right. I said, If I am right, will you promise to tell me everything? She nodded.

  A man, I said, looking straight into her eyes. She lost her calm.

  His name was Leopard Lee. He was twenty-four and was the head of Company Thirty-two. He was from the South, from a family of gardeners. He was a delicate man. She had met him at a headquarters meeting two months ago and had secretly thought about him since. She told me that that was it. Her story was done.

  I said, Did you two have private talks? She said, What do you mean? How could I do that? Well, how do you know he likes you? I asked. She said, Well, I just feel that he does. She said she of course couldn’t be sure, but anyway this was not what she wanted to tell me. I asked, What’s the problem? She said, I just know I’m not supposed to have those thoughts at all. She said that the awful thing was that she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She was disturbed and she didn’t like that. I joked and said it sounded like a personal-life corruption, that she should bring the problem to the company meeting. She said it’s not nice to make fun of other people’s pain. I asked if it was really pain. She said it is supposed to be pain and it was. It dragged her, burned her. It made her mind pop up dirty thoughts, thoughts about men and teapots.

  She looked helpless. I said I had exactly the same symptoms. She asked what had I done about it. I said I read a book. She asked if I had felt better after reading. I said that I did. She asked if she could learn the title of the book. I said, It’s called The Second-Time Handshake. It’s a banned book, I got it from Little Green’s suitcase. It was hand-copied, three hundred pages. She asked what the book was about. I said a story of a man and a woman. She said she supposed the book must have poisoned Little Green’s head. I said that I had to agree. She said she did not want to be misguided by the book. I said of course, but who knows what one’s judgment may truly be. I said that I would not believe a strong-minded person like her would be poisoned by a book. It would be ridiculous. It would be a joke. She said that made sense. She told me to drop the book in her rain boot at night. I then said that I would not be responsible for whatever happened in her head in the future. She said she would take responsibility for herself.

  She devoured the book. Yan, the commander, the Party secretary, devoured the handwritten book in three nights with a flashlight in the mosquito net. When she returned the copy, she looked different. She told me, I want to write him. But then her face fell. She said, I can’t. It’s not safe. We went to the brick factory. I asked her to explain to me why it was not safe. She said that the bookish man’s letter to Little Green was opened by Lu—that’s how the company knew where to catch them that night. The Party bosses could look into anyone’s letters and suitcases at any time. There was no rule against this.

  I told Yan that I had hated her for exposing Little Green. She said that I should. She lowered her head. She listened to my accusation quietly. I said, You are a murderer. I cried. She said she hated herself but it was what she was made to do. She had known for a long time that Lu had been spying on Little Green. As the Party secretary and commander, she had no choice when the case was reported.

  Yan took my hands in hers and rubbed them. Her hands were rough, like those of an old peasant. She said that only now had she understood how unforgivable her act was. She herself now was in Little Green’s position—involved with a man. How unforgivable it was, what she did. She said she was a frog who had lived at the bottom of a well—her knowledge of the universe was only as big as the opening of the well. Her naïveté and ignorance made her a murderer. She was fooled by Party propaganda, by Red Flag magazine and the People’s Daily. She was trained to be a murderer. Who was not? She didn’t understand the world around her, the world where the murderers go on living while the innocent die like weeds.

  I remembered her snake-catching in the reeds. I asked her about it. Gazing at the sunset, she said that it was for Little Green, to make her come back to her senses one day. She had collected sixty-nine water snakes in a jar, which she stored under our bed. She had to reach the perfect number of one hundred. She said it was the first time in her life she had put faith in superstitions. Her grandmother once collected snakes to cure her disabled sister. When she had one hundred, her sister stood up and walked. She had been paralyzed for six years.

  You know the snakes are poisonous, don’t you? I said. She nodded. Her smile was calm and that touched me deeply. I asked if she would allow me to join her. I said I would not be afraid of the snakes. She nodded, grabbing my shoulders.

  We went out to hunt for the snakes separately. I never caught one. I was scared of these creatures. Their shape horrified me. The grease on their tails made me paranoid. I had nightmares, my body wrapped in snakes. I didn’t tell Yan about my dreams. I couldn’t believe that she was not scared of them. When she brought more snakes back, I imagined the horror she had gone through. She was my heroine again.

  We talked more about men, in particular Leopard Lee. I sugge
sted that, if she wanted, I could be her personal messenger. She shook her head and said if it was wrong for Little Green, it should be wrong for her too. I’m a Party member. I can’t do things I have forbidden others to do. She looked sad but determined. She was being ridiculous, yet her dignity caught my heart. I was drawn to her as I looked at her. I couldn’t have enough of her that evening. She was my Venus.

  It’s only superficial, isn’t it? I said on our way back to the barracks. She said suddenly, I bet you can fight with Lu now, because you’ve developed sharp teeth. She laughed. She made a hat of reeds for me as we discussed how the letter should be written and how to find an official excuse for me to deliver it to Leopard Lee.

  I felt joy. The joy of being with Yan. The joy of having her depend on me. Two weeks passed. Still Yan had not given me anything to deliver. When she saw me, she avoided the subject. I could tell that she was happy, yet a little nervous. I saw her hang red-colored underwear to dry. Bright red. She hummed songs, spending more time looking at herself in front of a palm-sized mirror by the door. She stopped swearing. I teased her. I swore the words she used to swear. She knew my intention. She just smiled, called me a brat. I asked her about the letter to Leopard. She kept on equivocating. She said that she had no time to write. I said Leopard might have forgotten her. That night, when I was lying in bed, she opened my curtain and threw in a folded letter.

  Comrade Leopard Lee:

  How are you? I was wondering how the agricultural initiative is progressing in your company. Here we are making good progress. I have thought of our meeting often. It was meaningful as well as politically fruitful.

  In the margin Yan had written, “Will you please help?” I took a piece of paper and replied that I would do whatever the Party required of me.

  The next day I rewrote her letter. I did not know what Leopard Lee looked like, so I described Yan’s face instead. I tried to imagine what they would do when they would be together, how they would touch each other; just thinking of it made my heart beat fast. I wanted to describe Yan’s body but I had never seen it. I described my own instead, touching myself and imagining my body was hers and my fingers his.

  When Yan returned, I whispered that I had finished. She was excited and said that she could not wait for bedtime to read it. I told her that I wanted to see her reading it. Yan said then we should make an excuse to get in bed together. We made a plan and waited for the dark to fall.

  After dinner Yan and I sat by the door. She started to repair her rain shoes while I took out my rifle to clean. We said nothing to each other and pretended that we were concentrating on our hands. I took apart the gun and cleaned it. I was absentminded. I stole a couple of moments to glance at Yan. She sanded the cracked shoe, applied glue and let it sit. She didn’t look at me, but I knew that she knew I was looking at her. Her face flushed. She smiled shyly. Lightly, she gave a few blows to the shoes. I adored her shyness because no one else would think that she could be shy. Her intimacy belonged to me.

  Lu was reading Mao’s work aloud. Other roommates had being going in and out of the room hanging their clothes on a string, splashing dirty water outside. The male soldiers in the opposite building were tapping their bowls with chopsticks. They sang, “When the sun rises, Oh-Yo, Oh-Yo, Oh-Yo, Yo, Yo, Yo, Oh, Oh.…” Their song had no end. The soldiers splashed water on the muddy ground as well and walked into their rooms barefooted. The doors were closed. The song dashed on.

  When darkness fell, I was already in bed. I waited for everybody else to get into their beds. I looked around the room through the net. I looked at Lu from the top down. Her concentration amazed me. She really read the Little Red Book every day. I was sure she had memorized every comma and period. Did she enjoy this? Or was she just putting on a show? Or both? Did she ever feel restless? She was young, her body was full. She liked to watch her own feet, I noticed. She often took a long time washing her feet. They were tanned dark brown, and her toenails were as clean as peanuts. They were not like ours, dyed orangish with fungicide. She used vinegar to rub off the dye on her toenails each night as the rest of us slept. Once the strong smell of her vinegar woke me up at midnight and I saw through the net that she had dozed off while applying it. Her feet rested on a stool, like two big rice cakes. It was a pair of young feet, elegantly shaped. I asked myself the reason Lu spent so much time taking care of her feet. And I understood. Her feet were her intimacy. She needed that intimacy to survive just as I needed Yan’s.

  I began to say that I did not have enough blankets and was afraid of catching cold. Yan sneezed and said that she felt cold too. Lu, as usual, was still studying. Annoyed by our noises, she said impatiently, Why can’t you help each other, comrades? Why couldn’t you think of something to solve the problem, such as to share the blankets together? She fell right into our trap. I jumped down with my blankets, rushed into Yan’s mosquito net. We closed the curtain tightly. I couldn’t help giggling. Yan covered my mouth with her hands. I gave her the letter. She pulled the blankets up over our heads and turned on her flashlight.

  Her face flushed. She read and reread the letter. She whispered that it was the best thing she had ever read. She said that she did not know I was so talented. She pressed her cheek against mine. She whispered the same words again and again, that I was talented. After she read the letter two more times, she wanted me to imagine how Leopard Lee would react after reading this letter.

  I told her that he would fall in love with her. She told me to repeat what I had just said and I did. She whispered, How can you be sure? I whispered back, If I were a man, I would. She asked if I ever tasted pellet fruit. I asked what pellet fruit was. She said it was a type of fruit that grew in the South. When it ripened, it cracked itself open, making pang-pang-pang sounds like firecrackers. She said this was how her heart was beating now. I said I was glad I had talent. She said I should be because I made her spellbound and she was at the mercy of my hands.

  Turning off the flashlight, we came out of the blankets for air. I asked if pellet fruit was edible. She said, Yes, it’s sweet, but the fruit has an ugly shell like a porcupine. I said I couldn’t tell that you had such a mellow heart when I first saw you. I told her that her mellowness made me question whether she was a real Party hard-liner or just an armchair revolutionary. She said, Grind and level your teeth now.

  Through the mosquito net I saw Lu finishing off vinegaring her feet. She capped the bottle, stood up, turned off the light and climbed into her bed. Yan and I lay awake in the dark, too excited to sleep. Soon we heard Lu’s snoring. The moon’s pale lilac rays scattered through the curtains. I heard the sound of our roommates’ even breathing. The snakes were beating against the sides of the jar under the bed.

  The restlessness came back. It stirred me deeply. I felt my mind and body separating themselves. My mind wanted to force sleep while my body wanted to rebel. Somehow I did not want to figure out why my body wanted to rebel. I was enraptured by a sense of danger, a heat, a spell.

  Yan turned away from me, sighing. I wanted to flip her over, but was afraid suddenly. A strange foreignness arose. My body stiffened. She murmured. I whispered, Did you say anything? I heard my own echo in the dark. She sighed and said, Too bad … I waited for her to complete the sentence. She went silent as if she were afraid as well. I said, I’m waiting. She said, Too bad you are not a man. She sighed again. It was a deep and frustrated sigh. I felt dejected. My youth rose bravely. What would you do if I were? I asked. She turned back to face me and said she would do exactly what I had described in the letter. Her breath was hot. Her eyelashes touched my cheek. A warm stream gushed from my feet to my head.

  We lay in silence. In fever. One of her legs was between mine. Our arms were around each other. Then almost at the same time, we pulled away. To make light of the uneasiness, I said that I would like to recite a paragraph from the Little Red Book. Go ahead, you armchair revolutionary, she said. Chairman Mao teaches us, I began, “Taking a stone, he hit his own toe instead of anoth
er’s; that’s the result that all the reactionaries are going to get as they try to resist the revolutionary force.” Right, she followed, only when we are following the Chairman’s teaching can we be invincible. Let’s do a self-criticism, I said. She said, After you. What’s on your mind? Confess. Make a clean breast of your guilt.

  My guilt or your guilt, Comrade Party Secretary?

  An old saying goes, “When a good thing comes, it comes in a pair.” That autumn was a magic season. When the beets in the fields were sweet enough to eat, we had to draft reports on how local peasants had been stealing our beets. We would deliver the reports to headquarters so the company would not be blamed for a decrease in output. Yan had been following a “one eye open, one eye closed” policy, which meant that she was not too strict on the correctness of the reports. In fact, she knew exactly who the thieves were. It was not the local peasants, not the field rats. It was the soldiers themselves. I was one of them. The salary I received was not enough to cover my food expenses, so in late evening I became a thief. I dug into the mud for beets, radishes and sweet potatoes.

  Yan pretended not to see us. In fact, she was busy doing her own thing. She was driven by her belief in acupuncture treatment. She had been taking Little Green to our neighboring farm hospital—Red Star Farm Hospital—to see a group of doctors from the People’s Liberation Army who were there teaching the local doctors the techniques of acupuncture. Yan took Little Green there twice a day, at dawn and late in the evening. She got up at four-thirty in the morning, packed Little Green on the tractor and bounced all the way to the hospital for a session of needles, and then took Little Green back, leaving her with the cafeteria people for breakfast as she herself rushed to the fields without eating anything to catch up with us.