The Fat Years (7 page)

Then they started shooting at us, and Shi Ping and I were separated.

A couple of weeks later, I was arrested, but they let me go when they found out I was pregnant.

Actually, I was already three months pregnant. I was so caught up in the June 4 events that I didn’t even notice. At the time I believed it was Shi Ping’s child, but later on I didn’t dare say for certain.

I lived with my mother and waited for the baby. The big courtyard was full of people from political and legal circles, who all knew of my situation; we had to put up with a lot of tongues wagging and fingers pointing behind our backs. Fortunately, after June 4 everyone felt they had just survived a calamity and they didn’t want to be too nosy and attract attention.

I didn’t hear anything from Shi Ping for a long time. He escaped to Hong Kong in secret. Later on, he went to France and married a Frenchwoman. He never even sent me a single letter to let me know he was safe.

When my son was born, I named him Wei Min, giving him my last name. When Wei Min was twenty years old, he changed his name to Wei Guo, exchanging the word “people”—Min—for “nation”—Guo.

Our restaurant was closed for a year and a half, but the following autumn, we received a notice that we could open again. Did Ban Cuntou help me? I don’t think so.

Mother and I became extremely busy reopening the restaurant and trying to make a living. To begin with, business was very slow. The national economy was in decline, and many people were out of work in Beijing. President Jiang Zemin had let it be known that he intended to crack down on private businesses like ours. The people who had made up our most solid customer base couldn’t satisfy the thought-police investigators, so their work units fired them, and they didn’t have either the money or the spirit to eat in restaurants. A lot of our regulars had been foreigners, but they had not yet returned to China. Needless to say, the winter of 1991 was a cold one.

In 1992, Deng Xiaoping made his “southern tour” in support of continued economic
Reform and Openness, and then Beijing’s financial conditions started to improve. At that time we worked particularly hard on our business and didn’t go in for any more “salon” activities. My mother and I read up on some new recipes, remodeled the restaurant inside and out, trained a new cook from Guizhou, and business gradually picked up, but it was exhausting work. My mother handled the lunch crowd while I took care of my son in the daytime, then I handled the dinner crowd. Gradually some of our old customers started drifting back. They would talk for hours, taking from five thirty to midnight to eat dinner. Sometimes I would sit beside them and listen, but I would close up shop at midnight—no more talking until dawn. Freedom of speech at the dinner table slowly returned in the late 1990s. By listening to them talk and by reading some of the banned books from Hong Kong they gave me, I slowly began to understand what modern Chinese history had really been like, especially the things that my mother and father had been through.

Our Taiwanese and Hong Kong compatriots also started coming back, along with some foreigners. Peter, or Pi-te as we used to call him, arrived around the middle of 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China. I called him Little Pi. He was slightly younger than me and very shy. He was a reporter stationed in Beijing, working for a foreign news agency, and he especially liked me to tell him about the Tiananmen democracy movement of 1989. After we’d known each other for a year, he very formally asked me to be his girlfriend. I thought he was decent, and nobody else seemed to be after me at the time, so I agreed. I knew that I wouldn’t be with him for a lifetime—I didn’t love him that much—so I refused to move in with him. Later, when he was transferred home, he asked me to marry him, but I turned him down.

At that time all my friends loved to discuss contemporary politics and criticize the government. That’s why I cannot adapt to today’s situation. Suddenly in the last two years, since China’s so-called Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began, not only has everybody stopped criticizing the government, but they have all become extremely satisfied with the current state of affairs. I don’t know how this transformation came about. My mind is a complete blank because I recently spent some time in a mental hospital and the medicine they gave me has left me muddleheaded. My mother tells me that one day I came home and started shouting, “They’re going to crack down again! They’re cracking down again!” She says I didn’t sleep all night and kept mumbling to myself. Early the next morning, I went out into the courtyard and started cursing the Communist Party, cursing the government, and cursing our neighbors, shouting that the law courts are all bullshit. And the courtyard was full of representatives of the Chinese legal system! Not long after that, I fainted, and when I woke up I was in a mental hospital. My son, Wei Guo, said he had arranged it all. He said he had saved my life by preventing me from shouting all that crazy nonsense. Otherwise, if a crackdown really did start, they would probably shoot me in the head.

When I was discharged, everybody around me had already changed. When I asked them what had happened while I was in the hospital, they wouldn’t tell me. I don’t know if they were feigning ignorance or if they really didn’t remember. What astonished me most was their reaction when I started to talk about the past, especially the events around June 4, 1989. They didn’t want to talk about it; their faces went blank. When we talked about the Cultural Revolution, all they could remember was the fun they had when they were sent down to the countryside—it had all turned into some sort of romantic nostalgia for their adolescence. They didn’t even know how to “remember the bitter past and think of the sweet future” like the Party had taught them. Certain collective memories seemed to have been completely swallowed up by a cosmic black hole, never to be heard of again. I just couldn’t understand it. Had they changed or was there something wrong with me?

I also started to suspect that the antidepressants the hospital had given me were having serious side effects.

Now I go on the Internet all day and argue with people under several different names.

I discovered that the nationalistic “angry youth” on the Internet are actually not all youths. Some of them are in their fifties and sixties. They grew up during the Cultural Revolution and heeded Old Mao’s call for young people to engage with important national affairs. None of them went to college. They work at the most menial jobs in society and haven’t had the benefits of the Reform and Opening policies. Now they are laid-off or retired and they have learned how to go on the Internet, where they can find like-minded people and a place to vent their anger and dissatisfaction. Their language is the language of the Cultural Revolution, they especially revere Mao Zedong, are especially nationalistic, anti-American, and bellicose. The cultural enlightenment movement of the 1980s and the ideological polemics of the 1990s have had no influence on them. Their mode of thinking remains an unreconstructed Maoist Chinese Communist Party mode of thinking. I love to contact them, to join their patriotic forums, old-classmates’ Web sites, and argue with them.
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.

I know only that in doing this I am reminding everyone that they should never forget that the Chinese Communist Party is not the great, glorious, always correct party of their propaganda.

Of course I am also telling myself never to forget this lesson.

Naturally my postings are very quickly deleted by the Internet police; sometimes they block me completely and I cannot even post them. But
their
posts are never ever deleted.

Wei Guo must have found out about my Internet activities and turned me in to the authorities. That’s why I’m being watched.

I feel very lonely. I don’t trust anyone except my mother. A while ago, I ran into the writer Lao Chen, at the Sanlian Bookstore. He used to come to the old restaurant quite often to talk, and the impression he gave me was that he was one of us. He’s also Taiwanese, so I latched on to him and jabbered on for quite a while before I realized that I hadn’t seen him in ten years, and he might not be the person he was back then. The Taiwanese and Hong Kong people of today are not like the Taiwanese and Hong Kong people back then. How could he be the same? Eventually I found some excuse and left. I didn’t think that he would look up my mother’s new restaurant, and then get my e-mail address from her. My mother must still be hoping that I’ll find a man and stop doing what she believes are crazy things. She still has another mistaken idea: she thinks I cannot get along with mainland-Chinese men, so she is always introducing me to Taiwanese and Hong Kong men. What can I tell her? I’m such a bad daughter, still relying on her to support me at my age.

My poor mother, she has to deal with Wei Guo every day and take care of him for me. Even when she wants to send me an e-mail, she doesn’t dare use our home computer. She has to walk a long way over to an Internet café for fear that Wei Guo will find out where I am. She never gives up on anyone—if I have inherited any good traits, they all come from her.

Should I take a gamble and answer Lao Chen’s e-mail? I’m really longing for someone whom I can talk to face-to-face, but everyone I’ve met in these last two years has disappointed me. We have nothing in common anymore. Could Lao Chen be an exception?

I’m Zhang Dou, twenty-two years old.

I’m taping this video now in Miaomiao’s house in the rural Huairou district just outside Beijing.

I’m from Henan Province, where my parents were peasants. I’ve had asthma since I was a child, but I’m quite tall—at thirteen, I looked like I was sixteen.
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. I made bricks for building houses for about three years, and I almost died from several asthma attacks. Once I tried to run away and was rescued by some strangers who took me to the local Labor Bureau, but the Labor Bureau sold me again to another illegal brick kiln. Six or seven years ago the illegal brick kilns in that area were exposed by the national media. Many of them were closed down and many child laborers were saved. Most of them were of the same age and background as me—all of them were missing persons. I met a number of reporters then, and one of them was Miaomiao from a Guangzhou paper. We hit it off especially well, and she told me I should write an article describing what had happened to me. I didn’t write anything very good, but Miaomiao really liked it and wanted to help me get it published. Then I was sent back to school. My mother died quite young and my father went south to work. I went back to school to do the first year of middle school over again.

A year or so later, I got a letter from Miaomiao. She said the media had all been told that they were not to publish any more news about the illegal brick kilns because it would damage the nation’s image. My piece couldn’t be published; it could only be posted on the popular liberal Internet Web site Tianya. I received quite a few comments until it was
“harmonized” off the net by the web police.

Miaomiao gave me her e-mail address, and when I went into town I sent her an e-mail to tell her I didn’t want to go to school anymore. There was nobody with me at home, and I wanted to go and find a job. Miaomiao wrote back and told me to come to Beijing and stay with her. She’d quit her job on the paper in Guangzhou and moved back to Beijing. She said the office world was too horrible and the pressure was too great. She would rather be a freelance writer and work from home.

Just after my seventeenth birthday, I went to Huairou district outside Beijing to find Miaomiao. She now lived in the countryside.

She taught me how to make love and how to play the guitar. I discovered that she was an excellent cook and baked cakes and cookies, too. She had three cats and three dogs, all strays that she’d brought home with her. She said that before the Beijing Olympics there were so many demolitions and relocations that many people left their dogs and cats behind, and so Beijing was full of stray dogs and cats. Even valuable golden retrievers became dog meat and were sold for only seven yuan a pound in the farmers’ market. I was also a stray that she had taken in, and now I didn’t have to worry when my asthma flared up.

She wrote articles and television scripts to provide for us. Sometimes I would work at a nearby pet clinic, and I became very chummy with the clinic staff because I was always bringing cats and dogs in for treatment. Miaomiao had bought a small house from some peasants. It had three north-facing rooms, a separate kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower. We lived there very happily with all the cats and dogs for a year and three months, until Miaomiao turned thirty-two.

Then we heard that the whole country was in chaos, and people in Beijing were very frightened. The first thing we worried about was running out of food, both for ourselves and for our dogs and cats. When another crackdown was announced, things settled down, but Miaomiao would not let me go outside for fear I might be arrested. I stayed indoors for a whole month. Food supplies were very short then, and many more people abandoned their pets on the streets again. Every time Miaomiao came home, she brought more dogs and cats with her. Some of them were sick or injured. So we had over a dozen dogs and cats living with us, and I learned how to take care of them.

Winter passed, and people suddenly became more prosperous and everyone started smiling. But then something hard to understand happened to Miaomiao. She suddenly didn’t recognize me, didn’t recognize anyone. Whenever she met anyone, she just nodded and smiled but didn’t say a word. She only took care of her dogs and cats, baking some sugar-free cookies for them every couple of days. She no longer wrote articles or played the guitar. When she felt the need, we would make love, but she no longer discussed anything with me.

I always knew that all the time I was in Beijing she was taking some sort of drug when she thought I wasn’t looking. Then she would be completely spaced out for a while and would not recognize anyone. This usually lasted for only about half an hour, but this time she didn’t recover.