The Fat Years (10 page)
He also has asthma just like me and has been taking corticosteroids for many years. This has led me to the bold hypothesis that our not suffering from memory loss has something to do with our asthma. Ha! This is wonderful news. It proves that within the boundaries of our nation, there are as many people who still remember what happened that year as there are suffers from chronic asthma. It’s just that they don’t know of each other’s existence. If I can bring together a hundred or a thousand of these asthmatics, then I can prove to all our nation’s people that that month did in fact exist. Ha!
Last Friday evening, I went to Wudaokou to see a friend, and the outdoor equipment store on the ground floor of his apartment building was being cleared out and cleaned. I went in to look around and under a pile of junk I noticed an old copy of the popular liberal paper
Southern Weekly
from that lost month. It must have been the last issue they came out with before being forced to stop publishing. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a great treasure, so I just bought a few things and then took the paper along with them. When I compared the printed version of the
Southern Weekly
with the online version, as I expected there were many discrepancies. For example, the printed version carried an article critical of that year’s crackdown, but in the online version it had been deleted and replaced by an article explaining why Western universal values are inappropriate for China. I don’t know why, but when I saw how the
Southern Weekly
had been defiled and distorted so that it was now opposed to universal values, I burst out laughing. I forgot that the coffee shop was full of other customers.
That lone issue of the
Southern Weekly
was my document No. 71—evidence for the true historical existence of that missing month.
Even more fortunately, in the small hours after I’d left my friend’s place and hadn’t driven very far, I spotted five or six young men beating up another man who was lying on the ground. When they saw my car, they all took off running. When I stopped the car, experience told me not to get involved, but while I was hesitating, I realized that the young man was gasping for breath, and that was something I am very familiar with. I got out of the car and walked up to him. I saw his arm shaking and then I understood. I reached into his trouser pocket and found, as expected, his asthma inhaler. I shoved it into his mouth, sprayed like crazy a couple of times, and he revived.
Should I continue to help him? I wondered. Suddenly I became extremely curious. What was he like, this kid who took the same medication I did? I’ve had many bouts of this sort of curiosity in my life. You could say that I’ve traveled my whole life’s road on the basis of this sort of curiosity. So I decided to take care of the kid.
He was so big and heavy! I had a hell of a time dragging and lifting him into my car. Finally I got him in and took him to Peking University Third Hospital. I was afraid he would check out and leave the hospital, so I went to see him the next morning. He was still sound asleep. When he woke up in the afternoon, he asked me in a wheezy voice to buy some groceries and take them to his family in Huairou; he wasn’t even afraid that I’d disappear with his money. I decided to do what he asked. I’d wait to see the next card, just like in a poker game. By the third day I knew I’d been right. He remembers that month. We
are
the same, and I’ve finally proved that I’m not alone. Ha! He is Zhang Dou, and I made him my brother, closer than a flesh-and-blood brother.
In two years, he’s the only person I’ve found who is like me. Everybody else is different.
At first I thought all those other people just didn’t want to talk about the events of that month. Then later I realized that they recalled things wrongly, completely differently from the way I remembered them. Finally I came to the conclusion that in all their memories there were twenty-eight days missing. In order to verify this memory loss, I went to the library to look up the daily and weekly newspapers from that year, but the library had only online versions and it was no longer possible to read the printed versions. The online reports of those twenty-eight days were completely different from my memory of them: they held that the world economy had gone into crisis at the same time as the official start of China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. The horrifying month that came between these two historical events had completely disappeared.
For a while I thought that even though the government had distorted the truth, at least the common people would remember what had happened, but later on I had to admit that it was a case of total collective amnesia.
Complete collective amnesia. I suspected that this amnesia was related to the nationwide bird flu inoculation that spring, but I could not confirm my suspicion.
I started to frequent Beijing’s secondhand bookstores looking for related reports, but all I could find were official government newspapers and mindless entertainment magazines. There were no publications that carried the truth.
I bought a Jeep Cherokee in Beijing and took off south on the G4 Beijing–Hong Kong–Macao highway to collect more evidence of that month. It was only in rather strange places, though, that I found a few snippets of corroborating evidence. For example, in a guesthouse at the foothills of Mount Huang, I found a complete issue of the financial magazine
Caijing
that reported on how the new round of great economic decline in early February of that year was affecting China; at Hengdian World Film Studios in Zhejiang, I saw part of an
Asia Weekly
magazine from Hong Kong that reported on how the people were hoarding food that year; in a squalid urban village near Wuhan University in Hubei, I picked up half of an old
China Youth Daily,
published by the Communist Youth League, in which the main article, “The Leviathan Has Arrived,” introduced the seventeenth-century Western political philosopher Thomas Hobbes; the general theme of the article was that given a choice between anarchy and dictatorship, people will always choose the latter. Another article was a retrospective report describing how the government had failed miserably during the 2008 riot of over ten thousand people in Wan-an in Guizhou Province, when the police were accused of covering up the death of a young girl; in the Tujia ethnic region of Xiangxi in Hunan, I found an incomplete clipping from the
Southern Weekly;
it was an advertisement on how to use a made-in-China radio—because at that time many people were afraid that the power supply would fail and they would not be able to watch TV or surf the net, so they bought radios. On the reverse side of that advertisement was an article discussing the 1983 crackdown on criminality.
As time went by, media evidence was harder and harder to come by. That’s why I was so ecstatic when I found that late-February
Southern Weekly
with its clear evidence of that missing month.
I became much more anxious to find people like myself. I made a list of all the people I knew. The ones I believed always to have a clear understanding of things I called clearheaded people. I went to talk to these clearheaded people one by one, but came back disappointed every time. Am I like the lone survivor on earth whom we see in those apocalypse movies? But the heroes in those films are always destined to find other survivors later on. I relied on that idea to persist resolutely in my search.
Finally I met Zhang Dou. We both believe that this is only a beginning. Out of more than a billion Chinese people there must be many more like us.
I told Zhang Dou I’d been going to his home every day to see if Miaomiao and the dogs and cats needed anything. I like his kind and smiling Miaomiao and her pets more and more. Zhang Dou said that when he got out of the hospital I could come and live with them. Ha! I was quite excited. I need a safe place to store my accumulated evidence. I hope Zhang Dou gets out of the hospital soon.
A supplementary tape recording:
I spent a few days visiting several big hospitals pretending to be sick but actually taking a look at their asthmatic patients. I tried to raise the issue of the missing month, but I was disappointed because none of them remembered it. I thought everyone taking corticosteroids would be just like Zhang Dou and me, but I was mistaken. I told Zhang Dou about my discovery, but I also told him that we must not give up. “We absolutely must not forget how lonely we used to be. As long as there might be Chinese people who have not forgotten that month, we definitely have to look for them.”
To prevent us forgetting, here is another supplementary tape:
Last week on New East Road I ran into Lao Chen, a former journalist for
Mingbao
and the
United Daily.
I remembered that he used to be one of my clearheaded people who once helped me out with something important. Is he still a member of the clearheaded group? From the look in his eyes, I think the chances of him still being one of us are not great, but I should not let any opportunity go by. Look him up when you have time.
Little Xi, or
feichengwuraook,
didn’t return my e-mail, but Fang Caodi sent me one asking me to come and see him. I didn’t answer him immediately.
Recently all I’d been thinking of was Little Xi and I couldn’t seem to stop. But what was really weird was that when I thought about Little Xi, I also started thinking about Fang Caodi. I kept thinking about that time I saw him jogging near Happiness Village Number Two and all the
mouleitao
nonsense he kept spouting. For all the many years I’ve known him, I noted to myself, he’s always called me Lao Chen, but this time he actually called me
Master
Chen. I even started to think that Fang Caodi’s state of mind seemed to be in some inexplicable manner similar to Little Xi’s.
The other day I opened up a box that I have not opened since moving to Happiness Village Number Two and took out my notebooks—one of them was titled “Fang Caodi.” I started to read what I’d written:
Fang Caodi, original name Fang Lijun. Later on, when an artist with the same name suddenly became famous abroad, the Fang Lijun I knew changed his name to Fang Caodi.
I first came to know Fang Caodi when I was an editor at Hong Kong’s
Mingbao
and frequently received letters from an American reader signed “Old Fang.” Sometimes he corrected facts or evidence given in an article, but more often he would be offering us a great deal of related material, most of which was too detailed to print. I came to know that Old Fang understood a great many unofficial and secret aspects of contemporary China. Once I put a notice in the readers’ section asking him to give his real name and address, and he did. I even wrote back to thank him.
He paid particular attention to my articles, and he could even spot the ones I’d written under a nom de plume for the China page of
Mingbao.
To use a modern expression, he was my “fan.”
We first met in the summer of 1989 in Hong Kong, when he was on his way back to the mainland. I was surprised that he wanted to enter China at a time when so many others were trying to get out. He asked me if I was familiar with the organization that was rescuing leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement. I told him there was a Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Movements in China, but at that time I didn’t know there was also a secret organization spiriting people out of China.
I realized that his life experiences were quite unusual, so I invited him to meet me again the next day, and then I made these notes.
Fang Lijun’s or (Fang Caodi’s) ancestors came from Shandong. He was born in what was then known as Beiping in 1947. His father had joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Xinjiang, the restive northwestern province, together with the Xinjiang warlord Sheng Shicai. Later he went over to the Nationalist Party. In 1949, just before the People’s Liberation Army entered Beiping, he boarded a plane to Qingdao, and then took a ship to Taiwan, leaving behind his young third wife and his youngest child—Fang Lijun.
Sheng Shicai’s branch of the Communist Party was a quite different affair from the Communist Party of Zhu De and Mao Zedong. The former had once actually advocated that Xinjiang, with almost half its population being Muslim, become independent from China. Fang Lijun’s father not only betrayed the Communist Party, however, he was also closely involved with criminal gangs in the Northwest and was responsible for training people with “special skills” for them. Fang Lijun was born in a historic old Daoist temple on the east side of Beijing. After liberation, this temple was taken over by the Ministry of National Security—that shows how vigilant the Chinese communists were about Daoist supernatural techniques.
After they took power across the entire country, the Chinese communists started a Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. From 1950 to 1953, they cracked down severely on clandestine nationalist agents, organized crime, and members of religious organizations and secret societies. Anyone possessing Daoist-style “special skills” was liable to be considered part of a counterrevolutionary secret society. Mao Zedong suggested that one out of every thousand Chinese fitted these counter-revolutionary categories, and that the Party should first execute half that number. Large numbers of people who had worked for the nationalist government but then had surrendered, and even people who had worked underground for the Communist Party in the
White areas, were also executed at this time. They included the writer Jin Yong’s father, Zha Shuqing, and the essayist Zhu Ziqing’s son, Zhu Maixian.
After the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the criminal gangs and religious secret societies went into hiding and their voices were silenced throughout the land for quite some time. The leaders who had escaped most promptly went to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Fang Lijun’s father was implicated in all forms of counterrevolutionary secret activities, and so he went to Taiwan. Fang Lijun’s mother, who was a Daoist secret society “Big Sister,” was not so fortunate—she died in a Beijing prison.
As for Fang Lijun, the offspring of a counterrevolutionary nationalist spy and criminal-gang member father and a religious secret society mother, he grew up in an impenetrable Daoist temple where there were no longer any religious activities. He was raised by an old gatekeeper, and later helped the old man with many temple repairs. He finished upper middle school in the process.
Fang Lijun was not allowed to go to college due to his shady family background. Because he was a few months too old, he was also not eligible to be sent to the countryside with the “old three classes” of 1967, ’68, and ’69. He was even less eligible to become a Red Guard. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, then, he’d been assigned to teach in an elementary school in the Mentougou district of Beijing. But before he could even start, the Cultural Revolution reached a more intense level, and he was sent off to work as a coal miner in the Muchengjian mine, and there he stayed for several years.
According to his account, one day in September 1971 he suddenly got the urge to see the Summer Palace. He had heard so much about it, but he had never visited it, and he thought it might be a long time before he would have another chance to go. When he got halfway there, however, the road was closed. He guessed that there was something going on, maybe some troop transfers, at the restricted military area on Jade Spring Hill near the Summer Palace. When he got back to the workers’ dormitory, he told everybody something big was going to happen in China. And it certainly did. In a short time the shocking news was broadcast that Chairman Mao’s designated successor, General Lin Biao, had betrayed the nation and attempted to flee, but his plane had crashed in Outer Mongolia.
Fang Lijun refused to go to work again after that. He told me that he believed “history had come to an end.” He wrote a small note and went to the bridge between Zhongnanhai Party Headquarters and North Lake, where he stuffed the note into a slit in the white-marble railing. The note said, “History has already come to a halt and will no longer move forward. From now on, all new revolutions will be counterrevolutions. Don’t try to fool me anymore. What right do you have to make me dig for coal?”
His asthma flared up again and he stayed in the dormitory. No matter how much his work unit threatened him, he would not go into the coal pit again.
He could not be sure whether it was in 1971, when United States Secretary of State Kissinger visited China twice, or in 1972, when President Nixon came, but anyway the Americans brought with them a list of relatives of Chinese American citizens who were being detained in China. At this time, when American–Chinese relations were thawing out, and in order to show their goodwill, the Chinese allowed a group of people to leave the country. One of them was Fang Lijun—because his father had long since left Nationalist Party political circles, and had been granted asylum by the American government as a pro-American political refugee.
When Fang Lijun received the notice, he went to the Public Security Bureau and was given a folded-up transit pass. He still strolled around the Summer Palace and the North Lake, enjoying the sites for a few days. Then he went back to the Daoist temple on the east side of Beijing to say good-bye to the old man who had raised him.
When the old man heard his story, he was very worried. “Why don’t you hurry up and leave?” he asked. “What if the policy changes and you can’t get out? Go and buy a train ticket to Hong Kong right away today.” The old man dug up a few pieces of gold leaf buried in one corner of the temple grounds. They were left over from some temple repairs, and he’d kept them there all these years. “Take these and trade them for money for your journey,” he said. “Your mother was the temple’s great benefactor. When she was in prison, she took our secrets to her death and firmly maintained that this Daoist temple was involved only in religious activities and had nothing to do with any reactionary secret societies. It’s because of her that this seven-hundred-year-old temple still exists.” Today he could finally pay back the temple’s godmother by helping Fang Lijun. The old man had raised Fang Lijun, but he had not revealed the truth about himself and the temple until this last moment. That’s how wary people were of each other in those days.
It was a good thing he took some money, because when the train south reached Guangzhou, Fang Lijun had to stay there a week, waiting to join in the quota for Hong Kong passengers. In Shenzhen, he had to wait two more days before entering Hong Kong. Without a passport or an identity card, carrying only a transit pass, Fang Lijun finally went through customs at Luo Wu station, where they took his pass and allowed him to enter Hong Kong.
When Fang Lijun went to the American consulate in Hong Kong to apply for a visa, he ran into a technical problem: he had not entered Hong Kong illegally, but he had left China only on a transit pass, therefore he was not eligible to be a political refugee, and the Americans could not immediately issue him with a visa. He would have to apply formally for a visa on the grounds of family reunification, with his father.
Fang Lijun found temporary lodgings in a cheap guesthouse in the Chunking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui. He stayed there the better part of a year while the American visa process dragged on. While living in that guesthouse he certainly broadened his horizons. He met backpackers and small-business operators from as many as fifty different countries. There was an American hippie who was tired after spending several years in Goa and was now going back to America to join a hippie commune and continue to live his carefree, self-reliant life. Fang Lijun was extremely envious of him.
Eventually Fang Lijun went to Los Angeles and met his now quite elderly father whom he hadn’t seen since he was a small child. When Fang Lijun’s father had run with Sheng Shicai and the Nationalist Party, he had harmed quite a few people. He was very afraid that someone would take revenge on him, and so he hid at home in Monterrey Park most of the time. He built a high wall around his house and even installed an iron door to his bedroom. The father had remarried, and Fang Lijun lived with them less than a month. Then he took his father’s advice and moved to Texas, to the Houston Chinatown, to seek help from one of his father’s former subordinates. He worked as an accountant on the second floor of this man’s furniture and antiques store. There was a teenage daughter, and the two families fondly hoped that Fang Lijun would marry her. She, however, was completely Americanized, and when she got wind of what her parents were up to, she refused even to eat with Fang Lijun at the same table. He took his meals alone in the shop’s storage room. This certainly was not the kind of American Chinatown life he had imagined.
A few months later, Fang Lijun made contact with his hippie friend and left Houston for New Mexico to join the commune. It was located on a large piece of agricultural land where the members cultivated fresh organic vegetables. They also made their own clothes, raised bees, and made jam and candles. They felt like they were self-sufficient, but their seeds, raw materials, tools, and other everyday high-tech items, and their medicines, like Fang Lijun’s corticosteroids for his asthma, were all purchased in the city.
Living on a farm, they could not escape hard physical labor. Those hippies were all from middle-class urban families and they found it pretty tough going. But Fang Lijun was used to hard work in China and he was good at it, and could fix just about anything without a lot of talk. Because of all that, he was very well liked on the commune and he spent many happy years living there.
Unfortunately, in time the commune began to split up due to squabbles between the hippies, and then the whole movement started to wane and most of the members drifted away. The great majority of communes were unable to keep going after the Vietnam War ended, and Fang Lijun’s commune was no exception. There were no new members coming in and although some of the old-timers came back, they soon left again. In the end only Fang Lijun and an older woman everybody called “Mom” remained. “Mom” was resolved to stay on with Fang Lijun. There were only the two of them, and as the years went by they were pretty much the same as a traditional husband and wife.
One day in the early 1980s, “Mom” told Fang Lijun that she was getting too old to be a hippie anymore and she wanted to go back east and live with her daughter. So the two of them shut off the water and electricity, boarded up the windows, and took a train across the United States to Maryland, where they split up. Fang Lijun headed north to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. There he ended up as a cook in a self-service chop suey joint in Boston’s Chinatown. The boss liked him a lot, too, and he worked there for several years.
One day Fang Lijun suddenly decided to go to the Harvard-Yenching Library, and from then on he was hooked. He worked only in the evening at the restaurant, and in the daytime he jogged from Boston Chinatown to Cambridge to read the Chinese periodicals in the Harvard Library. That was when he started writing letters to the editor at
Mingbao
—that was me, Lao Chen.
In 1989, he really did return to the mainland, and in 1992, when Deng Xiaoping made his celebrated “southern tour” to promote economic development, Fang Lijun left China again—he always moved against the mainstream.
Back in America, Fang Lijun sent me a letter telling me that he was doing odd jobs in New York’s Chinatown. At the time I was back in Taiwan working for the
United Daily
and I heard that the
China Times Weekly News
had set up an editorial office in New York. I casually recommended Fang Lijun to them, and they actually brought him in to act as an editorial assistant there. In no time at all, they promoted him to assistant editor. Fang Lijun wrote and thanked me profusely, and I really did feel a special sense of accomplishment. I knew that Fang Lijun, as an experienced and knowledgeable jack-of-all-trades, was perfectly suited to being an editor for a news magazine.
The next time I received a letter from him, Fang Lijun was in Nigeria in West Africa. He later told me that he had always kept in touch with a Nigerian he’d met in the international guesthouse in Chunking Mansions, and he’d invited him to Africa. When Fang Lijun was young, he had always dreamed about going to friendly states like Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania and making a contribution to their development. So he went without the slightest hesitation. It turned out that his Nigerian friend wanted to trade with China. He asked him to be his partner. Fang Lijun thought of all those red, white, and blue fabric bags the Chinese use to carry goods and other things when traveling. They could buy them in China, ship them to Nigeria, and sell them all over West and Central Africa.