When I was a child, I heard the sad scream of a train and longed for it. As a teenager, I often had dreams of running away from home, and sometimes I would actually spend a night on the road. My favorite places to visit were the old Shanghai North Station and the dry bridge on Gonghexin Road. I loved to lean over the railing and watch the two tracks stretching out into the distance under the bridge, letting the steam and coal dust from the north-south trains hit me in the face. But the memory of my first train ride was unpleasant, even terrifying. When I was nine years old, I returned home with my mother, and in the dim light of the old North Station, several prisoners were tied up, first face first, then yelled into our carriage, sitting across from my mother and me, sullenly staring at us all the way without saying a word. The “three-year natural disaster” left a child with the visual backdrop of a kidnapping in the dim light and the shadowy muzzles of the escorting officers. As an adult, I unfortunately got into the bad karma of “the history of Western political thought,” seven words, except for the last one, which is taboo. The Chinese scholars crawled and crawled behind them, picking up the pieces, but they still had to do the same. I couldn’t help it. Once, when I was teaching a class at home to a graduate student about the difference between state taxation and protection racketeering, I was short-circuited and blurted out, “What’s a state? Legal Triads; What is a Triad? No legalized country yet.” The two nice kids from the provinces were shocked and bowed their heads, looking at their notebooks and pounding on them like garlic; I myself was shocked, knowing that I had accidentally blurted out my childhood trauma on the train in the “language of learning”.
1
In 1966, before I entered middle school, my father raised twenty dollars to help me “weather the storm, see the world, and grow up in the midst of a great storm. In order for me to “weather the storm, see the world, and grow up in the midst of great storms” (Mao Zedong), my father raised twenty dollars and arranged for me to go on a tandem with a high school student from the neighborhood. We left home on November 16 of that year. “On my first day of the revolution, I had to buy a ticket to take the city tram, but I didn’t have to buy a ticket to take the train at the train station. A sea of people was boiling inside the station, surging and crashing against the dilapidated old North Station in waves. It was like the tide crashing against a small bank that had already collapsed, and not a single man in a railroad uniform stepped forward to stop it! The students rushed to the platform, yellow uniforms and red armbands, pointing to the long queue lying beneath them, getting on the train if they wanted to, pointing to the mountains and the rivers, with a great spirit, much more beautiful than in 1949 when the city’s young citizens crowded in front of the Bund building to roll gold. At that time, I was not yet a child, and the little boy was more interested in the military shrine of August 1 than in Beijing, so he got on a bus to Nanchang first. The result was too crowded, could not get a foothold, had to get off. At this time just a long line of stuffy tankers on the other side of the platform pulling a whistle into the, so do not turn around with the crowd surging, a butt down, tube it north to south, Hangzhou, Suzhou. The car stopped, really Hangzhou, this is the first stop of my tandem.
I was very self-conscious at the beginning of the seven days in Hangzhou, always surrounded by big-character newspapers in Zhejiang University and Hangzhou University. It’s also a great way to get the most out of your time and money. In the years of the big series, “play in the mountains and water” is a very bad word. I later heard from my lover that they were more revolutionary than we were at that time. For this reason, I felt for a long time that I was three points shorter than her. During the Cultural Revolution, it was usually the high school students who were more “revolutionary” than the university students, and the women who were more “revolutionary” than the men. Decades later, I read a famous quote from Luxembourg: “When there is only one revolutionary left on the street, that revolutionary must be a woman.
A week later, we went back to Guangzhou to catch the southbound train. As soon as the train stopped, all the doors and windows were closed. As soon as the train stopped, all the doors and windows were closed. The youngsters inside were probably suffering from the crowding and treated the youngsters outside like tigers and wolves, refusing to accept the train. The two sides stalemate for several minutes, finally a sleeper bunk window open a crack, but only sticks out a tea jar, thousands of revolutionary generals flocked to that crack, scrambling to fill the tea jar. Once the water was full, the tea jar shrank, and the window was about to fall again, it was too late and too soon, a Peking general stuck a flattened burden into it, and everyone shouted in unison, prying the window crack wider and wider like a crowbar. But to a certain height, the fulcrum and the force point to pull away from the distance, the flattening will not be vigorous, the two sides again became a stalemate. The Red Guards, who had stuffed the flat-bed into the window, immediately picked me up high and pistoned me into the crack like a small piece of luggage. When I got in, I immediately returned and grabbed the man who was closing the window, dragging him backward with all my strength. In this way, the sleeper car finally had twenty to thirty people squeezed into it. As a result, the train was more than an hour late at Hangzhou Station. However, when the train sounded and the carriage was shaken, we quickly became Red Guard comrades again. The “off-board” and “on-car” factions, who were eager to fight a moment ago, gradually settled down.
I remember two very touching details. There were a group of girls sitting in the bottom bunk – high school students from Shanghai’s Guangming Middle School – and the boys standing to the side were too shy to squeeze in. When they saw that I was still a kid and had been standing for too long, they patted their legs and said, “You can take turns sitting on our laps. That kind of simple cheerfulness would probably only cause an ambiguous laughter among today’s high school students, but at that time it was so commonplace that no one thought about anything else. There were two bunk beds overhead, crowded with a working-class family who had moved in to support the construction of Guangzhou, with their children and an elderly man in tow. The Red Guards at the bottom made a pact with each other that they paid for the sleeper tickets, but we didn’t. No matter how crowded we were, we couldn’t occupy the bunk of the family above us. In this way, the people at the bottom stood and the people at the top slept for two days and two nights in Guangzhou, and we became good friends. The Cultural Revolution should never be denied, but it should never be dismissed as simply as it is today. Such negativity will inevitably lead to retribution. In recent years, the resurgence of new leftist ideas can be regarded as retribution. The order at that time, for example, was order out of order, order out of order, and a well of patient research could feed a large group of political scientists, sociologists, and even anthropologists. The French Revolution, no matter how bad it was, after all, fed nearly a thousand historians for two hundred years, so it faded away and did not make a comeback. The Cultural Revolution in China, however, has become a waste well, with a layer of spit on top and all sorts of fake Cultural Revolution faces underneath.
Guangzhou gave me a strange impression: why are there so many buildings of the former dynasty? What a backdrop of the former dynasty, very incongruous in a sea of red. We live in Shahe, and when we get to the city, we must pass by a “Martyrs Road”, which commemorates not Jiang Jie and Liu Hulan, but the Kuomintang, such as the 72 martyrs of Huanghuagang, the 19 Road Army General’s Cemetery, etc. The architecture is also unique, with a southern flavor and an obvious western style, and the two do not fit together. The style of those buildings is also unique, with both a southern flavor and a distinctly western style, which blends well with each other and is incongruous but not ugly. This early memory of Guangzhou was later confirmed by my travels in the American South. There too, unlike the North, it was filled with buildings commemorating the Civil War, and always the opposite of what the North said. From then on, I had an unexplained feeling about the South, a simple geographic term, and felt that everything in the South had an “other” connotation, sheltered, but therefore mysterious, strange things moving underneath, warm and ambiguous, making people dare not make a judgment.
After two years, old Mao changed his face and said, “Now is the time for the young generals to make mistakes,” and with a wave of his hand, he drove the young students to the countryside. At that time, the train ride was a different story. Millions of Zhiqing in Shanghai went to the countryside, almost as if they were crying out for a child to be born from their mother city. The old, dilapidated North Station was a huge, noisy maternity ward. No one could bear the thought of such a delivery, especially when it came once every three to five days. The old North Station was unbearable, so the glorious task was transferred to the far northern suburbs of the Pengpu truck yard. Pengpu truck yard is empty, scribbled hanging a few red banners, even to the children to send off. As more people were sent off, the words “Warm Farewell” were left unchanged, only the name of the place underneath was changed: today a piece of “Heilongjiang”, tomorrow a piece of “Yunnan”, and the day after tomorrow another piece of “Heilongjiang”. “Next week, if it’s “Heilongjiang” again, just take out the first few names on it. There were even smaller boys in the alley who were willing to walk, and each time they would walk two to three hours to watch the fun, and then come back and say, “First the drums and gongs were loud and the slogans were loud. When the siren sounded and the train shook, the cries started immediately, silencing the slogans. Ten thousand people cried together, terrified to death.” Although I was determined to go to a place where the authorities had not mobilized me, and “the more difficult it is, the more we move forward,” I felt sad when I listened to these children talk so much. On the day I left, I did not shed any tears, but had a big fight with the station staff over the details. The place where I went to my hometown was far away from the railroad, so every time I went to the county town for business, I couldn’t help but go to the train station and stand there for a while, looking back toward Shanghai. This kind of attachment to trains and railroad tracks, which I also knew was bad, meant that my determination to stay rooted in the countryside was not strong enough, and when I returned to the production team, I didn’t dare to tell my revolutionary sister in the collective household. But every year, after autumn, thoughts would come to me: will I go back this year? In the first year, after the autumn reckoning, I got a total of thirteen yuan in surplus grain, no more and no less, which was equal to a ticket for a seat on a bunk from Langkau to Shanghai. If I bought this ticket, I didn’t eat or drink for a year, which made me lose the idea of going back by train. I later heard that when Zhiqing started to return to the city in 1979, the policy from above gave way because the collective petition of the Zhiqing in Yunnan became a big issue, and because the Zhiqing in Shanghai lay down on the tracks near the North Station, which alarmed the international community. It seems that one thing leads to another. The cognoscenti left the city of their birth by train, beating gongs and drums, and finally fought to return to the city, but they also had to line up and lie down on the train tracks one by one with ease to make it happen.
II
It was in the days of the intellectuals that I learned to climb trains, drill trains, jump on trains, and other ridiculous things. First, let’s talk about climbing the wagons.
Henan is too poor, and Lancao is even poorer. After the death of Jiao Yulu, it was still the habit of Lankao to go out to beg for food. Especially in May of every year, when there was a shortage of food, it was natural to go out and beg for food, which was equivalent to the “right to live” as it is called nowadays, and even the United Nations could not stop it. At that time, I also admired Mao Zedong as a beggar to walk across the Xiangjiang River for social research, I wanted to go with my fellow villagers to ask for a return rice, to make a go of it. I contacted the family, the composition is absolutely pure, poor peasants. They agreed that I should accompany them as the eldest son of the family. But when the chief branch secretary found out, he wouldn’t let me go for fear that he wouldn’t be able to bear the blame from above. The family left, but they left behind begging experience encouraged me: as long as there is a dirty hand towel wrap head, wear a cardigan, round cloth shoes, shoulder hanging a cummerbund, as poor peasants, Longhai line, Beijing-Guangzhou line on the truck with you sit, no one will stop. I and another member of the collective household determined to dress up as that effect, like a mine theft look, sneaking out of the village.
It was true that no one was in charge of the journey from Langkau to Zhengzhou, and the wind was blowing as if no one was there. But once the train stopped, there was a problem. The train whined and whined its way to the Zhengzhou station, but it didn’t stop, but passed through, heading for the northern suburbs of Zhengzhou and stopping at its own arrival yard before stopping. It was at least four or five miles of railroad line, all on foot, from the arrival yard to the departure yard, walking back through the formation yard. The glasses on the bridge of my nose betrayed me during this walking distance, “What kind of poor peasant wearing glasses comes out to beg? Three questions, the railroad workers asked me about my background. What I didn’t expect is that they heard that we were Shanghai Zhiqing, but more sympathetic, took us to the railroad staff canteen to eat, white steamed buns with spicy soup, two years in the countryside did not eat such a good meal, of course, gobbled up. After the meal to touch the departure field, and made a difficult task. It was the largest departure yard in the national railroad system, with dozens of turnouts and dozens of locomotives all stopped in one direction, a spectacular and fascinating sight. The two of us dug under the belly of the train, and we were so overwhelmed that it was more like stealing a land mine.
At that moment, a railroad worker like Li Yuhe, who waved a bugle light, came up to us. He saw our predicament and taught us how to read the signal lights: there were six signal lights in two rows and three rows on each branch of the track, and the different arrangement of the six lights indicated which direction the locomotive underneath was heading after departure. Thanks to Li Yuhe’s “secret code,” we were saved. In the darkness of the Zhengzhou departure track, the tracks were like a spider’s web, and the blue signal lights were flashing non-stop. We followed the map and quickly found a train that was heading south immediately. The train turned to the Beijing-Guangzhou line, which was even more powerful than the Longhai line. Until dawn, before slowly stopped at Luohe station, gasping for air, adding coal and water. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do that, but I think I’m going to be able to do that. Change places, change places!” It turned out that it was not the police who came to arrest us, but a female railroad employee who was passing by the overpass and happened to find two “passengers” in the open car under the overpass, sitting in an extremely dangerous position, before shouting and screaming. She was on the bridge and we were on the car, so we couldn’t hear each other for a while, and we were shouting and gesticulating like deaf people, and it took us half a day to understand the danger: the car was full of logs, and there was a gap of about one meter in front, in which we were sitting. ! Thanks to this kind woman, her first thought was not to arrest the two “blind streams,” but to instruct the “blind streams” to get out of harm’s way and find another safe place. In this way, we were not the devils who stole the mines, but, on the contrary, we were walking on top of the wagons, carrying our cloth burdens, like railway guerrillas, while the female railroad worker, like Mrs. Fanglin, stood on the overpass and gave us directions from afar. With each wagon we crossed, we looked back at Mrs. Fanglin’s gestures and opened our mouths to ask questions. When we finally found an open wagon with a machine on it, and sat down behind the machine instead of in front of it, the uniformed Fanglin’s wife stopped gesturing and left.
The next step was the Xinyang region of Henan. Paddy fields gradually appeared by the roadside, and herd boys riding on buffaloes, the mountains were green, and so was the water. After two years away from the south, we finally saw small bridges and flowing water again. We stood up and shouted excitedly to the herding children, who could not hear us, but waved their arms to us. Unfortunately, the train stopped at Guangshui, the first stop in Hubei province, and we were caught.
Since all the railroad workers we had met were so kind, and since our country was full of good mountains and rivers, and all the poor and peasants were dear to us, we assumed that the same thing would happen in Hubei, and got off the train in a big way to wash our faces with a tap. I was surprised that the Hubei police at the Guangshui station were waiting for us, and I walked over to them with a towel in my hand and bumped into them. They were guarding the homes of the slightly more affluent Hubei people, keeping the Henan beggars out of the way, and arresting one or two of them. Local protectionism actually existed during the Cultural Revolution, and the economic differences between the two neighboring provinces naturally led to some discrimination. The Hubei police took us, two strange and blind Henan refugees, down, and were very proud of us, questioning us vigorously and speaking disdainfully.
As I had experience in Zhengzhou and knew a little about the Hubei people’s disdain for the Henan people’s poverty, I began by explaining that I was not a refugee who had come to Hubei to beg for food, but rather a Shanghai Zhiqing who had come to Henan to join the army, in an effort to confess and be lenient. But they didn’t believe me and said that the state had never sent any Shanghai Zhiqing to Henan (which was also true). So the two sides were stuck in a stalemate over Shanghai. They didn’t understand the Shanghai dialect, and if they didn’t understand it, they couldn’t prove our Shanghai origin; in turn, they asked us many questions about Shanghai to see if we knew it. One profound question that I still remember today is: Which direction is Chongming Island in Shanghai? Of course, the answer was as good as the question. The first thing I noticed was that there was no way I could get the money to pay for the train to Wuhan. The meaning of this retaliation was not only to force us to spend all our money, but also to realize its malicious intent when we got on the bus: two poor, student-like peasants, dirty and dirty, one of them wearing glasses, were really fed up with the taunts in the strange eyes of the bus passengers. That experience contributed to my lifelong negative impression of Hubei men. This is how I aborted a romantic Maoist begging trip. I hate Hubei because it discriminates against the poor and is an unpleasant “south. As the proverb goes, “There are nine birds in the sky, but there are Hubei men on earth.
It is only later that I learned that there is still a lot of provincial and even county discrimination on the Chinese map. If someone puts a different color on the map, based on the white line, the color plate will be colorful. For example, the people of Shanghai discriminate against people from the northern part of Jiangsu Province, which is already famous overseas, but not necessarily in one province, and the people of Guangzhou discriminate against people from Zhongshan County, which is not necessarily famous. However, all the mainlanders who discriminate against people from neighboring provinces and counties are called “Mainland Cousins” in Hong Kong, which is clean, thorough and neat. And the Chinese, including Hong Kong people, are alarmed at the existence of racial discrimination in the United States when they come to America. All Chinese are said to be in a colorless and transparent “glass enclosure” that makes it difficult for them to be promoted. Inside the “glass enclosure,” those higher Chinese who discriminate against their compatriots at home are the most aggressive, the most sensitive to national pride, and the most vociferous against discrimination. It seems that discriminatory hormones can only be equalized at the positive and negative poles if we go to the farthest distance. But it’s just a two-way vent. At the end of the day, the discriminators are discriminated against, and there is a cry of patriotism. A fellow historian of mine, Professor Ge Jianxiong, who teaches history and geography at Fudan University, heard this and joked that the most patriotic group of Chinese people should look abroad, not at home. This is also a sincere and trustworthy statement. What I’m trying to say is that on this discrimination map, Henan Province, where I’ve lived, is probably a negative altitude area. I have not heard that they can discriminate against anyone, but I know that they are discriminated against not only by the Hubei in the south, but also by the Shandong in the east, the Shaanxi in the west, and even the Xinjiang in the far frontier. They sit almost on their asses, squatting in a low-lying basin, and the surrounding highlanders, no matter what tribe they belong to, look at them blankly. This is, of course, because they are poor, and out of poverty comes ignorance, and the patience that goes with ignorance.
When we left Langkau to work as workers in Gong County, three hundred miles away, the grandmother of a five-guarantee household in the village missed us so much that she went out of her way to visit us. Most of the farmers in Lancao had never seen a train before, but at a meeting of the three levels of cadres in the county, a group of production team leaders saw the train moving and actually danced around the front of the train shouting, “Yelp! It stops like a worm, doesn’t eat and doesn’t drink, so why would it run?” (You have to pronounce it with a native Chinese pronunciation to get the effect). The train was forced to stop, resulting in a laughable parking accident on the Longhai line. The aforementioned brigade branch secretary, a “revolutionary pioneer”, the People’s Daily sent his long newsletter, full-page with photos, using this title. He and the head of our collective household went to Beijing to attend the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the National Day, and at the Great Hall of the People, they made a joke more real than the one in the novel about Chen Huangsheng’s visit to the city. In the Great Hall of the People, the old branch chief squatted on his hands and knees, and when his buttocks puckered up, he took that sacred seat. Who knew that the seat was movable and reversible, but before he could squat firmly, the floor flipped over, and our “revolutionary pioneer” was caught with his feet up in the Great Hall of the People. I wonder if Chairman Mao saw this comedy skit on the podium? Most likely she would smile kindly.
She had never left the land in her life. She was small-footed and carried a basket of eggs and vermicelli, and it was a miracle that she could still find her way to our factory without getting lost. I don’t know if she was a joke on the train, but the first day she arrived at my beloved’s dormitory, I was shocked. The two of us were outside rolling dough for her, and she was sitting inside when she suddenly shouted in terror, “Yelp! Why is there an old lady in the house? Why are they also black pants and a red jacket?” (Also pronounced with a Chinese dialect). It is a folk custom in Langkau that an old man over seventy must wear a red jacket to ward off evil spirits. I rushed into the house at the sound of the news, but there was no other old woman, just her, sitting in front of the closet! It turned out that the closet mirror reflected her body, and the poor girl had never seen a mirror that could see her whole body in her whole life, so she had never seen her whole body in her whole life, and the moment she saw it, she was so frightened of herself that she screamed and shouted and alarmed a building! There was also a younger generation of Lankao people, such as the local intellectuals, who were mostly as simple and sympathetic as their parents’ generation. I later developed from climbing trains to climbing trucks. When I came back from the county town, I mostly climbed on a truck with legs. Most of the drivers would acquiesce, because most of the laborers’ families also had a handful of intellectuals pounding in the bitter water. But there are mean people, and once I climbed into a coal truck and ran into one. The driver saw me in the mirror, non-stop to oust me, the car opened, I climbed up, so three, the driver began to yell at me. At this time, several local female intellectuals in the car could not bear to see, crying in unison, cursing: “People from Shanghai to me in Lancao, so far from home, parents are not there, and you bully people? You’re not a human being, you’re an ass, you’re a son of a bitch, you shall not die a happy death!” Except for the only dirty word, all the cursing is done, and it’s really hard to hear. The rules of Lancao folk, in fact, is not feudal, but very early spontaneous post-modern feminism: men can not curse with women, especially not with unmarried daughters, if the other side of the curse, men can only dry listen to not return. The driver, scolded by these little girls, dared not say a word, but could only climb up the driver’s building in hatred, slammed the car door, and drove away.
I also miss our village and village youths who have returned to our village. Some of them were the top students of the first and second middle schools in Lancao County, and it was not easy for them to get into these schools. They had to take dried sweet potatoes to school, and they worked hard on their homework, which was no worse than the Fudan Affiliated Middle School in our collective household. One of them was called “fake girl” by her fellow villagers, who was shy and gentle like an older girl, just the opposite of the revolutionary girls in our collective household who were nicknamed “tomboy” or “iron girl”! The “dummy girls” in the countryside, usually through annual recruitment, cadres, and military service, are a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The way out for the “fake girls” in the countryside is usually through annual recruitment, recruitment and military service, which is a glimmer of hope in the sky. But since the arrival of a collective household in Shanghai, “the more difficult it is, the more it moves forward,” and Chairman Mao’s meeting, that glimmer of hope has been blocked. After the September 13 incident, the rootedness of this collective family was shaken one after another, and they began to seek various ways to return to the city. The higher-ups were also interested in taking care of this advanced collective, and when similar quotas came down, they always let us go first.
After three or two years, when the ten of us left, their age was also delayed. We played very well on weekdays, and there was always a common language among some small intellectuals, but as soon as someone in the collective household was transferred, they hid away with complicated feelings and never joined the farewell party. No one could bear to look at them when they were swept away by that kind of resentful look from afar. I later read a lot of articles about the old third session’s reminiscences, novels, poems and the like, but almost none of them mentioned that they had blocked the way out for the children of peasants, as if it was only right and proper for the Zhiqing to go, and it was only right and proper for the children of peasants to be blocked in the countryside. This sense of inequality, which has crept into the collective unconscious of a generation, has never been confronted and is probably deep in the marrow.
In the Zhiqing Revolution, sixteen million people went to the countryside, three hundred and sixty days a year, diluting the local peasant family’s wages every day, and on the last day before leaving, they had to take away the last “red bean” from the family’s eldest son. I just said that China’s map could be painted with the colorful colors of mutual discrimination, and it was like playing another domino game on this map: first, Lao Mao waved his hand, and the dominoes fell down, and the Zhiqing in the city fell down first; the children of the peasant families were originally in the same place and could have stayed there, but they were pushed down by the people in front of them, and they were pressed down to the bottom of the circle of dominoes; after a moment of silence, a siren sounded, and the children of the peasant families fell down, too. When the cognoscenti rolled over, almost all the dominoes were erected again; there were writers, poets, scholars, and all kinds of “words” complaining about the silent years that had just fallen; only the last few dominoes were silent and could not get up again. Old Mao likes to quote Li He’s poem, “If there is love in heaven, heaven will grow old”, how can heaven grow old? Only people get old. With my clumsiness, I have not been able to understand the sadness of this great man. From Li He to Lao Mao, how much injustice has Heaven seen on earth? Who can see that it has aged an inch? I suspect, at least, that the heavens are invisible to the dark crevices of historical movement, much less to the spirits that lie tumbling down in them.
In 1997, I went back to Lankao with my lover and child, and most of the people in Zhuang don’t know each other anymore. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do that, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do that. The only thing is that the embarrassment of having to greet everyone, or the pretension of He Jingzhi’s “returning to Yan’an in my dreams”, which I was worried about, did not appear. We were just like three ordinary passers-by who occasionally passed by the northern countryside called Tangzhai and quietly looked around. When I saw a man with a “fake girl” on his back from afar, I dared to walk up to him and try to tap him on the shoulder – and when I looked back, an old face with a stubbly beard almost pressed up against my glasses shouted, “Well, if it isn’t Xueqin! ” Nearly thirty years later, it seems like only yesterday that he broke up with me, and for a split second he called out my name!
Three
According to the folks back home, a bus is not a bus, but a ticket bus. This is the reason why there is a very simple name for mixed buses: mixed tickets. In the village where I was a member of the team, a male laborer usually had only two sets of clothes: a jacket in the summer and a cloth shirt in the winter, and a jacket when he took off the cloth. When it was hot, they went down to the river to take a bath, scrubbed their clothes and hung them on the branches to dry, and then soaked them in the water to dry before they could go ashore. It was such a poor place, but because of Jiao Yu Lu, I was able to meet people from above, and there were even foreign affairs activities of a national nature. For the first time in my life, I sat down to talk with foreigners, not in Shanghai when I was a child, nor at Harvard later, but in Langkau, in Tangzhai: the collective family received Laotian pilots from the Kaifeng military airport as arranged by the propaganda department of the county party committee, who propagated Mao Zedong’s strategic ideology of encircling the city from the countryside, and the conversation was very enthusiastic. These pilots were arranged to receive training at an inland airport like Kaifeng, presumably in order to maintain international secrecy? At events like these, the village folks have the opportunity to participate, even if it’s just to stand around and watch, and learn the language and learn some of the official vocabulary that is so incongruous with their own local life. The mouths of the poor, who had to devour thousands of pounds of sweet potatoes all year round to feed their hunger, would often have written “words” flying in and out with the blackened dried potatoes. For example, the captain yelled at us to go to work, but not to go to work, but to “go to work”; the townspeople thought it was too bad for us to buy a bus ticket home with a year’s leftover money, so they taught us how to beg for food and get a bus ticket. “The people’s railroad is built by the people, the people’s railroad is ridden by the people!” It’s a bit of black humor that the poor are born with rich mouths, and it’s really “cool”.
Probably the only railroad in China at that time was the Old North Railway Station in Shanghai, which was a dead end, with trains going in and out backwards, so passengers could only go in and out through the ticket cutouts. At the other stations, there was a waiting room on one side of the tracks, and if you were patient enough, you could always avoid the ticket-cutting gates and walk to the platform from both ends of the tracks. Thus, the barrier to enter the station is not difficult. The hard part is running into a ticket check on the train, which is not easy. At such a time, I usually go through, and walk towards the ticket inspector with a scalp, as if the food car was coming back to pass by, when the glasses on the bridge of my nose can help a little, the ticket inspector saw a person wearing glasses, most of the time no interrogation, sometimes revealing, then make up the ticket to admit punishment, visible poor peasants only taught me courage, but not taught me wisdom. Of course, it is also my own IQ is not enough. In order to win the wisdom of the winner, lancao another collective household a friend for the most. He once had to transfer from the Longhai line to Beijing, and then to the Beijing-Harbin line, to go ten thousand miles away from the Heilongjiang borderlands, to visit his sister in the other side of the queue. He had only five yuan in his pocket, just enough to buy steamed buns to fill his belly. His trick is: wearing a military coat, collar buttoned up, under a pair of green army pants, in the event of a dangerous situation, that is, to lift the tea jar, with a standard official language all the way over to say: “Give way, give way”, the checker saw his attire, only thought he was a sufficient level of army cadres to turn on the water, how would think of a military coat inside no! Uniform, much less a red collar? Of course, we must respectfully “make way”. Five dollars to travel ten thousand miles, taking advantage of the people’s affection for their loved ones, the PLA, is the ultimate evil! I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a problem with it, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a problem with it before.
Henan is so poor that the number of ticket mixers is increasing. The railroad also has no choice but to send people with red armbands to block the traffic under the train, and then punish them collectively as hard laborers. After I arrived at the factory, I often had to go to Zhengzhou to borrow books and return them, so I couldn’t afford to buy so many tickets, so I continued the bad habit of mixed tickets for several years. Gong County, where the factory is located, is 60 kilometers away from Zhengzhou, but there are a lot of intellectual youths who live in Zhengzhou, so they usually form a group on weekends and use the group’s courage to mix buses. It’s not easy to gather them on Sunday night, but when they get on the train, they greet each other back and forth and recognize dozens of brothers and sisters, and they also become a gang. The ticket checkers later found out that there were a lot of fare evaders in this area, so they always started to search for them before the Gongxian station arrived. Once they were identified, they would move their feet to rub against their counterparts and eventually more and more people would come together to form a lump. The ticket checkers had no choice but to hope that the law enforcement officers on the platform could block them at the door. When the ticket checkers on the platform found out that the young workers had already scattered like birds and beasts, and they had agreed in advance to scatter in all directions. Almost every Sunday night, there were several “dumpling” events at the station, which in hindsight were spectacular. The young workers later invented a special tool with “high-tech” features. They soon discovered that there was only one key for train doors, which was common throughout the country: an outer triangle with a hole in the center, inserted into the keyhole, screwed into the inner solid triangle, and then pulled to the right, and all the train doors in China could be opened at that moment. Cut a piece of 9mm diameter steel pipe, put it on the bed of the train, crank the handle, and squeeze the three-sided clamps into it to make a good train key. It’s so much easier to solve the problem of getting off the train and out of the station: when the train comes to a halt, just open the door that backs up to the platform, get off the train and lift your legs. I had one of these “high tech” products that stayed with me for a number of years after I jumped the queue. It remained on my key ring for several years after I became a so-called “gentleman”, had a so-called “sense of identity”, and was no longer embarrassed to mix cars. I think it was brought back to Shanghai? According to the townspeople, they “joined the national cadres” and worked as instructors in the Lauschitz army academy for a while before they slowly “discharged their armor and returned to the fields,” and forgot about it in that nook and cranny.
The literary brother who traveled ten thousand miles for five yuan and I were graduate students from Henan Province. He took literature, and I took history, because I didn’t have a university degree, and I had to be discriminated against a little bit more because I was self-taught. I took the exam for three years in a row, and every time, something unfair happened. By the fourth year, I could only say, “It’s hard to take the test every year,” and felt dejected. He was so frustrated that he could find new words for his complaints, such as Hu Qiaomu’s famous line about crying for Sanni: “I work hard for you, and then I sell my affair. This shows the aura of a scholar of literature and scholarship, who has been defeated repeatedly, but still remains unrestrained and unrestrained. That year was the last time I vowed to “pose for the dressing table and sell my affair”, and a little story really happened: we lived in Gong County, and the examination hall was located in Kaifeng, three hundred miles away from each other, which was exactly the same as the saying in the Henan opera: “Bianjing is the place to catch the examination”. The only problem was that there was no post station and no bus, so we had to get up at midnight on the first day to catch the modern third-class train. The air in the carriage was so foul that every breath was taken by someone else, making you dizzy and dazed. That day, I got on a bus at Kaifeng Station Square, sat down, turned my head outward, and recited foreign languages under my breath, my mind already not quite clear. It was not long before I heard a Kaifeng accent: “Brother, what do you want to lose? I was wearing a blue cardboard suit with my jacket pocket unbuttoned, and an envelope in my pocket, which had been opened, but instead of money, I had a pass card that was more important than money. The first one was smiling proudly at me, giving me an eye roll and urging me to look inside the envelope to see “what’s missing”. At this point I came to my senses! This is the “thief”, who anchored me on the train and only got me on the bus; when he got me, he found that it was a pass card, so he could have rubbed it and thrown it away. And remind the owner to take a look and “check it out” on the spot! There was only about a minute to complete this turn of events: How did they do it? How do we exchange glances and reach a tacit agreement after we get the job done, and then have a little skit in the old style? I was young, and although I did not have time to figure it out, I was not as prone to misstatements as I am now. If I had shouted, “Catch the thief,” it would have been a disgrace to the scenery and to my intellectual dignity for decades to come. I finally held back that shout, and looked up with the same smile: “no loss, no lack of anything! The two sides worked well together to produce a modern piece in the old style. The two sides worked well together to complete a modern skit with an ancient style. At the end of the show, the thieves get off with dignity, the leader snaps his fingers, and the three men get off at once, their military coats fluttering, and then they are gone.
When I traveled in the US for a while, I also preferred trains to long-distance Greyhounds. The Amtrack is certainly nice, with few passengers, big seats and clean air. The washroom was so spacious that it was like being taken down from an airplane and doubled in size for wheelchairs, with perfume, toilet paper, and toilet seat washcloths. The best part was that there was an AC outlet on the side of the seat under the window. Ladies and gentlemen sat down on the bus, plugged in their laptops, and quickly typed on the keyboard with their fingers flying as if they were playing the piano. I’m no good. Even though I boarded such a train, it still brought back memories of my stay in China, and I couldn’t get rid of them. The above ungentlemanly memories, the absurdities of my youth, are what I remembered little by little on the American train, typing on the computer at the window. Naturally, I miss the young man who came up to the station in Kaifeng. Seventeen years ago, he helped me take the exam, which lasted three days and five sessions, as if with God’s help. He was a bright spot on the turning point of my destiny, can I call him a “thief”? But in the Chinese dictionary, there is no more appropriate word.
I still have a scar on my knee from jumping off a train in China twenty years ago. It was a time when I was on a moving truck and the train driver in front of me agreed to slow down for a minute as we passed the Gongxian station so that I could jump onto the platform at the station. I fell on the cinder blocks next to the tracks with a thud, fell to my knees, bleeding, and had to run out of the station when I pulled my legs up. This left three small cinder blocks on my knees, embedded in that skin, transparent, a wonderful pre-modern three-point marker, and a memento. They’re always reminding me: don’t play dumb, old buddy. Forget Yale, Princeton, next stop. Write about your China first; the country is white, the other piece is black, and you’re just a gray area between them; write about the five flowers, write about the three-inch key, write about the thief who opened the envelope and threw it back to the owner!
These are the words that remain under my skin. And of all the bad karma I mentioned at the beginning, the most depressing is the saying of the old Hegel: one can go to the ends of the earth and not get out of one’s skin. It is hard to imagine a more cruel judgment than that, a sentence that is a mark of fire, and there is no end in sight to that judgment: you are hopelessly out of your skin, and hopelessly out of this three-pointed brown mark.
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