Ha Jin - Ocean of Words

Our political instructor, the Party secretary of our company, interrupted my thought. “I’ve talked with him, and he admitted he had gone to that woman six times this year.”

“Six times?” Again I was surprised. “He is new. How could he get to know her so quick?”

“I asked the same question.” Instructor Chang tapped his cigarette lightly over an ashtray and raised his head, looking across the small room in which we were sitting. He wanted to make sure that the orderly was not in the next room. “I think there must have been a pimp, but Liu Fu insisted he got to know the Fairy by himself when he had his hair cut in her barbershop. Obviously he is a novice in this business. No old hand would leave his picture with that weasel.”

“You’re right.” I remembered last year a bulletin issued by the Regimental Political Department had carried a report on this young woman. After being caught in bed with an officer, Little White Fairy was brought to the Regimental Headquarters, where she confessed many soldiers and officers had visited her. Once she had received six army men in a single night, but she didn’t know any of their names. Each man gave her a two- yuan bill and then went to bed with her. That was all. Regimental Commissar Feng swore to have those men found out, for they must have belonged to our Fifth Regiment, the only army unit in Hutou. But those were old dogs who had never left any trace.

“You should talk to him.” Secretary Chang exhaled a small cloud. “Comrade Wang Hu, your platoon has done everything well this year except this Liu Fu matter. Don’t get lost in the training. Mind modeling is more important. You see whenever we slack a little in ideological education, problems will appear among our men.”

“Secretary Chang, I’ll talk to him immediately. From now on I will pay more attention to ideological education.”

“Good.”

It seemed he didn’t want to talk more, so I stood up and took my leave. Outside, the snow had stopped and the north wind turned colder. On my way back to my platoon, I felt bad, wondering how to handle the case. I was upset by Liu Fu. What a shame. I had always considered him as a candidate for an important job. His squad leader, Li Yaoping, was going to be demobilized the next year, and I had planned to have Liu Fu take over the squad. To be fair, Liu was in every way an excellent soldier. He surpassed all of my men in hand-grenade throwing. He could throw a grenade seventy-two meters. In our last practice with live ammunition, he scored eighty-four points with nine shots, which was higher than everybody except me. I got eighty-six. If we had a contest with the other three platoons, I would surely place him as our first man.

Needless to say, I liked him, not only for his ability and skills but also for his personality. He was a big fellow, over a hundred and eighty centimeters tall and a little heavily built but very nimble. His wide eyes reminded me of a small pony in my home village. In a way, his square mouth and bushy brows made him resemble those ancient generals in Spring Festival pictures. All the other soldiers liked him a lot too, and he had quite a few friends in our Ninth Company.

I can never forget how he became a figure of poetry. In the spring, when we sowed soybeans, I assigned the Third Squad to pull a plow, since we didn’t have enough horses and oxen. On the first day the men were soaked with sweat and complained that it was animals’ work. Though they sang some revolutionary songs and even pretended to be Japanese soldiers marching into a village, still there was no way of making the labor lighter. But the next day was different. Liu Fu and two other boys in the Third Squad appeared with bald heads. They said a bald head would make the sweating more endurable and the washing easier after the work. The atmosphere in the field came alive. The three shining round heads were wavering about like balloons at the front of the team. Everybody wanted to get some fun out of it. Because Liu Fu was taller and had a bigger head, he became the main target. In a few hours a poem was made in his honor, and the soldiers in the field chanted:

When Big Liu takes off his hat,

The county magistrate shakes his head:

“Such a vast piece of alkaline land,

How can the grain yield reach the Plan!”

When Big Liu takes off his hat,

The hardware store is so glad:

“With such a big shining bulb,

How many customers can we attract!”

When Big Liu takes off his hat,

The saleswoman is scared out of breath:

“Having sold condoms for so many years,

I’ve never seen such a length and breadth!”

In a few days the whole company learned the doggerel. Big Liu was never offended by it. He even chanted it with others, but he would replace the name Big Liu with Small Wang, Old Meng, and some others. As his popularity grew, he was welcomed everywhere in the company. A boy like him could be a very able leader of a squad or a platoon. This was why I had planned to promote him to squad leader the next year. But who could tell he was a “Flowery Fox.”

Our Party secretary was right: There must have been a pimp. Hutou was over fifty li away from Mati Mountain, where we were garrisoned; at most Liu Fu had gone to the county town seven or eight times on Sundays. He had seen Little White Fairy six times? Almost every time he went there? It was impossible, unless at the very beginning somebody took him directly to that woman. I remembered Li Dong had gone with him for his first visit to the town, and the second time Zhao Yiming had accompanied him. Both of the older soldiers were reliable; it was unlikely that they could be pimps. But to know a man’s face is not to know his heart. I had to question Liu Fu about this.

Our talk did not take long. He looked crestfallen and ashamed, but he denied there had been somebody else involved and insisted to me that a good man must accept the consequences of his own actions.

In a way, I appreciated his only blaming himself for the whoring. If another man like him was found in my platoon, I would have trouble clearing our name. People would chuckle and say the First Platoon had a whoring gang. That would give Liu Fu a hard time too, because he would surely be treated by the other men as a sort of traitor.

But I did take this case seriously, for I had to stop it. We stayed at the border to defend our country, and we must not lose our fighting spirit by chasing women. Unlike the Russians on the other side, we Chinese were revolutionary soldiers, and we could not rely on women to keep up our morale. Every Saturday night we saw from our watchtower the Russians having many college girls over in their barracks. They would sing and dance around bonfires, kiss and embrace in the open air, roll and fuck in the woods. They were barbarians and Revisionists, while we were Chinese and true Revolutionaries.

So I ordered Liu Fu to write out his self-criticism, examining the elements of bourgeois ideology in his brain and getting a clear understanding of the nature of his offense. He wept and begged me not to take disciplinary action against him. He was afraid his family would know it, and he would carry the stain for the rest of his life. I told him that a disciplinary action would have to be taken and that I was unable to help him with that. It was better to tell him the truth.

“So I’m done for?” His horsey eyes watched my mouth expectantly.

“Your case was sent down by the Regimental Political Department. You know our company cannot interfere with a decision from above. Usually, an offender like you is punished with a disciplinary action, but this doesn’t mean you will have to carry it for the rest of your life. It depends on your own behavior. Say from now on you behave well in every way, you may have it taken out of your file when you are demobilized.”