China Dream Read online

  ‘That’s because I’m eating fish now, but back then I was fishing for your affection!’ he says, forcing a smile.

  ‘Bet you take the head when you eat fish with your young mistress,’ she says, looking down at her plate to avoid his gaze. Since their daughter left, they bicker all the time. Ma Daode usually ends every argument by storming off and staying out all night, which infuriates Juan even more.

  ‘Don’t listen to those false rumours being spread about me,’ Ma Daode replies, still chomping on his food and trying to sound unruffled. ‘If you care how you look in other people’s eyes, you will be doomed to die in their mouths.’

  ‘Save your crap aphorisms for your girlfriend,’ his wife snorts, helping herself to more fried beans. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t hire a private detective to catch you red-handed. I wasn’t jealous when I was young, and I’m even less jealous now. Men – they’re all the same. When they’re poor, they want a wife; when they get rich, they want a harem. It’s all such a waste of time.’ Ma Daode suspects that Juan knows about Yuyu, but not the other women.

  An allergic rash has broken out on Juan’s neck from the seafood she is eating. She and Ma Daode take turns to pick at the fish until only the skull, spine and tail remain.

  ‘Our gang of sent-down youths are planning a reunion next Saturday,’ she says. ‘You’ve done the best out of us all, so you should host the dinner.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll book a table at Fragrance of a Hundred Flowers,’ Ma Daode replies.

  ‘Not another sordid nightclub!’ says Juan, the light rash now rising to her face. ‘Why do you always have to surround yourself with young women? Do you imagine you’re Ximen Qing from Plum in the Golden Vase, with six wives and ten concubines?’

  ‘But it’s the top restaurant in the city now. You can sit thirty people in the private rooms, and order whatever you want.’ He looks up at the opening credits of When You Loved Me the Most, and feels his mood lift as he contemplates all the women who are waiting to see him tonight.

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot: a box of mooncakes arrived today from the CEO of Ten Thousand Fortunes – I hid it under Ming’s bed,’ Juan says, then goes upstairs to fetch it.

  Ma Daode checks his phone and sees a message from the young kindergarten teacher, Changyan: SEND ME A DIRTY JOKE – QUICK! Immediately, he forwards her the one that the estate agent Wendi sent him this morning: A PEASANT WENT INTO TOWN TO BUY SOME CONDOMS, BUT WHEN HE GOT TO THE PHARMACY, HE FORGOT WHAT THEY WERE CALLED, SO HE SAID, ‘MISS, DO YOU HAVE ANY PLASTIC BAGS TO PUT PENISES IN?’

  Juan brings the box to the table and opens it. The red satin interior casts a rosy glow over her face. ‘Ah, he knows I like mooncakes,’ Ma Daode says, his eyes lighting up. ‘Let me try one.’ He chooses a cake and breaks it in two, and where the filling should be finds instead a small bar of solid gold. ‘Damn!’ he moans. ‘I was just in the mood for a proper mooncake. The ones Wuwei County sent us were revolting – they were filled with tinned meat.’

  When Juan opens the lower tier of the box her face is tinted a deeper red by bundles of 100-yuan notes, each printed with the crimson face of Chairman Mao. ‘Must be forty thousand yuan in there,’ she quickly calculates. ‘Looks like he wants a big favour from you.’

  ‘Yes – he’s asked me to get his brother a job in the Industry and Commerce Department. What a hypocrite. Always bangs on about cultivating a Communist spirit and opposing commercialisation, while behind the scenes he’s doing corrupt deals with shady businesses.’ Ma Daode looks up at the television again and switches channels.

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he’s promoted to Deputy Mayor next year. He’ll be at the East is Red reunion as well, so be careful what you say in front of him.’ She stares at the heap of gold ingots beside the broken mooncakes, each one looking to her like a small brick of worry. ‘Where shall we hide this? The attic’s full. Hey, did I tell you your sister’s working for a direct-selling company now, flogging fortune-telling kits and good-luck charms? She keeps pestering me to introduce her to new customers. It’s obviously a dodgy pyramid scheme. Why don’t you just give her this cash and tell her to leave me alone.’

  ‘Is she mad? The government has labelled fortune-telling a “feudal superstition” and is threatening to ban it. Those good-luck charms are a con. The crooks buy cheap leather bags for a hundred yuan, call them “fortune bags”, then sell them for ten times the price. Anyway, good fortune cannot be bought with money or charms: destiny emerges only through struggle.’ Ma Daode is pleased with this latest maxim. He picks a bogey from his nostril and flicks it onto the floor.

  The doorbell rings. In silent solidarity, Juan swiftly covers the mooncake box with a newspaper and Ma Daode hides it inside the cupboard. Then Juan presses her eye to the peephole. It’s Song Bin’s wife, Hong.

  ‘Let’s get moving – it’s seven o’clock already!’ Hong says cheerfully, as she steps inside. She’s wearing a flamenco-style pleated skirt and red lipstick a shade lighter than the one she wore yesterday. She sits on the sofa and admires her long, purple-lacquered nails. Ma Daode taps the vibrating phone in his pocket and watches Juan disappear upstairs again.

  ‘Is Song Bin home yet?’ he asks Hong.

  ‘No, he’s always back late, just like you,’ Hong replies, still gazing at her nails. ‘The Civility Office staff seem to get more work than anyone. He keeps having to stay late into the night for emergency meetings.’

  ‘Turn on the television, if you like – Juan won’t be long,’ Ma Daode says, then rushes to the bathroom to check his texts.

  WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MR DIRTY DREAM?

  Ma Daode rolls his toad-like eyes and types: PREPARING FOR TOMORROW’S MEETING. AND YOU? He finds the heated Japanese toilet they recently installed very comfortable to sit on.

  ONLINE SHOPPING. JUST BOUGHT MYSELF A PAIR OF ITALIAN SANDALS. EVERYONE AT WHITE HEAVEN WAS TALKING ABOUT YOU THIS AFTERNOON.

  IT WAS YOUR FAULT FOR DISTRACTING ME. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, TEXTING ME DURING A MEETING? NO POLITICAL NOUS. As he recalls his crazed rant at today’s Party meeting, he feels short of breath, as though someone is stuffing his chest with straw.

  HEY, YOU CAN’T TELL ME OFF – YOU’RE NOT MY BOSS ANY MORE. TOMORROW WE MUST COME CLEAN ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP.

  DON’T BE SILLY. I’LL COME TO YOU TOMORROW NIGHT, AND BRING A BOTTLE OF VINTAGE XIJIU.

  SO YOU’RE BUSY WITH ANOTHER WOMAN TONIGHT, ARE YOU? I’M JUST MISTRESS NUMBER THREE, OR NUMBER FOUR, AREN’T I? WELL, I TELL YOU, DIRECTOR MA, I’VE HAD ENOUGH! TOMORROW I’M GOING TO HAND OVER YOUR SIGNED DECLARATION OF LOVE TO THE DISCIPLINE INSPECTION COMMISSION, THEN WE’LL SEE WHAT GLORIOUS FUTURE YOUR CHINA DREAM HAS IN STORE FOR US!

  STOP THIS MAD TALK! YOU’RE UPSETTING ME. Ma Daode is starting to panic.

  I WANT TO FLY TO THE NETHERWORLD AND DRINK A CUP OF OLD LADY DREAM’S BROTH OF AMNESIA ON THE BRIDGE OF HELPLESSNESS.

  YOU’RE LOSING YOUR MIND! DON’T BE ANGRY WITH ME, I BEG YOU. The thought that she might be contemplating suicide makes Ma Daode break into a sweat.

  SINCE I STARTED MY JOB AT WHITE HEAVEN, I HAVEN’T HAD ONE DAY OF PEACE. I WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR WIFE AND TELL HER EVERYTHING.

  MY BLOOD PRESSURE’S RISING, DARLING. I MUST TAKE MY MEDICINE. SPEAK LATER. A chill runs up his spine as he clutches his warm phone. ‘Mistress’, ‘lover’, ‘concubine’ – these are words often heard during the trials of corrupt officials. If any of his mistresses report him to the authorities, he will lose his job and privileges, and return to square one. He usually handles situations like this with ease, but the disturbing memories that have intruded into his thoughts recently have left him so confused that even this small problem seems insurmountable. As soon as he hears his wife and Hong shut the front door behind them, he creeps out of the bathroom and returns to the sofa.

  Another text beeps. WHAT’S GOING ON? WHY HAVEN’T YOU CALLED? He stares at the small icon of his oldest mistress, Li Wei, next to this message, and realises he hasn’t seen her for almost a
month. Over the last two weeks, he has slept with Wendi and Changyan on alternate nights and, despite his better judgement, has met up with Yuyu twice. He decides that he should summon all of his girlfriends to a meeting and lay down some new ground rules. He wonders which woman he should sleep with tonight. Li Wei is at the bottom of his list. No, Yuyu should be – she is about to report him. Maybe he should take Yuyu with him to Li Wei’s apartment. That really would be a ‘night of blissful debauchery’, as the ancients would say …

  We didn’t have enough cash to buy my parents a coffin, so my sister pawned a picture frame and a copper wash bowl. She considered pawning my father’s two-toned brogues as well, which he seldom wore but always kept polished, but decided to give them to me. With the 30 yuan she raised, we bought a cheap plywood coffin. Now that I’m rich, I could house my parents’ bones in a stone tomb, if only I could find them. After we buried the coffin in the wild grove near Yaobang Village, so many Red Guards were buried there as well that it was impossible to know which grave belonged to whom. For those who survived, that wild grove has become a place of nightmares.

  ‘The swan flies away, never to return / I think back to the past, and my heart feels hollow,’ Ma Daode recites to himself as he pulls on his socks. Why am I being haunted by all these flashbacks, all these dreamlike visions of death and violence? The past and the present keep colliding in his mind. Last night, he dreamed of a place he has never seen before. It was a hospital corridor. Both walls were painted green on the lower half and a line of white ants was crawling along the dark crimson floor. At the end of the corridor was a room where the China Dream Bureau documents were stored. He opened the door and saw himself, sitting head bowed in front of a screen, typing the Bureau’s annual report, his body shrouded in furry white mould. He could hear children playing basketball outside, and could smell the stench of rot wafting from his decaying double. Then, suddenly, he saw a boy with a slashed cheek, staring straight at him, blood spewing from his mouth. Wendi pinched his nose, trying to wake him up, and whispered, ‘What did you say? Whose death do you want to avenge?’

  Ma Daode glances at the leftover fish bones and charred beans lying on the table, and remembers the canteen of Yaobang Village School. It wasn’t a real canteen – just a small room with a stove in the mud house of a villager who had been killed in the crossfire during a battle on the river front. Two hundred East is Red recruits were sent to that battle, armed with just four hand grenades each. Only thirty returned alive.

  Before he steps out of the front door, Ma Daode looks into the hallway mirror, presses an imaginary gun to his head, and says to himself: ‘Hurry up and make the China Dream Device so that all these bloody nightmares can be erased.’

  Dreams evaporate, wealth trickles away

  Director Ma looks out through the car window at the fields he ploughed when he was a sent-down youth. The blazing August sun has scorched a line of young saplings planted along the Fenshui River. Beyond them, he sees the imposing red-brick warehouse that was built in the 1920s beside a pier where junks from the cities upstream would pick up cargo on their way to Ziyang. Now the river is too shallow for large vessels to navigate, but back during the violent struggle, it was filled with boats and the sound of gunfire. Rival factions fought for control of the river front to ensure the flow of supplies to their forces in Ziyang. It was here that East is Red and the Million Bold Warriors waged their bloodiest battles.

  In a battle in May 1968, an East is Red unit from the electricity plant joined forces with a platoon of lower-middle-class peasants and students from Red Flag Secondary School to regain control of the wharf. They approached in rowing boats, firing shrapnel at the red warehouse, and moored at the pier. A dozen workers jumped ashore and charged at the warehouse with machine guns, yelling, ‘Enemy forces must surrender or die!’ But the Million Bold Warriors were prepared. They tossed hand grenades at the pier, setting it alight. Then they gunned down any East is Red worker who jumped into the river and sent motorboats out to block their escape routes.

  Four days later, our unit drove to the red warehouse in army tanks to launch a revenge attack. When we arrived, we saw a hundred black and swollen corpses still trapped beneath the pier … As Ma Daode stares at the red warehouse now, he catches a scent of rotting flesh … We held a funeral service for them. One girl stepped onto a stone bench and recited her poem through a megaphone: ‘“I’m dying, mother. / Tell the Million Bold Warriors that no crime against humanity will evade the punishment of history.”’ We had lit hundreds of incense sticks to try to mask the stench, but it was so overpowering that after reading only two lines the girl stopped and retched.

  On the other side of the river he can see Yaobang Industrial Park. The wild grove has been felled recently to make way for a road that will extend to a steel bridge currently under construction. Eventually the park will spread across the river, doubling in size and engulfing the whole of Yaobang. The villagers have mounted fierce protests against the development, so work has been placed on hold for the last six months. But the authorities have decided that Yaobang must be demolished today, and as Ma Daode lived here in the Cultural Revolution, Mayor Chen has sent him to persuade the villagers to peacefully evacuate their homes.

  In a meeting convened by the Demolition Bureau last night, Director Ma heard that the government has offered Yaobang more compensation than any other village that has been demolished in the county. But because of Yaobang’s proximity to Ziyang, its farmers have become rich over the last decade selling mushrooms, herbs and poultry to the city, and have built three-storey houses which they insist are worth much more than the compensation offered by the government. Endless disputes have ensued. Director Ma has no choice now but to grit his teeth and make a final, last-ditch effort to bring them round.

  He remembers how, a year after he left the village, he returned with his propaganda troupe to perform the final scene of The White-Haired Girl. He danced the proletarian hero while Juan danced his fiancée, the white-haired peasant girl. After rescuing her from her mountain cave and overthrowing the evil landlord, he led her off towards a glorious Communist future, leaping and pirouetting across the stage with such dazzling grace that the entire audience gasped in awe. In the evening, Secretary Meng, the village head, invited him and Juan back for dinner. He served them wine and fried vegetables, and even killed a chicken in their honour. The villagers felt proud that the sent-down youths they had looked after for so long had achieved such success.

  The straight concrete road along which Ma Daode is being chauffeured in a Japanese Land Cruiser was built in 1978, at the start of the reform era. The riverside track it replaced used to get very muddy after the rain. When Ma Daode first arrived here with the eleven other teenagers from Ziyang, he slipped down into the mud so many times that, in the end, he pulled off his canvas shoes and trudged the rest of the way to the village barefoot, all the while staring at the bottom of the girl in front of him, who would later become his wife. That first evening, Secretary Meng presented each of the sent-down youths a hand-carved whetstone. Four years later, when he received the official letter summoning him back to Ziyang, Ma Daode walked to the end of the pier, took the whetstone from his bag and hurled it into the river as far as he could.

  In the distance he glimpses the Cultural Revolution slogan ENEMY FORCES MUST SURRENDER OR DIE painted on a wall which, a second later, he sees is the new perimeter of the Industrial Park. As the car speeds on, he realises that it is he who is daubing the past onto the present.

  As soon as the girl on the stone bench retched, everyone else began to vomit as well. Then five ragged Million Bold Warriors were dragged from the red warehouse out onto the pier, kicked in the back of their knees and forced to kneel. Raising a Mauser pistol high in the air, a mad-eyed boy called Tan Dan announced that East is Red had lost one hundred and twenty comrades and that their deaths must be avenged. Then he went over to the five captives and, one by one, shot them in the head and kicked them into the river. A
fter he walked away, all that remained on the pier was half a skull dripping with fresh blood.

  Director Ma tells his driver, Mr Tai, to pull up on the side of the road, then he jumps out, clasps his hands together and draws deep breaths, trying to empty his mind. He doesn’t want these nightmare visions to distract him from this morning’s task. The demolition workers who tried to bulldoze the village last month were attacked so violently that several were taken to hospital and almost died. At noon today, a task force including police officers, armed police and ambulance men will enter the village to enforce the evacuation. On the road ahead, Director Ma sees red flags fluttering from the flat roof of a fake house constructed of concrete blocks and plywood.

  ‘Please get back in the car, Director Ma,’ says his secretary, Hu. ‘You have a lunch meeting at one with the Prosperity Hotel general manager to discuss sponsorship of the Golden Anniversary Dream, so we don’t want to run late.’

  ‘Do we have to go any further?’ Mr Tai says nervously. ‘What if the villagers drag us out of the car?’ He’s wearing a smart Western suit and has a long, skinny neck. A young man from the Demolition Bureau is sitting in the passenger seat beside him.

  ‘Drive on, don’t be afraid,’ says Director Ma. ‘I was a sent-down youth here in the Cultural Revolution, so they will treat us with respect.’ He then phones Commander Zhao, head of the Demolition Bureau, and Director Jia, head of Public Security, who are travelling in the car behind, and says, ‘We’ll go in first. You stay here. I’ll call if we need you.’

  The Land Cruiser pulls up outside the concrete house festooned with red flags. Before Director Ma set off this morning, he was told by his network of informers that this fake house was the protest headquarters, and that the surrounding makeshift watchtowers were equipped only with bricks, metal rods and petrol cans, and could be easily overcome. The fake house stands right at the entrance to the village. There are three toppled telegraph poles blocking the road ahead, and red flags and banners jutting from the trees on either side. The surrounding fields are dotted with other fake dwellings farmers have built in the last few months, hoping to pass them off as real houses and so earn more compensation. These tall shacks have neither stairs nor electricity, and are used mainly for housing pigs and growing mushrooms. Although many villagers have factory jobs in the cities, few have dared leave Yaobang recently in case their land is seized in their absence. To protect their property, they have formed a Land Defence League and take turns manning the various watchtowers. Although they drove back the demolition team last time, it was not a complete victory. Twenty villagers were arrested and thirty were hospitalised; the mushrooms in Gao Wenshe’s shack were tossed onto the fields, and a bulldozer dumped earth into the village pond, killing Old Yang’s goldfish. Ma Daode has been informed that in preparation for today’s assault, Old Yang’s son, Genzai, has built a cannon and converted his delivery van into a crude armoured tank.