My old home, p.22
My Old Home, page 22
“So”—Li Tongshu loved to jest as they passed Mao’s portrait—“the old guy’s still up there, eh?” They always had a good laugh, because the portrait had become such a permanent part of the landscape that without Mao gazing imperiously out over Tiananmen Square’s vastness this iconic public place would have seemed incomplete. Biking back home in the evenings, Little Li always looked forward to that moment when they finally turned off the broad Avenue of Eternal Peace, to leave the exposed outer world of enormous Stalinist buildings, intimidating squares, and broad socialist boulevards, and reenter the filigree of ancient winding alleys and low-lying courtyard houses where people actually lived. As they entered this maze of hutongs, he felt like a small fish leaving the dangerous open ocean for the safety of a sheltering reef. Despite its dilapidation, the satisfyingly diminutive scale of Big Sheep Wool Alley and its familiar sights and sounds were a comfort to Little Li as a boy. He’d come to love the clamorous din of cicadas that, as if secretly directed by an unseen choirmaster, swelled in a collective crescendo before falling away into perfectly coordinated silence; the distinctive cries of street peddlers as they trudged by, hawking their services and wares; the ethereal moan of homing pigeons fitted with hand-carved whistles as they flew overhead in airborne arcs to the commands of unseen earthbound keepers; the gentle clinging of bicycle bells heard over courtyard walls; and the distant chuffing and hooting of steam engines arriving and departing the distant train station.
Sometimes at night, when he went to the public latrine out on Big Sheep Wool Alley, he’d close his eyes and pretend he was blind. With an accuracy as deft as when his father hit just the right key on the piano without looking, he knew how to feel his way across the courtyard with his feet, reach out at exactly the right moment to grasp the cool smoothness of the iron latchkey on the gate, and then navigate the alleyway until he picked up the first sulfurous scent emanating from the public latrine. Like a mariner guided by celestial navigation, he then knew exactly how many steps he needed to take before turning right and mounting the four stone stairs into the latrine itself. The stink in this sepulchral place of communal evacuation was foul, but so familiar that the whole neighborhood would have seemed somehow denatured without it.
One Sunday morning, Little Li awakened to find his father standing beside his bed holding a saw and a coil of rope.
“I think we can save the old willow,” he announced excitedly.
“What?” mumbled Little Li, still half asleep.
“The old willow—it just needs to be pruned and watered. So I borrowed a saw and some rope from Old Wu’s workshop. Shall we do it together?”
“Do what?”
“Save our lovely willow,” he said, beaming. Little Li reluctantly got up and dressed. As they walked outside to survey the tree, which arched its neglected branches over their room, his father announced, “Here’s the plan: we’ll tie the rope around your waist, and you’ll climb up and trim away the dead branches.” Because his father’s enthusiasm brooked no complaint, Little Li threw one end of the rope up over a branch, tied the other around his waist, and climbed into the tree.
“Get that branch!” his father excitedly commanded. “No, higher! Yes! That one!”
By the time Little Li came back down after scrambling through the skeleton of leafless branches, he had blisters on his hands and his body ached. Still, so infectious was his father’s enthusiasm that he pitched in again after lunch, this time to spade up the earth around the old tree’s trunk, trim the battered persimmon tree in front of Granny Sun’s room, and even prune the feral wisteria vine that ranged on a trellis above their veranda. And then, although evening was falling, he sawed up all the trimmed branches into lengths small enough to burn in their stove.
“Comrades!” announced the chief of the Big Sheep Wool Alley Neighborhood Committee, after calling a meeting of all the residents one evening. “Our committee has been handed down a new policy: residents are now permitted to divide up the garden space into plots in each courtyard for cultivation by individual families.”
“You mean we can grow things for ourselves?” asked Granny Sun in her predictably direct way.
“That’s the new policy,” answered the committee chief.
“Is this idea of private property new communist theory?” she persisted.
“It is not a question of theory,” he replied with irritation. “It’s a question of eating.”
“Oh, I see,” said Granny Sun, as if that explained everything.
The change was, in fact, a complete reversal of past policy; however, what was important to the committee chief was not consistency, but that a decision come down from on high now needed to be implemented. Peasants in the countryside were already cultivating private plots, raising chickens, ducks, rabbits, and even keeping pigs. Now urbanitess were being afforded similar privileges. Even tenants of apartment buildings were getting in on the action by cultivating beans, peas, and squash in window boxes, sending vines climbing around window bars and up drainpipes.
As it turned out, except for playing the piano, there was nothing Li Tongshu enjoyed more than gardening, and by summertime his allotment of hardpan in Willow Courtyard had come alive with vegetables and flowers. He even managed to find a potted gardenia at a street market, whose fragrance was so dangerously sweet it seemed positively counterrevolutionary. He and Little Li sometimes bicycled to the edge of the city with a burlap sack in search of manure dropped on the road by the horses and donkeys pulling carts. And after washing dishes, they sprinkled the wastewater onto his beloved plants.
That spring, the old wisteria shot out Medusa-like tendrils that exploded into grapelike bunches of fragrant purple blossoms; the old willow unfurled a new cascade of weeping green foliage; for the first time in years, the persimmon tree fruited; and when Li Tongshu’s squash vines discharged flamelike orange flowers, he became childlike with excitement.
“Hey, Professor Li, are you in possession of state agricultural secrets?” an engineer from the next courtyard jokingly asked one day upon seeing his garden.
“Just serving the people,” replied Li Tongshu impishly.
No one refused the slender-necked yellow squash, the succulent red tomatoes, or the plump green peppers he generously shared with neighbors in return for their wastewater.
“What are you doing?” Little Li called out one summer evening when he found his father sitting on a stool in the middle of his idyll.
“Just enjoying my little green friends,” he responded with a smile. “Even though they’ll soon be gone, they neither complain nor surrender. They just keep turning sunlight and water into life, doing something useful, remaining true to their natures without betraying each other.”
Months passed without more political drama or upset—as Dr. Song had hopefully predicted, things had settled down. Li Tongshu sought to banish his recurring fears that something dark still lurked just over the horizon. Of course, Chinese politics were still a whirlpool constantly spinning things into their opposites. But for now, the situation allowed a measure of hope and optimism. And Little Li was free to roam the city with Little Wang. They loved to visit the storytellers, acrobats, and seers who congregated in Tianqiao (天桥). Here his friend was most fascinated by the curbside dentists who wore necklaces of decayed molars, had tabletops arrayed with giant tongs, and cast sadistic come-hither grins to passing potential customers. Just being around Little Wang’s swaggering cockiness made Little Li feel stronger. One day when they were fooling around on Coal Hill, overlooking the Forbidden City, he began pretending he was a beggar. Seated cross-legged in the middle of the stone steps going up the hill, he made a cup out of both hands, screwed his face up like a palsied mendicant, and chanted, “Give what ya can! Give what ya can!” To Little Li’s astonishment, an old woman handed him fifty-five cents. As soon as she left, they repaired to the Forever Red Restaurant (永红小吃), near Wealth and Power Hutong (富强胡同), for a tasty snack.
As Little Li approached puberty, he began to be powerfully and mysteriously drawn to girls who rendered him speechless. He was most fixated on Feng Yi, a girl in his class with radiant pink cheeks, shiny black pigtails, and nubile breasts just beginning to create a suggestive swell under her tunic. Once, while playing blindman’s buff, she’d won the draw to tie the blindfold over his eyes, and when she touched him, she triggered feelings akin to an atomic blast. Little Wang, on the other hand, had an admirably insouciant way of joking with girls until they broke down into fits of embarrassed giggling. And since he was the only person who seemed to have actual information about the mysterious longings now possessing him, Little Li viewed him as possessing the keys to a forbidden kingdom.
“Okay, here’s what you need to know about ‘chicks’ [娘们],” he began with braggadocio as they passed two particularly cute girls coming home from school one day. “The first thing is that, when guys start getting big ‘peckers’ [鸡巴], they want to use them, and there’s only three things peckers are good for: ‘taking a piss’ [撒尿]; ‘shooting down the airplanes’ [打飞机]; and ‘shooting the cannon’ [放炮]. The only other thing you need to know is that, even though every guy wants to ‘shoot the cannon’ with girls, no one talks about it in public.”
“Do the girls want to do it, too?” asked Little Li hesitantly.
“They love it, too, but they’ll never admit it. But I’ve got a cousin who’s doing it now to a lot of girls.”
“Doing what?”
“Stickin’ his thing between their legs!”
Such things were almost impossible for Little Li to imagine. As far as he could tell, adults were asexual beings who never talked about anything related to such topics, much less showed any overt expressions of amorousness toward members of the opposite sex. And it was unthinkable to broach the subject with his father, who seemed to exist on another plane, one ruled by propriety and decorum rather than the riot of passions now beginning to well up inside him. The only manifestation of overt sexuality to occur in Willow Courtyard involved the tiny carved ivory amulet of the Yellow Emperor (黄帝), the mythic grand progenitor from whom all Chinese are said to have descended, which had been given to Li Tongshu by his own father. Because its most distinguishing feature was an oversized erection (an ancient symbol of fertility), his father had kept it in their wardrobe with his American wristwatch and roll of U.S. bills. The day he came home and found Little Li playing with it was one he would not soon forget. His father had snatched it away, and the next time Little Li saw it, the amulet’s “jade stalk” (玉杆) was gone.
Little Li would have been surprised to learn that any of the dour teachers at school ever allowed the kinds of lusts that were now inflaming him to overcome them. Though the party clearly did not welcome competition from the libido, Little Li had observed that this most animal of urges sometimes erupted anyway through the carefully scripted surfaces of daily life, and often in embarrassing ways. Little Wang was full of stories about lecherous cadres forcing themselves on young women, or voyeurs peering into people’s windows. One afternoon, as they were walking down Water Millstone Hutong, Little Wang suddenly stopped and pointed at a cardboard sign reading “Temporarily Closed” affixed to the entrance of the neighborhood women’s latrine.
“This is the place where…!” He began laughing so hard he couldn’t finish.
“Where?” asked Little Li.
“Check out the roof!” Little Wang managed to get out, pointing to a gaping hole in the latrine’s tile roof that looked as if an artillery round had made a direct hit.
“What happened?”
“This horny old guy who used to head the local Neighborhood Committee climbed a tree at the back of the shitter and managed to pry up a couple of roof tiles so he could spy on the ladies doing their business. One night he must have been up in his tree ‘shooting down airplanes’ and gotten carried away, because he…he…” Again Little Wang doubled over in laughter.
“He what?” begged Little Li.
“The old ‘pervert’ [老色鬼] lost his grip, fell through the fucking latrine roof, and landed right on top of an old crone and her granddaughter crouching side by side inside.”
“Was he hurt?”
“One of his legs snapped like a wooden chopstick! There he was lying in all that shit and piss, with his junk still hanging out, and he couldn’t hightail it out of there because of his leg.”
“What did they do to him?”
“The old bugger was accused of ‘crimes of counterrevolutionary voyeurism’ [反革命偷看罪] and sent off to a ‘reform-through-labor camp’ [劳改营]. And then there was this other ‘moronic egg’ [傻蛋] I heard about who kept dreaming about feeling up a girl he liked at his factory. But then he screwed up big-time by telling a friend and soon the whole factory knew about his horny dreams! But that wasn’t the end of it, because, some dumb fuck told the poor girl, who’d never even said hello to this creepy guy. Then when she learned everyone else also knew about his gross dreams, she got so embarrassed she committed suicide!”
“Killed herself?”
“Ate rat poison and went off to Western Paradise.”
“What did they do to the weirdo?”
“His factory party secretary accused him of having ‘counterrevolutionary dreams of rape’ [反革命梦奸罪], and he, too, was packed off to a ‘reform-through-labor camp.’ ”
Uncontrollable passion coupling with indiscretion in Mao’s puritanical China could lead to tragic consequences. Mathematics Teacher Yao was a slender, reserved woman who taught the fifth grade at Little Li’s school. Because she was still single at age forty, everyone assumed she was doomed to remain “an old spinster” (老姑娘). One morning, when she inexplicably failed to show up for class, no one thought much of it. However, the next day, when History Teacher Liu, who was married to a stout, unprepossessing woman who worked in the Conservatory library, also failed to show up, rumors began ricocheting around that a new political purge was under way. Then a boy in the class above Little Li who played percussion and was nicknamed “the Hoodlum Drummer” (流氓鼓手) announced that anyone who wanted to hear the whole story about Teacher Yao should meet at lunchtime under the poplar tree in the far corner of the schoolyard with five cents.
“So here’s the straight shit,” began the Hoodlum Drummer as a hush fell over those who’d paid up. “One night last week, the Public Security Bureau received a tip from a vice-principal who was angry at Teacher Yao because she wouldn’t shoot the cannon with him; he told them that a crime was being committed in the woodwind practice room. When police broke down the door, they found Teacher Liu with his drawers down around his ankles, just about to make some ‘clouds and rain’ [云雨]. They took photos and told Teacher Yao that if she didn’t confess about all the others she’d been ‘shooting the cannon’ with they’d release the pictures.”
“Can we see them?” a boy in the back blurted out.
“Oh yeah! Sure!” mocked the Hoodlum Drummer. “For five cents you want photos?” Everyone laughed at the mortified boy. They were, however, impressed by the raconteur’s savvy, even though only a minority in his audience actually understood what they’d just heard.
The story took a more tragic twist two days later. As Little Li was approaching school that morning, he was stunned to spot Teacher Yao kneeling on the sidewalk outside the front gate. Even though it was chilly, she wore only a tattered tan blouse that barely covered her slender torso, and she was rocking back and forth, moaning. A group of girls lugging instrument cases hurriedly passed her by with their gaze downcast, as if they might be done harm by making eye contact. Then a knot of boys gathered across the street to gawk. But no one dared move to help the distraught woman. Finally, an agitated vice-principal appeared.
“It’s nothing,” he kept tutting nervously, far more concerned with maneuvering Teacher Yao into the gatehouse and out of sight than with consoling her. But just before finally disappearing inside, she looked over to where the stunned boys were standing and let out a plaintive howl.
“Aiyahhhhhhh!” she cried. “I’m no longer among the living!”
Although the boys were not sure what she meant, they could not miss her anguish. Thereafter, no one referred to Teacher Yao again. She simply ceased to exist.
14
NEVER FORGET CLASS STRUGGLE
WHEN HE was notified that the vice-dean of the Conservatory wished to see him, Li Tongshu feared the worst. It turned out, however, that he was not being called to a self-criticism session, but to provide piano accompaniment for a new revolutionary opera.
“What new opera?” he asked the vice-dean warily.
“A bold new work, Spark Among the Reeds [芦荡火种], which celebrates the New Fourth Route Army’s heroic struggle against the Japanese occupation of the Chinese Motherland during World War II.”
“But perhaps I’m not the most suitable person for such an important production,” he demurred, dreading involvement in a propaganda project.
“This is a brand-new opera under Jiang Qing’s direction,” replied the vice-dean peremptorily. “The schedule has been set, and you’ve won the assignment as accompanist.”
Because Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, was becoming China’s cultural tsarina—or, as she liked to call herself, “a plain sentry for the Chairman, patrolling the ideological battlefront”—Li Tongshu knew he had no choice. But during the first rehearsal, all he could think about as he banged out each stultifying number was of that moment when he would not have to listen to another bar of this dreadful score. Then, at the very last run-through, as he was hammering out the finale and looking forward to his liberation, the production manager appeared behind him.
