He spent hours each afternoon stalking the pestiferous foe with a rolled newspaper, slaying scores past ten. Hundreds and hundreds were poured each morning from his paper cone into the teacher's waiting tray. Throughout the land other children were turning in comparable kills. In less than a month the flies were gone, all across China. Each schoolroom was sent an official pennant to hang in the window. The red silk had filled Yang with the sort of pride that made national songs rise to the throat.
Then he learned from his biology teacher that the year preceding the Great Fly Kill had been the year of the Great Sparrow Kill. That year Mao had been advised that there were such-and-so-many wild birds in China and, during its little life, each bird could be calculated to eat at least this-and-that-much grain. Which came to a whole lot. So Mao had edicted that all the kids should go out beneath all the trees where all the birds roosted, and beat clappers all night every night until they roosted no more. After three nights the birds were all dead from exhaustion and irritation. All across China! How very impressive and commendable. Except that, in the season after the birdless year, there were all those flies...
No, the slogan songs no longer brought the old tolling to Yang's blood. He still enjoyed hearing it in his sister's voice but he feared it was gone from him forever, that ring, cold and gone.
But not the wonder, he was glad to say. Not that. For instance, what had all those schoolteachers in all those classrooms all across China done with all those dead flies?
Is not the way of heaven like the pulling of a bow?
The high it presses down.
The low it lifts up.
The excessive it takes from.
The deficient it gives to.
The approach of the Beijing Marathon and its international coverage brought about a relaxation of many edicts and a return to some neglected ceremonies. In the go parlors, waitresses were allowed to dress in traditional servant's gowns and pour tea for the players engrossed over their click-clicking go boards with the elaborated obeisance of old. In the food markets, children could sell cones of nuts and keep their profits, as long as they had personally gathered the nuts.
In Qufu, the small town near Yang's village in Shangong province, a group filed out of the old cemetery. In spite of the solemnity of the occasion, there was about the group an air of victory, of lost grounds regained. Many of the mourners carried unveiled birdcages, a sight forbidden until recently, and some of the women wore heirloom brocade, still musty from so many years secreted away. Yes, victory! For the loved one they had just left behind committed to the keep of the ancestors had not been reduced to the usual wad of yellow-gray ashes and smoke in the wind; he lay in a real grave, and the fresh mound of earth above him glowed like a monument.
Especially in Qufu was this burial sweet. Qufu was the birthplace of Confucius. For centuries the townspeople pointed with pride to inscriptions on family headstones that proved they were direct descendants of the famous philosopher. Then, in 1970 a regiment of Red Guards marched through the town to the ancient cemetery and toppled all those headstones. When they retreated from the cemetery they hung a huge red-and-white banner across the high stone entrance. The words on the banner left little doubt about the Chairman's attitude toward the ancestors:
WASTE NO MORE GOOD EARTH ON THE USELESS DEAD. CREMATE!
Confucius himself was exiled to the purgatory of fallen stars, along with countless poets and essayists who had expounded on his work over the centuries. Teachers like Yang's father who continued to mention the philosopher were stripped of their positions and their clothes and pilloried in town squares as "enemies of the collective consciousness." Many were sentenced to correction farms and the cultivation of cabbages and leeks instead of young minds.
Confucius's contemporary, Lao-tzu, was never officially excommunicated, oddly enough. Perhaps because his work is so scant and so obscure; perhaps because historians have never agreed on his identity, or if he was actually a living person at all. He may have been too much a myth to comfortably condemn.
The procession stopped on the slope outside the cemetery and gathered to admire the birds and speak with old acquaintances and colleagues. One of the professors pointed down the hill. A string of runners were angling off the highway onto the dirt road.
"It's our young warriors!" he cried. "For Beijing. Those two. I have them in class. The two in front!"
He continued to shout and point, though it was obvious to all which pair of athletes he meant; their new uniforms shined like chips of clear blue sky against the dingy gray outfits of their teammates.
When the two front-runners passed the bottom of the hill the excited teacher yelled, "Chi oh, boys; chi oh!"- a slang expression the professor heard around school for "pour on the gas."
Other men applauded and repeated the call, until the sudden display of local pride made the women hold their ears and the birds fly in panic against the bamboo bars of their cages.
He who is fearless in being bold will meet with his death;
He who is fearless in being timid will stay alive.
Of the two, one leads to good, the other to harm.
Heaven hates what it hates,
Who knows the reason why?
It would be Yang's last workout. The trainer had advised him to keep his customary fervor in check. But as always, when he reached this feeble cotton field with its nine grassy pyramids, Yang veered off the packed ruts and went hurdling through the rows. He headed for the tallest of the mounds. He didn't know the name for the huge escarpment, only that it was a feng, one of a multitude of false tombs built centuries ago by sly emperors hoping to thwart desecration by thieves.
He did not look behind him. He knew the rest of the team was far back, some probably still on the avenue, jogging in and out of the swaying buses and bicycles.
The only runner out ahead of him was his friend Zhoa Cheng-chun. Zhoa and Yang had pulled quickly away from the others passing the cemetery. But when he heard the cheering and saw the waving crowd up the hill, Yang had slackened his stride to allow Zhoa to run on ahead.
"Chi oh!" he had urged his friend, pretending to pant with exhaustion. "Pour on the gas."
To have kept up would not have been respectful. Zhoa was nearly four years his senior and already a member of the academy. Zhoa was the hometown hero and the provincial marathon champion. His time of 2:19 was second only to the 2:13 of the Chinese record-holder, Xu Liang. Yang felt he could have matched Zhoa's pace for many more kilometers, but he did not wish to show a discourtesy. He let him run on.
Besides, Yang liked to have this part of his workout to himself. As he left the road he could hear the people at the cemetery cheering for the rest of their school's team, far behind.
His sprint took him past the field girls working to salvage some of the season's rain-ravaged cotton, then along the dirt dike of the irrigation ditch. Without slowing he long-jumped across the shallow coffee-brown stream, his feet churning the air. His landing startled a small hare from the brush along the bank. Yang called after the zigzagging animal, "You too, long ears! Chi oh!" He heard the girls laugh behind him.
He slowed when he reached the steep path at the corner of the feng. It had drizzled again that morning and the worn dirt would be slick. The last thing he wanted to do before tomorrow's trip was slip on the red mud. To soil the beautiful blue warm-ups sent him from Beijing would have been close to traitorous.
The climb made his heart quicken in his ears and brought a light beadwork of sweat to his lower lip. That was good. He did not perspire easily, even in this French-made suit of artificial fibers, and he needed a sweat to flush the poisons and rinse his head. He ran harder.
When he at last achieved the flattened square at the peak of the dirt pyramid he was sweating hard and his panting was no longer feigned. His father had first brought him here, just a babe, carried piggyback. He had played with the milkweed pods at the edge of the little flat square while his father and his grandfather went through the compl
icated sparring dances with wooden swords or bamboo pikes festooned on each end with colored ribbons to better describe the swing and swirl of the maneuver. His grandfather still came, though rarely, and without the mock weapons. The routines the old man did were simple sequences and might be seen in any park or yard.
Yang went immediately into his tai chi quan routine. He did all the basic maneuvers plus some his father had created - Stand By to Kick Monkey Nuts, and Feed the Dog That Bites You. Then he moved on to the new National Routine that had been instituted since the fall of the Gang of Four. Much like football warm-ups - jumping jacks, toe touches, neck twists. After these exercises he commenced scurrying around the little earth square in a crouch, shadow wrestling.
He was a good wrestler. The summer before he had placed third in the Torch Festival in his age/weight, and for a time his instructors at middle school wished him to concentrate on that sport, leave distance running to those with longer legs. He demurred but kept in wrestling shape. When there was a wedding in the village he was the one called on by the bride's family for the traditional bout with the bridegroom's supporters. The families knew he could make a good showing against the surrogate suitors and, more important, when pitted against the groom himself, Yang could be counted on to lose.
Spreading his towel, he finished off his workout with forty pushups from his fingertips, then forty fast sit-ups, hammering his stomach muscles as he finished.
He forced his mind to calm as he pounded the familiar knots from his abdomen. Forget those cheering townspeople. What was there to worry about? No one expected victory. Only continuity: run from here to there and back, however long it took.
His fists drove out the embolism and at last he fell back, the clean clothes forgotten, and sent his breathing up into the sky. It was all one color. There had been no sun all day. There would be no stars that night. For months now the heavy sky had shut them out, like a pewter lid on a shallow pot.
He rolled over and gazed past the checkerboard grid of cotton and cabbage in the direction Zhoa had informed him that they would fly tomorrow to reach Beijing, thousands of miles away. Yang could not conceive of such distance, nor of the towering mountains and terrible gorges where, Zhoa had claimed, no one lived. No green fields crawling with work units like aphids on a leaf; no jam of smoky huts; no roads, no bicycles, no people. Just lifeless space, clear, the way it was on the rare winter evenings when the clouds were driven south by the cold, and the long flank of the night between his bed and the stars was laid naked.
He heard the girls laugh again and stretched to see over the milkweeds. The other runners were approaching at last along the road, meeting Zhoa on his way back from the turnaround. The girls were laughing at the way the team grabbed at Zhoa's belly to make him smile. Everyone liked to tease Zhoa so they could see his smile. It was spectacular. He had been blessed with an extra tooth, diamond shaped, right between his two regular front teeth. Bright and healthy too, his uncle had said of the phenomenon. Yang could see it flash even from his distant seat.
The giggling suddenly ceased and Zhoa's smile fled. Looking back up the road Yang saw three young men, carrying shotguns and examining the road ruts, pretending that they were on the trail of the runners. A joke, certainly, but no one except the three with guns laughed.
These were not ordinary hunters. Their unkempt hair and loud swagger revealed that they were labor toughs, a growing cadre of semidelinquents who had eschewed education for the factories and the fantan cellars. Their attitude toward the pampered students was well known. Especially sport students. There had been frequent skirmishes, and the toughs had promised more. Pampered people loping nowhere was contrary to the Spirit of the True Revolution, was their claim; just another sign of Western decadence, jogging into China instead of creeping. Let comrades seeking exercise take up the shovel! That is what the Chairman would have said.
Only in the last few years had competition become acceptable enough to come out into the open. It was like the pet birds singing uncovered in the parks again. And just this morning his sister had told Yang that she had seen a woman at the Friendship Hotel carrying a cat. It was still unacceptable to purchase a pet, but the animal had been shipped as a gift to the hotel by a recent guest from London.
"Can you imagine?" his sister had wondered. "From a foreign land, a cat?"
Only with difficulty, Yang thought, trying to reconcile in his mind such ironies as rude reactionaries and free cats and false tombs. For example, it had always been an irony to him that these fengs, the forced effort of thousands of slaves thousands of years ago, afforded him the loftiest feelings of freedom he had ever known. Except for running. If you ran far enough you could get free for a while. Truly free. Another irony. It seemed that freedom came as a result of forced effort, as though the brain needed the minions of the legs and lungs and heart to build for it the solitude of separation.
Suddenly his reverie was shattered by an explosion, then two more, then a final blast. He was on his feet, scanning the rows and ditches below. Early Nation Day firecrackers? The backfire of a tractor working late?
He saw the three hunters, running along the base of his feng, laughing and shouting and waving their guns. The leader, the oldest, with the longest hair and the biggest gun, bent to the cotton rows and lifted his prize high by the ears. The hindquarters were blown entirely away but the animal still lived, uttering long thin whistles and pawing the air to the delight of the younger hunters. The girls turned away in horror and Yang sat back to wait for the men to leave. He wrapped his arms around his stomach, shivering.
It was all extremely difficult to reconcile.
In the customs terminal of the Beijing Airport, the American journalists fidgeted nervously through the forms and waited for their bags to be examined, feeling that sudden gulp of realization that Yanks always get along with their first breaths of communist atmosphere - that "They-can-getcha-and-keep-ya!" gulp-wondering and worrying about the copy of Oriental Hustler among the shirts, the stashed gold Krugerrands and crank in the shaving bag, when out of nowhere, to their rescue and relief, came an ominous Chinese drugstore cowboy with a tight smile and a wallet full of official cards. He introduced himself as Wun Mude, from China Sports Service, and gave them each a stiff handshake and a sheaf of diplomatic documents. He rattled a few phrases in Chinese to the brown-suited Red Guards, and the bags were snapped shut and the three journalists whisked past the long line and the immigration officer, and they were outside.
"Always good to know somebody at city hall," the editor observed. Mude merely smiled and motioned toward a waiting van.
The athletes had been arriving from their parts of the world for days, according to their respective countries' budgets. The poorer were to fly in, run, and fly out. The better heeled got there a few days early to acclimatize.
The American runners had been in Beijing for nearly a week, wishing their budgets had been a little less well-heeled. The Oriental food had loosened their lower intestines and the Beijing air had plugged their lungs: "When you run into the wall in this venue," observed Chuck Hattersly of Eugene, Oregon, when he came in from a light workout, wheezing and spitting, "you get to see what it's made of!"
The Americans were quartered in the modern Great Wall Hotel, complete with elevator Muzak and hot-and-cold running houseboys assigned to each room. The visiting Orientals, the Japanese and Koreans, were in the Beijing Hilton. The Europeans were scattered between. The Chinese were in a large compound dorm with most of the other Third World entries. The day before the race, everybody had arrived except the Tanzanian, Magapius Dasong.
In his tiny double room at the compound, Yang lay exhausted and sleepless after the day's flight in the old Russian turboprop. It had not been the lofty joyride he had expected, this first trip off the earth. The old airplane had been noisy and drafty, the seats confining, and the windows too small. At first he had been thrilled by the great mountains, so steep and terrible looking, but when he examined the range through th
e field glasses passed him by his father's colleague, he saw that the wild slopes had been tamed. Centuries of hungry toil had chiseled them into steps, thousands of descending agricultural terraces.
Tossing now in his narrow bed, he wished he had never looked. Every time he closed his eyes to try to sleep, he saw those terraced mountainsides, each few feet of retaining wall and few inches of soil the effort of so many hands and years, for another precious ton of corn, another trailer of cabbage.
A large state is the lower
reaches of a river --
The place where all the streams
of the world unite.
In the union of the world
The receptive always gets the
better of the Creative
by stillness.
Being still, she takes the
lower position.
Hence the large state, by
taking the lower
position annexes the
small state,
And the small state, by taking
the lower position
annexes the large state.
It had always been a peculiar thing to Bling, his first name. His father had called him Ling Wu, after his father the stone mason, and his mother had called him Bill, after her father the missionary. So his name had never really been William.
Yet from his first day of school in Pittsburgh he had been called William by his sixth-grade teacher. By his classmates, Willy Wu, as though it were all one word, an American Indian word perhaps, certainly not half-Irish, half-Chinese-an Indian name for an uncertain wind: Willawoo.