Free Years of Red Dust by Qiu Xiaolong

overwhelmed him again?
    He reached for the pills, recalling that the year before, a counterrevolutionary had been executed in the People’s Square for the crime of splashing a bottle of red ink on a statue of Chairman Mao, an accident that had appeared to the Red Guards as an atrocious crime of assassinating the great leader—symbolically.
    What if he did not have easy access to the pills the next time?
    He decided to carry, in a green plastic wallet, a packet of sedatives hidden behind Jianyin’s picture. It would appear natural for him to touch the picture time and again—to make sure of the tranquilizer still being there, available through her gaze.
    To his dismay, the picture soon turned yellow, either through some chemical reaction to the pills or from the constant touch of his sweaty hand. It seemed a portentous sign.
    He eventually began to recover, but he did not really regain any confidence—not until after the death of Mao later that year. No one in school mentioned the incomplete poem again. It would be too ironic to chant, “A long life to Mao, a long, long life.” He still carried the wallet with the hidden pills, though he no longer worried about a nervous breakdown. The picture turned increasingly yellow with time, looking almost like a remnant from another life, and he failed to bring himself closer to Jianyin in person. Nor could he admit to her that he had picked up the picture and still had it with him. Their relationship seemed to have been framed in the plastic picture pocket.
    Then one chilly winter day, the wallet was stolen. For weeks, Peng was devastated, until he found a cold comfort in a thought: to the pickpocket, the pills, long pulverized, must have looked like drying material, to protect a still precious picture.

A Jing Dynasty Goat
(1979)
    This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1979, an important and eventful year for our country. In January, China established diplomatic relations with the United States. Comrade Deng Xiaoping visited the United States and held talks with President Carter. In February, Chinese frontier troops launched a counterattack against Vietnamese aggressors in the Guangxi and Yunnan frontier zones and won great victories. In April, with the goal of four modernizations of our country in mind, Deng Xiaoping enumerated the four cardinal principles: keeping to the socialist road, upholding the proletarian dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party, and upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought. The CPC Central Committee and the State Council ratified four special economic zones in Guangdong and Fujian. At the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic ofChina, Comrade Ye Jianying recalled the great achievements of the Chinese Party and people since liberation in 1949 and presented a self-criticism of the Party’s mistakes during the Cultural Revolution.
    Â 
    After twenty-one years’ imprisonment, Jiang Xiaoming was suddenly released on a July morning.
    The Party secretary of the Shanghai No. 1 Prison, high-buttoned as usual, in a spic-and-span gray wool Mao suit, explained the higher authorities’ decision.
    â€œIt is the right decision to release you in 1979, Comrade Jiang,” the Party secretary said, with all the imaginable sincerity in his official tone. “It was a mistake to put you into prison in 1957, during the anti-bourgeois-rightist movement, but you ought to be grateful to the Communist Party for its great policy. When we recognize a mistake, we correct it. Otherwise, you could have remained in that dark cell all your life. So, you start a new life today. Go back to your home in Red Dust Lane. We have contacted the neighborhood committee there, and the room is still there under your name, waiting for you.”
    In addition, the Party secretary gave Jiang five hundred yuan as a kind of compensation for these