The next afternoon he came across Secretary Liu in the changing room of the bathhouse. Liu, standing on a long bench, was taking off his undershirt; his columnar thighs were clothed in red shorts. Bin, done with bathing, was walking to the door, buttoning his shirt with one hand and holding a basin in the other. Seeing nobody near Liu, he moved close and asked, “Secretary, have you received a letter from the county’s Cultural Center?”
“Oh yes.” Liu put his hands behind the elastic waist of his silk shorts, about to take them off; but he changed his mind, pulled out his hands, and sat down on the bench.
“So you’ll let me leave?” Bin asked.
“Director Ma and I have considered that. Unfortunately, no. It can’t be so easy. We don’t want to ‘lend’ you to anyone. We just wrote them back and insisted that if they really want you, they must take you for good and never send you back. Our plant has a fixed quota of employees. You can’t keep your position here while working for others. We want you to leave for good, so we can use the quota to hire someone else. It’s unfair that you occupy the latrine if you don’t crap.”
“Damn you!” Bin cursed, tears gathering in his eyes. “You promised to let me go! Why did you change your mind? Why?” He shook the white basin, in which his soapbox and slippers clacked.
Liu cringed a little. Then seeing two men at the other end of the room, he regained his composure. He said, “It’s true we promised that, but we didn’t say you could leave this way, did we?” He chuckled, resting his left foot on the bench and fondling his big toe.
Bin realized he had been tricked again. The two leaders meant to make him suffer and enjoyed seeing him miserable. “There’ll be no end between us!” Bin said through his teeth, and stomped out of the bathhouse.
The leaders had never expected an important place like Gold County’s Cultural Center would be interested in Bin. To some extent, they were scared by the breakthrough in his job search. The official letter stated clearly that Bin might become an art cadre in the future if their quota allowed. How could Liu and Ma let him occupy such an important position? That would be like allowing a caged tiger to return to its native mountain or a poisonous snake to grow wings, turning into a wild dragon. Once they lost control over him, he would write and paint in any way he pleased and would certainly take revenge on them. Understandably, Liu and Ma changed their minds and were determined to keep Bin in their hands.
However, the process of job transfer had started and couldn’t be stopped overnight. Within two weeks, a newspaper owned by the Dalian Railroad Company and a magazine of folk arts each sent people to the plant to read Bin’s file and make arrangements for transferring him to their editorial offices. Both Liu and Ma were impressed by the arrivals of these visitors, never having thought Bin was so resourceful. The two propaganda units were each willing to offer him an excellent job, of which neither Liu nor Ma would ever dream for his own children. It was evident that once he became an art cadre, Bin would make them stink beyond the radius of a hundred miles; he was so narrow-minded that he might try to ruin their children as well; therefore, at any cost, they must not let him go. Liu told the visitors, “We are glad that you’d like to take Comrade Shao Bin. We won’t keep him; but you must promise us one thing.”
“What?”
“You will never send him back.”
“Why?”
“Mental,” Ma said, his forefinger pointing at his temple with the thumb cocked up. One of his eyes was shut as though he were in pain.
That was enough to scare anyone away. Having heard those words, one pair of the visitors didn’t bother to read Bin’s file and left the plant within ten minutes.
Bin was informed by the newspaper and the magazine that the plant’s leaders thought him inadequate for the jobs. Outraged as he was, he couldn’t figure out why the leaders had changed their minds.
When he asked them for an explanation a week later, Ma yawned and told him plainly, “We do want to help you find a decent ‘home,’ but you’re such an important man that we have to get Secretary Yang’s permission to let you go.”
“Yes,” Liu chimed in. “Secretary Yang wants to keep you here for some special use in the future. He told us to take good care of you.”
They laughed, seeing that he believed them. Ma sneezed and spat on the floor, though a yellow spittoon sat in a corner of his office.
As if struck by a calamity, Bin couldn’t control his tears anymore. He rushed out of the office, his heart pounding. Once he was outside, tears flooded his cheeks; he put his palm over his mouth to prevent himself from wailing out. Never had he expected Secretary Yang would interfere with the job transfer.
If Yang was so determined to keep him in his clutches, it meant Bin would be stuck in this madhouse for good. How he regretted having disrupted the election six months before! Again, without a second thought he had laid a trap for himself.
That evening he told his wife about Yang’s interference; Meilan was so disappointed that she said it served him right and he had asked for it. Everyone understood the importance of peaceful coexistence, even a first grader knew that, but Bin, a man of almost thirty-two, had purposely provoked a clash with the commune’s Party secretary. Nothing good would come of this. He had set himself on fire.
Bin didn’t talk back, realizing he had indeed acted too rashly. What a painful lesson. He rapped his chest with his fists now and then.
The Office of Workers’ Education had been encouraging young employees to take the college entrance exams in June. The previous year nobody in the plant had entered for them, whereas many factories and companies in the county had one or two persons that had passed the exams and got enrolled in a college or a professional school. This was not good for the image of the plant, and therefore Secretary Liu announced at a meeting that the leaders supported whoever would compete in the exams. “We don’t want others to think we are an illiterate tribe,” Liu told the staff and workers. “If any of you would like to try, we’ll give you two weeks to prepare yourself. Our plant will pay you for doing that.”
Nobody dared try except Bin. When he entered his name for the exams, both the leaders laughed and thought he’d gone berserk again. First, he was overage; no school was accepting a freshman older than twenty-eight. Second, he had only five years’ elementary education; although he was capable of wielding a brush and throwing out a few lines of ancient poetry once in a while, by no means could he handle the systematic exams in mathematics, chemistry, physics, political science, ancient Chinese and literature, and a foreign language — English or Japanese or Russian. So they let him put in his name, provided he wouldn’t withdraw under any circumstances. Bin promised he would not; at all costs he had to leave the plant. The leaders were pleased that he had begun weaving a net for himself again, and they expected to make him a laughingstock.
Eight
IN DISMOUNT FORT streets were swept and walls whitewashed. Slogans were posted on tree trunks and electrical poles; paper flowers, red flags, and colorful bunting decorated porches and gates; all the windows facing the streets were washed and wiped clean. The town had just launched a crackdown on flies, mosquitoes, mice, and bedbugs. The air was heavy with the smell of dichlorvos.
A conference on the use of methane in country households was going to be held here, and several important officials from the provincial capital would be present. Dismount Fort had been chosen to host the conference because Willow Village in the commune had finished constructing methane pits for all its households. For cooking and lighting, the villagers began to use the gas produced from rotten vegetables, grass, and manure. The village was the first one methanized in the province, and it became a model. In Dismount Fort, many brick walls carried slogans in whitewash, such as UTILIZE METHANE, TURN WASTE INTO TREASURE; SAVE ENERGY RESOURCES TO BUILD OUR MOTHERLAND; METHANIZATION IS A GREAT CAUSE; ANSWER THE PARTY’S CALL, BEAUTIFY OUR HOMES.”