Years of Red Dust (19 page)

But Fei wasn't alone in facing these problems. Throughout the country, more than half of the state-run factories were in deep trouble, some nearing bankruptcy. According to the
People's Daily
, this was “inevitable in the historic transition from the state economy to the market economy.” Whatever the official interpretations, the government had given up subsidizing those factories. A new policy was generated instead: a state-run company could apply for bankruptcy and its employees could be sent home with a onetime compensation. Interested entrepreneurs were encouraged to buy such companies and were offered a huge discount if they retained some of the employees for at least two years.

That special clause reduced the government compensation for factories, it was argued, but contributed to political stability by reducing unemployment numbers.

When Comrade Kang's factory was put on the list of factories for sale, the buyer turned out to be none other than Big Buck Kang. After he agreed to keep about two hundred employees, he got the factory for only a “symbolic sum.” In the logic of the new age, this kind of transaction was a good thing. The state would stop losing money, and some of the now ex–state employees would hold onto their rice bowl—at least for a couple of years more.

There was one concession that Big Buck Kang refused to make in the negotiations. It was about the pensions and benefits of the retired employees, none of which he would take on. The only exception was the former executives. As for Comrade Kang, Big Buck Kang included him in the executive severance package, which meant that, as an ex-executive, the old man would still enjoy his pension and benefits as before.

What astonished us was his secret business plan, which was revealed after the conclusion of the deal. He mortgaged the factory for five or six times more than what he'd paid for it. Then he unveiled plans to raze the factory to make way for housing construction. It turned out to be close to a planned subway route, so his proposal attracted a large number of investors. Also, he reached an agreement of joint development with a real estate contractor, through which he was able to keep his part of the original deal with
the government by retaining those two hundred employees as temporary construction workers. At the end of construction, he would own one third of the whole apartment complex.

It was one arrow that killed several birds. It helped the state by getting rid of a financial burden, kept two hundred workers' pots boiling—at least for the next couple of years—and would help meet the housing needs of the city.

Not to mention the unbelievable profits it would generate for Big Buck Kang.

Questions arose in the lane like bees swarming out of an upset hive.

“It's like catching a white fox with one's bare hands,” Old Hunchback Fang commented in indignation. “He hasn't paid a single penny out of his pocket.”

“Why was it impossible for Fei to have done that?” Four-Eyed Liu joined in. “At least then the workers could have shared some of the profits. And later perhaps some of the housing too.”

But Big Buck Kang wasn't willing to discuss the deal with us, saying that he had to see his father, who had just come home from the hospital. He was a good son and was trying to keep the old man in the dark.

But Comrade Kang wasn't going to have a peaceful evening, examining the pictures of his son in childhood. A retired worker from his factory came stumbling into
the lane. She wanted to air her grievances to the “Comrade Director Kang” without knowing anything about his illness. Emotionally distraught, she started sobbing and complaining to him in front of the whole lane.

“Oh Comrade Director Kang, you should have never retired. Do you know what Fei has done to our factory? That bastard has squandered away state property for his personal benefit. His severance package for selling the factory came to six figures.”

“Selling the factory!” Comrade Kang was stunned.

“What's more, he got a fat red envelope under the table—a certificate for a three-bedroom apartment when the construction project on the site of our good old factory is done. It's really a changed world, Comrade Kang. It's just like going back to the old society over one night. The black-hearted, big-buck capitalist, who bought our good old factory for nothing, is wallowing in money, and we workers are suffering—it's like we're in an abyss of scorching fire and freezing water. Alas, Chairman Mao's dead, and you're retired, who is going to take care of poor retired workers like us?”

Comrade Kang, having been in and out of the hospital of late, was totally oblivious of what had happened to the factory. Listening to her, he broke out in a cold sweat, slipped from the bamboo chair, and passed out on the curb in front of the lane.

That evening, after we rushed Comrade Kang back to the hospital, we prayed for his recovery. But then we worried
about his reaction when he woke up and learned all the details about the destruction of “the good old factory,” particularly the role Big Buck Kang had played in it.

Little Hao, a young member of the evening talk of Red Dust Lane, was less pessimistic. “What's the big deal? If the factory was once the father's, it's now the son's—at least, all the value of it.”

This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 2001. It was another year of great achievements for the Chinese people. In spite of a diplomatic standoff over the detention of an American spy plane and crew after a midair collision with a Chinese fighter jet earlier in the year, China made huge progress in its international relations. In June, leaders of China, Russia, and four Central Asian states launched the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and signed an agreement to promote trade and investment. In July, Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games, which spoke eloquently for the enhanced status of China in today's world. In November, after years of negotiation, China joined the World Trade Organization.

 

It was crab season again. Aiguo, a retired middle school teacher who lived in Red Dust Lane, couldn't help casting
another glance toward the neighborhood seafood market in the afternoon sunlight. There was no point stopping in for a look at the live crabs crawling in cages, since he couldn't afford to buy even one in the new millennium. Indeed, Confucius says:
time flows away like water
. Memories rise to the top like algae in a pond.

Five or six years before the economic reform started in the eighties, Aiguo was so disappointed with the banishment of Confucius from the classroom that he began to develop a crab complex. He made a point of enjoying the Yangchen river crabs three or four times during each crab season. His wife had passed away, and his son had just started working in a state-run steel plant and was dating a young girl, so Aiguo justified his one and only passion by referencing well-known writers like Su Dongpo, a Song dynasty poet, who declared a crab feast the most blissful moment of his life—“O that I could have crabs without a wine supervisor sitting beside me”—or like Li Yu, a Ming dynasty scholar, who confessed that he wrote for the purpose of earning “crab money”—his “life-saving money.” As an intellectual immersed in what “Confucius says,” Aiguo had to restrain himself from lecturing about the sage in public in those days, but he used the sage's ritualistic rules for crab-eating at home.

“Do not eat when the food is rotten; do not eat when it looks off-color; do not eat when it smells bad; do not eat
when it is not properly cooked; do not eat when it is off season; do no eat when it is not cut right; do not eat when it is not served with the appropriate sauce . . . Do not throw away the ginger . . . Be serious and solemn when one offers a sacrifice meal to his ancestors . . .'” Aiguo would quote from the
Analects
by Confucius over a platter of steaming hot crab, adding, “It's about the live Yangcheng crabs, really, about all the necessary requirements for them, including a piece of ginger.”

“All are but excuses for his crab craziness. Confucius says,” his son commented to the neighbors with a resigned shrug. “You don't have to listen to him.”

Indeed, Aiguo suffered from a characteristic crab syndrome: as soon as the western wind rose in November, it was as if his heart were being pinched and scratched by crab claws. He had to conquer the craving with “a couple of the Yangcheng River crabs, a cup of yellow wine,” before he was able to work hard for another year, full of energy for whatever “Confucius says,” until the next crab season.

Aiguo retired just as the economic reform was picking up steam in the nineties, when the price of crab started to rocket. A pound of large crabs would cost three hundred yuan, which was more than half of his monthly pension. Crabs became a luxury affordable only by the newly rich in this society in transition. For the majority of the Shanghai crab eaters like Aiguo, crab season became almost a torture.

In the same
shikumen
house lived Gengbao, a former
student of Aiguo's. Gengbao hardly acknowledged Aiguo as his teacher, since he had flunked out of school, having gotten a number of D's and F's from Aiguo. As it is said in
Tao Te Ching
, “In misfortune comes fortune.” Because he failed at school, Gengbao started a cricket business and made a small fortune. In Shanghai, people gambled on cricket fights, so a ferocious cricket could sell for thousands of yuan. Gengbao was able to catch the fiercest crickets from a “secret cemetery,” a place from where the crickets, having absorbed the infernal spirits, fought like devils. It proved to be a lucrative niche market. Even after making a fortune, he chose not to move away from his attic room in Red Dust Lane, since he believed its feng shui had brought his fortune. So he stayed on, living next door to Aiguo, despite having bought a new apartment somewhere else in the city. In the old building, he shared the common kitchen, as well as a common passion, with Aiguo: the crab. Gengbao enjoyed crabs to his heart's content and made a big show of it, parading crabs through the kitchen, nailing crab shells like monster masks on the wall above the coal briquette stove. Aiguo suffered through all of this, sighing and quoting from a Confucian classic, “It's the teacher's fault to have not taught a student properly.”

“What do you mean?” Aiguo's daughter-in-law responded. “Gengbao is a Big Buck nowadays. Your ancestors must have burned tall incense for you to have taught such a successful student.”

If there was any cold comfort for Aiguo of late, it was
that he was able to talk about Confucius openly again. But, being retired, he could only give his lecture to his grandson, Xiaoguo, an elementary school student. The array of the mysterious crab shells on the kitchen wall seemed to appeal more to Xiaoguo, who had never tasted a crab before.

“You have taught me so many things about Confucius. But what does a crab taste like, Grandpa?”

That was an impossible question for the retired teacher to answer. There is no way to taste a crab without putting it into the mouth. Aiguo adored his grandson, and as Confucius says, “You have to try to do what you should do, even though it's impossible to do so.” Finally, he managed to demonstrate—to an extent—how delicious a crab could possibly be by concocting the special crab sauce of black vinegar, sugar, ginger slice, and soy sauce.

“It's somewhat like that,” Aiguo said, letting Xiaoguo dip a chopstick into the sauce and suck the tip of the chopstick, “but much better, Xiaoguo.”

Unexpectedly, from there Aiguo began to obsess over finding a way to satisfy his crab craving; all the crab-rich memories had come back to him the moment the sauce on the chopstick tip touched his tongue. He experimented further by stir-frying the egg yolk and white separately in a wok and then mixing them with the special sauce. The result was something redolent of the celebrated fried crab meat at Wangbaohe Restaurant. To his greater surprise, even small shrimp or dried tofu dipped in the special sauce could occasionally produce a similar effect. On those days
when he could not find anything in the refrigerator, which was under the surveillance of his daughter-in-law, he would simply dip the chopsticks in and out of the special sauce, sip at his yellow wine, and chew the ginger slices.

Needless to say, all the experiments merely added to the curiosity of the close-observing Xiaoguo, who kept asking crab-related questions of Aiguo.

“Living in a poor lane, and dipping in nothing but crab sauce, one can still enjoy life,” Aiguo, seemingly lost in Confucius again, said to his bewildered grandson, “Confucius says something very close to that about one of his best students . . .”

That afternoon, suffocating from those memories, Aiguo was shuffling within sight of the
shikumen
house in Red Dust Lane when, even at a distance, he smelled something like trouble. Stepping in, he saw his grandson Xiaoguo washing his hat in the sink in the common kitchen—and to Aiguo's consternation, a red crab shell nailed on the white wall. So he started questioning Xiaoguo.

As it turned out, that morning, Xiaoguo passed by a new house with the door open and caught sight of people busily preparing a huge banquet of sacrifice to their ancestors. It must have been a rich family, as there were so many luxurious cars parked in front, and there were also scripture-chanting monks hired from a Buddhist temple. He couldn't help taking a closer look. To his surprise, he
saw a crab scurrying out of the front door and to the sidewalk. It must have escaped from the kitchen in the midst of all of the confusion. So like a streak of lightning, Xiaoguo took off his hat and picked up the vicious-looking crab. Instead of going to school, he ran back home and prepared the special sauce, after a fashion, and boiled the crab. After devouring it without really tasting it, he painted a multicolored face on the crab shell with a Chinese character beneath it—“Swear.” Then he hung the shell like a primitive mask on the wall.