“Nothing—my mind is relaxing in a total blank, as you suggested.”
“Take it easy, Chen, with your new position in the city congress, and
with your name as a best-selling poet.”
To all appearances, Chen had been moving up steadily. His new membership
in the Shanghai People’s Congress was seen as another step toward his
succeeding Party Secretary Li Guohua in the police bureau. But Chen was not
so sure about it. The congress was known as a political rubber stamp, and
thus city congressman was more of an honorary title. Possibly a compromise
more than anything else, Chen knew, for quite a few hard-liners in the Party
opposed his further promotion in the bureau, on the ground of his being too
liberal.
It was true, however, that his poetry collection had enjoyed unexpected
success. Poetry makes no money and, in a money-oriented age, its publication
was nothing short of a miracle. And it was actually selling well.
His thoughts were interrupted by two new bathers flopping down into the
water, one short with gray hair and beady eyes, one tall with an aquiline
nose and beer-bottle-thick glasses. Apparently, they were continuing an
earlier argument.
“Socialism is going to the dogs. These greedy, unscrupulous dogs of the
Party officials! They’re crunching everything to pieces, and devouring all
the bones,” the short one declared in indignation. “Our state-run company is
like a gigantic fat goose, and everyone must take a bite or pluck a feather
or two from it. Did you know that the head of the City Export Office demands
a five percent bonus in exchange for his export quota approval?”
“What can you do, man?” the tall one said sarcastically. “Communism
echoes only in nostalgia songs. It’s capitalism that’s practiced here—with
the Communist Party sitting on the top, sucking a red lollipop. So what can
you expect of these Party cadres?”
“Corrupt throughout. They don’t believe in anything except doing
everything in their own interest—in the name of China’s brand of socialism.”
“What is capitalism? Everybody grabs for his or her money—in spite of all
the communist propaganda in our newspapers. They’re just like the beer froth
in the tub.”
“The cops should have bang-banged a few of those rotten eggs!”
“Cops?” the tall one said, splashing the water with his big feet.
“They’re jackals out of one and the same den as those wolves.”
Chen frowned. Complaints about the widespread corruption were not
surprising, but some of the specifics did not sound too pleasant to a naked
cop, or to a naked editor either.
“Chinese is still an evolving language. Corruption—fubai—literally means
‘rotten,’ ” Chen said in a quiet voice to Lei, “in reference to bad meat or
fish. Now it refers exclusively to the abuse of power by the Party cadres.”
“Yes, things go bad easily,” Lei said. “You can put Yellow River carps
into the refrigerator, but you can’t put in the Party cadres.”
It was intriguing to think about the linguistic evolution. In the
sixties, corruption meant the rotten bourgeois way of life, in reference to
something like extramarital sex. A young “corrupt” teacher in Chen’s school
was fired for engaging in prenuptial sex. In a more general sense, the word
could also have referred to bourgeois extravagancy—even to such a bath,
whose entrance fee alone cost more than the monthly income for an ordinary
worker. In the last few years, however, the word took on an exclusive
target—the Party officials.
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