Black Class Cur
Tom Bradley


"Im humble duck shit. But youve been everywhere and seen everything. Advise me, Shifu."

The Shifu said nothing at first. He just sat and gently rocked himself on his strange clay
bed.

It was the only bed like it, as far as anybody knew, for thousands of li around. Slender stove pipes were wound inside in a tin labyrinth. The Shifu called it a kang and used it as proof of his claim to proud Mongolian heritage, though nobody around here was particularly knowledgeable about Mongolians. The peasants either laughed or went away when the radios choppy signal played Mongolian epic poetry on National Minority Day. "Just old ladies complaining about their naughty camels" was the general interpretation.

Here in the subtropics the Shifu never lit the little stove underneath his kang, of course, nor slept beneath the garish felt coverlet. He sat on top during the day waiting for phone calls, looking like an impoverished warlord on his throne, and secretly slept in a hammock at night and during nap time, just like everybody else.

The Shifu eventually held out his shaking hands and spoke to Bu Yu. "Let me see your brothers letter again."

He only knew about 100 characters, most of them obsolete, but seemed eager to appear as though he could magically ascertain something specific from the feel of the papers. He licked the index finger of his left hand and eroded a tiny muddy patch at the edge of his bed. Then he dipped a corner of the first page in the mud and held it up to the dim light coming through the oiled-paper window. He sniffed it, tasted it, felt it and performed other seemingly random actions. Bu Yu was certain that the old man was just improvising at this point.

This use of the kang as an instrument of divination was his whim, and he indulged it, as he did all his whims, at mild personal peril. Whenever an ideology rectification movement came along, he was the first to be singled out by the locals as a bourgeois individualist. But still he remained the Shifu and never got completely purged from the planning committee. He retained his post and significant title as Telecommunications Commissar because, as a northerner, he spoke better Mandarin than anybody else, and he could make himself understood, more or less, on the phone.

The old granny who had run the village since Liberation in a stone-age matriarchy was always expecting calls from some important cadre far away, declaring them a model commune and shifting them from rice to something more prestigious like lichees or, even better, reinstating the rapid industrialization of the Great Leap Forward. Social climbing Granny loved pig iron more than pigs and dreamed of a return to the pseudo-Stalinist line of thirty years before, when shed briefly been a member of the proletariat instead of the peasantry.

The telephone itself was a rarity in this district, a souvenir from the late cooperativization
of the village. By the time the Peoples Liberation Army had finally gotten around to this place, the wires had already been strung up, and theyd been able to dispose of their cumbersome walkie-talkies. The other villages in the county were proud of their early conversion to revolutionary ideals, but today they had no phones and no Telecommunications Shifu.

So the old man got to have his own little house, phone and kang. Since he owed his station in life to his spoken language, he tended to exaggerate his tones and to husband them like precious commodities, just as his beloved CCTV reporters did. When the province installed the relay tower and the communal television made its appearance, the Shifu started spending every evening in the meeting hall listening to the anchorman on the news. He would contort his face and disturb the other viewers with on-the-spot imitations.

"Do you listen to one word of the reports?" Granny would ask him. "Are you receiving any political benefit from this program? Or is it just a music lesson for you?"

Everybody laughed at him. But Bu Yu admired his rich tones. Somehow, the Shifu, though aged past even his own reckoning, managed to keep his voice as sweet as a silver flute. He wasnt using it much today, though. Bu Yu decided to break the silence before the old man could doze off.

"My brothers letter says that the foreigner is more than two meters tall, and that he has a
long beard the color of northern Shaanxi pine tree ears." Bu Yu spoke those last five words very clearly, repeating the exact specifications in the botany encyclopedia which constituted the commune library. He remembered the faded illustration: a lurid saffron shade.

The Shifu was twiddling the corners of the flimsy pages, idly rolling the precious words of Bu Yus younger brother into muddy lint balls. "And what color might northern Shaanxi pine tree ears be?" he asked absently.

So the old scoundrel failed the test. He must have lied about having ridden horseback with the legendary Ho Lung from the pine mountain strongholds of the north in 1932. The peasants said that an old scoundrel could always remember the meals he ate, the girls he had, and the battles he fought as a youth, but nothing after that.

But maybe the embryonic Peoples Liberation Army hadnt eaten tree fungus in those days. Maybe theyd saved the ears for refugees from the partisan slaughter campaigns and deserters from the Guomindang counterrevolutionary forces. Bu Yu decided to let the question of the Shifus veracity pass for now. He needed advice, and who else could give it?

"This big-nose calls my brother Mosquito Lunch, right in front of the others. And they all
laugh. Thats not dialectical materialism. Am I wrong or right, Shifu?"

The Shifu looked as though he were about to laugh also. The blackish bags under his eyes stiffened for a second. "Right," he said. "Has your brother actually asked you to come save him or something?"