T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

But then there was a tug on the line, and I forgot all about it.

(1983)

Mao flicks on the radio. Music fills the room, half notes like the feet of birds. It is a martial tune, the prelude from “The Long March.” Then there are quotations from Chairman Mao, read in a voice saturated with conviction, if a trifle nasal. A selection of the Chairman’s poetry follows. The three constantly read articles. And then the aphorism for the hour. Mao sits back, the gelid features imperceptibly softening from their habitual expression of abdominal anguish. He closes his eyes.

FIGHTING LEPROSY WITH REVOLUTIONARY OPTIMISM

Chang Chiu-chu of the Kunghui Commune found one day that the great toe of his left foot had become leprous. When the revisionist surgeons of the urban hospital insisted that they could not save the toe but only treat the disease and hope to contain it, Chang went to Kao Fei-fu, a revolutionary machinist of the commune. Kao Fei-fu knew nothing of medicine but recalled to Chang the Chairman’s words: “IF YOU WANT KNOWLEDGE, YOU MUST TAKE PART IN THE PRACTICE OF CHANGING REALITY. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE TASTE OF A PEAR, YOU MUST CHANGE THE PEAR BY EATING IT YOURSELF.” Kao then inserted needles in Chang’s spinal column to a depth of 18 fen. The following day Chang Chiu-chu was able to return to the paddies. When he thanked Kao Fei-fu, Kao said: “Don’t thank me, thank Chairman Mao.”

Mao’s face attempts a paternal grin, achieves the logy and listless. Out in the square he can hear the planetary hum of 500,000 voices singing “The East Is Red.” It is his birthday. He will have wieners with Grey Poupon mustard for breakfast.

How he grins, Hung Ping-chung, hurrying through the congested streets (bicycles, oxcarts, heads, collars, caps), a brown-paper parcel under one arm, cardboard valise under the other. In the brown-paper parcel, a pair of patched blue jeans for his young wife, Wang Ya-chin. Haggled off the legs of a Scandinavian tourist in Japan. For 90,000 yen. In the cardboard valise, Hung’s underwear, team jacket, paddle. The table-tennis team has been on tour for thirteen months. Hung thirsts for Wang.

There is a smear of mustard on Mao’s nose when the barber clicks through the bead curtains. The barber has shaved Mao sixteen hundred and seven times. He bows, expatiates on the dimension of the honor he feels in being of personal service to the Revolutionary Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. He then congratulates the Chairman on his birthday. “Long live Chairman Mao!” he shouts. “A long, long life to him!” Then he dabs the mustard from Mao’s nose with a flick of his snowy towel.

Mao is seated in the lotus position, hands folded in his lap. Heavy of jowl, abdomen, nates. The barber strops.

“On the occasion of my birthday,” says Mao, “I will look more like the Buddha.” His voice is parched, riding through octaves like the creak of a rocking chair.

“The coiffure?”

Mao nods. “Bring the sides forward a hair, and take the top back another inch. And buff the pate.”

Out on the Lei Feng Highway a cold rain has begun to fall. Chang Chiu-chu and his pig huddle in the lee of a towering monolithic sculpture depicting Mao’s emergency from the cave at Yenan. Peasants struggle by, hauling carts laden with produce. Oxen bleat. A bus, the only motorized vehicle on the road, ticks up the hill in the distance. Chang’s slippers are greasy with mud. He is on his way to the city to personally thank Mao for the healing of his great toe (the skin has gone from black to gray and sensation has begun to creep back like an assault of pinpricks) and to present the Chairman with his pig. There are six miles to go. His feet hurt. He is cold. But he recalls a phrase of the Chairman’s: “I CARE NOT THAT THE WIND BLOWS AND THE WAVES BEAT: IT IS BETTER THAN IDLY STROLLING IN A COURTYARD,” and he recalls also that he has a gourd of maotai (120 proof) in his sleeve. He pours a drink into his thermos-cup, mixes it with hot water and downs it. Then lifts a handful of cold rice from his satchel and begins to chew. He pours another drink. It warms his digestive machinery like a shot of Revolutionary Optimism.

Hung is two blocks from home, hurrying, the collar of his pajamas fastened against the cold, too preoccupied to wonder why he and his class brothers wear slippers and pajamas on the street rather than overshoes and overcoats. He passes under a poster: fierce-eyed women in caps and fatigues hurtling toward the left, bayonets and automatic weapons in hand. It is an advertisement for a ballet: “The Detachment of Red Women.” Beneath it, a slogan, the characters big as washing machines, black on red: “GET IN THE HABIT OF NOT SPITTING ON THE GROUND AT RANDOM.” The phlegm catches in his throat.

When Hung turns into his block, his mouth drops. The street has been painted red. The buildings are red, the front stoops are red, the railings are red, the lampposts are red, the windows are red, the pigeons are red. A monumental poster of Mao’s head drapes the center of the block like an arras and clusters of smaller heads dot the buildings. Hung clutches the package to his chest, nods to old Chiung-hua where she sits on her stoop, a spot of gray on a carmine canvas, and takes the steps to his apartment two at a time.

Wang is in bed. The apartment is cold, dark. “Wang!” he shouts. “I’m back!” She does not rise to meet him, to leap into his arms in her aggressive elastic way (she a former tumbler, their romance a blossom of the People’s Athletic and Revolutionary Fitness Academy). Something is wrong. “Wang!” She turns her black eyes to him and all at once he becomes aware of the impossible tumescence of the blanket spread over her. What is she concealing? She bites the corner of the blanket and groans, the labor pains coming fiercer now.

Hung is stung. Drops package and valise. Begins to count the months on his fingers. All thirteen of them. His face shrinks to the size of a pea. “Wang, what have you done?” he stammers.

Her voice is strained, unsteady: “YOU CAN’T SOLVE A PROBLEM? WELL, GET DOWN AND INVESTIGATE THE PRESENT FACTS AND THEIR PAST HISTORY.”

“You’ve been unfaithful!”

“Don’t thank me,” she croaks, “thank Chairman Mao.”

Mao’s eyes are closed. His cheeks glow, freshly shaven. In his face, the soapy warm breath of the barber: in his ears, the snip-snip of the barber’s silver scissors. His shanks and seat and the small of his back register the faint vibration of the 500,000 voices ringing in the square. A warmth, an electricity tingling through the wood of the chair. Snip-snip.

Mao’s dream is immediate and vivid. The sun breaking in the east, sweet marjoram on the breeze, crickets singing along the broad base of the Great Wall, a sound as of hidden fingers working the blades of a thousand scissors. The times are feudal. China is disunited, the Han Dynasty in decline, the Huns (Hsiung-nu) demanding tribute of gold, spices, silk and the soft, uncallused hands of the Emperor’s daughters. They wear impossible fierce mustaches stiffened with blood and mucus, these Huns, and they keep the rain from their backs with the stretched skin of murdered children. An unregenerate lot. Wallowing in the sins of revisionism and capitalist avarice. Mao, a younger man, his brow shorter, eyes clearer, jowls firmer, stands high atop the battlements supervising the placement of the final stone. The Great Wall, he calls it, thinking ahead to the Great Leap Forward and the Great Hall of the People. Fifteen hundred miles long. Forty feet high, sixteen across.

In the distance, a duststorm, a whirlwind, a thousand acres of topsoil flung into the air by the terrible thundering hoofs of the Huns’ carnivorous horses. Their battle cry is an earthquake, their breath the death of a continent. On they come, savage as steel, yabbering and howling over the clattering cannonade of the horsehoofs while Mao’s peasants pat the mortar in place and quick-fry wonton in eighty-gallon drums of blistering oil. Mao stands above them all, the khaki collar visible beneath the red silk robe smoothing his thighs in the breeze. In his hand, held aloft, a Ping-Pong paddle.