Years of Red Dust by Qiu Xiaolong Page B

the bride and bridegroom have done during the forty-five minutes when they were alone in the wedding room? All the details—that she came out barefoot, her hair disheveled, her clothes in disarray—spoke for themselves. But others had different versions. The young couple must have heard the fight outside from the very beginning. How could they have been in the mood? So it must have happened before the wedding.
    The humiliation of having fought with his wife and turned himself in for a false murder on his wedding day,plus gossip in the lane about the circumstance of Qian’s pregnancy, proved to be too much.
    Once again Big Bowl hung his head low, as if he were suffering from a broken neck, just the way he had when he had first moved in and buried his face in a big bowl.
    Fortunately, his uncle had mailed a large sum from the United States, Bamboo Chopsticks announced proudly in the lane. According to the new policy, overseas Chinese could buy their apartments in the city with foreign currency. So the young couple was soon going to move out of Red Dust Lane to a new apartment.
    There, we hoped, they would be able to start a new life.

A Confidence Cap
(1987)
    This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1987. In the beginning of the year, the Party authorities launched the campaign to fight against bourgeois liberalism under Western influence and accepted Hu Yaobang’s resignation from the post of general secretary of the Party Central Committee. In October, in the CPC National Congress, Zhao Ziyang gave the report “Advance along the Road of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” stating that the basic role of the Party during the primary stage of socialism is to lead people in an effort to turn China into a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and modern socialist country by making economic development the Party’s central task while adhering to the four cardinal principles and persevering in reform and open policy. With such an important document to guide China’s reform, the Chinese people are full of confidence for the great future of thecountry. Of course, there can be twists and turns in our advances; of this we are well aware, and the Party authorities took decisive and effective measures against widespread corruption in the system. This year, an agreement between China and Portugal was signed calling for the return of Macao to China in 1999.
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    Twenty years had passed like a snapping of one’s fingers, Fu Guodong thought, standing hatless, shivering in the cold wind outside the university conference hall. However, he had never thought about buying himself a hat, since that winter night in 1966.
    That long-ago night, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he had witnessed his sick father wearing a tall white paper hat bearing big Chinese characters:
Down with the black bourgeois authority, American secret agent
. The old man was a college professor who had studied in the United States and had come back in the fifties as an authority in physics, and he was turned into a black target for the Red Guards in the sixties. A young boy, Fu himself was turned into a “black puppy,” having to support his sick father as he stood on the mass-criticism stage near the entrance of Red Dust Lane. There he saw the tall paper hat on his father’s head trembling in the howling wind as some sort of pale sign from the underworld.
    His father passed away shortly afterward, though his “political hat” still cast a shadow over the family, particularlyFu. It was a shadow not removed until several years after the Cultural Revolution, when Fu became a college student at the university where his father had taught. Four years later, as if through another stroke of ironic causality of misplaced yin and yang, he started teaching there too.
    He did not dream of becoming an authority like his father.
Once bitten by a snake, a man turns