One afternoon, as this old Red Guard surveyed the ranks, such as they were, of the first fighting force he'd been associated with since the treacherous suppression and back-to-school order of March, 1967, he felt his heart swell. Hoping his sudden access of ardor would catch their attention and maybe even hold onto it for a while, he delivered what might be called his first bona-fide Hong Xiaoxue speech. It was a short one, but otherwise almost comparable to the soul-stirrers of his youth.
"We must run the foreigner out," he said, "but in these early stages of our movement we need to use the conservative dialectical method of 'being split in two.' We mustn't make the short-sighted blunder of the Boxers before us. We have a moral responsibility to struggle the foreigner first and awaken his class consciousness so he can return to his homeland, just as the imperialist-tool American P.O.W.'s returned from the conflict in Korea, to export the world proletarian revolt. We must at least make such an attempt or risk being classified forever as mere hooligans. Always remember, comrades, you are Mao's little yellow buffaloes, opening furrows wherever you go for the seeds of his thought to take root!"
Yawns. Mumbled observations on Mao's being dead for quite a while, and not producing much thought at all these days, as far as anybody could ascertain.
Bu Yu had thrown in too many four-character words at once, too soon. He had gotten carried away into garrulousness. He tried to win them back and to redeem the speech by introducing a little material that would strike closer to home.
"You little brothers want to talk about dead figures of national veneration? Well, I happen to know that several of your mothers keep photos and paintings of the late premier Zhou Enlai in the your hovels. But did you know that, back in 1966, he took the blatantly revisionist line of protecting the big-noses on Beijing's embassy lane from the righteous wrath of the Red Guards?"
"Ho-hum. Was anybody even born yet?" jeered somebody who squatted on the rear layer of fronds—another putschist-snake wanting a purge.
The troops lost interest again. The meeting degenerated even past the point of gastronomic babble, and sank down into the childishness of sport.
Some of the older ones scattered away into the woods after crickets to pit against each other in prizefighting bouts on flattened river bed rocks. The foolhardy ones stripped and tried to submerge themselves for a swim among crispy dead fish.
Bu Yu saw that the first outright rule of comportment he'd have to enact would be a moratorium on badminton. Aside from being an effeminate game invented by British imperialists to keep their wives' lubricious thighs off the shoulders of strapping colonial serfs, the racquets and shuttlecocks themselves were distracting, a perpetual incitement to shrieking babyish chaos.
The puzzling monster game was starting up again on the quadrant of riverbank closest to his nest. The bugbear with the doctorate reappeared, who so often distracted the Hong Xiaoxue tongshimen from the real work of revolution. Bu Yu grabbed the nearest screamer and demanded to know, once and for all, who or what this Doctor San Mu Ai De Wen was supposed to be.
Before he submerged his hungry self into his role, the boy looked at Bu Yu with a fair measure of the old scorn for the blackened court jester returning to his eyes.
"How ignorant can you be at your age, Uncle? Everybody knows Three-Mothers-Aids-the-Plague. He's a giant demon, the color of Mandarin oranges after you peel them, and he'll tear the front of your father's house down and steal your baby sisters from the hammock."
"A child's imaginary villain," sniffed Bu Yu, fighting scorn with scorn. "Unreal nightmare stuff for babies only, like the adversaries of Monkey King. Not as interesting as real flesh and blood class enemies, don't you think?"
"Oh, but he is real. He spends his spare time dickering with peasants over extra girl babies for his breakfast."
"Yes," added another little comrade. "And he has a familiar fox spirit, pretty but poisonous, who rides his giant nose like a peasant straddling a water buffalo. And, in the evening, she makes scary rhythmic shrieky noises behind the bushes in the park."
They bounded off, leaving their commander with a large but blurry qualm looming in the back of his head.
* * * *
Oddly enough, it was to our commissar alone that Bu Yu wound up revealing the fullness of his intentions.
It was during one sunset, the hour when most of his living forces began to sneak off for supper with their families, leaving Bu Yu alone at the encampment with the literal waifs—little animals, uninteresting and malnourished, all staring eyes, empty bellies and emptier heads, who hung on mostly from fear of the dark.
As he made gestures toward feeding himself and them with the few mouth-stinging grey carp that floated in on the chemical foam, bloated bellies up, he tried to encourage everyone with the words his faction had always cheerfully bandied about in times of physical privation.
"This is like Soviet Russia in 1917, and look what became of them!"
The waifs were not responding. They certainly had no clue as to who or what the word "soviet" signified; and, looking into their glazed eyes, Bu Yu came to the intestine-freezing realization that they didn't even know what 1917 meant. How many is such a big number, and how many rice husks can it count into your mouth?
On this night our commissar had been assigned to stay on later than usual, ostensibly to give his commander a little companionship among these infant ghouls. With that possibility in mind, Bu Yu just started speaking in mid-thought, disburdening himself into a receptive ear for the first time since pitching camp here.
"We must make life so unpleasant for the big-nose that he leaves the Motherland and takes as many of his own kind with him as possible, and—"
Before he could take a second breath, the commissar, my ever-smooth and handy creature, interrupted Bu Yu with an almost verbatim anticipation of what he'd planned to say next. He began to express things in bright teen talk that seemed to border on something higher—but perhaps, Bu Yu, in his agitated state of mind those days, read more into the words than was really there.
Through a yawn my boy pointed out that the leave-taking itself shouldn't be too difficult to induce, as foreigners were extremely mobile and irresponsible. They had little sense of contractual honor and low tolerance for discomfort or inconvenience.
"That's exactly right," marveled Bu Yu.
After his attempts to slog into the muddled awareness of the others, Bu Yu was overwhelmed by the clarity of this youngster's brain. He deluded himself that such a brain might conceive some sympathy for him.
Trying to keep his voice from trembling with excitement, Bu Yu said, "From what I've heard, this big-nose is typical of his kind. It would mean as little to him to pack up and leave before his job is done as it apparently would to destroy the honor of one of China's pure little plum blossoms—"
Bu Yu's heart swelled at the mention of the last phrase, and he added, not thinking of the potential consequences, "Corrupting Little Sister is nothing but a five-minute's prank to this imperialist."
(I resent that—sometimes it took the better part of a quarter of an hour.)
The commissar leaned forward, eyes brightening. Bu Yu understood too late that he'd said way too much.
"And what does China's, um, little sister think of all this?" The key word was carefully enunciated to make sure this bit of intelligence had definitely passed between them.
Something inside Bu Yu, maybe simple self-loathing, now made him confess his second dirtiest secret to his second worst enemy, the one person who could do him the most damage at this point. He told our hungry-eared commissar (and therefore me) the secret he'd never considered revealing to anyone. Bu Yu had unravelled the thread of his fate to the point where beardless, ballless boys were all he had left as comrades and confessors. He hadn't intended to mention his little love; but now that he had, he couldn't prevent himself from going on. Pacing the bank, kicking the smaller urchins aside, Bu Yu pretended to be preoccupied with some serious adult matter and to be exposing his fatal secret in an offhanded manner, as though it were merely a source of minor irritation.
"As a matter of fact, I have no idea what she thinks. I haven't seen her since she was in split pants, peeing on the cobblestones. I don't want her to see what I look like now. I'm scared my whiskers will make her laugh at me in a mean way."
And that was it.
I can vouch for there being something irresistible about the amoral openness of our commissar's little face. Never mind the reason for his attentiveness: to gather ammunition to destroy Bu Yu in the only place where he'd managed to go undestroyed.
Without blinking an eye, my dwarf spy said, "Wouldn't it be my responsibility, as Commissar, to tell the others that we're mobilizing in order to resolve your personal family problem? Wasn't a war once fought in Asia Minor for such a shaky reason?"
He looked in Bu Yu's eyes and paused just long enough to extract fathomless agonies. Then he smiled and whispered, "This is a picnic for them. Why spoil it?"
Just as he was rising to go home and have supper with his family, my apt pupil turned around and, almost as an afterthought, tacked on the last of many lies he'd brought to this doomed encampment, but the first explicit untruth to exit his mouth: "I promise, on my word of socialistic honor, Commander Bu Yu, that I won't tell a soul."
* * * *
Meanwhile, downriver, at the municipal park, I'm all hunched over, trying to be debonair enough not to gag and puke at the terrible things my boots are being put through. I do my utmost to take a jaunty promenade on the elbow of the cutest and naughtiest China doll south of the Yangtze.
One slight strip of ground has been kept relatively unmuddied for the purposes of rehearsing an anemic lunar new year's celebration, or something like that. I see serried ranks of six-year-olds—those whose class consciousness Bu Yu failed to raise against me—prancing around in Year of the Rat costumes, pre-theory of subconscious-style. Glittering, scaly tails penetrate plump cheeks like child molesters' dream-penises, wiggling with coached seductiveness in time to a pirated Hong Kong disco tape.
Behind these gyrate a range of individuals gotten up to resemble an even younger brand of meat. They wear giant plastic infant heads on their shoulders. Flesh-tone body stockings make them appear bare-naked except for the traditional short aprons that keep the genders of these sham toddlers just ambiguous enough to be, one would suppose, fascinating—at least to a certain type of park-frequenting person.
Such aprons can be seen on pairs of bronze baby-statues in some of the crasser northeastern Buddhist temples. The idea is to reach under and pinch whatever slippery little lump you find. If it's a scrotum, you'll be blessed with a son. If labia—well, that unfortunate contingency can always be dealt with by other provisions in the Flowery Middle Kingdom's rich cultural heritage, usually involving a jagged implement and a patch of good earth. A shameful waste, from which my very taste buds recoil like snails from grain spirits.
The ruling party has so far failed to provide a new socialist system of esthetics to replace the more or less satisfactory pre-Liberation one they liquidated; so now the commies seem to be trying out a kind of sentimental pedophilia as part of their "bold, unprecedented modernization experiment." It's as close as their collective imagination can come to a western democratic style of public celebration. Building a culture from ashes, they expect in a few decades to cough up an emotionally nutritious set of rituals, and this is what they get: large-scale pederasty, and a painful demonstration of what Lu Xun meant when he said that it's impossible to become a man in China.
I trust Bu Yu arrived at that wisdom not long after I did.
Tom Bradley's latest books are Family Romance (Jaded Ibis Press, illustrated by Nick Patterson), Felicia's Nose (MadHat Press, with Carol Novack, illustrated by Nick Patterson), A Pleasure Jaunt With One of the Sex Workers Who Don't Exist in the People's Republic of China (Neopoiesis Press), Even the Dog Won't Touch Me (Ahadada Press), Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing) and Put It Down in a Book (The Drill Press), which was named 3:AM Magazine's Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2009. His latest novel, with secret title and hidden nature, illustrated by the alchemical artist David Aronson, is coming next year from the legendary occult publisher, Mandrake of Oxford.
Further curiosity can be indulged at TomBradley.org, and check out Tom's pages at Unlikely Books and Smashwords.
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