China in Ten Words (12 page)

On a few occasions we guessed right and so got a grandstand view of the executions. This was the most shocking sight in all my childhood. Armed soldiers formed a semicircle to prevent the spectators from coming too close. The soldier designated to perform the execution would kick the prisoner in the back of the legs, making him drop to his knees. The soldier would take a few steps back, to stay outside the range of blood spray. Then he would raise his rifle, take aim at the back of the prisoner’s head, and fire. I was struck by how such a small bullet had such enormous force—more than that of a large shovel—for it would knock the prisoner down to the ground in a second. After that first shot the executioner would go forward to confirm that the prisoner was dead; if still alive, he would need a second bullet. When the soldier turned the body faceup, I would see something that made me shake all over: the entry wound was just a little hole, but where the bullet came out the other side the prisoner’s face was shattered beyond recognition, and what had been a forehead was now a gaping crater, as big as the bowl out of which I ate my meals.

Now I need to return to that long and terrifying dream, the nightmare in which I experienced my own destruction. It happened late one night in the final weeks of 1989. I dreamt I was trussed up with cord, a board over my chest, standing at the front of the stage in the high school playing field, two armed guards behind me, landlords, rightists, and counterrevolutionaries arrayed as understudies in the wings, although the “black pen” I mentioned earlier was curiously absent from their ranks. Below the stage was assembled an inky cloud of people whose voices clattered like rain on a sidewalk. Through the loudspeaker I heard a solemn, censorious voice denouncing my various crimes, for it seemed I had committed multiple murders, of varying degrees of depravity. Finally there came the words:
“Sentenced to death, execution immediate.”

No sooner was the sentence read than the soldier behind me took a step forward, slowly raised his rifle, and pointed it at my head. He was standing so close, the muzzle butted my temple. Then I heard a loud bang as he pressed the trigger. The impact of the bullet knocked me off my feet but, strangely, I was somehow able to stand up again and even heard a buzz of noise from below the stage. My head had been split wide open, like an egg that’s been cracked, spilling both the white and the yolk. With my empty eggshell of a head I wheeled around to face the executioner and gave a roar of rage. “Hell, we’re not at the beach yet!” I cried.

Then I woke, drenched in sweat and heart pounding as always. But now, unlike the earlier occasions, I did not rejoice at the passing of the nightmare, for recovered memories began to torment me. The high school playing field, the sentencing rally, the hands that died ahead of time, the truck and the soldiers armed to the teeth, the shootings on the beach, the bullet so much stronger than a shovel, the little hole at the back of the skull and the gaping cavity in the forehead, the blood slick on the sand—these awful sights replayed themselves endlessly in front of my eyes.

I began to search my conscience: why was I always dreaming at night of being hunted down and killed? Surely it was the result of my writing so much about violence and bloodletting during the day. A karmic law of cause and effect was at work, I became convinced. And so in the hollow of the night—the early hours of the morning, perhaps—under my quilt damp with cold sweat I issued myself a dire warning: You’ve got to stop writing this kind of story.

Since then twenty years have passed, but when I look back, I still feel a pang of fear. I had pushed myself to the edge of a mental breakdown, and if I had not experienced that particular nightmare and recovered those lost memories, I might have continued to wallow in blood and gore until I’d reached the point of no return. If that had happened, then I would not now be sitting in my home in Beijing, rationally writing these words; instead I might well be slumped in some ramshackle psychiatric hospital, gazing blankly into space.

Sometimes life and writing can actually be very simple: a dream can trigger memory’s recall, and everything changes.

*
xiezuo

†
Gang of Four was the name given to a radical faction influential in the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution, consisting of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. Removed from office in October 1976, they were subsequently jailed. The campaign against the authority of teachers served a radical agenda by counteracting the efforts of Zhou Enlai and others to restore order to the educational system.

lu xun

O
ne day in May 2006 I was sitting in the departure lounge of Copenhagen’s well-run airport, surrounded by travelers of multiple nationalities murmuring away in their various languages. I gazed out through the plate-glass windows at the Norwegian Air jet that would soon fly me to Oslo, and my eyes were drawn to the huge portrait on its tail. Whose portrait is that? I wondered. No immediate answer presented itself, and the tantalizing question kept me rooted to my seat. The face looked strangely familiar, with rather long, tousled hair and a pair of old-fashioned spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose.

As boarding began I rose and joined the line at the gate, and soon I had claimed my window seat, still puzzling over the identity of the man on the tail. Just as the plane lifted off from the runway I suddenly realized who he was, for I had seen the very same picture inside a Chinese edition of
Peer Gynt:
it was Henrik Ibsen. Watching Copenhagen gradually slip away behind me, I couldn’t help but smile. The world has seen any number of great writers, I thought to myself, but Ibsen must be the most frequent flier among them.

I landed in Oslo one hundred years after Ibsen’s death. The streets were shrouded in a gentle drizzle, and banners imprinted with that same portrait fluttered on both sides of the road, creating two columns of identical portraits—countless Ibsens, near and far, gazing at me in the rain from behind their round spectacles, as though they had a message to impart.

My first meal in Oslo was in a restaurant that Ibsen had often patronized. It had that patina of age one encounters so often in Europe, with round pillars and an exquisite fresco on the high ceiling. To mark the centennial a small round table had been set out near the door; on it lay a black top hat and a just-drained glass of beer, foam still lining its lip. A walking stick stood propped against a vacant chair, suggesting that Ibsen had just stepped away from his table and might return to his seat at any moment.

In the days that followed I did not enter the restaurant again, but I would often pass it as I set off for an engagement or returned late at night. Each time I would pause to take stock of the montage inside and discovered that a subtle change took place during the course of the day: in the morning the glass would be full, but by the evening it would be empty, with that circle of foam around the lip. My curiosity about Ibsen’s world made me wonder if he would have been equally curious about mine—if his phantom at the restaurant table might notice a Chinese author coming and going and wonder, “What has this man written?”

It made me think of our own Lu Xun, for it was he who introduced Ibsen’s name to Chinese readers in essays written in classical Chinese and published in the monthly periodical
Henan
in 1908, just two years after Ibsen’s death. Later, in 1923, Lu Xun would give his famous lecture at Peking Women’s College of Education, prompted by Ibsen’s play
A Doll’s House
, in which he considers what kind of future faces its heroine, Nora Helmer, when she leaves her husband and strikes out on her own. “What happens after Nora leaves?” Lu Xun asked. “Ibsen sheds no light on this—and since he is dead, we cannot ask him. Even if he were still alive, he would not owe us any answers.” As a reader of
A Doll’s House
Lu Xun then answered the question himself: after Nora leaves, “she has only two real choices: she can either descend into prostitution or she can return to her husband—the only other option being to die of hunger.” In Lu Xun’s view, for women to deliver themselves from submission and dependency, they needed to gain economic equality with men. Lu Xun continued with typical acerbity:

Money is an unseemly topic that may well be deplored by gentlemen of lofty principle. But I tend to think that people’s views differ not only between one day and the next but also before and after meals. When people admit that money is necessary to feed oneself but still insist on its vulgarity, then one can safely predict that they still have some undigested fish or meat in their systems. They’d sing a different tune, I’m sure, if you made them go hungry for a day.

The portrait of Ibsen on the tail of the plane and its reappearance fluttering on the banners in Oslo streets made me conscious of Ibsen’s special status in Norway. He obviously enjoys an exalted reputation in many places, but I have a vague sense that in Norway “Ibsen” does not simply signify the author of classic works but is freighted with a meaning that goes well beyond the scope of literature and biography. In this respect it is similar to the “Lu Xun” of my childhood—that is to say the “Lu Xun” of the Cultural Revolution years. With this thought in mind, when I gave my lecture at the University of Oslo, I told some stories about Lu Xun and me.

T
he Cultural Revolution was an era without literature, and it was only in our Chinese textbooks that one could catch a faint whiff of literary art. But the assigned texts were confined to the works of just two authors: Lu Xun’s stories and essays and Mao Zedong’s poetry. In my first year of primary school I believed innocently that there was only one prose author in the world, Lu Xun, and only one poet, Mao Zedong.

In his own day there was surely no author with more highly developed critical instincts than Lu Xun. When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, it claimed that a new society had been inaugurated and in the same breath demanded that the old society be relentlessly condemned. Thus it was that Lu Xun’s scathing works were wielded as whips to lash and scourge the supine form of China’s past. From an early age we were taught that the despicable old society was “cannibalistic,” and Lu Xun’s first short story, “Diary of a Madman,” was presented as Exhibit A: a fictional story that recorded a madman’s ravings about “eating people” was interpreted, to suit the political agenda of the time, as a true statement of social realities. The other stories by Lu Xun adopted as compulsory schoolroom texts—“Kong Yiji,” “New Year’s Sacrifice,” “Medicine,” and so on—were likewise read purely as models of how to go about exposing the evils of the old society.

Of course, Mao Zedong’s high regard for Lu Xun was a key factor in all this, enabling the writer to enjoy a stellar reputation in the new society, hailed as a threefold great: great author, great thinker, and great revolutionary. Lu Xun died in 1936, but his influence reached its apogee during the Cultural Revolution (which began in 1966) when it was second only to that of Mao himself. In those days almost every essay—whether printed in the newspaper or read out in a radio broadcast or handwritten on a street-side big-character poster—would always, after its obligatory quotations of Mao Zedong, cite some assertion by Lu Xun. Denunciations issued in the name of the people would borrow lines from Lu Xun. The confessions of landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists would borrow lines from him, too. “Chairman Mao teaches us” and “Mr. Lu Xun says” were the standard political tags punctuating speeches and articles throughout the land.

There was something paradoxical about the use of that prefix “Mr.,” for during the Cultural Revolution this form of address was thoroughly debunked as a Bad Thing associated with feudalism and the bourgeoisie. Lu Xun alone was permitted to enjoy this feudal/bourgeois title, others being known simply as Comrade or, failing that, Class Enemy.

Lu Xun at this time was no longer a controversial author; the intense attacks of which he had once been the target were now a thing of the past. Like the sky washed clean after a storm, this new “Lu Xun” was fresh and radiant. “Lu Xun” had changed from an author to a catchphrase, one that represented eternal correctness and permanent revolution. For a full ten years from primary school through high school, in one textbook after another I glumly read and rehashed the writings of Lu Xun but never could make much sense out of them; I felt only that they were dark, depressing, and utterly tedious. Apart from the occasions when I was putting together a passage of revolutionary invective, where I found it necessary to quote him, the rest of the time his work was basically incomprehensible to me. As a catchphrase, in other words, Lu Xun had his uses, but as a writer I found him a deadly bore. For this reason Lu Xun’s writings do not figure at all in my childhood experiences, only Lu Xun the catchphrase.

During my Cultural Revolution years I made the most of this powerful “Lu Xun” phrase. My experience of growing up consisted largely of revolution and poverty, with a good deal of endless argument thrown in. For me argument was a luxury that provided mental nourishment in a life of deprivation.

One argument pitted me against a primary school classmate, the question at issue being: when is the sun closest to the earth? Early morning and late afternoon, he said, for that’s when the sun looks biggest. Midday, I said, for that’s when the sun is hottest. The two of us began to engage tirelessly in a marathon debate: every day no sooner would we meet than we would reiterate our hypotheses and reject each other’s views. After talking this kind of nonsense for goodness knows how long, we began to seek support in other quarters. He took me off to see his sister, who listened to our competing theories and immediately sided with her little brother. Still a couple of years short of puberty, she did not even bother to interrupt the game she was playing. “First thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon,” she said, kicking her shuttlecock. “Of course that’s when the sun is closest.”

I was not about to throw in the towel and insisted we go and consult my brother. He was naturally just as determined to stand up for his sibling and did so in no uncertain terms. “You better watch yourself,” he said, waving both fists in my classmate’s face. “If I hear you say morning and afternoon one more time, you’re going to get a taste of these.”

I found Hua Xu’s response disappointing, for I wanted to be vindicated by truth, not by brute force. Off we went in search of slightly older children. Some supported the other boy, some agreed with me; the argument raged back and forth with no clear winner. By the time this had gone on for a year or so, the older children had all served as umpires to our quarrel at one time or another, and they were getting tired of it. Just the sight of us approaching them bickering would make them yell, “Get lost!”

The scope of this acrimonious debate thus confined itself ultimately to two participants only: him and me. Later my classmate’s views underwent further refinement, and he found more reasons to cast doubt on my “heat theory”: if temperature is the decisive criterion, he said, does that mean the sun is closer to earth in the summer and farther away in the winter? I countered by questioning his “observation theory”: if visually confirmed size is what counts, then does this mean that on a rainy day the sun has got so small as to completely disappear?

We continued to squabble until the day that I brought in Lu Xun as my ally; that brought him to his knees soon enough. In desperation, I had resorted to bluff. “Mr. Lu Xun has said it, at midday the sun is closest to the earth!”

He looked at me dumbly. “Did Mr. Lu Xun really say that?”

“Of course he did.” I spoke with great assurance, to mask my guilty conscience. “Don’t tell me you don’t believe Mr. Lu Xun?”

“No, it’s not that.” He waved his hand in alarm. “But why didn’t you say so earlier?”

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, as I improvised madly. “I didn’t know before. I just heard it on the radio this morning.”

He hung his head. “If Mr. Lu Xun says this too, it has to mean you’re right and I’m wrong.”

It was as simple as that: his position on the distance between the sun and the earth, which he had defended to the hilt for twelve months flat, collapsed in ruins at once before my fictitious Lu Xun. In the days that followed he was pensive and subdued, tasting alone the bitter flavor of defeat.

That was a characteristic of the Cultural Revolution era: no matter whether it was an argument between rebels or between Red Guards or simply a row between housewives, the final victor would always come out with something Mao Zedong had said, so as to crush their opponent and bring the argument to an end. I had originally intended to make up a quotation by Mao but couldn’t quite bring myself to utter such an outrageous lie, and so I ended up by changing “Chairman Mao teaches us” to “Mr. Lu Xun says.” This way, if my fiction was ever exposed and I was denounced as a little counterrevolutionary, I would at least be charged with a slightly less heinous crime.

As we entered middle school this classmate and I embarked on a new argument, one that would become equally prolonged. This time we found ourselves at odds on the nuclear issue. If one tied all the atomic bombs in the world together and detonated them all at once, he said, the resulting explosion would shatter the earth into a thousand pieces. I disagreed profoundly. The earth’s surface, I conceded, would suffer terrible devastation, but the planet itself would suffer no structural damage and would continue to spin on its axis and orbit the sun as it always had.