"In China, it's impossible to become a man."
—Lu Xun
The civic authorities have drained the artificial lake, and thousands of handcarts are purging the bed of five centuries' accumulation of mucus, slopping it everywhere ankle-deep. They are late for Spring Festival for the first time in a few thousand years of recorded history, demonstrating the relative merits of emperors and politburos.
This being the post-Liberation period, everybody in the city has to take a turn manning a shovel, unless he or she can afford, with discretion, to hire and exploit a substitute. Abusing my exalted position as a "foreign expert", I terrorized one of my tubercular grad students into taking my place; but, even so, I wear high-topped, laced-up Red Wing boots, after the manner of first-world proles.
I'm afraid of accidentally dragging even one booted toe in the residue that covers the street. According to my physician back home, who admittedly diagnosed himself with hypercautionary Sinophobia, the mud throughout communist-held territory in Asia is infested with hideous snails that are, in turn, infested with microscopic wormlets that burrow into the pads of your feet and slither up through your legs and pelvis, up, up, till they get to your liver and turn it to smelly gristle.
I've been invited to banquets with important provincial cadres where trenchers full of such gastropods were brought out, and I've grabbed chopsticks out of Long Marchers' hands, screaming, "Wait a second! You're not even supposed to step on those little cock-suckers!" But almost nobody heeded my warning, and nobody died. So I assume it's a matter of building up immunities over the millennia.
Spread nastily before me today in the middle of the park is a mythical quagmire. Mushed deep inside, under the more recent top layer of discarded scum-bags (three sizes, one color), verminous creatures guard a treasure. There are stories around town of snail-resistant people finding ancient perforated coins and jade bracelets. Someone was shot for trying to smuggle out a rotten skull with ruby-inlaid porcelain teeth. The periphery is crawling with Peoples' Liberation Army men.
Beyond that periphery, just out of those PLA men's eyeshot, tucked behind South China foliage in a quadrant of jungle where, incredibly, humanity's pullulation thins out for a brief space, a certain former Red Guard used to camp out. He still squats there among the shadows, for all I know, foursquare in his formidable integrity. We don't exactly keep in touch. I was a friend of his family, in a manner of speaking, and I admired him, but he never returned the compliment.
His name was Bu Yu, and he resented my large alien presence in the Flowery Middle Kingdom. He took it into his head to re-start the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, at least to the limited extent necessary to dislodge me, one way or another. His objective was to deliver the local university students, merchants, civil servants and party apparatchiks out from under my Red Wing boot, which he, perhaps not altogether unfairly, considered to be planted square in the middle of everyone's faces.
To suggest that Bu Yu was mentally unbalanced would be less than sporting; but it's fair to say that he didn't have his mental finger set firmly on the political pulse of his fellow townsmen. They were just as delighted as any other southern Chinamen when Deng Xiaoping gave them permission to get back in touch with those petty entrepreneurial instincts which had, since time immemorial, defined their tribe. It would have been easier for Bu Yu to foment socialist rebellion in Beverly Hills. The snack hawkers in particular loved having me stalk their sidewalks, a ringer for Santa Claus, the very embodiment of acquisitiveness and bourgeois self-indulgence.
Bu Yu had recoiled from the sight of me, and had gone into self-imposed exile at a street boys' secret forest-encampment, located on the bank of the stream that fed the periodically drained lake. He spent his nights sleeping like a Mongolian on clay, surrounded by yellow industrial suds that caked up on the riverbank, and he passed his days growing a beard that was supposed to convince the more superstitious street boys that he was an ancient and wise man.
I do, however, know of at least one youngster, a bright daisy-colored comrade, who saw in the beard nothing more than facial hair—sparse at that, particularly compared to the dazzling array of stawberry-blond nipple-ticklers that hung off the jutting jaw of his role-model, hero, and god on earth—namely, me. I suborned the little sycophant to serve as my eyes and ears on the riverbank, and fetch me weekly reports on the babblings of Bu Yu, my mortal adversary—and my own hero, in many ways. I hope that doesn't sound too other-embracingly white and liberal. Or maybe masochistic.
Once in a while indigenous water people appeared before Bu Yu's eyes, floating among crackling bubbles on their tiny bamboo houseboats as they'd done since prehistoric times, the only members of the non-criminal classes in China who'd been assigned to no particular work unit. They wore a new expression on their faces for the first time in twenty thousand years: one of bewilderment over the increasing skimpiness and somatic strangeness of the fish they caught.
"Do we eat this extra fin or worship it?" they seemed to ask each other in the unwritten language that nobody but the few dwindling dozen of them understood. For all his political theory, Bu Yu was unable to offer advice, and so would remain speechless till they drifted out of sight.
When dirty magazines from Hong Kong appeared for the first time under the pile of banana leaves that constituted the boys' secret assembly hall, Bu Yu had waded out to purge them, to fling them far across the face of the waters. The froth had stung his feet, tough as they'd become on his shoeless meanderings during the Ten Years' Chaos. He decided at that moment to sleep henceforth with his lower extremities immersed, the pain seeping up and up into his brain and increasing the ardor of the bad-element anarchist who'd been usurping control of his dreams ever since the "opening of the doors" to outlanders like me.
Finally a kind of emery paper formed on his soles and insteps, a reptile skin composed ambiguously of Bu Yu himself and some foreign material. He became wedded to a sensation such as I imagine the desert peoples of Wulumuqi felt in their purification rites, back in the days before the light of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought was brought to bear on their backward mentalities. They performed week-long geothermal ablutions to undermine the structural integrity of the epidermis, then coated themselves with a pepper sauce, not unlike the stuff rich Sichuanese put in their capitalist-class food by way of condiment. But the Wulumuqi sauce was poison outright, a body lotion that reamed out the skin pores and induced pathological ecstasy.
Occasionally he even used the suds in the mornings to wash those few parts of his face unobscured by hair. Bu Yu flung himself on his belly in the glutinous sand and submerged that part of him which takes the place of a conscience in the Oriental constitution. It was a display of raw fearlessness calculated to impress children, whose nerve endings remain so much more tenderly attached than our own. And it inspired even higher levels of astonishment than he'd expected.
Perhaps the sallow spume took some visual effect upon Bu Yu's flesh that was awesome. He had no way of ascertaining for sure, as mirrors were never brought to the no-girls-allowed encampment, and the river was too adulterated with opaque substances to be reflective, even at its frequent sluggish moments. Nevertheless, if witnessing Bu Yu perform his morning toilet inspired the majority of his followers to respect and fear him more, my own precocious spy was merely put off by what I'd tutored him to regard as demagogic exhibitionism. I made sure there was always at least one sour puss in the bunch.
Having failed to muster his former comrades-in-arms (they'd all sunk into premature middle age and become beauticians or career TV-university students), Bu Yu was forced to lower his sights. He was surrounded by a kindergarten full of children instead of an army of seasoned Red Guards who struggled, and maimed while struggling. The excessive zealot, the tooth-gritting, gore-gushing fanatic soldier of a decade ago, had been reincarnated on the riverbank as a whacker of flowers with thorn switches, a marksman with rubber band-powered, pebble-loaded slingshots: not a rebellion-maker, but an aimless vandal, a future candidate for the triad gangs if somebody didn't take him in hand.
But Bu Yu sensed that maturity didn't matter at this point, if the boys could be directed firmly away from their inherited bad-element leanings and toward political consciousness in his newly instituted Hong Xiaoxue program, his outdoor Red Elementary School.
He had tried at first, through incentives such as free fish-fries, to up the membership, to "cook" as many lads as possible and cement their loyalty. In a momentary confusion brought on by dismay over the moral decay of this town's latest generation, he'd lost sight of the original plan and become convinced that his presence on the river could be justified only by large numbers of converts. As though he were some Jesus-possessed missionary, Bu Yu had wanted to redeem children like pawned possessions, revealing more about his own upbringing than I'm sure he would have liked.
But soon enough he returned to his senses, and was even forced to take contrary measures to limit membership. For, like all well-planned organizations, this one had to be arranged along auspicious numerological lines. The inner circle could number neither more nor less than thirty-five, seven times five, threescore and ten divided by two, which happened to be the exact age of both Bu Yu and the adversary, who lived in somewhat plusher quarters among actual grown-ups in town.
That would be me, of course, but Bu Yu had chosen not to specify as much, just yet, at least not in the ears of the more babyish infantrymen, for fear of frightening them off altogether. Though a sweet man, and ludicrously out of shape—a jolly old elf, in fact—I am half again as tall, and three times as heavy, as the average Chi-com, with devil-colored eyes that seem especially to trouble children on the street when I'm in a certain mood. Bu Yu was right to be reluctant to introduce my specifications into the camp dialectic. But my spy made sure that plenty of unauthorized scuttlebutt regarding "the adversary's" identity seeped down into the awareness of the lowliest grunts in the trenches, causing a good number of them to go AWOL.
Eventually Bu Yu would be obliged to begin setting up the infrastructure of offices and commands that would provide a solid backbone for his miniature army. Once the members had mellowed a bit and the real business of class struggle could commence, there'd need to be a secretariat, along with teams in charge of materials and propaganda, liaison and external affairs, finance and logistics, plus a special task force for armed combat and its preparations.
All this would be based on fond memories of the brave rebellion-making force he'd belonged to during the best years of his life. I sometimes wonder, looking back, if it was symptomatic of encroaching age when this commie hero of mine spent a greater amount of his free time imagining bureaucratic maneuvers than planning specific skirmishes to come.
Before Bu Yu could bore these congenital anarchists with the dry realities of organized class war, he had to make the encampment seem like an esoteric fraternity, to appeal to their primitive instincts. He remembered the entertaining lies about old gangster societies that the peasants had poured into his own preadolescent ears during the forced rustications, and he applied them here at the twig and tendril fort: the freemasonry borrowed from protestant missionaries; the qi gong spells and formulaic gyrations; the time-telling from observing the dilations of cats' eyes—all the rudimentary psychological and physiological magic that would soon lead up to the more correct Red Book-wielding loyalty dances.
At the same time he tried to avoid corrupting these green brains with the more metaphysical superstitions which he and his middle-school classmates had combatted so hard in the short-lived Four Olds Movement. Those belief systems slithered out of one's guts, up and up, transgressed beyond simple magic, and approached the insidious pathology called religion. But he had a suspicion that his scrupulosity was wasted on many of the thinner, more raggedy recruits, who'd been saturated already with such poison by their toothless grannies at bedtime, judging from the Daoistic way they scampered home as soon as the sun began to sink and the river turned blood-red.
Whenever the mauled carcass of a large fanged monkey washed downstream from the mountaintops, Bu Yu had to shout reality back into their ears before they could bolt: "Of course wild pigs are strong enough to rip their heads in half like that!" Then, allowing the dialectical materialist in him to get the better of the youth recruiter, he would incautiously add a rhetorical question: "What other creature up there could do it?"
The children had a whole bestiary of other creatures, most possessing three or four eyes and combustible breath, or, more terrifying still, two eyes, two legs, language and self-consciousness.
It was exactly their fear of violent death that made the substance of blood wield power over their small imaginations. So Bu Yu had risked later revolutionary historians' accusing him of feudalistic tendencies, and had introduced blood oaths of secrecy into the riverside ceremonial. This flattered his followers into believing that he valued their confidence and that he assumed somebody in their lives, a teacher, parent, or even a neighborhood committeewoman, would care enough to listen if they revealed their new uncle's unregistered presence outside the city walls.
The blood was derived from depriving oneself of the first layer of skin on the barest tip of the fifth finger of the right hand, or the left, whichever seemed more profound and symbolical to the particular bleeder, instead of removing the whole first joint, which had been the method of dynastic bandits. A generation of sons returning home each night lacking body parts might call attention to their enclave.
As for me, I wouldn't be willing to bet foreign exchange currency that such dismemberment would cause much of a stir in the degenerate small-time hawker households many of the more unfortunate little soldiers came from. It was, after all, a city of shopkeepers. Confronted with surgical stitches across their offspring's torso, these fine burghers would just ask for a percentage of the price the missing organs had fetched on the overseas black market.
Even the less deprived boys tended to be elementary school dropouts, alienated already from their papas, those traitors to the cause of socialism, outright royalists and opportunistic glommers-on to the line of the old saboteur Deng Xiaoping. It was small cause to wonder that such fathers had failed to maintain even twelve years' worth of filial piety from their sons, and no surprise that such sons should have established a secret family of their own, with a home base made of sticks and straw that doubled as a mock fortification in their daddy-annihilating army games.
At least it would not be necessary to drive one traditional weakness from the hearts of the Hong Xiaoxue enrollees. None of them could be said to suffer from feudal familism, the central flaw that had held China back from achieving true proletarian dictatorship all these millennia. Bu Yu himself had set a fine example by breaking with his own clan, effecting a final and cleanly split—except for one sweet, lovely pink propinquity that nobody (least of all I) could blame him for clinging to, in his private heart.
