Under the Red Flag (14 page)

“Eat the dung,” Grandson ordered, and whacked Big Hat on the back with the fork.

“Oh, help!”

The street was unusually quiet, no grown-ups in sight. “Yes or no?” Grandson asked.

“No.”

“Say it again.”

“No!”

“Take this.” Grandson stabbed him in the leg with the fork.

“Oh! Save my life!”

One of the prongs pierced Big Hat’s calf. He was rolling on the ground, cursing, wailing, and yelling. Strangely enough, no grown-ups ever showed up.

This was too much. Surely we wanted to see that bastard’s blood, but we wouldn’t kill him and go to jail for that, so a few of us moved to stop Grandson.

“Keep back, all of you.” He wielded the fork around as if he would strike any of us. We stood still.

Grandson picked up one of the droppings with the fork and raised it to Big Hat’s lips. He threatened, “If you don’t take a bite I’ll gut you. Open your mouth.”

“Oh! You bandit,” Big Hat moaned with his eyes closed. His mouth opened a little.

“Open big,” Grandson ordered, and thrust the dung into his mouth.

“Ah!” Big Hat spat it out and rubbed his lips with his sleeves. “Fuck your mother!” he yelled, and lay on his side wailing with both hands covering his face.

Grandson threw the fork to the other side of the street; he looked around at us with his crazed eyes, then walked away without a word. His broad hips and short legs swayed as though he were stamping and crushing something.

Without any delay we all ran away, leaving Big Hat to curse and weep alone.

Shortly afterward Grandson became famous. Boys of the lower grades in our Central Elementary School would tremble at the mere sight of him. With him leading us, we could enter some other areas of town without provoking a fight. Except for us, no one dared play on Main Street any longer—the former noncombat zone was under our control now. Some of the officers’ children, a bunch of weaklings though they ate meat and white bread and wore better clothes, even begged us to protect them on their way to school and back home. They would pay us with tickets for the movies shown in the army’s theater and with tofu coupons, since Sickle Handle’s father, the old blacksmith, had lost all his teeth and liked soft food. For a short while our territory was expanding, our affairs were prosperous, and our Eastern Empire began to dominate Dismount Fort.

But a month later, Grandson’s uncle failed to renew his contract and couldn’t find work in town. We were surprised to hear that he hadn’t been a permanent, but a temporary worker in the fertilizer plant. The Lius decided to return to their home village in Tile County.

Grandson left with the family, and our empire collapsed. Because none of us was suited to be an emperor, the throne remained unoccupied. Now boys from the south even dared to play horse ride in front of our former headquarters—Benli’s house. We were unable to go to the department store at the western end of Main Street or to the marketplace to buy things for our parents and rent picture-story books. Most of us were beaten in school. Once I was caught by Big Hat’s men at the millhouse and was forced to meow for them. How we missed our old glorious days!

As time went by, we left, one after another, to serve different emperors.

Fortune

Blind Bea, a locksmith, used to be a street fortune-teller in the old days. Though his practice was banned in the New China, people in Dismount Fort had never stopped seeing him in secret. Whenever there was a wedding or a funeral, they would go to him beforehand and ask about a lucky day or a good burial place. Because of his poor sight, Bea seldom went out, but he knew what was happening in town. Some people believed he was a kind of scholar who could fathom the mysteries between heaven and earth without stepping out of his threshold. Blind Bea lived well. Except for the children who often watched him through the back window of his hovel, nobody was jealous of his eating large white bread at lunch and dinner.

Tang Hu of Sand Village heard that a month ago a peasant had lost a horse and gone to the fortune-teller to ask its whereabouts. After reading the bamboo slips, Blind Bea raised his knotted hand and boomed out, “He carried his balls to the poplar woods in the east.” The owner of the horse said it was a mare, but Bea told him to forget male or female and just go search the woods. A few men went there and found the horse.

These days Tang had been thinking of visiting Blind Bea, because he had been dogged by bad luck for the past few years. The summer before last he lost two litters of piglets, and last fall a flood ruined his cabbages and turnips. Then he had acute appendicitis and could have died if a truck hadn’t happened to be passing the village and carried him to the Commune Clinic in time. Nonetheless, the doctors opened his stomach, and Tang lost all the original wind his parents had put in him. He wondered whether these misfortunes had been caused by the graves of his ancestors which faced east instead of south.

Tang pulled up his horse cart before the locksmith’s and went inside. Blind Bea crouched over a vise filing the copper switch of a flashlight. At the sight of Tang he put down the rasp and returned to the armchair covered with a roe deer’s skin.

“Take a seat,” Bea said.

Tang sat down and explained what was on his mind. Blind Bea asked his name and the hour and date of his birth. Then he closed his eyes and sat back, mumbling something to himself while fingering a string of green-jade beads. Tang rolled up a cigarette and lit it. A dragonfly was fluttering on the wire gauze of the window, struggling in vain to get out.

“I don’t see any problem here,” Bea said three minutes later.

“Not because of my ancestors’ graves?”

“No. According to the Diagram, you should have a mighty life. You were born to be a big general. Those graves can’t stop you at all.”

“Really?” Tang was surprised. “You say I’m going to be a general?”

“Maybe. Although the Diagram says you were born to decide
the life or death of thousands, it depends on whether you can realize your destiny.”

Tang turned his head aside and thought for a moment. “Then how come I had bad luck these years?” he asked.

“Let’s see. What’s your son’s name?”

“Da Long.”

“What? A great dragon?”

“Yes.”

Blind Bea shook his head and began leafing through a dogeared book. He stopped at a page and read for a minute. “That won’t do,” he said.

“What won’t do?”

“Your son’s life is too strong. His fortune reduces yours, and he is the evil star over your head. ‘Da Long,’ what a name! Only a king should have such a name. The truth is that he is a dragon, while you’re a tiger. His life has overcome yours. See, you’re forty-three now. At your age lots of men have already made their fame and wealth, but you’re still a cart driver, commanding only a couple of scabby horses.” Blind Bea chuckled and lit his long pipe. Smoke came out through his yellow teeth.

“What should I do?” Tang asked.

“How old is your son?”

“Fourteen.”

“Too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he was under ten, you could change his name without hurting your fortune.”

“But what am I to do now?”

“Have his name changed. It’ll hurt, but it’s better than do nothing about it.”

Silence.

The two men seemed deliberately to avoid looking at each other. Then Tang said, “What name should he have?”

Bea opened a notebook, tore a page out, and handed it to Tang. His other hand removed the horn-rimmed glasses from his broad face, revealing eyes like a dead fish’s.

Taking the paper, Tang lowered his head to read it. He found five bold characters in a vertical line: “Horse, Ox, Dog, Mountain, Spirit.”

“Damn it,” he cursed, and struck his thigh with a fist as thick as a horse hoof, his long eyes tilting up to his temples.

“You’d better hurry. There aren’t many years left,” Bea said absently. “A man over forty is like the day in the afternoon. You know that.”

Tang Hu got up and produced a one-yuan bill. “Old Bea, I understand. Thank you for telling me the truth.” He placed the money in Bea’s hand and put on his straw hat. He turned to the door, whose frame seemed too low for his large body, and bent down to get out.

The horses were drawing a large load of rocks along Eternal Way in Dismount Fort, a small town that in the ancient times had been a transfer post where Chinese troops stopped for rest and preparation on their expeditions to Korea. It was a hot windless day, and all the windows of the houses on the street were open. Flies were buzzing around Tang and landed on the horses. At a street corner a grinder was chanting “Hone a knife and sharpen scissors.”

Brandishing the whip once in a while, Tang was lost in thought and let the horses find the way home by themselves. From the moment of his birth, I knew he was a jinx to me, Tang
thought. He never slept quietly at night, waking up every other hour, playing and crying. My wife had to take care of him day and night. He allowed nobody in the house to have a good sleep. A selfish brat from the beginning. … He shat on my neck. I never carried him again. Everybody in the village laughed at me. A son shat on his dad’s neck. Son of a rabbit, he’s been shitting on me all these years! … My fortune is going down day by day, while his fortune is growing like grass. In the first grade he was a group leader in the Young Pioneers; a year later, a bugler; then a brigade leader. Always got high grades. So many awards on the walls. Only fourteen, already attractive to girls. Orchid of the Lius comes to do homework with him three times a week in the evenings. A small womanizer, learning fast. No, a born one.

I never touched a woman until I was twenty-seven. No girls would look at me, because of my cross-eyes. They wouldn’t think of me as a man, because I was poor and my folks were humble. Who knows I was born to be a general and would command thousands of men and horses? Do for their ancestors, they think me no more than a sheep that anyone can kick, a dumb ass that anyone can flog, a chamber pot that anyone can pee into. A caged tiger is a puny animal compared with a free dog…. Dragon boy, you’re strong because you have a tiger dad, because I spilled the best of mine into your life. Cocky boy, you laughed at me because I misread the character “vicious” as “wolf.” It served you right. Those slaps were a good lesson, to teach you to be filial. Young wolf, you’ve been eating away my fortune all these years. This time we must settle everything and you must change your name.

The cart entered Sand Village. The tall cypresses thrust themselves into Tang’s field of vision. Cracking the whip, he hurried the horses to the construction site in the orchard to unload the rocks.

The sun had just gone down behind the western hill and cast on the woods and fields the vast shade that was gliding east rapidly. The chime for ceasing work was sent out from a yard of I-steel hung on an ancient elm outside the production brigade’s office. Hearing the chime, the commune members wiped the blades of their sickles and hoes and began going home. Soon the winch at the well by the village entrance started squeaking, buckets were clanking on the streets, and bellows were burring in every house. A loudspeaker announced repeatedly that all newlyweds must attend a family-planning meeting at seven in the evening.

After dinner, Tang talked to his son about changing his name. His wife, Zhen, was stitching the sole of a cloth shoe, and Hsia, his daughter, lay prone on the brick bed reading a textbook on nature.

“No, I don’t want to change my name,” Da Long said.

“You must,” Tang said. “From now on, you’ll be called Horse.”

“No, I’m not a horse! What a dumb name.”

“All right, you’re Ox.”

“No, I’m not stupid like an ox. I’m smarter than the other boys at school.”

“Don’t be so arrogant. Chairman Mao says everyone should be a willing ox in serving the revolutionary cause. Don’t you remember that?”

“My old man,” Zhen put in, “why do you want to have his name changed all of a sudden?”

“His name is a jinx to me.” Without waiting for a response, Tang turned to his son again. “It’s an honor to be Ox.”

“I don’t want to be that. Everybody is used to my name already.”

“Damn it, then from now on you are Dog.”

“What a joke! All my classmates will make fun of me for such a name.”

“All right, you’re Mountain then.”

“Why don’t you call yourself Mountain?”

Tang stood up and went for his son. “Don’t, please,” Zhen begged, holding his arm.

“Dad,” Hsia said and sat up, “you’re too superstitious. We’re in the New China now. Who would believe a name is a jinx?”

“Shut up, girl!” Again Tang turned to his son. “Da Long, now you must call yourself Spirit.”

“Crazy.” The boy shook his head. “I’m an atheist, a leader in the Young Pioneers. How can I call myself that?”

“The word ‘Spirit’ doesn’t mean a god here,” Tang said. “It’s a good word and means the best of a man. Our family name, Tang, is the same word as the great dynasty’s. See, with such a name you’ll carry on the best of China’s most glorious past. Isn’t it good enough, Tang Spirit?”

“No, it sounds silly. I don’t want to change my name.”