One Man's Bible (26 page)

35

“You clown!” the former lieutenant colonel rebuked him, but he was now the favorite of the Army Control Commission. He was also the deputy leader of the team in charge of purifying class ranks, although, of course, army personnel were actually in charge.

You really were a clown. You were a bean made to jump helplessly in the all-embracing sieve of the totalitarian dictatorship, but you didn’t jump out of the sieve, because you didn’t want to get smashed up.

You had to welcome being controlled by army personnel, just like you had to take part in the parades to cheer each of Mao’s latest string of directives released on the radio news at night. As soon as the slogans had been written, people assembled, formed ranks, and began marching on the streets, usually until midnight. To gongs and drums and the shouting of slogans, one contingent after another marched across Chang’an Avenue from the west, as one contingent after another marched across from the east, each on parade for the other. You had also to be enthusiastic and not let others see that you were worried.

You certainly were a clown, otherwise you would have been “dog shit, less than human.” Those were Old Man Mao’s own words of warning, to draw a line of demarcation between the people and the enemy. Faced with choosing between being dog shit and being a clown, you chose to be a clown. You loudly sang the army song, “Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention.” Like a soldier, you stood to attention before the portrait of the Commander-in-Chief that hung in the middle of the main wall of every office, and, holding high a red plastic-covered copy of Mao’s
Sayings
, you shouted “long live” three times. After the implementation of army control, all this was compulsory daily ritual at the start and finish of work. It was called “seeking instructions in the morning” and “reporting at night.”

At such times, you had to be careful not to laugh! Otherwise there would have been dire consequences, unless you were prepared to be a counterrevolutionary and hoped that at some future date you’d become a martyr. The former lieutenant colonel was absolutely correct, he was a clown, but he didn’t dare to laugh. It is only you of the present, who recalling those times, can laugh, although you find that you can’t.

He was the representative of a group of people’s organizations in a ferret-out team controlled by army personnel. When that group of masses and cadres chose him, he knew that his judgment day had come. However, the masses and cadres of the group that looked to him for support did not know that that single item in his file, his father’s having “hidden a gun,” could see him purged from that one big revolutionary family.

At the meeting of the ferret-out team, Officer Zhang read aloud an “internal control” list—that is, a list of persons on whom internal control was to be carried out. This was the first time he had heard the term, and it gave him a shock. The “internal control” was not directed only at ordinary workers, but included certain Party cadres. The ferreting-out was to start with “bad people” who had infiltrated people’s organizations. This was no longer the Red Guard violence
of two years ago, or the armed fighting between factions of people’s organizations. It was now leisurely, and directed by army personnel, and, like a strategic plan of war, it was planned, coordinated, and fought in stages. The Army Control Commission had removed the seals from the personnel files, and in front of Officer Zhang were piles of materials on people with “problems.”

“All of you here are representatives of people’s organizations. Comrades, I hope all of you will rid yourselves of any capitalist-class factional feelings, and purge any bad elements who have infiltrated your organizations. We can have only one standpoint, and that is the standpoint of the proletariat. Factional standpoints are not allowed! We will discuss each of these cases, decide whom to put in the first list and whom to put in the second list. Of course, there is also a third list, and whether they are dealt with leniently or harshly depends on whether those persons take the initiative to admit their crimes, and on how they conduct themselves in confessions and disclosures!”

Officer Zhang had a wide face and a square jaw. His eyes swept over the representatives of the various people’s organizations as he jabbed a thick finger at the big pile of documents. Then, removing the cover on his cup, he began to drink his tea and to smoke.

He cautiously raised some questions, but only because Officer Zhang had said discussions were allowed. He asked what problems Liu, his former superior and department chief, had apart from a landlord family background? Also, there was a woman bureau chief who, back in those times, had been an underground Party member and organizer of student movements. According to the findings of his group, she had never been arrested, and there were no suspicions of her having been anti-Party or having capitulated to the enemy. Why had she also been listed for special investigation? Officer Zhang turned to him, raised the hand holding the cigarette, and gave him a look. That was when the former lieutenant colonel had rebuked him: “You clown!”

Several decades later, you were able to read a number of memoirs
that gradually shed light on the internal struggles within the Chinese Communist Party. At the Political Bureau meetings, Mao Zedong probably gave his generals a look like this if they so much as offered the slightest dissent, then went on smoking and drinking his tea. Other generals would come forth to rebuke them. It was not necessary for the old man to say anything.

You, of course, were not a general. The former lieutenant colonel also yelled at him, “You insect!” Quite right, you were a very small insect. What was your ant’s life worth anyway?

After work, he went to get his bicycle from the shed downstairs and ran into Liang Qin, who worked in his office. When he had rebelled two years earlier, it was Liang Qin who had taken over his work. But his life as a rebel had ended. Seeing no one around, he said to Liang, “Go on ahead, but after the intersection slow down. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Liang went off on his bicycle and, afterwards, he caught up.

“Come to my home for a drink,” Liang said.

“Who else will be there?” he asked.

“My wife and son!”

“No, it wouldn’t be convenient. Let’s just cycle and talk like this.”

“What is it?” Liang had immediately sensed that something was wrong.

“Do you have any problems in your background?” He didn’t look at Liang and asked the question as if it was nothing of importance.

“No!” Liang almost fell off his bicycle.

“Have you ever contacted anyone abroad?”

“I don’t have any relatives abroad!”

“Have you ever written letters to anyone abroad?”

“Wait! Let me think. . . .”

There was another red light, and they each put a foot on the ground and stopped their bicycles.

“Yes, I have. People at the workplace asked me about it, it was many years ago. . . .” Liang was on the verge of tears as he said this.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry! You’re out on the road. . . .” he said.

At that point, the green light came on, and the tide of bicycles started surging ahead.

“Tell me what else there is to this, I won’t implicate you!” Liang had pulled himself together.

“There is talk that you could be a spy, you will need to be careful.”

“Where did you hear this?”

He said he didn’t know.

“I did, in fact, write a letter to Hong Kong, to a neighbor of mine. We had grown up together, but, later on, one of his paternal aunts got him to go to Hong Kong. I did, in fact, write him a letter asking him to get me a dictionary of English idioms, that was all, and it was many lifetimes ago! It was during the war in Korea, when I had just graduated, I was in the army as an interpreter in a prisoner-of-war camp. . . .”

“Did you receive the dictionary?” he asked.

“No! You’re saying . . . the letter was never sent? Was it intercepted?” Liang went on to ask.

“Who knows?”

“I’m suspected . . . of having communicated with a foreign country?”

“It was you who said this.”

“And do you suspect me?” Liang turned to ask him.

“I’m not going into that with you. Just be careful!”

As a long, two-carriage, electric trolleybus passed close by, Liang swerved and almost collided with it.

“No wonder they transferred me out of the army. . . .” For Liang, everything had suddenly become clear.

“All this is not so important.”

“What else is there? Tell me everything, I won’t bring you into it, even if they beat me to death!” Liang’s bicycle swerved again.

“Don’t get yourself killed in the process!” he warned.

“I won’t stupidly kill myself! I’ve got a wife and a son!”

“Just be careful!”

He cycled around the corner. What he didn’t say was that Liang’s name was on the second list.

Some years later . . . How many years was it? Ten . . . no, twenty-eight years later, in Hong Kong, you answered a telephone call in your hotel. It was Liang Qin, who had read in the papers about your play. You didn’t instantly recognize the name, and thought it was someone you had once met, and that the person wanted to see your play but couldn’t get tickets, so you quickly apologized that it had already closed. He said he was your old colleague and wanted to take you out for a meal. You said you were flying out the next morning and that there wasn’t time, maybe next time. He said, in that case, he would drive over right away to the hotel to see you. It was awkward to put him off, and it was only after putting down the receiver that you remembered him and your last conversation on your bicycles.

Half an hour later, he came into your room. He was dressed in a suit, leather shoes, linen shirt, and a dark-gray tie, but he was not flashy like the new rich from the Mainland. When you shook his hand, there was no gold Rolex watch, thick gold bracelet, or heavy gold ring. However, his hair was black, and, at his age, it would have been dyed. He said he had settled in Hong Kong many years ago. That neighbor from his youth, to whom he had written for the dictionary, found out how much he had suffered because of that letter, and felt so bad that he arranged for him to come out. He now had his own company, and his wife and son had moved to Canada on visas they had purchased. He told you frankly, “During these years, I have earned some money. I’m not wealthy, but I have enough to live out my old age in relative comfort. My son has a Ph.D. from a Canadian university, so I don’t have anything to worry about. I commute, and if I can’t stay in Hong Kong, I can pull out anytime.” He also said he was grateful for the words you said to him back then.

“What words?” You couldn’t remember.

“ ‘Don’t get yourself killed in the process!’ But for those words of yours, I wouldn’t have been able to keep watching what was happening.”

“My father couldn’t keep watching,” you said.

“He killed himself?” he asked.

“Luckily, he was discovered by an old neighbor who called an ambulance, and he was rushed to a hospital and saved. He was sent to a reform-through-labor farm for several years. Then, less than three months after being exonerated, he became ill and died.”

“Why didn’t you alert him at the time?” Liang asked.

“How could I dare write at that time? If they found out, my own life would also have been in jeopardy.”

“That’s right, but what sort of problem did he have?”

“Talk about yours, what sort of problem did you have?”

“Hey, let’s not talk about all that!” He sighed, and, after a pause, asked, “How’s your life?”

“What are you referring to?”

“I’m just asking, I know you’re a writer, I’m asking how you are financially. You understand . . . what I mean, don’t you?” Liang was unsure how to put it.

“I understand,” you said. “I’m managing.”

“I know that it’s hard to make a living as a writer in the West, especially for Chinese. It’s not like in business.”

“Freedom,” you said. What you want is freedom, the freedom to write the things you want to write.

He nodded, then again worked up the courage to say, “If you . . . Look, I’ll be frank. For a time, I was financially constrained and didn’t have the money, but you need only to say. I’m not some big tycoon but . . .”

“If you were a big tycoon you wouldn’t be talking like this.” You laughed. “A big tycoon would donate the money to carry out some fancy bit of engineering that would enable him to do more trade with the homeland.”

Liang Qin took out a business card from his suit pocket, added an address and telephone number, and gave it to you, saying, “That’s my mobile number. I’ve bought the house, so that address in Canada won’t be changing.”

You thanked him, said you didn’t have a problem, and that if you had to rely on writing for a living, you would have stopped writing a long time ago.

He was deeply moved and blurted, “You’re really writing for the people of China!”

You said you were writing only for yourself.

“I know, I know, write all about it!” he said. “I hope you’ll write all about it, really write all about those times that were not fit for human beings!”

Write about all that suffering? you asked yourself after he had left. But you were already weary of all that.

However, you did think about your father. When he was exonerated and came back from the reform-through-labor farm, he was restored to both his former job and salary, but he insisted on retiring and came to Beijing to see you, this son of his. He planned to do some traveling after that, to drive away his cares and to spend his last years peacefully. You couldn’t have known that the very night after you had spent the day with him at the Summer Palace, he was to cough blood. The next day, he went for a hospital examination and they found a shadow on his lung. It was diagnosed as full-blown lung cancer in its final stage. One night, his illness suddenly got worse, and he was admitted to a hospital. Early the next morning, he was dead. When he was alive, you asked him why he had attempted suicide. He simply said he really no longer wanted to live at the time. However, when he had just been able to live again, and, moreover, wanted to live, he suddenly died.