Ha Jin - Under the Red Flag

“Oh, we were told Chairman Mao had the same ration! Oh, oh,” Li moaned and burst out sobbing, too overwhelmed to say anything clearly. People were finally convinced that he was indeed a wolf in human skin. Slogans and curses surged one after another. The men with cudgels fell on him.

“Oh, spare my life, ouch! I’m a counterrevolutionary, all right. Don’t beat me!”

“Beat him!”

“Skin him!”

That night Li was jailed in the stable behind the inn, and a group of men went to his home and confiscated all the valuables and his bankbook. From the next day on, the motorcycle and the camera became public property and everybody in the league could use them (that was how dozens of men learned to ride a motorcycle); the fowling piece was committed to the care of the league’s armed platoon. Of course, many of them enjoyed firing it when hunting pheasants and hares in the mountains.

A month later Li Wan was sent to Sea Nest Village to be reformed. Lucky for him, he didn’t labor in the fields. He served as a barefoot doctor there for five years, but without being paid. In the meantime, he wrote over a hundred letters to the Provincial Administration and Shenyang Military Region, asking for rehabilitation.

In the beginning of the sixth year his case was finally clarified. Flighty as he had been, he was by no means a counterrevolutionary. He was called back from the village. All the confiscated property was returned to him, but the motorcycle was already worn out and wouldn’t start, the camera’s lens was missing, and one of the barrels of the fowling piece had been blasted. Yet he got richer, because the bankbook was given back to him; in addition, he received a large sum of salary for his five years’ work in the village. All at once his savings doubled. On the very day when he deposited the money in the People’s Bank, the clerks there began spreading the news in town. Within a week, Li’s nickname was changed to Ten Thousand, of which he seemed to be proud. How unjust the Lord of Heaven was! Li became the richest man again. Just the interest was more than a worker could make. This is exploitation, isn’t it? everyone wondered.

Li simply despised the whole town, unable to get along with anybody. He bought a new motorcycle and a new camera, which was made in Shanghai, though. He had given up hunting but taken to fishing, so he bought himself two steel fishing poles and a large nylon net. These days he was thinking of buying a rubber boat. Still he wouldn’t lend the camera to anyone; still he would give nobody a ride; still he would haggle with vendors in the marketplace and with hawkers on the streets. People went on talking about his stinginess and arrogance. In secret, some were looking forward to another political movement.

For years Jia Cheng thought of leaving his wife and starting a new family. When he bought her out of a brothel in Gold County eighteen years before, he had not expected she would be sterile, although she had told him about her numerous abortions and miscarriages during the years of prostitution and had mentioned her doubt about her fertility. She was a tall, handsome woman with smooth white skin, glossy dark hair, and long eyes, which together with the curved brows made her oval face rather graceful.

In the beginning Jia was happy, since his wife knew men well and tried to please him in many ways. She did everything out of gratitude. Because he had bought her out and given her a family, she hadn’t had to stay in that profession any longer, to catch the pox and to be educated later in one of the schools set up by the communists to help and reform prostitutes from the old days. Nonetheless, she had been in three brothels for over ten years from the age of fourteen, long enough to forget her original name, which she probably had never had. A prostitute was always given a professional name, such as Spring Lotus, Gold Peony, Water Daffodil, White Dove. Usually the name changed once the woman was sold to another house. On the day when Jia bought his wife out, she signed as Ning Feng Wen—those words were the family names of the madams of the three brothels she had been through. From then on, that became her name.

Eighteen years passed. Jia was in his late fifties now, still working in the only photo shop in Dismount Fort. Year after year he expected to have a child, a son, but Ning had never been pregnant. Very often Jia regretted paying two hundred silver dollars for his wife. If he had known she was infertile, he would have chosen another woman. It serves you right, he thought. When you were young you only liked women who had kung fu in bed, but you didn’t want to spend money visiting those pleasure houses every week, so you brought her home. Now it’s too late to think of carrying on your family line. You’re already an old useless dog. It serves you right.

“Did you touch the melons?” he asked his wife one Saturday afternoon.

“No, who wants to touch your rotten melons?” she said, knowing that he had hidden them away so as to take them to his mistress in Gold County the next morning.

“But two are missing,” he said calmly.

“Where did you put them?”

“In the backyard.”

“Probably a dog stole them,” she answered without turning her head. She was busy making corn-flour porridge, beating the glue in a large bowl with an aluminum spoon.

Quietly Jia put the six remaining melons into a white cloth sack and carried them into the small dark room used for developing photographs.

Ning never asked him where he went on Sundays, but she knew, and tried hard not to let it disturb her. She had met hundreds of men. They were all the same and couldn’t live without chasing a woman, just as every cat eats fish. She kept reminding herself that she mustn’t stop Jia, who was her benefactor. Besides, she had promised him before their marriage that she would never interfere if he took another woman, and that she would remain his servant forever. Because the new government had banned polygamy, he couldn’t have another wife, even though Ning was barren; in secret, however, he had been seeing another woman, whose name Ning didn’t know. While she appeared composed, Ning was actually ill at ease. What if he gets a child with that woman? she thought. Will he walk out on me? Then, how can 1 live? Sometimes she woke at night, listening to the man snoring away beside her. She wanted to cry, but tears had stopped coming to her eyes long before. She thought it would have been better if she had never been born.

That evening after dinner, Aunt Zhang living on Eternal Way came to the Jias’. She sat on the edge of the brick bed, waving a palm-leaf fan. “Ning, do you want to make some money?” she asked.

“How?” Ning said, pouring Aunt Zhang a cup of boiled water.

“A young couple in the barracks are looking for a family to care for their baby boy. Sixteen yuan a month. They’ll pay for all expenses.” Aunt Zhang pressed Ning’s white wrist with her shrunken hand as though to convince her that it was a good bargain.

“Well…” Ning paused. She had never done that kind of work before, but on second thought she felt like having a try. I can’t always depend on my husband, she reasoned. If he runs out on me, I must make a living by myself.

“If you want to do it, tell me now,” Aunt Zhang said. “The couple are desperate, because the officer is leaving for Great Gourd Island in two days and the mother can’t take care of the baby while working in the city. I’m sure lots of people will jump at the deal.”

“All right, wait a minute, let me talk to Old Jia.” Ning got up and went into the small dark room, where Jia was writing captions on photographs.

After a short while she reappeared and told Aunt Zhang that she would accept the work. As arranged, the young couple were to bring their two-year-old here the next morning.