The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [105]
And where the moor was brown, southwest China was green. The paddies were green, the vegetable gardens were green, the hills of tea on the horizon were green. Here and there a metal rooftop shone silver, or a pond sparkled in blue, but they were like buttons on a gigantic emerald cloak.
“The rice in this area,” Wu said, “produces two crops a year, so the peasants are always busy planting, harvesting, or tending their fields. Two crops a year is wonderful! If we could ever find a way to grow three, there would be no growling stomachs in China ever!”
He laughed at what seemed to be an old joke.
“Three crops,” Peng muttered. “A typical Sichuanese dream. We do not need more harvests, we need more factories.”
After a couple of hours they came to a sharp bend in the road where a small teahouse and a few shacks were clustered.
“Do you need to use the toilet?” Wu asked Neal.
“Wouldn’t mind.”
Wu led him around the back of the teahouse. A bamboo fence screened the lavatory from view. The toilet was an open trench about three feet deep, graded so that the urine ran down a slope but the feces remained. Neal discovered the physics of the operation as he relieved himself of the morning’s coffee and Wu squatted down to do something more serious.
“What do they do?” Neal asked. “Burn it off every day?”
“Oh, no. The shit is valuable fertilizer. The night-soil removers come with buckets and carry it into the fields.”
“Is there a lot of competition for that job?”
“It is assigned by class.” Wu’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Very often, intellectuals or their families who were exiled from the city perform this job. My father was a night-soil remover after he was freed from prison.”
“Is it a punishment?”
“Not really. It is just that city people do not know the skills of farming, and this is something simple they can do. It is very hard work, though.”
So, after a few thousand years of taking shit from the gentry, Neal thought, the peasants are giving it back, literally.
“We cannot waste anything in China,” Wu said. “What do you do with shit in America?”
“Send it to Washington.”
“That is a joke.”
“You’re telling me.”
Wu stood up pulled his trousers up. “Yet you purged President Nixon and sent him to the countryside.”
“I don’t think he’s lugging around buckets of night soil, although it’s an appealing image.”
“President Nixon is a very great man. You should rehabilitate him.”
The stuff you hear in men’s rooms.
“Perhaps if he corrects his thinking,” Neal answered. “Does Peng ever have to piss, or is he really a robot?”
“You should not fight with Mr. Peng. He is an important man.”
“That’s why I’m fighting with him, Xiao Wu.”
“I do not understand.”
Neither do I, Wu, but I’m beginning to.
“Dwaizhou Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters,” Wu translated from the signpost at the road junction.
Neal didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters, just a long, straight dirt road that stretched through rice paddies and wheatfields and disappeared into some low hills on the horizon.
They drove down the road for about three miles before coming to an S-curve among a copse of trees. On the other side, the road dropped into a valley in which Neal could see several villages, a dozen concrete grain silos, and a group of larger buildings that resembled a town center: the Production Brigade Central Committee Headquarters.
The car pulled into a parking lot in front of the largest building. A greeting committee of sorts had formed, and met Neal with broad smiles and an array of bows as he stepped out of the car.
“Mr. Frazier, please meet Mr. Zhu,