Lenin's Kisses (32 page)

Grandma Mao Zhi said, “But what if they don’t have any special skills?

Chief Liu laughed lightly. “As long as they have something, it’ll be fine.”

Grandma Mao Zhi raised her voice and said,

“In that case, I’ll pick out a few for you, but you must put what you said today into writing and stamp it with the official county committee and county government stamps, together with your own fingerprint. Regardless of whether or not you ultimately succeed in purchasing Lenin’s corpse and bringing it back, the people of Liven will only perform until the end of the year. As of the beginning of next year, we will no longer fall under the county’s and the district’s jurisdiction. Also, no matter what, you must give each Liven performer a monthly salary of three thousand yuan.”

In this way, they quickly reached an agreement. Grandma Mao Zhi had no reason not to agree, so she simply acceded to all of Chief Liu’s conditions. Chief Liu also agreed to everything Grandma Mao Zhi asked for.

All of the lights in the building had gone dark, and even the cleaning staff had disappeared, but Chief Liu opened the door to his office and shouted into the hallway, “Is anyone there?” With this, someone suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and Chief Liu instructed him to tell the people remaining to immediately drop their rice bowls and come running to his office. In this way, Grandma Mao Zhi managed in a single night to sign a contract with the county committee, the county government, and Chief Liu, who was in charge of overseeing all of the county’s work. Each clause in the contract was clearly written, and every word was legally binding.

The two-page contract read as follows:

Party A: The village of Liven, deep in the Balou mountains.

Party B: The Shuanghuai county committee and county government.

For historical reasons, over the past several decades the village of Liven has been requesting permission to be allowed to withdraw from society and return to the so-called free and enlivened existence that it formerly enjoyed. With the mutual agreement of both parties, therefore, the county committee and county government have reached the following agreement with respect to Liven’s proposed withdrawal from society:

1) Liven must establish two special-skills performance troupes, known as the First and Second Shuanghuai County Special-Skills Performance Troupes, respectively, and each troupe must have at least fifty performers. The first of these troupes has already been established, and the second must be established within ten days.

2) The two troupes’ administrative and performance rights will be controlled by Shuanghuai county. Shuanghuai, furthermore, will guarantee that each Liven performer will earn at least three thousand yuan a month in salary.

3) The two troupes will perform only until the final day of this lunar year, which is to say the thirtieth day of the twelfth month. After that point, the troupes will no longer have any administrative or economic relationship with Shuanghuai county.

4) As of the final day of this year, Liven will no longer fall under the administrative jurisdiction of Shuanghuai county and Boshuzi township, but rather it will once again become an independent village. All of the village’s people, plants, rivers, territory, and other aspects will thereby have no relation to the county or district. Similarly, no one from the county or district shall interfere with any of the village’s affairs. But if Liven were to experience a natural disaster, Shuanghuai county and Boshuzi township would still have a responsibility to offer uncompensated assistance.

5) As the final date specified in the performance troupes’ contracts approaches, the county must, before the end of the year, submit the formal document affirming that “Liven will no longer fall under the jurisdiction of any county or township” to each department and board committee in the county, as well as to the township government and every village committee in the entire county.

Naturally, the final page of the agreement contained the bright red seal of the county committee and county government, together with the signatures of both Grandma Mao Zhi and Chief Liu, in their respective capacities as the representatives of the two parties. Not only did they both sign the document, but furthermore Chief Liu, at Grandma Mao Zhi’s urging, placed his private seal and his fingerprint below his signature, and Mao Zhi added her own fingerprint. In this way, the last white page of the document was marked with a red seal, looking as the snowcapped mountains of Balou might if they were abloom with red roses.

After everything was filled out and Grandma Mao Zhi had been accompanied back to the county guest house to rest, it was agreed that the next day she would be escorted back to Liven, where she would establish the second performance troupe. Given that the number of troupes had been doubled, the amount of time needed to raise enough money to purchase Lenin’s corpse would be cut in half. As a result, it was now projected that by the end of the year Shuanghuai county would be able to purchase Lenin’s corpse and install it on Spirit Mountain.

With everything arranged satisfactorily, Chief Liu had no choice but to retreat to his Hall of Devotion.

C
HAPTER 9:
F
URTHER
R
EADING—
H
ALL OF
D
EVOTION

1)
Hall of Devotion.
Also known as a Divine Hall. To explain the origins of this term, we must go back to the
xinchou
and
renyin
years, or 1961 and 1962—the period of famine and natural disaster when the infant Liu Yingque was left abandoned in front of the soc-school. Liu Yingque ended up becoming the adopted son of Teacher Liu at the soc-school, and in the process truly became a child of the soc-school—which is to say, a soc-school babe. At mealtimes he would carry his rice bowl to the canteen, and at class times he would carry his stool into the classroom along with the other cadres and Party members. He would listen as the teacher read aloud from official documents, newspapers, or editorials. He would glance through large books written by national leaders. Some of the Party members and cadres would smoke or doze off in class, but Liu Yingque would always listen attentively as the teacher lectured and read aloud. He would watch as his adopted father carefully wrote one line of block letters after another on the blackboard.

Given that this was a soc-school, the lessons naturally all concerned Great Man theory, addressing topics such as Marxist-Leninist economics, politics, and philosophy. Yingque didn’t understand Great Man theory, but as he listened he gradually learned to read and write, and before he turned ten he was able to make his way through an entire newspaper article. After the teacher’s wife ran away with a cadre from a neighboring county when Liu Yingque was twelve, he was formally promoted from the status of soc-school babe to that of the teacher’s adopted son, whereupon he began his formal studies.

However, it was precisely around this time that the unprecedented Cultural Revolution began. The Cultural Revolution regarded this teacher at this rural soc-school as a rich peasant, and therefore a class enemy—an enemy who spent every day on stage reading from great books. A notice bearing the county committee red seal arrived at the soc-school, which relieved Teacher Liu of his teaching duties and assigned him to sweep the floor and watch the school gate. Teacher Liu fell into a depression, and constantly needed to take Chinese medicine.

One day several years later—when Yingque was sixteen, his sister was nine, and Teacher Liu was fifty-six—Teacher Liu suddenly began to feel chest pains. He lay down in bed, his head covered in sweat and his sheets completely soaked. This happened to be the period of the fall harvest, and the school was in intersession. All of the cadres had returned home, and Yingque’s sister, Liu Xu, had gone to visit a classmate in the city, so the only people left at the school were Yingque and his foster father. It was muggy, the tree leaves were drooping in a sickly manner, and the cries of the cicadas were as long as a whip. Squatting down in front of his bed, Teacher Liu grasped his shirt, then repeatedly pounded his chest, his face completely pale. At this point, Yingque returned home and shouted, Father, Father! He was prepared to run to the county hospital with his foster father in his arms.

Teacher Liu waved him away. He examined Yingque for a moment, then said, Yingque, you are sixteen and already are taller than I. If I entrust your sister, Liu Xu, to you, would you be able to raise her?

Liu Yingque suddenly realized the severity of the situation, and nodded solemnly. What his father said next, however, left Yingque completely bewildered. Teacher Liu asked if Yingque was willing to look after Liu Xu for the rest of her life. He explained, I’m concerned that once she grows up she will come to resemble her mother, becoming skittish and unreliable. But you, ever since you were young, have grown up in the soc-school, and by the age of thirteen you could fill out the school’s examination booklets as well as the cadres themselves. I am convinced that you will go on to have great success in life. If you do, then your sister won’t end up like her mother. Her mother resented my lack of success, and because of it ran off with someone else. If you have success, and are willing to marry your step-sister, then I will die content. I will know that it wasn’t in vain that I took care of you and Liu Xu for the past ten years. When Yingque’s foster father reached this point, a tear appeared in his eye—though it was unclear whether this tear appeared because he was suffering from chest pain, or because he was struck by the tragedy of human existence. His face was pale and sallow, and as the tear ran down his cheek, it was as if it were rolling down a creased piece of paper.

As Yingque gazed at his foster father, he nodded and asked, But what kind of success can I achieve?

The school courtyard was completely silent. The sound of the crows in the trees outside the door echoed through the darkness. When Yingque nodded, his foster father smiled, as though a thin beam of fluorescent lights had been illuminated in the summer night. Then, his father edged over to the side of the bed, sat up, and wiped the sweat from his brow. He took Yingque’s hand and placed a key in his palm, saying, Use this to open the door on the east side of the school warehouse. Once you go look at that room, you will be guaranteed to have success in life. You will know what you need to do. Whether you have modest or great success will depend on you, on fate, and on luck, but if you visit that room, then even if you only go on to become a commune secretary, I will feel that I’ve done all that I could to help you achieve success. After having been addressed as “teacher” by cadres my entire life, I will feel that I succeeded in raising my son to enter the government and become a cadre.

Yingque gripped that sweat-covered key and stood in front of his father’s divine
¹
bed, as though he had suddenly found a road to a holy place but didn’t dare take the first step.

His foster father said, My entire life earnings are in that warehouse. Go look, and after you see it you will strive for success your entire life.

In his father’s bedroom, Liu Yingque could barely see anything, but at the same time it was as if he could see a path through the darkness, and a flickering light. The sun was bright outside, lighting up all corners of the soc-school. As Yingque entered through the school gate and crossed the courtyard, then arrived at that storage room on the east side of the school, he didn’t have any idea what he would find inside. He opened the door, quietly went over to the easternmost warehouse, then stopped and pulled himself together. He unlocked the door and opened it, and the first thing he saw was that the sunlight that had been shining on the outer wall now poured into the dark room.

It turned out that this was also a storage room, the only difference being that while the other three rooms were full of the school’s bikes, cart wheels, old ladders, old blackboards, stools, chairs, and desks, together with the pots, bowls, chopsticks, and serving dishes that the Party officials and cadres left behind when they were not at the school, in this particular storage room there weren’t any of those sorts of random objects. Instead, the room was full of the school’s textbooks and other documents. This room was in fact like a large library or a book depository, except that the books were not arranged on shelves; they were all piled high on a round table against the wall. The walls of the room were covered with old newspapers, and the ground was paved with bricks, while the ceiling was made from thatched straw. The room had a strong mildew odor. Liu Yingque stood in the doorway, looking as though he had taken a wrong turn. Initially he didn’t notice anything different about this room—didn’t see anything that would guarantee him success in life, as his foster father had promised.

The room was extraordinarily quiet, but it was into this silence that Yingque walked. He first looked at the tables, and noticed that the arrangement of books on each table was actually completely different from what you would find in a library or reference room. Each author’s works were grouped together and arranged into piles. The first level covered half the table, the second level was positioned two inches back, the third level two inches beyond that, up to the top level, which was like the top of a tower, with only a few volumes arranged there. Because this was a soc-school, the books were not recreational novels; rather, they were all on politics, economics, or philosophy. There was a complete clothbound set of Marx’s and Engels’s collected works, together with individual volumes of their respective titles. There were the complete works of Lenin and Stalin, and also works by Hegel,
³
Kant,
⁵
Feuerbach,
⁷
Saint-Simon,
⁹
Fourier,
¹¹
Ho Chi Minh,
¹³
Dimitrov,
¹⁵
Tito,
¹⁷
Kim Il Sung,
¹⁹
and so forth. There were multiple copies of some titles, such as
The Communist Manifesto, Capital, Discourse on Surplus Value,
and
Lenin’s Complete Works,
but there were also single copies of some titles, such as Holbach’s
²¹
Christianity Has Been Exposed,
Feuerbach’s
Future Philosophy,
Locke’s
²³
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
and Adam Smith’s
²⁵
The Wealth of Nations
.