Chapter Forty-Two: Encounter

Another shooting star streaked across the sky, dragging a long tail as it flew northward. Just then, a dark cloud drifted in from somewhere, covering the violet imperial star. Chen Wenbin’s brows furrowed ever so slightly, and a thought took root in his mind: Could it be...

About ten minutes later, I felt the stone I was sleeping on shift beneath me. I assumed I was dreaming, so I rolled over and continued sleeping. But soon after, a violent tremor threw me off the stone entirely. My hands pressed against the ground, sensing the earth itself was shaking. Slate tiles slid noisily from the roof of the house.

“An earthquake!” It was a term I’d only read about in books, never experienced myself.

It’s said that on that night, somewhere in China, a city was wiped from the map, with hundreds of thousands dead or injured. But that was a story for later. We, hidden on the mountain, knew nothing of it.

From that night on, Chen Wenbin came out every evening to watch the stars. Sometimes he’d arrange pebbles to make calculations. When I asked what he’d discovered, he replied, “Something major is going to happen on this land, and soon.”

Celestial phenomena and human affairs often intersect in astonishing ways. In 1947, in Zhidan County, Shaanxi, one afternoon, a huge fireball appeared in the northwest sky, traveling southwest. The local villagers said, “Chiang Kai-shek’s days are numbered.” Sure enough, a little over two years later, the Chiang family dynasty collapsed.

Since the spring of 1976, two revolutionary elders, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, passed away in succession. The Tangshan earthquake struck, and there were rumors of serious illness and unrest. Was there truly some portent in all this? I could not say, perhaps Chen Wenbin already knew the answer.

That September, the nation mourned a great loss, and though we were on the mountain, Chen Wenbin had told me the day before: the violet imperial star was gone.

A month later, autumn arrived, and the Gang of Four finally fell. The nation began overturning wrongful convictions. When I saw smoke curling from my family’s chimney for the first time, I knew I could go home.

Home—I had been gone a full year, but at least I still had one to return to. What followed was a period of redress and endless investigation. Because I’d fled, my paperwork as a youth volunteer was in the northeast, and my household registration couldn’t be transferred, so I couldn’t get ration tickets or work credits. But everyone knew about my father’s wrongful case, and the authorities didn’t make things too difficult. They simply brought Chen Wenbin and me to the county seat for records and registration. That was the last time I saw him, in the final month of 1976. Before the new year, I received a photograph from the north: me, Fatty, Yuan Xiaobai, and Chen Wenbin together. I wasn’t sure if the others had gotten their own copies.

In the lunar new year of 1977, I visited Wuli Pu, but the Chen family was gone. Villagers said Chen Wenbin had left a month earlier, together with his eccentric old master. It was my first time seeing his home—two mud-brick rooms, a yard enclosed by a simple fence, and a single jujube tree. Every house was decorated for the holiday, red banners and festive colors, except his, where a stark white mourning couplet was scrawled above the door in black ink.

I spent 1978 in Hong Village. My father’s case was finally cleared; he was innocent, and so was my mother. Yet after all the turmoil, both had aged overnight, their hair gone gray. Years spent confined to damp, shadowy places had left my father with severe arthritis, so he could never work the fields again. My mother, too, was left with lingering illness—her waist suffered serious injury, said to be from those people beating her with thick wooden sticks, all because she refused to identify my father as a spy.

By 1979, I was an adult, but our family was in decline. In the countryside, losing your labor meant losing everything. Once, we had only half a sweet potato left. My father offered it to my mother, who insisted she wasn’t hungry. Finally, neither could bear to eat it, and they gave it to the mice. That year, I took on the burden of providing for the family. With medical bills and living expenses, we owed over six hundred yuan—a fortune for a family like ours in those days.

In May of 1979, driven to desperation, I decided to take a chance. I sold our only pig for travel expenses, and joined many others on a southbound train.

Shenzhen was still a tiny fishing village then; my destination was Guangzhou. Everything was unfamiliar—the language, the food—but every day, countless people like me arrived, all hoping to earn their next meal. Thus began my life sleeping rough on the streets.

Guangzhou was both realistic and ruthless. I wandered daily, just trying to survive. I had little education, no experience, so I hauled sandbags, mixed cement at construction sites. Compared to men in their twenties or thirties, my strength fell short. Eventually, I found work as a rickshaw puller.

As the earliest city to open up, Guangzhou astonished me—a country bumpkin—with its sharp-witted people. For example, they’d import electronics from Hong Kong, assemble them locally. A digital watch cost only two yuan to make, but could wholesale for ten. Soon, from the businessmen riding in my rickshaw, I learned that in the north, the price would double again.

Such profits stemmed from the information gap and shortage-driven seller’s market of that era. After ten years of suppression, pent-up social demand burst forth. Even pirated cassette tapes sent north would spark fierce competition. So, half a year later, I joined the ranks of the street traders—the hustlers.

My first batch was fifty pairs of flared jeans, bought with half a year’s rickshaw earnings. I boarded the northbound train again. In Shanghai, I opened my parcel and set up a street stall right outside the station. Within five minutes, everything was snapped up. Ecstatic, I bought a return ticket that very day. Thus began my career as a hustler.

Clothes, electronics, audio equipment, daily necessities, hardware—whatever was profitable and easy to obtain, I dealt in. More than half my time was spent on trains, my destination dictated by wherever I could buy the fastest northbound ticket, regardless of where it ended.

This life lasted over half a year. Sometimes I made money, sometimes I lost it—mostly through scams, as I was still young. Whatever I earned, I sent back home. After six months, I still had empty pockets, belonging nowhere.

I met Fatty again in Xi’an, that time carrying a big box of Teresa Teng cassettes—the hottest items on the market. Under the old city gate, I nibbled lamb stew and lazily unzipped my bag, laying the cassettes out on a blue cloth.

“Brother, how much for these tapes?”

Without looking up, I replied, “Five yuan each, three for ten. How many do you want?”

He said, “So expensive! I think fifty cents each is fair. How’s that? I’ll take them all for fifty cents!”

“Get lost!” I hated troublemakers like this. I noticed his feet still planted before me, a pudgy hand reaching for my cassettes.

“Hey now, I said I’m not selling!” I looked up to see a face the size of a basin, capped with a deep blue Lei Feng hat, grinning at me. That big hand grabbed a fistful of cassettes, weighed them, and said, “Fifty cents, are you selling or not?”

“Get out!” I stood and threw a punch, but he was as sturdy as ever.

At the Drum Tower square, a dumpling shop called “Defachang,” Fatty and I sat before jars of Xinghua Village liquor. I couldn’t hold my drink, but I remembered we’d drunk together two years ago when we parted ways.

We got thoroughly drunk, spending the whole afternoon drinking.

After detouring through Taiyuan, Fatty returned to Chengdu two months later. Through friends, he found his father’s old comrades and learned of his family’s fate. His father was an upright man, who hanged himself in prison with strips torn from his trousers. His mother followed soon after. Their bodies lay in the People’s South Road square for seven days, no one daring to collect them, until a few of his father’s former subordinates quietly fetched wheelbarrows and took them away at night.

Fatty’s family mansion became the Revolutionary Committee’s office. He was left homeless, and before leaving, he sneaked into the motor pool, stole a case of gasoline, and returned to the old house at midnight. He knew the place intimately, having grown up there. Even the guard dogs once ate from his bowl. He soaked the house, once his own, in gasoline and set it ablaze before fleeing. To this day, he’s still an undocumented resident, with no home to return to, drifting around Xi’an.

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