Country Driving [169]
If there were any bosses in the crowd, I couldn’t recognize them, and there weren’t any sisters either. The bikinis on the marquee drew strictly men: they milled around in front of the sign, listening to the barker. Many of them were dressed in their work uniforms; some wore hard hats. The troupe charged five yuan for entrance—about sixty cents, a little more than an hour’s wages for the average worker. Over the course of half an hour, the barker patiently coaxed them into the tent—“Wor-k-e-rs and bo-s-s-es!”—and all told they drew seventy customers. The audience sat on narrow benches, facing a rough stage of unpainted boards.
The show began with a middle-aged woman who sang a patriotic song about development entitled “Walking Into a New Era.” After that, two girls appeared wearing bras, panties, and white bobby socks. One girl was tall and thin; the other short and fat; together they danced to electronic music. They ignored the beat and they ignored each other; each woman seemed to dance to some private melody in her head. They did not smile and their eyes remained fixed on the boards at their feet. Periodically the barker—now he had become the MC—called into the microphone: “Shake it girls, shake it! Shake it, shake it, shake it!”
The crowd was silent, and the only signs of life were the cigarettes that glowed in the darkness. The men looked dazed—maybe that’s inevitable when people breathe pleather for ten hours and then watch such an odd progression of acts. A young man came onstage and performed a halfhearted breakdance routine, and then the girls in panties and bobby socks returned. They were followed by an older man with the haggard face of a consumptive, who gave a thin-lipped smile and sang a popular song called “The Tibetan Plateau.” Next, a man and a woman performed a comedy sketch that ended with the man’s zipper down and the woman wielding a cleaver. After that, the MC took the stage and embarked on a long monologue. He told a story about his childhood, and how he’d grown up a lonely boy in a poor village where most adults had migrated. His mother and father left to find factory work, and over the years they lost touch, which made the boy feel guilty for depending on his grandparents. Finally he took to the road, traveling through coastal regions, searching for his parents. He visited factory towns one by one, but he never found his family; at last he was picked up by a kindly variety show troupe. At the end of the monologue, a woman appeared from the wings, carrying a fresh-cooked meal in a pot. “Mama! Mama!” the MC wailed, and then the woman stepped offstage—it was only a dream.
After the story was finished, the MC passed around a bowl, looking for donations from the audience. The men’s faces remained impassive but some of them contributed small bills. They gave more freely during the shoulder act. This involved another performer standing onstage, popping his shoulder out of its socket, and writhing in pain while the cash bowl made a torturously slow circuit of the tent. The show ended when one of the dancing girls—face unsmiling, eyes fixed on the floor—slowly pulled down her panties to flash a good five seconds of frontal nudity. Finally the crowd responded: the men murmured and sat up straight and their cigarettes glowed bright. And then it was over, and the music ended, and the spectators filed outside, where the sky had turned dark and the night-shift lights shone from the windows of the Tongfeng Synthetic Leather Company.
THE RED STAR ACROBATIC and Artistic Troupe was originally from a poor village called Xiaohong in Henan Province. They were an extended family: three brothers, their father, an uncle,