Anchee Min - Red Azalea

After the Spring Festival, we went every day to hoe the cotton fields. The wind from the East China Sea mixed with sand and felt needle-sharp. It pricked our skin and cracked our lips. Frost damaged the buds. The soldiers were resentful. They swore when the water pipes were frozen in the morning. They picked fights over tiny things like who had more space on clothes strings. It was useless when Lu called for a “united and harmonious family.” Yan was busy looking for Lu’s faults. She wanted to kick Lu out of the company. Lu knew it and was doing the same thing to Yan.

Yan and I had long stopped meeting at the brick factory, because we could not tell where Lu would send her human watchdogs. Yan’s face was long. She started swearing again. There were executions of all types on the farm. Headquarters was frustrated at the soldiers’ faithlessness. Posters of people being sentenced to death were often seen on the walls. It was called “Killing a chicken to shock the monkeys.”

Yan one day came to me and told me that Orchid had become Lu’s watchdog. She had been following us secretly. I disagreed. I said Orchid was a good human being. Yan said no one in this company was human anymore. We were dogs. We fought for other’s meat. Weren’t we willing to do anything to buy comfort? Lu’s been assigning light jobs to Orchid, and that is suspicious. I said to Yan, You see an enemy behind every tree. She said she did perhaps. It’s a madhouse. The Red Fire Farm.

One morning while I was hoeing in the cotton field with my platoon, a white van drove by and stopped on the path. A group of well-dressed people in green army coats got out and walked toward us. As they passed, they looked at us from head to feet with critical eyes. You-a man suddenly pointed his finger at me. I wiped the sweat off my face and said, Me? Yes, you. The man came closer and asked, How old are you? He was about forty years old. He spoke in standard dialect, like a broadcasting announcer’s Mandarin. I told him I was twenty. He asked me if I could give directions to the headquarters. A woman in the group was taking notes of our conversation. As I was giving them instructions, they encircled me, observing my profile, squatting on their heels, narrowing their eyes to measure my body length and features. The man asked me if I had blisters on my hands. I showed them the blisters on each of my hands, my shoulders and my knees. They studied the blisters and took a close look at my nails, which were all dark brown because of working with the fungicide. I heard the man whisper to a woman. The woman wrote something down in her notebook. A few minutes later they went back to their van. They did not take the directions I had given them.

That night, during the study meeting, instead of dozing off, the soldiers were gossiping about who those people were and why they came. Finally, a girl whose aunt was working in the government’s cultural bureau explained the cause: Comrade Jiang Ching, Madam Mao, was reforming the movie industry and had sent a group of her associates to find correct-looking young men and women to train as China’s future film actors. The type of look which could convince the masses that if there were a pair of enemy bayonets set across his neck, he would not renounce his Communist beliefs in exchange for his life. The chosen few would be taught to play the leading roles in movies. As a political requirement, the candidates had to be outstanding workers, peasants or soldiers.

I told the news to Yan and she thought it was fantasy talking. Our faces were in no way close to beauty. We were brown potatoes. The chance of being chosen was like setting out to find a needle in an ocean.

Someone in my room hung a broken mirror next to the door the next day. Everyone began bending sideways to take a look at herself before leaving the room. At noon I saw Lu making faces at herself when I opened the door. After a few embarrassing moments, Lu told me to take the mirror down. I said it was not my mirror. She said, Do as I say. She added that she would hold a meeting tonight on what we need to do to stand clear of bourgeois influence. I took the mirror down and gave it to Lu. Lu hung the mirror in front of the company bulletin board and painted a large slogan behind it as a reminder: “The collapse of a dam begins with an ant hole.” That night Lu lectured for two hours on how important it was to fight the invisible ideological enemies.

Lu’s lecture did not stop people’s movie-star fantasies. They wore their best clothes and made all kinds of excuses to go to headquarters to pass by the windows of these unusual guests. Orchid and I were assigned to go to the headquarters’ shops to buy preserved vegetables. We saw that headquarters was full of people. Everyone was discussing where the film-studio people would be and I heard someone say they would take the Red Heart Drive to come back.

Orchid asked me whether we should get on the Red Heart Drive when she saw others moving that way. I hesitated. You never know, Orchid encouraged. She then told me that, the day before, a girl was picked when she was brushing her teeth in Company Thirteen. They asked her to put on more toothpaste and to continue brushing while they did the interview with her.

Orchid and I went to the Red Heart Drive. We waited, like many other people, pretending that we were just taking a walk. After half an hour we saw the white van appear. Everyone suddenly became animated and began to smile at the van. I smiled as it passed.

Orchid and I were using the restroom when we heard someone practicing a Mao poem loudly while taking a bowel movement in the men’s room. “Four seas stir float cloud water angry,” the man recited, then he stopped. I heard his shit drop. “Five continents shake flutter wind thunder fighting.” Again the sound of shit dropping.

“The Communists are like the seeds.” A girl was singing Mao’s quotation song behind me. “The people are like the earth. We must integrate ourselves with the people wherever we go…” Orchid yelled, Don’t get too excited. You’re going to fall and integrate with the manure. “Bloom and grow roots in the people…” the girl continued.

A week later Yan and Lu were called to headquarters by the farm’s Chief Party Secretary for an important meeting. They came back with an announcement: two women and one man had been selected from the entire Red Fire Farm to go to the film studio for the first regional contest. I was one of them.

I looked at myself again and again with the tiny mirror. Imagining the mirror a huge screen, I practiced all kinds of expressions I thought would look good to the millions in the audience.

Yan told me that I was given the choice of either dancing or reciting one of Mao’s poems during the contest. I decided to recite Mao’s poem “Praising the Winter Plum.” The Winter Plum was Mao’s symbol of the Communist Party and the Red Army. Yan watched me as I prepared the recitation. She sat there like a Buddha statue. When I asked her how I did, she said she saw a golden phoenix soaring out of a chicken coop.

Three days later Yan was assigned by headquarters to take me to Shanghai for the contest. The night before we took off, Yan did not come back until midnight. Without saying a word, she took off her shoes, got into the net and closed the curtain tightly. I knew what was on her mind but could do nothing to help.

Shut the fucking light off, will you, Comrade Lu? Yan yelled from the net. I haven’t done my study yet-Lu sat on her stool firmly. It’s bedtime! Yan shouted. Lu stood up and said, I am studying Marxism! Yan interrupted her: I don’t care if you’re studying capitalism! I just want the light off! Lu sat down, turned her pages and said, Stop acting like Hitler! Yan jumped off the bed, switched off the light and got back into her net. Lu went to switch the light back on. You whore! Yan shouted furiously, opening the net curtain. She picked up her erhu from underneath the bed and threw it at the light. The light bulb broke along with one of the erhu’s strings. I’ll report everything to headquarters tomorrow, Lu said in the dark.