Rouge Street Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Henry Holt and Company ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  FOREWORD

  Brutally funny, intricate, and alive, the three novellas that comprise Rouge Street—“The Aeronaut,” “Bright Hall,” and “Moses on the Plain”—teeter on a fulcrum between past and future. Behind is Mao’s China, when the country’s northeast stood at the heart of an industrial revolution; ahead, around the corner, is China’s transformation into the economic superpower of the twenty-first century.

  As one character in “Bright Hall” says: “Still the same people, though.” The bullies, the bold, the dreamers, and the pragmatists all witness the collapse of state-owned factories, skyrocketing unemployment, and mass demolition of businesses and homes that mark the late 1990s. Rising and falling through a world of turbulent change, Shuang Xuetao’s characters have surprising, often hidden, loyalties. The familiar world can dissolve instantaneously and whole spaces can disappear. What each chooses to remember constitutes their map of this world: the ground from which future decisions—split-second and momentous—will spring.

  Yanfen Street, or Rouge Street, winds through Tiexi District, in the city of Shenyang, in the province of Liaoning. The district was settled by people thrown unceremoniously together—alleged class enemies and their equally despised children, former felons, hooligans, peasants, migrant workers, and the poor. Together, they formed a vast labor pool, disappearing into mines, smelters, and machine factories, tasked with building tractors or transformers, cleaning toilets, or making cigarettes. In “Bright Hall,” Pastor Lin describes miners “recruited from among the downtrodden—rural migrants, unregistered households, demoted rightists, injured laborers—and corralled in Yanfen Township.” All must settle, and attempt to thrive, in jobs they have not chosen.

  In the twentieth century, Russia, Japan, Chinese warlords, and Chiang Kai-Shek fought bitterly for control of this area. Liaoning province, touching North Korea at one corner and Inner Mongolia at another, and sitting atop the Yellow Sea, is a location of strategic value. Every power that has occupied the region, with its coal mines and vast deposits of iron and magnesium, has capitalized on it as a source of raw materials and, later, as a center of heavy industry. Under Mao Zedong, the northeast rose to prominence as the “eldest son” of the nation. Smokestacks, chimneys, and factories ruled the landscape, accompanied by worker dormitories and shantytowns.

  By the 1990s, Shenyang had a population of four million in an economy that was 85 percent state-run and heavily subsidized. In 1998, reform legislation came into effect, and companies were given three years to become profitable. A million people were soon laid off, losing not only their jobs but their health care and pensions. When factories closed, neighborhoods were demolished, people were relocated, and meager compensation was distributed, but only as a stopgap measure. Undreamed-of opportunities suddenly presented themselves for those with an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to play the game. But for millions of others, a very different state of existence arrived: that of being desperately poor while a select few, whose fates only yesterday had been tied to yours, grew wildly rich. A common world was fragmented into millions of individual pieces.

  Earlier generations were told the story of a promised land, a communist future where workers would seize the means of production, triggering the end of capital and, ultimately, the end of class. The inheritance for this new man and woman, this new society, would be radical egalitarianism. In Rouge Street, residents tell gripping stories of the denounced, the resurrected, the ill-fated, and the stubborn, mingled with tales of prophets—Moses parts the waters, and Jonah is carried in the belly of a whale. The terrible and the miraculous can occur, but to what end? What if Moses parts the sea but leaves his people on the plain, far from the promised land, surrounded by walls of water?

  Can a person, forced to fall, descend with dignity?

  * * *

  Shuang Xuetao (双雪涛), born in 1983, grew up on Yanfen Street in the city of Shenyang. The area is famously depicted in Wang Bing’s documentary trilogy West of the Tracks, filmed with a rented handheld digital video camera from 1999 to 2001. Nine hours long, the trilogy shows the universe of life on Yanfen Street and in Tiexi District as “remnant factories” started to shut down and housing demolitions began. Wang Bing is one of the great filmmakers of our time. Film scholar Jie Li writes in Jump Cut that West of the Tracks “preserves the integrity of its disintegrating subject’s time and space … and is edited into a narrative that maintains a humility of perspective rare in documentary treatments of the working class.”

  This is also a fitting description of Shuang Xuetao’s writing. While employed at a bank in Shenyang, he wrote two well-received novels. He left Shenyang for Beijing’s Renmin University, and began to focus on the short story form. His novella, “Moses on the Plain,” the title story of his 2016 collection, was a sensation, catapulting him to literary stardom. A cascade of voices narrates “Moses on the Plain,” which appears on the surface to be a detective tale. But here, as in Shuang Xuetao’s other stories, surfaces quickly transform. Revelations do not result from new evidence but from the ripple effects of things long understood; events are driven by a resoluteness in each character—promises made, hidden bonds, a web of ethics that governs each life.

  In Rouge Street, it’s the nature of life for people to ask jolting questions, which I might paraphrase this way:

  Do we pursue the past or the future, i.e., the head or the tail of the monster?

  Who thinks without categories?

  Can one rise in tumultuous times without stepping on the heads of others?

  One should be bold, but how bold?

  Knowledge is truth, labor creates freedom. Is that so?

  Can you solve a puzzle and still not have the answer?

  Who is our conscience?

  Such questions, asked by individuals, are approached in ingenious ways in the structure of all three novellas. Reading “The Aeronaut” or “Bright Hall,” we encounter a chessboard midgame. A long series of moves has already been made, and the outcome appears decided. There are no hidden spaces on a chessboard, no secret journeys, yet what seems inevitable can be swiftly overturned: individual pieces, each with their own isolating small or large problem to solve, have the potential to turn a game upside down. “Each of us has our own road to walk,” says Master Li, one of the many souls who shape “Moses on the Plain.” Every piece has limited power, sight, and possibility; but a fugitive can gain strength, or a man with a gun can be made powerless, depending on the configuration of the whole—a configuration that materializes not from thin air but from the communal architecture of the past.

  Mathematics and probability are inherent to the structure of chess, yet just a few rules give rise to a dazzling tower of unknowns. Rouge Street is similar. Its stories feel like simple plains folded into interconnected infinity cubes. On the surface, Shuang’s language is crisp and matter-of-fact. Here’s Gao Xiaofeng, in “The Aeronaut,” discussing his uncle:

>   According to my mother, after Uncle Mingqi’s business failed, he was in the middle of gassing himself when he heard Grandpa grunting that he needed to pee. He went to help Grandpa, hugged him and wept for a while, and then decided to go on living.

  But then time and space expand, even as the scene is confined to a small room, the crowded home of the Gao family: a woman makes dumplings for her husband; the husband nurses a drinking problem; a girl goes dancing with a boy wearing wide-bottomed pants; a man, who long ago promised to roast a rabbit for his boss, one night bathes his nine children before calmly committing suicide; a son improves the technology of a parachute; a boy is the unseen witness to a hilarious, wondrous drunken monologue. The narrative spins with panache and grace, regret and youthful dreams intersecting in the residents’ tiny living quarters—the enclosure of a single story. The reader, buoyant, is bounced forward into the rest of their lives.

  Like Gao Xiaofeng, the characters of Rouge Street tell it like it is, and this truth-telling is the surprising method by which his stories generate mystery. We can see the crime, the criminal, the victim, the setting, the motive, the facts, the interrogators—but this turns out to be a kind of tunnel vision. Shuang’s approach is prismatic, aware of how the mind can fold decades of experience into an overpowering feeling, an instinct, a mission. Multiple characters remember the same long-ago event, but in recalling the past, each looks through a private keyhole shaped by their own experiences and values. The past, therefore, takes on a kind of elasticity, as idiosyncratic details begin to stand in for the whole. For the reader, the experience is thrilling: we are thrown through a series of paradigm shifts. We are granted more and more reality.

  Late in Rouge Street, a character distills an idea that recurs in all three novellas: “My memory is great, it’s just whether or not I choose to remember.” This choice, in all its complexity, is the most powerful influence on how each individual faces the impossible. Loyalty—to a memory, a feeling, a friendship—is the shape-shifting mystery of Rouge Street, the spur for action. Out of loyalty, a police officer hesitates, an ethics teacher becomes a murderer, a man takes flight, a boy drowns, a doctor refuses to break under interrogation, and a good man exacts vengeance on the powerful. Loyalty to a memory is their defense against a rapidly changing world—it binds them to the streets that created them, and keeps that reality alive. To what will we be true? Who or what will we protect? We thereby stake a claim to our own lives.

  * * *

  The three novellas collected here assert that the fantastical is an intrinsic part of the real; that imagination and reason discover the world together. Shadow Lake, upon which “Bright Hall” turns, is aptly named: the lake of shadows, a tangible body accompanied by a play of light. Jeremy Tiang, who so brilliantly translates these works, asked Shuang about the origin of this lake—an expanse of absolutely clear water at the heart of Yanfen Street—which does not appear on any map. Shuang responded,

  When I was little, there was a lake like that in Yanfen Street, though it wasn’t really a lake, more a small pond. But it was a vivid jade green, the shape of a diamond, and left a deep impression on me. More recently, I asked my mom about it, and she didn’t remember it at all—probably because it was so tiny. It was only because I was a child that I’d imagined it was enormous. So you could say that there was a real-life original for Shadow Lake, but it was very different from the Shadow Lake of the novella.

  The novelist in me feels recognition: a pond in the shape of a diamond metamorphoses to occupy another realm. In “Bright Hall,” the remembered pond becomes the portal of fiction, where space and time are reconfigured by narrative. Shuang’s work is at ease with the fantastical, which is perhaps the disguise of the unsayable. What is the giant fish in “Bright Hall,” the monster that swallows confessions, lives, and histories? How does it survive in a lake absent from all maps, a lake so crystalline it inspires wonder and fear? “Moses on the Plain” spirals toward an answer. We are carried forward and pushed under by connection and history, by solidarity and cruelty; we are entangled in collective movements so complex and far-reaching we have little chance to understand them—but each individual ultimately acts alone: do we paddle out into the lake to face our past? Do we heed the promises we made as children? Do we remember how we came to be?

  Yanfen Street, as Shuang brings it to life, has a clarity that allows his characters to be seen in their full dimensions. The ground shifts beneath them; rising and falling force them into new perspectives. Only when the children in “Bright Hall” sink to the bottom of the lake do they see the foundation of their era—knowledge that, if they are fortunate, they will bring with them back to the surface.

  —Madeleine Thien

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Born in the northeastern city of Shenyang, Shuang Xuetao spent much of his childhood in the neighborhood known as Yanfen Street, and may even have appeared in Wang Bing’s famous documentary of the area. He recalls it as a run-down place of dirt roads and dingy houses. “Our neighbors were thieves, swindlers, con artists, drunkards, and gamblers,” he said in a 2019 interview. “There were respectable people too, but you had to look quite hard to find them.”

  Yan (艳/yàn) means “bright,” and fen (粉/fěn) means “powder.” Yanfen, “bright powder,” is not the usual way to say “rouge,” but that is probably what is being referred to in the name Yanfen Street. The most common explanation comes from the early days of the Qing dynasty, when the surrounding land was used for the cultivation of plants that would be turned into makeup for the ladies of the imperial palace. The township became known as Yanfen (胭粉/yānfěn, “rouge powder”), before these syllables shifted into their contemporary meaning.

  There are other legends about the name’s origin. In one, a woman named Pear Blossom hung herself after being forced into marriage; red flowers bloomed on her grave. Another emphasizes a second century B.C. burial site in the Yan kingdom, suggesting that the current name is a corruption of the similar-sounding Yanfen (燕坟/Yānfén), meaning “Yan tomb.”

  Not all of Shuang’s stories are set in Yanfen Street (the thoroughfare, less than two kilometers long, also lends its name to the surrounding neighborhood), yet his name is indelibly associated with this district, which exerts a presence over all his writing. In another interview, he said, “For me, Yanfen Street was like the American Wild West, a place inhabited by the downtrodden, lawless and free, and therefore full of life.” He is also attracted to the contrast between the vibrancy of the name and the dull gray shantytown of his childhood, where the roads were puddled with mud, and the water and electricity might be cut off at any moment.

  In 1995, the Shenyang singer Ai Jing released an album titled Once upon a Time in Yanfen Street whose title track features the refrain “Yanfen Street, so many stories happened here.” The song also contains a verse recalling an incident she’d witnessed: a young man with long hair and flared trousers being denounced and paraded through the streets in disgrace because of his decadent fashion sense—an echo of the disapproval Li Mingqi faces in “The Aeronaut.” In another verse, Ai Jing remembers lying on a stone bench, gazing at this dilapidated district, fantasizing about a future in which there are “more and more skyscrapers.”

  Indeed, Yanfen Street today is a bustling suburb of Shenyang, with orderly paved roads and many high-rise buildings. It may no longer be the disreputable, rough neighborhood of bygone days, but its wild spirit remains in Shuang Xuetao’s writing, and so lives on.

  —Jeremy Tiang

  THE AERONAUT

  1

  That morning in 1979 when Li Mingqi first showed up at his doorstep, Gao Likuan bristled, and not just at the boy’s outlandish attire—although his bell-bottoms and flashy leather belt certainly didn’t help. Gao had known Mingqi all his life, along with his two younger brothers and six little sisters; the family really was that large. The Lis lived in the row behind the Gao household, and beyond them was Red Flag Square, originally built by the Japanese,
who paved it with marble from their quarry in Fuxin. When the work was done, the foreigners released a flock of pigeons into the square, which locals swiftly caught and took home for dinner. The next day, they released another flock of pigeons but stationed soldiers to guard them with rifles; that’s how the Chinese learned that these birds were there to be fed, not eaten. The Japanese surrounded the square with banks and offices, abandoning the structures when they departed. In 1967 a statue of Chairman Mao was erected in the middle, and the pigeons all flew away, never to return. Beneath the Chairman stood a squad of stone soldiers led by a man with rolled-up sleeves who carried a great crimson flag that billowed in the wind.

  The Li house was another Japanese remnant, covering some thirty-odd square meters, with a high ceiling and exquisitely crafted windows. Though the printing company had provided both the Gao and the Li homes, Li Mingqi’s father had added a loft to his, with five steps stuck into the wall leading up to it. A family of eleven, women sleeping below and men above—not a bad arrangement.

  The main reason for Gao Likuan’s annoyance, apart from Li Mingqi’s ridiculous clothes, was that Mingqi’s father had once been Gao’s apprentice before going on to surpass him, and it stung to have the man’s son now courting his daughter. Gao was a senior technician at the company, and there was nothing he couldn’t do—no printing problem ever daunted him. He was also well respected: the foreman would offer him a cigarette whenever they spoke, and even light it for him. His status was due not only to his formidable skills but also to his long-standing Party membership: born into hardship, Gao Likuan had grown tired of people’s sneers and joined the Communists to print their leaflets. His leaflets were better than anyone else’s, his colors more vivid, only growing stronger with time. He had no schooling but learned to read and write at the printing company, and after he’d picked up enough words to turn a phrase, he would occasionally punch up the managers’ slogans to make them even more inspiring. One of the bosses later sent him a letter saying he was proof that great masters existed in every line of work, including propaganda. He wasn’t Master Gao yet—back then he was still Young Gao, and Young Gao spent two years printing leaflets, getting thrown in jail twice, first by the Nationalists and then by the Japanese. Both times he was beaten, so viciously the second that he was blinded in one eye, and subsequently he was known as One-Eyed Gao.