Ma Jian - Red Dust

‘In the Cultural Revolution, we came here to pledge devotion to the Party before we were sent to work on the farms,’ she says. ‘My classmates asked the teacher, "How long are we going away for?" And the teacher said, "Just look at the Chairman’s hand: that’s right, five years." ‘

I peer back at the statue. ‘What about the hand behind his back?’

‘There are only three fingers on that one!’ She laughs and sweeps back her shoulder-length hair. A smell of damp feet moves through the bus. Outside the window, red banners advertise a raffle for holders of a fixed deposit account. A man in a white shirt yells into a microphone and points to a bicycle tied to the roof of a truck with red silk ribbons. In the sweltering evening, the people milling about him look like ducks drifting on a waterhole.

‘Is it true you can buy bicycles on the free market now?’ I ask, tugging at my shirt collar. The bag sticking to my back is soaked with sweat.

‘Yes, but you still need coupons for Shanghai Golden Deer bikes. All the department stores have raffles now. Peasants flood in from the countryside and buy like mad. The hotels are full. Everyone is caught in the race to get rich. A ten-year-old wrote a letter to her neighbour threatening to kill his son unless he shared his prize with her. What do they buy? Anything as long as it comes with a raffle ticket. I’ve seen people buy a hundred boxes of matches, three hundred bars of soap, six alarm clocks. .’ She looks like a gypsy girl with her fresh face and heavy lips. I remember the rumour circulating Beijing poetry circles that she and Hu Sha are lovers.

We walk through a meat market that reeks of the scorched hairs on roasted pig heads. We climb a stairwell strewn with charcoal briquettes, bicycles, glass bottles, rotten vegetables, enter a room on the fourth floor and sit down on a double bed.

Yang Ming’s husband Wu Jian is sitting on the sofa. He has the face of a student and the unkempt curls of an artist, or of someone who has just crawled out of bed. He speaks to me in a thick Sichuan accent. ‘So what do you think of Chengdu?’ I look into this stranger’s face and say, ‘Hot, crowded, polluted. Too many cars.’

We huddle around an electric fan that churns heat and sweat through the air. I think longingly of the meadows. This room is not even large enough for a horse to stand in. Wu Jian comments on the articles in the paper he is reading.

‘Stupid farts. It’s all very well telling us to put some elegance into our lives, but we don’t even have room to wash our feet!’

I put out my cigarette and read the article he is pointing to. ‘In the past, due to prevailing leftist ideologies, anyone paying attention to how they ate or dressed was accused of aspiring to a bourgeois lifestyle. But now that living standards have improved, we must be brave and encourage people to introduce some elegance into their lives. Elegance is a mark of socialist and spiritual civilisation. .’ As I read aloud, Wu Jian drums his fingers on the sofa’s wooden armrest.

Yang Ming walks in with the soup that has simmered on the kerosene stove in the corridor, places it on the table and sprinkles coriander leaves over the top. She is wearing a long flowery dress now. She must have changed in the toilets, or in a neighbour’s room, perhaps. Her breasts swing freely as she moves her arms. I imagine it feels good to take off one’s bra after a long hot day.

‘Try one of our Chengdu cigarettes, they’re not bad.’ Wu Jian is wearing a white vest. His soft, pale face is dripping with sweat. He looks as though he might jump up any moment and scream his head off.

‘Did your work unit give you this room?’ I ask. ‘I lived in a dormitory block like this once. Nearly drove me mad.’

‘At least it’s just the two of us. Next door there are three generations living in one room. The women sleep on the bed and the men camp on the floor. I can’t imagine how those babies were conceived.’

‘Haven’t they built you apartments yet?’ I remember coming to Chengdu a few years ago to interview a model worker. His room was so small I had to create a living room in a corner of his factory and take the pictures there.

‘After thirty years of communism, our work unit has only just got round to building some decent homes. But there are five hundred families fighting for forty-five flats. The unit set up a committee to allocate them, but six months have gone by and nothing has been resolved. The clever ones get someone high up to put in a good word for them, the others snitch on their colleagues, accusing them of lying about pregnancies or dependent mothers. Last month the committee was about to announce the results of the third selection process, but two of the candidates got married, and a woman accused of faking pregnancy gave birth to a child — so they had to start all over again. I will be old and grey before I get on the list.’ He waves his hands in the air as he speaks. There are thick tufts of hair under his arms.

‘A child might help,’ I say.

‘Seniority counts more than children. In the communist world, the older you get the more you’re worth.’ I can see he is waiting for me to laugh.

‘The electrician downstairs used to fight with his sister-in-law over the cooking and washing up,’ Yang Ming says. ‘Last month he punched her eyeball out. Now that she has lost an eye, her family have jumped to the top of the list. Seems a big price to pay for a flat.’ She pulls her hair into a tight ponytail. The damp hair in her armpits is jet black.

I take a slug of beer. ‘You’re doing all right though,’ I say. ‘Got yourselves a television. How many stations can it receive?’ As I glance at the screen, a soprano steps onto the stage and sings, ‘Rock, rock, waves of the sea, cradle our warriors to sleep. .’ A huge cut-out moon dangles above her head.

‘Everyone keeps teasing me at work about the letters that come for you. They say, "Your husband’s called Wu Jian, isn’t he? So who is this Ma Jian all of a sudden?" ‘

I laugh and look down at the table. ‘You shouldn’t have cooked so much, Yang Ming.’

‘Least I could do.’ She wipes a hand across her face and rubs a handkerchief down her cleavage. ‘Our Party secretary looked worried today. I’m sure he read that piece in the papers,’ she says, pausing to take a sip of soup. ‘A labour exchange has just opened in Guangzhou. Skilled workers can resign from their posts and look for equivalent jobs elsewhere. Nine thousand workers signed up at the inaugural meeting, and the committee was able to find new jobs for two people there and then. Everything will change now. We’ll all be able to switch jobs, move to other towns, other provinces.’ She glances at Wu Jian. I sense they have a lot to talk about.

‘Has Chengdu changed much in the last two years? I read that after Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Chengdu has the largest number of private businesses in the country.’

My eyes sweep over the room and fall on a life-size photograph of Yang Ming’s face that is staring at me from the wall. Smells of fried chilli blow in from the corridor and mingle with the steam and cigarette smoke in the room. Sweat pours down my face. The fleas soaking in my hair burrow into my scalp. I am terrified they might start falling onto the clean bed I am sitting on.

‘The country is starting to shake, like a kettle coming to the boil. People are buying televisions, cassette players, electric fans. Wang Qi has a foreign cassette player, cost him three hundred yuan, it has four speakers and stereophonic sound. I went over the other day to listen. You’re staying with him tonight, it’s all arranged.’ She leans back and puts her wet handkerchief on top of the television.

‘Sorry, which way is the bathroom?’ I push the table towards Wu Jian and squeeze out. The elderly neighbours are chatting in the cool of the dark corridor. I find a relatively clean corner of the latrines, pull down my trousers and scratch my thighs. A lump of someone’s fresh turd steams by my feet. I look at the city through the cracked window pane, and know that every room is crammed with bodies and each body is dripping with sweat. I feel a longing for the empty grasslands and the cruel deserts. At least the air was clean there. Now that I have sunk into this steaming city, everything seems familiar and ordinary.