After dinner Bin was sitting outside the dormitory house, smoking and waving a fan on which spread a misty landscape — a temple, a river, and two slender boats, each punted by a tiny fisherman in a straw hat. His Adam’s apple moved up and down while his lean face looked tense. He was deep in thought; his small eyes narrowed as the bushy brows joined. Above his head flared a 25-watt lightbulb, around which a puff of gnats were flitting, a few mosquitoes buzzing among them. The air smelled of rotten fish and fresh corn. Beyond the high wall two trucks were tooting their horns on the street, as if quarreling.
In the middle of the courtyard, Meilan was washing bowls and dishes with an angry clatter at the faucet. Bin understood that this time he had been in the wrong. A wise man should do everything to preempt bad odds, as Meilan had told him, but he had been impervious to reason and let the bad odds multiply. Unlike his plant, the department store had only sixteen employees; it was unable to build an apartment house on its own. So his family depended on him to get decent housing, but he had blown the opportunity. Who could tell in what year a new apartment would be available again? Heaven knew how long his family would have to live in this single room.
Choking with anger, he was determined to do something about the injustice. Even though he couldn’t correct the leaders’ wrongdoing, he wanted to teach them an unforgettable lesson and show them that he wouldn’t swallow an offense. But what should he do?
He remembered that the materialist thinker Wang Chong of the Han Dynasty had said something about punishing the evil with the writing brush. He couldn’t recall the exact words. That passage must have been in the paperback The Essence of Ancient Chinese Thought, which he had read a few weeks before. He stood up and went back into the room. On the top of a wicker bookshelf, the book was sandwiched between an epigraphic dictionary and an album of flower paintings. He pulled it out and without difficulty found the passage, since he had folded the bottom corner of the page as a bookmark. He perused Wang Chong’s words:
How can writing be merely playing with ink and toying with brush? It must record people’s deeds and bequeath their names to posterity. The virtuous hope to have their deeds remembered and therefore exert themselves to do more good; the wicked fear having their doings recorded and therefore make efforts to restrain themselves. In brief, the true scholar’s brush must encourage good and warn against evil.
Bin closed the book, profoundly moved. Writing and painting belong to the same family of arts, he reasoned; they are both the work of the brush. Yes, to fight the evil is the essential function of fine arts. As an artist and scholar I ought to expose those corrupt leaders. Whatever they are, painting and writing must not be embroidery and decoration; they must have strength and a soul — a healthy, upright spirit. A good piece of work should be as lethal as a dagger to evildoers.
After Meilan and Shanshan went to bed, Bin began grinding an ink stick in his antique ink slab, which was in the shape of a crab, carved out of a Gold Star stone. His hand kept moving clockwise in tiny circles. The ink was ready in a few minutes; he picked up a brush made of weasel’s hair and began to draw a cartoon. On a large sheet of paper he drew a huge official seal, standing upside down. Then on the seal’s bulky handle he sketched an ecstatic face with a few hairs on the crown. Up on the seal’s flat top, which was in the form of an oval stage, he put a dozen midget men and women sitting together in two rows. He made sure that two of them in the center resembled Secretary Liu and Director Ma. Liu, wearing a handlebar mustache, sat with his short arms crossed before his chest, while Ma’s long face was pulled downward as though his mouth was filled with food. Behind the human figures Bin set up a six-story building with broad balconies and tall windows, from which fluorescent rays were darting out.
The drawing finished, Bin dipped a smaller brush in the ink, then wrote a line of bold characters at the top of the paper as the title: “Happy Is the Family with Power.”
The excitement of creating a meaningful piece of work kept him awake after he went to bed. He forced himself to count his heartbeats, which were faster than the second hand of the clock on the wall. His temples were tight, and his head wouldn’t cool down; within two hours he got up three times to urinate in the outhouse in the west corner of the courtyard. Not until two o’clock did he go to sleep.
The next morning he showed the cartoon to his wife. “Good, good,” she said. “I hope this will be a land mine and blast them.”
Carefully he stuffed it into a manila envelope addressed to the Lüda Daily, a regional newspaper in which he had published three words of calligraphy. On his way to work, he went up Bank Street and dropped the envelope into the mailbox in front of the post office.
Two
FOR DAYS the whole plant was talking about the housing assignments. The leaders had anticipated the discontent and were not worried. Only two big-character posters, fewer than they had expected, appeared in the plant; both were pasted on the side wall of the office building. One was entitled “Workers’ Park Is Not for the Workers to Inhabit”; the other, “What Makes the Housing Principle Flexible?”
Though the two posters touched on bribery and the privileges the leaders had granted themselves, Secretary Liu and Director Ma were not daunted by this sort of writing. What they feared was that some workers might put out posters at the Commune Administration, appealing to their superiors to interfere with the plant’s housing, but so far nothing of that kind had happened. In fact, the workers’ bitter voices were dwindling.
The mollification was mainly the result of four buckets of human excrement that had been secretly dumped into the larger apartments, one bucket in each. For two days the unused rooms stank and teemed with flies and maggots; some of the walls were soiled.
It was a simpleminded trick, far from reaching the effect the rumor claimed: the leaders would no longer want the stinking apartments. On the contrary, they still meant to move in, though it was true that Liu and Ma had been outraged and almost called an emergency meeting after seeing the mess. But both of them were seasoned cadres and hadn’t acted rashly.
“We should report it to town police,” Ma said to Liu, returning from the park.
“You really think so?”
“Yes, it’s damage to public property, you know.”
“Forget it, Old Ma. We’ve no idea where the shit came from or who to suspect. The police can’t do a thing if we don’t give them any clue.”
“Then what should we do?”
After exchanging views, they decided to keep quiet about the incident and not have it investigated, because they felt that their reticence might pacify the workers some. Indeed it did; within a few days they could see that those resentful eyes became less hostile.
Director Ma assigned a group of temporary workers, hired from a nearby village, to clean and whitewash the walls of the apartments and scrub the cement floors with caustic soda and Lysol. The two leaders went to Workers’ Park over ten times within a week to ensure that no trace of human stench was left in their future homes. Afterwards, their wives also went over to check the sanitary conditions. Mrs. Ma wanted the window frames and the doors to be repainted; this took four workers another day.
In three weeks the cartoon appeared in the literary and art section of the Lüda Daily. Apparently, the editors of the newspaper hadn’t taken it as a significant piece of work; it came out only four by three inches, inserted in the bottom left corner of the page. Yet the author’s name, authenticated by the mention of his workplace, stood below the drawing. Anyone with a little imagination wouldn’t fail to link the happy crowd in the cartoon to the cadres of the Harvest Fertilizer Plant.