T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The Huns rein their steeds. They are puzzled, their babble like the disquisitions of camels and jackals. From a breezy pocket Mao produces the eggshell-frail ball, sets it atop the paddle. The grizzled Hun-chief draws closer, just beneath the rippling Chairman. “Hua?” he shouts. Mao looks down. Cups his hands to his mouth: “Volley for serve.”

Chang is having problems with his legs, feet. The left is reluctant to follow the right, and when it does, the right is reluctant to follow suit. To complicate matters the leprous toe has come to life (feeling very much like a fragment of glowing iron pounded flat on an anvil), and the pig has become increasingly insistent about making a wallow of the puddled road. A finger-thick brass ring pierces the pig’s (tender) septum. This ring is fastened to a cord which is in turn fastened to Chang’s belt. From time to time Chang gives the cord a tug, gentle persuader.

Ahead the buildings of the city cut into the bleak horizon like a gap-toothed mandible. The rain raises welts in the puddles, thrushes wing overhead, a man approaches on a bicycle. Chang pauses for a nip of maotai, as a sort of internal liniment for his throbbing toe, when suddenly the pig decides to sit, flip, flounder and knead the mud of the road with its rump. The cord jerks violently. Chang hydroplanes. Drops his gourd. Comes to rest in a dark puddle abob with what appears to be spittle randomly spat. He curses the animal’s revisionist mentality.

There are two framed photographs on the wall over Wang’s bed. One a full-face of Mao Tse-tung, the other a profile of Liu Ping-pong, originator of table tennis. Hung tears the Mao from the wall and tramples it underfoot. Wang sings out her birth-pangs. In the street, old Chiung-hua totters to her feet, listening. Her ancient ears, withered like dried apricots, tell her the first part of the story (the raised voice, slamming door, footsteps on the stairs), and the glassy eyes relay the rest (Hung in the crimson street, flailing at the gargantuan head of Mao suspended just above his reach like the proud stiff sail of a schooner; his use of stones, a broom, a young child; his frustration; his rabid red-mouthed dash down the length of the street and around the corner).

Chiung-hua sighs. Mao’s head trembles in a gust. Wang cries out. And then the old woman hikes her skirts and begins the long painful ascent of the stairs, thinking of white towels and hot water and the slick red skulls of her own newborn sons and daughters, her spotted fingers uncertain on the banister, eyes clouding in the dark hallway, lips working over a phrase of Mao’s like a litany: “WHAT WE NEED IS AN ENTHUSIASTIC BUT CALM STATE OF MIND AND INTENSE BUT ORDERLY WORK.”

Mao is planted on one of the few toilet seats in China. The stall is wooden, fitted with support bars of polished bamboo. A fan rotates lazily overhead. An aide waits without. The Chairman is leaning to one side, penknife in hand, etching delicate Chinese characters into the woodwork. The hot odor that rises round him tells of aging organs and Grey Poupon mustard. He sits back to admire his work.

IMPERIALISM IS A PAPER TIGER

But then he leans forward again, the penknife working a refinement. The aide taps at the stall door. “Yes?” says Mao. “Nothing,” says the aide. Mao folds the blade back into its plastic sheath. The emendation pleases him.

IMPERIALISM SUCKS

The man lays his bicycle in the grass and reaches down a hand to help Chang from the mud. Chang begins to thank him, but the stranger holds up his hand. “Don’t thank me,” he says, “thank Chairman Mao.” The stranger’s breath steams in the chill air. He introduces himself. “Chou Te-ming,” he says.

“Chang Chiu-chu.”

“Chang Chiu-chu?”

Chang nods.

“Aren’t you the peasant whose leukemia was cured through the application of Mao Tse-tung’s thought?”

“Leprosy,” says Chang, his toe smoldering like Vesuvius.

“I heard it on the radio,” says Chou. “Two hundred times.”

Chang beams. “See that pig?” he says. (Chou looks. The pig breaks wind.)

“I’m on my way to the city to offer him up to the Chairman for his birthday. By way of thanks.”

Chou, it seems, is also en route to the capital. He suggests that they travel together. Chang is delighted. Shakes the mud from his pantlegs, gives the pig’s septum an admonitory tug, and then stops dead. He begins tapping his pockets.

“Lose something?” asks Chou.

“My gourd.”

“Ah. Maotai?”

“Home-brewed. And sweet as rain.”

The two drop their heads to scan the muddied roadway. Chang spots the gourd at the same moment the pig does, but the pig is lighter on its feet. Rubber nostril, yellow tusk: it snatches up the spotted rind and jerks back its head. The golden rice liquor drools like honey from the whiskered jowls. Snurk, snurk, snurk.

Old Chiung-hua lights the lamp, sets a pot of water on the stove, rummages through Wang’s things in search of clean linen. Her feet ache and she totters with each step, slow and awkward as a hard-hat diver. Wang is quiet, her breathing regular. On the floor, in the center of the room, a brown-paper parcel. The old woman bends for it, then settles into a chair beside the bed. A Japanese-made transistor radio hangs from the bedpost on a leather strap. She turns it on.

ASSISTING MORE DEAF-MUTES TO SING “THE EAST IS RED”

It was raining, and the children of the Chanchai People’s Revolutionary Rehabilitation Center could not go out of doors. The paraplegic children entertained themselves by repeating quotations of Mao Tse-tung and singing revolutionary songs of the Chairman’s sayings set to music. But one of the deaf-mute children came to Chou Te-ming, a cadre of a Mao Tse-tung’s thought propaganda team, in tears. She signed to him that it was her fondest wish to sing “The East Is Red” and to call out “Long live Chairman Mao, a long, long life to him!” with the others. While discussing the problem with some class brothers later that day, Chou Te-ming recalled a phrase of Chairman Mao’s: “THE PRINCIPLE OF USING DIFFERENT METHODS TO RESOLVE DIFFERENT CONTRADICTIONS IS ONE WHICH MARXIST-LENINISTS MUST STRICTLY OBSERVE.” He was suddenly inspired to go to the children’s dormitory and examine their Eustachian tubes and vocal apparatuses. He saw that in many cases the deaf-mute children’s tubes were blocked and frenums ingrown. The next morning he operated. By that evening, eighteen of the twenty children were experiencing their fondest desire, singing “The East is Red” in praise of Mao Tse-tung. This is a great victory of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, a rich fruit of the Great Proletarian Revolution.

In the shifting shadows cast by the lamp, old Chiung-hua nods and Wang wakes with a cry on her lips.

When Mao steps out on the balcony the square erupts. Five hundred thousand voices in delirium. “Mao, Mao, Mao, Mao,” they chant. Confetti flies, banners wave. Mammoth Mao portraits leap at the tips of upraised fingers. The Chairman opens his arms and the answering roar is like the birth of a planet. He looks down on the wash of heads and shoulders oscillating like the sea along a rocky shoreline, and he turns to one of his aides. “Tell me,” he shouts, “did the Beatles ever have it this good?” The aide, an intelligent fellow, grins. Mao gazes back down at the crowd, his frozen jowls trembling with a rush of paternal solicitude. It is then that the idea takes him, then, on the balcony, on his birthday, the grateful joyous revolutionary proletarian class brothers and sisters surging beneath him and bursting spontaneously into song (“The East Wind Prevails Over the West Wind”). He cups a hand to the aide’s ear. “Fetch my swimtrunks.”