The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [36]
“Presto!”
As he and Neal left, the warm ripple of a woman’s laughter followed them.
5
Xao Xiyang took the lid off the mug and sipped at the green tea. His neck ached, his eyes hurt, and even the fine quality of this particular tea did nothing to change the stacks of figures on his desk.
He sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette. The acrid taste of the cheap tobacco burned his mouth. His lesser colleagues teased him—as regional party secretary he could easily have used the “back door” to procure as many Marlboros as they could bring from Hong Kong—but the habit of caution was still with him. He had known men to be imprisoned during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution for far lesser “crimes” than smoking American cigarettes.
He took off his glasses and wiped them on the short sleeve of his cheap cotton shirt. He could smell his own stale perspiration in his armpits. He glanced at his watch and realized that he had been poring over the agricultural statistics for seven hours. And still they didn’t change.
Ninety-seven million people in this province, Xao thought. More than in the entire Han Dynasty at its height, more than the Ming, more than Rome. I am responsible for ninety-seven million people. And I don’t know how to feed them. Here, in the so-called Rice Bowl of China, we can no longer feed ourselves. A cultural revolution indeed.
His assistant, Peng, currying favor, had repeated to him the flattering play on words that was being repeated in the teahouses: “If you want to eat, go see Xao Xiyang.” And it was true that he had made some reforms, throwing out some of the ideologues who were so badly mismanaging some of the production teams. But “some” was not good enough. The reforms had to be systemic.
And the system was so idiotic, Xao thought as he took another long drag on his cigarette. Insane, really. And I blame you, old friend, he thought, looking at the Chairman’s portrait that hung on the office wall, as it did on all office walls.
They had begun as tongmen-jr—comrades—although the Party cliché was a curse on his tongue now. He had looked up to the Chairman then, almost as an older brother. He had joined the Party, fought the Kuomintang, lost, and joined the Chairman on the Long March. How clear things seemed in those days, how clear and pure in the crystalline air of the mountains, when he and the Chairman and all the rest were fighting to build a new China in a new world.
And the fighting. Fighting the Kuomintang, and then the Japanese, and then the Kuomingtang again. Fighting with the Chairman’s guidance, under his precepts of guerrilla war. Like fish swimming in the sea of the people. And as they fought, they liberated, came to control vast areas of the country. And they threw out the landlords and gave the land to the peasants, then recruited the peasants for the army. And he remembered that when they retreated from a village, the Kuomingtang would come back in and shoot all the peasants who had been left behind.
What fighting he had seen! Bodies stacked like rice hulls along the side of the road. Entire villages beheaded by the Japanese. He remembered the Japanese patrol they had pinned down in the mountain pass—they had picked them off one by one over the course of three days. When finally they went to loot the bodies, they saw that some of the Japanese had not been shot at all, but had frozen to death, their bodies stuck to the rocks by ice, their fingers frozen to their rifle triggers.
And in those same mountains he had met her. She was a courier, a message runner … a spy. She risked torture at the hands of the Japanese, but she never flinched, and he had heard of her before he met her. He chuckled at the memory. They hadn’t called it “love,” that would have been too romantic and decadent. No, they had called it a “oneness of spirit in revolutionary fervor”—but it was love. Such beauty … such soul …
They married in a high mountain meadow and honeymooned