three-inch-wide belts the performers were wearing. She traded her best collection of Mao buttons for a belt. She showed me her belt. It was made of real leather and had a copper buckle. It was designed by Comrade Jiang Ching, my heroine, she said. Have you read Mao’s books? she asked. Yes, I did, I said, all of them. She said, That’s wonderful, because that’s what I did too. I memorized the Little Red Book and know every quotation song.
I told her that I was a Red Guard since elementary school, my experience much less glorious than hers, though I would not be fooled about how much one knew about Mao quotation songs. She smiled and asked me to give her a test. I asked if she could tell where I sang.
The Party runs its life by good policies…
Page seven, second paragraph! she said.
If the broom doesn’t come, the garbage won’t automatically go away…
Page ten, first paragraph!
We came from the countryside…
Page a hundred forty-six, third paragraph!
The world is yours…
Page two hundred sixty-three, first paragraph!
Studying Chairman Mao’s works, we must learn to be efficient. We should apply his teachings to our problems to ensure a fast result…
She joined my singing.
As when we erect a bamboo stick in the sunshine, we see the shadow right away…
Where are we? I shouted.
Vice Chairman Lin Biao’s Preface for Mao Quotations, second edition! she shouted back, and we laughed, so happily.
We were still talking when we reached the barracks. We stood in the dark, filled with incredible delight. Be careful, she said. I nodded and understood: avoid Lu’s attention. We took separate paths and went back to our room.
I could not sleep that night. The room and the mosquito net felt very different from yesterday. Yan did not speak to me in the room, but there was life and fresh air. I felt spring. The growth of the reeds underneath the bed for the first time became tolerable. I thought I would like the green in the room. Would Yan? She was in the bunk beneath me. There was so much that I wanted to share with her. But I dared not talk to her. Lu’s bed was next to ours. We, eight people, sleeping in one room, compartmented by mosquito nets.
Lu would be jealous of us, of our delight. I felt sorry for her. I wished I could be her friend. It was sad that the only thing she was close to was the skull. I felt sympathy for her for the first time. It was a funny feeling. What made me care for Lu? Yan? Lu was two years older than Yan. She was twenty-five. She wanted so much. She wanted to control our lives. What was she doing with her youth? Wrinkles had climbed on her face. Soon she would be thirty, and forty, and she would still be at Red Fire Farm. She said she loved the farm and would never leave. I wondered how anyone could love this farm. A farm that produced nothing but weeds and reeds. A complete darkness. A hell. Lu spoke no truth. She did not know how. Did she have feelings? Feelings that Yan and I shared tonight? She must have. She was young and healthy. But who dared to be dear to her? Who truly cared for her besides flattering her for her power? Whom would she be sharing her feelings with? Would she marry? What a funny thought to think of Lu being married. Men in the company were afraid of her. They yielded to her, accepted her dominance. Men surrendered before they faced her. The shadow of her appearance chased men away. They treated her like a poster on a wall. They showed her their admiration but framed her on their mind’s wall. I saw loneliness in Lu’s eyes. The eyes that stared into fields on rainy days. The eyes of thirst.
Lu went to bed late. She sat on a wooden stool studying Mao’s works. Every night she practiced this ritual. She took about ten pages of notes each night. She was the last one to go to bed and the first to get up. She cleaned the room and the hall. I love to serve the people, she liked to say. She quoted Mao’s teaching when she was praised. She would say, I did only what the Chairman taught me. She would recite, It is not hard for a person to do a couple of good things for others; it is hard for a person to spend his entire life doing good things for others.
I found Lu’s behavior frightening. Her rigidness exposed her single-minded ambition for power. I became more careful, more polite toward her. I selected words carefully when I spoke with her. We talked around each other. She tried to grasp the core of my mind. She knew that neither of us could control the other. She was displeased. Lu sensed my intimacy with Yan immediately, like a dog to a smell. She came to me one day after work and said, I know why you have been looking excited, you are such a thief. I said, I don’t understand what you mean. She smiled and nodded. She told me to go on duty to inspect the soldiers’ suitcases room by room. She went with me. She told me to rummage about the articles to look for obscenity. As we were walking back to our room after duty, she said suddenly, Do you remember what you said last night? I almost stumbled over a rock. She hit my guilty conscience. I said, How would I know whether I had said anything? I was sleeping-how could I know? But you know, I just heard it, she said with an insidious smile. Just heard it, she repeated. Her words felt like bugs climbing up my back.
Lu opened the door to let me in first, then she followed in and closed the door. Tell me, what’s been on your mind? She looked at me as if I were a fly and she were a spider, as if we fought in the net she weaved. I said, I’ve got to go wash my clothes. I haven’t had clean clothes to wear for a week. I must hurry because I have a platoon meeting to hold. She looked at me, my dirty clothes, my bare feet. She said, I thought you were a sincere person. I said, I am a sincere person. She said, But not to me. I want you to be aware of your growing sophistication. You’re losing your purity. The purity which I saw when I first picked you in Shanghai. Remember what I told you about what I liked about you? Remember, I had asked you to keep what’s good in you? I said I had been keeping the goodness and would keep that but now I had to wash my clothes. She stepped back to let me walk through the door. Don’t pretend that you don’t understand me, she said. If you sincerely want to become a member of our Party, it won’t do you any good if you refuse to be honest with me.
As I washed my clothes, I thought about how easily Lu could destroy me by making false reports and dropping ambiguous words into my dossier, which only the Party bosses had access to. Words that could bury me alive. Words that once in the dossier would never be changed. They would follow me even after death. The dossier determines who I am and who I will be. It would be the only image of me the Party considered real and trustworthy.
As the Party secretary, Yan had the power to do the same as Lu, to manipulate people. But Yan never liked to play tricks. She believed in justice, no matter how unjust her justice was to me. She tried not to give expression to a personal grudge-a principle Mao had set for every Party member. She tried not to do that to Lu, though she wanted to very much. She never added extra salt or vinegar in her reports to the headquarters. I was moved by this when I read her reports as I copied them for her. It brought me closer to her. I saw no such quality in Lu. Lu often volunteered to work longer hours in the fields doing all the good things anyone could think of, but she would never forgive anyone who had stepped on her toes by disagreeing with her at meetings or disobeying her orders. I’ll pinch him like pinching a bug if anyone has the guts to make a fool of me, she said to our faces. I’d be glad to give the enemy a taste of the iron fist of the proletarian dictatorship.
Lu brought back a dog from the headquarters. His name was 409. 409 was a military-trained German shepherd. It was said that he could do anything. 409’s mission was to watch a pig named Tricky Head. Tricky Head, a male pig weighing almost two hundred pounds, was the company’s big headache. He was the trickiest of his group. The company did not have enough fine animal feed. The pigs were given half fine feed and half coarse grain. One day the farmhands found that a few of the bags of fine feed were gone-one of the pigs must have eaten them, but they could not figure out which one. Two days later another few bags of fine feed were gone. This time the farmhands noticed that the pigs were eating the undigested shit of Tricky Head. They suspected that Tricky Head was the thief. They targeted him and caught him in the middle of his theft. The strange thing about Tricky Head was that he had the face of a dog and he acted like a dog. He could jump out of the pen and into the grain storage and afterward, when he had enough fine feed, he would run back to the pen and pretend nothing had happened. He did not eat any less at the last feeding of the day. He was bigger than the others.
Lu adored 409. She spent all her savings and bought the dog dry meat. She trained him and rewarded him. 409 soon became very attached to her. They would take a walk by the sea every night. Lu became more pleasant than she used to be. 409 was mean to everybody but Lu. Lu was proud of 409’s loyalty. She encouraged his meanness. She often recited one particular Mao quotation to 409. She ordered 409 to sit by her feet, then she would say, Isn’t it a key question that one must learn to be able to tell who is his friend and who is not? 409 would bark a yes to
