Chaos and All That Read online

  movie. No sooner had the women decided it was all right to put on skirts over bare legs than there was a cold snap that was enough to give you arthritis.

  Still, London was a nice enough place. People were flock-ing to it from all parts of the world, searching for freedom.

  More and more of them all the time, so that this freedom was going up in price and became more elusive the later you arrived. At least that was what Old Gu was always telling Haha.

  Haha had come here to go to college. Someone had

  helped her find a cheap place to rent, and there she stayed apart from her time in class at college. She had no real friends in London. The other Chinese students were all rushed off their feet, and the natives weren’t in the habit of standing around and passing the time of day. Because Haha had a scholarship, money wasn’t a problem, but she was so bothered by all those things gushing out of her mind that she 8

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  was practically oblivious to the delights that London offered. She even lost track of why it was she had come here in the first place. She rattled around her flat for hours on end babbling to herself, her moods swinging from one extreme to the other. Things she barely understood wove themselves into a net that entangled her as she went to class and wrapped itself round her on dates with her boyfriend. Everything but Haha herself was outside the net –

  the things she was supposed to learn in class, Michael, people who wanted to get to know her.

  She was trapped in the net and enchanted by it. The

  French window that faced her desk had louver doors instead of curtains, and every night as she pulled them shut she would repeat the street cry she had heard in Peking as a child when the old stores were boarded up for the night:

  “Shutters away, hey!” They’d been everywhere, those old-fashioned stores, but then suddenly they were gone,

  replaced by glass-fronted boutiques with mannequins in the windows. What a thrill it had been to stand out in the street after the change first took place and gawk at the bright-colored tiles and neon signs! Back then, the residents of the old courtyards had wanted nothing so much as the chance to move into an apartment building. It wasn’t until they moved into their new flats and found they had nothing to do all day that they realized what it was like without that down-to-earth feeling. The sights and sounds of Peking were all the more evocative for Huang Haha here at the other end of the earth, and she felt nostalgic for the 1960s, when two cents would buy a candyman, and fifty would buy a big package of fried biscuits or almond shortcakes frosted with red sugar. She longed for the coarse yellow toilet paper

  – you had to try and rub it smooth before you used it, and when you’d finished, you had to rub your bottom to stop the itching – for the queues to buy sanitary pads, for tiny goldfish, for crickets, for the slab cake that old men would cut and sell by the piece. She even remembered with affec-9

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  tion the way the vendors would hawk and spit. When they blew their noses, they would pinch off the snot and wipe their fingers on their trousers before picking up another piece of the cake.

  Haha sat by the window looking out at the street. The leisured ladies of London were taking the air, their compla-cent faces redolent with the pomp and grandeur of British culture. This took her back to the streets of her childhood, to the revolutionary grannies of Peking who seemed to find themselves and their society more radiant than the sun.

  They would strut up and down the street, chests out, beady eyes vigilant, and woe betide you if you got in their way or if they didn’t like the look of you. The final line of the tirade would always be, “Just don’t forget this is the great capital city, all right?” The ladies of London only had to say “Don’t forget . . .” for their children to denounce them as racists, imperialists, or conservatives. Better for them just to smile benignly at the world, shake their heads, exchange knowing looks, and then return to their refined appreciation of the pleasant weather. Londoners restored antiquities, displayed them prominently, and left them alone; the people of Peking picked up the shards of their past and either sold them off or smashed them for the hell of it. It was enough to set Haha wondering about the meaning of life.

  London. Peking. Classical sculpture. Opera. Nationality.

  Peking Man. Anna Karenina. Wang Baochuan. The criteria for making judgments that had been drummed into her

  from infancy were no use at all when she actually had to make up her mind about anything. Those criteria were all about victory and defeat, right and wrong. Everything she did was in competition with the people of London. It was like being in a great wrestling ring, where it was either win or die. If the Asian sages were not king, it was because the Western aggressors had usurped their crown. But in practice the images of the combatants were so blurred that she couldn’t tell them apart anymore: Does The Story of the Stone 1 0

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  really have to be greater than the works of Shakespeare?

  Must the Chinese poet Li Po be greater than Goethe? Do all my essays have to be stupendously brilliant? If I make a mistake, does that make me a failure? How do I get to be what I’m supposed to be?

  Haha would fill whole pages writing out the two words right and wrong. These two words had been with her all her life; everything she had done was stamped with one or the other of them. No matter how much needless conflict and anguish it caused her, she still used right and wrong to punish herself and others.

  Not that she was a pessimistic person. It was Daddy who had come up with the name Haha, hoping that with such a name she would rise joyfully above the ordinary. As for him, in spite of a lifetime spent parading the virtues of transcen-dence, he still ended up taking his life during the Cultural Revolution. Mommy had always said that “a resolute Communist Party member would never contemplate suicide.”

  Daddy’s actions had done away with any claim he might have had to such noble status and had landed Haha and her mother in the soup at the same time. Still, Haha was determined to remain optimistic at all costs, or at least to put on a good show of optimism, and so prove herself as cheerful as her name and worthy of the auspicious future the fortune-teller had predicted for her as a child: “Her face is full; her achievements will be abundant.”

  “It’s no big deal. I’m fine.” At least, that was what she told everyone else. However many rights and wrongs she wrote at her desk, she still had a name to live up to.

  * * *

  “Oh my God. It’s going to pot. The kids are all turning into little rebels!” wailed Auntie, waving the frying pan.

  Nineteen hundred and sixty-six wasn’t just some random number picked out of thin air, nor were the extraordinary events of the year bearing that number taking place on some 1 1

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  idle whim. If the earth was really the revolving sphere that the Teacher said it was, then it was only to be expected that the things that took place where we were in the morning could happen in America the same evening. Just look at the papers! They were full of reports that a great and unprece-dented Cultural Revolution was about to break out, and then what do you see when you turn on the TV in the

  evening but Americans marching in the streets in a Cultural Revolution of their own! We were taught that “every word of the Great Leader is a roll of the war drum,” and sure enough, there on the TV were Africans shouting, “Long live Chairman Mao!” and beating time on tom-toms. Of course, they just might have been actors dressed up and putting on a show for our benefit, but surely the foreigners we
saw on the news queuing for copies of the Selected Works couldn’t all be acting, could they? It was said that everyone in the world had a copy of the Little Red Book, the only exception being the old man who sat by the standpipe scraping the scum off his tongue. He said it cost too much, but then he turned out to be a member of the landlord classes, so what could you expect? In the morning the sun rose on our side of the earth, and in the evening it shone on the other half; any place it wanted to make red became red, and who was there that could resist its glow? When the Great Leader reviewed the Red Guards – my brother among them – resplendent in

  their military fatigues, army belts, and red armbands, it seemed that our euphoria had spread right through the world. Apparently British students were growing their hair long and shouting slogans in the streets. Only they should have got their facts straight before they started to make revolution – as far as we were concerned, long hair and high heels, like cats, dogs, and rabbits, were all class-enemy stuff, and growing your hair long was like asking to have your throat slit. Foreigners didn’t seem quite able to comprehend the “overall direction”; maybe it was something to do with 1 2

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  the way the sun shone on them. The world was not quite as easily manipulated as was our globe at home.

  “I want to be a Red Guard too.” I longed for the prestige of wearing fatigues, belt, and armband.

  “Piss off,” said my brother.

  “What’s a little kid like you doing swearing?” Auntie scowled at him.

  “Do you read Lu Xun?” Brother countered.

  “Oh my God. I just happen to have read everything

  except Lu Xun!” Auntie stuck out her tongue at him.

  “Didn’t you read Lu Xun’s essay on the swearword His mother’s ——— ?” Brother was getting quite worked up.

  Auntie and I glanced at each other, both at a loss. They hadn’t told us about this one in elementary school.

  “If a real authority like Lu Xun says that His mother’s

  ——— is part of the national heritage, how can you make revolution without it?” Brother’s neck bulged defiantly.

  Auntie didn’t back down. She made a little officer suit in a delicate shade of dogshit brown for me to wear instead of fatigues with epaulets like my brother and his crowd. I wasn’t sure if it looked more like a nationalist uniform or a communist one, but when my brother saw it he was meaner to me than ever. Well fuck you anyway, Big Brother. I tried it on, struck some revolutionary poses in front of a mirror, and decided I was a natural to be a dancer.

  I danced my way to the front door. Auntie called after me, “Don’t be late coming home.”

  “Don’t you fucking boss me around!” There! I’d finally managed to say it, although I didn’t think I’d used the word to very good effect.

  “Little brat! I should take a strap to you!” My mother appeared in the courtyard. She was wearing a mannish Mao suit that made her waist look slimmer and showed off her breasts and hips. I fled.

  The street was packed with Red Guards. As I stepped

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  over the threshold of the big red gate and out into the alley, the first thing I saw was the old tongue-scraping pedicab driver. Now he was an old landlord being beaten up by Red Guards, his nose bloody and his face bruised. The simple working man of a few days ago had suddenly been trans-formed into a member of the exploiting classes, in just the same way that he must have changed from landlord to pedicab driver at some time in the past. Apparently the Red Guards had searched his house and discovered a strange chart on which was written the names of hexagrams used for divination. Some people said it was superstition; others that it was a counterrevolutionary slogan; still others that it was an old land deed. Finally it was decided that his most hei-nous offense was scraping off all that yucky stuff in a delib-erate attempt to turn the stomachs of the revolutionary masses, so that the revolutionary masses would be so grossed out by the sight of him at work on his tongue that they wouldn’t be able to practice correct oral hygiene themselves.

  He was “unrepentant despite his great crimes,” and the Red Guards made him eat dirt, so that his landlord-class tongue would become physically the piece of stinking dog shit it was politically. They also gave his wife a yin-yang haircut, one side left long and the other side shaved bald and shiny.

  When I saw him crawling along the ground licking up the dirt, his head smeared with blood and muck, his face so beaten up that he looked like a ghoul, my knees started knocking and I felt like throwing up. I’d rather have watched him scraping a pound of scum off his tongue.

  I skirted unsteadily around a crowd of Red Guards about my brother’s age – junior high school students – and pretty tough looking. But I still wanted to go along to school with them, to see if I could join the Red Guards too. What made a Red Guard? An old-style army uniform bleached by many washings, a webbing belt, a red armband bearing the words Red Guard in the scrawly writing of the Supreme Commander, basketball shoes, and a military backpack. Even the 1 4

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  Great Leader himself wore a red armband, and when he waved his hand at Tiananmen a million Red Guards wept their hearts out as if by some hormonal reaction. Later on we were all conditioned to burst into tears the moment He appeared on the screen. He was divine, and the revolutionary tides of the world rose and fell at His command. If even He wanted to be a Red Guard – their leader, that is – how could anyone, even a newborn, resist the urge to wear the red armband? Besides, I was all of eleven years old. I wasn’t always going to be trailing along behind my brother and his friends, selling their pamphlets or “maintaining revolutionary traffic discipline” by declaiming slogans on buses: things like “Make a resolution to fear no hardships, overcome ten thousand difficulties and win final victory.” I’m not sure which genius came up with the idea of having elementary schoolkids bawling revolutionary songs and declaiming Directives from On High to complete strangers on the street and in the buses. We sang and shouted ourselves hoarse, but no one ever applauded. Whoever’s lousy idea it was, they made us look like a bunch of idiots.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?” Little Ding asked me in the school yard.

  “I’ve come to join the Red Guards.” I looked over to the classroom building. Classes had been suspended long ago, and the only person still around was the old commissionaire who watered the flowers.

  “Me too.” She was chewing a toffee again, and her front teeth were black with decay. Back when we were in school, she used to show off by sticking a piece of wire right through her teeth to prove how rotten they were.

  “Do you know what you have to do to join?”

  “People like us with good families just fill out a form – ”

  She caught herself. “Your family’s got no problems, eh?”

  “Course not.”

  “Then you’re fine.” When she grinned, I could see the bits of toffee sticking to her black teeth.

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  I knew she’d be fine – her father was a general and her mother a doctor assigned to care for the state leaders in Zhongnanhai. Her teeth were living proof of her mother’s fine quality of neglecting personal matters for the common good, just as my mother had got my own birth out of the way prematurely so she could get back to serving the revolution sooner.

  Our school’s only Red Guard organization was named 8–

  18 to commemorate August 18, the day that the Great

  Leader had
reviewed a Red Guard parade. The 8–18 group was headquartered in the classroom building in what had been the fifth-grade classroom. As we peered around the door of the classroom, there was a crack like a whiplash. A boy with big round eyes was standing in wait for us, flick-ing a leather belt.

  “What’re you doing here?” He had one foot on the chair.

  “We’ve come to sign up for the Red Guards,” I said. Little Ding hadn’t finished her toffee.

  “You expect to be a Red Guard looking like that?” He glared at Little Ding’s mouth. Suddenly I noticed that we were surrounded by Red Guards, boys and girls in faded military fatigues, all students from grades higher than ours.

  I tried to draw myself up to my full height. The problem was that I couldn’t stand up too straight because I thought that this might make me look too much like a kid in primary school. To look like a grown-up you have to slouch a bit, but then to look like a revolutionary you have to thrust your chest forward and buttocks back. I sat down.

  “Who told you you could sit down?” His eyes popped out even farther. “Stand up!”

  I stood up. Nothing for it, I’d just have to be a primary schoolkid. There I was, hands behind my back, chest out, buttocks back.

  He eyed me up and down. “How old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Eleven! A fucking eleven-year-old and she wants to be a 1 6

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  Red Guard.” His neck bulged. He couldn’t have been more than twelve himself.

  I just stood there, chest out, tummy in, buttocks back, pigeon-toed, submissive and attentive.

  “Class origin?” he snapped.

  “Revolutionary cadre!” I held my head high.

  “Revolutionary military!” Little Ding’s voice was louder still.

  “Hmm.” The boy took his foot off the chair and went