Lenin's Kisses (35 page)

In the end, the rural areas where Chief Liu stayed ended up becoming more affluent than the neighboring regions, and consequently he was promoted from soc-school cadre to the position of deputy Party secretary of the commune, and then promoted again to Party committee member. Able at a young age to manage cadres who were ten or even twenty years his senior, Chief Liu was able to draw a red line under his occupation at the age of twenty-three.

Three years after the commune was converted into a township, Liu Yingque was transferred from Boshuzi commune to Chunshu township. Although he was only the deputy township chief, the township chief had been hospitalized and therefore Chief Liu was responsible for the township’s business. He convened a meeting with all of the village heads, and told them that every village should have ten men stay behind to lead a group of women and the elderly in working the fields, while the rest of the village’s young men and women should go out to find work. They could steal and loot if they had to, but no matter what, they couldn’t remain at home working the land. He gave each young person a letter of introduction to the township, and then used several trucks to haul the boys and girls, the men and women, to the district and provincial bus stop. After they got out of the truck, however, he wouldn’t pay them any heed, telling them that even if they were starving to death, they shouldn’t return home in less than three to six months. He said he would fine any residents a hundred yuan if they went home early for reasons other than sickness or disaster, and if they didn’t have any money he would confiscate their pigs and sheep until the residents, no doubt screaming and hollering, left home again.

A year later, Chunshu township had one group of young people and children after another go to work in the city—even if they were merely washing dishes, cooking, or collecting garbage—so that every town and village would have money to buy salt and coal. One house after another was rebuilt into a tile-roofed residence. In Huangli village, there was a household in which all of the children were girls, so Liu Yingque sent the two eldest daughters to the provincial capital to find work. Within half a month, however, they had used up all their money and were famished, and started selling their flesh.
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Within half a year, the family was able to build a new house, and Yingque led all of the cadres in the township to their home to host an impromptu meeting, bringing the parents flowers and hanging a plaque on the wall of the house. The officials even issued congratulatory letters, stamped with the township’s seal, to those two girls who were out selling their flesh. Although Yingque spit on the ground upon walking out of the house of those two flesh-selling girls, afterward all the village boys and girls competed to leave the township to go look for work, and the township enjoyed some of the best days it had ever seen.

A year after that, when the township chief was released from the hospital, the county didn’t allow him to keep his position, and instead promoted Liu Yingque from deputy township chief to township chief.

After Liu Yingque was promoted, he began speaking and acting like an emperor.

One day, one of the men from the township who had gone out to find work was escorted home by one of the city dwellers. When he returned, Chief Liu asked, “What’s wrong?” The man from the city replied, “He’s stolen from others! How is it that people from this district are sent out to steal?” Chief Liu slapped the thief’s face, and shouted, “Tie him up!” Someone from the police station got a rope to tie his hands, and then accompanied the accuser into the township to eat. After their meal, Chief Liu walked the accuser back to his car, but as soon as he departed he had his officers release the thief.

Chief Liu asked, “What did you steal?”

The thief lowered his head.

Chief Liu hollered, “I said, what did you steal?”

The thief replied, “I stole a motor from the factory.”

Chief Liu said sharply, “Get out of here! Your punishment is that within three years you need to set up a factory in your village. If you can’t do so, then if someone else brings you in for stealing, I’ll send you to jail.”

The thief left. He didn’t go back to his village to see his mother and father, but immediately returned to the city. Or he went to the provincial capital or to cities in the south to develop his skills. Soon, he did in fact manage to establish a small factory in his hometown—either a flour, rope, or nail factory.

Another day, someone called from the district asking Liu Yingque to go into the city to fetch someone, and he had no choice but to go. He took a ride into the city, where he visited the district’s Public Security Bureau, and found more than a dozen seventeen- to nineteen-year-old women who had all been selling their flesh in the entertainment district. The women were squatting at the base of the wall half-naked and clutching their clothes. When the person at the Public Security Bureau saw Chief Liu, he asked, “Are you the township chief?” Chief Liu replied, “I am.” The officer squinted at Chief Liu, then spit at him, saying, “Fuck, do the factories in your township churn out whores rather than grain?” Chief Liu stared in amazement, then lowered his head and wiped away the spittle while cursing the officer under his breath. Then he looked up with a smile, and said, “I’ll take them away, and when we get back I’ll make them parade around the village carrying old shoes. Would that be okay?”

He led the women out of the bureau, but as soon as they were outside he addressed them, saying, “You have the ability to make a Public Security Bureau Officer divorce his wife, disrupting his family so much that his wife and children leave him. You have the ability to become a madam and teach other women to follow in your footsteps. You have the ability to send money home, enabling your family to build a tile-roofed house and permitting the entire village to have electricity and running water, such that the village will erect a good-merit stela celebrating your good deeds.” He then spit repeatedly on them before turning around and heading back to the bus station.

The women stared after him in shock, then started giggling and dispersed throughout the city.

Afterward, some of the villagers did in fact set up hairdressing shops and massage parlors in the city. They served as managers, and had young women from the countryside come and work for them. Others went from collecting trash to setting up a recycling center. Someone else went from helping cart around bricks and cement to eventually helping the city-dwellers build kitchens, repair their walls, and construct chicken coops. Eventually, he began advising people on new buildings. For instance, he would point out how between the first and second floors the outer wall of the new building leaned to the east, but from the second to the third floors it straightened out and leaned back to the west, and by the time it got to the fifth or sixth floors it was perfectly straight. In the end, he became a labor contractor, and on his ID card he was listed as the manager of a construction team.

Three or four years passed, and Chunshu township gradually began to acquire an air of prosperity. All of the roads leading to the village were paved, and electrical lines were installed. In front of each family’s newly constructed house there was a stone lion. Chunshu became a model for the entire county, and the Party secretary personally came to the village to give a talk. Liu Yingque drew a red line under his lifeline for the age of twenty-seven, and wrote that he was promoted from township chief to township secretary. When he was thirty-three, that red line was extended upward, as he was again promoted, from township secretary to deputy county chief, becoming the youngest deputy county chief in the entire district.

Now Liu Yingque was thirty-seven years old, and his life achievement chart was already marked in bright red. His Hall of Devotion was extraordinarily quiet, to the point that you could hear the air entering through the crack beneath the door. The night was as dark as the bottom of a well, and people who’d been out for an evening stroll had all returned home to sleep. The old man guarding the gate to the residential compound for government employees had long since locked up. Chief Liu sat at a table in the center of this Divine Hall, looking repeatedly at each of the portraits on the wall. Over and over he read out loud the underlined descriptions of their significant achievements. Eventually, his gaze came to rest on his own portrait, positioned last in the row of ten great military marshals.

In the picture, Chief Liu appeared with a flattop, a square head, and a red face. Although he was smiling brightly, his eyes carried an unmistakable trace of sorrow and anxiety, as though something truly difficult to accept had just been revealed. His gray suit was very elegant, and he was wearing a bright red tie. But if you looked closely, you noticed that the suit looked awkward on him, as though he had not actually been wearing it when the photograph was taken, but rather had it painted in afterward. As Chief Liu looked at the portrait, the portrait gazed back at him. When he looked excited, however, the portrait retained its melancholy expression.

Chief Liu’s excitement immediately faded.

He continued staring at the portrait, though, and as he did so the soles of his feet began to itch and feel hot. He knew that he was about to have another burst of energy. Each time he was promoted he would always come alone to his Hall of Devotion and look at the portraits on the wall. When his gaze finally came to rest on his own, he would invariably feel a burst of energy start at his feet and work its way up through his body, as a wave of blood surged to his head. Needless to say, this meant he had to do something—walk up to the portrait and write down his age and the rank to which he had been promoted, and then draw a thick red line under the row specifying that in such-and-such year and such-and-such month he had been promoted to such-and-such rank. Afterward, he would burn three incense sticks in front of his foster father’s portrait, meditate for a while, and bow. Then he would go back home, locking the door behind him.

However, this time when Chief Liu came to his Hall of Devotion, it was not because he had just been promoted, but rather because of the success of the village’s performance troupe, and because he and Grandma Mao Zhi had just signed a contract agreeing that she would establish another performance troupe, and because by the end of the year they would have raised far more money than was needed to purchase Lenin’s corpse. Chief Liu had never expected that even now he would feel this surge of energy emanating from the soles of his feet, as though he were standing on a brazier on a cold day. Suddenly, his palms got sweaty and he felt an overwhelming urge to go up to his chart and write down a new promotion, underlining it in red. He knew that if he didn’t write something, he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

He hesitated, the sweat from his palm soaking his fingers. His head was pounding, and as the blood filled his veins, he felt as though a herd of wild horses was galloping through him.

He stood up.

He abruptly pulled a pen out of his pocket, then carried a stool over to his portrait. Counting from the bottom, he carefully wrote a line of text on the tenth empty line:

In the
jimao
Year of the Hare, when Liu Yingque turned thirty-nine, he was promoted to deputy district commissioner.

Chief Liu had originally intended to write that that in the
wuyin
Year of the Tiger he had been promoted to the position of district commissioner, but when he took up his pen he felt a jolt of modesty, so he pushed the date back a year and assigned himself a lower position. He revised it to read that in the
jimao
Year of the Hare, when Liu Yingque turned thirty-nine, he was promoted to the position of deputy district commissioner. After all, Lenin’s corpse had not been purchased yet, and it wouldn’t be until the following year that the people would begin to have so much money that they couldn’t spend it all, and the question of whether he would be promoted first to deputy district commissioner or whether he would skip right over the position of deputy commissioner and be promoted directly to district commissioner had not yet been decided. Chief Liu knew that it was inappropriate for him to preemptively claim something he had not yet achieved, and that even his own wife wouldn’t let him do this, but he still wrote it down and then underlined it in red.

The earlier red lines had all turned dark over time, and seemed to be waiting impatiently for a new one. After Chief Liu drew the bright red line, he jumped up from his stool and took a step back. He gazed at that new line of text and that new thick red line, and his face lit up in a bright smile. He felt a wave of peace flow over him, and the energy and warm blood that had been surging through his body began to subside.

He had to return home. It was already the middle of the night.

But just as he was about to leave, his hand began to shake as he grasped the door handle, and he suddenly had a nagging feeling that he had neglected to do something. He initially thought that it was because he had forgotten to burn incense for his foster father, so he removed three incense sticks from one drawer and a sand-filled incense holder from another. He lit the incense sticks and stuck them in the holder, then pushed the table over to his father’s portrait. He watched as the three columns of smoke spiraled up into the air. He recognized that since he was already a county chief and almost like an emperor, it would be entirely unbefitting for him to kneel down and kowtow before his foster father’s portrait. But he still solemnly gazed at the portrait, and bowed down three times while holding his hands to his chest, intoning: “Father, you can rest easy: Next year I will buy Lenin’s corpse and bring it to Spirit Mountain. Within two or three years I will be promoted to district commissioner.”