Years of Red Dust Read Online Free PDF

response. “Here’s an article about prisoners being raped and branded in Japanese prison camps. There is no question about it now. Branded!”
    â€œYou’re sick,” Old Root snapped. “How can you talk like that? Everyone listen, anyone bringing up the subject again will not share the same sky with me.”
    A refusal to “share the same sky” was a strongly worded expression. No one had expected such a reaction from Old Root, who was just one of her neighbors, though an avuncular one. After his unexpected interference, the gossip about her unrevealed secret subsided.
    At the end of the year, Bai looked like a totally changed woman—like a stuffed scarecrow, gesticulating in the wind, trembling amidst the crows of terror as darkness came falling over the field. It was hard to believe that her beauty could have been shed so quickly, like pear blossom petals after a storm.
    â€œThe white petals stamped over and over on the wet, black ground,” Old Root commented. “Resurrection is terrible.”

(Tofu) Worker Poet Bao I
(1958)
    This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1958. It has been another victorious year for China in the socialist revolution and socialist construction. In January, the CPC Central Committee convened a conference to discuss the prospects for the Second Five-Year Plan. In April, the first rural people’s commune was founded in Henan province. In May, the CPC adopted the general line of “going all out, aiming high, and achieving greater, faster, better, and more economical results to build socialism.” Then the CPC Political Bureau decided to double the steel production of the previous year. All these sparked “the Great Leap Forward” movement. Across rural China, 90.4 percent of all households were incorporated into people’s communes.

    It was in the mid-fifties that Bao Hong moved into Red Dust Lane from Ningbo, where he had been a young apprentice in the local tofu shop. Confident of his tofu-making skill, he had intended to pursue the same profession in Shanghai. In 1958, following Chairman Mao’s call for unprecedented development of the steel industry in “the Great Leap Forward,” Bao got a job in Shanghai No. 3 Steel Plant instead.
    That year witnessed, among other political movements, a nationwide campaign called Red Flag Folk Songs, which was aimed at pushing workers and peasants to the forefront as writers and artists. For Chairman Mao, this was not an impulsive decision. As early as 1942, in a talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, he had already set forth his theory that literature and art should serve politics. So it was now a matter of necessity that a large team of worker and peasant writers play a dominant role in the construction of the new socialist China.
    On an early spring morning, a senior editor of
Liberation Daily
came to the steel plant. Bao happened to be taking a lunch break, wiping the sweat from his forehead, digging into a bowl of rice with fried tofu. As the white-haired editor explained the purpose of his visit to the steelworker, Bao laughed, shaking his head like a rattle-tambourine. “You’re kidding. I’ve only studied for three years in elementary school. If you want me to make a piece of tofu, no problem—you’ll have one as white as jade in no time. But how can I write a poem for your magazine?”
    â€œBut I’m looking for a worker poet for our magazine,” the editor persisted.
    â€œWhat can I say?” Bao responded. “Look at this piece of tofu. It tastes like rice glue. What’s wrong? The soybean. Indeed, what kind of soybean makes what kind of tofu. And the same with the water, which has produced the dull color of this tofu. The peddler’s such a lousy one that I’ll never buy from him again. Anyway, what an uneducated worker says will never interest an intellectual like you. No,