Free Years of Red Dust by Qiu Xiaolong Page A

lost years in prison.
    As accustomed to being a rightist as a snail is to carrying its house on its back, Jiang was befuddled. In 1957, Mao had called on intellectuals to speak out like “a hundred flowers blossoming together,” and Jiang, a young teacherwho had just published a history book, talked about the contingency of history in a department meeting. Then, all of a sudden, he was thrown in jail as a rightist, for the crime of denying the ultimate role of the proletariat in making history. He had since lost his ability to tell the difference between night and day, let alone analyze historical and social changes, having lived in a dark prison cell, like a lone bat.
    It was a hot, bright morning outside of the high walls. He blinked in the sunlight. The street looked so different. One block away, there was a fancy store with a dazzling display of summer fashions in its windows—a line of mannequins dressed in skinny-strap, tulip-cup necklines and brief-and-halter combinations . . . as if from a Hollywood movie scene. He rubbed his eyes.
    According to an old Chinese saying, “Seven days in a high mountain cave, and a thousand years has elapsed down in the mundane world.” Jiang shook his head. A red convertible sped by, from which a young girl in a yellow summer dress looked at him curiously, a pug dog sitting on her lap. It was another scene he had never before witnessed.
    After wandering about for two hours in a maze of traffic, floundering along the new roads and the old roads he could hardly recognize, making one wrong turn after another, finally he found himself approaching a used bookstore close to Red Dust Lane.
    He was not eager to go back to the lane. The attic room might still be there, but so much had changed.
How much
sorrow do you have? / Like the spring water of a long, long river flowing east!
Some long-forgotten lines were coming back to him. The prospect of him, an ex-rightist, reporting to the neighborhood committee seemed anything but pleasant.
    So he stepped into the bookstore, which was tiny, yet impressively stacked with books. The store appeared to have been converted from a residential room. With the wear and tear of so many years, his memory failed to register whose room it could have been.
    He was surprised to see a bikini girl on a poster marked “For Sale” near the entrance. In his memory, such a poster would have been condemned as bourgeois decadence. “For Sale” was also a new term for him. Fixed prices were said to be one advantage of the socialist system. Even this bookstore was bewilderingly different.
    There were so many new books. He could not understand some of the titles—even those in the field he had taught. He searched around for a while without finding anything he wanted to read. Then he recognized a piece of melody that came rippling across the store, Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet no. 1. He also heard a baby’s babble behind a bamboo-bead curtain at the back.
    To his astonishment, he came upon three copies of his study on the contingency of history under the bikini girl poster.
    Taking a deep breath, he took them to the counter. A young man with a thick mustache, apparently the ownerof the store, said with a scholarly air, “You surely have an eye for books, sir. They’ll be six hundred and thirty yuan.”
    â€œWhat?” Jiang gasped. “The original price is less than two yuan.”
    â€œIt was criticized as a counterrevolutionary attack against the Party in the fifties,” the owner said. “Out of print for many years. A collectable item. We got hold of them through a special channel.”
    â€œHow?”
    When Jiang had been snatched away from home, handcuffed, there were several copies of the book left behind. His wife had said that she would wait for his return, keeping all the books, though it was the books that had gotten him into the trouble.
    â€œYou will not be able to find it in any