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from “The Aeronaut”

That morning in 1979 when Li Mingqi first showed up at his doorstep, Gao Likuan bristled, and not just at the boy’s outlandish attire — although his bell-bottoms and flashy leather belt certainly didn’t help. Gao had known Mingqi all his life, along with his two younger brothers and six little sisters; the family really was that large. The Lis lived in the row behind the Gao household, and beyond them was Red Flag Square, originally built by the Japanese, who paved it with marble from their quarry in Fuxin. When the work was done, the foreigners released a flock of pigeons into the square, which locals swiftly caught and took home for dinner. The next day, they released another flock of pigeons but stationed soldiers to guard them with rifles; that’s how the Chinese learned that these birds were there to be fed, not eaten. The Japanese surrounded the square with banks and offices, abandoning the structures when they departed. In 1967 a statue of Chairman Mao was erected in the middle, and the pigeons all flew away, never to return. Beneath the Chairman stood a squad of stone soldiers led by a man with rolled-up sleeves who carried a great crimson flag that billowed in the wind.

The Li house was another Japanese remnant, covering some thirty-odd square meters, with a high ceiling and exquisitely crafted windows. Though the printing company had provided both the Gao and the Li homes, Li Mingqi’s father had added a loft to his, with five steps stuck into the wall leading up to it. A family of eleven, women sleeping below and men above— not a bad arrangement.

The main reason for Gao Likuan’s annoyance, apart from Li Mingqi’s ridiculous clothes, was that Mingqi’s father had once been Gao’s apprentice before going on to surpass him, and it stung to have the man’s son now courting his daughter. Gao was a senior technician at the company, and there was nothing he couldn’t do — no printing problem ever daunted him. He was also well respected: the foreman would offer him a cigarette whenever they spoke, and even light it for him. His status was due not only to his formidable skills but also to his long-standing Party membership: born into hardship, Gao Likuan had grown tired of people’s sneers and joined the Communists to print their leaflets. His leaflets were better than anyone else’s, his colors more vivid, only growing stronger with time. He had no schooling but learned to read and write at the printing company, and after he’d picked up enough words to turn a phrase, he would occasionally punch up the managers’ slogans to make them even more inspiring. One of the bosses later sent him a letter saying he was proof that great masters existed in every line of work, including propaganda. He wasn’t Master Gao yet — back then he was still Young Gao, and Young Gao spent two years printing leaflets, getting thrown in jail twice, first by the Nationalists and then by the Japanese. Both times he was beaten, so viciously the second that he was blinded in one eye, and subsequently he was known as One-Eyed Gao.

For some time after Liberation, One-Eyed Gao was happy: after all, it was a brand new world, a brand new era, even if he was still at the printing firm cranking out leaflets. It took a little longer for him to realize exactly what was so new about this world. The author of the complimentary letter was now the deputy mayor, and when he happened to think of Gao one day, he called the firm to ask if the propaganda genius was still around, or if he’d been martyred. The reply came: Yes, he’s still around, and still printing leaflets, only he’s lost an eye; he used to mix colors with two eyes, and now he does it with one, but the colors are just as bright. The deputy mayor sent someone to fetch him. They chatted for a while, and then the mayor announced that he was sending Gao off to cadre school. A few months of study, and Gao could be a deputy foreman. Gao Likuan said, I’m not presentable, I only have one eye, and anyway I’m no leader — I’m clumsy with words, I shake before crowds. I wasn’t fit to be an officer during the Revolution, and now that we’re in the New China, I’m very happy as I am, so why not continue as a worker? The deputy mayor replied, We owe you an eye, and that debt needs to be paid; besides, you have a bit of learning and your family background is impeccable — this is too good an opportunity to miss. Whether you want to or not, you’re reporting to school tomorrow.

Gao Likuan felt distinctly uneasy after getting back from City Hall, and asked his apprentice to come over for a drink. For his first visit to his mentor’s home, Li Zhengdao brought half a chicken and a bottle of strong baigan liquor. They pulled the chicken apart while they drank.

— Zhengdao, this chicken isn’t bad at all, where did you buy it?

— You can’t buy this anywhere, sir. I roasted it myself.

— Why the hell are you still working in a factory? Open a restaurant — you’ll make a fortune.

— It took me so long to roast this chicken, I’d just lose money. But of course I’m happy to do it for you, sir. Next time, I’ll roast you a rabbit.

Gao Likuan was delighted — not only could his apprentice make a mean roast chicken, he knew what to say to make you feel good. Gao took a big swig of liquor and began to impart his wisdom about the printing business. Zhengdao listened with his head tilted to one side, now and then tearing off a particularly delectable morsel of chicken for his mentor. Gao, who was drinking quite quickly, finally remembered what he’d wanted to discuss.

— I was summoned to City Hall today. I don’t feel good about it.

— How so, sir? When you got carried away in that big sedan chair, everyone just about lost their minds. Who knew you were an old revolutionary? You never said.

— Why the fuck would I say anything about it? If you have a big ass, you don’t need to take off your pants to prove it.

— That’s true.

— That courtyard in front of City Hall used to belong to the Japanese. That’s where I lost my eye. There’s still Japanese writing on the wall — they never painted over it. I don’t want to go to cadre school, but I’ve got no choice; I can’t offend the deputy mayor. I may only have one eye, but I can see clearly, and I know there’s no point in me going. Why ask a fish to walk on land?

They drank late into the night, and though Zhengdao stayed over, Gao Likuan snored so thunderously, Zhengdao didn’t get a wink of sleep. At dawn the next morning, he made Gao a large mug of tea and went off to work.

Gao turned out to be absolutely right — the wise have the gift of self-knowledge. The other people in the study session couldn’t really read, and some were even less articulate than he was; they spoke their local dialect, which was intelligible only to themselves. One man was an opium addict and went into withdrawal halfway through a class, rolling around on the floor and twitching until they sent him home. Gao Likuan may have had a facial deformity, but his bearing was respectable — his shoulders were broad, his face was square — and though he couldn’t speak as well as the professor, he could muster a couple of talking points when absolutely necessary. The mere fact that he separated his thoughts into points, rather than jumbling them all together like a bowl of congee, put him head and shoulders above the other students.

His problem was a weakness for liquor: he drank ten days out of the first fifteen, beat up a few classmates, and attacked an instructor who came to investigate. This wasn’t just drunken violence; he also used the brawling skills he’d learned as a child from the old martial artists in North Market, which had gotten him through his two stints in prison. Beating up class-mates was fine, but the instructor was older and had spent time in Yan’an, with bullet wounds that hadn’t yet healed over, making him a far more credentialed revolutionary than Gao himself. Yet this instructor found himself dragged by the hair along a passageway, losing a chunk of his scalp in the process. Nursing his injuries, he stayed up all night writing a letter to the Party, pointing the finger at Gao, touching on every significant revolutionary event he could think of — the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the October Revolution, the Boxer Rebellion, the Yan’an RectificationMovement — to prove that thugs could be found even in a classless cohort and needed to be torn out by the roots. As a result, Gao Likuan was expelled and sent back to the printing company with his bedding roll, and this time there was no sedan chair; he had to travel by bus. Li Zhengdao took the bedding from him without asking any questions. To be honest, he knew from personal experience about his mentor’s drinking habit. Once, Gao had gotten so worked up, he’d grabbed both Zhengdao and the chair he was sitting on and flung them out the window, into the street. And that was how Gao behaved when he had his freedom. It stood to reason that, cooped up in the cadre school, he would get bored and sneak out for a drink, leading, inevitably, to trouble.

Li Zhengdao was from Shandong. When his family couldn’t feed themselves, and his parents grew too hungry to move, he had set off for the northeast with a bag of seeds to cultivate the land. After the river burst its banks in ’40 and washed away his topsoil, he came to the city instead. First he worked in a secondhand bookshop, selling and appraising books by day, and taking the door off its hinges at night to serve as a makeshift bed. He learned to recognize a few words this way. Trying his hand at some more trades, he ended up at the printing company. Frankly, his proletarian credentials were also stronger than Gao Likuan’s, except he’d never spent time in prison and had no complimentary letter from the deputy mayor. Even so, he could hold his liquor and never caused problems. He was alert and skillful with his hands, and he knew that the times had changed. As he saw it, the floodwaters had just receded, leaving a swath of bare soil. Here was his opportunity. That evening, Gao finally gave him an opening.

— Zhengdao, could you roast me a rabbit tomorrow?

— Okay, I’ll bring it by your place tomorrow night.

— My hands do things they shouldn’t. Now that I’ve hit someone, I deserve to be kicked out of the class, but the deputy mayor has stepped in to keep me there. He told me to think hard about what I’ve done and come back again next week. It’s enough to torture a soul to death.

Zhengdao wiped a paper cutter and put it away in his tool- box. — Why don’t I take your place?

Gao rose unsteadily to his feet. — You would do that?

— I can’t bear to see you suffer like this.

— You’d have to stay there a whole month, stuck in a room all day hearing about Marx and Lenin. The gates are locked at night. Will you be able to stand it?

— I can try. If I fail, you can come and get me.

Gao spat on the floor. — All right then, I’ll owe you one. I’ll go to the municipal committee tomorrow and sort it out — where in Shandong are you from?

— Li Family Village in Shandong; my mother and father were both killed by the Japanese.

Zhengdao was being a little free with the truth there; his parents had actually starved to death, though if the Japanese hadn’t invaded, if they hadn’t conscripted men and confiscated rations, they probably would have had enough food, so it wasn’t a complete lie, either. Gao Likuan grabbed Li Zhengdao’s hand and shook it heartily. Shaking hands was a new thing Gao had learned about in cadre school. My apprentice, he said, even if I get married and have children, you’ll always be part of my family. After tomorrow, I’m not setting foot in City Hall again.

Zhengdao felt moved, and also a little guilty. He decided to make sure the roast rabbit the next day was extra delicious.

Li Zhengdao went to the class and really did disappear for an entire month. Gao Likuan resumed his bachelor lifestyle, working by day and drinking by night, donating nearly all his meager wages to the local bar. When he was done drinking, he’d go to the bathhouse for a soak, then lounge on the leather couch, taking a pumice stone to his feet, sipping strong tea, and chatting away late into the night. Ten days passed, and he’d all but forgotten there ever was such a person as Li Zhengdao. When Zhengdao came back after a month, his hairstyle had changed: it was longer now, neatly combed, and his little goatee had disappeared. He wore a blue polyester Mao suit. Right away, he made a beeline for the manager’s office. Now, what is this, thought Gao Likuan, one lousy study class and you think you’re brand new? How dare you greet the manager before your mentor? When you’re back in your worker’s uniform, I’ll deal with you!

He couldn’t have dreamed that Li Zhengdao wouldn’t put on a worker’s uniform again for almost twenty years. First he was promoted to deputy director in Gao’s workshop, implementing reforms in the production line and looking after some Russian clients, and then he became the chairman of the workers union for the entire factory, where he was charged with ideological reform. When they began rooting out rightist enemies of Communism, Zhengdao was the first to write a denunciation, naming a few of the recalcitrant older printers. In short order, he was promoted to deputy factory manager, with every copy of Chairman Mao’s Selected Quotes in the city printed under his supervision. He also traveled to nearby cities to give talks about how he had bettered himself.

Actually, Gao Likuan watched his ascent without ire — this was just his protégé’s true substance revealing itself. Even if he hadn’t gifted Li Zhengdao this opportunity, Li would have leaped into prominence sooner or later. After all, he never used notes when he spoke, and yet he was never less than eloquent, always ready with an apt quote from the Chairman. Moreover, Li Zhengdao continued politely addressing him as Mentor, and he never once lifted a finger against Gao through several campaigns. Gao called him Manager Li a few times, but he never allowed it, he would always say, Please, I’m just Zhengdao, without you there would be no me. That was good of him, Gao thought; he wasn’t forgetting the wok after the food was eaten. Then two decades after his return from the cadre school, the Cultural Revolution arrived and knocked Li Zhengdao off his high horse. He wasn’t thrown into the cowshed, nor was he made to clean toilets. They just ransacked his home several times, paraded him through the streets a little bit, made him assume the airplane position in a few struggle sessions, and shaved half of his head. He was removed from the coveted role of compiling Mao quotations and returned to the workshop, where he had to wear his uniform and resume the lowly work of operating the presses.

Over these twenty years, there were a few points where Gao thought Zhengdao had fallen short. First, he had children recklessly, nine of them in total. Once they popped out, he was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t give a thought to raising them, so this gang of kids spent all day long running around the streets, stepping carelessly on the backs of their shoes, the big ones leading the little ones without discipline or order. Second, despite Zhengdao’s promise that night, the roast rabbit never came. Gao suspected that rabbit would be more delicious than chicken, but even after waiting twenty years, he never got to taste it. Third, Zhengdao didn’t come to talk it over before hanging himself. Dying is a major event, and you ought to discuss major events with other people, but Zhengdao didn’t tell anyone. After getting beaten up yet again, he went home, gave all nine children a bath, then climbed up to the loft and put his head through a noose. All those years as a cadre, and such a selfish death. Gao had a lot to say about that.

And so when Li Mingqi showed up in ’79, even if Gao’s daughter hadn’t introduced him, Gao Likuan would have known right away that this was Li Zhengdao’s son. They looked exactly the same — tall and skinny, with a long, straight neck and deep-set eyes, like a foreign devil. After saying hello, Li Mingqi took out a handkerchief, wiped the seat of his chair, and sat down. He leaned his weight to one side, so that only a small patch of his white bell-bottoms touched the chair. Look at you, thought Gao Likuan, could you get any more uptight? Gao’s daughter Yafeng was twenty-three and worked in the transformer factory. She wasn’t exactly beautiful — her eyes bulged, her buckteeth pushed out her upper lip — but she was without question the most garrulous of the three Gao siblings. Even at her young age, once she got going, she would gab away for hours on end. That glib tongue persuaded her teacher to write a fake medical certificate, so she was never sent down to the countryside like all the other Educated Youths. After finishing junior high, she went straight into the transformer factory, earning over twenty yuan per month, more than anyone her age was getting. Yet on this day in 1979, Gao Yafeng sat by Li Mingqi’s side not saying a word. She was scared of her father and, like a mynah bird confronted with a cat, knew that no amount of talk would help the situation. Her big sister Yachun was bustling around, stopping only to pour Li Mingqi a cup of tea, and Yafeng thought this was true sisterhood, to give her this show of respect in spite of how much they quarreled. She itched to list Li Mingqi’s virtues, but when Gao Likuan’s thick brows beetled together, she swallowed the words back down.

Gao Likuan drank a mouthful of tea, glanced at his wife, and finally spoke: Make a bowl of noodles, Boss. Zhao Suying, a diminutive, average-looking woman who also worked at the printing firm, was four years older than Gao Likuan. Her feet had once been bound, and she had been married before, but neither of these facts was fatal — Gao’s missing eye made them an even match. Besides, her previous brief marriage was still childless when her husband died suddenly. After marrying into the Gao family, she had a baby every three years, two girls and then a boy, which pleased Gao. The only problem was Suying’s slow nature — she could spend half an hour walking between two telegraph poles. A crisis could be raging, and she’d still be asleep on the heated platform of the kang bed-stove. Gao roughed her up when he’d had too much to drink, but that didn’t make her move any faster. When he was done but still furious, she’d sweep up the broken bowls and chopsticks, then sit down and listen to opera on the radio: Mu Guiying Takes Command. Gao Likuan found himself thinking about China’s former capitalists, who’d assumed they’d come out on top in the New China, only to get held up by slow workers like her. So he gave her a nickname: Boss. Now the Boss stood up from her stool and went to the kitchen for a noodle board, which she put on the side of the kang, then back again for an aluminum basin covered with muslin that reeked of alkaline. We’ll have dumplings today, said Suying. That startled Gao. Suying held the purse strings, because the boss controls the money; that’s the natural order of things. He wasn’t even sure where she kept the savings book. All he knew was that she had some petty cash wrapped in her handkerchief, and when he wanted to get some liquor, she’d untie the knot and hand him a banknote. If they were having dumplings, she must have bought the ingredients specially. He felt conflicted. On one hand, he didn’t think they ought to treat Li Mingqi like an honored guest. On the other hand, dumplings paired excellently with liquor. As he mulled this over, he hauled out the small square table from under the kang and set it up in the middle of the platform.

[This excerpt comprises the first section of “The Aeronaut,” the opening story in Rouge Street, three novellas by Shuang Xuetao,  published on April 19, 2022 by Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt & Company). The excerpt appears here with the permission of the press.

The translator, Jeremy Tiang, writes, “The Aeronaut alternates between two time periods: a single day and night in 1979, following Li Mingqi’s visit to the home of his prospective in-laws, the Gaos; and a day more than three decades later, after Li Mingqi and his son have gone missing, and Li Mingqi’s nephew is summoned home to Shenyang from Beijing in order to search for them. The two storylines intertwine as the ideas planted on that one wild night in 1979 come to fruition many years later. This section comes from the opening of the novella, flashing back from the moment of Li Mingqi’s arrival to take in the complicated history between the Gao and Li families.”]

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