China in Ten Words by Yu Hua Read Free Book Online Page B

briefly—I was a puny little boy—and then given me the following tip: nip in before your adversary is ready and kick him in the balls. “What if it’s a girl?” I asked.
    “Boys don’t fight with girls,” he told me sternly.
    My brother’s demonstration of Red Guard fighting prowess lost us our reader’s card. But I found this no cause for regret, because by then I had read all the novels in the library. The problem was that the summer vacation was far from over and my appetite for reading was sharper than ever.
    At home all we had was the dozen or so medical books my parents had acquired in the course of their professional training, plus the four-volume set of Selected Works of Mao Zedong and Quotations from Chairman Mao —the Little Red Book, a compilation of sayings culled from Selected Works . I fingered these books listlessly, waiting for some chemistry to develop, but even after much turning of pages I found I had not the slightest inclination to read them.
    So I had no choice but to leave the house and, like a man with a rumbling stomach on a search for food, I went off on a hunt for books. Dressed in a pair of shorts and a tank top, with flip-flops on my feet, I roamed the sunbaked streets and greeted every boy I knew with the call, “Hey, got any books at home?”
    The other boys, all dressed exactly like me, gave a start when they heard my inquiry, for it was most likely the first time they had ever been asked such a question. They would nod their heads: “Yeah, we do.” But when I ran to their houses, full of excitement, all I saw was that familiar four-volume edition of Selected Works of Mao Zedong —always a new, unopened set. This taught me a lesson, and so the next time one of my respondents told me he had books at home I stuck out four fingers. “Four books, you mean?” When he nodded, my hand would drop to my side. “New books, right?” I would ask. When he nodded once more, I could not conceal my disappointment. “Oh, not Selected Works again!”
    Later I changed my opening question. “Got old books?” I would ask.
    The boys I met shook their heads—with one exception. This boy blinked, then nodded. “I think so,” he said.
    “Four books?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “Just one, I think.”
    But that could mean the Little Red Book. “Has it got a red cover?”
    He thought for a moment. “Gray, I think.”
    Now I was getting somewhere. His threefold iteration of “I think” raised my confidence enormously. I clapped my sweaty hand on his sweaty shoulder and treated him to such an endless stream of compliments that he was practically purring with pleasure by the time we got to his house. There he bustled about, moving a stool in front of the wardrobe, then groping around on top of the wardrobe until he finally got his hand on a small book caked with dust, which he presented to me. I immediately felt uneasy, for it was a pocketbook much the same size as Quotations from Chairman Mao . When I scraped away the thick layer of dust that coated the jacket, my heart sank at the sight of a red plastic cover—it was the Little Red Book.
    All my efforts outside having proved fruitless, I had no choice but to try to tap latent potential at home—to “increase internal demand to stimulate growth,” to borrow today’s catchphrase. I had a cursory glance through the medical books and then put them right back on the shelf, completely failing to notice the wonders concealed inside their covers and so postponing by two years my discovery of their secrets. After that, all that was left was a brand-new set of Selected Works of Mao Zedong and a dog-eared copy of the Little Red Book. That was the situation typical of every household then: Selected Works was simply political ornamentation, and it was the Little Red Book that was taken up for study on a daily basis.
    I passed over the Little Red Book and opted for Selected Works instead. This time I began to read it carefully and in so doing