The Fat Years (35 page)

Master Chen:
The literal translation would be “Teacher Chen,” but this is not a recognized form of address in English.

The sweet smell of books in a literary society:
A common Chinese saying, as in “a whiff of refinement.”

Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 southern tour:
After Deng Xiaoping formally retired, he still remained in power. His “reform” policies were threatened after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, so in 1992 Deng took a long tour through southern China and made several speeches announcing his continued support for economic reforms. At this time he may or may not have said “to get rich is glorious.” Deng’s reforms continued under the new leader, Jiang Zemin.

Ji Xianlin said the twenty-first century is the Chinese century:
Ji Xianlin (1911–2009) was a celebrated Chinese linguist and Indologist.

This year is the year of my zodiac sign, and a lot of strange things are bound to happen:
The Chinese believe that the year of a person’s zodiac sign, coming once every twelve years, is unlucky, and so one has to be very careful throughout that year.

They treat the Taiwanese like their little brothers:
China’s party-state government has long regarded Taiwan as a renegade province, and the 85 percent of Taiwanese on the island (as opposed to 15 percent of mainlanders) are considered of lower status than mainlanders.

The Tiu Keng Leng refugee camp:
Also known as Rennie’s Mill, this was a special settlement created by the Hong Kong government for Nationalist (Kuomintang) soldiers and supporters after they lost the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Chen Yingzhen:
A Taiwanese leftist writer and political activist (b. 1936) who spent several years in prison in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

ethnic conflict was growing increasingly acrimonious:
This is a reference to the feuds between the Taiwanese and the mainlanders. Chen Shuibian, president of Taiwan from 2000 to 2008, pressed for independence for the island, causing fears that the Chinese would invade.

I loved to watch those post-1949 Chinese films:
All the films from 1949 to the 1980s were Communist propaganda for any campaign that was running at the time. They are now known as part of China’s “Red Legacy.”

The Three Years Natural Disaster:
A Chinese Communist euphemism for the greatest famine in world history, which resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward policies and led to the death of some 45 million Chinese.

Politburo:
The Chinese Communist Party is organized on the Leninist model created in the old Soviet Union. The twenty-five-member Politburo, short for Political Bureau, is its second-highest organization. Only the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee have more power. Both groups are announced at Party congresses held at least every five years (cf.
three Party Congresses
, following note). For details, see Richard McGregor,
The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
, Harper, 2010.

three Party Congresses:
A Communist Party congress is held every five years. The next congress is due in 2012. At these congresses, the new top level of leadership (the Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee [nine members who are the heart of Chinese rule], president and premier) is presented to the nation, having been chosen in secret by the outgoing leadership in fierce factional infighting.

Party Secretariat:
The Secretariat of the Communist Party of China Central Committee is the CCP’s permanent bureaucracy. There are several secretaries and they manage the work of the Politburo and its Standing Committee.

feichengwuraook:
A genuine URL, but actually a phishing site designed to harm your computer.

monsters and demons:
A phrase made popular by Mao Zedong to attack specialists, scholars, and other so-called class enemies during the Cultural Revolution. On June 1, 1966, the
People’s Daily
published an editorial entitled “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons.” Soon after, the Red Guards went on the rampage for victims.

1983 crackdown:
During the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in late 1983 to early 1984, some factions of the Chinese Communist Party tried to stamp out the influence of Western liberal ideas and cultural practices coming into China due to the “Reforms and Openness” policies that began in 1979. It was a short-lived and largely ineffective campaign, but it did involve many public executions, often of young people, in Shanghai and other cities.

the trial of the Gang of Four:
The name given to a powerful radical leftist faction of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution. They included Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, and Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. They were imprisoned shortly after Mao’s death in 1976 and given a show trial in 1981 that resulted in prison sentences ranging from twenty years to life, and a death sentence for Jiang Qing that was commuted to life. Jiang Qing was famously defiant at the trial, claiming with considerable correctness that she was only carrying out Chairman Mao’s orders. She committed suicide in 1991. For details, see Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals,
Mao’s Last Revolution
, Harvard Belknap Press, 2006.

Rightist status:
Under Mao Zedong’s rule in China, Communist Party members who disagreed with Mao’s policies were frequently branded as Rightists. Some seven hundred thousand or more people were so labeled during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s because they disagreed with the collectivization movement later known as the Great Leap Forward that led to Mao’s great famine. Deng Xiaoping played a prominent role in carrying out this persecution. In the 1980s, these people began to be rehabilitated, many of them posthumously.

Public Security Bureau:
The PSB is the main arm of the Chinese police; they operate under the Ministry of Public Security. China also has a very powerful People’s Armed Police Force, a uniformed paramilitary group that is in charge of internal security, crowd control, crackdowns, etc. Many ad hoc groups of mercenaries, sometimes referred to as thugs, also perform similar duties in local areas.

Reforms and Openness:
The current reform era in China began in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Known in China as “Reforms and Openness,” it refers to the policy of reforming China’s economy into a putatively market economy, so-called “market socialism” or “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” and opening up to the world to allow an influx of foreign investment and cultural influences.

I present the strict facts and employ reasoned arguments, and I argue exclusively from the point of view of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. This infuriates them, and they all attack me:
This summarizes the activities, and their consequences for him, of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for more or less the same things Little Xi does in this novel, only in concert with others and at a more intellectual level.

It was then that I was abducted at the railway station and taken to do slave labor in an illegal brick kiln in Shanxi Province:
This part of Zhang Dou’s story is based on the 2007 Chinese slave-labor scandal, also known as the Shanxi Black Brick Kiln Incident, in which it was revealed that thousands of Chinese, children included, had been forced to work in illegal brick kilns, where they were tortured. Local Party officials were complicit in this activity.

“harmonized” off the net by the Web police:
A reference to Hu Jintao’s idea that China is a “harmonious society.” It has become a verb with a satirical meaning—as here, to suppress—on the Internet.

the SS Study Group:
“SS” has obvious Nazi overtones for English readers, and Wei Guo’s group certainly has fascist tendencies of the kind many older Chinese establishment intellectuals warned against in 2010. “SS” probably stands for Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, two Western thinkers from whom youthful ultranationalists derive antiliberal and statist ideas.

state tutors:
An archaic term from the days of imperial rule, referring to the emperor’s tutors. Here it is used ironically to indicate the similarities between Chinese Communist Party rule and imperial rule.

the New Whampoa Academy:
Whampoa, or Huangpu, is a district in Guangzhou where the Nationalist Party (KMT/Kuomintang) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military officers were trained from June 1924 to 1928, before the academy was shifted to Nanjing.

politics is the art of distinguishing between the enemy and ourselves:
In Mao Zedong’s 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao distinguished between two social contradictions: “between the enemy and us” and “among the people.” This kind of Maoist thought is still part of the Chinese Communist Party’s thought and practice.

the politics of the ancient Confucian Gongyang School:
The
Gongyang Zhuan
places particular emphasis on the thinking of respected rulers of the period, promoting the “One Great Unity” and “Bringing Order out of Chaos” points of view. To criticize this school of ancient thought could be seen as criticizing the Communist Party dictatorship.

appreciated by the government:
in Chinese,
guojia
means either “the nation,” “the state,” or “the government.” China is a Communist Party state in which the Communist Party is both the government and the state.

we must identify our enemies and let our hatred rise against them:
This way of thinking fits in with China’s increasingly aggressive posture, for example, in claiming the South China Sea as their “core interest” and initiating conflict with Japan (September 2010) over the Senkaku islands. This mind-set resembles that of Hitler’s Germany from 1933 to 1945—with Hitler’s goon squads and stormtroopers—and Japan’s ultranationalist
bushido
spirit from the 1930s to 1945.

PS: The “SS” in the SS Study Group refers to two Germans:
Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, as mentioned in the note to p. 64. Strauss was Jewish and Schmitt was anti-Semitic and antiliberal.

White areas:
As opposed to Communist Red areas, these were under the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government at the time.

wanted to write only about new people and new things:
“new people and new things” is a Cultural Revolution phrase referring to the Maoist Communist utopian idea of remolding human nature to produce a new type of human being.

the complete works of Jin Yong, Zhang Ailing, and Lu Xun:
Jin Yong is the pen name of Louis Cha (b. 1924), GBM, OBE, the most famous writer of martial arts fiction, many of whose works are available in English translation. He was a cofounder of the Hong Kong daily
Mingbao
.

Zhang Ailing:
Eileen Chang (1920–1995) was a Chinese modernist writer and is regarded by many to be China’s finest writer of the twentieth century. Her short stories are most highly prized, but her novels have also attracted critical acclaim, many being made into feature films. Zhang’s
Lust, Caution
was translated by Julia Lovell in 2007 and made into a popular film by the Taiwanese director Lee Ang in the same year. Her writing is characterized by its domestic detail and nicknamed “boudoir realism.”

Lu Xun:
The pen name of Zhou Shuren (1881–1936), a celebrated Chinese writer. His twenty-six short stories have been repeatedly translated, most recently as
The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China
by Julia Lovell (Penguin, 2009). He is considered to be the founder of modern Chinese literature and was also lionized by Mao Zedong as a great “revolutionary.”

Maotai:
A powerful liquor produced in Maotai in southwestern China. It is distilled from fermented sorghum.

You can drink it without any worries:
A reference to the many bogus products in China, including liquor and wine, such as that discovered in a major wine scandal in December 2010.

He was seeking an absolute self-reliance:
This is Chinese Communist Party propaganda and not exactly what Mao did. While rejecting the West, China relied heavily on Stalin and the Soviet Union, until Khrushchev’s Twentieth Congress speech against Stalin made Mao worry that he might also be criticized in a similar way. After that, Mao tried to dominate the world communist movement, declared that nuclear war would be an acceptable option if only half the Chinese people were killed, and so on. His actions led to a Sino-Soviet break when Khrushchev ordered all Russian technicians out of China.

Qiong Yao, Yan Qin, Cen Kailun, Yi Shu, and Zhang Xiaoxian:
Qiong Yao (Ch’iung Yao, b. 1938) was the most popular and prolific romance-novel writer in Taiwan for over thirty years, from 1963 into the 1990s. Many of her works have been made into feature-length films and television series. In the 1990s, her work began to be read on the mainland and she became one of the bestselling writers in China. Yan Qin, Cen Kailun, Yi Shu, and Zhang Xiaoxian are all popular Hong Kong Chinese writers of romance fiction who are very popular on the mainland.

The Bible says that when the world is full of masters, then the end of our days is in sight:
Matthew 24:14, “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all the nations, and then the end shall come.”

Yang Jiang:
The wife (b. 1911) of the celebrated scholar Qian Zhongshu, and a major writer in her own right. Her
Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder”
is a classic memoir of their difficult life on a farm during the Cultural Revolution, including an account of their son’s suicide.

we Chinese are not happy:
A satirical allusion to the popular 2009 book
China Is Not Happy
(or
Unhappy China
) by Song Xiaojun and others that encourages China to seek world hegemony.