Anchee Min - Red Azalea

Even when winter came, we continued to meet. Sitting by the bricks, Yan would practice her erhu; I would just lie back and listen. We began to talk about everything, including that most forbidden subject-men.

Yan said that according to her mother, who hated her father, most men were evil. Mother said that she wouldn’t ever have produced nine children with my father if she had not wanted to respond to the Party’s call, “More population means more power.” Men take pleasure in seducing and raping women, she concluded.

I remembered how Yan had taken off her belt that night and ordered the male soldiers to beat the bookish man. I understood where her hatred for men had come from. I said her father did not represent every man. Yan insisted he did. She then told me about her five brothers, all in their twenties, all tall and strong. They talked obscenely at midnight while the whole family of eleven slept in the same room. Her elder brother talked about tricking a neighbor girl to come into the room, seducing her on the bed while his four brothers watched through a door slit. I asked how her parents reacted to this. Yan said they refused to believe it. They accused Yan of misreporting. The brothers beat her up and her parents watched and thought they did the right thing. That was the main reason she left her family for the Red Fire Farm.

Yan asked me about how I felt about men. I said, If you want to hear the truth, you might be shocked. She said she was ready and promised to continue to be my friend no matter what I told her. I told her a story. A story I had never told anyone. It happened during a Red Guards’ meeting when I was sixteen. There had been a power failure and as we were waiting in the dark, a hand touched my back. Trembling, it slowly moved around my side to touch my breast. I was shocked but allowed the hand to stay for about a minute and then stood up and moved to another seat. When the lights came back on, I turned. I saw three boys sitting behind me, all about my age. One of them looked nervous and pale. I knew him-a straight-A student, a popular calligrapher who had a girlish face.

I thought that I had lost my purity. I was ashamed of myself.

Why didn’t you yell? Why didn’t you push his hand away? Yan asked. I told her I didn’t know why myself. I told her that actually my body felt good. She was stunned. She sat in silence for a long time. She put her face in her palms.

The reeds swayed like the sound of whispering. Sah-sah-sah, sah-sah-sah. I watched Yan, the way she gathered her courage. She asked whether I knew the difference between the sexual organ of a grown man and a boy. I had seen a picture of it in an acupuncture book. It was drawn as an upside-down teapot. Yan nodded and said that was good enough. She sat for a while longer. Blushing, she told me that she had something to confess. I waited. She said, Never mind. I said, You don’t trust me. It’s not that, she said. I said, What is it? She took a breath and said that she really couldn’t. She couldn’t make herself say it. She rested her forehead on her knees. I said she could take all the time she needed to get ready. She said that she would never be. Like a snail shrinking its head into the shell, she wouldn’t come out. I begged. I said I had closet-thoughts too. She said that’s different. Hers was a monster. I poked apart her knees and lifted her chin with my fingers. I looked at her and said I almost can tell what that might be. She said I wouldn’t be right. I said, If I am right, will you promise to tell me everything? She nodded.

A man, I said, looking straight into her eyes. She lost her calm.

His name was Leopard Lee. He was twenty-four and was the head of Company Thirty-two. He was from the South, from a family of gardeners. He was a delicate man. She had met him at a headquarters meeting two months ago and had secretly thought about him since. She told me that that was it. Her story was done.

I said, Did you two have private talks? She said, What do you mean? How could I do that? Well, how do you know he likes you? I asked. She said, Well, I just feel that he does. She said she of course couldn’t be sure, but anyway this was not what she wanted to tell me. I asked, What’s the problem? She said, I just know I’m not supposed to have those thoughts at all. She said that the awful thing was that she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She was disturbed and she didn’t like that. I joked and said it sounded like a personal-life corruption, that she should bring the problem to the company meeting. She said it’s not nice to make fun of other people’s pain. I asked if it was really pain. She said it is supposed to be pain and it was. It dragged her, burned her. It made her mind pop up dirty thoughts, thoughts about men and teapots.

She looked helpless. I said I had exactly the same symptoms. She asked what had I done about it. I said I read a book. She asked if I had felt better after reading. I said that I did. She asked if she could learn the title of the book. I said, It’s called The Second-Time Handshake. It’s a banned book, I got it from Little Green’s suitcase. It was hand-copied, three hundred pages. She asked what the book was about. I said a story of a man and a woman. She said she supposed the book must have poisoned Little Green’s head. I said that I had to agree. She said she did not want to be misguided by the book. I said of course, but who knows what one’s judgment may truly be. I said that I would not believe a strong-minded person like her would be poisoned by a book. It would be ridiculous. It would be a joke. She said that made sense. She told me to drop the book in her rain boot at night. I then said that I would not be responsible for whatever happened in her head in the future. She said she would take responsibility for herself.

She devoured the book. Yan, the commander, the Party secretary, devoured the handwritten book in three nights with a flashlight in the mosquito net. When she returned the copy, she looked different. She told me, I want to write him. But then her face fell. She said, I can’t. It’s not safe. We went to the brick factory. I asked her to explain to me why it was not safe. She said that the bookish man’s letter to Little Green was opened by Lu-that’s how the company knew where to catch them that night. The Party bosses could look into anyone’s letters and suitcases at any time. There was no rule against this.

I told Yan that I had hated her for exposing Little Green. She said that I should. She lowered her head. She listened to my accusation quietly. I said, You are a murderer. I cried. She said she hated herself but it was what she was made to do. She had known for a long time that Lu had been spying on Little Green. As the Party secretary and commander, she had no choice when the case was reported.

Yan took my hands in hers and rubbed them. Her hands were rough, like those of an old peasant. She said that only now had she understood how unforgivable her act was. She herself now was in Little Green’s position-involved with a man. How unforgivable it was, what she did. She said she was a frog who had lived at the bottom of a well-her knowledge of the universe was only as big as the opening of the well. Her naïveté and ignorance made her a murderer. She was fooled by Party propaganda, by Red Flag magazine and the People’s Daily. She was trained to be a murderer. Who was not? She didn’t understand the world around her, the world where the murderers go on living while the innocent die like weeds.

I remembered her snake-catching in the reeds. I asked her about it. Gazing at the sunset, she said that it was for Little Green, to make her come back to her senses one day. She had collected sixty-nine water snakes in a jar, which she stored under our bed. She had to reach the perfect number of one hundred. She said it was the first time in her life she had put faith in superstitions. Her grandmother once collected snakes to cure her disabled sister. When she had one hundred, her sister stood up and walked. She had been paralyzed for six years.