Chapter Thirty

“The people who were big and strong,” says Bobby, “were the first ones to die.”

Bobby and I are alone in the English faculty office. His voice is muted. No Peking Opera just now.

“Everyone was given the same amount of food, you see,” says Bobby. “If you were very small, very thin, you could survive. That’s all, just survive. Everyone had a very difficult time.”

I squirm in my chair. I love Chinese-y as much as the next guy, but this is my first day back.

“All the books say the Great Famine was caused by drought,” continues Bobby, “but that’s not true. Those people starved because of Mao Zedong. My father was one of those people. I dug the hole to bury him.”

I know already that Bobby’s was a family of semi-literate Gansu Province farmers who’d never had much of anything. They’d always managed, but that changed dramatically when Mao decided to inflate rice production numbers so he could go down in history as an all-around genius. He did go down in history, having put to needless death more of his own people than Stalin ever thought about.

“There was a lot of pressure,” says Bobby, “to have very big harvests. There was no reason for it, but you had no choice. If the soil and the weather in your area only make so much rice for every wu, well, that’s all it can make. People know because they have been on that land for many generations. But now you were expected to double or triple that amount.”

Farmers were forced to use their rice reserves as seeds planted very close together. The result was a lot of weak plants that couldn’t hold their heads above water. At the same moment, Mao was pressuring farmers to neglect their fields in favor of producing crap-quality pig iron, to inflate iron production numbers. Mao’s ego tantrum, called the Great Leap Forward, starved thirty million people.

“In my own family,” says Bobby, pushing his glasses higher on his nose, “my mother gave up some of her food for the children. Some days she couldn’t get out of the bed. My father was a big man, so he could never get enough to eat. He became very sick.”

I squirm a little more, but Bobby continues with accounts of people dying from colds and minor infections. No one wanted to use the word starvation, least of all the local officials held accountable by Beijing. The extent of the catastrophe was severely undersold.

“Finally the government had to do something, so they said that every family could have a small garden just for themselves. That made a very big difference for us. Really, that is what saved us.”

Eighteen-year-old Bobby, head of household now, eagerly planted turnips and pumpkins and cabbage and other vegetables from the family’s secret store of seeds, plus a small plot of rice that he worked every evening after laboring in the common fields. The garden thrived and Bobby’s remaining family eked by. After several hard years, they were able to store a small cache of grain.

“This was so important to our minds,” he says. “It gave us a little feeling of control. One year later, we began to think about having a pig. That was a very frightening idea for us because that pig would eat a lot of our food. We could not imagine giving our food every day to a pig.” He laughs at the recollection. “After years with no meat, you couldn’t really believe that it would ever be on your plate again. When you are in a time, your thinking is just limited to that time.”

I nod. I never throw any of my food to a pig.

“Finally,” says Bobby, “in 1972, the universities opened again. There were no examinations because no one was able to pass. There had been no schools for many years, you see, except for studying Mao Zedong’s writings or singing some patriotic songs. So everything had to begin from nothing. Some officials came around and interviewed young people in every village. I was selected for university and my life completely changed. I was sent to Gansu Foreign Language School to study English. Then I was given a teaching job for one dollar a day. That meant my family would survive. I took care of my sisters and brothers, all five of them, for half of my life.”

Bobby leans back in his chair, removes his glasses, and massages his thick eyebrows. “I can’t believe it, really. Soon I will retire, and I have enough money to do whatever I want. I remember how to farm. I can hold some earth in my hand and know exactly what to do with it. Maybe I will buy some piece of land in the United States and be a farmer again.”

I nod, picturing Bobby somewhere outside Des Moines in a John Deere cap, singing falsetto through his nose as he throws some of his food to a pig. Hey, if I can be a Chinese schoolteacher…

Bobby has promised me a personal translation of Li Bai’s poem, “Drinking Alone in the Moonlight,” which has never been properly rendered in English, says he. Every Chinese character has multiple meanings, thus every Chinese poem has multiple threads running through it, and all but one are lost in translation. Not to worry, though. Bobby’s on it.

After the final class of the day, I labor up the stairs to Lil’s apartment. My first day back on the job went well enough. The kids all stared at me, but at least they were paying attention for once. For my own part, I had trouble not staring at Itsy, who kept those spooky eyes of hers demurely down. Once I thought I saw a sly smile at the edges of her pout, or so I congratulated myself. It was the smile of a cat who’d just passed a wonderful night with the canary.

“How’d it go with your father?” I asked her after class.

Rui Long shrugged her bird-like shoulders. “I think I’m grounded. That auntie woman walked me to school this morning. I guess she’ll be walking me home, too.”

That could actually be a good arrangement. Not only does my body need a little rehab, but this is China, where the top three national pastimes are gossiping over rice, gossiping over noodles, and gossiping over Twice Cook Pork. No one keeps this kind of nugget secret for long here, if indeed it’s a secret now.

At the top of the stairs, I pant my way beneath and around the neighbors’ wash. Never walk beneath a pair of trousers, I’m told. Especially if you’re wearing them. I push open the door of the apartment and hear a scraping sound. Looking down, I find that a manila envelope was slipped beneath the door while I was away.

Inside the envelope is a fresh raggedy page from Tree’s dream journal. This would be page two of Chapter Thirteen. I decide to make myself a drink before reading it. Dropping the page next to the computer, I hit the on button and walk into the postage-stamp kitchen.

Ah. As I roll up my one shirt sleeve to wash, I’m pleased to see the tiny beginnings of a forest of mushrooms erupting from the vermiculite in the aquarium. Their color, a menacing dark red, is beginning to show. The kai xin gou, on the other hand, could be in a spot of trouble. That nasty crack has grown in size, all but cutting the bell-pepper thing in half. As I wash my hands, I give it a bit more toxic Chinese tap water. That’ll help.

I lean forward over the kitchen sink to check the status of my gold maxillary first premolar crown out on the ledge. It’s still there, dotting the third eye of Immortal Korean Chocolate Buddha. He’s still laughing. At me, I think.

As I wash my hands, I wonder what that little nugget of gold might actually bring. I also wonder how, in the middle of a city of eleven million Chinese, a six-foot-four near-albino with a machete might go about harvesting a three-meter length of bamboo without being noticed. But a helicopter and rope-ladder seems out of the question.

Tree phoned me this morning to crow about the new pages, and of course I said I was gratified. She apologized for not delivering them herself, but she and her Mr. Xu are up to their mmmm’s just now. “Julian,” she said on the phone, “this Fibonacci stuff is the most exciting information I’ve ever encountered. I’m doing my whole show on it this week.”

The last time Tree stumbled onto something really exciting, she and Lillian and I wound up inside a refrigerator carton with a candle, the Kabbalah, and a double-terminated Herkimer quartz crystal. Naked.

The first page is good, by the way. No, it’s really good. I went over it several times last night, more than a little jealous at how deftly the conclusion is turning in a direction I’d totally failed to anticipate. Odd, though. Truman is talking dip slopes and other obscure geologists’ terms that can’t have very much to do with Southern Noir. I’m more than a little curious about this second page.

I seize the gin bottle by the neck and suck on it for a little while. My definition of making myself a drink these days. There’s a popping sound as my lips come away. Shuddering, I return to the front room and the American Teacher’s Computer and say hi to Cowboy Shirt Elvis. He doesn’t reply. I decide to make a quick check of my email and there encounter the usual spams, chain forwards, too-little too-late petitions against the Iraqi war—uh, operation—and another all-caps message from Jeremy, which I delete unopened. Sore loser.

Now my eyes register a name I’ve never before seen in print, let alone in my personal inbox: Ana Manguella. I open the message.

Dear Julian,

What a surprise to encounter you at the museum! It was quite a chain of improbable circumstances that put me there that day, and I’ve reflected on what that could mean. Still don’t know! But, recalling our conversation on the train, I thought you might be interested in the link below. Happy reading.

All the best,

Ana

The link takes me to a highly academic site on European mythology that features an article on Heracles. Above the article is an old drawing of our superhero, club in hand and lion skin adorning his head. With the aid of his cousin, Iolaus, Heracles is battling the wicked Hydra. He/they don’t seem to be making much headway.

Deciding to put off reading the article till I’ve savored Truman’s latest page—and made myself another drink—I thank Ana for the information and ask whether she might be able to free up some time for an afternoon stroll along Kowloon Bay. No woman can resist being walked beside a body of water. It can be a sewage treatment lagoon. Doesn’t matter.

After mailing and downing drink number two, I break out Page Two. Nothing earth-shattering. More wacky handwriting. More geological peculiarity. Here’s something strange. The first paragraph of the new page ends with the word “blue.” There’s only one other paragraph on the page, and it ends with “green.” Curious, I go back to the first page of Chapter Thirteen, which too is composed of exactly two paragraphs, the first concluding with the word “beware,” the other “sheen.”

We won’t think about that just now.