clumsiness.
Neither the headquarters heads nor the soldiers were responding to Lu’s exhibited leader’s skills. Seasons passed and Lu was still where she had always been. Although Lu did not like to deal with frustration, she was a good fighter. She picked more fights with Yan, pointed out her imperfections in front of the ranks. Yan became even more furious. She wanted to eat Lu up. It took me a half month to figure out the words Yan had muttered when insulted by Lu. She called Lu a mother of fart. When Lu wished to extend a meeting in order to sharpen the soldiers’ minds, Yan said, Let’s sharpen the hoes first. Lu said, You’re going to get crushed in a blind alley if you only pay attention to pushing your cart forward without watching which track you’re on. Yan said dryly, Let’s get crushed. Lu said, As you make your bed, so you must lie on it. Yan said, Damn. I should do something to sharpen my teeth.
I often felt that Lu had more than two eyes when she watched or spoke with me. Lu once said that she would like to cultivate me to join her special advanced activist study team. I did not say that I was not interested, but I must have betrayed disinterest. She said she was greatly disappointed. I said I would do my best to stay close to her team. I promised to borrow her Mao study notes. She said she knew my reason for not joining her. She said it was bad to live under someone’s shadow. She said she would hate to leave a stone in her shoes. She said if one did not come to her political senses, one would lose her political future.
Though it was important for me to look noble to my troops, I made my choice to ignore Lu’s warning. I felt that I must stand by Yan. By supporting Yan, I would cast myself as the lesser of two evils in a bad play. I never wanted to be a soldier at the Red Fire Farm. I felt like a slave. Yan was my reason, my faith to go on. Yan made me feel at least that we were achieving something, the impossible, as it now seemed, but it was still something.
To make Yan proud, I assigned the hardest tasks to our platoon-applying manure, taking night shifts, digging canals. I told my soldiers that my ambition was to make the platoon well-known in the company so everyone would have the best chance to be considered for membership in the Communist Youth League. The soldiers believed in me. Orchid even quit her knitting. By the end of the year, my platoon was selected as the Vanguard Platoon and was given a citation at the entire farm meeting. I was accepted into the Communist Youth League.
At the oath ceremony Yan walked onstage to congratulate me. She shook my hands and squeezed them in her carrotlike fingers. Laughing, she whispered that she could not wait to have me join the Party. She said that I must become a Party member. She said, I could make it happen to you next spring. She said she would like to see it happen very much. I was excited. I could not say a word. I squeezed her hands back, hard. For many nights afterward, before going to sleep, I replayed the ceremony in my head. I dreamt of Yan’s laughing. I realized how much I liked it.
After the busy summer season ended, the soldiers were allowed a little time for themselves after dinner. The spare time made me feel empty in the heart. I missed Little Green terribly. I would comb her hair and wash her clothes, but although her body was getting back to its original shape-she was once again slim like a willow-her mind seemed to have gone forever. Nothing I tried made her respond to me. She still wore the shirt with the plum flowers on it-the one she had on the night she got caught-but it had holes under the armpits and elbows. The shirt reminded me of the night-I’ll never forget it-when I had my gun pointed at her. I did not know how other people were living with this guilt, if there was any guilt. No one talked about it. The company pretended it had never happened. Little Green was given light jobs working as a storage guard and was given coupons for sugar and meat. Yan was strange in the way she treated Little Green. She grabbed her and gazed into her eyes. She observed her anxiously. She tried to talk to Little Green when everyone else had quit a long time ago.
Little Green had become dangerous to herself. Once I caught her swallowing tiny stones. Orchid also caught her eating worms. I reported the incidents to Yan. From then on I often saw Yan follow Little Green around the fields late in the evening. They were like two lost boats drifting over the sea in a dense fog.
Yan still went to catch the poisonous snakes. And I still followed her. Her secretiveness and my curiosity became the melody of the farm’s night.
I began to dislike going into my mosquito net. It was too quiet. I avoided my bed and walked on a narrow path through the reeds. As the daylight faded, I found myself at the farm’s brick factory. Thousands of ready-to-bake bricks were laid out in patterns. Some stacks were eight feet high, some leaning as if about to fall, and some had already fallen. I could hear the echo of my own steps. The place had the feel of ancient ruins.
One day there was another sound among the bricks, like the noise of an erhu, a two-stringed banjo. I picked out the melody-“Liang and Zhu”-from a banned opera; my grandmother used to hum it. Liang and Zhu were two ancient lovers who committed suicide because of their unpermitted love. The music now playing described how the two lovers were transformed into butterflies and met in the spring again. It surprised me to hear someone on the farm able to play it with such skill.
I followed the sound. It stopped. I heard steps. A shadow ducked by the next lane. I tailed it and found the erhu on a brick stool. I looked around. No one. Wind whistled through the patterned bricks. I bent over to pick up the instrument, when my eyes were suddenly covered by a pair of hands from behind.
I tried to remove the hands. Fingers combatted. The hands were forceful. I asked, Who is this? and there was no reply. I reached back to tickle. The body behind me giggled. A hot breath on my neck. Yan? I cried out.
She stood in front of me, smiling. She held the erhu. You, was it you? You play erhu? I looked at her. She nodded, did not say anything. Though I still could not make my mind connect the image of the commander with the erhu player, I felt a sudden joy. The joy of a longing need met. A lonely feeling shared, and turned into inspiration. In my mind, I saw peach-colored petals descend like snow and bleach the landscape. Distant valleys and hills melted into one. Everything wrapped in purity.
She sat down on the stool and motioned me to sit next to her. She kept smiling and said nothing. I wanted to tell her that I had not known she played erhu, to tell her how beautifully she played, but I was afraid to speak.
She picked up the erhu and the bow, retuned the strings, bent her head toward the instrument and closed her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she stroked the instrument with the bow-she started to play “The River.”
The music became a surging river in my head. I could hear it run through seas and mountains, urged on by the winds and clouds, tumbling over cliffs and waterfalls, gathered by rocks and streaming into the ocean. I was taken by her as she was taken by the music. I felt her true self through the erhu. I was awakened. By her. In a strange land, faced by a self I had not gotten to know and the self I was surprised, yet so glad, to meet.
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
