Years of Red Dust Read Online Free PDF Page B

there’s nothing you can do about it.”
    â€œHold on. That’s fantastic, Comrade Bao. The soybean and the tofu. That’s dialectic. It’s brilliant. And the water too. Thank you so much.”
    â€œWhat?” Bao was totally lost.
    â€œI will contact you,” the editor said, rising, scribbling several lines in his notebook in a hurry. “I definitely will call you, Worker Master Bao.”
    A couple of days later, the editor called Bao: there was a short poem on the front page of the
Liberation Daily
.
    Â 
    What kind of soybean makes what kind of tofu.
What kind of water generates what kind of color.
What kind of skill produces what kind of product.
What kind of class speaks what kind of language.
    Â 
    The name of the poet, printed in a larger type, was none other than Bao Hong. There was a short editorialnote underneath his name saying, “In his simple and vivid language, the emerging worker poet Bao has eloquently spoken the truth: the class struggle is everywhere in our socialist society. While the class enemies will never change the color of their nature, we, the working-class people, will prove our true selves in whatever we choose to do and say. The first two lines are hidden metaphors in parallel, juxtaposing the images with the following statement. The technique is called
xing
in the
Book of Songs
.”
    As Bao held the newspaper in his hand, his face turned white as a piece of tofu.
    â€œIn our socialist revolution and construction so full of miracles, a piece of tofu can be magical too,” one of his fellow workers commented by way of a joke. “A tofu worker poet indeed.”
    â€œI’m not a tofu worker,” Bao protested, his face suddenly scarlet, as if spread with too much red pepper sauce.
    However, it was a huge success, that short poem of his, and it was reprinted in the
People’s Daily
and several other newspapers. It became one of the most anthologized poems that year.
    Soon, a large number of worker-and-peasant poets appeared, like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Everywhere people could be heard reading and reciting revolutionary poems singing the praise of the Three Red Flags. A poetry competition was staged in the People’s Square in the center of the city, and Bao sat at the rostrum as a judge.
    Bao himself came up with a couple of heroic lines:
    Â 
    A shout from our Chinese steelworkers,
And the earth has to tremble three times.
    Â 
    After the poetry competition, the mayor of Shanghai shook hands with him at the Second Shanghai Literature and Art Conference. The radio interviewed him. The magazines covered him. The rush of invitations from companies and schools inundated him.
    Bao then became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, which supported a limited number of “professional writers” by providing them with a salary equivalent to the amount they had made from their previous work units. This program was created in the interest of furthering socialist literature and art, Bao declared proudly in the lane, so that a revolutionary worker like him could concentrate on writing at home instead of having to work from eight to five in the steel plant. Xin, the head of the Writers’ Association—as well as a veteran Party writer who had attended the Yan’an Forum Talk in 1942—had personally recommended Bao for membership.
    Now Bao wrote full-time in his
tingzijian
room, which had a curtained window above one of the lane’s common sinks. While washing in the sink, the housewives in the lane could not help standing on tiptoe and peering in. He was seen reading seriously with a pair of glasses, making notes, thumbing through a large dictionary half the size of the table in his room. He came less and less to our evening talk at the lane entrance. When he did, he began speakinglike a man of letters, flashing out new terms like “revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary