China in Ten Words (7 page)

This episode had elements of a concert program, beginning with a prelude, when the man took a basket of dirty clothes outside to a well and began to do his washing. His wife, who worked in another part of the country, could go home only one month a year, so a young neighbor began to help him with his laundry. The first few times she put his underpants to one side for him to wash, but before long she took to washing them along with his other clothes. A flirtatious minuet followed: she started to borrow books from him and discuss her reactions to them, in conversations that sometimes took place in his bedroom. That led in turn to a rhapsody, with the consummation of their affair. Once, twice, a third time—and that third time the trap was sprung.

By this point catching fornicators had become a popular sport, largely replacing the revolutionary passions of a few years before. People suffering from sour grapes transmuted their craving for illicit sex into a desire to catch others in the act. As soon as they sniffed out an improper relationship, they would keep the offending parties under strict surveillance, waiting for the moment to strike, when they would come bursting through the door to catch the naked couple as they frolicked. And so it came time for the hapless pair to perform the
Pathétique
Symphony, Cultural Revolution style.

In this poster, one quote from the girl’s confession particularly caught my eye. After her first time, she said, she “couldn’t sit down.” This expression made me hot all over, and set all kinds of thoughts running through my head. That evening I called my friends together and we sat down on the riverbank, sheltered by a row of willow trees as the moonlight shone down between their swaying fronds. “Do you want to know something?” I asked in a hushed tone. “What happens to a girl after she’s done it with a man?”

“What?” they asked, a quaver in their voices.

“She can’t sit down,” I said mysteriously.

“Why not?” they gasped.

Why not? I didn’t have a clue either. But that didn’t stop me from telling them with airy condescension, “Once you get married, you’ll understand why not.”

When I look back on this episode now, I realize that for me the big-character posters functioned primarily as a form of erotica. But strange to say, my readings in erotica reached their climax not in the street but in my own home.

Since my parents were doctors, we lived in a dormitory for hospital staff. It was a two-story building, six rooms up and six rooms down, a common staircase connecting the two floors, just like the two-story classroom buildings in school. Eleven hospital staff were housed in the building, two rooms being occupied by my family—Hua Xu and I downstairs, my parents upstairs. The bookshelf in their room was where they kept their small collection of medical reference works.

Hua Xu and I had the job of taking turns cleaning the room upstairs, and we were under instructions to do a thorough job of dusting the shelf. I tended to give it only the most cursory wipe, never imagining that those dull-looking tomes might conceal startling wonders. Browsing through them the summer I’d finished elementary school, I had seen nothing special. But my brother had.

I was in the second year of middle school by this point, and he was in the second year of high school. There were several days in succession when, with my parents away at work, Hua Xu would sneak upstairs with some of his classmates and some strange cries would come from my parents’ room.

Downstairs, hearing all this commotion, I began to suspect something fishy. But when I ran upstairs, I found Hua Xu and his friends chatting happily, as though nothing untoward was happening. Though I looked around carefully, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. As soon as I was back downstairs, the weird noises started up again. And those sounds continued for a good couple of months as my brother’s classmates trooped up there day after day—I think all the boys in his year must have made the trip at one time or another.

This convinced me that my parents’ room must hold some awful secret. One day, when it was my turn to do the housecleaning, I inspected every corner of the room as minutely as a detective, but my search drew a blank. Then I transferred my attention to the bookshelf, suspecting something had perhaps been slipped inside one of the books. I took each book down and turned its pages one by one. As I began to work my way through
Human Anatomy
the wonder suddenly came into view: a color plate illustrating the female genitalia. If I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, I could not have been more transfixed. I hungrily studied every detail of the photograph, as well as the entire written commentary.

I have no idea whether I too gave a shout of astonishment on my first glimpse of the color plate, for I was too stunned to be capable of noting my reaction. What I do know is that after all those acts of pilgrimage by Hua Xu’s classmates, it was now
my
classmates’ turn to troop upstairs, their turn to make those strange, involuntary cries that came from somewhere deep inside.

T
he final reading cycle began in 1977. Now that the Cultural Revolution was over, previously banned books could be published once again. When the works of Tolstoy, Balzac, and Dickens arrived in the local bookstore for the first time, this caused as much sensation as if today a pop star were sighted in some celebrity-deprived suburb: everyone ran to spread the word and craned their necks to see. Given the limited number of volumes in the first consignment shipped to our town, the bookstore posted an announcement that customers would have to line up for a book coupon. Each person was entitled to only one coupon, and each coupon entitled one to purchase only two books.

I remember vividly the scene outside the bookstore that day. Before daybreak there must already have been a good two hundred people in a line outside the bookstore. To be sure of getting a coupon, some had arrived the night before, plunking their stools down outside the door, where they sat in a neat rank and passed the night in conversation. Those who arrived at dawn that morning soon realized they were very late. They remained hopeful nonetheless and joined the long queue.

I was one of these Johnny-come-latelys. When I dashed to the bookstore that morning, I ran the whole way with my right hand in my pocket, clutching tightly a five-yuan note—a princely sum for me at the time—and because only my left arm was swinging freely, I ran with an odd leftward lurch. I thought I would be among the first, only to find that there were at least three hundred people ahead of me. Behind me more continued to arrive, and I could hear them muttering with dismay, “Can you believe this? Up so early and we end up late!”

As the sun rose our assembly was divided into two camps: those who had not slept and those who had. People in the first camp, having endured a night on their stools, felt that their coupons were in the bag, and so for them the issue was: which two books to buy? People in the second camp had run to the bookstore after a good night’s sleep, and their question was: how many coupons would be issued? Rumors flew. The stool-sitters at the front predicted there would be a hundred coupons at the most. This notion was roundly rejected by the people standing in line, some of whom thought two hundred coupons a more likely figure, although those behind disagreed—there should be more than that, they said. Coupon estimates continued to rise until someone forecast a total of five hundred. We unanimously ruled this out. There were fewer than four hundred people in line, so if they issued five hundred coupons, then all the trouble we had gone to in queuing up would seem ridiculous.

At seven o’clock the door to the New China Bookstore slowly opened. An exalted, almost mystical sensation surged through me at that moment. Although it was just a shabby old door creaking open on dirty hinges, I could almost see a splendid curtain being drawn aside on a stage, and the bookstore clerk who emerged appeared in my eyes to have the poise of a theater impresario. This transcendent feeling, alas, did not last long. “Fifty coupons only!” the man shouted. “The rest of you can just go home.”

Those of us standing in line felt a chill pass through us from head to toe, as though a bucket of cold water had been dumped on our heads in full winter. Some drifted away, disconsolate; some grumbled and moaned; some cursed for all they were worth. I stood rooted to the spot, my right hand still clutching the five yuan, and watched, bereft, as the people at the front filed cheerfully into the store to collect their coupons. For them, the fewer the coupons, the greater the value of their sleepless vigil.

Many of us remained huddled outside the bookstore and watched as people came out, proudly brandishing their purchases. We would gather around somebody we knew and enviously reach out a hand to touch their reprints of
Anna Karenina, Le Père Goriot
, and
David Copperfield
. Having lived so long in a reading famine, we found it a matchless pleasure just to feast our eyes on the new covers of these classics. Some generously held the books up to our noses and let us sniff their subtle, inky smell. For me that odor was a heady scent.

Those immediately behind No. 50 were anguish personified. They let loose an endless stream of foul language, and it was hard to tell whether they were cursing themselves or cursing something else. My neighbors and I in the last third of the queue felt only a pang of disappointment, whereas those who had only just missed out on a coupon were like people who see the duck they have cooked flap its wings and fly away. Particularly No. 51: just as he was putting his foot inside the door he was told the coupons were all gone. He stood there for a moment, then shuffled off to one side, head down, clutching his stool to his chest, watching blankly as others marched out with their books and we gathered around to touch and sniff them. He was so strangely silent that I turned my head several times to look at him; it seemed to me he was watching us with a look of total nonrecognition.

Later I heard some gossip about this No. 51. He had played cards with three buddies until late the previous night, then come to the bookstore with his stool. In the days that followed he would greet his friends with a rueful refrain: “If we’d stopped just one round sooner, I wouldn’t have been No. 51.” And so for a little while No. 51 became a catchphrase in our town: if someone said, “I’m No. 51 today,” what he meant was “I’ve had such rotten luck.”

Now, thirty years later, we have moved from an age without books to an age when there is an excess of them—in China today, more than two hundred thousand books are published each year. In the past there were no books to buy, whereas now there are so many that we don’t know which ones to buy. Once Internet outlets began to sell books at a discount, traditional bookstores soon followed suit. Books are now sold in supermarkets and newspaper kiosks, and pirated books are peddled by traveling salesmen by the side of the road. Once we saw pirated books only in Chinese, but now we see them popping up in streets and alleys in English as well.

The book fair that takes place every year in Beijing’s Ditan Park is as lively as a temple festival. It combines book sales with lectures on classical literature, demonstrations of folk arts, photography exhibitions, free film showings, and cultural performances, along with fashion, dance, and magic. Banks, insurance companies, and asset management firms promote their financial products. Loudspeakers blare music one minute, lost-person bulletins the next. In this cramped and crowded space, writers and scholars attend book signings while quack doctors take pulses and dispense advice, scribbling prescriptions just as rapidly as the authors sign their books.

A few years ago I was involved in just such a book signing. An incessant din drummed in my ears, as though I were in a factory workshop with machines humming and roaring around me. In a row of temporary tents was piled a huge variety of books, and booksellers held microphones to their mouths and hawked their wares much as small vendors in a farmers’ market call out the prices of vegetables and fruit, chickens and ducks, fish and meat. What was most memorable for me was to see bundles of books worth several hundred yuan being sold off for a throwaway price, for 10 or 12 yuan. No sooner did one salesman yell, “Bundle of books for 20 yuan,” than another would counter with an even more attractive deal: “Rock-bottom prices! Classics for 10 yuan a bundle!”

Even the book vendors found this a bit unbelievable. “What kind of bookselling is this?” they said to themselves. “We might as well be selling wastepaper!”

So their sales pitch would take a different line: “Come and get it! For what it costs to buy wastepaper you can get yourself a bundle of classics!”

I cannot, however, let this story end amid the calls of the auctioneers at the Ditan Book Fair. I want to go back to that scene outside the bookstore in 1977. Although that morning thirty-odd years ago left me empty-handed, I see it now as the point when I began to embark on a true reading of literature. Within a few months new books did arrive on my shelves, and now my reading was no longer subject to the vagaries of Cultural Revolution politics. Instead, it grew abundant and replete, flowing on continuously like the Yangtze’s eternal surge. “What have these thirty years of reading given you?” I am sometimes asked. It is no easier to answer that than to articulate one’s reaction to a boundless ocean.

I did once sum up my experience in the following way: “Every time I read one of the great books, I feel myself transported to another place, and like a timid child I hug them close and mimic their steps, slowly tracing the long river of time in a journey where warmth and emotion fuse. They carry me off with them, then let me make my own way back, and it’s only on my return that I realize they will always be part of me.”

One morning several years ago, my wife and I were walking in the old town of Düsseldorf when we stumbled upon the home of Heinrich Heine, a black house in a row of red houses, even older, it seemed, than the old houses around it. It made me think of a faded photograph where you see a grandfather from another era with his sons on either side of him.