Under the Red Flag (23 page)

It was past midnight when he was back in his house again. After lighting the lamp, he was surprised to find nothing seemed to have changed. Even the note was still under the lamp. He picked it up and saw, beneath his own writing, four big characters: “Nets Above, Snares Below.” It was Secretary Zhao’s handwriting.

Oh, Lu thought with a moan, it’s impossible to go anywhere. I can’t escape. They’ll never leave me alone until I write out what they want. All the officials are of one family; I can never jump out of their palms.

After burning the note over the lamp, he lit a joss stick to keep mosquitoes away. Tired of worrying, he remembered an old saying: “If the enemy come, we have troops to stop them; if a flood comes, we have earth to dam it.” Worrying is useless, he told himself; the cart will find its way around the hill when it gets there. He took off his clothes and went to bed, allowing himself not to think of anything. Soon he fell asleep.

He snored for seven hours without a stop. When he woke up, the sun already covered half the bed. He stretched his legs in the sunlight and began worrying about the confession and thinking how to avoid the trial in the evening. Unable to come up with a plausible excuse and unable to stop missing the slant-eyed waitress,
he resumed cursing himself. All the trouble came from his inability to control his penis. Strange to say, that little fellow, ignoring its master’s disgust and hatred, went erect again, bulging the front of the underwear like a torpedo. Lu hated it. If only he could have plucked it out! It had no shame and fear, and wanted to go into action even in the face of danger and annihilation. He got up and put on his clothes. Still the erection wouldn’t go away. He gave it two slaps with the sole of his rubber shoe. The beating somehow scared the little devil down.

Lu went out, washed his face, took a corn cake, and hurried to the field with a hoe on his shoulder and a large straw hat on his head. Whatever had happened, he must not be slack in his work. He should pretend that everything was normal.

Evening came. With only five pages of writing and with the vision of the leaders furious at his attempted escape, Lu dared not go to the brigade’s office. He thought it better to stay home and wait until the leaders’ anger waned a little. If they asked him the next day, he would say he had a stomachache and couldn’t walk, and would beg them for a few more days. He cooked himself a pot of noodles with string beans, but he was too worried to enjoy the food; he forced himself to think how to make a few more passages of the confession.

The clock with a long pendulum ticked away on the red chest. In the room two ducks perched in a corner while a few chickens strutted and pecked about. On the broad brick bed were scattered his son’s clothes and toys and his wife’s sewing bowl, filled with scraps of cloth, threads, partly stitched soles, scissors, awls. It was stuffy, so after supper Lu took off his undershirt and pants, wearing only the shorts. He sat by the scrawled sheets of paper absentmindedly.

He didn’t expect the leaders would come to his home to look for him. The second he saw them in the yard, he lay down and held his stomach with both hands. They burst in, and Wang yelled at him, “Sit up, you son of a tortoise!”

“Oh, I’m sick.”

“Don’t play tricks with your grandpas. We can see through you. Get up. I saw you hoeing turnips two hours ago. No illness can be so quick. Get your damn ass up!”

Without a word Lu climbed up and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Why do you try to trick us?” Secretary Zhao questioned.

“I’m sick. I really can’t walk.”

“Cut it out,” Wang bellowed. “We know how you feel.” Then he lowered his voice. “All right, we’re going to take care of our patient tonight. Come with us. We’ll cure you of your illness in a couple of days.”

Lu was terrified, his scalp numb. He knew they would apply the tactics called “cartwheeling”—they would take turns questioning him day and night, not allowing him to sleep until he collapsed, confessed everything, even invented things to please them. He could not possibly resist so many of them. If necessary, the leaders could send for a platoon of militiamen. He was so scared that he broke into tears. “Oh, I’ve cracked my brains, but can’t write more. I really don’t know how to write. I’ve used a bottle of ink already. Please let me go just this once. I’m going to kowtow to you.”

“Hold it,” Wang ordered. “You can’t deceive us any longer.”

Scribe Hsiao stepped forward and restrained Lu from going to his knees.

“Oh, heaven,” Lu cried out, “how can I convince you of my sincerity? Do you want me to die? All right—my family’s already
broken, and I don’t want to live anymore.” He pulled a pair of large scissors out of the sewing bowl and put them against his throat. “No more! If you want my life, say it. I’ll die here to show you my remorse.”

“Stop bluffing,” Wang said, smiling with contempt. “I know what stuff’U come out the moment you raise your buttocks. Do it, kill yourself. Then we’ll believe you’re a good, progressive comrade.”

“Lu Han, don’t take us to be beardless idiots,” Zhao said. “Who’s ever heard that a man killed himself with scissors. That’s woman stuff.”

“Do it,” Wang ordered. “Let’s have an eye-opener. We’ll name you a Revolutionary Martyr and give your family provisions.”

Lu was wailing, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Yes, do it,” Zhao demanded with his arms open. “We’re waiting. If you don’t, you’re not a Chinese.”

Lu moved down the scissors as if to prove his inability to kill himself. He turned around and bent down.

“What are you doing?” Wang said.

Lu ripped open his shorts, pulled out his scrotum, and cut it off together with the testicles. He dropped the cutting and fell to the ground, screaming and groaning. Immediately the chickens rushed over and carried away those meaty parts.

“Stop the chickens and get his balls back!” Wang yelled, kicking at a duck that was on its way to the bloody spot.

Both the secretary and the scribe ran out, but it was too late—the chickens had disappeared into the dark yard. Inside, Wang was busy stanching the bleeding with a towel. The sleeves of his white shirt were covered with bloodstains. Still Wang never stopped cursing. “Damn your ancestors. Who told you to do this? I hope you’re bleeding to death.”

“I hate it, hate it!” Lu said through his teeth, clenched to choke his moaning. One of his legs was twitching, the toe drawing small circles on the ground.

Finally Wang managed to tie up Lu’s crotch with three towels, and the blood was almost stopped. Then Hsiao returned with several men and with Chu’s horse cart. They wrapped Lu up with a flowery quilt and carried him out. The moment they placed him in the cart, the horses set out galloping to the Commune Clinic in Dismount Fort. Both the leaders went with the cart. They even gave Lu sweet-potato liquor on the way to stop him from moaning and shaking.

Lu’s self-castration earned him freedom. Nobody thought of pressing him for the confession again, since his act had indeed proved his remorse and sincerity. Naturally, a lot of men shook hands with him when he was back from town. The leaders even went to his father-in-law’s house the day after the castration and tried to persuade Lu’s wife to forgive him and come back home. On hearing of the sad news, Fulan burst into tears, saying she was guilty and shouldn’t have mistreated her husband that way. Her father, a well-respected old man, scolded her in front of the leaders and ordered her to go back at once. That very day she returned with Baby Leopard in Chu’s horse cart. Now she wanted to take good care of Lu and was determined to be a model wife.

As for Lu, he felt things were fine. Losing his testicles didn’t differ much from being sterilized by the family-planning team. Quite a few men in the village were emasculated that way, and the only difference was that they carried more weight below their bellies. Let others babble whatever they liked. Yes, he was gelded, but he had a son, who was as strong as a bear cub, to carry on his family line. From now on that devil of a penis would cause
no trouble, and his family would enjoy peace and unity, which would surely lead to security and prosperity. Though he sweated more than before while working in the fields, he felt his back never so straight and his body never so sturdy. People noticed his face glowing with ruddy health and his hair turning darker and thicker. He did so well that the villagers elected him an exemplary commune member. Secretary Zhao even had a heart-to-heart talk with him and encouraged him to write an application for Party membership, which Lu was, of course, delighted to do. Most significant of all, he had a new, normal life.

A Decade

I left the countryside twelve years ago when my father was transferred to an artillery division in Dalian. Ever since then we have lived in the city. If my aunt were not in Dismount Fort, I might have forgotten that small town where I went to elementary school only for two years in the late 1960s. My aunt comes to visit us every fall, helping Mother prepare our winter clothes and pickle vegetables. Once in a while she brings that town back to my memory.

Last summer I went to Dismount Fort for the first time after a decade. The town was smaller than I had thought. Every street seemed shorter than it had been. On the first day, I rode my uncle’s Peacock bicycle to the marketplace, the Blue Brook, the Eastern Bridge, White Mansion—our classroom building, and other places that I still remembered. But the distances between them were so short I visited them all in less than two hours. From the second day on I gave up the bicycle, and instead I walked around. Few people knew me, because my family had never lived in the town and I had stayed at my aunt’s when going to school there. After strolling through the streets, I found the town basically the same, and the only difference was that
there were fewer children now. I stopped at some houses where my former classmates had lived, but they had all left, working in nearby counties and cities. Most girls had become textile workers in Gold County. Their parents didn’t remember me. There was only one boy who had not left and whose mother still knew me, but he was jailed for raping two women.

Life in the countryside was dull. There was nothing going on in the evenings. After supper most people would sit outside, chatting away and fanning themselves until the cool breeze came from the Yellow Sea around midnight. I missed my boyfriend, who was my classmate at the college. He stayed with his parents in Tianjin during the summer. At night I would write to him. If tired of writing, I read Turgenev’s
Smoke
and a current issue of
Youth
, a small literary magazine published in Shenyang, which carried a story of mine. Since I had time, I read the whole issue from cover to cover. I didn’t like most of the pieces in it, but there was a narrative poem that aroused my interest. The poem tells a story from a former Red Guard’s point of view. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution a teenage boy together with his classmates paraded their teacher, an old man, through the streets. The boy kicked the teacher hard and broke his ribs. For the following years he was full of remorse and tried to make up for what he had done. Then the teacher fell ill, and the boy, a young man now, looked after him for five months until the old man died with gratitude. I didn’t like the sentiment of the poem, but it reminded me of a young woman teacher, Zhu Wenli, who had taught me at the Central Elementary School in Dismount Fort eleven years before.

I was in the fourth grade when she came to our school. At a glance you could tell she was a recent college graduate. She
looked shy and timid. In the beginning, whenever she spoke, not only her cheeks but also her ears turned red. She was a charming young woman, tall and slender, her hands very delicate with long, thin fingers. Her dark eyes were as sensitive as though they were always ready to be in tears. At that time, in the middle of the revolution, we had no sense of beauty. As one of the slogans says: “Sweet flowers are poisonous.” To us, Wenli was someone dangerous rather than pretty. But I remember I liked looking at her in profile; in that way she reminded me of the ballerinas in the revolutionary model play
The Red Women Detachment
. Certainly Wenli never wore a uniform; besides, her lips were thicker and the tip of her small nose too round, lacking the stern looks of a woman soldier.

She taught music in her first year. The class mainly consisted of two parts: the songs praising Chairman Mao or composed for the quotations from him; the dances expressing our loyalty to the Chairman and the Party. Though she was knowledgeable about music and was even able to compose a song, Wenli’s voice was much too soft and too weak for those revolutionary songs. We believed we sang better than she, because our voices were more sincere and passionate. But she was a wonderful dancer. Standing on one toe, she could raise the other leg slowly back and forth with ease, as if it had no weight. She could stretch out her arms with a lot of grace and poise. We all enjoyed watching her dance, though she didn’t seem to have the strength for a loyalty dance, the vigorous kind we did on the streets. Soon we learned that she came from a capitalist family in Shanghai. No wonder she looked so delicate and fragile.