Under the Red Flag

  Under the Red Flag

  Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

  Under the Red Flag

  STORIES BY HA JIN

  Published by the University of Georgia Press

  Athens, Georgia 30602

  www.ugapress.org

  © 1997 by Ha Jin

  All rights reserved

  Designed by Erin Kirk New

  Set in 10 on 14 Berkeley Old Style Medium

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jin, Ha, 1956-

  Under the red flag: stories / by Ha Jin.

  207 p.; 21 cm.

  ISBN 0-8203-1939-2 (alk. paper)

  Contents: In broad daylight—Man to be—Sovereignty—Winds and clouds over a funeral—The richest man—New arrival—Emperor—Fortune—Taking a husband—Again, the spring breeze blew—Resurrection—A decade.

  1. City and town life—Fiction.

  2. China—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.I6 U53 1997

  813’.54 21 97-12235

  Digital edition ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-3678-7

  ISBN-10: 0-8203-3678-5

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  FOR JENIFER KASDON

  Acknowledgments

  “In Broad Daylight” first appeared in the Kenyon Review and was winner of the Kenyon Review Prize for Fiction (1993) as well as the Pushcart Prize (1995). It was reprinted in Norton Introduction to Fiction, Norton Introduction to Literature, and Into the Widening World: International Coming-of-Age Stories, ed. John Loughery (Persea Books). “Emperor” was also first published in the Kenyon Review. “Man to Be” originally appeared in TriQuarterly under a slightly different title and was winner of the Pushcart Prize (1997). “Winds and Clouds over a Funeral” was first published in the Indiana Review, “The Richest Man” in the North American Review, “New Arrival” in the Chicago Review, “Fortune” in the International Quarterly, ”Resurrection” in the Atlantic Monthly, and “A Decade” in Cicada.

  Contents

  In Broad Daylight

  Man to Be

  Sovereignty

  Winds and Clouds over a Funeral

  The Richest Man

  New Arrival

  Emperor

  Fortune

  Taking a Husband

  Again, the Spring Breeze Blew

  Resurrection

  A Decade

  Under the Red Flag

  In Broad Daylight

  While I was eating corn cake and jellyfish at lunch, our gate was thrown open and Bare Hips hopped in. His large wooden pistol was stuck partly inside the waist of his blue shorts. “White Cat,” he called me by my nickname, “hurry, let’s go. They caught Old Whore at her home. They’re going to take her through the streets this afternoon.”

  “Really?” I put down my bowl, which was almost empty, and rushed to the inner room for my undershirt and sandals. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  “Bare Hips, did you say they’ll parade Mu Ying today?” I heard Grandma ask in her husky voice.

  “Yes, all the kids on our street have left for her house. I came to tell White Cat.” He paused. “Hey, White Cat, hurry up!”

  “Coming,” I cried, still looking for my sandals.

  “Good, good!” Grandma said to Bare Hips, while flapping at flies with her large palm-leaf fan. “They should burn the bitch on Heaven Lamp like they did in the old days.”

  “Come, let’s go,” Bare Hips said to me the moment I was back. He turned to the door; I picked up my wooden scimitar and followed him.

  “Put on your shoes, dear.” Grandma stretched out her fan to stop me.

  “No time for that, Grandma. I’ve got to be quick, or I’ll miss something and won’t be able to tell you the whole story when I get back.”

  We dashed into the street while Grandma was shouting behind us, “Come back. Take the rubber shoes with you.”

  We charged toward Mu Ying’s home on Eternal Way, waving our weapons above our heads. Grandma was crippled and never came out of our small yard. That was why I had to tell her about what was going on outside. But she knew Mu Ying well, just as all the old women in our town knew Mu well and hated her. Whenever they heard she had a man in her home again, these women would say, “This time they ought to burn Old Whore on Heaven Lamp.”

  What they referred to was the old way of punishing an adulteress. Though they had lived in the New China for almost two decades, some ancient notions still stuck in their heads. Grandma told me about many of the executions in the old days that she had seen with her own eyes. Officials used to have the criminals of adultery executed in two different ways. They beheaded the man. He was tied to a stake on the platform at the marketplace. At the first blare of horns, a masked headsman ascended the platform holding a broad ax before his chest; at the second blare of horns, the headsman approached the criminal and raised the ax over his head; at the third blare of horns, the head was lopped off and fell to the ground. If the man’s family members were waiting beneath the platform, his head would be picked up to be buried with his body; if no family member was nearby, dogs would carry the head away and chase each other around until they ate up the flesh and returned for the body.

  Unlike the man, the woman involved was executed on Heaven Lamp. She was hung naked upside down above a wood fire whose flames could barely touch her scalp, and two men flogged away at her with whips made of bulls’ penises. Meanwhile she screamed for help and the whole town could hear her. Since the fire merely scorched her head, it took at least half a day for her to stop shrieking and a day and a night to die completely. People used to believe that the way of punishment was justified by heaven, so the fire was called Heaven Lamp. But that was an old custom; nobody believed they would burn Mu Ying that way.

  Mu’s home, a small granite house with cement tiles built a year before, was next to East Wind Inn on the northern side of Eternal Way. When we entered that street, Bare Hips and I couldn’t help looking around tremulously, because that area was the territory of the children living there. Two of the fiercest boys, who would kill without thinking twice, ruled that part of town. Whenever a boy from another street wandered into Eternal Way, they would capture him and beat him up. Of course we did the same thing; if we caught one of them in our territory, we would at least confiscate whatever he had with him: grasshopper cages, slingshots, bottle caps, marbles, cartridge cases, and so on. We would also make him call every one of us “Father” or “Grandfather.” But today hundreds of children and grown-ups were pouring into Eternal Way; two dozen urchins on that street surely couldn’t hold their ground. Besides, they had already adopted a truce, since they were more eager to see the Red Guards drag Mu Ying out of her den.

  When we arrived, Mu was being brought out through a large crowd at the front gate. Inside her yard there were three rows of colorful washing hung on iron wires, and there was also a grape trellis. Seven or eight children were in there, plucking off grapes and eating them. Two Red Guards held Mu Ying by the arms, and the other Red Guards, about twenty of them, followed behind. They were all from Dalian City and wore homemade army uniforms. God knew how they came to know there was a bad woman in our town. Though people hated Mu and called her names, no one would rough her up. These Red Guards were strangers, so they wouldn’t mind doing it.

  Surprisingly, Mu looked rather calm; she neither protested nor said a word. The two Red Guards let go of her arms, and she followed them quietly into West Street. We all moved with them. Some children ran several paces ahead to look back at her.

  Mu wore a sky-blue dress, which made her different from the othe
r women who were always in jackets and pants suitable for honest work. In fact, even we small boys could tell that she was really handsome, perhaps the best looking woman of her age in town. Though in her fifties, she didn’t have a single gray hair; she was a little plump, but because of her long legs and arms she appeared rather queenly. While most of the women had sallow faces, hers looked white and healthy like fresh milk.

  Skipping in front of the crowd, Bare Hips turned around and cried out at her, “Shameless Old Whore!”

  She glanced at him, her round eyes flashing; the mole beside her left nostril grew darker. Grandma had assured me that Mu’s mole was not a beauty-mole but a tear-mole. This meant her life would be soaked in tears.

  We knew where we were going, to White Mansion, which was our classroom building, the only two-story house in town. As we came to the end of West Street, a short man ran out from a street corner, panting for breath and holding a sickle. He was Meng Su, Mu Ying’s husband, who sold bean jelly in summer and sugarcoated haws in winter at the marketplace. He paused in front of the large crowd, as though having forgotten why he had rushed over. He turned his head around to look back; there was nobody behind him. After a short moment he moved close, rather carefully.

  “Please let her go,” he begged. “Comrade Red Guards, it’s all my fault. Please let her go.” He put the sickle under his arm and held his hands together before his chest.

  “Get out of the way!” commanded a tall young man, who must have been the leader.

  “Please don’t take her away. It’s my fault. I haven’t disciplined her well. Please give her a chance to be a new person. I promise, she won’t do it again.”

  The crowd stopped to circle about. “What’s your class status?” a square-faced young woman asked in a sharp voice.

  “Poor Peasant,” Meng said, his small eyes tearful and his cupped ears twitching a little. “Please let her go, sister. Have mercy on us! I’m kneeling down to you if you let her go.” Before he was able to fall on his knees, two young men held him back. Tears were rolling down his dark fleshy cheeks, and his gray head began waving about. The sickle was taken away from him.

  “Shut up,” the tall leader yelled and slapped him across the face. “She’s a snake. We traveled seventy kilometers to come here to wipe out poisonous snakes and worms. If you don’t stop interfering, we’ll parade you with her. Do you want to join her?”

  Silence. Meng covered his face with his large hands as though feeling dizzy.

  A man in the crowd said aloud, “If you can share the bed with her, why can’t you share the street?”

  Many of the grown-ups laughed. “Take him, take him too,” someone told the Red Guards. Meng looked scared, sobbing quietly.

  His wife stared at him without a word. Her teeth were clenched; a faint smile passed the corners of her mouth. Meng seemed to wince under her stare. The two Red Guards let his arms go, and he stepped aside, watching his wife and the crowd move toward the school.

  People in our town had different opinions of Meng Su. Some said he was a born cuckold who didn’t mind his wife’s sleeping with any man as long as she could bring money home. Some believed he was a good-tempered man who had stayed with his wife mainly for their children’s sake; they forgot that the three children had grown up long before and were working in big cities far away. Some thought he didn’t leave his wife because he had no choice—no woman would marry such a dwarf. Grandma, for some reason, seemed to respect Meng. She told me that Mu Ying had once been raped by a group of Russian soldiers under Northern Bridge and left on the riverbank afterwards. That night her husband sneaked there and carried her back. He looked after her for a whole winter till she recovered. “Old Whore doesn’t deserve that good-hearted man,” Grandma would say. “She’s heartless and knows only how to sell her thighs.”

  We entered the school’s playground where about two hundred people had already gathered. “Hey, White Cat and Bare Hips,” Big Shrimp called to us, waving his claws. Many boys from our street were there too. We went to join them.

  The Red Guards took Mu to the front entrance of the building. Two tables had been placed between the stone lions that crouched on each side of the entrance. On one of the tables stood a tall paper hat with the big black characters on its side: “Down with Old Bitch!”

  A young man in glasses raised his bony hand and started to address us. “Folks, we’ve gathered here today to denounce Mu Ying, who is a demon in this town.”

  “Down with Bourgeois Demons!” a slim woman Red Guard shouted. We raised our fists and repeated the slogan.

  “Down with Old Bitch Mu Ying,” a middle-aged man cried with both hands in the air. He was an active revolutionary in our commune. Again we shouted, in louder voices.

  The nearsighted man went on, “First, Mu Ying must confess her crime. We must see her attitude toward her own crime. Then we’ll make the punishment fit both her crime and her attitude. All right, folks?”

  “Right,” some voices replied from the crowd.

  “Mu Ying,” he turned to the criminal, “you must confess everything. It’s up to you now.”

  She was forced to stand on a bench. Staying below the steps, we had to raise our heads to see her face.

  The questioning began. “Why do you seduce men and paralyze their revolutionary will with your bourgeois poison?” the tall leader asked solemnly.

  “I’ve never invited any man to my home, have I?” she said rather calmly. Her husband was standing at the front of the crowd, listening to her without showing any emotion, as though having lost his mind.

  “Then why did they go to your house and not to others’ houses?”

  “They wanted to sleep with me,” she said.

  “Shameless!” several women hissed in the crowd.

  “A true whore!”

  “Scratch her!”

  “Rip apart her filthy mouth!”

  “Sisters,” she spoke aloud. “All right, it was wrong to sleep with them. But you all know what it feels like when you want a man, don’t you? Don’t you once in a while have that feeling in your bones?” Contemptuously, she looked at the few withered middle-aged women standing in the front row, then closed her eyes. “Oh, you want that real man to have you in his arms and let him touch every part of your body. For that man alone you want to blossom into a woman, a real woman—”

  “Take this, you Fox Spirit!” A stout young fellow struck her on the side with a fist like a sledgehammer. The heavy blow silenced her at once. She held her sides with both hands, gasping for breath.

  “You’re wrong, Mu Ying,” Bare Hips’s mother said from the front of the crowd, her forefinger pointing upward at Mu. “You have your own man, who doesn’t lack an arm or a leg. It’s wrong to have others’ men and more wrong to pocket their money.”

  “I have my own man?” Mu glanced at her husband and smirked. She straightened up and said, “My man is nothing. He’s no good, I mean in bed. He always comes before I feel anything.”

  All the adults burst out laughing. “What’s that? What’s so funny?” Big Shrimp asked Bare Hips.

  “You didn’t get it?” Bare Hips said impatiently. “You don’t know anything about what happens between a man and a woman. It means that whenever she doesn’t want him to come close to her he comes. Bad timing.”

  “It doesn’t sound like that,” I said.

  Before we could argue, a large bottle of ink smashed on Mu’s head and knocked her off the bench. Prone on the cement terrace, she broke into swearing and blubbering. “Oh, damn your ancestors! Whoever hit me will be childless!” She was rubbing her head with her left hand. “Oh Lord of Heaven, they treat their grandma like this!”

  “Serves you right!”

  “A cheap weasel.”

  “Even a knife on her throat can’t stop her.”

  “A pig is born to eat slop!”

  When they put her back up on the bench, she became another person—her shoulders covered with black stains, and a red line trickling down her
left temple. The scorching sun was blazing down on her as though all the black parts on her body were about to burn up. Still moaning, she turned her eyes to the spot where her husband had been standing a few minutes before. But he was no longer there.

  “Down with Old Whore!” a farmer shouted in the crowd. We all followed him in one voice. She began trembling slightly.

  The tall leader said to us, “In order to get rid of her counterrevolutionary airs, first we’re going to cut her hair.” With a wave of his hand, he summoned the Red Guards behind him. Four men moved forward and held her down. The square-faced woman raised a large pair of scissors and thrust them into the mass of the permed hair.

  “Don’t, don’t, please. Help, help! I’ll do whatever you want me to—”

  “Cut!” someone yelled.

  “Shave her bald!”

  The woman Red Guard applied the scissors skillfully. After four or five strokes, Mu’s head looked like the tail of a molting hen. She started blubbering again, her nose running and her teeth chattering.

  A breeze came and swept away the fluffy curls from the terrace and scattered them on the sandy ground. It was so hot that some people took out fans, waving them continuously. The crowd stank of sweat.

  Wooooo, wooooo, woo, woo. That was the train coming from Sand County at three-thirty. It was a freight train, whose young drivers would toot the steam horn whenever they saw a young woman in a field beneath the track.

  The questioning continued. “How many men have you slept with these years?” the nearsighted man asked.

  “Three.”

  “She’s lying,” a woman in the crowd cried.

  “I told the truth, sister.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

  “Who are they?” the young man asked again. “Tell us more about them.”

  “An officer from the Little Dragon Mountain, and—”