Radish

Chapter One

An autumn morning, the air thickly humid, a layer of transparent dewdrops clung to blades of grass and roof tiles. Leaves on the scholar tree had begun to turn yellow; a rusty iron bell hanging from a branch was also dew laden. The production team leader, a padded jacket draped over his shoulders, ambled toward the bell, carrying a sorghum flatbread in one hand and clutching a thick-peeled leek in the other. By the time he reached the bell, his hands were empty, but his cheeks were puffed out like a field mouse scurrying away with autumn provisions. He yanked the clapper against the side of the bell, which rang out loudly — clang, clang, clang. People young and old streamed out of the lanes to converge beneath the bell, eyes fixed on the team leader, like a crowd of marionettes. He swallowed hard, and wiped his stubble-ringed mouth on his sleeve. All eyes watched that mouth as it opened — to spit out a stream of curses: ‘I’ll be fucked if those stupid commune pricks aren’t taking two of our stonemasons one day and two carpenters the next. He turned to a tall, broad-shouldered young man. ‘They’re breaking up our workforce. The commune plans to widen the floodgate behind the village, mason,’ he said to him. ‘Every team has to send them a mason and an unskilled labourer. It might as well be you.’

The handsome young mason had black eyebrows and white teeth, the contrast lending him a heroic bearing. A gentle shake of his head sent back a lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead. Speaking with a slight stammer, he asked who the unskilled labourer would be.

The team leader folded his arms, as if to fight off the cold, and rolled his eyes like pinwheels. ‘A woman makes the most sense,’ he rasped, ‘but we need them for picking cotton, and sending a man would be a waste of manpower.’ He looked around and his gaze fell on the wall. A boy of ten or so stood in a corner. He was barefoot and stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of long, baggy, green-striped white shorts that were stained by grass and dried blood. The shorts ended at his knees, above calves shiny with scars.

‘I see you’re still with us, Hei-hai, you little shit!’ the team leader said as he studied the boy’s jutting breast-bone. ‘I thought you’d gone down to meet the King of Hell. Are you over the shakes?’

The boy didn’t respond, just kept his bright black eyes fixed on the team leader. He had a big head and a skinny neck that seemed in danger of snapping from the load it carried.

‘Feel like earning a few work points? Though I don’t know what a pitiful little thing like you could possibly do. A fart would knock you off your feet. Go with the mason to the floodgate, how’s that? But first run home and get a hammer, then you can sit up there and smash rocks, as many as you feel like, or as few. If history’s any judge, these commune jobs are just busy work meant to fool the foreign devils.’

The boy shuffled up to the mason and tugged at his jacket. He was rewarded with a friendly pat on his shaved gourd of a head. ‘Go home and ask your stepmother for a hammer, and I’ll meet you at the bridgehead.’

The boy took off. He had all the appearance of running, his rail-thin arms flailing like a scarecrow in the wind, but none of the speed. All eyes were on him, and as they looked at his bare back, they suddenly felt the cold. The team leader tugged at his jacket. ‘When you get home,’ he shouted, ‘tell your stepmother to give you a shirt, you poor little beggar!’

He stole in quietly through the gate. A snot-nosed little boy with a pushed-in face was sitting in the yard, playing in the urine-wetted mud. He looked up and threw open his arms: ‘Bro… bro… pick up…’ Hei-hai bent down, picked up a light red apricot leaf to wipe his stepbrother’s nose, then slapped the snotty leaf onto the wall like a leaflet. He waved the boy off and slipped into the house, where he picked up a claw hammer from a corner and slipped back outside. The little boy called out again, so Hei-hai snatched up a fallen branch, drew a wide circle around his stepbrother on the ground, then tossed the branch away and sped to the rear of the village, where a medium-sized river flowed, spanned by a stone bridge with nine arched openings. Owing to summer floods, the trunks of weeping willows growing in profusion on the levee were covered with red fibrous roots. Now that the water had receded, the roots had dried out. The willow leaves had yellowed and fallen into the river, to be carried slowly downstream. Ducks gliding near the riverbank quacked as they dug their red beaks into aquatic grasses in search of food, though who knew if they found any.

The boy was wheezing by the time he reached the levee. His jutting breastbone seemed to contain a clucking hen.

‘Hurry up, Hei-hai!’ the mason shouted from the bridgehead.

Hei-hai, still appearing to be running, made his way over to the mason. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ the mason asked as he looked him over.

Hei-hai just gaped at him. The mason was in work clothes — pants and jacket over a red athletic shirt, its dazzling collar turned up flamboyantly. The boy stared at that collar as if it were a bonfire.

‘What are you looking at?’ the mason asked, rubbing the boy’s head, which rocked back and forth like a drum rattle. ‘You,’ he said, ‘your stepmother has knocked the sense right out of you.’

The mason whistled a tune, rapping his fingers on the boy’s head as they walked onto the bridge. The boy stepped carefully to keep his head where the mason could rap it with thick knuckles that were hard as little clubs. It hurt, but he bore it silently, with only a slight wince. The mason could whistle just about anything with his moist, red lips. Puckering them up and spreading them a bit, he mimicked the crisp, melodic notes of a meadowlark and sent them soaring into the sky.

They crossed the bridge, climbed the levee and headed west to the floodgate, about half a li away. The floodgate was also a bridge of sorts, the difference being a flashboard that held back the water when it was down and released it when it was raised. The levee’s gentle slope, densely covered with feathery river locusts, gave out onto a wide, spongy sandbank where wild grass was already taking root in the wake of the summer flood. Rich open country spread out beyond the levee as far as the eye could see, saturated from the annual floods with silt deposits that turned once hard black earth into fertile soil. The most recent flood had been light enough to spare the levee, so the gate had remained shut. The floodplain was so densely planted with Bengalese jute it was like a virgin forest. A light mist shrouded the field on that early morning, lending it an oceanic quality.

The mason and Hei-hai strolled up to the floodgate, where two teams waited on the sandy ground. Men made up one team, women the other, like a pair of rival camps. A commune cadre, notebook in hand, stood between the teams and gestured as he spoke to them, raising and lowering his arms. The mason led Hei-hai along the floodgate’s concrete steps and walked up to the man. ‘Reporting in from our village, Deputy Director Liu,’ he said. He had often been temporarily assigned to the commune, where Director Liu was frequently in charge of projects, so they already knew each other.

Hei-hai was staring at Director Liu’s broad mouth. When the purple lips that formed that mouth came together they produced a string of sounds: ‘You again, you slippery devil. That damned village of yours sure knows how to meet quotas. They’ve sent me a man who could slip through the holes of any strainer. Just my luck. Where’s your helper?’

Hei-hai felt the mason’s knuckles on his head.

‘Him?’ Director Liu wrapped his hand around the boy’s neck and wobbled his head back and forth. Hei-hai’s heels nearly left the ground. ‘Why send me this skinny little monkey?’ he snarled. ‘Can he even lift a hammer?’

‘All right now, Director Liu Taiyang,’ the mason said as he pried the man’s hand from Hei-hai’s neck. ‘The glory of socialism is that everyone eats. Hei-hai comes from three generations of poor peasants. If socialism won’t take care of him, who will? Besides, his mother’s gone, and he lives with a stepmother. His daddy went off to the north-east like a man possessed and hasn’t been home for three years. He might be bear food by now or lying in the bellies of wolves. Where’s your class sentiment, Director Liu Taiyang?’ This he said partly in jest.

Hei-hai was lightheaded from the shaking. He’d been close enough to the director to smell the alcohol on his breath, and it made him sick. It was what his stepmother smelled like much of the time. After his father left, she often sent him to the canteen to barter dried yams for alcohol, and she didn’t stop drinking till she was drunk. That was when the beating and the pinching and the biting started.

‘A skinny little monkey!’ Director Liu spat out, then turned and continued lecturing the others.

Hammer in hand, Hei-hai scampered onto the floodgate, about a hundred metres long and a dozen or more metres tall, and fronted on the north by a rectangular trough, the same length as the floodgate itself. It contained the remnants of the summer floodwaters. The boy stood atop the floodgate, gripping the stone railing as he gazed down at the water, where scrawny black fish swam clumsily between the rocks. Both ends of the gate butted up against the towering levee, which was part of the road to the county town. There were stone railings, half a metre high, at each end of the five-metre-wide gate. A few years earlier, a passing horse cart had knocked a number of cyclists over the side, leading to broken legs and hips and even a fatality. He’d been younger then, of course, and had had a lot more meat on his bones. His father hadn’t left for the north-east and his stepmother hadn’t started drinking. He ran over to see what was going on, but arrived too late, after the cyclists had been taken away, and all that remained in the trough was muddy water stained red. His nose was keen enough to detect the stink of blood floating up from the water.

Gripping the cold white stone railing with one hand, he rapped it with his hammer, causing both railing and hammer to ring out. And as he listened intently to the sound, scenes from the past flitted in and out of his eyes before disappearing. A bright sun shone down on the jute field beyond the levee, and he watched a fine mist skitter among the plants. The fields were too densely planted: low to the ground there were gaps between the stalks, but the upper branches and leafy tops came together, damp and glistening. He let his eyes drift westward, past the jute field to a patch of sweet potatoes, where the fleshy purple leaves gleamed. Hei-hai knew they were a new variety, short vines heavily laden with potatoes bigger and sweeter than most, with white skins and red pulp; they burst open when cooked. A vegetable plot bordered the sweet potato patch to the north. Now that all private land had reverted to the commune, this is where production brigade members planted vegetables. Hei-hai knew that both the vegetable plot and the sweet potato patch belonged to a village five li away. It was one of the richer villages. The vegetable plot was planted with cabbages and radishes, whose long, lush tassels were such a deep green they were nearly black. A lonely two-room shed in the centre of the plot was home to a lonely old man. The boy knew all this. Jute plants as far as the eye could see spread out north of the field. The same was true to the west. With jute on three sides and the levee on the fourth, the sweet-potato plot and vegetable field looked like a big square well. As the boy’s thoughts wandered, the purple and green leaves turned into autumn well water, and then the jute became water, while sparrows skimming the tips of the jute plants were transformed into green kingfishers snapping up tiny shrimp from the water’s surface.

Deputy Director Liu was still lecturing. Here is what he said: If agriculture is to follow the Dazhai Commune model, irrigation will be its lifeblood. That’s one of the points of the Eight Point Charter for Agriculture. Agriculture without irrigation is like a child with no mother. Or a child with a mother with no breasts. Or it’s a child with a mother with breasts but no milk. Without milk the child will die, or if it lives, it’ll turn out like this little monkey (Director Liu pointed to Hei-hai, up on the floodgate. The boy had his back to the people and they could see two sun-illuminated scars streaking down his back like jagged lightning bolts). And besides, the gate is so narrow it claims lives every year. The commune’s revolutionary committee takes this very seriously, and after studying the problem from all angles, we’ve decided to widen the gate. To get the job done, we’ve mobilised labourers from all brigades, more than two hundred of you. This is the first stage: girls and married women, young and old, plus the little monkey (he pointed a second time to Hei-hai up on the gate whose scars now shone like mirrors) will break up all the rocks within five hundred square metres to the size of restorative pills or egg yolks. Masons will then shape the pieces of stone appropriately. These are our two blacksmiths (he pointed to a pair of deeply-tanned men, one tall, the other short, one old, the other young), who will repair chisels the masons have dulled. Those of you who live close by will return to your villages for meals, the others will eat in the village up ahead, where we’ve set up a field kitchen. The same for sleeping: those who live farther away will spend the nights under the bridge openings (he pointed to the arched openings below the floodgate). The women will sleep from east to west, the men from west to east. Straw will be spread out on the ground for sleeping, fluffy as spring mattresses, too fucking comfy for the likes of you.

‘Are you going to sleep under one, Director Liu?’

‘I’m in charge, I’ve got a bicycle, and it’s none of your business where I plan to sleep, so don’t get your guts in a stew. Do soldiers ride horses just because their officer does? Now get your asses to work. You’ll get plenty of work points, and I’ll throw in a measure of water conservation grain and twenty water conservation cents. Anyone who doesn’t want to work can fuck off. Even the little monkey will get money and rations, and by the time work on the gate is finished he’ll have put on weight, you can bet on it.’

Hei-hai didn’t hear a word Director Liu said. He had draped his skinny arms over the railing and was holding his hammer in both hands. He heard music like birdsong and the chirps of autumn insects from the jute field. The retreating mist seemed to thunder as it caromed off jute leaves and both deep red and light green stalks. The sound of grasshoppers rubbing legs against forewings was like a train crossing an iron bridge. He’d once seen a train in a dream, a one-eyed monster running at a crouch, faster than a horse. What if it had run standing up instead? The train had just stood up in his dream when he was awakened by a swat from his stepmother’s hearth broom. She told him to fetch water from the river. The swat didn’t hurt, that was just a blast of heat, but the sound was like someone far away clubbing a jute sack filled with cotton. With the carrying pole over his shoulder, he hooked on the full buckets of water; they barely cleared the ground, and he could hear his bones creak. His ribs pushed against his hipbones. Holding the swaying pole with both hands, he climbed the steep levee onto a path twisted by willow trees, whose trunks seemed fitted with magnets; they pulled the tinplate buckets away from him. One hit a tree and sloshed water onto the path, turning it so slippery it was like stepping on melon rinds. He fell awkwardly, and the water soaked him like a waterfall. His face smacked into the ground, flattening his nose, which was scored by a grassy stalk. Blood ran from his nose into his mouth. He spit out one mouthful, swallowed the next. His buckets sang merrily as they rolled down to the river. He clambered up and ran after them. One rested at an angle in riverbank reeds, the other was being carried downstream. He chased it down the riverbank, running on four-spined star thistle that he and the other kids called dog-turd grass. He tried to grip the burrs with his toes, but still slipped into the river. It was warm and nearly reached his navel. His shorts billowed out and wrapped around his waist like a jellyfish. Now wading, he sloshed after his bucket, and when he caught it, he turned and headed back upstream, holding up the bucket in one hand and paddling with the other. The river ran hard, making him stumble as he leaned forward and thrust his neck out. It felt to him as if a school of tiny fish had encircled his legs, and began nibbling gently. He stopped, trying to capture the sensation, but it vanished. The river darkened, as if the fish were fleeing in panic. But the pleasant sensation returned once he started walking again. The fish were back, it seemed. This time he didn’t stop, just kept forging ahead, eyes half shut, moving forward.

‘Hei-hai!’

‘Hei-hai!’

He snapped out of his reverie and opened his eyes. The fish vanished. The hammer slipped out of his hands and dropped into the green water below the gate, spraying a watery chrysanthemum into the air.

‘That little monkey’s not all there,’ Director Liu said as he climbed onto the gate and grabbed the boy by the ear. ‘Go on, go break rocks with the women and see if you can find a mother who’ll take you in.’

The mason also came up onto the gate and rubbed the boy’s cold scalp. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘go find your hammer. Break as much rock as you can. Then you can go play.’

‘If I catch you loafing on the job, I’ll cut your ear off as a snack to go with my drink,’ Director Liu thundered.

Hei-hai trembled. He slipped through the handrail, grabbed the base of a pillar with both hands and hung there.

‘You’ll kill yourself doing that!’ the mason shouted in alarm as he reached down to grab the boy’s hand. But Hei-hai pulled away, clung to a bulge in one of the bridge pylons and slid down nimbly. Pressing up against the stone like a wall lizard, he let himself down into the trough, scooped up his hammer, climbed out and disappeared under a bridge opening.

‘That damned little monkey!’ Director Liu said, stroking his chin. ‘He’s just a goddamned little monkey!’

Hei-hai emerged from under the bridge and timidly made his way to the women, who were talking and laughing. The young women blushed red as coxcombs, wanting to listen to the dirty talk, but afraid to hear it. When the boy appeared darkly in their midst, the women’s mouths clamped shut. A moment later, there was a bit of whispering, and when they saw that he did not react, their voices grew louder.

‘Would you look at that sorry little kid! They let him go half naked in this weather!’

‘You can’t love a kid that doesn’t come out of you.’

‘I hear she does you-know-what at home…’

Hei-hai turned away from the women and gazed at the river. The surface was red in places, green in others. Willow trees on the southern bank fluttered like dragonflies.

A young woman in a crimson bandana walked up behind Hei-hai and said softly, ‘Where’s your village, boy?’

He cocked his head and glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He spotted a fine dusting of yellow fuzz on her upper lip. She had big eyes, but dense, fuzzy lashes gave her a sleepy look.

‘What’s your name, boy?’

Hei-hai was fighting with the star thistles in the sand, pinching off six-and eight-thorned thistles with his toes. Then he stepped on them, snapping off all the thorns and crushing them with feet as hard as a mule’s hooves.

She laughed gaily. ‘That’s quite a talent, dark little boy. You have feet like horseshoes. Why don’t you say something?’ She poked him on the shoulder with two fingers. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I asked you a question.’

Hei-hai felt the two warm fingers trail down from his shoulder and stop at one of the scars on his back.

‘Oh my, where did you get these?’

His ears twitched. That caught her attention, such incredibly long ears.

‘So, you can wiggle your ears,’ she said. ‘Just like a bunny rabbit.’

Now the hand had moved up to Hei-hai’s ear, and he felt the two fingers pinch his delicate lobe.

‘Tell me about these scars.’ She gently tugged his ear until he was facing her, level with her chest. Rather than look up, he stared straight ahead, at red-checked fabric across which lay the tip of a yellowed braid. ‘Dog bites? Boils? Climbing trees? You poor thing.’

Moved, he gazed up at her smooth, round chin. He sniffled.

‘Looking to adopt, Juzi?’ a large, round-faced woman shouted.

Hei-hai’s eyes rolled in their sockets, the whites fluttered like moths.

‘That’s right, my name’s Juzi,’ she told him. ‘I’m from a village up ahead about ten li. If you feel like talking, just call me “big sister Juzi”.’

‘Looking for a husband, Juzi? Have you found the one you want? How many years will you have to hold out till this duckling is ready to mount?’

‘Stinking old crone!’ Juzi cursed the fat woman. ‘Nothing but shit comes out of that mouth.’ She led Hei-hai over to the mountain of broken rock and dug around to find one with a flat surface. ‘Sit on this,’ she said, ‘and stay close to me. Start breaking rocks, but take it easy.’ She found a smooth rock for herself and placed it near his. In a matter of moments, the sandy area in front of the floodgate was ringing with the sound of metal on stone. With Hei-hai as their topic, the women exchanged views on a hard life and the reasons behind it. In this ‘women’s philosophy’ eternal truths were mixed with plenty of nonsense. Juzi paid no attention to it — she was focused on the boy. At first he acknowledged her attention with an occasional glance, but before long he looked to be in a trance, eyes wide, gazing into space, while she looked on anxiously. He grasped a rock with his left hand and raised the hammer with his right. The effort seemed to exhaust him, and the hammer dropped like a heavy object in free fall. She nearly cried out every time she saw the hammer descending toward his hand, but nothing happened — the hammer traced a wobbly arc in the air, but always landed on the rock.

Hei-hai’s eyes were fixed on the rocks at first, but a strange sound drifted over from the river, thin and faint, like nibbling fishes, now near, now far. Straining to capture it with both eyes and ears, he saw a bright gassy cloud rising over the river, which seemed to capture the oscillating hum within. His cheeks grew ruddy and an affecting smile gathered at the corners of his mouth. He had long forgotten where he was sitting and what he was doing, as if the arm that moved up and down belonged to someone else. Then the index finger of his left hand went numb, and the arm jerked. A sound emerged from his mouth, something between a moan and a sigh. He looked down and saw that the nail on that finger was cracked in several places, and that blood was oozing from the cracks.

‘Have you smashed your finger?’ the woman asked as she jumped up and stepped over to crouch by him. ‘Oh no, look what you’ve done! Who works like that, letting his thoughts fly off to who knows where?’

Hei-hai scooped up a handful of dirt while she was scolding him and pressed it on the injured finger.

‘Have you lost your mind, Hei-hai?’ She dragged him down to the river. ‘There’s filthy stuff in that dirt.’ The soles of his feet slapped loudly on the gleaming banks. He crouched down at the river’s edge, where the woman stuck his finger into the water. A trickle of dirty yellow formed in front of his finger. Once the dirt had washed away, red threads of blood quivered in the water. The boy’s fingernail looked like cracked jade.

‘Does it hurt?’

He didn’t make a sound. His eyes were fixed on river shrimp at the bottom. The transparent crustaceans’ feelers fluttered slowly, exquisitely.

She took out a handkerchief embroidered with a China rose and wrapped it around the finger, then led him back to the rock pile. ‘Sit here and relax,’ she said. ‘No one will bother you, you poor little devil.’

The other women stopped what they were doing to cast misty looks their way. Silence lay over the rock pile. Patches of cloud floated through the bright blue sky like lambs, casting fleeting shadows that enshrouded the pale riverbank and the stoic water. The women’s faces wore dreary looks, like barren soil in which nothing grew. After a long moment of indecision they went back to work, as if waking from a dream, the monotonous sound of metal on stone creating an aura of resignation.

Hei-hai sat silently, staring at the red flower embroidered on the handkerchief. Another red flower adorned the edge, this one created by blood from under his fingernail. The women quickly put him out of their minds and went back to laughing and talking. Hei-hai brought his injured finger to his mouth and untied the knot in the handkerchief with his teeth, then packed the finger in another handful of dirt. Juzi was about to say something, but stopped when she saw him retie the handkerchief around the finger using his teeth and free hand. She sighed, raised her hammer and brought it down hard on a dark red rock. Its knife-like edges emitted enormous sparks when they came in contact with the hammer, visible even in the bright sunlight.

At noon, Liu Taiyang rode out from Hei-hai and the mason’s village on a black bicycle. Standing in front of the floodgate, he blew his whistle to stop work and announced that the field kitchen was up, but only available to those who lived farther than five li. Everyone hurriedly gathered up their tools. The young woman stood up. So did the boy.

‘How far away do you live, Hei-hai?’

Hei-hai ignored her, turning his head this way and that, as if searching for something. Juzi’s head followed, and when his stopped swivelling, so did hers. Looking straight ahead, her eyes met the lively eyes of the mason, and they held the look for nearly a minute.

‘Time to eat, Hei-hai,’ the mason said. ‘Let’s go home. Don’t give me that look, it won’t do you any good. We live a couple of li from here, and we’re not lucky enough to eat in the kitchen.’

‘You two are from the same village?’ she asked the mason.

Stuttering with excitement, he pointed toward his village, telling her that he and Hei-hai lived just across the bridge. They chatted cordially, about ordinary things. He knew she lived in the village up ahead, so she could eat in the kitchen and sleep under the bridge. She was willing to eat in the kitchen, but not to sleep under the bridge. The autumn winds were too cold. She lowered her voice and asked if Hei-hai was a mute. Absolutely not, he assured her, adding that he was very intelligent, and at the age of four or five had been a real chatterbox, his crisp voice, like a bean in a bamboo tube, hardly ever stopped. But over time he spoke less and less, and often froze like a statue; no one had any idea what he was thinking. Look at his eyes, so black you can’t see the bottom. The woman remarked that he did seem smart, and for some reason she’d taken a liking to him, almost like a kid brother. The mason said that’s because you’re a good person with a kind heart.

The three of them — mason, woman, Hei-hai — lagged behind, the man and woman talking fervently, as if hoping to drag out the walk. Hei-hai followed, lifting his legs high and stepping lightly, his expression and movements like those of a small tomcat patrolling the base of a wall. Liu Taiyang, who had been delayed in the grove of river locusts, caught up with them on his creaky bicycle when they reached the bridge, which was so narrow he had to get off and walk.

‘What are you hanging around here for? How’d you do this morning, you dark little monkey? Hey, what happened to your paw?’

‘Smashed his finger with the hammer.’

‘Shit! Mason, go see your team leader and have him send somebody else. I won’t be responsible if the kid kills himself.’

‘It’s a work injury,’ the woman complained. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘You and I have known each other for years, Director Liu,’ the mason said. ‘What’s one kid for a big project like this? And what can he do in the production team with that hand?’

‘Damn you, you skinny little monkey.’ Director Liu mulled it over. ‘I’ll give you a new job. You can pump a bellows for the blacksmiths, how’s that? Think you can handle it?’

The boy sent pleading looks to the mason and the woman.

‘You can do that, can’t you, Hei-hai?’ he asked.

She pitched in with an encouraging nod.