The road dipped into a familiar valley, the traffic began picking up again, and the outskirts of the Lipu City came into view. New two- and three-story shops closed in on both sides of the road, cutting off Chu’s view of the surrounding rice paddies. He came up behind a truck loaded dangerously high with bags of fertilizer and was forced to slow to a crawl before finding an opening in the oncoming traffic to pass. As always, he was amazed at how this once-poor mountain town had grown in the years he had been gone. He had gone to the Lipu Number One High School when the town had a population of perhaps 20,000, and the largest building was the Lipu County Communist Party headquarters. Then the main road had been narrow and dirty, noisy from dawn till dusk with the sound of peasants hawking produce, and often so crowded with foot traffic that bicyclists had to dismount.
In the past ten years the town had doubled in size. The main road had been widened and paved, and was lined with new construction. The hawkers had been relocated to an open-air farmer’s market. Pedestrians no longer reigned supreme, having been forced to the sides of the road by an arrogant stream of cars, trucks and motorcycles. The largest building was now a Taiwanese-owned factory that produced extruded plastic toys for the American market. The Party headquarters, by comparison, looked small and dowdy, as if the economic reform had left it behind. But that’s not true, Chu chided himself, remembering his political training. The Party is responsible for all this progress.
Chu accelerated again as he exited Lipu, anxious to make up for the time he had lost. The road left the valley and now began to climb in earnest. For a while rice terraces staggered up the hills after it, but then, as if exhausted by the climb, gave way to stands of broken corn stalks — harvest was long past — and the occasional orchard. Chu had the road largely to himself now. He enjoyed the challenge of following its twists and turns, accelerating as it dipped through narrow mountain valleys and then shifting down as it headed upward once more.
Chu’s stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. No matter. His mother knew that he was returning home for a visit. He had called before leaving his army camp in Amoy. By now she would have started preparing a welcome home feast in honor of her only son and his promotion. There would be seven dishes, he estimated, mentally ticking them off — lean pork, fried fish, steamed prawns, broiled chicken, scrambled eggs with diced green onions, mixed vegetables with pork cubes and peanuts, and winter bokchoi, all stir-fried to his taste with just the right amount of peanut oil and pork drippings. Plus a large plate of Lipu’s famous sweet oranges sliced into wedges for dessert. The thought of all this food brought another rumble from his stomach. Army food, even in the officers’ mess, had nothing to compare with his mother’s cooking.
And he had such good news for his parents! He had been selected for Lieutenant Colonel far ahead of his year group, and was being sent to a special command for intensive training.
The road became a series of switchbacks as it made the final climb to his village. This part of the road had been little more than a goat trail when Chu was growing up, but his father, the village head, had taken the lead in widening it two decades ago. “If we only have a real road,” he had told his fellow villagers, “we can get our crops to market.” Energized by his father’s vision, driven by his iron will, twenty sandal-shod, black-jacketed men had worked tirelessly through the slack months of winter with adzes and shovels. By spring a road wide enough for a walking tractor and a narrow trailer had been carved out of the mountainside.
Buried in the mountains to the northwest of Lipu, possessing no rice paddy at all, Chu’s village had been the poorest of a county of poor villages. But the road had transformed it, just as his father had promised it would. No longer limited to what a man could carry on his back, the villagers began sending trailerloads of produce to the Lipu market. His father and uncle, seeing that oranges grown at this altitude were sweet and without blemish, set about clearing additional land and planting trees. When the wisdom of their actions became apparent after a couple of years, the other villagers had joined them planting orchards of their own. The road had been widened further, until a 2–1/2-ton truck could make the journey.
The road crested into a small plateau, covered as far as the eye could see with orange groves. The village sat in the middle of this green opulence, several dozen new homes and a few older ones surrounding the old church. Of course it hadn’t been a real church for decades. The Irish priest who had built it had been driven out by the Red Army, and the building itself had been “returned to the people.” From the fifties through the seventies it had served as the headquarters of the agricultural collective, until the commune system was abandoned in turn and the land it controlled was returned to the villagers. It now served as the headquarters of the village council and all-around meeting hall, but it was still called, despite everything, “the old church.” The Irish priest had built well, Chu reflected.
Chu pulled up in front of his father’s house, surprised to see a white Toyota Landcruiser with government plates already parked there. Several young boys from the village ran up and, playing soldier, saluted smartly as he exited the jeep. Chu returned the salute.
“Are you a general yet, Uncle Dugen?” one of the boys asked hopefully.
Chu recognized the face of his cousin’s son. “No, just a lowly Lieutenant Colonel,” he laughed, pointing at the two bright stars that adorned his yellow epaulet. The boys were appropriately awed at this insignia of rank and called out to their fellows to come see.
From inside the house came the sound of raised voices. Chu frowned. “Who’s come to visit?” he asked the boys, pointing at the government Toyota.
“Secretary Fu,” came the reply.
For as long as Chu could remember, Fu Mingjie had been the head of the Lipu Party Committee. He was an arrogant little man, originally from Shantung province in the north, who was widely detested for both his manner and his accent. Thirty years in Lipu, and he had never bothered to learn the Fukienese dialect of these parts. Instead, he demanded that everyone speak to him in Mandarin. In the opinion of the people, he was a corrupt Party official. Not that the opinion of the people mattered. Fu was said to be very well connected in the Party hierarchy.
The voices grew louder, and the door of the house opened.
“I would rethink your position if I were you,” he heard Secretary Fu say loudly in his tongue-twisting northern accent. “If you use our trucks, you won’t have to pay the road tax.”
“So now it’s the road tax, is it?” his father shouted back in his own rough approximation of standard Chinese. “Don’t forget who built the road in the first place!”
“All roads are the property of the people’s government…” Fu broke off in mid-sentence as he saw a tall, uniformed officer of the PLA walking up to him.
“You remember my son, Lieutenant Colonel Chu Dugen,” his father said, emphasizing Chu’s new rank.
If Secretary Fu was impressed he didn’t show it. “Since you have visitors, I’ll be going,” he said curtly, with the barest hint of a nod at Chu. “Think well on what I have said.”
“Bu song,” Chu’s father said, “I’ll see you on your way.” The traditional words of parting sounded distinctly unfriendly on his tongue.
Chu watched Fu drive away, then turned to his father with a quizzical glance. “What was all that about?”
“Mafan,” his father answered angrily. “Trouble. It’s always trouble when he comes around.” He fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one up.