Read Online Years of Red Dust by Qiu Xiaolong - Free Book Online

would not do for the Americans to see a deserted street. The people chosen would be wearing their spic-and-span Mao jackets, as would the plainclothes cops stationed at each and every corner. Pig Head Jin and I started arguing about one particular detail. He declared that he had once seen a Red Flag limousine during the Romanian president’s visit to China. The limousine was made of special bulletproof steel, shining like a black dragon in the sun. Jin thought the American president must be riding around in the same limousine. I differed, saying that the American president and Chinese premier must have come in a convertible, waving their hands to the Chinese people, so that the American people could see it on their TVs across the ocean. TV was said to be something common in the United States, even though there was not a single TV set in our lane yet. We could only stay in the room like caged cats, curiosity-crazed.
    Liming then fell to studying the water stains up on the ceiling. The stains appeared to be miraculously connected into dotted lines, merging into a contour of the Rocky Mountains, he maintained in earnest, having recently caught a glance of the mountains in an old textbookmap at a recycling center. Qiao, a freckled girl from next door, busied herself hiding-and-seeking among a sweep of drying socks, which Granny had to air inside the room for the day. Qiao developed a Dacron allergy, and she began rubbing her eyes and nose as if suddenly lost to a world of unfriendly, American pollen. (I have heard that she was dumped, years later, because of her incessant sneezing, which caused her then ex-lover to suffer severe insomnia.) As for me, I imagined myself in an airplane on a successful espionage mission unreported in the official newspapers. But my paper airplane knocked itself down against the bare wall of Lulu’s room.
    What made things even worse was an inconvenience totally unanticipated. There was not a single private bathroom in the lane, as was the case with many other neighborhoods, so at home, people used chamber pots, or went out of the lane to a public bathroom, which was now totally out of the question. In Lulu’s place, there was a small cabinet partition made for this purpose, but I found it too hard to excuse myself while in a room packed with several girls my age.
    Finally, it was almost two in the afternoon. Granny mumbled to herself. Commissar Liu would soon come to the lane, briefing the neighborhood committee on the status of the tour. If the Americans had passed by, the security alert would be reduced to a less intense level. She stretched her neck out of the window, only to see Old Hunchback Fang crouched at the lane entrance, motionless, more like a disabled cat in the distance.
    Granny began to be worried. She had heard a story told by Pony Ba about the assassination of another American president. How true the story was, we did not know. Pony Ba’s father was a Bad Element—and was locked in together with other class enemies in the neighborhood committee office at this very moment—who had gotten into trouble for listening to the Voice of America. The tension was building up in the room, and now in the lane too. Soon the uncertainty grew to be almost unbearable.
    Still, not a chicken was flying, nor a baby crying, nor a cat jumping. Red Dust Lane held its breath, as if awaiting resurrection. Some wondered whether Commissar Liu could have lost his way, but others brushed aside the possibility. Commissar Liu was a reliable, experienced Party cadre.
    As the old clock’s hand moved to three thirty, Granny became panicky. Something must have happened. Lulu turned on the radio. No special news. Normally, news about a distinguished foreign guest’s visit to the city would not be broadcast until seven o’clock in the evening. She volunteered to go to the neighborhood committee for the latest information, but Granny could not let her go. Every move had to wait until