The Fat Years (19 page)

“Little brother,” Fang Caodi instructed Zhang Dou, “Lao Chen is far wiser than we are; we should listen to him, you understand?”

When Lao Chen, who was eating with great gusto, heard Fang Caodi say this, he felt a little embarrassed. He stood up to give Old Fang a hug.

Lao Chen found he was enjoying the flavors of their long dinner very much, so much so in fact that some of his lost feeling of happiness started to come back. He felt so good that he actually found himself telling his two companions how he’d come to know the insomniac national leader He Dongsheng. He explained how He Dongsheng would sleep through the films Jian Lin showed, but could not sleep at night, and so drove his own car all over town, and when he was pulled over by a traffic cop, he phoned his secretary, who then wiped his ass for him.

After dinner, Zhang Dou carried on playing his guitar, and Fang Caodi sang Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” Old Fang sang it perfectly in the style of the young Dylan.

As they continued drinking Yanjing beer and eating cookies, Zhang Dou took out his computer and went on the Internet. Fang Caodi asked Lao Chen to show him how to look up his friend.

“I’m not exactly sure,” said Lao Chen. “I only have this note.” He took it out of his pocket.

“What does it mean?” asked Fang Caodi.

“I think it is
maizi busi,
‘the grain does not die,’ in Romanized script,” said Lao Chen.

Zhang Dou took a look.

“Let’s go to Henan and look for her,” said Fang Caodi. “I’ll drive. Professor Hu said that church is in Henan—we can find out where exactly when we get there.”

“Whoa. Don’t get too excited,” said Lao Chen. “That church is called the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground, but I don’t even know for certain that Little Xi
is
called
maizi busi,
not to mention whether or not the two names are related.”

“I found
maizibusi
!” exclaimed Zhang Dou suddenly. Lao Chen and Fang Caodi gathered around the computer.

“You just put in
maizibusi
?” asked Lao Chen.

Zhang Dou nodded.

Lao Chen had only guessed at Chinese characters for
maizibusi
and had never thought to just look up the Romanized text.

There was only one link, a post put up two weeks before on the club3.kdnet.net “Cat’s Eye” server:

“Is that her?” asked Fang Caodi.

“It certainly sounds like her,” said Lao Chen.

“From her tone, she’s one of us,” Fang said.

“From the tone, the writer is not young either,” said Zhang Dou.

“Where was it sent from?” Fang Caodi asked Zhang Dou.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask someone online to help me find out.”

When Lao Chen saw that it might be Little Xi, he was so overcome with emotion that he had to sit down and hold back his tears.

“Let me tell you about those twenty-eight days,” said Fang Caodi as he handed Lao Chen another bottle of beer and sat down in front of him. He took a few deep breaths, like an athlete warming up before a race.

“That year, just before the Spring Festival, I took a trip to Macau, and on the way back I stayed in Zhongshan in Guangdong for a change of scene. Zhongshan was once a very prosperous area, but people from Hong Kong and Macau were no longer coming to buy houses or holiday there, the factories had shut down, the peasant workers had to stay in the countryside rather than return to work in the city, and university graduates could not get jobs. I had been cooking for a baked-squab restaurant for only a few days when I was let go. I didn’t care, I could just enjoy myself. On the eighth day of the first lunar month, I noticed that the
Southern Daily
and all the other papers at a newsstand had the exact same headline: ‘World Economy Entering Period of Crisis.’

“Everybody was feeling worried, the atmosphere became extremely tense, and my landlady came looking for me. ‘Did you register at the police station before you moved in?’ she asked. ‘What kind of age are we living in?’ I asked. ‘Do outsiders have to register to live in Zhongshan?’ She retorted that if I didn’t register I couldn’t stay, and I said she was violating our contract. At this point the neighbors came over—the local authorities had told them to. They actually said that my landlady could pay for me to stay in a small inn, but I could no longer stay in their courtyard, and they made me hand over my room key immediately. I asked for my deposit back and told them I’d move out.”

“What point are you trying to make?” asked Lao Chen, growing impatient.

“Paranoia,” said Fang Caodi, “it was like that for at least a week. Everybody said China was going to fall into chaos, the machine of the state was nowhere to be seen, the situation was approaching anarchy. It was lucky the peasant workers had not come back to the city, or there would have been serious trouble. But I should never have left Zhongshan. If a city like Zhongshan was that tightly wound up, I should have known that the farther inland I went the worse it would be. As I made my way over the hills, I felt like a mouse crossing a busy street and I acted quite recklessly. I still wanted to go sightseeing, to visit Jinggangshan, Mao Zedong’s revolutionary base in Jiangxi, as well as Mount Longhu. When I passed Shaoguan and came to the outskirts of a town called Meishang Fork (where the three provinces of Guangdong, Hunan, and Jiangxi meet) the bus was stopped and everybody had to get off. Outsiders were not allowed to enter the town. We were not stopped by police, but by a temporary detachment of townspeople. I slipped away and stayed in a peasant’s house—until two days later when I was picked up by the Public Security police. The peasant had turned me in because the People’s Liberation Army had already begun a general crackdown.

“Then they discovered,” Fang went on, “that I was carrying an American passport. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be Chinese when I came back from the U.S., but it’s a hell of a lot harder to regain Chinese citizenship than it is for a Chinese to become an American citizen. So I’d registered myself in Beijing as a corporation and hired myself as a manager; I renewed my contract regularly, and so I had a work permit. Once in a while I went to Hong Kong or Macau, but I could return and live indefinitely in China.

“Back to my being arrested. There was a six-person joint hearing in an office of that Public Security Bureau. There were two Public Security police, two prosecutors, and two judges. One of the prosecutors was a formidable older woman, and one of the judges was a very young woman.

“ ‘Look at you,’ said the female prosecutor, ‘you don’t look like an American. Say something in English for us.’ I recited a section of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ and I did it quite fluently.

“But the prosecutor was not having any of it. ‘You’re obviously Chinese. You can’t fool anybody by pretending to be American. Why would an American hide in a peasant’s house? What the hell is an American doing here anyway? There aren’t any tourist attractions or investment opportunities here. You look like an American spy to me.’

“ ‘Captured foreign spies are to be executed,’ said the male prosecutor.

“ ‘You have no objections?’ the female prosecutor asked, looking at the young female judge.

“ ‘He can’t be executed,’ said the young female judge.

“ ‘Why not?’ asked the male prosecutor. ‘We’re supposed to punish criminals
severely
and rapidly.’

“ ‘If we capture an American spy,’ the young judge said, ‘we are supposed to report it to the higher authorities.’

“The two prosecutors immediately responded that that would take too much time.

“ ‘Then let’s pass sentence,’ said the male prosecutor.

“ ‘You can’t pass sentence,’ said the young female judge.

“ ‘Why can’t we pass sentence?’ asked the male prosecutor. ‘The Americans sent a spy over here, and
we Chinese are not happy. Isn’t that so?’

“ ‘You can be unhappy,’ the young female judge countered, ‘but you can’t be stupid. If he’s a spy, we have to report it to the higher authorities; if he isn’t, we have to let him go.’

“ ‘Americans no longer have extraterritorial rights,’ said the male prosecutor.

“ ‘It has nothing to do with extraterritoriality,’ said the female judge. ‘It is not a crime for a Chinese person to carry an American passport in China—and that’s according to our own Chinese law.’

“The two prosecutors looked very unsettled at what the young judge was saying.

“ ‘Comrade,’ the female prosecutor said, ‘stop arguing. You know perfectly well you’re wasting police time. They worked so hard to arrest this guy and now you want to let him go. This is a waste of our group’s time, too. And furthermore, you’re interfering with our work schedule. At this rate we won’t be able to reach the target set by the higher authorities.’

“The other prosecutor nodded in approval, while the two Public Security officials and the other judge had yet to open their mouths.

“ ‘I can’t worry about that,’ said the stubborn young female judge, ‘I operate on the basis of our national laws. If he’s a spy, report him to the higher authorities. If he’s not a spy, set him free.’

“The female prosecutor stared fiercely at the young judge. She was so angry she was about to explode, but the men just bowed their heads in silence. I was stunned. Then the female prosecutor shouted, ‘Get him out of here!’ and they escorted me off the premises. My life and freedom had been saved. Even in a deserted little town like that, China has outstanding talent like that young woman. Even if it’s just for her sake, I cannot allow the world to forget what happened during that lost month.”

Lao Chen was moved by Fang’s story and longed even more for Little Xi.

“I knew,” Fang Caodi continued, “I couldn’t keep running around wildly; if I was picked up again, I might really be executed. There was a Daoist temple near the town, and when I recited the names of a few old Daoist monks I’d heard of, the old monk there let me stay. Some other time I’ll tell you about my monastic seclusion and the practice of
inedia.
You’ve heard of
inedia,
haven’t you? It basically amounts to fasting. Would you believe that I can practice
inedia
for fourteen days? We could have a competition and see who can practice it for the longest time …”

“Forget it,” said Lao Chen, looking at a text message, “you win already. I can’t stand missing a single meal. Finish your story. I need to talk to you about something.”

“I wanted to practice
inedia
in the temple for twenty-one days,” Fang went on, “but when I reached the fourteenth day, the old monk came in with a bowl of gruel and told me that I should go outside and see what was happening in the world. What he said made sense, so I went back to the county seat, where the atmosphere was still extremely tense, and the papers announced that there was no end in sight to the crackdown. Fortunately, transport was running again, and so I went to Zhangzhou in Jiangxi. It was eerily quiet. People were avoiding each other’s eyes in the street, just like in Beijing after June 4, 1989. At the beginning of March, the evening papers announced that the crackdown had come to an end, and the following day all the papers carried the same headline: ‘China’s Golden Age of Prosperity Has Officially Begun.’ Now everyone was smiling and taking to the streets to set off firecrackers. So you see, there were twenty-eight days between the time the world economy entered a period of crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy was officially announced. The nation went from potential anarchy and terror to the comparatively lesser fear of a police crackdown. China’s Age of Ascendancy was not announced until after the crackdown, and not, as everybody today says, on the same day that the world economy went into crisis. That’s the end of my story, Lao Chen. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“I’ve had a text message from Hu Yan. She says the Grain Fallen on the Ground underground church is in Jiaozuo in Henan. Old Fang, let’s take a trip to Henan.”

F
ang Caodi had been all over, north and south of the Yangzi, and as he drove his Jeep Cherokee at high speed along the G4 highway, overtaking every car he came to, he told Lao Chen about some of the strange and fascinating things he had witnessed.

Fang Caodi said there was a place called Happy Village in the Mount Taihang area of Hebei; everyone in the village was exceptionally happy, but the media had been repeatedly ordered not to report this. Probably because upstream from the village was a huge, secret chemical factory. After he heard about it from a reporter in the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, Fang Caodi went directly to Happy Village. Everyone in the village really was smiling and extraordinarily friendly. They all looked pretty healthy, too. The men wore flowers in their hair, and there were old women sitting around, bare to the waist and sunning their droopy breasts; they didn’t seem to mind at all when strangers walked by. It was a spectacle virtually never seen in China. He followed the river upstream from the village, and after about five kilometers he saw a huge chemical factory with a wide-perimeter barb-wire fence and warning signs all around it. There was no way to get any closer, but he could see small planes flying in and out of what looked like a private landing strip.

Lao Chen listened to Fang Caodi; he didn’t dare say a word, even though he felt like it, for fear that Fang Caodi would take his attention off the road. He was driving so fast and talking so much that several times they came very close to an oncoming vehicle. Lao Chen vowed that, if he arrived in Henan alive, he’d give thanks to God
and
Buddha.

Lao Chen didn’t want to die before he had found Little Xi. If he were to die in an accident, he hoped it would be while holding her hand, and facing their last seconds of life together. If he were to die a natural death, he hoped that Little Xi would be sitting at his bedside watching over him. He wanted to grow old with her. But now she was almost definitely living in her own personal hell, unable to see any way out. He had to give her hope, had to end her loneliness, had to do everything in his power to bring her out of her shell, so that she wouldn’t feel so exhausted.

He took a bite of one of Miaomiao’s cookies. Outside the window was the unending North China Plain, and inside his heart was full of unending love; he never imagined he could feel this way at his age.

Driving south from Beijing past Baoding, but before they reached Shijiazhuang, Fang Caodi pulled over to the side of the highway near a slip road.

“Follow the highway from Shijiazhuang and we’ll be there,” said Lao Chen, looking at the GPS.

Fang Caodi didn’t respond.

“What’s wrong?” asked Lao Chen.

“I’m sorry,” said Fang Caodi, “but I’m having a premonition.”

“A premonition about what?” Lao Chen asked.

“A premonition,” Fang said, “about that Happy Village I told you about.”

“What about it?” Lao Chen was outwardly relieved it was nothing to do with Little Xi.

“I don’t know,” Fang said, “but I’d like to take a look. It won’t take long, it’s not very far.”

Lao Chen could only agree with him.

They turned off on the side road and headed west on a paved road for about half an hour, and then went into the hills for about twenty minutes on a gravel road. They got out of the car and walked another half an hour on a mountain road until they reached Happy Village.

It was completely deserted. Fang Caodi went into each house one by one. “The villagers didn’t even take their farm tools or kitchen utensils,” he said. “It looks pretty suspicious.”

Lao Chen noticed that all the houses in Happy Village were the typically simple and crude constructions you see in rural North China, especially in Hebei. The peasants of Hebei were not the poorest in China, but Lao Chen believed that of all the rural architecture in China that of Hebei was the most unsightly; they made no stylistic demands, and generation after generation they continued to build crude and simple houses; it was easy to see that the peasants of Hebei didn’t care much about aesthetics. Yet there were colored paintings on the outside walls of every house. The paintings had the flavor of those New Year pictures called
nianhua,
but their style was much freer, and some of them even exhibited some charmingly sexual poses. In Lao Chen’s present state of mind, he could see feelings of love in the paintings. On one wall was a very colorful life-sized flower. This kind of extra decoration and attempt at adornment was something rarely seen in a primitive Hebei village. These peasants had become graffiti artists, and perhaps Happy Village really lived up to its name.

Lao Chen thought it would be interesting to meet the peasants who had made the paintings, but some other time. “What’s wrong?” he asked Fang Caodi, who was staring blankly upstream. “Let’s go.”

“It’s been less than a year,” said Fang, “and they’re all gone.”

“Don’t ask me to walk another five kilometers upstream,” said Lao Chen. “I can’t even walk one more kilometer.”

“There must be a road,” said Fang Caodi, “that leads to the chemical factory.”

“That road probably comes from the Shanxi side,” said Lao Chen, trying to dissuade Fang Caodi from the trip to the factory he knew he was about to suggest. “I can think of a hundred reasons why the villagers moved, and none of them have anything to do with that factory. You shouldn’t always be trying to find some sort of conspiracy.”

Fang Caodi stubbornly refused to move, so Lao Chen played his trump card. “Old Fang,” he said, “you know that your premonition can’t prevent something from actually happening.”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Fang Caodi, “let’s go.”

Wei Xihong, female, from Beijing, also known as Little Xi; most recent Internet name
maizibusi;
last-known employment: selling ice-cream bars in the Yellow Emperor’s hometown of Xinzheng in Henan Province; previously employed as a ticket seller in three villages claiming to be the original home of the mythical
Pangu. Based on this itinerary, her next stop would be either Mount Shennong, named for the legendary founder of agriculture, or one of the various places that claimed to be where the Great Yu parted the waters and created the Chinese continent.

Indeed, she went next to Jiaozuo, known in ancient times as Huaichuan. There are six old cities in this region, and local legend has it that nearby is the place where Emperor
Yandi or Shennong planted the five grains and tasted the hundred grasses. It goes without saying that there are many parks with historical themes in the area, and no shortage of jobs in the tourist trade. She didn’t, however, immediately look for employment, but wandered around somewhat distractedly because Jiaozuo brought back some deeply personal memories.

She thought of her first posting as a judicial clerk-secretary in that county-level court. And of the pressure on her to agree to all those executions. The examples her colleagues brought up to sway her were of Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, and Luoyang, all of which towns had executed forty or fifty people. Even a backwater like Jiaozuo had executed thirty people. When Little Xi visited Luoyang, Kaifeng, and Zhengzhou, the events of the 1983 crackdown never entered her head. But when she went to Jiaozuo the events of that year appeared right before her eyes.

Those events had changed her life forever and proved she was not cut out to be a judge in the People’s Republic of China.

Little Xi stayed in bed for two days in a small inn in Jiaozuo before coming to a decision. She resolved to rid herself of the ghosts of the 1983 crackdown. In the early morning of the third day, she took a small bus toward Wen County, Jiaozuo, and went to the Warm Springs township. She walked around aimlessly until she passed a big house where the front gate was open and a number of friendly-looking, elegant people were milling around in the yard.

There was a spring couplet pasted on the gate. The top line read: “Heaven bestows the Tree of Life / Faith, hope, and love abide eternally.” The bottom line read: “The Spring of Life gushes from the earth / Body, mind, and soul dedicated completely.”

Is this a
home church? wondered Little Xi. Aren’t they supposed to be underground? How can they be so open?

At that point, the people in the yard disappeared into the building, leaving only one middle-aged man standing by the gate looking at Little Xi. He took a few steps toward her, and she saw that he was lame. “Please come in,” he said to her. Little Xi walked slowly into the yard with her eyes fixed on the banner on the house front:
GRAIN FALLEN ON THE GROUND DOES NOT DIE
.

She thought to herself, I’ve only ever heard that the spirit does not die, or that matter cannot be destroyed, but this says that a grain of wheat never dies—it certainly accords with philosophical materialism.

The man responsible for the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground was called Gao Shengchan. From his name, meaning “high level of production,” one could easily tell that his parents had been minor local officials who had given their children names like “Production” and “Planning” in accordance with government policies at the time of their births.

Two years earlier, Gao Shengchan, Li Tiejun, and three others had organized an underground Protestant church in Jiaozuo City. But they soon came into conflict with the government-run Three-Self Patriotic Church, were arrested by the Public Security police on orders from the local Bureau of Religion, and were sent to prison. There they dubbed themselves “grain fallen on the ground,” from Jesus’s parable that if only one grain of wheat fell on the ground and died, it would then give birth to a great deal more wheat. They had already resolved to die for their religion and they grew even stronger in prison; they would never abandon God’s work. After their release, they were all the more resolute. Li Tiejun, who had made some money in business, bought a piece of land in the Warm Springs township, built a big meeting house, and established a Christian fellowship. Four leaders set up fellowships in the villages around Jiaozuo and put into practice Mao Zedong’s policy of “the countryside surrounding the city.” Gao Shengchan traveled between these four fellowships preaching the gospel. Nowadays the Bureau of Religion and the Public Security police no longer bothered them as before. Even more unusual was that almost more people than the fellowships could handle were asking to join their church.

More than thirty people now participated in the Warm Springs fellowship’s daily witness meetings and Bible-study sessions, and there were upward of two hundred people at their weekend revival meetings. The parishioners introduced new members every day, and some, like Little Xi, just walked in off the street.

Gao Shengchan had once worried that if the church was too active it might attract the attention of the authorities. But Li Tiejun and the other three leaders had already dedicated their lives to God’s work and they wanted to press forward with no regard for the consequences; there was no way Gao Shengchan could restrain them. For example, when Li Tiejun wanted to put spring couplets with Christian themes up on the church gate, Gao Shengchan opposed this as being too conspicuous. In China there are things that you can do, but you cannot be too loud about doing them, he thought. Gao could not change Li’s mind, and Li Tiejun said that they not only had to have a good product, but they also needed some good propaganda, and the spring couplets were an advertisement. What Li Tiejun said also moved Gao Shengchan: “Our mission is just and honorable, and I refuse to hide our light under a bushel.” In the end, Li had been right. Many people learned about the church from the spring couplets; they came in to listen to the revival meetings and ultimately joined.