Anchee Min - Red Azalea

The restlessness came back. It stirred me deeply. I felt my mind and body separating themselves. My mind wanted to force sleep while my body wanted to rebel. Somehow I did not want to figure out why my body wanted to rebel. I was enraptured by a sense of danger, a heat, a spell.

Yan turned away from me, sighing. I wanted to flip her over, but was afraid suddenly. A strange foreignness arose. My body stiffened. She murmured. I whispered, Did you say anything? I heard my own echo in the dark. She sighed and said, Too bad… I waited for her to complete the sentence. She went silent as if she were afraid as well. I said, I’m waiting. She said, Too bad you are not a man. She sighed again. It was a deep and frustrated sigh. I felt dejected. My youth rose bravely. What would you do if I were? I asked. She turned back to face me and said she would do exactly what I had described in the letter. Her breath was hot. Her eyelashes touched my cheek. A warm stream gushed from my feet to my head.

We lay in silence. In fever. One of her legs was between mine. Our arms were around each other. Then almost at the same time, we pulled away. To make light of the uneasiness, I said that I would like to recite a paragraph from the Little Red Book. Go ahead, you armchair revolutionary, she said. Chairman Mao teaches us, I began, “Taking a stone, he hit his own toe instead of another’s; that’s the result that all the reactionaries are going to get as they try to resist the revolutionary force.” Right, she followed, only when we are following the Chairman’s teaching can we be invincible. Let’s do a self-criticism, I said. She said, After you. What’s on your mind? Confess. Make a clean breast of your guilt.

My guilt or your guilt, Comrade Party Secretary?

An old saying goes, “When a good thing comes, it comes in a pair.” That autumn was a magic season. When the beets in the fields were sweet enough to eat, we had to draft reports on how local peasants had been stealing our beets. We would deliver the reports to headquarters so the company would not be blamed for a decrease in output. Yan had been following a “one eye open, one eye closed” policy, which meant that she was not too strict on the correctness of the reports. In fact, she knew exactly who the thieves were. It was not the local peasants, not the field rats. It was the soldiers themselves. I was one of them. The salary I received was not enough to cover my food expenses, so in late evening I became a thief. I dug into the mud for beets, radishes and sweet potatoes.

Yan pretended not to see us. In fact, she was busy doing her own thing. She was driven by her belief in acupuncture treatment. She had been taking Little Green to our neighboring farm hospital-Red Star Farm Hospital-to see a group of doctors from the People’s Liberation Army who were there teaching the local doctors the techniques of acupuncture. Yan took Little Green there twice a day, at dawn and late in the evening. She got up at four-thirty in the morning, packed Little Green on the tractor and bounced all the way to the hospital for a session of needles, and then took Little Green back, leaving her with the cafeteria people for breakfast as she herself rushed to the fields without eating anything to catch up with us.

I always brought an extra steamed bread with me. I gave it to Yan when she came to the field. It took her three bites to finish a hand-sized steamed bread. One day she came back soaking wet, mud pasted on her clothes. She said that she had fallen into a canal with her tractor. Yan was screaming happily. She said she was too excited to speak. She said, Magic has happened-Little Green is coming back to her senses. Yan shouted, A long, long life to Chairman Mao. She asked us to shout with her. We did. When the soldiers encircled her for more information, she said that she had left Little Green in the hospital for more observation. She said that Little Green had sung a phrase of “My Motherland” this morning. Yan broke two poles that day in carrying one-hundred-pound hods of manure to the field.

That evening Yan conducted as we sang opera at the study meeting. Yan’s fever affected the company. No one paid attention to Lu, who was standing in the corner shaking her head. Everybody sang “Nothing in the World Can Put Off a Communist”-an aria from The Red Lantern. After that, Yan for the first time offered to perform on her erhu for everybody. She was admired and worshiped.

I sat back enjoying Yan’s happiness. In her happiness I experienced again her heartrending pain for Little Green. I suggested that we sing “My Motherland” to keep Little Green blessed. Yan played a note on her erhu. But she broke a string because she struck it too hard. She apologized to the crowd. Instead of adding a new string on the erhu, she placed it aside and sang. The sound was the same-her voice was exactly like her erhu. We could not help laughing. Yan did not mind. She sang in a high pitch:

Yan’s happiness did not last. Not a week. When Little Green got back, she looked the same, like a vegetable. The acupuncture worked for a moment and then the nerves reverted to idleness. Yan refused to give up. She kept sending Little Green back to the hospital. One day the tractor broke down; she carried Little Green on her back and walked two hours to the hospital. The next day Yan did not wake up on time. She was too tired. I offered to take Little Green to the hospital. Yan insisted on going there herself. We ended up going together. We took turns in carrying Little Green. Little Green slept like a dead pig on our backs. She looked hopeless. Yan said she still had her last bet, the bet on the snakes. I did not say I didn’t believe in that for a second. She had so much hope in her voice. She was insane.

I hitched a ride on a tractor to Company Thirty-two to meet with Leopard Lee. Yan sent me there as our company’s representative to “exchange revolutionary experiences” with his company. I was as excited when called for the mission as if I were going to meet my own lover. The letter, folded carefully, was in my inner pocket. I buttoned the pocket up in case my jumping on the tractor might shake it out. I checked every now and then to see whether it was still there. I had rewritten the letter the night before. Yan drowned in reading it. She was up at dawn. She told me that I had made her another person. True, I thought. She had become much softer. She was nice to everyone, including Lu. The soldiers were flattered, and Lu puzzled.

Yan gave a holiday to the company when it was not raining. She herself went to cut heaps of reeds the whole day. When she saw me, she smiled shyly as if I were Leopard Lee. To my own surprise, I spent more time thinking of her. I could not help it. I watched her eating dinner. She ate absentmindedly, shoveling food into her mouth. She would stare into distant fields or watch a bug chewing the heart of a cotton flower. She told the cafeteria to add more sugar to the dishes. She wore red, bright red underwear at night. She smiled at the mirror when she thought no one was around. She told me to buy her a bottle of vinegar when I went to the shop. She sat with Lu before bedtime to clean the chemical dye off her toenails. She sometimes sang operas with me and Lu. She sang like her erhu, her voice made stringlike sounds. The roommates said they could not tell the difference. She yelled, What’s wrong with that? The roommates went to hide in their mosquito nets, covering their mouths with their hands and laughing hard.

When I saw Leopard Lee, I was surprised by Yan’s choice. He was a male version of Yan: with big and intense eyes, knifelike eyebrows and bristly oily hair. He was not as tall and strong as I had imagined. He reminded me of a monkey, with long arms, quick in actions. I could tell by the way he was admired by his soldiers that he was a successful leader. They all called him Leopard. He responded to them affectionately. He joked with them and told them not to damage the sprouts when hoeing. He looked awkward after I had announced that I was from Company Seven. He looked at me from the corner of his eye.