AT THE END OF ’72, Mr. Li was sent to a small coal mine in Anyang, Henan province, to work as an accountant. Henan winters were full of sandstorms. Black water flowed through ditches, bordered by white ice. If you looked inside a ditch, you could find small chunks of black coal mixed in with the gray gravel. The water sprung up from underground and brought the coal up with it. After every mighty gust of wind, clouds of sand and gravel settled against windbreaks. On the surface of the piles of gravel was fine black soot. It was perfectly reasonable because when the wind blew past the coal pile by the railroad tracks, it had picked up the fine coal particles. When he walked from his dorm room to the accounting office in the morning, Mr. Li took note of the orderliness of the universe. Everything seemed too normal for a dream.
Back then, Mr. Li looked upon everything with suspicion.
When Mr. Li got to work at the accounting office, he was always wearing a floppy felt hat on his head. This type of felt hat had a brim that could fold down and cover his entire face, allowing his whole head to stay warm. It was a wonderful feeling. Mr. Li would have liked to, wanted to, and hoped to wear the felt hat from morning to night. Henan winters were freezing, and the mine was on top of a coal mountain. Despite the firewood, the buildings were so leaky and poorly constructed that the rooms were always cold. But when the leader saw him wearing a felt hat indoors, he grew angry: stop scaring me with that devilish thing all right? Then he snatched the hat off Mr. Li’s head. That was suspicious.
When Mr. Li went to work, he wore a big blue coat. The coat was huge, but he had gotten it for free. Though it didn’t make much sense, it was still a fortunate turn of events. The one who gave him the coat was the chief of the labor section, a man from Guangdong. Mr. Li felt an affinity for the man right away because of the three languages that Mr. Li spoke, Cantonese was second only to English. He tried to speak Cantonese to the guy but the chief said: “comalade,” do not speak Cantonese to me la, or else people will think we’re insulting them la. That made sense, it was the same way in America. It was rude to speak Chinese in front of the Americans. The chief from Guangdong gave him the coat and said it was a worker’s entitlement. Mr. Li asked, what is a worker’s entitlement. The Guangdong guy said: waka’sh entitlement meansh the country caresh about you la. He didn’t fully understand, but Mr. Li didn’t press on the issue. Among the worker’s entitlements were other things like a rubber raincoat, a pair of gloves with rubber grips, a dust mask, and so on. Mr. Li asked innocently: I’m not going down the mine, why do I need these? Someone nearby rolled his eyes at him and said: you wanna go down the mine? Easy! Mr. Li shut up instantly. He had already spent two years at the cadre school and had learned a thing or two.
Mr. Li didn’t take off his coat when he worked. The advocate stared at him with a dour face until Mr. Li started to get goose bumps. Is it that cold? Why are you hunched over like that? Are you really that cold? Confronted with such questions, Mr. Li chose to remain silent. He walked over to the window and studied the thermometer. After he had availed himself of the information, he returned to his seat. The advocate followed him to the thermometer and said: fifteen degrees Celsius, and here I thought we were in a refrigerator!
Mr. Li knew that refrigerators for storing vegetables were set at fifteen degrees, isn’t that cold enough? But he kept silent. Inside of a nightmare, anything you say can and will be used against you. Had he spoken out loud, his world would have instantly transformed into a refrigerator, and he might have turned into an onion. He had learned much from his time at the cadre school. For example, if he pinched his nose in the bathroom, that afternoon, he would be shoveling shit until the smell killed him. When the advocate declared fifteen degrees to be not cold, Mr. Li was certain that if he didn’t stop himself and blurted out a complaint, big trouble would necessarily have followed. Mr. Li thought to himself: “This must be my Indian roommate trying to turn me into an onion!”
By 1973, Mr. Li had already internalized the rules of his Indian roommate’s games. Whatever he said, happened, just like magic. The basic rule of the game was you had to do whatever people told you to do, and you weren’t allowed to refuse; however uncomfortable, you had to do it without complaining. As long as he followed these two rules, even his roommate couldn’t do anything to him.
When Mr. Li worked, he wore a pair of a fur-lined boots. He was unaccustomed to the northern climate and got frostbite year after year. Back in America, it had gotten cold as well, but he had never gotten frostbite. Undoubtedly, this was one of his Indian roommate’s tricks, but as far as Mr. Li was concerned, this was one of the less impressive acts. For example, the blood-swollen turtlehead was a truly hilarious prank. A headful of bumps wasn’t bad either. Sometimes his roommate’s imagination was impeccable, like how he was sent to Anyang, in Henan. There was definitely no such a place in China, but the name was perfect: Anyang. What a Chinese sounding name! If I were Indian, I definitely would not have been able to come up with such a name. But the frostbite wasn’t a good touch; it wasn’t all that realistic, and it was hard to turn into a good story to tell later. The other gags were great, full of humor; but there is no humor in frostbite, only pain.
Mr. Li wasn’t entirely unshakable in his belief that the world before him was a nightmare, an illusion that the Indian created. That morning, as he walked to the accounting office, he faced strong headwinds. He could feel the texture of the sand and gravel that pounded his face. It was hard to be convinced that the Indian could have imagined all those details. As the wind coursed, the utility pole, the branches, and the grass all howled in distinctive pitches. It would be unbelievable to suggest that the Indian had created every single one of those details. Humans can only think one idea at a time. It would have been impossible to create so many sounds simultaneously. Therefore, if in fact everything was an illusion created by the Indian, he would have had to harness some sort of a natural force to conjure it. That is to say, everything he saw had an element of reality in it, in addition to an element of fiction. The difficulty was in trying to figure out what was fictional and what was real.
That morning, when Mr. Li arrived at the accounting office, the labor chief wasn’t there. He felt a weight lifting. The chief was a nuisance, forever looking for problems. Mr. Li didn’t know how to use an abacus, he always did math by heart. His mental calculations were both fast and accurate. But the man shoved the abacus on his desk and forced him to pluck on the wooden beads whenever he did the books. In the chief’s absence, he quickly put the abacus away. The sight of the thing gave him goose bumps.
Whenever the abacus was in front of him, Mr. Li couldn’t help but wonder, what the hell is this thing good for? To him, it looked like prayer beads that he had to notch whenever he was doing accounting as a sign of reverence. But these prayer beads were too goddamn inhumanly complicated. He swung his legs onto the desk and sat back to reflect on all the details of that morning. He felt that as long as the chief wasn’t around, and no one else was around, when he was alone, everything seemed close to its natural state. But as soon as people showed up, everything fell under the control of his Indian roommate. There was only one purpose for all this manipulation, which was to drive him crazy. It wasn’t as if he had committed some sort of treachery, all he did was flush the toilet a bunch of times. For his Indian roommate to try to snuff him out for such a trivial thing was just plain evil!
Mr. Li later said that at the time, he thought he was on the verge of insanity. On one hand, he couldn’t shake off his habit of using the scientific method to analyze everything he saw, looking for causes and effects, means and ends, arriving at explanations that didn’t have anything to do with his Indian roommate. On the other hand, no matter how hard he tried, he always ended up turning his suspicion toward his roommate. At that point, he felt like he was going to lose it: just think about it, we lived together for years, we had decent rapport, but this is how he treats me! The only thing he could do to keep from going over the edge was to tell himself over a long sigh: alas, let’s keep an open mind about this. Only then could he shut it all out of his mind.
That day, someone came to the accounting office to tell Mr. Li that there was someone at the bottom of the hill looking for him. Mr. Li locked the door and headed down toward the white houses in the distance that were the mine’s administrative unit. He was in good spirits, so he returned to his analytical habit.
He thought about how the houses on the sunny side of the hill had a favorable climate. It was relatively dry and warm during the winter. Not only that, but it was at the foot of the hill so there was no need to hike up after every outing. It would have been fitting to base all of the coal mine’s party, state, labor, and youth there. Yet, most of the housing was situated in a dark and humid gorge at the top of the mountain. But that also made sense because the entrance to the mine was inside the gorge. It wouldn’t have made sense to make all the workers climb four hundred flights of stairs to go to work every day. Had that been the case, the workers would have been worn out and out of breath by the time they even got to their place of work (the tunnel entrance). Therefore, the fact that the mining facilities were placed in two separate locations was perfectly sensible and not at all suspicious.
The houses at the bottom of the mountain had snow-white walls and gray roof tiles. They looked appealing, which seemed reasonable. After all, it was the face of the whole operation. But upon closer inspection, they weren’t all that appealing. The white surface was only a layer of dust. Where there wasn’t as much dust, you could see the earthen structure below made of yellow mud (adobe—Wang Er’s note). Looking up, the beams under the roof weren’t painted and had turned black from weathering. Several of the windows were pieced together with broken shards of glass. The paint on the doors and window frames was so thin that you could still see the striation on the wood underneath. None of that was hard to explain. The economic situation of the mine wasn’t exactly superb.
In regard to the mine’s economic situation, the president of the mine probably knew more than anyone else. He said: “comrades, remember to be economical. After all we are a regional state enterprise.” What exactly a regional state enterprise means is a mystery, but one could hazard a guess. The term often appears on the packaging of cigarettes and matchboxes. Whenever you see those words, it means low quality and modest prices. It was the same way in America; the big famous brands offered high-quality goods at high prices. The small less-famous companies sold things that were cheaper and of a lower quality. And then, there were the generic products that they sell at supermarkets. Those were probably made by regional state enterprises too. Therefore, since the mine was a regional state enterprise, it was economically limited and the shabbiness of the office was to be expected.
Even if he didn’t know what a regional state enterprise was, Mr. Li would still have been able to deduce the economic condition of the mine. They were still using chisels and dynamite down in the tunnel. There were only two electric mine carts that went out of order every few days. When they malfunctioned, Mr. Li was no longer an accountant; he became a mine cart repairman. Mr. Li said, I don’t know anything about fixing mine carts. But they said: it doesn’t matter what you know, it just matters that you’re from the mining school. Even if you have never eaten pork, you must have seen a pig run, right? You can sit there and help come up with ideas. If the electric mine cart couldn’t be fixed, the miners would have to haul everything out manually. And if the generator broke, then even the doctor from the infirmary had to sit and help. When she got bored, she used her stethoscope to listen to everyone’s lungs. The mine also had three automobiles, one of which he must have seen before at the American National Museum of Industrial History. He didn’t want to dwell on it. Had he done so, he would undoubtedly have begun to suspect his Indian roommate again.
When Mr. Li arrived at the conference room door, he was mentally stable. It was because his empirical investigations that morning had been a success. Had it gone on like that for much longer, his psyche would have recovered and he would no longer have been his awkward and goofy self. Had that been the case, perhaps Line wouldn’t have thought that he was like E.T., and perhaps she would not have liked him. If she hadn’t liked him, then she wouldn’t have married him and I might still have a chance to have her as my wife. Yet, the years flow like water and the things that happened happened. Things that have already happened do not have the potential of ever not happening.