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comment, “but how fortune eventually works out, you never know.”

Chinese Chess
(1964)
    This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1964. Having weathered the “three years of natural disasters,” China has made new, gigantic progress in the socialist revolution and socialist construction. As Chairman Mao pointed out, over the past fifteen years, literature and art associations and their publications have failed to carry out Party politics, having actually slid to the brink of revisionism in recent years. So it is necessary to talk about class struggle every year, every month, every day. In October, China successfully exploded its first atom bomb, and the Chinese government proposed to convene an international conference to discuss the prohibition and destruction of nuclear weapons. On the international front, Premier Zhou Enlai set forth the basic principles for China’s support to the other countries.

    In 1964, Lihua failed the college entrance examination.
    To be fair to him, his scores were not that bad—they were even slightly higher than the enrollment acceptance level—but he suffered from a disadvantage. In the “class status” column of the college application form, he had to put his father down as a clerk “with historical problems,” because the older man had been an activist in a student organization associated with the Nationalist government before 1949. It was a political stain that, though not serious enough to put the old man on the blacklist of the new society, cast a shadow on Lihua’s horizon. Melong, another student from Red Dust Lane, entered Shanghai Teachers College with a score actually lower than Lihua’s, because of his worker family background. There was a Party policy frequently quoted in the newspapers:
Family background counts, but not absolutely. What counts more is young people’s own political performance.
The second sentence was generally regarded, however, as no more than a decorative veneer.
    Still, Lihua’s parents wanted him to have another try the following year. Or, as an alternative, to start working in a small eatery through the early retirement arrangement of his father, who had worked there for more than twenty years, standing by a concrete sink in a pair of black rubber shoes, washing dishes from morning to evening. Lihua was not eager to get into his father’s shoes, which the old man would kick off the first thing when he arrivedback home, revealing water-soaked feet as pallid as salted fat pork. So Lihua made a halfhearted attempt to review the test books, not believing that the second time would make any difference. Instead, he started to play Chinese chess in earnest, trying to bury his head like an ostrich in the world of chess—at least for a while.
    Spending four or five hours daily at the chessboard, Lihua soon found himself turning into a top player in Red Dust Lane. At a tournament outside the lane, he was “discovered” by Zhu Shujian, a white-haired chess master who had retired from the Shanghai City Chess Team. Zhu saw great potential in Lihua. Though not ready to acknowledge him as a student yet, Zhu started to take him to competitions among the higher-level players. Unexpectedly, Lihua saw a career option far more tempting than his father’s, if he could become a member of the Shanghai City Chess Team. The chessboard presented the possibility of a different world to him, one in which he did not have to worry about his family background, so long as he calculated every move on the board, like with a math problem.
    On a July morning, Lihua followed Zhu to a cobble-covered street in the old city section, where Wan Liang was going to play against several challengers in a wheellike succession. A member of the Shanghai City Chess team in the fifties and a runner-up in a national tournament several years ago, Wan had suddenly disappeared from the scene a while