T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Wang is in bed. The apartment is cold, dark. “Wang!” he shouts. “I’m back!” She does not rise to meet him, to leap into his arms in her aggressive elastic way (she a former tumbler, their romance a blossom of the People’s Athletic and Revolutionary Fitness Academy). Something is wrong. “Wang!” She turns her black eyes to him and all at once he becomes aware of the impossible tumescence of the blanket spread over her. What is she concealing? She bites the corner of the blanket and groans, the labor pains coming fiercer now.
Hung is stung. Drops package and valise. Begins to count the months on his fingers. All thirteen of them. His face shrinks to the size of a pea. “Wang, what have you done?” he stammers.
Her voice is strained, unsteady: “YOU CAN’T SOLVE A PROBLEM? WELL, GET DOWN AND INVESTIGATE THE PRESENT FACTS AND THEIR PAST HISTORY.”
“You’ve been unfaithful!”
“Don’t thank me,” she croaks, “thank Chairman Mao.”
Mao’s eyes are closed. His cheeks glow, freshly shaven. In his face, the soapy warm breath of the barber: in his ears, the snip-snip of the barber’s silver scissors. His shanks and seat and the small of his back register the faint vibration of the 500,000 voices ringing in the square. A warmth, an electricity tingling through the wood of the chair. Snip-snip.
Mao’s dream is immediate and vivid. The sun breaking in the east, sweet marjoram on the breeze, crickets singing along the broad base of the Great Wall, a sound as of hidden fingers working the blades of a thousand scissors. The times are feudal. China is disunited, the Han Dynasty in decline, the Huns (Hsiung-nu) demanding tribute of gold, spices, silk and the soft, uncallused hands of the Emperor’s daughters. They wear impossible fierce mustaches stiffened with blood and mucus, these Huns, and they keep the rain from their backs with the stretched skin of murdered children. An unregenerate lot. Wallowing in the sins of revisionism and capitalist avarice. Mao, a younger man, his brow shorter, eyes clearer, jowls firmer, stands high atop the battlements supervising the placement of the final stone. The Great Wall, he calls it, thinking ahead to the Great Leap Forward and the Great Hall of the People. Fifteen hundred miles long. Forty feet high, sixteen across.
In the distance, a duststorm, a whirlwind, a thousand acres of topsoil flung into the air by the terrible thundering hoofs of the Huns’ carnivorous horses. Their battle cry is an earthquake, their breath the death of a continent. On they come, savage as steel, yabbering and howling over the clattering cannonade of the horsehoofs while Mao’s peasants pat the mortar in place and quick-fry wonton in eighty-gallon drums of blistering oil. Mao stands above them all, the khaki collar visible beneath the red silk robe smoothing his thighs in the breeze. In his hand, held aloft, a Ping-Pong paddle.
The Huns rein their steeds. They are puzzled, their babble like the disquisitions of camels and jackals. From a breezy pocket Mao produces the eggshell-frail ball, sets it atop the paddle. The grizzled Hun-chief draws closer, just beneath the rippling Chairman. “Hua?” he shouts. Mao looks down. Cups his hands to his mouth: “Volley for serve.”
Chang is having problems with his legs, feet. The left is reluctant to follow the right, and when it does, the right is reluctant to follow suit. To complicate matters the leprous toe has come to life (feeling very much like a fragment of glowing iron pounded flat on an anvil), and the pig has become increasingly insistent about making a wallow of the puddled road. A finger-thick brass ring pierces the pig’s (tender) septum. This ring is fastened to a cord which is in turn fastened to Chang’s belt. From time to time Chang gives the cord a tug, gentle persuader.
Ahead the buildings of the city cut into the bleak horizon like a gap-toothed mandible. The rain raises welts in the puddles, thrushes wing overhead, a man approaches on a bicycle. Chang pauses for a nip of maotai, as a sort of internal liniment for his throbbing toe, when suddenly the pig decides to sit, flip, flounder and knead the mud of the road with its rump. The cord jerks violently. Chang hydroplanes. Drops his gourd. Comes to rest in a dark puddle abob with what appears to be spittle randomly spat. He curses the animal’s revisionist mentality.
There are two framed photographs on the wall over Wang’s bed. One a full-face of Mao Tse-tung, the other a profile of Liu Ping-pong, originator of table tennis. Hung tears the Mao from the wall and tramples it underfoot. Wang sings out her birth-pangs. In the street, old Chiung-hua totters to her feet, listening. Her ancient ears, withered like dried apricots, tell her the first part of the story (the raised voice, slamming door, footsteps on the stairs), and the glassy eyes relay the rest (Hung in the crimson street, flailing at the gargantuan head of Mao suspended just above his reach like the proud stiff sail of a schooner; his use of stones, a broom, a young child; his frustration; his rabid red-mouthed dash down the length of the street and around the corner).
Chiung-hua sighs. Mao’s head trembles in a gust. Wang cries out. And then the old woman hikes her skirts and begins the long painful ascent of the stairs, thinking of white towels and hot water and the slick red skulls of her own newborn sons and daughters, her spotted fingers uncertain on the banister, eyes clouding in the dark hallway, lips working over a phrase of Mao’s like a litany: “WHAT WE NEED IS AN ENTHUSIASTIC BUT CALM STATE OF MIND AND INTENSE BUT ORDERLY WORK.”
Mao is planted on one of the few toilet seats in China. The stall is wooden, fitted with support bars of polished bamboo. A fan rotates lazily overhead. An aide waits without. The Chairman is leaning to one side, penknife in hand, etching delicate Chinese characters into the woodwork. The hot odor that rises round him tells of aging organs and Grey Poupon mustard. He sits back to admire his work.
IMPERIALISM IS A PAPER TIGER
But then he leans forward again, the penknife working a refinement. The aide taps at the stall door. “Yes?” says Mao. “Nothing,” says the aide. Mao folds the blade back into its plastic sheath. The emendation pleases him.
IMPERIALISM SUCKS
The man lays his bicycle in the grass and reaches down a hand to help Chang from the mud. Chang begins to thank him, but the stranger holds up his hand. “Don’t thank me,” he says, “thank Chairman Mao.” The stranger’s breath steams in the chill air. He introduces himself. “Chou Te-ming,” he says.
“Chang Chiu-chu.”
“Chang Chiu-chu?”
Chang nods.
“Aren’t you the peasant whose leukemia was cured through the application of Mao Tse-tung’s thought?”
“Leprosy,” says Chang, his toe smoldering like Vesuvius.
“I heard it on the radio,” says Chou. “Two hundred times.”
Chang beams. “See that pig?” he says. (Chou looks. The pig breaks wind.)
“I’m on my way to the city to offer him up to the Chairman for his birthday. By way of thanks.”
Chou, it seems, is also en route to the capital. He suggests that they travel together. Chang is delighted. Shakes the mud from his pantlegs, gives the pig’s septum an admonitory tug, and then stops dead. He begins tapping his pockets.
“Lose something?” asks Chou.
“My gourd.”
“Ah. Maotai?”
“Home-brewed. And sweet as rain.”
The two drop their heads to scan the muddied roadway. Chang spots the gourd at the same moment the pig does, but the pig is lighter on its feet. Rubber nostril, yellow tusk: it snatches up the spotted rind and jerks back its head. The golden rice liquor drools like honey from the whiskered jowls. Snurk, snurk, snurk.
Old Chiung-hua lights the lamp, sets a pot of water on the stove, rummages through Wang’s things in search of clean linen. Her feet ache and she totters with each step, slow and awkward as a hard-hat diver. Wang is quiet, her breathing regular. On the floor, in the center of the room, a brown-paper parcel. The old woman bends for it, then settles into a chair beside the bed. A Japanese-made transistor radio hangs from the bedpost on a leather strap. She turns it on.
ASSISTING MORE DEAF-MUTES TO SING “THE EAST IS RED”
It was raining,
In the shifting shadows cast by the lamp, old Chiung-hua nods and Wang wakes with a cry on her lips.
When Mao steps out on the balcony the square erupts. Five hundred thousand voices in delirium. “Mao, Mao, Mao, Mao,” they chant. Confetti flies, banners wave. Mammoth Mao portraits leap at the tips of upraised fingers. The Chairman opens his arms and the answering roar is like the birth of a planet. He looks down on the wash of heads and shoulders oscillating like the sea along a rocky shoreline, and he turns to one of his aides. “Tell me,” he shouts, “did the Beatles ever have it this good?” The aide, an intelligent fellow, grins. Mao gazes back down at the crowd, his frozen jowls trembling with a rush of paternal solicitude. It is then that the idea takes him, then, on the balcony, on his birthday, the grateful joyous revolutionary proletarian class brothers and sisters surging beneath him and bursting spontaneously into song (“The East Wind Prevails Over the West Wind”). He cups a hand to the aide’s ear. “Fetch my swimtrunks.”
Though the table-tennis team has taken him to Japan, Malaysia, Albania, Zaire, Togoland and Botswana, Hung’s mental horizons are not expansive. He is a very literal-minded fellow. When Wang made her announcement from between clenched teeth and dusky sheets, he did not pause to consider that “Thank Chairman Mao” has become little more than a catchword or that virgin births have been known to occur in certain regions and epochs and under certain conditions or even that some more prosaic progenitor may have turned the trick. But perhaps he didn’t want to. Perhaps the shock cauterized some vital portion of the brain, some control center, and left him no vent but a species of mindless frothing rage. And what better object for such a rage than that the ice-faced universal progenitor, that kindly ubiquitous father?
The pig is swimming on its feet, drunk, ears and testicles awash, eyes crossed, nostrils dripping. It has torn the cord free from Chang’s pants and now trots an unsteady twenty paces ahead of Chang and Chou. Chou is walking his bicycle. Chang, rorschached in mud and none too steady of foot himself, limps along beside him. From time to time the two lengthen their stride in the hope of overtaking the pig, but the animal is both watchful and agile, and holds its liquor better than some.
They are by this time passing through the outskirts of the great city, winding through the ranks of shanties that cluster the hills like tumbled dominoes. The river, roiled and yellow, rushes on ahead of them. Chang is muttering curses under his breath. The pig’s ears flap rhythmically. Overhead, somewhere in the thin bleak troposphere, the rain submits to a transubstantiation and begins to fall as snow. Chang flings a stone and the porker quickens its pace.
“But it’s snowing—”
“Thirty degrees—”
“Your shingles—”
“Blood pressure—”
“Hemorrhoids—”
Mao waves them away, his aides, as if they were so many flies and mosquitoes. His face is set. Beneath the baggy khaki swimtrunks, his thin thick-veined legs, splayed feet. He slips into his slippers, pulls on a Mao tunic, and steps down the stairs, out the door and into the crowd.
They are still singing. Holding hands. Posters wave, banners flash, flakes fall. By the time Mao’s presence becomes known through the breadth of the crowd, he has already mounted an elevated platform in the back of a truck. The roar builds successively—from near to far—like mortar rounds in the hills, and those closest to him press in on the truck, ecstatic, frenzied, tears coursing down their cheeks, bowing and beaming and genuflecting.
The truck’s engine fires. Mao waves his cap. Thousands pass out. And then the truck begins to inch forward, the crowd parting gradually before it. Mao waves again. Mountains topple, icebergs plunge into the sea. With the aid of an aide he climbs still higher—to the seat of a chair mounted on the platform—and raises his hand for silence. A hush falls over the crowd: cheers choke in throats, tears gel on eyelashes, squalling infants catch their breath. The clatter of the truck’s engine becomes audible, and then, for those fortunate thousands packed against the fenders, Mao’s voice. He is saying something about the river. Three words, repeated over and over. The crowd is puzzled. The Chairman’s legs are bare. There is a towel thrown over his shoulder. And then, like the jolt of a radio dropped in bathwater, the intelligence shoots through the crowd. They take up the chant. “To the River! To the River!” The Chairman is going swimming.
Chang and Chou feel the tremor in the soles of their feet, the blast on the wind. “They’re cheering in the square,” says Chou. “Must be the celebration for Mao’s birthday.” The trousers slap round his ankles as he steps up his pace. Chang struggles to keep up, slowed by drink and toethrob, and by his rube’s sense of amaze at the city. Periodically he halts to gape at the skyscrapers that rise from the bank of shanties like pyramids stalking the desert, while people course by on either side of him—peasants, workers, Red Guards, children—all rushing off to join in the rites. Ahead of him, the back of Chou, doggedly pushing at the handlebars of his bicycle, and far beyond Chou, just visible through the thicket of thighs and calves, the seductive coiled tail of the pig. “Wait!” he calls. Chou looks back over his shoulder. “Hurry!” There is another shout. And then another. The crowd is coming toward them!
Straight-backed and stiff-lipped, propped up by his aides, Mao rides the truckbed like a marble statue of himself, his hair and shoulders gone white with a fat-flake snow. The crowd is orderly (“THE MASSES ARE THE REAL HEROES,” he is thinking), flowing out of the square and into the narrow streets with the viscous ease of lightweight oil. There is no shoving or toe-stamping. Those in front of the truck fan to the sides, remove their jackets and lay them over the white peach fuzz in the road. Then they kneel and bow their foreheads to the pavement while the black-grid tires grind over the khaki carpet. Light as milkweed, the snow-flakes spin down and whiten their backs.
The sight of the river reanimates the Chairman. He lifts his arms like a conductor and the crowd rushes with hilarity and admiration. “Long live,” etc., they cheer as he strips off his jacket to reveal his skinny-strap undershirt beneath, the swell of his belly. (At this shout, Hung, who is in the process of defacing a thirty-foot-high portrait of the Chairman in a tenement street three blocks away, pauses, puzzling. It is then that he becomes aware of the six teenagers in Mao shirts and red-starred caps. They march up to him in formation, silent, pure, austere and disciplined. Two of them restrain Hung’s hands; the others beat him with their Mao-sticks, from scalp to sole, until his flesh takes on the color and consistency of a fermenting plum.) Mao steps down from the truck, his pudgy hand spread across an aide’s shoulder, and starts jauntily off for the shoreline. People weep and laugh, applaud and cheer: a million fingers reach out to touch the Chairman’s bare legs and arms. As he reaches the water’s edge they begin to disrobe, stripping to khaki shorts and panties and bra
Two hundred yards up the shore Chou abandons his bike along the roadway and dashes for the water, Chang hobbling behind him, both neck-stretching to catch a glimpse of the Chairman’s entourage. Somewhere behind them a band begins to play and a loudspeaker cranks out a spate of Mao’s maxims. In the confusion, Chang finds himself unbuttoning his shirt, loosing the string of his trousers, shucking the mud-caked slippers. Chou already stands poised in the gelid muck, stripped to shorts, waiting for Mao to enter the water. His mouth is a black circle, his voice lost in the boom of the crowd.
And then, miracle of miracles, Mao’s ankles are submersed in the yellow current, his calves, his knees! He pauses to slap the icy water over his chest and shoulders—and then the geriatric racing dive, the breaststroke, the square brow and circular head riding smooth over the low-lapping waves! The people go mad, Coney Island afire, and rush foaming into the chill winter water—old women, children, expectant mothers, thrilled by Mao’s heroic example, charged by the passion to share in the element which washes the Revolutionary Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
Chou is in, Chang hesitating on the bank, the snow blowing, his arms prickled with gooseflesh. The water foams like a battle at sea. People fling themselves at the river, shouting praise of Chairman Mao. Chang shrugs and follows them.
The water is a knife. Colder than the frozen heart of the universe. The current takes him, heaves him into a tangle of stiffening limbs and shocked bodies, a mass of them clinging together like worms in a can, the air splintering in his lungs, the darkness below, a thousand hands, the mud, the cold. He does not catch a glimpse of the Chairman’s entourage, nor does he have an opportunity to admire the clean stroke, the smooth glide of the Chairman’s head over the storm-white waves, forging on.