Upsetting the Balance

“A journey of a thousandli begins with but a single step,” Hsia answered. The proverb made him grimace. “More than a thousandli from Shanghai to here, and my poor feet feel every stinking step I took.”

“Ah, but here we are in the hibiscus-flower garden,” Nieh Ho T’ing said with an expansive wave. “Surely you can take your ease.”

“Hibiscus-flower night soil,” Hsia said coarsely; he reveled in a peasant’s crudity. “It’s just another dive.”

The Jung Yuan (which meant hibiscus-flower garden) had been a fine restaurant once. It looked to have been looted a couple of times; soot running up one wall said someone had tried to torch the place. Those efforts were all too likely to succeed; Nieh wondered why this one had failed.

He sipped tea from a severely plain earthenware cup. “The food is still good,” he said.

Hsia grunted, unwilling to admit anything. But, like Nieh, he’d demolished thelu-wei-p’in-p’an — ham, minced pork, pigs’ tripes and tongue, and bamboo shoots-all in a thick gravy-that was one of Jung Yuan’s specialties. Pork and poultry were the only meat you saw these days; pigs and chickens ate anything, and so were eaten themselves.

A serving girl came up and asked, “More rice?” When Nieh nodded, she hurried away and returned with a large bowlful. Hsia used the lacquerware spoon to fill his own eating bowl, then held it up to his mouth and shoveled in rice with his chopsticks. He slurped from a bowl ofkao liang, a potent wine brewed from millet, and belched enormously to show his approval.

“You are a true proletarian,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said, not at all ironically. Hsia Shou-Tao beamed at the compliment.

A couple of tables over, a group of men in Western-style suits was having a dinner party, complete with singsong girls and a raucous orchestra. Despite all Peking had been through, the men looked plump and prosperous. Some had their arms around singsong girls, while others were trying to slide their hands up the slits in the girls’ silk dresses. A couple of the girls pulled away; not all entertainers were courtesans. Most, though, accepted the attentions either as their due or with mercenary calculation in their eyes.

“Collaborators,” Nieh said in a voice that would have meant the firing squad in territory controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. “They could not be so rich without working hand in glove with the little scaly devils.”

“You’re right,” Hsia grunted. He filled his bowl of rice again. With his mouth full, he added, “That one there, in the dark shiny green, she’s a lot of woman.”

“And her beauty is exploited,” Nieh answered. Like a lot of Communist officials, he had a wide puritanical streak in him. Sex for sport, sex for anything but procreation, made him uneasy. His stay in a Shanghai brothel had reinforced that opinion rather than changed it.

“So it is,” Hsia said; Nieh’s doctrine was true. But the other man did not sound happy to concur.

“You are not an animal. You are a man of the revolution,” Nieh Ho-T’ing reminded him. “If joy girls are what you wanted in life, you should have joined the Kuomintang instead.”

“I am a man of the revolution,” Hsia repeated dutifully. “Coveting women who are forced to show their bodies”-a Chinese euphemism for prostitution-“to get money to live proves I have not yet removed all the old corrupt ways from my heart. Humbly, I shall try to do better.”

Had he made the self-criticism at a meeting of Party members, he would have stood with head bowed in contrition. Here, that would have given him away for what he was-and the scaly devils and their running dogs were as eager as either Chiang’s clique or the Japanese had been to be rid of Communists. Hsia stayed in his seat and slurped millet wine… and, in spite of self-criticism, his eyes kept sliding toward the singsong girl in the green silk dress.

Nieh Ho-T’ing tried to bring his attention back to the matter at hand. Keeping his voice low, he said, “We have to put fear into these collaborators. If a few of them die, the rest will serve the little devils with less attention to their duties, for they will always be looking over their shoulder to see if they will be next to pay for their treacheries. Some may even decide to cooperate with us in the struggle against imperialist aggression.”

Hsia Shou-Tao made a face. “Yes, and then they’d sell us back to the scaly devils, along with their own mothers. That kind of friend does our cause no good; we need people truly committed to revolution and justice.”

“We would be fools to trust them very far,” Nieh agreed, “but intelligence is always valuable.”

“And can always be compromised,” Hsia shot back. He was a stubborn man; once an opinion lodged in his mind, a team of water buffaloes would have had trouble dragging it out.

Nieh didn’t try. All he said was, “The sooner some are slain, the sooner we have the chance to see what the rest are made of.”