Under the Red Flag (3 page)

“So you were outsmarted by him?”

Some men in the crowd guffawed. Mu wiped her nose with her thumb, and at once she wore a thick mustache. “I taught him a lesson, though,” she said.

“How?”

“I tweaked his ears, gave him a bloody nose, and kicked him out. I told him never to come back.”

People began talking to each other. Some said she was a strong
woman who knew what was hers. Some said the Red Guard was no good; if you got something you had to pay for it. A few women declared the rascal deserved such treatment.

“Dear Revolutionary Masses,” the tall leader started to speak. “We all have heard the crime Mu Ying committed. She lured one of our officers and one of our poor peasants into the evil water, and she beat a Red Guard black and blue. Shall we let her go home without punishment or shall we teach her an unforgettable lesson so that she won’t do it again?”

“Teach her a lesson!” some voices cried in unison.

“Then we’re going to parade her through the streets.”

Two Red Guards pulled Mu off the bench, and another picked up the tall hat.

“Brothers and sisters,” she begged, “please let me off just this once. Don’t, don’t! I promise I’ll correct my fault. I’ll be a new person. Help! Oh help!”

It was no use resisting; within seconds the huge hat was firmly planted on her head. They also hung a big placard between the cloth shoes lying against her chest. The words on the placard read:

I am a Broken Shoe
My Crime Deserves Death

They put a gong in her hands and ordered her to strike it when she announced the words written on the inner side of the gong.

My pals and I followed the crowd, feeling rather tired. Boys from East Street were wilder; they threw stones at Mu’s back. One stone struck the back of her head and blood dropped on her neck. But they were stopped immediately by the Red Guards, because a stone missed Mu and hit a man on the face.
Old people, who couldn’t follow us, were standing on chairs and windowsills with pipes and towels in their hands. We were going to parade her through every street. It would take several hours to finish the whole thing, since the procession would stop for a short while at every street corner.

Bong, Mu struck the gong and declared, “I am an evil monster.”

“Louder!”

Dong, bong
—“I have stolen men. I stink for a thousand years.”

When we were coming out of the marketplace, Squinty emerged from a narrow lane. He grasped my wrist and Bare Hips’s arm and said, “Someone is dead at the train station. Come, let’s go have a look.” The word “dead” at once roused us. We half a dozen boys set out running to the train station.

The dead man was Meng Su. A crowd had gathered at the railroad two hundred yards east of the station house. A few men were examining the rail that was stained with blood and studded with bits of flesh. One man paced along the darker part of the rail and announced that the train had dragged Meng at least seventy feet.

Beneath the track, Meng’s headless body lay in a ditch. One of his feet was missing, and the whitish shinbone stuck out several inches long. There were so many openings on his body that he looked like a large piece of fresh meat on the counter in the butcher’s. Beyond him, ten paces away, a big straw hat remained on the ground. We were told that his head was under the hat.

Bare Hips and I went down the slope to see the head. Other boys dared not take a peep. We two looked at each other, asking with our eyes who should raise the straw hat. I held out my wooden scimitar and lifted the rim of the hat a little with the
sword. A swarm of bluebottles charged out, droning like provoked wasps. We bent over to peek at the head. Two long teeth pierced through the upper lip. An eyeball was missing. The gray hair was no longer perceivable, covered with mud and dirt. The open mouth was filled with purplish mucus. A tiny lizard skipped, sliding away into the grass.

“Oh!” Bare Hips began vomiting. Sorghum gruel mixed with bits of string beans splashed on a yellowish boulder. “Leave it alone, White Cat.”

We lingered at the station, listening to different versions of the accident. Some people said Meng had gotten drunk and dropped asleep on the track. Some said he hadn’t slept at all but laughed hysterically walking in the middle of the track toward the coming train. Some said he had not drunk a drop, because he had spoken with tears in his eyes to a few persons he had run into on his way to the station. In any case, he was dead, torn to pieces.

That evening when I was coming home, I heard Mu Ying groaning in the smoky twilight. “Take me home. Oh, help me. Who can help me? Where are you? Why don’t you come and carry me home?”

She was lying at the bus stop, alone.

Man to Be

At the Spring Festival Hao Nan was very happy, because a week ago he had been engaged to Soo Yan, one of the pretty girls in Flag Pole Village. She was tall and literate. By custom, the dowry would cost the Haos a fortune: eight silk quilts, four pairs of embroidered pillowcases, ten suits of outer clothes, five meters of woolen cloth, six pairs of leather shoes, four dozen nylon socks, a wristwatch, two thermos bottles, a sewing machine, a bicycle, a pair of hardwood chests. Yet Nan’s parents were pleased by the engagement, for the Soos were a rich family in the village and Yan was the only daughter. The wedding was scheduled to take place on the Moon Day the next fall. Though the Haos didn’t have much money left after the engagement feast, they were not worried. Since they had two marriageable daughters, they would be able to marry off at least one of them to get the cash for Nan’s wedding.

It was the third day of the Spring Festival. Nan and four other young men were on duty at the office of the village militia. Because the educated youths from Dalian had returned home to
spend the holiday season with their families in the city, the young villagers had to cover all the shifts. It was a good way of making ten workpoints—a full day’s pay, so nobody complained. Besides, it was an easy job. For eight hours they didn’t have to do anything except stay in the office and make one round through the village.

Outside, a few snowflakes were swirling like duck down around the red lanterns hung at every gate. The smell of gunpowder and incense lingered in the air. Firecrackers exploded now and then, mingled with the music of a Beijing opera sent out by a loudspeaker. Inside the militia’s office, the five men were a little bored, though they had plenty of corn liquor, roasted sunflower seeds, and candies with which to while away the time. They had been playing the poker game called Beat the Queen. Liu Daiheng and Mu Bing wanted to stop to play chess by themselves, but the others wouldn’t let them. There was no fun if only three men drew the cards, and they wanted to crown two kings and beat two queens every time.

Slowly the door opened. To their surprise, Sang Zhu’s bald head emerged, and then in came his small body and bowlegs. “Hello, kk-Uncle Sang,” Nan said with a clumsy smile that revealed his canine teeth.

Without answering, Sang glared at Nan, who had almost blurted out his nickname, Cuckold Sang. People called him that because his young wife, Shuling, often had affairs. It was said that she was a fox spirit and always ready to seduce a man. People thought that Sang, already in his fifties and almost twice his wife’s age, must have been useless in bed. At least he didn’t have sperm, or else Shuling would have given him a baby.

Sang was holding his felt hat. He looked tipsy, his baggy eyes
bloodshot. “Uncle Sang,” Wang Ming said, “take a seat.” Without a word, Sang sat down and put his elbows on the table.

They needed a sixth person to play the game One Hundred Points. “Want to join us?” Nan asked.

“No poker, boys,” Sang said. “Give me something to drink.”

Yang Wei poured him a mug of corn liquor. “Here you are,” he said, winking at the others.

“Good, this is what I need.” Sang raised the mug to his lips and almost emptied it in one gulp. “I came here for serious business tonight.”

“What is it?” Daiheng asked.

“I invite you boys over to screw my wife,” Sang said deliberately.

All the young men were taken aback, and the room suddenly turned quiet except for the sputtering of the coal stove. They looked at one another, not knowing how to respond.

“You’re kidding, Uncle Sang,” Daiheng said, after a short while.

“I mean it. She’s hot all the time. I want you to give it to her enough tonight.” Anger inflamed Sang’s eyes.

Silence again fell in the room.

“Afraid to come, huh?” Sang asked, his sparse brows puckered up. A smile crumpled his sallow face.

“Sure, we’d like to come. Who wouldn’t?” said Ming, who was a squad leader in the militia.

“Well, sometimes heaven does drop meat pies,” Bing said, as if to himself.

“No, we shouldn’t go,” Nan cut in, scanning the others’ faces with his narrow eyes gleaming. He turned to Sang and said, “It’s all right to do it to your wife, Uncle Sang, but that could be
dangerous to us.” Turning to the others, he asked, “Remember what happened at the brickyard last summer? You fellas don’t want to get into that kind of trouble, do you?”

His words dampened the heat in the air. For a moment even the squad leader Wang Ming and Liu Daiheng, the oldest of them, didn’t know what to say. Everybody remained silent. What Nan had referred to was a case in which a prostitute had been screwed to death by a bunch of brick makers. Of course, prostitution was banned in the New China, but there were always women selling their flesh on the sly. The woman had gone to the brickyard once a month and asked for five yuan a customer, which was a big price, equal to two days’ pay earned by a brick maker. That was why the men wouldn’t let her off easily. They gave her the money but forced her to work without a stop. As they had planned, they kept her busy throughout the night, and even after she lost consciousness they went on mounting her. She died the next day. Then the police came and arrested the men. Later three of them were sentenced to eight years in prison.

“Nan’s right. I don’t think we should go,” Wei said at last.

“You’re no man,” Sang said with a sneer, stroking his beardless chin. “I invite you boys to share my wife, free of charge, but none of you dare come. Chickens!”

“Uncle Sang, if you want us to come,” Daiheng said, “you ought to write a pledge.”

“But I don’t know how to write.”

“Good idea. We can help you with that,” Ming said.

“All right, you write and I’ll put in my thumbprint.”

Ming went to the desk, pulled a drawer, and took out a pen and a piece of paper. He sat down to work on the pledge.

Nan felt uneasy about the whole thing. How could a husband invite other men to have sex with his wife? he asked himself. I
wouldn’t. Never. Shuling must’ve had an affair with someone lately and have been caught by Cuckold Sang. They must’ve had a big fight today.

Sang was dragging at his pipe silently. Sitting beside him, Bing was putting the poker cards back into the box.

“Here,” Ming said, walking over with the paper, “listen carefully, Uncle Sang.” Then he read aloud with his eyebrows flapping up like a pair of beetle wings:

On the third eve of the Spring Festival, I, Sang Zhu, came to the Militia’s Office and invited five young militiamen—Hao Nan, Liu Daiheng, Yang Wei, Mu Bing, and Wang Ming—to have sex with my wife Niu Shuling. By doing this, I mean to teach her a lesson so she will stop seducing other men and be a chaste woman in the future. If any physical damage is done to her in the process of the activity, none of the young men shall be responsible. I, Sang Zhu, the husband, will bear all consequences.

The Pledger:

Sang Zhu

Wei placed the ink-paste box on the desk. “Put in your thumbprint if you agree, Uncle Sang.”

“All right.” Sang pressed his ringworm-nailed thumb into the ink, took it out, blew on its pad, and stamped a scarlet smudge under his name. He wiped off the ink on the leg of his cotton-padded trousers, which were black but shiny with grease stains. Turning away from the table, he blew his nose; two lines of mucus landed on the dusty floor.

“Now, let’s go,” Ming said, and motioned to the others as though they were going off to bag a homeless dog, which they often did on night patrol.

Nan felt unhappy about the pledge because Ming, the son of a bitch, had put Nan’s name first and his own name last among the group, as if Nan had led them in this business. At least, it read that way on paper. He was merely a soldier, whereas Ming was a squad leader.

The snow had stopped, and the west wind was blowing and would have chilled them to the bones if they had not drunk a lot of liquor. Each of them was carrying a long flashlight, whose beam now stabbed into the darkness and now hit a treetop, sending sleeping birds on the wing. They were eager to reach the Sangs’, get hold of that loose woman, and overturn the rivers and seas in her. In raptures they couldn’t help singing. They sang “I Am a Soldier,” “Return to My Mother’s,” “Our Navigation Depends on the Great Helmsman,” “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China.” In the distance, soundless firecrackers bloomed in the sky over Sea-Watch Village. The white hills and fields seemed vaster than they were in daylight. The first quarter of the moon wandered slowly through clouds among a few stars. The night was clear and quiet except for the men’s hoarse voices vibrating.