My old home, p.13
My Old Home, page 13
9
ROAD TO NOWHERE
“HAVE YOU ever thought about trying to escape from Yak Springs?” Little Li asked Little Liang one night, while they were soaking in the hot springs.
“Escape?” his friend gasped, shocked by the audacity of the question. “It’s senseless even to think about such things!” Then, lowering his voice as if he feared that even here someone might be eavesdropping, he added, “Even if we got away from the compound, you know we’d never be able to return home. So where would we go?”
“Maybe we could get across the border to—”
“Are you crazy?” interrupted Little Liang. “We’d never get near a border, much less across it! As soon as Station Chief Wu saw we were missing, he’d file a report, and they’d be after us! And, then when they caught us, let’s not even think what they’d do! Yak Springs would seem like paradise compared with where we’d be sent!” They both fell silent.
A neophyte might well imagine that a country as vast, varied, and populous as China would present endless opportunities for fugitives to lose themselves in its overcrowded enormity. But the system of controls set up by the party was so all-embracing that there was virtually no possibility of living outside its confines: to buy food one needed “ration coupons” (粮票); to purchase train tickets or stay in hotels one needed “work unit” (工作单位) “letters of introduction” (介紹信 ); and everyone was anchored to their prescribed places of residence by their “household registration card” (户口本). Chinese society was so well regimented that exiting it was virtually impossible.
“Do you think we’ll be here forever?” wondered Little Li.
“Heaven knows!” responded Little Liang. “Maybe you can arrange for us both to go to America! How about that?” he added facetiously. “You’re half American. We’ll find your people, go to Hollywood, buy flashy cars, marry beautiful girls with blond hair and big tits!”
“Glad your picture of America is so clear and positive,” replied Little Li. He was amused by his friend’s jest, but it was also a reminder that part of him was American, even out here in Yak Springs. As he lay in bed that night, he remained so riled up by their talk of escape that he couldn’t sleep. Not knowing what else to do, he dressed, stole through the compound, and slipped out the front gate. It was, he thought, ironic that this was one of the few unguarded gates in China. But, then, it was an exit to nowhere. Yak Springs was a bizarre contradiction: absolute freedom and complete confinement.
Able to see no more than the dimmest outline of the gray road stretching away before him in the starlight, he began walking. In Beijing he’d been able to imagine life as having a direction: if he practiced his flute and studied hard, he could expect to become a respectable musician, be assigned a job, get married, and have a child. But life at Yak Springs was lacking both goals and a destination. It was true that his past life had been punctuated by interruptions, unexplained cancellations, and dashed hopes; nonetheless, it had retained a general sense of forward motion and purpose. Now it had been stripped of both and he feared he’d never see Beijing, his father, Granny Sun, or Little Wang again.
It was a moonless night, and in the inky darkness his father appeared in a series of visions that unspooled spontaneously like dreams. He was playing the piano, sitting in stony silence at their kitchen table, and staring in horror at his bloody hands after the Red Guard attack. Oh, those horrible mangled hands that had clasped together for so many prayers and played so much beautiful music! How could such an image ever be forgotten? And did his father still think of him? Did he curse his foolishness for leaving San Francisco? Was he regretful now about having been so different and willful? Did anyone back in Beijing still remember him? Did he, Li Wende, matter to anyone? He felt utterly insignificant.
China had been victim of so much tumult, tragedy, and hurt. Suddenly there’d be an empty chair at a dinner table, a missing place in a bed, clothes left hanging unworn in a wardrobe, or a bicycle gathering dust in an entryway. People disappeared, jobs were canceled, friendships were destroyed, and marriages ended, all without explanation, often without even a farewell. Then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as they’d vanished, years later people reappeared, but so aged and eroded that sometimes even family members didn’t at first recognize them. As he grew older, Little Li had come to realize that he was living in a world of permanent disorder. Chairman Mao had famously proclaimed, “World in great disorder: excellent situation! [天下大乱, 形势大好].” Disorder for him seemed to be an organizing principle. He lived to overturn things. Under his guidance, one moment’s infallible “correct line” (正确路线) became the next moment’s completely “incorrect line,” so that a friend became an enemy and a loving child became an adversary. Those who protested were the first to disappear, while those who accommodated survived. However, even abject collaborators found no permanent refuge, for the party had nothing but contempt for those who faithfully obeyed it. The more obedient a person was, the more reviled he or she became, because the party so despised China’s historical powerlessness and subservience that it was repelled by the spectacle of its own people being bullied into submission, even by itself. Those who tried to maintain moral clarity in such a maelstrom of perfidy and opportunism were viewed as quaint, unreliable throwbacks to a “feudal” world that traded in the obsolete currency of personal honor. And because the party no longer gave its minions the option of leaving to study abroad, as Li Tongshu had been able to do under Chiang Kai-shek, there was no exit. The outside world had once served as a last haven for those wishing to opt out of the Chinese whirlwind. Under Mao this exit, too, had been closed.
When he was a child, he had loved to pretend he was blind and then make his way by touch, sound, and smell to the latrine on Big Sheep Wool Alley. Now it was so dark he did not need to close his eyes to have to feel his way along the road with his feet. In Beijing, of course, he’d actually been going someplace, if only to the latrine. Now, forgotten, forsaken, and forlorn, he was going nowhere. Perhaps, he thought, he should just jump off the top of the quarry and be done with his meaningless life. What was he saving himself for, to make more gravel? But to commit suicide here where no one would notice or care seemed more absurd than to go on living! The old man lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood near Iron Lion Tomb had at least had someone peering in horror from a window upstairs to mourn his loss. But out here, who’d notice a death? With no danger of being overheard, he began crying out to the road as if it were a person, which in a cryptic way it was for him. After all, he’d spent as much time working on it as in any other place in his life.
“I walk on you every day, Road, but you take me nowhere!” he cried out in anguish as if it were a living being. “Will you ever take me someplace? Do I still have a purpose?” He was beginning to wail now. “I curse you, Road, and I curse the revolution that made you! Down with the Chinese Communist Party! Down with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and down with the Cultural Revolution!”
Even in the middle of this dark night, in the desolation of Qinghai, he half expected some higher authority to rain retribution down on him. But when he stopped to listen, all that came back was the sighing of the wind. Emboldened, he allowed even more forbidden sentiments to gush forth. “The party’s the enemy of the people! Long live Li Tongshu and American imperialism! Down with the counterrevolutionary revisionists Station Chief Wu Wei and Master Chef Wangbadan!” He bawled these insults out into the void until he’d disgorged every heresy he could summon up. But all of it was just swallowed up by the infinitude of indifference around him, and in the end, he felt so ridiculous that he was overcome by a fit of crazed laughter. Then everything began spinning. Kneeling on the road to stop his dizziness, he clasped his hands above his head and, with the gravel he himself had chipped and transported cutting into his knees, he cried out, “Father! Father! Where are you?”
All he wanted at this moment was to know that someone, somewhere, still cared for him, so that he could entertain some small hope of reunion at some distant time. He felt like running away, but there was no place to run. As Little Liang had reminded him, China was one huge penitentiary, made up of concentric circles of ever smaller and more self-contained prisons, one inside the other ad infinitum, like those nesting matryoshka dolls he’d seen as a child in the Moscow Restaurant at the Beijing Exhibition Center. Lying on a tuft of grass along the roadway, he gazed up into the vault of stars above and felt woefully earthbound. He was not sure how long he lay there. When he did finally get up, a hint of pink was suffusing the sky over the Anymachen Range and he started trudging back to the compound. There, he wrapped himself in his old quilt, fell asleep, and dreamed of Willow Courtyard.
So remote was Yak Springs that no broadband radio signals reached it, and the few newspapers that arrived via truck were the only connection inmates had with the world beyond. Unfortunately, Little Li did not always get a chance to read these papers before they were exfoliated by Eunuch Liu and sent on to their final socialist mission. And keeping up with the news in latrine format was as frustrating as piecing together scattered fragments of classical texts written thousands of years ago on “bamboo scripts” (竹简) left buried in tombs. Just as one began a revelatory paragraph, it would infuriatingly end. But he was stunned, one day in 1972, to read a fragment of a privy article noting that U.S. President Richard Nixon had been to Beijing. Still, he had no idea what this meant. For, from what he could learn from subsequent newspapers, the Cultural Revolution still raged, Mao was still in charge, and the party was still “putting politics in command” (政治挂帅).
One evening, Station Chief Wu made another mealtime appearance, this time to announce that henceforth inmates would be required to remain in the canteen Monday nights after dinner for “political study sessions” (政治学习会). The first topic would be Mao’s 1945 warning on the need to engage in constant ideological housecleaning. “As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, and our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly,” he’d written. “Our comrades’ minds and our party’s work may also collect dust and also need sweeping and washing.”
“All right, who would like to kick off the first of these very important discussions with a comment on our chosen text?” Station Chief Wu began the first session, after Eunuch Liu had done his usual introduction. He was met by dead silence, with everyone trying to avoid making eye contact—which was difficult, given his roaming eyeball. “How should we here in Yak Springs view the idea that ‘our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly’?” he persevered. Except for Superintendent Peng, who cleared his throat, there were still no responses. “All right,” he finally proclaimed with irritation, “it’s clear that political consciousness in our unit is extremely low, so, for our next session, we’ll assign a text for all comrades to read in advance and write an analysis.” Someone groaned.
But there was a problem with this plan, too: there were no written texts available in Yak Springs. Station Chief Wu’s remedy was to deputize Eunuch Liu to choose an editorial from an old People’s Daily and read it out loud to the class. His first choice was entitled “Never Forget Class Struggle.”
“All right, now that we’ve had a chance to absorb this important theoretical analysis, who’d like to summarize it for us?” asked Station Chief Wu, gazing hopefully out over his parish of bored tutees, several of whom had nodded off during the liturgical reading. As far as Little Li could detect, there was no one dreaming about waging class warfare at Yak Springs. When there were no volunteers, he called, in desperation, on Eunuch Liu.
“Well…” he began, quickly realizing that despite having the editorial read out loud, he hadn’t a thought in his head. “Well…I’d like to ask the leadership if I might study the text more closely tonight and give a more complete report tomorrow.” There were several snickers.
“Clearly, we need more ‘thought work’ [思想工作] in our unit,” rebuked Station Chief Wu angrily, and summarily concluded the study session.
Several days later, a chalkboard appeared next to the entrance to the canteen, and Station Chief Wu charged Little Liang with providing a short summation of each week’s study topic in multicolored chalk. Little Liang was furious at being drawn into such a futile exercise, until he learned that the new assignment would afford him a whole day off from roadwork each week. For the next study session, Station Chief Wu chose a turgid editorial on the dangers of “taking the capitalist road” and ordered all inmates to write a paragraph of analysis.
“What the fuck am I supposed to write?” cursed Little Liang. “There is no one here in the compound actually ‘taking the capitalist road,’ because there’s no capital and no such road to be taken! Then there’s the inconvenient fact that, with the exception of the Goloks and truck drivers, virtually every inmate here was involuntarily born into a bad ‘class category’ and is still paying for it!”
“Maybe that’s what you should write: ‘The broad masses at Yak Springs will never forget class struggle, because class struggle is what got us all exiled here,’ ” replied Little Li, laughing.
It was not long before no one paid any mind to the chalkboard or their study sessions. Indeed, soon even Station Chief Wu lost interest and sent Little Liang back to the quarry. However, he underwent an alchemical change upon receiving word that a provincial military official would soon pass through Yak Springs. At this, he summoned Little Liang to his office and ordered him to revive the lapsed chalkboard and inscribe it with Mao’s famous appraisal of American military might: “All reactionaries are paper tigers.” So anxious did he become over the pending visit that he made Little Liang rewrite the slogan three times.
Then, one morning, inmates arrived in the canteen for breakfast to find that someone had etched the chalkboard with the bright-red outline of a giant erection and dangling scrotum emblazoned with the English letters “USA,” so it looked as if an American guided missile were about to score a direct hit on Mao’s slogan. Every time a person entered the canteen and saw the chalkboard, a new burst of snickering rippled through the room. However, when Master Chef Wang spotted the outrage, he made a beeline for Station Chief Wu’s office. Moments later, his door flew open, and he stormed into the canteen. After studying the offending drawing for a moment, Station Chief Wu glowered at the breakfasting inmates as if they were all collectively responsible, ripped the chalkboard from the wall, stomped its gray slate into shards on the floor and then commanded all inmates to muster in the parking area. One by one he called on each to step forward, thrust his right fist into the air, and deny any complicity in this dastardly act. Little Li feared his American parentage would automatically turn suspicion on him, and was greatly relieved when, before his turn came around, Eunuch Liu appeared and announced that a truck driver who’d just departed was under suspicion. But as inmates walked back to the canteen, Little Liang winked.
“No truck driver could ever draw a dick that beautiful,” he whispered to his friend.
When the military official’s trip was canceled, the chalkboard and what came to be referred to as “the Big Incident” (大事件) were soon forgotten.
Although chipping gravel was hardly his ideal of “service to the people,” by now Little Li had become so deft at this primitive craft that he could almost work with his eyes closed. Gravel was the life’s blood of the highway, and after every piece was laboriously hand-produced by the boys, it had to be carried by basket and carrying pole to wherever it was needed to grade the roadbed or fill potholes. But Little Li had come to experience the admittedly tedious, repetitive nature of their work as strangely satisfying. With gravel, you knew exactly where you stood: how long you’d worked and how much you’d produced. To handle gravel was to know the tyranny of weight, but at least your achievements were measurable and incontrovertible. There was no arguing with a ton of gravel. Nor could any political challenge refute the fact that the stretch of road assigned to the care of the two boys was without potholes.
When Liang Shan was precipitously taken off road duty by Superintendent Peng and assigned to the truckers’ camp across the highway to manage passing convoys, he welcomed the lighter assignment. It was only when, several weeks later, he was also ordered to vacate the living space he’d fashioned in the old barracks and move into a dilapidated sod hut next to the truck parking area that the full logic of his reassignment became apparent.
“That turtle egg is stealing my place!” he ranted. “So much for serving the people! But before I walk out the door the last time, I’m going to—”
“Be careful!” interrupted Little Li, worried by such unrestrained wrath. The next morning, when the compound witnessed an unprecedented act of defiance, his concern proved justified. As Superintendent Peng was just gulping down a mouthful of noodles, Little Liang marched to his table.
“You may be a superintendent, but you’re also a useless piece of counterrevolutionary yak shit who steals the people’s property!” he announced in a voice loud enough for everyone in the canteen to hear. With dripping noodles still hanging out of his mouth, Superintendent Peng looked up at his accuser and blinked. Then, after seeming to swallow, he stood up and began wagging a threatening forefinger in Little Liang’s face.
“With this kind of hoodlum attitude [流氓态度], you’re headed for big trouble!” he managed before beginning to snort and gasp like a drowning man. Then, as his face turned radish red, he keeled over onto the floor. Springing from his wok, Master Chef Wang flipped the fallen superintendent onto his back and was pounding on his chest with his big greasy hands when a tangle of half-chewed noodles exploded from his mouth and landed at the feet of Little Liang, who kicked it back onto his tormentor.
“What the fuck’s going on here?” yelled Station Chief Wu, running into the canteen from his office to see what all the commotion was about, only to find his road superintendent on the floor coughing violently with noodles emerging from one nostril.
