Years of Red Dust Read Free Page A

eyes.
    â€œDon’t worry about the fee. Put as much as you like into the tricycle,” I said. “I am your fan.”
    It was a heavy load, but I pedaled to the airport as if on wings. In the trunk that smelled of the fish she sat, pensive, without her makeup. People could have taken her for someone working for the food market, as her white raincoat, though expensive, looked like a uniform.
    At the airport, I attempted to help her check the luggage, but it was hard with so many people trying desperately to get all their belongings aboard. She looked at the blackboard, on which the written characters appeared to have faded, having possibly been worn off by rubbing against the other luggage. She handed the blackboard to me, heaving a deep sigh, in a pose I thought I had seen in a Beijing opera called
Xizi Holding Her Heart
.
    â€œIt’s the blackboard program for my first day on stage. Ihave kept it ever since. You love Beijing opera, I know, so you keep this. I don’t think I will ever step on the stage again,” she said, as she produced her purse.
    I pushed back the money she offered me, my hand touching hers for a split second. “The blackboard more than covers the fee.”
    Standing outside, I gazed at her retreating figure and listened to the last clicking of her sandals as she disappeared into the somber gate, the sound like a helpless beat made by the night watchman in the Tang dynasty.
    My mind was blank until an old proverb occurred to me: a love affair that causes the fall of a city—in a different version, the fall of an empire. In that opera I had seen her perform, Emperor Xuan lost a great empire because of his infatuation with his favorite concubine, Yuhuan. Xiao and Shen reversed the order: it took the fall of Shanghai to finally bring them together.
    Humming the tune from the opera, I thought of a Chinese proverb. As a horse proves its strength by galloping a long distance, people get to know each other in times of disaster. And then another proverb came to mind: a beauty’s fate is as thin as a piece of paper. I tried to think of some lines of my own, but without success. It’s strange that those old sayings function like a retaining wall when the soil begins slipping from the slope.
    There’s such a lot I do not know about her, I kept telling myself. Why had she not consented earlier, for one thing, if she had cared for him that much? A lot of empty space,but from another perspective, that may be just as well. In a traditional Chinese landscape painting, empty space allows room for imagination. You may laugh at my maudlin sentimentality over a small personal drama during such an important historical time. But in the last analysis, where do we live? In our petty personal lives, not in a history textbook.
    I pedaled back home late that night. The sky was occasionally lit up with shells and searchlights. I did not fall asleep at once, instead turning and tossing on the bed. Some time around midnight, the sound of machine-gun fire broke out, seemingly close to the lane. On impulse, I rolled off and crawled under the bed, where I started thinking what I had never thought before, listening to a lone insect chirping at that unlikely hour. After a while, I sneaked out for a look, then came back in to sleep. The night was once again shrouded in silence. I dreamed of a white petrel taking off the runway, soaring over the boundless oceans.
    Early in the morning I turned on the radio and heard that Shanghai had been liberated the previous night—the night of May 25, 1949. The Nationalist government collapsed not with a bang, but with an insect’s screech. History passed by as I huddled under the bed like a bamboo-leaf-wrapped Zongzi dumpling. The woman announcer on the radio declared proudly, “The city has turned to a new page.”
    So that is why I’m bringing the blackboard to the evening talk of the lane. Ordinary folks we are, but we must keep ourselves