Years of Red Dust Read Online Free PDF Page A

resonant and meaningful to all of us: “Down with American imperialism!”
    However, Bai came back, to the consternation of the lane, in the middle of 1954. It was like a bolt out of the clear blue sky. As it turned out, she had been wounded, captured, put into a prisoner camp, and finally sent home. There was something like a shroud cast over her family, over the lane, and over those who had known her.
    No one knew what she had experienced while in the American prison camp, but in the lane it was whispered that she was now on the list of “Internal Control.” No longer a revolutionary martyr, but under suspicion from the Party authorities. After all, anything could have happened to her in the POW camp. Taiwanese and American secret agentshad been sent there, as was reported in the
People’s Daily
, with mind-boggling offers to induce the captured Volunteers to secretly betray the People’s Republic. No one could guarantee that she had not been brainwashed or bought off. With the UN embargo weighing down the economy, the Nationalist troops sulking across the Taiwan strait, and the American imperialists patrolling the Korean borders, the Party government had to be suspicious of someone who had spent more than a year in the company of the Americans.
    Initially, Bai managed to greet us as before. It did not take long, however, for her to realize that people were trying to avoid her. The neighborhood committee was at a loss about what to do with her. There was no welcome meeting held for her in the lane or at the hospital. The red flower disappeared from her door. Then her smile disappeared too, after the secret police came to visit her. We did not know what they discussed behind her family’s closed door.
    She changed overnight, like a frost-damaged flower.
    Indeed, she put us in an embarrassing situation. People knew she must have suffered in the war, but they did not want to get into trouble by associating with someone who was “politically untrustworthy or suspicious.” In the light of Chairman Mao’s theory of struggle against enemies everywhere, her unexpected and unexplained return bespoke, to say the least, of political unreliability. And people could not be too careful.
    Bai resumed her work at the hospital, but no longer as the head of the political study group there. Nor did she serve in the operating room. The hospital boss was worried about sabotage by class enemies, especially when high-ranking Party cadres were on the operating table. So she was reassigned to cleaning the hospital, working as more of a janitor than anything else. In Mao’s discourse, all the changes made no difference so long as the goal was to “serve the people.” But people knew there was a difference. Bai might not be classified as a class enemy, nor persecuted or tormented, but she was politically written off.
    She was too clever a girl not to be aware of all this, but what could she possibly do, except hang her head low, like one with a sign on her forehead? She no longer talked to her neighbors, instead hurrying in and out of the lane as if she had wrapped herself up in a cocoon.
    She was, in fact, literally wrapped up. In the early fifties, people dressed pretty much the same all year round. Still, they would loosen up a little in the lane, in the summer, leaving a couple of buttons undone. Bai, on the contrary, always wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned up to her chin and long pants covering her feet, even on a hot summer day.
    This, too, seemed to support a whispered speculation that something had happened to her in the POW camp. People had read and heard graphic stories of what Japanese soldiers had done to Chinese women during the Second World War. The American barbarians could not have been that different.
    One evening, Young Hu joined the evening talk, waving a magazine in his hand. “Guess why Bai keeps herself wrapped up all the time?” Hu went on without waiting for a