“Who are you? What the devil are you talking about?” Yang threw up his right hand.
“I am Shao Bin. Why are you so forgetful?”
Still Yang couldn’t recall what wrong he had done to this man. He shouted, “I don’t know you. I swear by my Communist Party membership, I don’t know what hole you jumped out of!” Turning to the other candidates, he said, “Damn it, I want an investigation of this.” His fleshy cheeks turned pink as he wheezed.
Two guards ran over and hauled Bin off the stage. They clutched his arms and dragged him to the exit while another man holding the placard followed behind. Meanwhile the audience was whooping, laughing, coughing, and chattering. It seems most of them didn’t believe what Yang said, and many had changed their minds about his candidacy. He had been transferred to this county three years before; people did not yet know him well enough to doubt Bin’s accusation.
In fact Yang had never heard of the name Shao Bin. He hadn’t seen the letter of accusation either. He had merely been informed by his aide, Dong Cai, that a troublesome worker had sent him a lengthy report on the fertilizer plant’s leaders. The letter had been transferred to Liu and Ma after Dong Cai had glanced through it and decided it had been written mainly out of jealousy. Of course Yang, having committed himself to other more important matters, didn’t ask further about it and put it out of his mind completely. Who could expect that out of a few pages of obscure writing would jump such an extraordinary election buster? Now, Yang’s candidacy was ruined, and his ambition to become the chairman of the County People’s Congress in the near future was shattered.
Because of Bin’s intrusion, Yang didn’t get enough votes for the position. The woman, who was elected, had outrun him by thirty-four votes. In Yang’s chest hatred was flaming. The moment he returned to the Commune Administration, he called the fertilizer plant. Liu answered the phone and was shaken by his superior’s rage. He tried to convince Yang that Bin was merely a madman, who was fond of painting and writing indeed, but nobody would take his words seriously.
“He pretends to be a fool,” Yang said huskily, “but he’s smarter than both of you. The timing, the word choice, the calligraphy, and even the way he raised the placard, damn it, who can do it better?”
“Yes, Secretary Yang, he’s a capable troublemaker.”
“Send me a report on this man. I must know more about him.”
“Yes, we’ll do that immediately.”
Liu was stunned, because Yang was by nature an affable man and seldom showed his temper. Without delay, he admitted his fault in not having kept closer watch on Bin and having caused such a disturbance to his superior. He promised that from now on the plant would make every effort to control this crazy man. If a similar thing happened again, he would accept any disciplinary action against himself.
Hanging up, Liu explained to Ma what had happened. For half a minute Ma was too shocked to say anything. Who would imagine a toad could grow wings and soar into the sky!
The two leaders talked about how to handle Bin this time; both of them agreed that they should remain calm and do nothing to provoke him at the moment. In their hearts, they were frightened. This mad dog Shao Bin was simply unpredictable. He was too bold and too imaginative and would do anything he took a fancy to. Unlike those puny intellectuals — the college graduates in the plant — whose faces would turn pale and sweaty and who would correct their faults the moment the leaders criticized them, this pseudo-scholar wasn’t afraid of anybody. What could you do if a man feared nothing? Even the devil didn’t know how to daunt a fearless man. In addition, Bin wrote and painted exceptionally well, his blasted brush always busy at night. Every now and then he had something published in a magazine or a newspaper. How, how could you stop him?
To a degree, Liu and Ma regretted that they hadn’t assigned Bin an apartment. If they had done that in the beginning, they wouldn’t have turned him into such a relentless enemy. But it was too late now; all they could do was adopt a quiet approach, leaving him alone for the moment, as though they hadn’t heard of the election. But this didn’t mean they would let him get away with it. No, they would square the account when it was the right time.
Presently they had Dongfang, the secretary of the Youth League, start a thorough investigation of Bin’s family background and his activities in the past five years so as to prepare the report to Secretary Yang and also accumulate material against Bin. If they tackled him again, they would finish him off with one blow.
Five
THE WORKERS HEARD of Bin’s disrupting the election, and they were impressed. They had taken him for a mere bookworm, but all of a sudden he had emerged as a man of both strategy and action. Naturally some young workers shook hands with him.
“Brother Shao, well done,” one said.
“Bin,” another chimed in, “you did it for us. We must show them that we workers are the masters here.”
Their words moved Bin and boosted his confidence. For days he felt lighthearted and was convinced that Liu and Ma’s silence meant they were shaken by what had happened at the election. Indeed, if he had undone their boss, he could ruin them easily.
Emboldened by his fellow workers’ compliments, Bin decided to pursue the tottering enemy. He started pondering how to compose another cartoon about the two leaders; since the Spring Festival was around the corner, he didn’t want them to have a peaceful holiday. Besides, it was the time when officials throughout China were busy raking in new perks, receiving gifts, and bribing their superiors and related powers. As a good citizen, Bin regarded it as his duty to sound a timely alarm against corruption.
After his wife and baby went to sleep, Bin ate two raw eggs directly from the shells and drank a large mug of hot malted milk. Then he began to grind the ink stick and wet a brush. Spreading a sheet of paper on the desk, he set about painting.
He drew two human figures in motion and made sure they resembled Liu and Ma. To identify them as cadres, a copy of Handbook for Party Secretaries, marked with the emblem of a hammer and a sickle, was inserted under Liu’s arm, and a lumpy official seal was attached to Ma’s broad waistband. They each had a garland of giant garlic around the neck and carried a bottle of Maotai liquor in a trouser pocket. Two packsacks full of pineapples and oranges were on their backs, and to a belt of each sack were tied a pair of fluttering roosters, upside down and with their claws bound. Around each man’s knees, four large carp were twirling and gasping in a string bag, whose mouth was grasped in the man’s left hand, while his right held two cartons of Great China cigarettes. In every one of their breast pockets was stuck a bundle of ten-yuan bills. The gifts were so heavy that both men dropped beads of sweat and walked with bandy legs. Yet they smiled ecstatically, the corners of their mouths reaching their ears.
Done with the drawing, Bin paused for a moment. Absently he dipped a smaller brush, made of weasel’s whiskers, into the ink. What title should I give it? he wondered. “Gifts for the Spring Festival”? No, that’s too flat. “On the Way Home”? No, a good title must cut to the quick, able to spur the reader and bite the enemy.
After several minutes’ thinking, he wrote these words at the top of the paper: “So Hard to Celebrate a Holiday!”
The next afternoon he mailed the cartoon to The Workers’ Daily in Beijing, a union newspaper that didn’t have a large circulation but was read throughout China.
The work accomplished, Bin felt joyful. Soon his joy was replaced by ecstasy. In his mind Chairman Mao’s instruction began reverberating: “The boundless joy in fighting Heaven, the boundless joy in fighting Earth, the boundless joy in fighting Man!” Those words, representing the mettle of the proletariat, warmed Bin’s heart and invigorated his blood; he felt younger, as though he had eaten a lot of ginseng or deer antler. Yes, with his brush, he was ready to engage any enemy.