Beijing Coma (11 page)

‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said, taking the cup from him. I wanted to swallow a large gulp, but the water was too hot.

‘Here in Guangxi it wasn’t starvation that drove people to cannibalism. It was hatred.’

I didn’t know what he meant.

‘It was in 1968, one of the most violent years of the Cultural Revolution. In Guangxi, it wasn’t enough just to kill class enemies, the local revolutionary committees forced the people to eat them as well. In the beginning, the enemies’ corpses were simmered in large vats together with legs of pork. But as the campaign progressed, there were too many corpses to deal with, so only the heart, liver and brain were cooked.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

I pictured my father’s body just before he died, and was relieved to think that it had been intact and unharmed.

‘There were so many enemies. If your father hadn’t been moved to Shandong, he would have got eaten in the end, too. How old are you? Nearly eighteen? Well you would only have been about two years old at the time, then . . . On 3 July 1968, Chairman Mao issued an order calling for the ruthless suppression of class enemies. He wanted all members of the Five Black Categories to be eliminated, together with twenty-three new types of class enemy, which included anyone who’d served as a policeman before Liberation, or who’d been sent to prison or labour camp. And not only them, but their close family and distant relatives as well.’

‘That’s a lot of people.’

‘Yes. Just think: the literal meaning of the Chinese characters for “revolution” is “elimination of life”. See this collection of books my research team has just brought out:
Chronicles of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi Province
. Look, it says here that, in 1968, more than 100,000 people were killed in Guangxi Province. In Wuxuan County alone, 3,523 people were murdered, and of those, 350 were eaten. If I hadn’t been imprisoned in August of that year, I too might have been killed.’

The ten volumes were stacked neatly on the small wooden shelf. They looked much heavier than my mother’s volumes of
Mysteries of the World
.

‘So who were the murderers?’

‘Who were the murderers? You could argue that the only real murderer was Chairman Mao. But the fact is, everyone was involved. On 15 June 1968, a public struggle meeting was held here in Wuxuan, during which thirty-seven former rich peasants were killed. After they were publicly denounced, they were made to stand in line, and were then beaten to death one after the other. When a peasant called Li Yan, standing second in line, saw the man in front of her being attacked with metal rods and howling out in pain, she broke free and tried to run back to her house. But the crowds that had gathered to gawk at the public beatings ran after her, and pelted her with bricks and rocks. She died in the doorway of a house not far from hers. It’s on that main street you must have walked down after you left the bus station. They’d branded her a rich peasant, but all she owned was three cows. You ask me who the murderers were. The answer is: everyone! Our neighbours, our friends across the street.’

‘We’ve got a girl called Li Yan in our class,’ I muttered distractedly.

‘After Li Yan was killed, her children and parents were murdered as well. Her whole family was wiped out. During those years, the PLA soldiers sent to Wuxuan County were stationed here in Wuxuan Town. They were meant to carry out the executions, and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages were only supposed to make the arrests. But the villagers were eager to show their commitment to the revolution, so they took things into their own hands, and started executing the class enemies themselves. Look at this passage. It’s a speech that was given by the director of the Wuxuan Revolutionary Committee at the time: “. . . The masses at the grass roots of society are permitted to carry out executions, but they shouldn’t waste bullets. Instead, they should be encouraged to beat the enemies to death with their own hands, or with the aid of stones or wooden sticks. This way, they will be able to draw greater educational benefit from the experience.” When your father was sent down here, there were about a thousand people incarcerated on the farm. After a couple of years, the hundred or so rightists among them were transferred to other camps. Of the nine hundred labourers who remained, over a hundred belonged to the twenty-three undesirable types. All of them were killed. The corpses of the few who’d contracted diseases were buried, but the rest of them were eaten.’

‘You’re a doctor. What are you doing working here?’ All I wanted was for him to close the huge book in his hand.

‘This is just a temporary post. Once I’ve finished overseeing this project, I’ll be sent back to the hospital. I wish I could get transferred somewhere else, though. It was very difficult returning to the hospital after my release. My mind kept flashing back to the summer day in 1968, when I watched the hospital staff line up the head, deputy head, and twenty of the best surgeons, gynaecologists, pharmacists and nurses against the wall and bludgeon them to death with bricks and metal rods. I saw our laboratory technician, Wei Honghai, lying on the ground. His head was smashed open, but his limbs were still shaking. A PLA soldier walked over and finished him off with a shot to the chest. They didn’t like using guns back then. Whenever they shot someone, the victim’s family was made to pay for the bullet.’

‘So where were all those people buried?’ I didn’t want to prolong this conversation, but I couldn’t find a way to change the subject.

‘No one wanted to collect the corpses. When relatives of the dead were seen to cry, they were murdered for “sympathising with bad elements”. A woman called Wang Fangfang from Wuling Village flung herself onto her husband’s corpse after he was murdered and burst into tears. She had a young baby tied to her back. The peasants beat Fangfang to death, then hit the baby with a metal spade. Hundreds of people were killed during those months. The streets and rivers were strewn with corpses. There were flies everywhere. It was horrible.’

‘A hundred thousand people were murdered in this province, and no one tried to stop it?’

‘No. Sometimes, when the militia grew tired of carrying out the killings, they forced the class enemies to kill one another. Listen to this passage about Daqiao District: “After the struggle meeting, it was decided that the bad elements locked in Building Four of the commune should be killed. The bad elements were immediately tied up with rope and led to a disused coal mine 300 metres away. They were made to stand in a queue and push the person in front of them into a pool of water that was 10 metres deep. When the bad elements resisted, the cadres and militia took control, and started pushing them in themselves. One of the women had lived on a boat and knew how to swim. After she was pushed into the water, she was able to swim to the other side, so the cadres had to hurl rocks at her. In the end, a militiaman pulled her out and stabbed her in the neck . . .”’

I couldn’t take any more. I felt stupid for having made so much fuss about being beaten by the police when I was fifteen. I looked at Dr Song and said, ‘At school, the only thing they told us about the Cultural Revolution was that three million people lost their lives. But I never really grasped the scale of the horror. I was only ten when it came to an end.’

‘We received death threats while researching this material. The national government told us to carry out this research, but the county authorities refused to cooperate because most of the people who organised the atrocities are now high officials in the local government. This whole project is a sham. Only five copies of these chronicles have been published. I doubt the public will ever get to read them. Once the victims we’ve listed have been rehabilitated, the chronicles will probably be locked away in the government vaults. None of the top officials will lose their job.’

Dr Song lifted the lid of my teacup and said, ‘Drink up before it gets cold.’ I pretended to take a sip. I felt too sick to swallow anything, or to leaf through the two volumes he handed me:
Chronicles of the Cultural Revolution in Liuzhou County
, and
Chronicles of the Cultural Revolution in Nanning District
. I longed to escape this dark and dismal office.

I thought of my father’s journal which was lying at the bottom of my bag, but I didn’t feel in the mood to take it out and enquire about all the people who were mentioned in it. All I could bring myself to ask was: ‘Does Director Liu’s daughter, Liu Ping, still play the violin? Is she still living in Wuxuan?’

‘Liu Ping was only sixteen when they killed her. She was the prettiest girl on the farm. She could dance and play the violin. The night the militia killed her father, they raped her, then strangled her with a piece of rope. Once she was dead, they cut off her breasts and gouged out her liver, then fried them in oil and ate them.’ Dr Song flicked to another page in the book. ‘Look, here’s a photograph of Director Liu’s family. The printing is very poor. That girl in the white skirt holding the violin is Liu Ping.’

It was just like the photograph my father had shown me, but in this one Liu Ping’s chin was raised a little higher. I was certain that my father had taken this one as well.

The sky outside the window was black now. My hands and feet were as cold as ice. I got up and said that it was time for me to go.

‘You’ve missed the last bus back to Liuzhou, I’m afraid. You’d better spend the night in the county guest house. There’ll be another bus in the morning.’

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t think of anything to say. All I wanted was to feel some sunlight on my face. I’d grown up reading sheet after sheet of public notices containing lists of executed criminals: thousands of names written in black ink, each one marked with a red cross. But the horror of the deaths hadn’t struck me properly until now. I remembered how after some school friends and I noticed the name Chen Bin on one of the lists, we ran over to our classmate who shared the same name, drew pink crosses all over him and cried out, ‘Only your death will assuage the people’s anger! Bang, bang!’ But in Dr Song’s office, I felt real terror, in a physical way that I hadn’t experienced before.

I briefly flicked through the
Chronicles of the Cultural Revolution in Guilin District
, remembering that I’d planned to go travelling there with A-Mei, then I got up, hurriedly shook the doctor’s hand and left.

As I walked from his office to the guest house, the skin on my back went numb. I sensed that everyone around me – the people walking behind me, towards me, or milling around on the street, and even the legless beggar sitting propped up against the lamp post – was about to pounce on me and eat me alive.

The night passed very slowly. Dr Song’s revelations had disturbed me so much that I didn’t dare close my eyes. While stroking and kissing A-Mei the night before, I’d come three times, so I was weak with exhaustion now, shuddering like a plane spiralling out of control. But despite my tiredness, I didn’t sleep all night.

The next morning I caught the first bus back to Liuzhou and arrived in the afternoon in a confused daze.

A-Mei was surprised to see me, because I’d told her I’d be away a week. The only explanation I gave was that the people I’d intended to visit had died.

‘How come you didn’t know that before you left?’ she asked.

‘They were friends of my father’s. I never met them.’

‘When did they die?’

‘In the Cultural Revolution.’

‘Put that cigarette out. You shouldn’t smoke so much. Your hair and clothes stink of tobacco.’ Then she said that she was only a baby when the Cultural Revolution started, but when she was older, her parents told her that during the violent years corpses with bound hands and feet would float down from China into the harbours of Hong Kong every day.

I didn’t want to talk about this subject any more. I told her I wanted to travel up to Beijing a few days earlier than I’d planned.

She stared at me blankly for a moment, and said, ‘Fine. I’ll go back to Hong Kong a bit earlier too, then.’

We decided that we’d set off for Guilin the next morning, stay there a few days, then go our separate ways.

I was aware that a change had taken place in me. I’d acquired that cold detachment one develops after experiencing a traumatic event. On the long-distance bus to Guilin, I didn’t hold A-Mei’s hand. I felt uncomfortable when her leg brushed against mine. A-Mei looked sad. I guessed that she thought I’d lost interest in her.

I hardly said a word during our time in Guilin, and she didn’t say much either. The intimacy that we had so recently established seemed to have evaporated. I knew that any show of affection would seem false, so I didn’t dare touch her, let alone kiss her. When I sat opposite her in a restaurant, all I was aware of was the oily stench from the kitchen. The neurons she’d brought to life in the emotional centres of my brain seemed to have withered and died. I felt out of kilter. The sunlight and the sky felt muggy and close.

On Guilin’s Elephant Trunk Hill, I asked her if she wanted me to take a photograph of her. She said no. I was relieved, because I felt incapable of fixing my attention on her.

A crowd of foreign tourists poured out of a coach, their blonde hair glinting in the sun. They put on multicoloured sun hats and smiled as they stood waiting for their photographs to be taken in front of the scenic backdrop. I wanted to tell them to run away, because the bodies of 100,000 massacred people were buried under their feet. They had no idea that China was a vast graveyard.

The following evening we moved to a new hostel. The girl at reception wasn’t very experienced, and let A-Mei and me share the same room. It was a large dorm with seven single beds. We were the only guests.

After I blew out the candle, A-Mei felt afraid, and so did I, so we squeezed up together on one of the single beds and held each other.