My old home, p.9
My Old Home, page 9
Farther down Victory Boulevard, Little Li came upon a crowd of Golok idlers gathered around a sheet of plywood hanging from a tree branch that had a dolphin-shaped MiG fighter jet painted on it with a hole cut out just above the shoulders of a cartoon pilot whose body protruded from the plane’s fuselage. For fifty cents, a customer could poke his head through the hole and have a snapshot taken as if he were piloting the plane. One after another, Goloks were poking their grinning faces through the hole to mug for friends, but as far as Little Li could discern, none ever paid to have a photo taken, leaving the Han Chinese proprietor scowling. It was easy to be impressed by the handsome, weathered faces and the playful manner of these tribal people, who broke into toothy smiles at the slightest excuse. When Little Li made a funny face at a small boy, his Tibetan mother began giggling so mirthfully that Little Li himself smiled for the first time in days. But at the same time, he felt plagued by a familiar frustration: he was again the eternal observer. As others acted, he was always an accessory watching from the sidelines—the opposite of Little Wang, who not only knew what was going on, but made things happen, so that when they were together he felt attached to an alternate propulsion mechanism. But why was he dwelling on such absurd things now? Here he was exhausted, hungry, alone, and exiled in one of the most godforsaken parts of the planet, and he was gawking at a pack of nomads!
Little Li was on the verge of heading back to the schoolyard when two white-uniformed policemen swept down Victory Boulevard on motorcycles, causing a frightened street cleaner to scamper to the curb, a horseman to clop hurriedly down a side street, and pedestrians to scatter. However, people soon began regathering in silent groups, as if anticipating that something special was about to happen. And it was not long before a phalanx of primary-school children, each carrying a small wooden stool, came parading down the broad boulevard. They were followed by a motorcycle with a sidecar and flashing lights leading an open jeep filled with a group of stern young men wearing red armbands. Next came a shiny new truck bearing a massive portrait of Chairman Mao. Then a second, older truck appeared with two expressionless youths in regimental greatcoats and fur-lined hats standing like charioteers behind the cab, flanking two prisoners with shaven heads and hands bound behind their backs. The first had a face as pale as the sunless winter sky and a white placard around his neck reading “Guo Liangshu: Historical Counterrevolutionary Guomindang Spy.” The second wore a blood-streaked shirt and a placard reading “Wang Songtao: Counterrevolutionary” slashed through with a crimson “X.” The very last truck carried a young Tibetan with a shaven pate, his skin bleached gray, lips as pale as dust, and eyes so filled with terror they looked as if they might explode from his head; he wore a placard reading “Spreader of Counterrevolutionary Tibetan Independence Propaganda.”
As soon as this procession had passed, onlookers streamed back onto the boulevard to follow it, as if they were holiday promenaders. Tagging along, Little Li soon found himself on a dusty sports field adjacent to the very school where he’d slept. Here the parading children were already seated on their stools in front of a makeshift stage draped with a banner reading “Leniency to those Who Confess: Severity to Those Who Resist (坦白从宽 抗拒从严).” The prisoners waited in their trucks behind a soccer goal as martial music blared. When some speeches began, the sound system was so poor that Little Li could make out only snatches of what was being said: “We must resolutely crush all…” “Those who have taken the capitalist road cannot…” “Tibetan independence will never succeed in…” A moment of silence was followed by the amplified sound of someone voiding his rheum. Then a voice that mixed militancy, righteousness, and hysteria read out the charges against each prisoner. Then the trucks started their engines again and as they snaked across the sports field, the crowd followed. At what looked like a dry riverbed, the prisoners were pushed off the trucks and the crowd became so silent that Little Li could hear the breeze rattling the dry poplar leaves. A young guard grabbed the blindfolded Tibetan and twisted his arm until he fell to his knees.
“The world is so dark!” he cried out.
“Shut up!” yelled the guard, cramming a rag into his mouth. The motionless onlookers hardly seemed to breathe.
“Mama, let’s go!” a child cried.
An order was barked, a pistol raised, and a popping noise sounded. The prisoner’s head kicked back, and his body slumped forward. A murmur rippled through the crowd. Lowering his pistol, the executioner disgustedly flicked away something that had splattered onto his cuff. The next prisoner was pushed forward. People were walking backward now. Then, after another popping sound, they began running, as if something were chasing them. Suddenly Little Li, too, was clamoring up the rocky bank. He didn’t stop running until he reached the storage shed where they’d spent the night. Finding no sign of the other two “educated youths,” he threw himself onto his quilt and fell into a tormented sleep. He was in the middle of a nightmare in which he was being commanded by the conductor of his school orchestra to choose several of his fellow musicians for execution when he smelled smoke and awakened. A short man with hooded eyelids and a cigarette drooping from his mouth was standing over him.
“You are Li Wende?” he said, as both a statement and a question.
“Yes.”
“You were absent when your group departed,” he replied curtly.
“Can I rejoin them?” Little Li asked, wanting nothing more than to get out of Gonghe.
“You must wait to be reassigned.”
“Where?”
“Unclear. Our director must arrange it. Come with me.”
As he followed the man out, Little Li tried to calm himself: since he’d never known where he was being sent, reassignment hardly meant a worse place.
Inside a dark reception room, under a set of faded portraits of Mao, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, sat a portly man with several long hairs growing from a mole on his chin.
“I am Director Shen of the Number Two Elementary School, charged with handling ‘educated youths’ in the region.” He consulted a file on his desk. “So—you’re from Beijing and play the flute.”
“Yes,” replied Little Li.
“Well, I’m not sure there will be much call for the flute out here,” he said with a sneer. “Now, it says here that you were originally assigned to the Gonghe County Song and Dance Troupe.”
“Really?” interjected Little Li, brightening at the idea.
“But it is now inconvenient to keep to that assignment.”
“Why?”
“Because the unit has been disbanded.” He laughed mockingly.
“So where will I be sent?”
“You would have gone back to Xining with the others, but since that’s no longer an option, we’ll have to find an alternative.” He consulted what appeared to be a list while lovingly stroking the hairs growing out of his mole. “Well, I’m afraid we’ll be obliged to assign you to Yak Springs,” he finally said.
“Where’s that?”
“Yak Springs is”…—Comrade Shen stopped to remove the top from a cup on his desk, and made a loud slurping noise as he sucked up a mouthful of tea—“a remote outpost that will give you the opportunity to steel yourself with a new spirit of hard struggle and self-reliance. As our party teaches, ‘We must fear no adversity in our willingness to promote revolution.’ ” Director Shen spat his mouthful of tea leaves out onto the dusty floor. “As Chairman Mao teaches, ‘Work is struggle.’ At Yak Springs you’ll have plenty of opportunity for both.”
“Is there a cultural troupe in Yak Springs?” Little Li asked hopefully.
“A cultural troupe?” Director Shen gave a loud guffaw. “Besides the odd nomad, there are hardly any people out there on the grasslands around Yak Springs. But, as Comrade Lei Feng tells us, we must all be willing to become never-rusting screws in the machine of revolution and bravely go wherever the party has a need. Isn’t that true?” Little Li nodded unenthusiastically.
When Little Li awakened before dawn the next morning, two trucks loaded with fifty-gallon drums of gasoline were waiting at the front gate. A driver wearing so many layers of clothing under his greatcoat that he looked as if he’d been pneumatically inflated gestured for Little Li to climb into the back of the second vehicle.
“Where’s Yak Springs?” he asked.
“On the old northwestern route to Lhasa,” the driver answered. “And unless you wanna get your pecker frozen off hanging it off the back of the truck, you’d better take a good long piss now.”
After returning from the latrine, Little Li climbed into the bed of the second truck. They soon found themselves out in grasslands where the only signs of human habitation were occasional black yak-hair tents that from a distance looked like giant insects stretching their wings. These were the dwellings of the Golok nomads who eked out an existence from their herds of yak and sheep in this unforgiving land. But as bleak as it was, after the chaotic confinement of Beijing and its predatory politics, Little Li found something unexpectedly soothing about such boundless openness and solitude.
With the lead truck whipping up choking clouds of dust, despite the infinitude of crystal-clear air, it was impossible for Little Li to inhale deeply. He tried hunkering down in one corner of his truck bed, fastening the flaps of his fur-lined hat under his chin, and pulling his head inside his greatcoat as if he were a tortoise. But his nostrils were soon caked with dust, his body stiff from the cold, and his head aching from the relentless jolting. Then he discovered that if he squeezed his eyes closed tightly, he could coax forth streaks of cheerful orange and red from somewhere deep inside his skull that made him feel a little less despairing.
At dusk, the road began rising into a low range of mountains, and as the trucks growled up the serpentine grade toward a pass, the plumes of dust subsided and Little Li stood up to look around. As they crested the ridge, the vista that opened up before them was like a hallucination: the setting sun was bathing distant snow-covered peaks in myriad hues of gold and turning the clouds a salmon pink. Then, as darkness fell and a full moon rose, it crowned these same towering summits with halos of silver that silhouetted them against the black sky, reminding him of the steeples of the great cathedrals of Europe he’d loved in his mother’s book. And with moonlight illuminating the roadway, the drivers turned off their headlights so that the stars overhead twinkled with such a dazzling brightness that the firmament seemed ready to rain down diamonds. With engines complaining in low gear, brakes squealing, and the crystalline air rife with the acrid smell of burning metal, the trucks began their descent to the valley floor below in the moonlight, Little Li was able to discern the outline of a square compound set to one side of the road like a floating raft tied to a long dock.
The trucks finally slowed as they reached a battered wooden placard fixed to an unprepossessing Tibetan-style sod wall:
Yak Springs Way Station
No. 6 Qinghai-Sichuan Highway Maintenance Bureau
Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture
Qinghai Province
After they turned in through a breach in the wall and the drivers turned off their truck engines, the only sound was the soft soughing of the wind blowing unobstructed across the broad valley. Looking around, he saw that the compound consisted of a collection of shabby structures with adobe walls and tile roofs sprouting grass. The one building of any distinction boasted a tin roof, a concrete stoop, and a flagpole constructed of plumber’s pipe painted yellow flying a tattered Chinese flag. Stiff-legged, Little Li jumped down from his truck and followed the drivers into the building where they were greeted by a lobby portrait of Chairman Mao encrusted with dust and grime.
“Where can I find someone in charge?” Little Li asked a driver, who gestured toward a closed door marked “Office.” Little Li knocked, a gesture that seemed absurdly formal in this setting.
“Enter,” a muffled voice answered.
Upon opening the door, Little Li found himself in a room enveloped by a penumbra of cigarette smoke. Barely visible was a wiry man in a stylish Mao suit seated behind a desk that, because the legs on one side were slightly shorter than on the other, threw the whole room out of perspective. Ostentatiously displayed on his tilting desktop was a telephone, covered in a thick layer of dust (hinting that it was vestigial); a large official stone seal; and a brass nameplate announcing in black characters “Wu Yang: Station Chief” (吴阳站长). Behind this display of power symbols sat a man whose eyes were deep-set in a skull-like face that was topped by a comb-over confected from what appeared to be no more than several strands of hair trained to make several laps back and forth across their host’s bald pate. What is more, when Station Chief Wu deigned to look up, Little Li noticed that one of his eyes wandered, creating the unnerving impression of being scrutinized by two people at once.
“Old Liu!” Station Chief Wu urgently called out, as if summoning an offstage actor who had missed an entrance cue. A moment later, a short bald man materialized in the doorway.
“Station Chief Wu, I am present,” he announced, holding his own lamp up to Little Li’s face to have a better look at the visitor.
“We seem to have an outsider here!” announced Station Chief Wu.
“I was told in Gonghe that I’d been assigned here,” offered Little Li tentatively.
“Here?” Station Chief Wu asked in surprise.
“I’m the ‘educated youth’ from Beijing.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Old Liu, as if he’d suddenly recalled something. “Yes, yes. Station Chief Wu, you’ll recall we had some discussions about another—”
“All right! All right! Just take care of him,” commanded Station Chief Wu.
“Of course!” replied his factotum with a servile smile.
“I appreciate your help,” said Little Li, hoping to curry some favor with his new overlord.
“No matter,” said Station Chief Wu, and returned his attention to a document on his desk.
“You must be hungry,” said Old Liu in a way that was almost feminine.
“I am,” said Little Li gratefully as they left the office.
“Then we’ll see if Master Chef Wang [王大厨] can make you some noodles. Afterward, I’ll take you out back so you can rest.” Little Li had not eaten since Gonghe, and the smell of food caused waves of suppressed hunger pangs to seize his body. “Oh, Master Chef Wang!” Old Liu sang out in a strangely operatic voice as they entered the almost empty canteen. “Will you feed this boy? After his long trip, he needs to eat.”
Master Chef Wang was a scurvy-looking man whose potbelly was upholstered by a filthy apron. His other most distinguishing feature was an enormous gold front tooth, which gleamed from his mouth like a headlight. Having just been recalled to prepare dinner for the drivers, he was not pleased by yet another request, and only after a bout of scowling did he consent to throw another handful of noodles into his enormous carbon-encrusted wok and fan his fading fire back to flame with his bellows.
When Little Li finished eating, it was all he could do to shoulder his pack and follow Old Liu outside into the cold. They were passing a strange structure built on stilts that was silhouetted against the moonlit sky when Old Liu stopped.
“Here we have the latrine,” he announced. “Just go up that ladder, but don’t be surprised by the pigs.” Little Li had no idea what he was talking about, but was too tired to ask.
In front of a long, low building with stamped-earth walls, Old Liu stopped again. “As a matter of historical information, PLA soldiers were billeted here in the 1950s and ’60s, when the Red Army was suppressing Golok rebels who opposed the reunification of our Motherland,” said Old Liu, gesturing with a sweep of his arm like a tour guide toward the vast emptiness lost in darkness beyond the compound walls.
“Am I to sleep here?” asked Little Li, weary and in no mood for a local-history lesson.
“You can sleep anywhere here you like,” replied Old Liu as he opened the door. “Just have a look around. Breakfast is at five-thirty.” Then, handing Little Li a candle, he departed. In the flickering light, Little Li saw he was in a windowless shed filled with piles of junk covered in dust and draped with cobwebs. Even if it had not been dark and he hadn’t been cold, dirty, and tired, it would have been a daunting task to fix up even a small corner of this ruin. Though only a few days had elapsed since his departure, Beijing already felt light-years away. He stood in the flickering light, feeling as if he’d slipped through the space-time continuum into a parallel universe from which he might never find his way back out.
7
YAK SPRINGS
LITTLE LI was unrolling his bedding on the littered floor when he noticed a sliver of light shining through a crack in the wall. Then he felt a draft of cold air and turned to see a silhouette standing in the doorway.
“Are you the new ‘educated youth’?” a gravelly voice asked.
“Yes,” replied Little Li, unable to see the face of the speaker.
“I’m your welcome committee!” the voice said, with a rueful laugh. When he raised his candle, Little Li was surprised to see before him a tall, handsome boy with a head of tousled hair and a face burned brown by the sun who looked to be a year or two older than him. But beneath his unkempt exterior, Little Li could also discern a certain fineness of features.
“I’m Liang Shan (梁善) from Shanghai,” said the boy, proffering his hand. “You can call me Little Liang.”
“I’m from Beijing,” replied Little Li in astonishment.
