Ha Jin: Under the Red Flag

“Please let her go,” he begged. “Comrade Red Guards, it’s all my fault. Please let her go.” He put the sickle under his arm and held his hands together before his chest.

“Get out of the way!” commanded a tall young man, who must have been the leader.

“Please don’t take her away. It’s my fault. I haven’t disciplined her well. Please give her a chance to be a new person. I promise, she won’t do it again.”

The crowd stopped to circle about. “What’s your class status?” a square-faced young woman asked in a sharp voice.

“Poor Peasant,” Meng said, his small eyes tearful and his cupped ears twitching a little. “Please let her go, sister. Have mercy on us! I’m kneeling down to you if you let her go.” Before he was able to fall on his knees, two young men held him back. Tears were rolling down his dark fleshy cheeks, and his gray head began waving about. The sickle was taken away from him.

“Shut up,” the tall leader yelled and slapped him across the face. “She’s a snake. We traveled seventy kilometers to come here to wipe out poisonous snakes and worms. If you don’t stop interfering, we’ll parade you with her. Do you want to join her?”

Silence. Meng covered his face with his large hands as though feeling dizzy.

A man in the crowd said aloud, “If you can share the bed with her, why can’t you share the street?”

Many of the grown-ups laughed. “Take him, take him too,” someone told the Red Guards. Meng looked scared, sobbing quietly.

His wife stared at him without a word. Her teeth were clenched; a faint smile passed the corners of her mouth. Meng seemed to wince under her stare. The two Red Guards let his arms go, and he stepped aside, watching his wife and the crowd move toward the school.

People in our town had different opinions of Meng Su. Some said he was a born cuckold who didn’t mind his wife’s sleeping with any man as long as she could bring money home. Some believed he was a good-tempered man who had stayed with his wife mainly for their children’s sake; they forgot that the three children had grown up long before and were working in big cities far away. Some thought he didn’t leave his wife because he had no choice—no woman would marry such a dwarf. Grandma, for some reason, seemed to respect Meng. She told me that Mu Ying had once been raped by a group of Russian soldiers under Northern Bridge and left on the riverbank afterwards. That night her husband sneaked there and carried her back. He looked after her for a whole winter till she recovered. “Old Whore doesn’t deserve that good-hearted man,” Grandma would say. “She’s heartless and knows only how to sell her thighs.”

We entered the school’s playground where about two hundred people had already gathered. “Hey, White Cat and Bare Hips,” Big Shrimp called to us, waving his claws. Many boys from our street were there too. We went to join them.

The Red Guards took Mu to the front entrance of the building. Two tables had been placed between the stone lions that crouched on each side of the entrance. On one of the tables stood a tall paper hat with the big black characters on its side: “Down with Old Bitch!”

A young man in glasses raised his bony hand and started to address us. “Folks, we’ve gathered here today to denounce Mu Ying, who is a demon in this town.”

“Down with Bourgeois Demons!” a slim woman Red Guard shouted. We raised our fists and repeated the slogan.

“Down with Old Bitch Mu Ying,” a middle-aged man cried with both hands in the air. He was an active revolutionary in our commune. Again we shouted, in louder voices.

The nearsighted man went on, “First, Mu Ying must confess her crime. We must see her attitude toward her own crime. Then we’ll make the punishment fit both her crime and her attitude. All right, folks?”

“Right,” some voices replied from the crowd.

“Mu Ying,” he turned to the criminal, “you must confess everything. It’s up to you now.”

She was forced to stand on a bench. Staying below the steps, we had to raise our heads to see her face.

The questioning began. “Why do you seduce men and paralyze their revolutionary will with your bourgeois poison?” the tall leader asked solemnly.

“I’ve never invited any man to my home, have I?” she said rather calmly. Her husband was standing at the front of the crowd, listening to her without showing any emotion, as though having lost his mind.

“Then why did they go to your house and not to others’ houses?”

“They wanted to sleep with me,” she said.

“Shameless!” several women hissed in the crowd.

“A true whore!”

“Scratch her!”

“Rip apart her filthy mouth!”

“Sisters,” she spoke aloud. “All right, it was wrong to sleep with them. But you all know what it feels like when you want a man, don’t you? Don’t you once in a while have that feeling in your bones?” Contemptuously, she looked at the few withered middle-aged women standing in the front row, then closed her eyes. “Oh, you want that real man to have you in his arms and let him touch every part of your body. For that man alone you want to blossom into a woman, a real woman—”

“Take this, you Fox Spirit!” A stout young fellow struck her on the side with a fist like a sledgehammer. The heavy blow silenced her at once. She held her sides with both hands, gasping for breath.

“You’re wrong, Mu Ying,” Bare Hips’s mother said from the front of the crowd, her forefinger pointing upward at Mu. “You have your own man, who doesn’t lack an arm or a leg. It’s wrong to have others’ men and more wrong to pocket their money.”

“I have my own man?” Mu glanced at her husband and smirked. She straightened up and said, “My man is nothing. He’s no good, I mean in bed. He always comes before I feel anything.”

All the adults burst out laughing. “What’s that? What’s so funny?” Big Shrimp asked Bare Hips.

“You didn’t get it?” Bare Hips said impatiently. “You don’t know anything about what happens between a man and a woman. It means that whenever she doesn’t want him to come close to her he comes. Bad timing.”

“It doesn’t sound like that,” I said.

Before we could argue, a large bottle of ink smashed on Mu’s head and knocked her off the bench. Prone on the cement terrace, she broke into swearing and blubbering. “Oh, damn your ancestors! Whoever hit me will be childless!” She was rubbing her head with her left hand. “Oh Lord of Heaven, they treat their grandma like this!”

“Serves you right!”

“A cheap weasel.”

“Even a knife on her throat can’t stop her.”

“A pig is born to eat slop!”

When they put her back up on the bench, she became another person—her shoulders covered with black stains, and a red line trickling down her left temple. The scorching sun was blazing down on her as though all the black parts on her body were about to burn up. Still moaning, she turned her eyes to the spot where her husband had been standing a few minutes before. But he was no longer there.

“Down with Old Whore!” a farmer shouted in the crowd. We all followed him in one voice. She began trembling slightly.

The tall leader said to us, “In order to get rid of her counterrevolutionary airs, first we’re going to cut her hair.” With a wave of his hand, he summoned the Red Guards behind him. Four men moved forward and held her down. The square-faced woman raised a large pair of scissors and thrust them into the mass of the permed hair.

“Don’t, don’t, please. Help, help! I’ll do whatever you want me to—”

“Cut!” someone yelled.

“Shave her bald!”

The woman Red Guard applied the scissors skillfully. After four or five strokes, Mu’s head looked like the tail of a molting hen. She started blubbering again, her nose running and her teeth chattering.