The charter members had stumbled onto this more or less secluded spot by deciphering fifteen-year-old inscriptions scratched on rocks and banyan trees by their uncles, the local Red Guards, on their junior long marches and on-foot linkups. Upon hearing that Bu Yu had been around during that remote and legendary antiquity, the boys had agreed by informal consensus to put him up, a black-skinned jester for their kingless court.
But, ever so gradually, he could sense it now, they were developing an interest not only in his eccentricities of speech and personal hygiene, but also in what he had to say about the great world beyond the ferns and fronds that shaded them here. Bu Yu was able to recapture a portion of his former rhetorical fervor, and his Hong Xiaoxue was beginning to take shape, as were the embryonic political consciousnesses of the lads. The family was developing a proper daddy.
He knew full well that encouraging children to stay away from their mothers' breakfasts and their schools' lunches was illegal. But Liu Shao Qi's organizing the An Yuan miners in 1927 was also illegal, in the extreme, and he was expelled from the politburo as a rightist. That did not hinder him, and the result was the glorious Autumn Harvest Uprising—an inspirational story Bu Yu was saving to tell the children after he'd laid a bit more theoretical groundwork in their heads.
At the school sessions disguised as impoverished fish-fries, he began his first formal attempts to instruct his charges in the principles of Red combat maneuverability and the Lo Ming line of guerilla tactics. This was seen by them as absurd at first, ensconced as they were in a leafy lean-to fortress they deemed impregnable by natural means.
"It's impregnable only in the sense that your sole enemies at this point are your fat-assed fathers who are too lazy and too bourgeois to muddy their feet by following you out here and dragging you back home to your school books."
"But, Teacher," said one of the few cooperative students (my personal mole-boy, in fact, who'd been instructed to feed lines to the commandant, and memorize any responses), "why do our fathers refuse to muddy their feet? For fear of the liver worms?"
"The what? No. Of course not. It's because muddy feet will make them look like peasants, and they would rather lose their sons than slip down a single notch on their topsy-turvy scale of class stratifications. Their social-climbing affectations deprive them of heirs, and yet they believe that those latch-keys strung about your necks will somehow prevent your love from drying up like a pig turd on a suburban sidewalk."
Very few of them had been listening, but several ears perked up at the mention of pig turds. Bu Yu had to remind himself not to allow the juvenile's traditional love of pig turd jokes to adulterate his style of public speaking on a permanent basis; for someday he hoped to address grown-ups again.
He continued. "But when there is a real enemy to be struggled, and when that enemy is fatter and taller and nastier than you, and his arrogance is only exceeded by his contemptuous lack of concern for you, then you must leave your little fort and go to him rather than wait for his siege engines to pull up to the gate. Then the Lo Ming line of guerilla tactics is the best method not only of survival but of prevailing. Chairman Mao exhorts us never to fight an unprepared war. Allow me to demonstrate."
And he would squat and draw, in the greasy sediment underfoot, battle schematics from recent and remote revolutionary history, while the boys who were interested gathered around, some without thought resting little hands on his shoulders.
"You Hong Xiaoxue tongshimen are looking for a road and a line to take," he said in a more tender voice, "though many of you don't even know it now. I will provide you with a road and a line, and an enemy to annihilate."
One effeminate tag-along child, from a family of low-level municipal clerks, thoroughly out of place, was just unvigorous enough to have sat still and listened to Bu Yu's hints, and just bright enough to have divined that there was a specific personage against whom they were to mobilize. He raised his reedy voice high enough to be heard over the general babble, and pleaded lenience, incredibly enough, on behalf of this as-yet-officially-unspecified enemy.
"But, Teacher, he has a wife. And a child, too. At least I've seen him spending a lot of time with a young girl in the park. Is it dialectical materialism to interfere with someone's papa?"
After a gasp and a terrifying dive deep into his own infantile memory (a certain female face leered up at him from the murk), Bu Yu's innermost guts recognized this sissy-boy's strange sense of anonymous mercy, as sure as if it had been his own weakness in a previous incarnation.
Mercy was the womanish characteristic that would one day make life on earth surpass the sweetest feudal fantasy of Heaven. But not until the revolution was complete and true proletarian dictatorship had been achieved all over the world. And, until that remote moment, this compassion, so generalized, so indiscriminate and so pointless in a materialistic universe, would be nothing less than a purulent ulcer on the side of his rebellion-making youth corps. Bu Yu must suture this wound shut before any ideological pus could slosh into the other boys' brains.
"You, child," he hissed, "are adopting the Chen Tu-Hsiu line of right-opportunist reconciliationism that brought catastrophe to our party in the spring of 1928."
The words were unimportant at this point. But Bu Yu's voice and face were filled with jeering contempt which caused the simpler individuals to laugh and ridicule the weakling among them. Their scorn was free of the murderous indignation that must come in later purges, but it served its purpose. The runt ran home sobbing through suds and mud, into the arms of his no doubt love-bloated Christian-convert maternal relative.
The worst kind. The kind you love and admire. That brings death. The best are those toward whom you can feel a tender condescension as they fetch you bowls of rice. But it were better to have one who physically tortured you, taught you early the meaning of the dislocated joint, the twisted bowel, the spoon-gouged eye, than gorged you on the syrup of her mammalian love. How well Bu Yu knew this.
I knew it too, from introducing myself to his family (loving females included) in the city park before the snail cataclysm. And he was right to have split from them: the Bu family was a bunch of grinning, feeble saps, standard self-loathing third-world types. They were giddy at the honor of a big Caucasoid condescending to be a "friend of the family" (so to speak), yet ashamed and apologetic about a certain camped-out relative of theirs—a stalwart who, in spite of his murderous feelings toward me, I wouldn't have hesitated to claim, in a loud voice, as my own twin brother.
I had even fewer compunctions about claiming his little sister as one of my own. She was Bu Yu's tender pride and hopeful joy, the compact personification of everything pure and dialectically materialistic in his heart's deep scarlet chambers. This was, after all, the People's Republic, with an emphasis on the possessive, and female comrades were to be valued as nowhere else in all of the extreme orient.
With Big Brother gone among the revolutionists, the child needed firm male guidance, which I felt it my duty to provide, as I was the cause of the fraternal vacancy in her darling existence. Nearly twenty years younger than us both, making her jailbait outright in any civilized country, she was the most lascivious little trough of slop I'll ever make a swine of myself over. My Red Wing may have been planted on everyone else's face during the day, but I shrink from telling you what sweet red thing was planted on mine in the early evenings—at least until mud-snails rendered our special cranny in the park inaccessible. (That Big Brother was not supposed to know should be obvious, but I emphasized it with warmth to my spy, anyway.)
Hence the merciful Christian-convert boy's innocent misapprehension that I was "someone's papa." From the moment he fled in the face of Bu Yu's sarcasm until he came back pleading for readmission, kowtowing his forehead audibly on the riverbank, this weeping weenie was tailed by his coevals on the streets as a security risk. But readmitted he was, for he would have constituted something of a loss. At least he was useful as an attention-getter. When not expelling or re-embracing him, the recruits were interested only in talking about food.
Bu Yu had so far been unable to provide them with much to eat besides deformed river vermin. He'd taught them a few of the old partisan tricks, like luring out, capturing and consuming live the frogs from under rocks in stagnant pools. While not exactly tasty or filling, they were supposed to make you clever, devious and slippery as an amphibian, just as gouts of sap made you tall as the tree they oozed from. These qualities presumably compensated for the strength you lacked from chewing on frogs and sap instead of the fat sides of town pigs. And, on market days, it was possible to glean a few vitamins from vegetable garbage floating by—but sand-scrub the diesel off or die.
As for the youngsters who, thanks to their innately superior class consciousness, or maybe just abusive parents, had already come under his sway and cooperativized themselves permanently at his side on the riverbank, Bu Yu could only try to supplement their diets with pilfered rice hay from the hillside paddy terraces, made more substantial with a healthy smearing of mineral-rich jungle clay.
There was the festival that had survived the Four Olds Movement, where the tea farmers upstream threw zongzi of glutinous rice and sweet red beans into the water, ghost confections which Commander Bu Yu retrieved and rationed for weeks afterward. He tried to convince the ungrateful boys that the farmers were not to be considered especially backward just because they didn't gobble these rice cakes themselves, as had become the custom in recent centuries among townsmen who'd finally learned to scoff correctly at spirits.
"Superstitious, yes. But there is a certain progressiveness about the farmers' admiration of the poet/hero whose waterlogged spirit those zongzi are intended to placate. He was a true proto-revolutionary who scorned the advances of the emperor, though his writings are not entirely free from reactionary characteristics."
But this politicization of the semi-dissolved rice cakes failed to get their minds off food. In those increasingly rare times when Bu Yu could get them to talk about the objective of their struggle, even that got twisted in a culinary direction.
One boy stood and said, "I've heard that when a Chinese gets no vegetables or fruit for ten years, his hair will turn the foreigners' color, the color of northern Shaanxi pine tree ears, or a fine Mandarin orange after you've peeled it, and you're about to take a bite." (A flattering image for my ginger mop; but I'll take it.)
"You don't mean it!" snarled the most theatrically inclined of them all, a big-eyed and -eared boy who'd been designated this tribe's Master of the Games before Bu Yu's sport-spoiling arrival. "You don't mean the very same color of the beard that hangs from the jaw of the baby-eating devil, Doctor San Mu Ai De Wen?"
"Oh, no! Hide!"
The usual Nanjing-style soldier's riot followed hard on the mention of that weird name. Bu Yu's living forces reverted to the savage condition to which they, in their extreme youth, lived in such close proximity. They commenced indulging in a strange apotropaic ritual, a primitive monster game or drama with assigned roles and memorized lines, featuring a bad spirit that Bu Yu did not recall from his own brainless baby years—but then, he'd been raised in a more enlightened time, the Great Leap Forward, when such feudal shades had been briefly banished from the land.
"I'm Doctor San Mu Ai De Wen!" screamed one boy, looming large while the others feigned terror. "That means I have three mothers, and I help spread the plague wherever I go! I'm going to tear the front of your father's house down!"
"It's Three-Mothers-Aids-the-Plague! Hide!"
The sillier and younger ones squealed like girls and ran to conceal their minuscule maidenheads in the bushes, so as not to be caught and eaten by a figment of their collective imagination that resembled me.
Back in town, their commandant had recoiled from my physical presence too quickly to have memorized enough of my external characteristics to make the connection himself. And, for all his talk of "propaganda" and "liaison" and "external affairs" and "logistics," Bu Yu had never mastered my name, barbarian monikers being the wrong shape to sit comfortably in any but the most youthful and flexible Chinese mind. That's why the boys had so charmingly transliterated "Dr. Samuel Edwine" into their gutter idiom, together with that wry literal rendering of the Sinicized syllables.
Bu Yu's brain, which, like mine, had been calcified to the normal extent after languishing half a lifetime on this earth, remained mystified as to the who-and-what of this lecture-disrupting bugbear, this contagious San Mu-Whatever, who, unique among dynastic demons, possessed not only a trio of loving moms, but a doctorate (mail-ordered from the back pages of Hustler, by the way). My spy was not about to enlighten him.
The boys who were hiding from me in the bushes forgot their hunger only until bulbs of vegetable matter depending from various twigs reminded them again.
"If that's the color of the Doctor's hair," said someone, who remained in the character of a cowering little girl and dreamily licked a lascivious red blossom, "does it mean that all barbarian intelligentsia don't get enough vitamins?"
"Of course they do. Foreigners eat more than two jin of meat for lunch."
"And jiaozi dumplings, two jin, for their supper."
Bu Yu decided to let this conversation run its course. If the troops would rather discuss victuals than ideology, so be it. Correctness grows directly from the judicious satisfaction of such needs. They had to be fed, he knew. But not as much as adolescents or full-grown men.
And there was another advantage, among the countless disadvantages, of working with children. While wringing one's hands over their diet, at least one didn't need to worry about procuring camp followers for them as well. They were too young to know, first of all, that they needed copulation, and, second, that they didn't need it at all.
Sitting and staring at all these sets of ribs, naked and horizontal under the shimmering trees, Bu Yu was reminded in a terrible way of the Venetian blinds, western-style Hong Kong imports, that he'd once ripped from a certain high provincial cadre's office in late 1964. "Other comrades work by sunlight and burn themselves black to feed the revolution," young Bu Yu had sneered, "while you prefer the twilight of the feudal opium den!"
"What have you to hide, Bad Element Lao Ren?" the Red Guards had screamed at the old man in the glorious struggle session later that afternoon, when blood vessels exploded in his wife's saggy temples and reduced her to a lopsided, drooling burden that had to be shot for her own good, as soon as they were able to liberate a working AK-47 from the army.
In those days the busy youth of China had to be reminded, even persuaded, to swallow a few grains of rice once in a while. But now hear their successors whine.
The next boy to speak was the son of a black-class merchant. He declaimed an invisible inventory across the face of the ruined river.
"Foreigners have the biggest blood peaches, and all the immortality noodles they can swallow, plus safety eggs, boiled just right, not too tough, even when it's not their birthday."
Feeling like a joyless schoolmarm tromping on a forty-points game with both big feet, just to join in on the fun (for there were fun moments when he was young, weren't there?), Bu Yu decided to step in and provide some cultural background that he hoped was innocuous and not too feudal. Perhaps, directed toward the allegorical, the boys could be gradually steered away from the gastronomical and toward the political.
"Yes," he grinned, "and do you comrades know why our ancient great-great-great grannies from time gone by called them immortality noodles? It's because noodles are long and thin, like the number one, and safety eggs are round, like the number zero, and together they make one hundred, the best age we could wish to attain on our birthdays, and—"
Someone scoffed loudly at this point. It was a brazen boy (guess who), older than the others, almost a youth, on the borderline of not belonging here. He was strong and, I'm pleased to affirm, well-fed: clearly it wasn't necessity but curiosity which brought him to the encampment (or maybe he was just running an errand for someone large and pale and evil, a great blond beast who lurked nearby). In one of the more recent mumbo-jumbo ceremonies, Bu Yu, smelling this kid's talent, but not his treachery, had hastily pronounced him Commissar, hoping to co-opt his aggressiveness with the flattery of a title.
This commissar had received a superior education by local standards, reactionary though it was, at the local key school, where he'd actually paid attention. He was aware, and tried to impress upon the few kiddies who might be persuaded to care, that their self-proclaimed commander had virtually no formal schooling, like most of his generation, who'd made rebellion, not term papers.
Our bright commissar now announced to the others that Bu Yu's immortality noodle "nonsense" was a pathetic example of the midget sense of history the Red Guards had developed between rampages during the Ten Years' Chaos. And no wonder "Mao's little generals" were so easily duped into throwing themselves into a short-lived movement that all of China had rejected in hindsight.
Bu Yu almost howled with horror and indignation.
The commissar ignored him and continued. "We only began to use western digits like one and zero after Liberation. And birthdays are recent also, at least among mainstream Han Chinese. What's your ethnicity, Commander? Up until the very late Qing Dynasty most people simply added to their ages every New Years' Day. How 'ancient,' then, can your stupid immortality noodle tradition be, Commander? Besides, I thought immortality was a feudal superstition, and that when we die our bodies turn into minerals useful for production and so on."
In the stunned hush that followed such a cheeky utterance, someone started a rumor which was to remain in brisk circulation long after this Hong Xiaoxue was disbanded, each twig and tendril of its fortifications washed downstream to clog the artificial lake: the commissar was believed to be a thirty-year-old genius dwarf party member, a trained expert ideological saboteur planted in the ranks by the very high provincial cadre whose wife and Venetian blinds Bu Yu had destroyed back in '64. And that wasn't too wide of the mark. He was indeed planted, but not by any old Chinaman. He was my protege, my handiwork—also younger sibling, coincidentally, to the tubercular grad student who was obliging enough to be scooping a certain foreigner's quota of lake mucus at that very moment.
It was high time for this small cooperative's second political purge. Bu Yu would try to nail my boy on class composition: his father was no doubt intelligentsia with foreign leanings, his mother a black class cur, his older brother a craven mud-scraping toady to the enemy.
But in the meantime it was essential to remain as calm as possible in front of one's inferiors. Bu Yu maintained his dignity—or that part of it which hadn't just been sand-blasted away. He considered not even making an immediate reply. But to say nothing at all would be to lose even more face. So he took a breath and murmured something like, "From what Guomindang rightist pamphlet, smuggled by which fishing boat, across which quadrant of the Taiwan Straits, did you, with your typical petite-bourgeois schoolboy's memory, plagiarize that, Comrade Commissar?"
"Huh?" said more than one of the others.
Bu Yu lost no time in labeling my mole a putschist. He forced him to undergo thought-remolding in the deep jungle alongside another boy, also a putschist. Bu Yu deliberately lumped together the two most dissimilar, yet most dangerous individuals. This would serve to confuse and distract the others from the counterrevolutionary content of their respective lines.
The other putschist liked to be called The Horseman, in honor of his favorite group activity: circle-jerking (which, like scissors-paper-rock and so many other cultural advances, originated in China). "Riding the Horse" signifies jacking off in gutter Mandarin; and, in this sense, The Horseman played Master Bates to the commissar's Artful Dodger. He even had the irritatingly ready laugh that characterizes his guild of specialists.
He was a Li Lisan-type neo-Bolshevik adventurist who wanted to kidnap my wife and send bits of her body in the mail to various places. He didn't care where, and wasn't worried about the postage. He considered that part a mere detail, a concern of the pencil pushers in the liaison office that Bu Yu had yet to establish.
This sordid self-abusing creature happened to have a little sister of his own, just like Bu Yu, and he had once offered to bring her to the encampment for everybody to "enter her meat" (literal translation), including Bu Yu, if "the commander used only the back garden and some soybean oil," which he offered to furnish in a plastic bag for a small extra charge.
In trying to get his fellows to give him a few fen in advance, The Horseman explained, "My father has intended to turn her out since she was born. From the time she could walk till now, ten years later, he has never allowed Little Sister to wear any clothes on the lower half of her body when she plays in the streets, not even in winter. And she must relieve herself openly on the sidewalk, like a baby, so she will grow accustomed to thinking of herself as public property. Socialistic, eh?"
When Bu Yu reacted with violent revulsion, the faceless rodent shrugged and said, "It beats slashing her throat at birth, which is what my uncles do to daughters. She has no civil existence, anyway, because she was born in violation of the one-child policy."
This little monster had once flung a stone and brained a Honda-riding boar hunter from a fire-watch brigade situated in the hills above them, and had stolen, or "requisitioned," as he put it, an extremely rare thing these days: a privately owned rifle. It was an ancient wide-bore dynastic make, a regular artifact, weighing at least twenty jin. The one time it was fired the roar was loud enough to produce waves on the surface of the river and bring shapeless, pale things up from the bottom. The Horseman had vowed to climb up on a park bench and discharge his artillery straight into one of my eye sockets. Fortunately he was not finding it easy, even with his sister's intercession, to procure more ammunition.
"That's all right," he leered, exposing his chafed self. "I'll just shoot my spare cannon in the strugglee's eye instead."
Elder sibling, himself, to a sweet pepper sprout of girl who had just managed to squeeze into existence under the one-child wire, Bu Yu found it difficult not to purge this evil brat on the spot, using a big rock. But he restrained himself. The Horseman was the ideal sort of maniac to class with the dangerous commissar, in order to discredit the latter in the eyes of the few circumspect youngsters.
Bu Yu might chain the commissar to such filth for thought-remolding, but rejected the idea of purging my boy completely. He was, after all, one of the few campers aware of something besides his own digestive tract. He had imagination, I'm proud to say, and even rudimentary socialist sensibilities—at least to the extent that I was able to coach him on such cobwebby relics of outmoded historico-political woolgathering.
For example, he'd been the only one not to scoff at Bu Yu's suggestion that they recruit some actual peasant-class boys into their small cooperative, some tea farmers' sons perhaps, in order to combat Stalinist/Comintern urban elitism among the ranks. And the commissar was willing, in spite of his professed contempt for Bu Yu, to bring useful bits of information from town, such as news about the ill-advised and naive student democracy demonstrations and their fascinating effect on the local power structure. (I'm afraid, however, that any intelligence he delivered concerning me was of the disinformative sort.)
"So, let him rebut me and try to humiliate me at political study sessions," Bu Yu was overheard mumbling to himself. "Nobody ever listens anyway."
