Red Moon

CHAPTER SEVEN fu nu neng ding ban bian tian Women Hold Up Half the Sky (Mao)

At the Bayan Nur spaceport, after Ta Shu watched Fred and Chan Qi being escorted away through a security door, he went and spoke to a group of security officers still standing there.

“Those are friends of mine, what are you doing with them?”

“They’re being taken for questioning.”

“I’m going to send their lawyers to help them, where should I direct those lawyers?”

The security guards conferred among themselves, made a couple of calls. Then: “Ministry of Public Security, Beijing. Inquire there.”

“Thanks for that.”

Ta Shu left the spaceport very worried. He tried to see the pattern, but there was too little he knew about the middle ground. That vast space between the thread of events he had witnessed and the great tapestry of the overarching landscape was like the clouds of mist that floated between the tiny travelers at the bottom of a painting and the distant peaks at the top. He needed to talk to people in Beijing. One person in particular, of course.

He went back inside and found that a flight left for the capital in an hour. He bought a ticket, waited for departure, got on a jet, sat in it as it took off and headed east.

As it hummed along he pondered the problem, feeling more and more oppressed by the downward pull of the Earth. It was like a giant press, squeezing him like an olive. He tried to sleep, but it felt as though he needed to keep his muscles taut just to keep his lungs working—even to keep his ribs from cracking. One g! It was a little frightening to feel how big their planet was, how fervently it clutched them to its breast. Even his eyes hurt in their sockets.

Finally, mercifully, he managed to sleep for a while. When he woke and looked out the jet’s window, he saw the hills west of Beijing. Here a town of nuclear plants lofted thick plumes of steam at the sky, marking a cold but humid day. The solar power arrays surrounding the nuclear plants were mostly mirror fields that reflected sunlight to central heating elements, so as the jet flew over them, broad curves of diamond light sparked in his vision at the same speed as their flight.

The hills farther on were cloaked with thick dark green forests. Ta Shu could remember when dropping into Beijing had looked like a descent into hell, the hillsides all cut to shreds and eroded to bedrock, the streams brown, the air black. Now, looking down at the revivified landscape, he could feel in his bones just how long a human life could be. All that change stretching below him had happened since he was young. Of course this proved he was quite old, but also it was proof that landscape restoration had become a science of great power: feng shui for real. Ecology in action. Life was robust, of course, but the hills of the Mediterranean, deforested in ancient times, had never grown back in two thousand years. Yet here below them lay a new forest, more wild than the wild. That forest was a living result of human knowledge. And of immense amounts of labor. If they could do that to the world—wreck it, restore it—what else could they do?

From the airport he went to the little apartment he kept in Beijing, an indulgence he could afford because of his travel shows. He dropped his bag and looked at the little place unhappily. Han Shan in the city.

That very evening he made a visit to his old student and friend Peng Ling. This was a somewhat desperate move, one he made only when he had a serious problem. He had become close to Peng Ling twenty years before, in a poetry class he had taught at Beijing Normal University. Even then Peng Ling had been a rising power in the political elite. Ta Shu’s class had been recommended to her by her psychotherapist, she later told him—or rather the therapist had required her to choose between studying poetry with Ta Shu or joining a Jungian analysis program that worked by playing with dolls in a sandbox, a very fashionable form of therapy in Chinese psychology at that time. Ling had chosen Ta Shu’s class, something they both became glad of. She had not been much of a poet, but she had been a joy as a person, and during their two years of work together they had become good friends. Since then Peng Ling had become a very big tiger indeed, but as Ta Shu himself was a bit of a culture star, perhaps, they had remained friends and stayed in touch, and met fairly frequently when they were both in Beijing. But Ta Shu never wanted to impinge on her time, and as the years passed he had gotten into the habit of waiting to hear from her, and contacting her only if something crucial came up, like a friend in serious need. This was precisely that kind of moment, so he sent her a message by their private WeChat line, and within minutes she replied, Yes come have tea at the end of the day, 5 pm my office, let’s catch up.

She was about twenty or twenty-five years younger than Ta Shu, and now in her prime in the Party hierarchy. Currently she was the member of the Politburo in charge of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, after holding many different posts through the years. One of the undeniable stars of the sixth generation of Party leadership, which was struggling to launch itself off the shoulders of the fifth generation, generally considered to be a weak one. By now these generations were quite nominal, extending back as they did to that first generation around Mao, the founders of the People’s Republic which had included Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and the other Eight Immortals. The generations since had been calculated very roughly by general secretaryships, Party congresses, and mandatory retirement ages, which combined to suggest that nowadays a leadership generation passed every decade or two. A very artificial thing, in other words, and yet still widely used, combining as it did the Chinese love of numbered lists with a more general human desire to periodize history, pursuing a hopeless quest to make sense of human fate by doing a kind of feng shui on time itself.

Whether one believed in that periodization scheme or not, Peng Ling was definitely prominent among the current leaders. She was the only female member of the standing committee, and so now she was getting mentioned as the woman most likely to break the ancient Confucian patriarchal lock on the top job. That would be tough, but it could happen; someone was going to be replacing the unpopular President Shanzhai at the upcoming Party congress, and who that was going to be remained completely uncertain.

On this day, her follow-up confirmation on WeChat had ended with welcome back from the moon and a happy face. So she knew what he had been doing. And when he was ushered into her office in Huairen Hall, deep in the Zhongnanhai complex of the Imperial City in the center of Beijing, she circled her desk to give him a hug.

“Master, how are you?” she asked, smiling cheerfully. She looked older, of course. It was always a little shock to see people younger than him looking old, a sign of just how old he must be. But Peng Ling looked healthy too, as if power had been good for her. He had heard people say she had just the right look to be a woman in power, and he thought he saw why. Of course one should be able to look any way, it wasn’t relevant, but she was bucking five thousand years of patriarchy, so it was good luck, or perhaps not a coincidence, that she was attractive in a serious way, friendly but formidable—like a favorite teacher, or an aunt you wanted to please—and also wouldn’t want to cross. Just a tiny bit scary, yes; or maybe that was just the power she wielded. In the end she looked much like millions of women her age.

“I’m doing well enough,” Ta Shu said. “I’m just back from the moon, as apparently you know, and now I’m feeling extremely heavy. How about you?”

“I’m busy. Here, sit down and let your immense weight sink into a chair. So what brings you to me? Is it something you saw on the moon?”

“Yes, sort of. I met a young American man up there, and then a young woman, who turned out to be Chan Guoliang’s daughter. I came back to Earth with them—I helped to get them down here, or so I was told. They were both in trouble. And I was with them when they were detained at the Bayan Nur spaceport and taken away. I saw that just this morning.”

She nodded, looking unhappy. “You’ve had a long day! I must tell you, I heard that Chan Qi got pregnant up there, and was brought home for safety reasons.”

“Yes, that’s what we were told too. She looks to be about five months pregnant. But now she’s back on Earth, and, you know, confinement for confinement—it seems severe to me. I can see requiring her to return to Earth, but I don’t understand the arrest. I don’t think her father would allow any mistreatment of her, so I’m wondering what’s going on, and if you can help.”

“So you want to help her?”

“Yes, and also the American man she’s with, who is in a different kind of trouble. An official up there named Chang Yazu died during a meeting with this young man, and he almost died too. Looks like it was murder, in fact, but then he was disappeared from the hospital, taken by some unknown group. Then, to tell you the whole story as far as I know it, the head of security up there, Inspector Jiang Jianguo, recovered him, and then asked me to let him travel with me as my assistant, so that he could get back down here. Jiang was afraid agents of a hostile organization would seize him again.”

“So you helped him get back to Earth?”

“Yes. I liked him. He’s a technician in quantum communication, working for a Swiss firm. But the moment we arrived here, he and Chan’s daughter were taken into custody. So I decided to come to you to see if you could offer me any clarification, or advice.”

“Not very much of either, I’m afraid. I heard about Chang Yazu’s murder, of course. I knew him, so I’m having the inspection commission look into it. Here, let’s have some tea. I can at least tell you some of what I know.”

“Thank you.”

They sat across a low table from each other, and a young woman came in carrying a tea tray, leaving it on the table beside Ling. As she tested the hot water in a cup, then sniffed the dry tea leaves inquisitively, she asked Ta Shu to tell her about his moon adventures, and he gave her what he considered the most entertaining of his stories, which turned out to be Earthrise and the feather and hammer. As he told them, she tapped on her wristpad for a while, and then brewed the tea.

“Here’s a little about Chan Qi and your friend,” she said after reading for a time. “Listen to this—it appears they’ve been released by someone, and have gone missing here in Beijing.”

“Really?”

“So I’m told.”

“That couldn’t have been easy.”

“No. It suggests there are powers involved above the level of the people who arrested them. Those were part of Public Security, and they don’t really have a tiger in this fight. They probably wanted out of the crossfire.”

“So there’s some kind of infighting?”

Peng Ling nodded, looking at him over her teacup. She tested it with a tiny sip.

Ta Shu said, “Do you think Chan Guoliang could have had anything to do with it?”

“Of course. It may have been his security people who sent her back from the moon. I think he’s the one who sent her up there in the first place.”

“Why would he do that?”

“She’s a troublemaker. Involved with some dissident groups.”

“Oh my. Tail Wags Dog?”

“Both Hong Kong and mainland groups. While she was in China, Chan could never be sure he had gotten her away from them, so he sent her off to the moon. Or so I heard. But apparently she is capable of getting into trouble wherever she goes.”

“And out of it too.”

“Maybe. That will be hard to tell, until we find her again.”

“Are you going to look?”

“Yes. I like Chan Guoliang. We’ve been working together pretty well, we are allies on the standing committee. And I need to know what’s going on. If one of Chan’s enemies gets hold of his daughter, he could be forced to do their bidding. That could be bad for both of us.”

“Isn’t Chan a New Leftist?”

“I don’t like these names, but he is sympathetic to that line.”

“And you?”

She sipped again at her tea. “Try it, it’s good.”

He ventured a sip; it had cooled just enough for him to abide it. A white tea called Handful of Snow, Ling said. One of her favorites from Yunnan. Subtle but distinct, with a delicate fragrance. He took a bigger sip, enjoying the sense of being back on Earth, immersed in its substance. Grounded. And he seldom drank a white tea.

After this pause for sipping, and possibly reflection, Peng Ling said, “You know me, Master. I am always for weiwen. Maintenance of stability. All the old virtues. Lean to the side. Harmonious society. Scientific outlook on development. All the best old ways.”

“It’s really Daoism,” Ta Shu said.

“Confucius too. Or really it’s Neo-Confucian. Like Deng Xiaoping. I like it. It suits me, because I’m a practical person. But now we have the New Leftists, wanting to steer us back toward socialism.”

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Ta Shu added. This was what every system since 1978 had called itself.

“Of course. And don’t get me wrong, I like the New Leftists for that very reason. It’s a way to stay free of the snares of globalism. To keep us all together here in China. So I lean that way, just between you and me. Not so much toward the liberals, because they seem to want Western values imposed on us, and thus they become part of the globalization package. That said, the liberalizers have some good points too. Their best suggestions need to be taken into account. We need some kind of integration of both, or all.”

“Finding the pattern,” Ta Shu said. “Yin and yang.”

“All your feng shui patterns, sure. Harmonious balance. The triple strand.”

“And yet things are always slightly out of balance, being alive. So which do you like most of the liberalizers’ ideas?”

“That’s easy. The rule of law.”

“Including independent judges? I’m surprised you would say that.”

“Just between us, I do say it. I don’t see how rule of law can hurt the Party. Not the way the constitution is written. It would only mean a big clampdown on cronyism and corruption. Really, I think anything above the law is wrong.”

“You say that!”

“I do.”

“But the Party is above the law.”

“The Party makes the law, but then it shouldn’t be above it. Party members shouldn’t be above the law, that’s the important point. The people have to be able to trust the Party.”

Ta Shu sipped his tea, regarded her. “Isn’t this part of Tail Wags Dog?”

“Maybe it is. Rule of law was always Hong Kong’s great advantage over the mainland. They got it from the British, and they kept it during the fifty years of transition as best they could. That’s why they did so well. We built up Shanghai to try to make it a rival financial center and cut Hong Kong down a little, but Shanghai was always a Party town, so it’s never been trusted by the outside world like Hong Kong is. In that sense you could say that rule of law is an economic value. It makes us stronger.”

“When you say us, you don’t mean the Party?”

“I mean China.”

“This seems like a dangerous thing for one of the seven to be saying!”

“I don’t say it to everyone. I trust you will keep this between us, and this room is privatized. I want you to hear my views.”

“So far, I hear that you want to stabilize things by agreeing to the New Leftists in their direction, and to the liberalizers in their direction. Feeling the stones indeed!”

“Well, we do have to get across the river.”

“Isn’t it just whateverism, like Hua?”

“No. Hua meant we should just do whatever Mao might have wanted. That was whateverism. The two whatevers! Come on, Master, I’m better than that. I’m doing what we have to do to keep China from falling into chaos.”

“Was going to the moon your idea too?”

She laughed. “Please! I’m not that old! I was still in your class when they started that!”

“I know. But it was a good move. So that makes me think it’s your kind of thing.”

“Thank you for your vote of confidence. But tell me why you think it’s a good move.”

“Mainly because it’s the moon, plain as that. That makes what we do up there important, because it’s a symbol of our national achievement.”

She laughed again. “I’m remembering now why I did so poorly in your class. I don’t really get feng shui, or any kind of symbolic thought.”

“But think how China has always been Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom. That middle was always said to be halfway between Earth and heaven. Now, with us on the moon, it seems to be coming true. China really is between Earth and heaven.”

“So it wasn’t symbolic after all.”

“Well, the Chinese language is always symbolic.”

“To me Chinese is always concrete. But then I’m a concrete thinker.”

Ta Shu nodded, thinking of her poetry so long ago. Bureaucratic memos, written down in classic forms; he used to laugh at her, but affectionately. She had taught him new things about poetic possibilities. “So okay, back on Earth, feet on ground, very concrete. What do you think should be done?”

She sipped her tea and thought. “Here’s how I see it. If the Party is going to continue to run the country, it has to run it demonstrably better than any other system could. And without Party members benefiting much more than anyone else. It’s quite a balancing act, so we have to feel the stones, yes, and pick a careful way. Go left then right, find out what works. Practice is the only criterion of truth, isn’t that another one of Deng’s sayings?”

“Yes. But I always wondered about that one. Practice has to have some guiding principles, and truth needs to be true to something.”

“Well, but all Deng’s sayings are like that. Just like most Party sayings, or the Yijing for that matter, or the Dao de jing. They’re general, you have to interpret them.”

“True,” Ta Shu admitted. “‘Do the appropriate thing to get the desired result!’” He sipped his tea as she laughed. She seemed in a good mood, so he asked, “Do you have particular allies on the standing committee?”

“Chan Guoliang, as I said. We make a good team.”

“And President Shanzhai?”

She frowned, gave him a knowing look: even in private, some things couldn’t be said. “We deal with him and his people as best we can.”

“His people being?”

“He wants to be succeeded by Huyou, minister of state security.”

“So is that the source of the conflict?”

“It’s one of them. The Twenty-Fifth Party Congress is coming soon, so the infighting is getting pretty vicious. There are black groups and superblack groups. And with Hong Kong just taken back into the fold, it’s a volatile time.”

“What about outsiders? Are the Americans involved in this?”

“No. Right now they’re dealing with a mess of their own. Their own citizens are currently trying to bankrupt the financial industry in order to take it over. A very worthy effort, but it’s causing them all to go crazy. And they never pay us much attention even at the best of times.”

“Hmm.” Ta Shu thought about it. “How should I proceed, then, when it comes to Chan Qi and my American friend?”

“You can’t go out on your own and find a single Chinese girl somewhere in Beijing. Chan will ask his security people to try that, and it might work. I’m going to do the same with mine. I have some channels that aren’t the same as his. There are public security teams made up entirely of women, and some of those report directly to me, as you might imagine. Women are often interested to help women in trouble.”

“Do they use that app that allows citizens to help the police?”

“Yes. That’s how most chaoyangqunzhong operate.”

“Is it dangwai?” Outside the Party usually meant weak.

“No. You join one of these networks and your citizenship score goes up, so it’s an easy way to improve it. Almost half a billion people do it, but of course that gets to be too many to cope with, so there are various agencies handling that information.”

“And no agency collates all of them?”

“Not really. Some try, but others resist. It’s a turf battle. Wolidou. The infighting is very real.”

“So there may be a Great Eyeball, but no one gets to see what it sees?”

“Exactly. It’s like a fly’s eyeball, with a thousand parts to it.”

He sighed. “See, you did learn something in that poetry class.”

“Because of a fly’s eye?” She laughed. “I must have.”

“Please let me know what I can do,” he said. “I want to help those young people. So if you look around inside the Great Eyeball, or some of your little fly eyeballs, and you find something out, let me know.”

“I will. I’ll try too with my own flies’ eyes.” She poured them more tea, looking thoughtful. Again Ta Shu felt the power emanating from her, that of a big tiger hidden in the shadows, watching. Ready to pounce.

After leaving Peng’s office in the old Imperial City, Ta Shu walked across Tiananmen Square, feeling the vastness of China in his joints and his bones. Never had the big square seemed so big, never had he felt so burdened by his body. No doubt it was simply the Earth squeezing him. A little punishment for leaving home. He wondered where he could get one of those exoskeletons that some people called a body bra. He had often seen disabled and elderly people striding about, trapped in skeletal frameworks that translated their motions into rude botspeak. But medical equipment shops were in short supply in the city center, or so it seemed to him impressionistically. On the other hand, this was Beijing. A quick scan of his wristpad showed that an alley running toward the central train station featured just such an establishment, tucked between a noodle shop and a pharmacy.

By the time he got to this place he had to sit down on a chair inside the door, surprised at his sudden exhaustion. The shop attendants, used to such arrivals, rushed to him with hot water and glucose gelatins, inquiring after him in a professional manner, but also with the friendly solicitude that was Beijing style. He explained his problem and they were suitably impressed, even amazed. A man from the moon! Everyone in the shop came over to inspect this lunatic and congratulate him on his voyage to the Jade Lady. He could see in their eyes an astonishment that he was currently too tired to feel, but seeing it brought back a little ghost of his own amazement, and he nodded, even smiled. Yes, he had really been there; he even hoped to go back. As he rested and they measured his limbs, he told them about the very slow Earthrise, and the Peaks of Eternal Light. The attendants loved learning or rehearsing these things. They brought out a couple of exoskeletons while they checked his bank numbers and insurance. Ah, this was Ta Shu! Cloud traveler supreme! Poet as old as the hills! Now they were even more impressed. It would have been very expensive to buy an exoskeleton, they told him, but as a use-at-need rental, they found it was well within his health budget, and there was no doubt that he needed it. It was a little frightening how quickly he had been crushed by his own world.

“Come on, Uncle, we’ll fit you with a really good suit, the latest style. You’ll be an elegant grasshopper by the time we’re done.”

For paralyzed people the fitting and integration of an exoskeleton was a complicated affair, they told him, stretched out over months of tests, and a certain amount of surgical fusion of electrodes and nerves. For a normal person it was much simpler. It was like a bra fitting as opposed to making him a permanent cyborg, one of the young women told him with a teasing smile. So Ta Shu stood up with a groan, felt the sugar they had fed him give him a little push, endured their manipulations as they strapped him into a suit. Really very friendly people. He ate a peach offered to him, as a test of his right arm and hand’s dexterity. They plugged the suit into his wristpad, made the pad a partner of the suit’s brain, and then the aluminum and plastic framing of the contraption moved with a little whirr at the joints. Try it: shift, then hold position without effort; shift and hold, shift and hold; it was a lovely thing to feel like he could rest while standing, all the while strangely supported, as if by the ghost of his young strong self. Also to walk around, as he discovered, with a sense that he was standing in almost exactly the way he would have wanted if he had been able to call it out. The thing seemed to just slightly anticipate his moves, which was nice, as he still felt too weak to work hard at keeping his balance. They instructed him to tuck and roll if he ever did tip the whole apparatus too far, and this would serve to protect him when he hit the ground; the suit would do the rest. The cap on his head, well supported by four struts bracketing his neck, would work like a bike helmet if he took a bad fall. “I will hope not to test that,” he said.

Some time was required to detach himself from this friendly group that now seemed to include much of the neighborhood, but eventually he walked down the street and away. It felt quite strange. It was not at all like dancing on one’s toes across the moon, but it wasn’t like stumping along on Earth either, and nothing like that desperate stagger across Tiananmen Square. He had to take care with his balance while descending the stairs into the subway station, but the suit seemed to help with that. It was like a strengthening of his muscles. He sat in one of the Daxing line car’s disabled seats, feeling self-conscious, but he needed the room, and no one paid any attention to him.

At the Jiaomen West stop he got out and walked up the stairs into the air, feeling weak but strong. Out into the old neighborhood. Ah his home ground, so ugly and sad, so magnificent! All the ghosts of his childhood charged him at once, but he dispersed them with a wave of his cyborg hand; he was so old he had outlived even nostalgia. A few of the work unit compounds from the 1980s still stood around him like giant houses, each filling a city block, with their courtyards hidden in their centers; but so many of them had been torn down that the ones remaining had become like hutongs, historical monuments of an older way, even though no one had ever liked living in them. Maybe hutongs had been like that too. People made these compounds home, but they weren’t homey.

He stumped into the entryway of his family’s compound and said hello to the old man who sat in the cubicle there. With his exoskeleton on the man didn’t recognize him. “I’m Ta Shu,” he said. “Chenguang’s son. I’ve come to visit her.”

“Oh! I didn’t recognize you in that outfit.”

“I know, it’s weird.”

Into the courtyard, dusty and bare. The trees that had been there in his childhood were gone. He crossed it, knocked on his mom’s door, opened it and said, “Ma, it’s me.”

“Ta Shu? Come on in. So nice you came by. Oh! What’s that you’re wearing?”

“Exoskeleton.”

“You okay?”

“Yes, I’m just tired. I’m back from the moon, and the gravity is crushing me.”

“I’m glad you’re back. I was worried about you up there.”

“It’s all safe now. The spaceships land on it pretty fast, but other than that it’s probably safer than a city street.”

“Did you like it?”

“I did. It was peculiar, but interesting.”

He told her about Earthrise and how long it took. She got up, with some difficulty, and put a teapot on to boil.

“You should have one of these,” he said, tapping his body bra, metal against metal. He rang like a tuning fork.

“I don’t want to get stuck in it.”

“Good point.”

They sat and drank Chun Mi tea, her favorite. Much stronger than Peng Ling’s white leaf tea. Ta Shu told her some more stories, and she caught him up on all the action in the neighborhood. Mah-jongg wins and losses, moves in and out, arrests. “And Mo Lan died.”

“Oh no! When?”

“Last month. Caught a cold, then pneumonia.”

“I’m sorry to hear. How old was she?”

“Year younger than me. Eighty-seven.”

“Was she the last of the girls?”

“I’m the last of the girls.”

“Of course. The best track team ever.”

“We had a good team, it’s true. We were all in the same class when they started the school.”

And then she was telling him the story again. He asked questions that he had asked before, said “I see” and “That must have been fun.” As her stories unspooled they ran backward in time, as always.

“Raised by Red Guards, can you believe it?”

“It must have been strange,” he said. “Weren’t they just teenagers themselves? Teenage boys with machine guns?”

“Just teenage boys with guns! But I never went hungry. My grandfather had been a landlord in the neighborhood, that’s why my father was sent to the country, but my grandfather was a good man and helped everybody, so when Dad and my brothers were sent away, and Mom lost her wits at the shock of that and was sent to the hospital, the neighbors took care of me. Them and the Red Guards. They treated me like a stray cat. Tossed me scraps from time to time. Boys with guns. It was dangerous, I suppose, but I was never afraid. I never went hungry. They took care of me from when I was seven to when I was nine. I remember every day of it.”

“It must have been very strange.”

“It was! I remember every day of it, it was so strange. But then after they all came back, and after the Gang of Four went down, things all went back to normal. And then I can’t remember any of the rest of my childhood, until I went to the sports school and met all the girls. And now I’m the last one left.”

“I guess that’s how it happens,” Ta Shu said.

He watched his mom fondly. How many times he had heard this story. Even inside the device, the weight of the world was still crushing him.