The Stone Monkey

soldier-turned-politician named Mao Zedong, whose capricious 1966 Cultural Revolution incited students across the country to rise up and destroy the four olds: old culture, customs, ideas and habits.
    The house of the Ghost’s father in an elegant part of Fuzhou was one of the first targets of the rampaging young men who took to the streets, practically shivering with idealism, on the orders of the Great Helmsman.
    “You are part of the old,” the leader raged. “Do you repent? Do you confess to clinging to the old values?”
    Kwan Baba had met them in his living room, which had shrunk to the size of a prison cell due to the number of shouting youths surrounding the family, and had gazed at them not only in fear but in bewilderment too; he honestly hadn’t been able to see the evil in what he’d done.
    “Confess and seek reeducation and we will spare you!” another cried.
    “You are guilty of old thought, old values, old culture . . . . ”
    “You have built a lackey’s empire on the backs of the people!”
    In fact, the students had no idea what Kwan Baba did for a living or whether the cooperative he headed was based on the purest principles of J. P. Morgan capitalism or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communism. They knew only that his house was nicer than theirs and that he could afford to buy art from an abhorred “old” era—art that did nothing to inform the people’s struggle against the oppressive forces of the West.
    Kwan and his wife, along with the twelve-year-old Ang and his older brother, stood speechless before the seething crowd.
    “You are part of the old . . . ”
    Much of that night was a terrible, confused blur to young Ang.
    But one part was permanently branded into his memory and he thought of it now, standing in his luxurious high-rise overlooking the harbor, awaiting the Changs’ betrayer.
    The tall student leader of the cadre stood in the middle of the living room, wearing black-rimmed glasses, lenses slightly askew because they’d been made at one of the local collectives. Spittle flying from his mouth, he engaged in a furious dialectic with young Kwan Ang, who hovered meekly beside the kidney-shaped coffee table on which his father had taught him to use the abacus years before.
    “You are part of the old,” the student raged into the boy’s face. “Do you repent?” For emphasis, with every line he spoke he swung the thick baton—heavy as a cricket bat—to the floor between them; it landed with a loud thud.
    “Yes, I repent,” the boy said calmly. “I ask the people to forgive me.”
    “You will reform your decadent ways.”
    Thud .
    “Yes, I will reform my ways,” he said, though he didn’tknow what “decadent” meant. “The old ways are a threat to the collective good of the people.”
    “You will die if you retain your old beliefs!”
    Thud.
    “Then I will reject them.”
    Thud, thud, thud . . .
    So it continued for endless minutes—until the blows the student rained down finally stole the life from what the student had been striking with the iron-tipped baton: the Ghost’s parents, who lay bound and gagged on the floor at their feet.
    The boy gave not a single glance at the bloody forms as he recited the catechism the students thirstily sought to hear. “I repent my ways. I reject the old. I regret that I have been seduced by unbeneficial and decadent thought.”
    He was spared, but not his older brother, who fled to the gardener’s shed and returned with a rake—the only weapon the foolish boy could find. Within minutes the students reduced him to a third bloody pile on the carpet, as lifeless as his parents.
    The fervent youngsters took loyal Kwan Ang with them, welcoming the young boy into the heart of the Glorious Red Banner Fuzhou Youth Brigade, as they spent the rest of the night ferreting out more of the pernicious old.
    None of the students noticed that the next morning Ang slipped away from their impromptu headquarters. It seemed that with so much reform to perpetrate none of them even remembered him.
    He, however, remembered them. His short time as an old-despising Maoist revolutionary—no more than a few hours—had been spent quite productively: memorizing the names of the youths in the cadre and planning their deaths.
    Still, he bided his time.
    Naixin . . .
    The boy’s sense of survival was strong and he escaped into one of his father’s junkyards near Fuzhou. He lived there for months. He would prowl through the huge