1. Welcome to Red Dust Lane (1949)

NOW, as your would-be landlord – to be exact, your second landlord, your ‘nifangdong’ – I’ve lived in this lane for twenty years come the end of 1949. For a new college student not yet familiar with Shanghai, looking for a place characteristic of the city, convenient, decent, yet inexpensive, Red Dust is the best choice for you. For the real, typical Shanghai life, I mean.

     Red Dust Lane – what a fantastic name! According to a feng shui master, there is a lot of profound meaning in the choice of a name. No point in selecting insignificant words, but none in pompous words, either. The evil spirit might get envious of something too big or good. We’re all made of dust, which is common yet essential, and the epithet ‘red’ lends a world of difference to it. All the connotations in the colour: human passion, revolution, sacrifice, vanity …

     You are an honest, hard-working young man, I know, so I hope you will become one of my subtenants here. Let’s take a walk along the lane, and you can really see for yourself.

     The lane was recorded as early as the late Qing dynasty. Look at this impressive lane sign in the magnificent calligraphy of a Qing dynasty ‘Juren’ – for your young ears, a successful civil service examination candidate at the provincial level. The lane was then developed as part of the French concession, though not as a central part of it. Indeed, so many changes, like the white clouds in the sky, one moment, a grey dog, the next moment, a black weasel … Of course, things are changing again at this very moment: the Communists advancing with flying colours and the Nationalists retreating helter-skelter. But one thing will never change under the sun, I assure you. This is a most marvellous lane.

     Think about the location of it – at the very centre of Shanghai. From the lane, you can easily reach out. To the south, the City God’s Temple Market, no more than fifteen minutes’ walk, where you’ll enjoy an amazing variety of Shanghai snacks. To the north, you can stroll along to Nanjing Road, the street-long shopping centre of Shanghai. If you prefer the fancier stores on Huaihai Road, it will take you no more than fifteen minutes to get there. On a summer night, you may occasionally smell the characteristic tang from the Huangpu River. Strolling around those landmark foreign buildings lined along the Bund, like the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank or Cathay Hotel, you may feel as if the river were flowing through you, and the city throbbing with you.

     Our lane is a medium-sized one with several sub-lanes; another plus, I will say. The front entrance opens onto Jinling Road. There, just a block ahead, you may see Zhonghui Mansion – the high-rise owned by Big Brother Shen, of the notorious Blue Triad, who is now down and out in Hong Kong. Karma, forsooth. As for the back entrance of the lane, it leads into the Ninghai Food Market. In case of an unexpected visitor, you can run out in your slippers and come back with a gasping carp. In addition, there are two side entrances on Fujian Road, with small shops and stalls clustered around. And peddlers, too. Nothing can beat the location here.

     This lane, this ‘longtang’ structure of Red Dust, in itself may tell you something of Shanghai history. After the Opium War, the city was forced open to the western powers as a treaty port with areas selected as foreign concessions. The expatriates were unable to tap the immense potential of the city, so some Chinese were allowed to move in and soon the concession authorities started to build collective dwellings for them in designated lots. For management convenience, houses were arranged in the same architectural style: in lines like barracks, row after row, accessible from sub-lanes to the main. Like in other lanes, most of the buildings here in Red Dust belong to the ‘shikumen’ style, the typical Shanghai two-storied house with a stone door frame and a small courtyard. In the early concession days, a shikumen house was designed for one family, with rooms for different purposes – wings, hall, front room, dining room, corner room, back room, attic, dark room, and ‘tingzijian’ – a cubicle above the kitchen. As a result of the city housing shortage, some of the rooms came to be leased, then to be subleased with the rooms further partitioned or subdivided, so a ‘room’ is practically for a family. You may have heard of a comedy called 72 Families in a House, which is about such an overcrowded housing condition. Red Dust is not like that. No more than fifteen families in our shikumen, you have my word on it.

     In Red Dust, there is a mix of people of different social or financial status. Small-business owners or executives take a wing or a floor, while ordinary workers choose a back room or the attic. As for the tingzijian, it usually goes to those struggling men of letters, the ‘tingzijian writers’ – really fantastic places for creative souls, with constant inspiration from the lane.

     Indeed, your life is so incredibly enriched with all the activity and inter-activity of the lane. You become part of the lane, and the lane part of you, too. Through the open black-painted door, you see this first-floor hall, don’t you? It has long been turned into a common kitchen area, with coal stoves of a dozen or more families all squeezed into the space, along with pots and pans, coal briquettes, and a pigeon-house-like cabin hung on the walls; a squeeze, but not necessarily so bad. Cooking in here, you may learn the recipes of provincial cuisines from your neighbours. Coming back soaked one rainy night, you don’t have to worry about catching a cold: a pot of ginger tea is being brewed for you on your neighbour Uncle Zhao’s stove, and Elder Sister Wu will add a spoon of brown sugar into the steaming hot drink. Nor will you find it monotonous scrubbing your clothes on a washboard in the courtyard, where Granny Liu or Auntie Chen will keep you informed of all the latest news of the lane. Some say Shanghainese are born wheelers and dealers. That’s not true, but there may be something in the fact that people in Shanghai have always lived in a miniature society with the continual education of handling relationships among neighbours.

     People get together a lot, not only in the shikumen but in the lane too. Their rooms being so crowded, they need to have some space elsewhere. All day long, the lane is truly vibrant with life – informal, relaxing, and spontaneous. In the early grey light, women will emerge in their pyjamas carrying the chamber pot, hurrying to the food market with sleepy eyes, and back with full bamboo baskets, preparing the food in the common sinks of the lane, and splashing each other with gossip gathered overnight. Men will stretch out, practicing tai chi, brewing the first pot of dragon-well tea, singing snatches of Beijing opera, and exchanging a few words about the climate, physical or political. For lunchtime, those people at home will step out again, holding rice bowls, chatting, laughing, or exchanging a slice of fried pork for a nugget of steamed belt fish. In the evening, Red Dust gets more exciting, with men playing chess or cards or mah-jong under the lamp in the lane, women chatting or knitting or washing. In summer, some will take out bamboo recliners or mats. It is so hot inside. A few will choose to sleep out in the lane.

     Let’s take a turn here. Don’t step under the droplets from laundry on these bamboo poles across the sky of the lane. An American journalist said, ‘the colourful clothing festooned on a network of bamboo poles presents an Impressionist scene’. But according to a folk belief, walking under women’s underwear may bring bad luck. Whether you believe this or not, it won’t hurt to take a detour. And that’s another convenience of those sub-lanes. You can go through a number of different ways. Here we are, moving toward the front entrance of the lane.

     Oh, look at these people gathered here, sitting on bamboo chairs, and wooden stools, and holding tea, cigarettes and paper fans. This is one thing special about the lane: the evening conversations of Red Dust Lane, ‘Red Dust Talk’.

     Something like chess and card games, or chatter among neighbours, you may well find in other lanes of the city. But what is going on here is truly one of a kind. Some people have moved out, but they come back to Red Dust for the evening talk. A time-honoured tradition here. Except in harsh weather, a group of people – an established audience base – always turns out for the evening talk of the lane, for the lane and about the lane.

     Now, what’s so special, you may say, about the neighbours’ talk? Well, what makes it so unique is a sort of fictionalisation that must have come from the Red Dust feng shui, a practice of producing a story out of everything or nothing, a way of seeing the world in a grain of sand. Of course, the stories of the lane residents have no real heroes or heroines – certainly not the type of ‘the talented scholar and beautiful girl’ or ‘the unrivalled kung fu master’. Nor are they about such conflicts or cliffhangers, as in books. Still, our storytellers here use all kinds of styles, traditional or avant-garde, flashing back and forth, showing but not telling, and narrating from a special point of view, and sometimes even from all points of view.

     As the characters are real people there, the evening talk is highly enhanced through its interaction with the real Red Dust life. While listening to a story, we offer interpretation from our own perspective, and contribution, if we happen to know something the narrator knows not. After all, a narrator is not always that reliable, what with stated or unstated reasons for omissions or alterations of fact. The audience knows better, and is capable of pulling a story to pieces and retelling it in different ways.

     What’s more, a story inevitably comes to an end at the last page of a book, happily ever after or not. Nothing is ever like that in real life. You imagine you can put an end to your narrative one intoxicated evening, but in a few years there will be some new development or unexpected twist, a new sequence of events, something entirely different. A comedy turns into a tragedy, or vice versa. We know better, which changes the meaning of the earlier story. Needless to say, sometimes we also play a part, however inadvertent or insignificant, in the stories of others, which, in turn, come to affect us.

     Now, look at this young man sitting in the centre of the group. He’s called ‘Old Root’, family name ‘Geng’, a homonym for ‘root’ – he invented the nickname for himself. According to him, ‘old’ in Chinese does not necessarily refer to one’s age; it also connotes wisdom and experience. Though only in his twenties, he has an old head. Self-educated, he reads books like swallowing dates and not worrying about their pits. Like the Chinese proverb: ‘Water does not have to run deep: it’s cool with a dragon in it.’ Judging from the position of his chair, he must be the storyteller for the evening.

     Oh. There’s a blackboard leaning against his chair … I don’t know anything about the blackboard, but there must be something exciting about it. And sitting next to him is ‘Four-Eyed Liu’, another bookworm, who likes to give his newspaper-based interpretation to everything. And ‘Big Hua’, who is as curious as a cat. Let’s stay here and listen for a while. Don’t worry about the time. If it gets late, I will buy you an evening snack – as your second landlord in Red Dust Lane. Listen. Old Root has just started:

     ‘Do you remember the opening statement in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms? “After peace comes war, and after war comes peace.” Things are just like that, an endless repetition in this mundane world of ours. Time rolls up and down, wave upon wave, leaving behind on the moon-bleached beach stories like shells. Open one, and you may find something after your heart, but if not, don’t be too disappointed. It is only a matter of perspective that things appear good or bad under the sun. In the year 1949, with the Communists in and the Nationalists out, there are so many things appearing and disappearing, like in the change of dynasties, like always.

     ‘Now, in the early spring days of 1949, the Nationalist government boasted of making Shanghai a Chinese Stalingrad, a turning point in China’s civil war, but people here could not help experiencing a sense of unreality. Shortly after Chiang Kai-shek announced his resignation, a monstrous white snake was killed by lightning in Qingpu county – there was a similar portentous sign at the end of the Qing dynasty. And then panic spread with the news of the vaults of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank being emptied of bullion. My friend, Cai, a waiter in Dexing Restaurant, told me something he saw with his own eyes. For several days in April, the restaurant was reserved by the top commanders of the Nationalist troops. One night, he served a platter of sea cucumber with shrimp roe in a reserved private room, where he saw a celebrated courtesan reclining naked on the table, feeding her big toe like a fresh scallop into a four-starred general’s mouth, her white foot still flexing to a tune from the gramophone – ‘After tonight, when will you come back?’ Now, Dexing is a genuine Shanghai cuisine restaurant, and these Nationalists knew they could never enjoy a Shanghai banquet again. The high-ranking officials being so decadent and pessimistic, how could the Chiang dynasty not fall?

     ‘Well, don’t be impatient, my Red Dust fellows. I’m not going to give you a long lecture on the change of dynasties. I’m coming to the story for this evening – and to the blackboard, too. It’s just that it always takes one thing to lead to another in this world. Like karma in Buddhism, or whatever you want to call it. Things are related and interrelated, though not so easily understandable to laymen like you and me.

     ‘Back to the story. Because of the negative propaganda about the Communists, rich Shanghainese started fleeing from the city by whatever means possible: rushing to the airport, to the train station, to the harbour. Like others, my boss fled to Taiwan without giving notice, abandoning the factory in March. I had to find work to support myself. So I borrowed from the food market a tricycle used for shipping frozen fish bars in its trunk. With the war raging near Ningbo, there had been no supply of fish for days in the market.

     ‘My idea was simple. As people were leaving pell-mell with all their belongings, intra-city transportation turned into a huge problem, too. For some, a tricycle could prove to be just what they needed. That presented an opportunity for me. Also, some people were getting rid of their things so cheaply. A heavy mahogany Ming-style cabinet of exquisite craftsmanship sold for a silver dollar, a single ‘yuan head’, I heard. In fact, I too got a radio for practically nothing. It was a chance of lifetime.

     ‘So I pedalled the tricycle around the swell Upper Corner of the city, venturing into Henshan Road, an area inhabited by fabulously wealthy people with young maids in black dresses, white aprons and starched caps, and armed guards standing at the grey iron gates. Behind the high walls, those mansions seen in the movies still shone impressively in the afternoon light. It came unexpectedly as another reminder that afternoon of the social polarities that exist. Such a large house was for only one family, I realised, while in our neighbourhood, a far smaller house has to be partitioned out like pieces of chopped tofu to accommodate a dozen or more families. A red-turbaned Sikh guard hurried over and ordered me to leave, ferociously, like the evil-chasing warrior striding out of a superstitious door banner. I was suddenly glad at the thought that things were going to change soon.

     ‘I decided to try my luck in some less fancy areas, where people also wanted to leave but didn’t have their own cars. I turned into Xinle Road, which stretched out silent and deserted, almost to the end, and I saw a woman standing alone, in a white raincoat.

     ‘She had a couple of purses in one hand and several bags and suitcases heaped on the kerb. She was standing in her high-heeled sandals, waving her other hand frantically at anything remotely resembling a taxi – at that moment, my approaching tricycle. As I had guessed, she was anxious to go to the airport. Perhaps in her mid-thirties, she had a willowy figure, fragile against the expensive buggy luggage. There seemed to be an elusive quality about her, especially in her large eyes, something that reminded me of a pear tree blossoming transparent in the late autumn. She hesitantly murmured in a distinct Beijing accent that she did not have much money left after purchasing her airline ticket. That was possibly true. A ticket those days could have cost a fortune. The tricycle trunk should be enough for her with all her belongings, I thought, noticing among her things a blackboard with names of Beijing operas written on it.

     ‘Then recognition came. She was no other than Xiao Dong, the celebrated Beijing opera actress. I can’t say I’m a Beijing opera fan – I cannot afford it – but once I had the opportunity of seeing her on stage at the Heavenly Toad Theatre. She played Yuhuan, a beautiful T’ang imperial concubine, alone in her chamber, drunk, amorous with the fantasy of her lord enjoying the rapturous ‘cloud and rain’ of another imperial concubine. It was such a breathtaking performance; the flowers must have folded themselves in shame before her graceful charm. But Xiao was much more than that. It’s hard to put into words. Well, you may have heard of those Beijing opera terms – ‘orchid fingers’, ‘water sleeves’, ‘wasp waist’, ‘lotus blossom steps’ … Suffice it to say that she had all of them. Perfection.

     ‘You have to watch her performance to really understand the art of Beijing opera. Many people declare they are willing to drown in the ‘autumn waves’ of her eyes. I knew better. One of those flower baskets with the silk ribbon sent to her cost more than I earn for a whole year.

     ‘What’s more, she was said to be pursued by Shen, the business tycoon connected with the Nationalist government and the Blue Triad. A couple of years earlier, when she lost her voice – it almost ended her career – Shen brought the best German doctor to cure her. But after her recovery, she spurned his proposal. Because of his being a married man, it was thought, but it was not uncommon for such a man to have a second wife or even a concubine. She might have been throwing an egg against a stone wall, but, to everyone’s surprise, instead of flexing his triad muscle, he kept piling flower baskets against any stage she was on, and was there in the front row smiling and applauding, like someone under a spell. The incredible story of the two was buried by the headlines of the civil war. I hadn’t heard anything about them for a while, and I had no clue why Xiao came to be standing on the side of the street in a white raincoat all alone.

     ‘“You are no other than Xiao!” I said.

     ‘“You know me?”

     ‘“Why are you leaving Shanghai?” It was none of my business, but I imagined few would enjoy Beijing opera in Taiwan, where most people spoke the Taiwan dialect.

     ‘“I have no choice. Shen is dying in Hong Kong,” she said, then added: “Sick, broke. His assets all gone because of the war. He’s nobody there, lying in a hospital with needles stuck all over his body. A dragon stranded in a shallow pool is being ridiculed by shrimps.”

     ‘That sounded like a line from a Beijing opera, the name of which I forget. I was not that thrilled with the quote; though not necessarily a shrimp, I was no dragon in her eyes. Still, her statement overwhelmed me.

     ‘Xiao chose not to go to him in his rich and powerful days. Now he’s down and out, she is giving up everything to fly to him. A decision made at the expense of her career. The city, gloomy with the spreading evening, appeared to suddenly glisten in her large lambent eyes.

     ‘“Don’t worry about the fee. Put as much as you like into the tricycle,” I said. “I am your fan.”

     ‘It was a heavy tricycle load, but I pedalled to the airport like we had wings. In the trunk that smelled of fish she sat, pensive. Without her makeup, people could have taken her for someone who worked at the food market, and her white raincoat, which, though expensive, looked like a uniform.

     ‘At the airport, I tried to help her check in the luggage, but it was hard with so many people trying desperately to get in all their belongings. She looked at the blackboard, on which the chalked characters had smeared from rubbing against the other luggage. She gave me the blackboard, heaving a deep sigh, with a pose I thought I recognised from an opera called Izi Holding Her Heart Out.

     ‘“It’s the blackboard programme from my first day on the stage. You love Beijing opera, I know. So you keep this. I don’t think I will ever step on the stage again.” She opened one of her purses and dug out some banknotes.

     ‘I pushed back the money she offered me, my hand touching hers for a split second. “The blackboard more than covers the fee,” I said.

     ‘Standing outside the airport, I gazed at her retreating figure, and listened to the last clinking of her sandals as she disappeared through that sombre gate, the resigned beat of a night watchman in the T’ang dynasty.

     ‘My mind was a total blank before an old proverb came to me: “A love affair that causes the fall of a city”. In a different version, the fall of an empire, as in that opera I saw at Heavenly Toad Theatre – Emperor Xuan lost his great empire because of his infatuation with his favourite concubine, Yuhuan. So it took the fall of Shanghai for Xiao and Shen to finally get together.

     ‘Humming the Beijing opera tune, I thought of another Chinese proverb. “As a horse proves its strength galloping a long distance, people get to know each other in the time of disaster.” And then of still another proverb: “A beauty’s fate is as thin as a piece of paper.” I tried to think of some lines of my own, without success. It’s strange that those old sayings function like a retaining wall, holding back the soil as it begins slipping from the slope.

     ‘There’s such a lot I do not know about her, I kept telling myself. Why had she not consented earlier, for one thing, if she had cared for him that much? A lot of her story is blank, but from another perspective, it may be just as well. Like in a traditional Chinese landscape painting; what is not there gives room for imagination. You may laugh at my maudlin sentimentality over a personal drama against such a historical background. But in the last analysis, where do we live? In our petty personal lives; not in a history textbook.

     ‘I pedalled home late that night. The sky was occasionally lit up with shells and searchlights. I did not fall asleep at once, instead turning and tossing on the bed. Some time after midnight, I was woken up by the sound of machine-gun fire close to the lane. On impulse, I rolled off the bed and crawled under it, thinking only about why I could hear a lone cricket chirping so late at night. After a while, I sneaked a look out the window and went back to sleep. The night was once again shrouded in silence. I dreamed of a white petrel taking off and soaring over boundless oceans.

     ‘Early that morning I turned on the radio and heard that Shanghai had been liberated. The Nationalist government collapsed, not with a bang, but with a cricket’s chirp. History had happened as I huddled like a bambooleaf-wrapped zongzi dumpling under the bed. The radio said: “The city has turned a new page.”

     ‘So that is why I’m bringing the blackboard to the evening talk of the lane. Ordinary folks we are, but we must keep ourselves abreast of all the changes happening around us. In this world of ours, things change dramatically as from azure oceans into mulberry fields. So I have a suggestion. Let’s start a blackboard newsletter. I have read about it in a Russian – Soviet Union, I should say – novel in which people put the big events on the blackboard as part of socialist education there. Our people here may not all be able to read newspapers or listen to radios, but at least we’ll get the general idea from our blackboard newsletters.’

     This is the last issue of the Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for 1949. In September, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, exercising the power of National People’s Congress, adopted the title ‘People’s Republic of China’ for the new state, which is to be a people’s democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class, based on the alliance of workers and peasants, and in unity with all China’s democratic parties and nationalities, and decided on Beijing for the country’s capital, the five-star red flag, and ‘March of the Volunteers’ for the national anthem. On October 1, on top of the Tiananmen Gate, our great leader Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Long live the People’s Republic of China! Long live Chairman Mao. Chinese people are happily bathed in the sunlight of Liberation. Here is a new song entitled ‘The Sky of the Liberated Area is Bright’:

 

     Bright is the sky of the liberated area,

     Happy are the people of the liberated area.

     The Democratic government loves the people.

     Countless are the good deeds of the Communist Party.

     Hu hu hu hu hei,

     Hu hu hu hu hei …

2. Cricket Fighting (1969)

IN THE summer of 1969, evenings were full of hilarity, with cricket fighting in a corner close to the end of Red Dust Lane. People carried over their clay cricket pots, squatted in a circle, and watched their crickets in combat. After a fierce battle, the victor would sing loudly, scratching its wings in the pot, while the vanquished would crawl to the edge, or jump for its life, straight out of the pot, if it had any energy left. Cricket owners and onlookers shouted and shooed, as if the fate of the world depended on what happened in the pot.

     As an elementary-school student unable to resist the corner, I was too young to own a cricket and there was no possibility of my parents allowing me to go to the countryside to catch one; in the days before the Cultural Revolution, some people gambled on cricket fights, which my parents did not like, but they allowed me to watch if it meant keeping me in the lane.

     One evening that summer, Cousin Min gave me a cricket that he had caught in a graveyard in Qingpu. Its name was ‘Big General’. It was not exactly big, but it was pitch black and a third of its head was given over to two gigantic teeth that glinted like a pair of axes in the sun. People believe in the spirit of the earth, and whatever grows up in the graveyard must have acquired the yin spirit of it. I believed it. Big General was a hell of a cricket. But I wondered why Min gave him to me.

     ‘No time,’ he said. ‘We have to fight for Chairman Mao.’

     It was the fourth year of the Cultural Revolution. With the old government system demolished, Red Guard organisations found themselves in power, and then their interests in conflict. Each faction claimed itself the most loyal to Chairman Mao, and others to be treacherous. Fights among factions were becoming common, initially with words, then stones or knives, and finally guns.

     I understood so little of it at the time. Nor did I much care. I owned a cricket. I discovered a grown-up’s prestige with my valuable possession. In the corner, people talked to me as an equal, even going out of their way to be nice, especially when they wanted Big General to fight their cricket. I learned a lot, too, about cricket-fighting, like how to choose the right feed, how to make a bamboo container, and then to improve the housing, how to correctly trim a cricket-goading rush stem, and to keep the pot warm in cold weather.

     The Big General made a brave new world of the lane for me. Having absorbed the infernal spirit of the graveyard, the cricket attacked its opponents as if it had come straight from hell, leg-ripping, jaw-cutting and belly-slitting in the purple arena of the clay pot. The first day, it defeated five crickets in a row, breaking the record of Red Dust Lane.

     And it kept winning loud applause for itself, and for me, with its teeth slashing the sunlight and its wings flashing my admiration. Beneath its left wing, there was a tiny orange dot shaped much like the mole on Chairman Mao’s chin, though I knew better than to mention it to others. I thought crickets to be the most inscrutable creatures in the world, born for the purpose of fighting each other in the name of their masters. I gave it a longer name: Invincible Big General Li Yuanba, the number-one hero in the Romance of the Sui and T’ang Dynasties, who, though small and swarthy, wields two axes like gigantic mountains. Li Yuanba tore a mighty opponent in two, thus making a great contribution to the T’ang Empire. My Big General would do exactly that for me.

     Having conquered all its rivals in Red Dust Lane, the Big General began to challenge other well-known crickets from outside the neighbourhood. Its name began spreading far and wide. Celebrated veteran cricket-fighters came all the way from Yangpu district to size up the Big General.

     I was eager to report all these victories to Min. But when I went to his home, Aunt Xiuxiu always told me that Min had to stay in the school. The headquarters of his Red Guard organisation, Revolution Thunderstorm, was facing an armed attack by a rival group, Expelling Tigers and Leopards, which enjoyed the support of a local police rebel organisation. I asked Aunt Xiuxiu to tell Min that the Big General was doing great.

     Then the Big General lost to an unknown cricket in a cheap bamboo container, the type used only for a second- or third-class cricket. It was utterly inexplicable.

     Like in the Chinese proverb, it is commonplace for a general to win or lose. Most crickets can resume fighting after a couple of hours, but that was not the case with mine. No matter how much I used the golden rush stem, the Big General would not fight. In the pot, to my shame, it would walk away from any approaching opponent, without so much as a show of teeth. If cornered, it jumped out of the pot.

     Soon, the Big General was booed by all the cricket-fighters. I found myself turning back into an insignificant kid; fewer and fewer grown-ups talked to me any more in the lane. In desperation, I consulted a cricket guru.

     Following his suggestions, I tried starving the Big General, the rationale being that it might fight to eat, and cannibalism applies to crickets too. It didn’t work. The moment I put the Big General into an opponent’s pot, it snatched up any remaining grain of rice, like a beggar, and ran for its life. I tried red pepper, which was supposed to make its teeth burn so much it would sink them into an opponent for relief. Nothing. Finally, I resorted to the ‘resurrection’ technique. I would drown the cricket in a bowl of water, then pull it out to dry in the sun and gradually come back to life. I drowned the Big General several times. The treatment was supposed to wash the memory of defeat out of its brains. One time, I held the cricket under the water a bit too long and when I pulled it up, its belly appeared swollen. Still, the Big General managed to come back to life.

     While I was bent over at the corner of Red Dust Lane, Aunt Xiuxiu came looking for me. She was worried about Min. His school was surrounded by the Expelling Tigers and Leopards. The telephone line was cut. Min was holding out in the headquarters with several loyal comrades. She’d had no news of him for several days. I tried my best to comfort her, but I had a cricket fight scheduled for the afternoon.

     I repeated the drowning one more time, but the Big General still showed no fighting spirit. In desperation, I tossed it up high into the air. It was a shock technique, similar to resurrection in effect, according to my cricket guru, the purpose being to concuss a cowardly head into becoming a hellish helmet. To my astonishment, the Big General jumped wildly out of the pot. In a hurry to recover it under my hand, my finger broke off a tiny piece of its leg.

     ‘Great, he’s really mad now,’ my guru observed.

     And sure enough, the Big General pounced on his next opponent, as if charging from another world. It snapped off half of its opponent’s head in the first match, tore off legs in the next, broke a third fighter’s jaw. Applause rose from all around, but I began to worry. The Big General was getting slower; days of starvation, pepper and drowning all seemed to have taken a toll. Against Black Devil, its fifth opponent in a row, the Big General wobbled on its legs. But, though limping, it hung on doggedly. I wanted to quit the fight on its behalf, but that was against the rules. With their teeth entangled, the Black Devil threw the Big General onto its back and, before it could recover, sank its teeth into its belly. Twitching, the Big General opened and closed its teeth, and then died. I wept.

     A couple of hours later, I learned that Min had been killed in an attack launched by Expelling Tigers and Leopards. Fighting against overwhelming odds, he was the last to fall and was disembowelled, a steel cleaver clutched tight in one bloody fist, in the other the Quotations of Chairman Mao.

     This is the last issue of the Red Dust Blackboard Newsletter for 1969. In this year, our Party and people have achieved great victories in the course of the great Cultural Revolution. In the Ninth CPC National Congress held under the presidency of Chairman Mao, Mao’s close comrade-in-arms and successor delivered the political report confirming the theory and practice of the Cultural Revolution. A new Political Bureau was formed. China successfully conducted its first underground nuclear test.

3. Foot Masseur (1998)

BLACK-HAIRED Ding’s luck changed dramatically, as if he was riding the roller-coaster at the new Jingjiang Theme Park. Like everything else in the world, the turn of fortune had a long chain of cause and effect. As a Buddhist maxim says, a peck or a drink must have been pre-determined, and be determining, too.

     It started in the late 1970s, when White-haired Ding, an old bachelor of Red Dust Lane, retired from the Yangtze Bathhouse and gave his job, as well as his tingzijian room, to his nephew, Black-haired Ding, who was then still a young boy farming in the countryside of Jiangbei, north of the Yangtze River. It was a special arrangement made out of consideration for the old man’s status as a national model worker – he had been received by Chairman Mao in the 1960s. Before going back to the countryside, the old man gave his nephew only one sentence of advice:

     ‘You can do a good job for yourself in any profession.’

     A bathhouse job was not considered a desirable one, not even in socialist China. In the pre-1949 era, bathhouse workers had been mostly from Jiangbei, an impoverished, backward area with derogatory connotations in the lexicon of Shanghainese. The job that awaited the young man was that of a foot masseur by the large pool.

     Even though the status was low, it was better than the alternative and the young man considered himself lucky; instead of farming in the countryside, he would be working at a state-run bathhouse in Shanghai, with all sorts of job benefits. He did not have to worry about hot water and could bathe to his heart’s content all the year around, a luxury even the well-off residents of Red Lane could not afford. He did not have to worry about cooking; there was a large stove in the bathhouse, where the employees warmed or steamed their rice, from breakfast to dinner. And he did not have to worry much about clothes. On arriving for work, he stripped naked, took a shower, and wrapped himself in a towel – uniform supplied, and always clean. It was hot work, massaging and sweating by the pool. The Mao jacket inherited from his uncle still appeared quite new and yet it must have been more than a decade old.

     Black-haired Ding also inherited the skill of a foot masseur and it did not take long for him to win a name for himself at the bathhouse. He took his uncle’s advice to heart and was passionate about his work. In time, he became just another resident of the lane, though his strong accent marked him always as being from Jiangbei.

     Eventually, it became the business of the lane that he find a girlfriend and Auntie Jia set him up with Linlin, who worked at a collective-run soy sauce shop. On Auntie Jia’s scale, a collective-run company employee matched nicely with an employee of a state-run bathhouse, factoring in wages, work benefits and job security. Soon, Linlin was seen visiting him in the lane. Since he had his own room, neighbours were alert on those occasions for any suspicious sounds after his door was closed. The neighbourhood committee, too, was vigilant. That is, until Linlin stopped coming.

     Black-haired Ding would not talk about her abrupt evaporation. It was said in the lane he had only himself to blame. One afternoon she brought some fruit to his bathhouse. He was excited by the visit and ran out in nothing but his towel, which concealed little. Linlin was overcome by embarrassment. Soon, though, a different version of the story began to circulate in the lane – that his constant exposure to naked male bodies in the bathhouse had created a sexual orientation problem. White-haired Ding was a bachelor all his life, which made it all the more credible.

     Black-haired Ding did not seem to care too much about the loss of his girlfriend. Nor did he try to refute speculation about his continuing celibacy. He went to the bathhouse as before, working hard, wearing the same Mao jacket.

     Time drains away like the dirty water in a bathhouse.

     In the years of the Cultural Revolution, there were so many things far more important than speculation about Black-haired Ding’s personal life. People in the lane did not talk about it any more, except to occasionally note that the absence of a wife seemed to confirm what everyone thought.

     The Cultural Revolution started with a bang and ended with a whimper. After the passing of great leader Chairman Mao, and after wise leader Chairman Hua stepped down, it was veteran leader Chairman Deng Xiaoping who started the economic reform of China. Black-haired Ding was in his thirties and had lost most of his Jiangbei accent, half of his black hair, and his nickname. He had long been the one and only Ding in the neighbourhood so it was probably inevitable. The lane knew from his occasional comments in the evening talk that he had his worries like everyone else, but he seemed less bothered by them, as if they got washed away in the hot water pool.

     ‘After all, what’s the difference between people when they’re all stripped naked?’ he’d say. ‘What’s the difference in dirty bath water?’

     In the course of the economic reform, however, a difference did become evident: the state-run bathhouse was considered too cheap to use by the new rich, who preferred the ‘special service’ performed by young female masseuses in the private-run bathhouses; but too expensive for the new poor. The state-run bathhouse went downhill as a business. Ding was laid off on one-third pay under the ‘waiting-for-retirement programme’. He could still look for other work, but his skills were useless outside the bathhouse.

     Ding thought about going back to his Jiangbei village, where he might be able to eke out a living on his reduced income. But when he learned that his childhood buddies were all married with children, he lost interest in going home. He wondered whether his uncle had done him such a good service by bringing him to the city in the first place.

     As luck would have it, and luck can be capricious, one of his former clients, nowadays a Big Buck with several companies in his name, infuriated his wife by enjoying himself too much in one of those new bathhouses, though he swore that it was nothing but a foot massage. He suggested she get the same service, and recommended Ding. Big Buck, having heard the stories about Ding’s sexual orientation, made a lucrative offer to Ding. ‘Prove to her the miraculous effects of foot massage. You may come to our house for the service.’

     So he went. It was a grand new mansion. Big Buck’s wife was like a goddess in her plush white robe, emerging from the steamy bathroom, footprints like lotus flowers on the hardwood floor. How Big Buck could have fooled around with such a wife at home, Ding could never understand. But he was occupied with something else, something more immediate, and intimate. Her bare feet were as perfect as if they had been carved out of soft white jade, her toenails like petals trembling in his lap; he could barely hold the manicure knife steady. People would have paid a bundle of money just to touch a little toe of hers, so glistening soft and white, like peeled fresh lychee. He managed to do a good massage. She tipped him handsomely. So did her husband, happy she was convinced by his deception.

     Ding had not expected her summons, but Big Buck’s wife requested his service again, and again. There, he could occasionally enjoy a free shower too, after she fell asleep on the sofa. It was almost like those good old days when he had first come to Shanghai, except with one difference – it was a quick, cold shower he took after working on her feet, necessary to deal with his excitement.

     His name spread among those rich ladies, who took for granted the story about his sexual orientation and welcomed him into their homes. To them, he was a eunuch in the royal palace. One insisted on enjoying his service in the bedroom, stretching her feet out, leaning against a down pillow as she talked on the phone; another preferred the bathroom as she luxuriated in a huge bathtub, placing her toes in his hands. Often, the sultry, sweating scenes became too much for him. But he had to control himself, he knew, and gulped down cups of cold water.

     He also had to dress himself properly now; he bought foreign-brand baggy pants, which the lane thought exotic, but he could tell no one the true reason for them. He could not afford to make mistakes.

     Ding considered himself the luckiest SOB under the sun. He made good money. A couple of evenings could bring in more than his former monthly salary in the state-run bathhouse. An easy and fantastic job it was, his eyes feeding on the sight of those naked or half-naked women, their dainty toes wriggling in his grasp, their shapely soles like soft dough to be kneaded by his expert hands to his heart’s content.

     The neighbours in the lane did notice some conspicuous changes about him.

     ‘You make a fortune, Ding?’

     ‘You have a girlfriend, Ding?’

     The first question was rhetorical, and the second, not so much; if he had a girlfriend he almost certainly would have brought her to the lane. And then there was the question of his sexual orientation.

     Like in a new Chinese saying, money burns a man. With all the money in his pocket, Ding was burning with desire. The constant exposure to these naked beauties helped little. Once again, he thought about having a girlfriend, but with his dubious reputation, no one wanted to introduce any girl to him. Nor could he try the new service in the ‘personal’ column of the Wenhui Daily. Once the news got out, he could lose his customers.

     Then he thought of the stories about the foot massage service in those private bathhouses. He was curious, both professionally and personally. How could those young girls do their job without any training? Anyway, he could afford it, he thought.

     So, one afternoon, he went to a private bathhouse. According to the service menu on the wall, just a foot massage was not that expensive. A tall, bearded man approached him at the entrance. ‘A girl?’ That was what he had imagined. He nodded. ‘Double expense?’ That he did not really understand, but he nodded again; if he said too much people would know how inexperienced he was.

     A young skinny girl led him into a cubicle, where he was told to lie down on a narrow bed. She removed his shoes and socks, pulled his feet down into a basin of hot water, and began to massage his feet. It was not how he did it, and there was little skill to speak of, but her soft fingers, especially when she started scratching and scraping the callus on his heel with her bare nails, made all the difference. In his professional experience, such treatment was done with a special file. His mind began to wander towards ecstasy when she said, ‘Pull down your pants?’

     He barely nodded, not knowing what to say or do. Without taking off her own clothes, she pulled down his pants, leaned over, and started licking and sucking before inserting him into her mouth. She must have gargled with a magical liquid, for her mouth became so warm, almost hot as she raised her tempo. It was more than he could endure and he was about to explode in her mouth when several cops burst into the cubicle.

     What happened next was like a nightmare; one in which he is unable to speak or act. He was aware of being dragged to a nearby police station and tossed in a holding cell, where he spent the night, but it was as if it was happening to another man.

     He was released in the morning, thanks to his clean record and information passed on by the neighbourhood committee of Red Dust Lane, now responsible for measuring out an appropriate punishment, which could mean a neighbourhood criticism meeting and Ding making a confession with all the lurid details. But there, Comrade Jun, the head of the committee, hesitated and hurried over to discuss the matter with Old Root.

     ‘What rotten luck. To be caught the first time!’ the old man said. ‘Still, it may be a timely lesson for him.’

     ‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Comrade Jun. He was known to be wise and fair; the lane knew to be thankful and respected his judgment.

     ‘If the story comes out, it means a big loss of face for him, but not without some positive effect,’ said Old Root. ‘At least, he’ll prove himself to be a man. And for the neighbourhood, the stories about his sexual orientation may disappear overnight.’ Old Root scratched at his chin. ‘But what if word gets out of the neighbourhood?’

     ‘That’s the question.’ Comrade Jun said, nodding. ‘That’s why I thought I should consult you.’

     ‘His service depends on people’s belief in his sexual orientation. Once word gets around, his career is over.’

     ‘Exactly; there are already so many unemployed in the neighbourhood, an increasing liability to the committee. Let’s not add to that. But he has to be punished for something, or I cannot file my report to the district police station.’

     ‘Wasn’t there a campaign to fight bourgeois liberalisation a couple of years ago? What about we punish him for that?’ Old Root had Comrade Jun’s absolute attention. ‘All his fancy new clothes – his baggy pants with so many pockets.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s a new American style, hip hop, I’ve heard.’

     ‘Old Root, you’re a genius. “Bourgeois liberalisation” covers anything, and everything, and never goes out of date. Proper and right for Ding.’

     This is the last issue of the Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for 1998. In March, Comrade Zhu Rongji succeeded Comrade Li Peng as premier and actively sought membership of the World Trade Organisation for China. In June, American President Clinton visited China. China suffered flooding along the Yangtze and other rivers in the autumn, but under the great leadership of our Party government, the Chinese people achieved victory fighting against the natural disaster. Later in the year, a financial crisis broke out in Asia, and China earned world respect for its role in the region’s economic recovery.