Serve the People! (7 page)

Wu Dawang progressed amenably through the initial stages of his future father-in-law's plan. Toward the end of the year he left to join the army, and the second major phase of his life began. On the training grounds of the People's Liberation Army, his simple virtues of honesty, industry and patience served him admirably, helping him to negotiate the challenges of the military life. To him, the hard physical exercise dreaded by so many of his comrades was no more punishing than the busy seasons of the farming year. Political study classes--a source of spiritual torture to some - he found no more tedious than the weeks of slack that followed planting or harvesting. Wu Dawang read his newspapers, studied editorials and perused documents in the safe knowledge that at the next meal there would be as many steamed rolls as he could eat, as well as meat. As he wore clothes, slept under quilts and ate food supplied, free of charge, by the government, every day in the army felt like New Year in the village he had j ust left. With a daily life of such luxury and ease, getting up earlier than everyone else to sweep the floor, or staying up later than everyone else to read editorials and note down in his diary all he had learnt and thought for perusal by his superiors, practicing drill on Sundays, washing trousers and socks for his comrades-inarms-all this seemed no hardship at all.

In public, Wu Dawang was careful to ensure his actions spoke louder than his words, and that his capacity for work was matched only by his willingness to embrace criticism. To think hard but say little, to channel ingenuity into practical ends and to blunt intelligence into worthy dullness-these were the survival strategies that Wu Dawang picked up from the veterans around him. Although Wu Dawang had notyet learnt from personal experience that advancing with caution permits a safe retreat, he none the less stuck firmly to this principle in his new life.

After only a year in the army, however, the sky fell in on Wu Dawang's world. His mother was struck down by cirrhosis of the liver and, all too soon, summoned her son back to Wujiagou to attend her deathbed. `If you want to do your duty by me before I die,' the old lady said to him, taking him by the hand, `then getyourself married, here in the village, so I know I'll have a daughter-in-law to tend my grave.'

So Wu Dawang went to see his prospective fatherin-law, who chewed his request over thoughtfully. `Have you won any commendations yet?' he eventually asked.

`No, not yet.'

'Have they let you join the Party?'

'Not yet.'

'Are you likely to get promoted?'

'Hard to say.'

After further meditation, Zhao heaved a long sigh. 'Don't think me heartless,' he said. 'It's just that people have high hopes. It's natural; everyone wants the best for their daughters. You're not in the Party, you've no commendations, no prospect of getting promoted. What kind of life can you offer my little girl?'

Wu Dawang collapsed to his knees, the tears streaming down his face. 'Father,' he begged, 'let me callyou Father. If I don't achieve everything you ask, if I fail to win commendations, join the Party, become an official and move Ezi to the city, if I don't find her a good job and give her a good life, I'll never show my face around here again, not even for my funeral.'

Zhao sank back into deep thought. 'You really think you can manage all that?' he asked at length.

'I'll put it in writing.' And so, on a blank piece of paper, he inscribed the following pledge:

After I, Wu Dawang, marry Ezi, I solemnly promise to do everything within my power to ensure I earn commendations within one year, join the Party within two and become an official within three. If I fail and am consequently unable to move the aforesaid Zhao Ezi to a new home in the city where she can eat steamed rolls every day, I, Wu Dawang, will never show my face, dead or alive, in Wujiagou again. If Ezi permits me to return, I swear to serve her in any way she chooses for the rest of my life. If I utter a single word of complaint I deserve to die in agony.

Almost as soon as the ink was dry on this prenuptial agreement, Wu Dawang was married. Two weeks later, his mother departed this world with a smile on her face. And from this point on, Wu Dawang was no longer master of his own destiny or of his marital happiness.

When he returned to the army, he toiled. But others also toiled, and he did not earn a commendation.

The following year, he struggled. But others also struggled, and he was not admitted into the Party.

As he laboured, to no avail, through those two long years, every time a letter arrived from his wife or father-in-law, asking how he was getting on, his panic mounted. A form of despair took hold of him. Every year, when his name failed yet again to make the list of new Party members and commendations, he would even contemplate suicide. But, just as desperation truly set in, the post of Sergeant of the Catering Squad fell vacant. It was well known that, although the work itself was filthy and exhausting, Catering Squad soldiers advanced quickly through the ranks - precisely because of the uncongenial nature of their duties. As a result, eight soldiers from across the three platoons and nine squads of the company vied to fill this single position-every single one of them, like Wu Dawang, of ambitious peasant origin.

The company's Captain was away on officer training at the time and the Political Instructor was lording it over the company like a little emperor. One word from him, and the prize would be yours. When the Instructor's wife came for a visit, the eight hopefuls were forever haring over to his room to sweep his floor or wash his wife's clothes, until his head was fairly turned with indecision. One weekend, as he continued to wrestle with the dilemma, the Political Instructor returned to find his own son riding on Wu Dawang's back, slapping his head as if he was cracking a whip against a horse's neck. `Faster! Faster!' he yelped, as Wu Dawang cavorted around the room on all fours, even letting out the odd whinny for added effect.

Outraged, the Political Instructor yanked his son off Wu Dawang's back, cuffed his offspring around the head, then turned to roar at his subordinate. `Where's your self-respect, man, crawling about on the floor like that?'

`I've always loved serving others,' Wu Dawang explained, standing up and brushing the earth off his hands and knees. `It's how I put the theory of Serve the People into practice.'

The Political Instructor stared at him, failing to conceal his amazement. Is that whatyou think Serve the People means?' he asked after a pause, an edge of uncertainty in his voice.

'If a person won't Serve the People in practice,' he replied, `how can he Serve the People in theory?'

For the next two weeks, the eight candidates kept up their extra-hours campaign of sweeping and mopping the Political Instructor's floor, of trimming and peeling vegetables for him, of buying sweets for his son and pounds of dates and walnuts for his wife. Over and above all this, however, Wu Dawang did something none of his competitors did: he made a habit of taking the instructor's son out to play, galloping around on all fours if the boy wanted to ride on his back, howling up at the heavens if he wanted to hear a dog bark. The smile never left the boy's face-until bedtime when he'd cry out in his sleep for his beloved uncle Wu Dawang.

Finally, the Political Instructor called Wu Dawang in for a momentous interview.

`What,' he asked, is the first, and only principle of Serving the People?'

To serve others as you would wish to be served yourself,' Wu Dawang replied.

`How do we give our lives meaning?'

By bringing glory to the enterprise of Serving the People every day of our lives and by devoting ourselves as absolutely to serving the needy as a son should devote himself to serving his parents.'

`Good,' the Political Instructor nodded, `well put. Simple, but thoughtful; practical, but idealistic; an accomplished marriage of theory and practice. My only quibble would be with the parent-son analogy.'

Wu Dawang was thus formally transferred to the Catering Squad as Deputy Sergeant, taking over responsibility for the company's food and water. From this point on, his career prospects were transformed. In the next year and a half, before he was appointed to the household of the Division Commander himself, Wu Dawang not only jumped a rank to full Sergeant, but was also admitted to the Party. With the help of his Political Instructor, commendations and awards became commonplace. Only one clause of his prenuptial agreement remained unfulfilled: promotion to officialdom. First his blood pressure tested too high, then other companies won the promotion quotas; another time, a soldier in another battalion beat him to it, then the yin fell out with the yang. For whatever reason, the four-pocket jacket that distinguished officials from the hoi polloi remained tantalizingly out of reach.

There could be little doubt that Wu Dawang's transfer to the Division Commander's house more than doubled his chances of promotion but, just as he had begun to hope the prize was within reach, Liu Lian suddenly brought his coolly untroubled emotional depths to a turbulent boil. It was like offering a former smoker an opium pipe, threatening to hurl him from absolute privation into an abyss of excess. Even though Wu Dawang could see that the bottom of this particular abyss was cushioned with a dense, perfumed carpet of flowers, he feared the lack of restraint with which he was likely to respond, should he permit himself to sink into it.

The opium analogy might help us to understand Wu Dawang's particular response toward the naked Liu Lian--his overwrought hesitation in the face of this delectable feast. Once he had stepped back from temptation, some sense of regret was almost inevitable. So far, he had paid for it in the currency of almost a whole night's sleep. After hours of restless reflection, lying still fully clothed in bed, he concluded that resistance would be useless and, most likely, counterproductive.

To contemporary eyes, life back then must seem lacking in emotional depth. More often than not, however, psychological complexity exists only in novels, as authors fill in details absent from protagonists' actual thoughts. As emotion, like comedy, is essentially immediate, its outward expressions tend to the superficial rather than the profound. That night, as the sky began to lighten, Wu Dawang finally dozed off and dreamed he was in carnal embrace with Liu Lian. On waking, he discovered a sticky smear across the underside of his quilt. Mortified, he pinched his own thigh into purple bruises of self-loathing. Then, from under his pillow, he took out a letter from his wife that had arrived three days ago and, while the dormitory was still asleep, reread it under his quilt by the light of his torch. It contained little by way of news, only that the wheat was now in and the autumn crops sown. She'd cut her hand harvesting the wheat and it had bled a lot but was better now. Because she'd had no one to look after their son while she was working, she'd left him tied up with rope in the shade of a tree at the top of the field with a few locusts and pieces of tile to play with. While her back was turned, he'd put a locust in his mouth and nearly choked on it. His eyes had almost popped out of their sockets, the letter said.

Wu Dawang wept as he pictured his son so close to death. He folded up the letter, got out of bed, left his slumbering company to its dreams, and strode with new resolution off to the Division Commander's house. A night's contemplation and a rereading of his letter had set a new plan in motion. His behaviour, in the next phase of our story, was set to switch from the passive to the active, as he strove to master the situation he found himself in; to appoint himself the chief protagonist of the narrative, the great helmsman steering the course of this particular love affair. But this was no high-flown struggle for clear moral victory-just one individual finding the courage to challenge his destiny.

For the record, he did not consider that matters were beyond repair. All that had happened was that Liu Lian had informed his immediate superiors that she no longer wanted him as her cook. He could resolve the situation himself, he thought; he could win her over. Hatred for Liu Lian, and for himself, welled up inside. He was the one who had wrecked a perfectly workable status quo, and so he would have to be the one to make amends-as if, after flouting some basic rule of dining etiquette, he now had to down a cup of spirits as a forfeit. He would do whatever was necessary. And in any case, the actual forfeit in store was hardly a humiliation or punishment, but rather held out the promise of romance and promotion.

At this point in our story, the depths that his relationship with Liu Lian would later reach lay hidden in the shallows of his pragmatic calculations. In fact, in the majority of cases, emotional complications are no such thing. Pull a knotty problem apart and, as likely as not, you will find at its heart an equation of overwhelming simplicity. Wu Dawang's return to the Division Commander's house-a decision dictated by professional ambition and marital obligation-can be explained in terms just as straightforward.

As he left his company, the horizon to the east was beginning to glimmer orange and a milky brightness was spreading in the sky directly over the barracks. Heading toward the Division Commander's house through the dawn light, as he had done almost every day for the past six months, he encountered his company's Captain, on his way back after a patrol check. Though his eyes were still blurry with sleep, the Captain's mind was clearly operational.

'Off to work then?' he asked, stopping right in Wu Dawang's path.

Wu Dawang mumbled an affirmative as he saluted and bid his Captain good morning.

After returning the salute, the Captain turned to carry on his way, then stopped, as if he had suddenly thought of something. `Wu Dawang,' he asked, `what must you remember, above all else, when working for a senior officer?'

`Don't say what I shouldn't say, and don't do what I shouldn't do.'

`Wrong.'

To serve the Division Commander and his family,' he corrected himself, is to Serve the People.'

`Better. Now say it again, but shout it this time.'

After glancing around at the dormitories behind him, he repeated the sacred principle louder, but still way below full volume. To Serve the Division Commander and His Family is to Serve the People.'