China in Ten Words (6 page)

Of the poisonous weeds I was exposed to as a boy only one appeared to be fully intact, and that was Dumas’
La dame aux camélias
. I was in the second year of high school by then, and the Cultural Revolution was on its last legs.
La dame aux camélias
came to us in manuscript form. Later, when I got to read a printed edition, I realized that the manuscript was actually an abridged version.

At that point Great Leader Mao Zedong had just died and his chosen successor, Wise Leader Hua Guofeng, was enjoying his short spell in the limelight, before the reemergence of Deng Xiaoping. I remember a classmate calling me over and telling me in a low voice that he had borrowed a gem of a book. He glanced around nervously. “It’s a love story,” he confided. When I heard that, my heart pounded. We burst into a trot and ran all the way to his house. As we gasped for breath my friend pulled from his satchel a manuscript wrapped in glossy white art paper. When I turned the paper over, I gave a start, for
La dame aux camélias
turned out to be wrapped in an official portrait of Wise Leader Hua Guofeng. “You counterrevolutionary, you!” I cried.

He was just as startled as I was, for he hadn’t noticed the wrapping; he said it wasn’t he but another counterrevolutionary who was responsible, the one who’d lent him the book. Then we conferred about how to deal with the now crumpled portrait of Hua Guofeng. “Let’s toss it in the river,” he said.

“Better not,” I said. “Safer to burn it.” So we disposed of the picture and then turned our attention to the manuscript. It was written in neat characters inside a notebook with a brown paper cover. My friend said he had it for one day only; it had to be returned the next morning. We sat with our heads together—an exciting way to read—and before we were a third of the way through, we were already sighing in wonder. “I had no idea there was such a great novel in the world!” we agreed. But this made us worry about losing it—we wanted to keep it for ourselves. Seeing that the book was not so very long, we decided to stop reading and begin copying, so that we could finish the transcription before the deadline ran out.

My classmate found a notebook his father had never used, and we took turns copying the novel. I started things off, and when my wrist began to ache, he at once took over; when he got tired, I took over. In the late afternoon, knowing that my parents would soon be coming home, we needed to pull up stakes and go somewhere safer. After some discussion we decided that a school classroom was the best bet.

High school classes were on the second floor, middle school classes on the first. Although the classroom doors were locked, there were always windows not securely latched, so we walked along outside until we found a room whose window would open. We clambered in and continued our copying in this unfamiliar room; when it got dark, we turned on the fluorescent ceiling lights and carried on.

As hunger gnawed at our bellies and our eyes and arms grew weary, we pushed some desks together; while one of us copied, the other lay down on this makeshift bed. We kept going until dawn, one copying, one sleeping, with roles changing more and more frequently. At the start each of us could copy for half an hour or more, but later we needed to take a rest every five minutes or so. He would lie down on the desk, and no sooner had he started snoring than I would get up and give him a shake. “Hey, wake up, it’s your turn.”

And as soon as I was asleep, he would be shaking me: “Hey, get up.”

And so, by constantly denying each other sleep, we finally completed our marathon copying mission. We climbed out through the window and headed down the road, yawning all the way. As we parted my friend glanced at the red glow in the eastern sky and handed me our copy. He was going to return the original manuscript and then go straight home to bed.

I got home before my parents were up, hastily gobbled down the cold rice and cold dishes left over from their dinner, and fell asleep right away. Almost at once, it seemed, I was woken by my father’s angry roar: he was demanding to know where I had spent the night. I mumbled an ambiguous answer, then turned over and went back to sleep.

I slept till noon that day, skipping school and staying at home to read our copy of
La dame aux camélias
. When we’d begun the transcription, our handwriting had been quite neat and regular, but our characters had become progressively more slipshod the longer the book went on. My own careless handwriting I could read well enough, but I could make neither head nor tail of my classmate’s. Frustrated by all the illegible words, I worked myself into a towering rage. When I could stand it no longer, I slipped the notebook inside my jacket and left home in search of my friend.

I found him on the school basketball court, about to shoot a basket. I bellowed out his name, giving him such a start that he turned and looked at me in astonishment. “Come over here!” I cried. “Get over here right now!”

Bristling at my aggressive tone, he flung the ball on the ground. He marched over with fists clenched, sweaty from his game. “What’s up with you?” he yelled.

I took the book out of my jacket, waved it under his nose, then slipped it back under my arm. “I can’t make out what you’ve written, you idiot!”

Now he understood. Mopping his face, he followed me with a chuckle into the copse next to the school. There I had him stand by my side as I pulled out the notebook and picked up the story from where I had left off. At frequent intervals I had to break off from my reading to ask him in exasperation, “What the hell are these characters?”

Thus my reading stuttered along until finally I reached the end of
La dame aux camélias
. Despite all the fits and starts, the story and the characters made my heart ache, and it was with great reluctance that I surrendered the notebook to him, my cheeks wet with tears.

That evening I was already asleep when he arrived outside our house, shouting my name furiously. He had found my cursive hand just as illegible as I had found his. So I got out of bed and accompanied him to a spot beneath a streetlamp where, as the rest of the town slept, he read away, utterly absorbed, while I leaned against the pole, yawning incessantly but always on call, faithfully deciphering scrawl after scrawl of misshapen calligraphy.

T
he third stage in my early reading career opened with street reading—big-character posters, in other words, a unique spectacle bequeathed to us by the Cultural Revolution. In those days, to tear big-character posters off the walls would have counted as counterrevolutionary activity, so new posters had to be stuck on top of old ones and walls became thicker and thicker, as though our town were swathed in an oversized padded jacket.

I didn’t get to read big-character posters in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, for I had only just entered elementary school, at the age of seven, and with my limited recognition of Chinese characters I could read only the titles of posters—and those with a certain degree of difficulty. My interest lay in the fierce street battles that were taking place. I watched with stunned fascination as the adults in our town waved clubs and shouted, “Defend to the death Great Leader Chairman Mao,” battering each other until they had blood streaming down their faces. This left me mystified. If everyone was out to defend Chairman Mao, I thought, why were they so intent on beating each other up?

I was a timid creature then, watching the battles from a safe distance. When a group of attackers charged, I ran away at once, making sure I was well out of slingshot range. My brother, two years older than me, preferred to observe the hostilities close up and would stand with his arms folded, insouciance personified.

Every day we would hang out in the streets, watching the fights that frequently broke out as appreciatively as if we were watching black-and-white films in the cinema; “watching movies” became, indeed, our term for hanging out in the street. A few years later, when wide-screen films in color appeared in the cinema, our slang was updated accordingly. If one boy asked, “Where are you going?” the boy heading out to the street would say, “Off to watch a wide-screen.”

It was in middle school that I became enamored of big-character posters. This must have been around 1975, in the closing stages of the Cultural Revolution, when bloody battles had given way to a glum apathy. Although there was no change to the streets themselves, what was happening in the streets was different. To us street kids, wide-screens were not nearly so much fun to watch as the earlier black-and-whites, when the streets were full of uproar and activity, like animated films from Hollywood. In the final years of the Cultural Revolution the streets were silent and subdued, like modernist European art-house movies. As we grew from street urchins to street youths our lives shifted from one idiom to the other. The rhythm of our lives in the mid-1970s had a lot in common with the protracted, static scenes and the slow pans and long shots of art-house cinema.

If I close my eyes now, I can see myself thirty-odd years ago, a schoolboy walking home in patched clothes, wearing khaki gym shoes bleached white from use, a worn satchel slung carelessly across my back, wandering aimlessly down the street past walls covered with big-character posters.

There, caught in that camera frame, that younger version of me was coming to appreciate the pleasure of reading. Just as enjoyment of an art-house movie requires a certain aesthetic perseverance, life in the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution needed to be carefully savored; only then could one discover the wonders hidden behind an unprepossessing exterior.

By 1975 people had been numbed into indifference by big-character posters and seldom read the new exposés that sprouted up overnight. Now well on their way to losing all relevance, posters were becoming merely wallpaper. People would walk right past them without looking, and I did the same—until one day when I noticed a poster with a cartoon attached. Years after stumbling upon the footnotes to
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
, my reading had finally discovered another new continent.

The cartoon took the form of a crudely drawn bed on which a man and a woman were reclining; gaudy colors had been applied to make the picture stand out more. This unusual illustration made my heart thump with excitement. On propaganda posters I was used to seeing revolutionary masses—men and women alike—sticking out their chests in heroic poses, but for a bed to appear alongside them was a complete novelty. Here, on a big-character poster espousing revolutionary values, this clumsy sketch of a couple on a bed had obvious sexual implications. I was all agog.

It was the first poster I had ever seriously spent time reading. Sandwiched between revolutionary slogans and frequent quotations of Chairman Mao were exquisite little passages that told the story of a pair of fornicators in our small town. Although I failed to find very explicit sexual details, the associations it conjured up in my mind were enough to set my heart racing, like a little boat bobbing about on the sea.

The names of the adulterous couple were written right above the garish cartoon. I related the story—with further embellishment and gratuitous details thrown in—to my best friends, who listened spellbound. After that we set off in high spirits to find out where the couple lived and worked.

It did not take more than a few days to track them down. The man lived in an alley on the west side of town. We had to wait outside his house for quite some time before he came back from work. Having been apprehended in flagrante delicto, the man was in no mood for further humiliation. He greeted us with a dark scowl and quickly scuttled into his house. The woman worked in a department store in a town three or four miles away. My friends and I agreed on a particular Sunday to make the trip, undeterred by the distance involved, and we soon found the store. It cannot have been more than a few hundred square feet in size. Inside stood three female shop assistants, and it was not clear to us which of them was the man’s bedmate. We stood in the doorway and debated which of the women was the most attractive, before agreeing in the end that not one of them was a looker. Then we yelled the name I’d seen on the poster. One of the women answered at once, turning to look at us in surprise, and we dashed off, whooping with glee.

Such was the barren aridity of that time: to see in the flesh the people featured in a wall-poster love affair was enough to put us in a good mood for days.

As this example suggests, although big-characters posters at this point were as crammed full as ever with sayings of Chairman Mao, passages from the left-wing writer Lu Xun, and revolutionary catchwords of the day, there had been a gradual change in the topics they addressed. As rivalry between factions festered and conflicts grew personal, gossip, insult, and muckraking were the new weapons of choice. Sexual innuendoes were beginning to show up in the poster exposés, for improper sexual relations were popular material when people indulged in character assassination and abuse. Thus I developed a taste for reading the posters and made a point of stopping on the way home from school to see whether any new posters had appeared and any juicy new revelations had emerged.

This kind of reading entailed a great deal of effort for very meager returns, and often several days of poster perusal would turn up absolutely nothing of interest. At first my classmates joined me, infected by my enthusiasm, but it didn’t take them long to write off this activity as way too unprofitable; their two days of eager reading had unearthed only a handful of anemic phrases—not nearly as stirring, they said, as my more colorful, enhanced versions. But they urged me to persist in my search, and every morning on the way to school they would sidle up to me expectantly and ask, “Anything new?”

The most earthshaking moment in my poster-reading career came when I discovered an account of a girl’s affair with a married man. It featured by far the most detailed content I had ever encountered, with certain passages citing verbatim the confessions written by the lovers after their capture.