After the last person lay down and the lights went out, he waited until there was a rhythmic sound of snoring. In the dark, the old cadre next to him tossed and turned, making the chaff mattress rustle; probably he could not get warm enough and couldn't fall asleep. He quietly told the old man he had diarrhea and was going to the lavatory. The underlying message was that should the night warden ask where he was, that was how to get rid of the man. He didn't think the old man would betray him: prior to the announcement that he was to be investigated, he was the leader of his work squad and he always gave the old man the lightest chores. He had the old man repairing loose hoes and guarding the drying square to make sure neighboring peasants didn't come with a sack to casually fill it with grain, then run off. The old man was a revolutionary from the Yan'an period and had a doctor's certificate for high blood pressure. However, when his faction was targeted in the movement, his military credentials weren't recognized and he, too, was sent here to the cadre school.
Dogs were barking everywhere in the village. Huang opened the door with his padded jacket slung over his shoulders. His wife was on the earthen kang under the bedcovers, and his little girl, awakened by the knocking, was crying. He hastily explained his desperate predicament and promised to get the bicycle back before daybreak. He said that he definitely would not implicate them.
Rain had not fallen for a long time on the dirt road into the county town. It was thick with dust and so uneven that the bicycle was shaking all the time. A wind started up, blowing dust and grit right into his face. He was choking and could hardly breathe-oh, the wind and grit that March night in early spring…
While at middle school, he and Rong, this classmate from whom he was seeking help, used to discuss the meaning of life together. This began with a bottle of ink. Rong had been taken in by an elderly widow without any children, and lived nearby. So, after school, Rong often came over to his place and they would do their homework, then listen to music. Rong played the two-stringed erhu well, and was crazy about the violin, but there was no question of his buying one. Rong could not even afford to buy one of the very cheap tickets for special student movies during the summer holiday break. He once bought an extra ticket for Rong, but Rong kept making excuses. He couldn't understand, but when he said the ticket would be wasted, Rong finally explained that if he saw one he would want to see another, and he would become addicted. However, Rong did not refuse to come to his house to play his violin.
One day, after finishing their homework, they listened to a record. It was Tchaikovsky's Violin Quartet in G Major, and Rong was enraptured. He remembered clearly that they were silent for a long while. Suddenly, he said he wanted Rong to know that the ink in the bottle on the table was not blue. Rong said, to be more accurate, it was ink-blue. But, he argued with Rong, when people saw this color and said it was blue or ink-blue, it established an agreement or a convention that gave it a common name, but, in fact, the color seen by each person was not necessarily the same. Rong disagreed, saying that however either one of them saw it, the color didn't change. The color, of course, did not change, but whether or not the color seen in the eyes of each person was the same, no one could know. Rong said there had to be an explanation. What was communicated was simply the term "blue," or "ink-blue," and, in fact, the visual perception conveyed by the same word was different. Rong asked what was the color of the ink in the bottle? He said who knows? Rong was silent for a while and then said he found it all a bit scary.
The yellow-orange rays of the afternoon sun were shining on the floorboards of the room. Years of washing and scrubbing had made the grain of the wood stand out. Suddenly, he was infected by Rong's terror. With the sun shining on them, even those very real floorboards became odd, and he began to wonder if they were actually so real after all. People could not comprehend the world, and the existence of the world depended on an individual's perception of it. If, when a person died, the world, too, became murky, or perhaps no longer existed, then what definite meaning did being alive have?
Afterward, he went to university while Rong stayed on in the village and worked as a technician in a small hydroelectric plant. They corresponded and continued such discussions for quite some time. This sort of awareness threw into question their entire school education; it was completely at odds with the unwavering certainty of the ideals of serving the people and the construction of a new society. He came to fear that his life was disappearing, it was as if there was no place for his sense of mission or responsibility to life. Now, however, even just being able to stay alive had become a serious problem.
He knocked for more than half an hour on the door of the county post office, and even knocked on all the windows facing the street. Finally, lights came on, and someone opened the door. He explained that he was from the cadre school and had to send an official telegram. Writing the message was not easy, and it had to be written in the fancy jargon prescribed for personnel who had been sent to the countryside. Also, he had to get this schoolmate of his, whom he had not contacted for a long time, to understand the gravity of his predicament so that he would speedily find him a commune to settle in and immediately telegraph an official document accepting him as a peasant. He also had to be sure not to arouse the suspicions of the person in the post office sending the telegram.
The road back went by the railway station. A few cheaply built single-story buildings stood alongside the desolate platform, lit by some weak yellowish lights. Two months earlier, the army officer had assigned him and about ten other sturdy youths to go there to meet a large batch of new arrivals from his Beijing workplace. Office staff, laborers, cadres, and their families were all there. No one had the good fortune of being excluded, not even the old, the sick, and the children. It was a special train with many carriages, and the platform was full of offloaded bedding rolls, suitcases, tables and chairs, furniture like wardrobes, and also big earthenware vats for pickling vegetables in brine. They looked like refugees. The army officer called it "war-preparation deployment." There was the heavy smell of gunpowder in Beijing due to the armed conflicts on the China-Soviet border in Heilongjiang province, and the Number One War Preparation Mobilization Command signed by Deputy Commander-in-Chief Lin Biao had arrived at the cadre school.
In the unloading, a big vat was cracked, and brine seeping out made the whole place stink of rancid fermenting vegetables. Taking advantage of his laborer family background, the old man who used to be gatekeeper in the back courtyard of the workplace building, started to swear loudly. Whom he was swearing at wasn't clear, and no one tried to stop him. Anyway, the man's supply of salted vegetables for a whole winter had been ruined. With their heads pulled into their scarves against the chilly wind, people kept watch on their own little piles of "home" as they sat on bedding rolls or suitcases waiting to be assigned to some villages near the cadre school. Not daring to cry aloud, children with faces red from the cold quietly sobbed by the side of the grown-ups.
Three hundred big carts mobilized from several communes had assembled outside the station, and braying mules, neighing horses, and cracking whips created a greater ruckus than the village market. A small car was stuck among the mules, horses, and carts, and could move neither forward nor backward. Finally, with bright red badges on his collar and cap and his greatcoat draped over his shoulders, Officer Song emerged from the car. He walked to the platform, climbed onto a wooden crate, and started waving his arms about. Officer Song, who was in charge of the cadre school, had an army-bugler background and no significant revolutionary credentials.