China in Ten Words (11 page)

But this colleague of mine proved reluctant to accept the commission, fearing that it might get him into trouble. It was my job to get things squared away, he kept repeating. On my return, I countered, I would present him with a box of Beijing’s famous dried fruit and a packet of the biscuits that Empress Dowager Cixi had most adored. Hearing this, my colleague couldn’t help but drool, for these things at the time were gourmet items on everybody’s wish list. Prudence was no match for temptation: he agreed to wait till I was safely on the bus, then drop off the request. My scheme had succeeded through bribery, we would say today—or through a sugar-coated bullet, as we would have put it then.

The day I entered the editorial offices of
Beijing Literature
, the staff were having their lunch break. Wang Jie (the editor who had discovered me in a huge pile of unsolicited manuscripts) sat me down on a shabby old sofa, poured me a cup of tea, and slipped out. A moment later an old lady with a ruddy complexion pushed open the door. “You’re Yu Hua?” she said.

This was Zhou Yanru. She asked me to change the ending to my story, for it was rather bleak and she wanted things to end happily. She who had never seen capitalism told me, who had never seen capitalism either, “Socialism is bright. Only capitalism can be so dark and dismal.”

I revised the manuscript in two days, following her instructions to the letter. To me at the time, getting published was more important than anything else. Never mind creating an upbeat ending—if she had asked me to make the whole story sparkle with light from start to finish, I would have put up no resistance. Zhou Yanru, very pleased, complimented me on my cleverness, then told me not to rush home. I should have a good look around the capital while I was there.

At that time I had no idea I would later make my home in Beijing, so I felt this was a priceless opportunity and roamed everywhere, trying to take in all the sights. China’s tourist industry was still in its infancy then, and during my whole time in the Forbidden City I saw only a dozen or so sightseers—such a contrast with today, when visiting a heritage site feels more like attending a mass rally. I took a long-haul bus to the Great Wall and climbed the steep slope at Badaling. There the bitter wind from Mongolia blew so hard it felt like several hands slapping me on the face over and over again. I met only one other tourist on the Great Wall: as I climbed up toward the beacon tower he was coming down. I greeted him and suggested he join me on another climb, but he shook his head vigorously. “Way too cold,” he said with a shiver.

When I descended and entered the run-down little bus station, the tourist I had just seen was huddled in a corner, still shivering. There was no sign of the bus that would take us back to the city, so I sat down next to him and began shivering, too.

After all my excursions I asked Wang Jie where else was worth seeing. She mentioned a few places; I said I had been to them all. “Time to go home, then,” she said with a smile. She went off and bought my train ticket, sat at the desk and totted up my expenses, then went to the business office to collect my money. I discovered then that not only would the two days I’d spent revising my manuscript be reimbursed but the days I’d spent sightseeing would be, too. When I traveled back south on the train, I had more than 70 yuan in my pocket, a princely sum to me at the time, and it gave me an unabashed sensation that I was the richest person in the world.

Wang Jie also provided written confirmation that I had revised a manuscript for
Beijing Literature
. It was not until I was back in Haiyan that I realized the importance of this document, for the first thing that the hospital director said to me when he saw me was: “Do you have any proof?”

I came back to find my little town all in a tizzy, for I must have been the first person in the history of our district to have been summoned to Beijing to make revisions to a manuscript. The local officials came to the conclusion that I must be some kind of genius, and they said they could not have me go on extracting teeth but should put me to work in the cultural center. That’s how, after a complex transfer procedure, with seven or eight red seals of approval stamped on my papers, I finally gained entry to the cultural center that I had dreamed of for so long. On my first day of work I made a point of showing up two hours late, only to discover I was the first to arrive. I knew then this was just the place for me.

That is my most beautiful memory of socialism.

A few years ago a Western reporter asked me why I abandoned the profitable world of dentistry for a writer’s paltry income. What he didn’t realize is that China at the time had just started to initiate reforms, and it was still the era of socialist egalitarianism—everyone eating from the same big pot. All employees in cities and towns got paid exactly the same, no matter what kind of work they were engaged in. I was a pauper in the cultural center, but I had been a pauper as a dentist, too. The difference was that a dentist was a pauper mired in drudgery, whereas now I was a pauper who enjoyed freedom and fulfillment.

Many years have passed since then, but my love of writing remains undiminished. All of us have countless desires and emotions that we cannot express, inhibited as we are by mundane realities and rational instincts. But in the world of writing these suppressed desires and emotions can find an unrestricted outlet. Writing tends to promote physical and psychological health, I feel, for it can make one’s life complete. To put it another way, writing enables me to claim ownership of two lives, one imaginary and one real, and the relationship between them is like that between sickness and health: when one is strong, the other is bound to fall into decline. So, as my real life becomes more routine, my imaginary life is all the more brimming with incident.

A
fter his visit to Beijing, Pankaj Mishra sent me an e-mail, perhaps from his home in London, perhaps from his home in New Delhi, or perhaps from some corner of the world that I have never heard of. “Why is it that your early short stories are so full of blood and violence,” he asked, “when this tendency is not so evident in your later work?”

It’s not easy to respond to this kind of query, not because it has no answer but because it has too many. Mishra, as a novelist himself, must know I could offer any number of reasons. I could talk eloquently on the subject for days on end, until my tongue was sore, only to find there was still more to say, yet more answers clamoring for attention. Experience tells me that too many answers are the same as none at all; perhaps only one can constitute a real answer. So I will supply just a single explanation, one that I think may be the most important; whether it is the true answer is impossible to know.

It’s your experience while growing up, I believe, that shapes the direction of your life. A basic image of the world is planted deep in your mind, and then, like a document in a copy machine, it keeps being reprinted again and again throughout your formative years. Once you reach adulthood, whether you’re successful or not, whatever you accomplish can only partially revise that most basic image; it will never be entirely transformed. Naturally some revise the image more and some revise it less. Mao Zedong, I’m sure, made more revisions than I have done.

It’s my conviction that the bloodshed and mayhem of my work in the 1980s were shaped by my experiences as a child. I was just entering primary school when the Cultural Revolution began, and I had just graduated from high school when it ended. In my early years I witnessed countless rallies, denunciation sessions, and battles between rebel factions, not to mention a constant stream of street fights. For me it was a regular occurrence to walk down a street lined with big-character posters and run into people with blood streaming down their faces. That was the larger context of my childhood, and the smaller context was equally bloody. My brother and I were used to running around in hospital corridors and patient wards, inured to screams and sobs, to pallid faces and last gasps, to blood-soaked gauze tossed on the floors of sickrooms and hallways. Sometimes, if the nurse had stepped away from her station outside the surgery door, we would quickly slip in, unchallenged, to observe an operation. We watched, entranced, as our father, wearing transparent gloves, slipped his hands through the abdominal incision and rummaged around in the patient’s organs and intestines. “Get out of here!” he would yell when he discovered us, and we would scamper away.

From 1986 to 1989 was my peak period for writing about blood and violence. In one of his books the critic Hong Zhigang lists eight stories I wrote during these years and comes up with no fewer than twenty-nine characters who die unnatural deaths within their pages. During the day as I worked on my stories, there were bound to be gruesome slayings and people dying in pools of blood. At night as I slept, I would dream I was being hunted down and killed. In those nightmares I would find myself friendless and alone, and when I wasn’t searching frantically for a hiding place, I’d be desperately fleeing down a highway. Typically, just as I was about to come to a bad end—as an axe was about to sever my neck, for example—I would awake with a start, dripping with sweat, my heart pounding, and it would take me a minute to pull myself together. “Thank God that was just a dream!” I would cry with relief.

But at daybreak, when I sat down at my desk and began to write, it was as though I had forgotten all about my nighttime trauma, and what poured forth from my pen was yet more bloodshed and violence. A new cycle of retribution would commence, and at night when I slept I would dream once again that I was on somebody’s death list. Life in those three years was so frenzied and so hideous: by day I would kill people in fiction, and by night I would be hunted down in dreams. As this pattern went on repeating itself I worked myself to the edge of nervous collapse but continued heedlessly to immerse myself in the agitation of writing, a creative high that took its own toll.

This went on until one night when I had a very protracted dream. Unlike the other nightmares, from which I always awoke before the moment of death, in this one I experienced my own annihilation. Perhaps I was just so tired that day that the prospect of my death failed to frighten me awake. It was this prolonged nightmare that enabled me to recover a true memory.

Let me say more about this memory. Although there was no shortage of violence during the Cultural Revolution, small-town life was basically very dull and confining. So whenever an execution took place, the little town on Hangzhou Bay where I grew up would buzz with excitement, as though it were a public holiday. Trials at the time, as I have noted, culminated in a sentencing rally on the high school playing field. The prisoners awaiting punishment stood at the front of the stage with a big sign on their chests identifying their crime:
COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY/MURDERER, RAPIST/MURDERER, ROBBER/MURDERER
, and so forth. Behind them sat the members of the county revolutionary committee. On either side were arrayed the ancillary targets of struggle, like landlords and rightists, “historical” counterrevolutionaries and “active” counterrevolutionaries. The convicted prisoners stood, heads bowed, as a representative of the revolutionary committee delivered into the microphone an impassioned indictment of their crimes and announced their sentences. If an offender was trussed up and had two armed guards towering over him, this meant he was earmarked for execution.

From my early childhood, I witnessed one after another of these rallies. Squeezed among the crowd of townspeople who packed the playing field, I would listen to the strident harangues that blared from the loudspeaker. The judgment took the form of a prolonged critique, starting off with sayings of Mao Zedong and quotations from Lu Xun, followed by paragraphs consisting largely of boilerplate borrowed from the
People’s Daily
, verbose and flavorless. My legs would be aching when I finally heard what crime the person had committed. The sentence itself was brief and to the point, consisting of just five words: “Sentenced to death, execution immediate!”

There were no courts in China during the Cultural Revolution, nor any appeals after sentencing, and we had never in our lives heard of such a thing as the legal profession. After the penalty was announced, there was no chance of lodging an appeal. Prisoners were taken directly to the execution ground and shot.

When the words “Sentenced to death, execution immediate” were read out, the prisoner was hauled off the stage by the guards and shoved onto the back of an open truck lined with two rows of soldiers armed with loaded rifles—always a grim and chilling sight. The truck would set off for the beach, where the executions took place, with hundreds of locals streaming along behind, some on bicycles, some on foot, all flooding toward the shore in a dense black horde. During my childhood years I don’t know how many prisoners I saw who crumpled at the knees when they heard their death sentence and had to be dragged forcibly onto the truck.

Once I witnessed this from just a few feet away. The prisoner’s hands, tied behind his back, were a ghastly sight, because the cord had been tied so tightly and for such a long time that it had cut off the circulation. His hands had not turned white, as one might imagine they would, but dark purple, almost black. Only later, when I picked up some medical knowledge in the course of my dental training, did I realize that flesh so discolored is damaged beyond recovery. Before this man was shot, his hands were already dead.

We children couldn’t possibly run fast enough to keep up with the truck, so often we would try to make an educated guess about which direction it would take, reasoning that if last time the executions were conducted at North Beach, then this time there was a good chance they would be at South Beach. As soon as the rally started we would make a dash for the shore, so that we could stake our claim to plum positions. But sometimes we would arrive at South Beach to find there was absolutely no one there and realized we had run to the wrong place; by then we had no chance of making it to North Beach in time.