China in Ten Words (8 page)

That morning took me back to my early childhood, to the hospital grounds where I lived and to an unforgettable moment I experienced there.

For my family to live in hospital housing was quite a common circumstance in China in those days, when the majority of urban employees were housed by their work units. I grew up in a medical environment, roaming idle and alone through the sick wards, lingering in the corridors, dropping in on elderly patients who knew me, asking new inmates what was wrong with them. First, though, I would wander into nurses’ stations and grab a few swabs soaked in alcohol to wipe my hands. I didn’t have showers very often then, but I would scrub my fingers with alcohol at least ten times a day, and for a while I must have had the world’s cleanest pair of hands. Every day too I breathed the smell of Lysol; many of my classmates loathed its odor, but I liked it and even had a theory that, since Lysol is a disinfectant, then breathing its fumes would be good for my lungs. Today I still find myself favorably disposed toward Lysol, because that’s the smell that surrounded me as I grew up.

My brother and I often played outside the operating room where my father toiled. Next to it was a large empty lot where on sunny days laundry was hung out to dry. We liked to run back and forth among the damp cotton sheets, letting them slap our faces with their soapy scent.

This memory, though happy, is dotted with bloodstains. When my father came out of surgery, his smock and face mask would be covered in blood. A nurse would often emerge with a bucket—full of bloody bits and pieces cut from the bodies of his patients—which she would dump in the adjacent pond. In the summer the pond gave off a sickening stench, and flies settled on it so thickly one might think it had been covered with a black wool carpet.

In those days the housing block had no sanitary facilities, just a public toilet across the yard, next to the morgue. Neither of these structures had a door, and I got into the habit of taking a peek inside the morgue every time I went to the toilet. The morgue was spotlessly clean; a concrete bed lay underneath a little window, through which I saw leaves swaying. The morgue stands out in my memory as a place of unimaginable serenity. The tree that grew outside its window was noticeably greener and more luxuriant than the others around it, but I do not know if that was because of the morgue or because of the toilet.

I lived ten years of my life opposite the morgue, and it’s fair to say that I grew up amid the sound of weeping. Patients who had died would lie in the morgue the night before their cremation. Like a roadside rest stop where one breaks a long journey, the morgue silently received those time-pressed travelers as they moved from life to death.

Many nights I would suddenly wake from sleep and listen to the desolate wails of those who had lost their loved ones. During those years I must have heard every kind of weeping there is, and the longer the weeping went on, the less it sounded like weeping—especially as dawn approached, when the cries of the bereaved seemed particularly sustained and heartrending. To me those cries conveyed a mysterious intimacy, the intimacy of depthless sorrow, and for a time I thought of them as the most stirring songs I had ever heard. Only later did I learn that it is under cover of night that most people pass away.

In those days there was no relief from the searing heat of summer, and often I would wake from an afternoon nap to find the entire outline of my body imprinted in sweat on my straw bed mat; sometimes I perspired so heavily it bleached my skin white.

One day, when curiosity impelled me to step inside the morgue, it felt as though I had exchanged torrid sunshine for chilly moonlight. Although I had walked past the morgue on countless occasions, this was the first time I had ventured across its threshold, and I was struck by how refreshingly cool it was inside. When I lay down on that clean concrete bed, I found the ideal place for an afternoon nap. On many baking afternoons that followed, if I saw that the morgue was not otherwise occupied, I would lie on the slab and savor its soothing coolness; sometimes in my dreams I would find myself in a garden full of blooming flowers.

Since I grew up in the Cultural Revolution, my education had made me a skeptic in matters of the spirit. Not believing in ghosts, I had no fear of them either. So when I lay down on the slab, it did not carry connotations of death. What it meant to me was a cool haven, an escape from the sweltering summer.

There were, however, several awkward moments. Sometimes I had just fallen asleep on the slab when I was awoken by cries and screams, and realized that a dead person was about to visit. Hurrying off as the weeping got closer and closer, the concrete bed’s temporary occupant made way for its overnight guest.

All this happened a long time ago. Growing up is, in a sense, a process of forgetting, and later in life I completely forgot about this macabre but beautiful childhood moment: how on a stifling-hot summer afternoon I lay in the morgue, on the slab that symbolized death, and there experienced life’s cooling caress.

So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me.

If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.

*
yuedu

writing

P
ankaj Mishra had been asked to write a piece about me for the
New York Times Magazine
and came to Beijing in November 2008. We spent hours talking together, sometimes in the warmth and comfort of indoors, sometimes venturing outside for a walk in the icy wind. When we ate out, I made a point of introducing him to different regional cuisines, and on his departure my new vegetarian friend complimented me on my skill in selecting dishes. “Well, it’s not much of a skill,” I told him. “I just order all the vegetarian dishes a restaurant has on its menu.”

If Mishra was grateful to me, I too was grateful to him. “To recall one’s past life,” Martial wrote, “is to relive it.” In the space of that short week, Mishra had me revisit my writing career, and thus bestowed on me a life relived.

“My writing
^*
goes back a long way,” I told him—such a long way, in fact, that it seems to emanate from another world. When I cast about for examples of my juvenilia, my thoughts skip quickly over my old composition books and gather instead on the big-character posters that were then pasted everywhere. Those primary-school compositions are not worth mentioning, because they had only a single reader, my bespectacled Chinese teacher. I prefer to start with the big-character posters that I authored, for they were the first works of mine to be displayed to the world at large.

In the Cultural Revolution era we were even more passionate about writing big-character posters than people are today about writing blogs. The difference between the two genres is this: The posters tended to be tediously alike, basically just a rehash of articles in the
People’s Daily
, their text riddled with revolutionary rhetoric and empty slogans, blathering endlessly on and on. Blogs, on the other hand, take a multitude of forms—self-promoting or abusive, disclosing intimate details here and carried away by righteous indignation there, striking affected poses right and left—and they dwell on every topic under the sun, from society and politics to economics and history and goodness knows what else. But in one respect the two genres are much the same: writing big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution and keeping a blog today are both designed to assert the value of one’s own existence.

As a little boy in primary school I was terrified of big-character posters. Every morning as I headed off to class with my satchel on my back I would nervously scan the walls on either side of the street, checking to see if my father’s name appeared in the headlines of the latest batch of posters.

My father was a surgeon and a low-level functionary in the Communist Party. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution I had personally witnessed the disgrace of several of my classmates’ fathers who were officials; they were denounced for being “power holders following the capitalist road.” Activists in the revolutionary rebel faction beat them till their faces were black-and-blue, and they were forced to wear wooden signs over their chests and tall dunce caps on their heads. I would see them every day with brooms in their hands, trembling with fear as they swept the streets. Passersby would give them a kick if they felt like it, or spit in their faces. Their children naturally shared the ignominy, being constant butts of their classmates’ insults and targets of their discrimination.

I lived on tenterhooks, anxious that my father might suddenly suffer a similarly awful fate, bringing me down with him. What made things worse was that my father had a landlord pedigree, for his family had once owned some thirty acres of land, which defined them as landlords pure and simple. Fortunately my grandfather had been a slacker with no ambitions to improve himself; all he knew how to do was to party and play around, and so every year he would sell off a piece of land here and there to pay for his extravagant lifestyle. By 1949 this wastrel had managed neatly to burn his way through the whole estate, and in so doing he sold off his landlord status. If he had held on to his land, he could hardly have avoided being shot when the country was liberated. So my father reaped the fruits of the family shame, dodging the nasty stigma of being a “landlord’s brat.” My brother, Hua Xu, and I, needless to say, were equal (though more distant) beneficiaries of my grandfather’s spendthrift ways.

Nevertheless, my father’s inglorious family history remained a source of anguish for me. Bad things are bound to happen sooner or later, and one morning Hua Xu and I finally saw on the way to school the big-character poster that I had most been dreading. My father’s name was emblazoned across the title, accompanied by two condemnatory labels: “runaway landlord” and “capitalist-roader.”

I was a fainthearted, fearful boy, and I’m sure my face must have completely paled at the sight of this headline. I told my brother I couldn’t summon up the courage to go to school—I was going to stay home and lie low. Hua Xu shrugged the whole thing off, saying there was nothing to worry about, and marched off toward school as though without a care in the world. His nerve held only for a hundred yards or so; at that point he turned around and came marching back. “Damn it, there’s no way I’m going to school either,” he muttered. “I’m going to lie low, too.”

Such was the backdrop to the creation of the first big-character poster to which I ever signed my name. With his life now at such a low ebb, my father chose both to stage and to perform in an exhibition of political theater, one that enabled the entire family to experience the Chinese New Year in full revolutionary style. Other households, having skimped and saved the whole year through, were able to indulge themselves for once in some lavish meat and fish dishes, but our meal instead consisted of “remembering the bitter to think of the sweet.” What that meant was mixing rice husks and weeds together and boiling them until soft, then kneading them into dumplings. In the old days “chaff dumplings” had been eaten only by the very poor, and for us to eat them on the most festive evening of the Chinese calendar was to taste the bitterness of the old society and savor the sweetness of the new.

I held one of these chaff dumplings with two hands and nibbled it cautiously. It was bland and tasteless, but I could feel the coarse husks scratching my throat as I swallowed. It hurt to eat them, and I told my parents so. My father put the best possible face on this. “It’s good if it hurts,” he assured me in a doctor’s upbeat tone. “That just shows you’re seeing the benefits of remembering the bitter to think of the sweet.”

My brother and I didn’t realize that our father, in his misfortune, was performing a revolutionary show, for which he had selected this ideal occasion of New Year’s Eve. A few days later, in the confessional materials that he submitted to his inquisitors, he made a great song and dance about this revolutionized Spring Festival, as a way of expressing his boundless loyalty to Mao Zedong and the Communist Party. After we had all swallowed our chaff dumplings and my mother had cleared away the dishes, my father spread open a huge sheet of paper, bigger even than the table, and we set to work writing a big-character poster. “Denounce the selfish and criticize the revisionist”—such was the theme of the hour. “Tonight, this last day of the year,” my father told us gravely as he ground ink in the ink stone, “we must do a thorough job of criticism and self-criticism.”

Hua Xu and I found this prospect invigorating and were both eager to be the first to address the topic. Neither of us was willing to yield ground to the other, so determined were we to demonstrate our prowess in self-criticism. My parents said I should go first: my brother, being two years older, ought to allow me this opportunity to shine. But, blinking desperately, I found myself unable on the spur of the moment to quite put a finger on my selfish, revisionist thinking. As I hesitated, Hua Xu restively pressed to speak, only to be overruled by my parents. They began to coach me, telling me that a few minutes earlier, when I felt that my throat was sore, that was actually selfish thought rearing its head. This took a big weight off my mind, but I still felt anxious. “Could that count as revisionist thought, too?” I asked.

My parents conferred. This did seem to be undoubted evidence of petit bourgeois attitudes muddling my mind, and bourgeois rubbish was a sure sign of revisionism. They nodded. “Yes, it counts.”

So, selfishness and revisionism—it was all there. I could breathe easily at last. Now it was Hua Xu’s turn. He announced proudly that he had once found a two-fen coin in the street but failed to hand it in to the teacher, instead buying himself two pieces of candy. My parents nodded solemnly. This act of my brother’s, they declared, was very similar to mine, an error that combined both selfishness and revisionism. Next up was my mother, and after her effort to combat selfishness and criticize revisionism it was my father’s turn. Our parents mentioned only a few peccadillos that were neither here nor there, leaving Hua Xu and me quite disappointed. My father’s performance was a particular letdown, for his self-criticism made no mention of being a runaway landlord and a capitalist-roader. My brother at once challenged him on this score. “Are you a runaway landlord?” he asked sternly.

My father, stone-faced, shook his head. The family had lost all its property before Liberation, he said, and during land reform they were classified as middle peasants. Why, if not for those thirty acres they had once owned, my mother chimed in, they would have ended up as poor peasants. Hua Xu raised his right hand gravely. “Can you swear to Chairman Mao that you’re not a landlord?”

My father raised his hand with equal gravity. “I swear to Chairman Mao, I am not a landlord.”

I wanted a share of the action, too. “Well, are you a revisionist?” I asked.

Again he shook his head. It was true he had joined the party before Liberation, he said, but all these years he had been engaged purely in technical work—a surgeon all along—so he didn’t count as a power holder pursuing the capitalist road.

Following Hua Xu’s cue, I raised my hand. “Can you swear to Chairman Mao? ”

Again he raised his hand. “I swear to Chairman Mao.”

Then we watched as he wrote the big-character poster. It skimmed over major issues and dwelled only on trivia, but it was our first effort at self-criticism, written on the eve of the Chinese New Year, no less. My father signed his name at the end, then proffered the brush to my mother, who signed her name and passed it on to my brother. I added my name at the very bottom.

Next we began to discuss where to display our poster. Let’s put it outside our front door, I said—that way the neighbors can admire our New Year’s Eve accomplishment. No, it should go up next to the cinema box office, Hua Xu argued—big-character posters had more readers there. Our parents must surely have been inwardly cursing us little devils, because for them this was purely a show, designed to display their revolutionary spirit and political awareness; they had not the slightest desire to have others view the poster. Moreover, this New Year’s Eve poster had considerable practical value, providing material for a splendid passage in my father’s exculpatory statement.

However dismayed our parents may have been to hear our suggestions, they simulated a warm sympathy for them, nodding vigorously and commending our initiative but pointing out that there was a problem with putting the poster up outside, for this would make it impossible for us to see it at all times. We ourselves were the objects of criticism in this poster, they explained patiently, so it should be placed on view in our own house, alerting us constantly to our past errors and ensuring that in the future we would always stick closely to Chairman Mao and travel far on the correct path.

In those days we had not yet moved to the hospital dormitory and lived in a house in a little street named Sunnyside Lane. It was one big room, divided into two by a partition made from a bamboo lattice over which old newspapers were pasted. My parents slept in the inner sanctum, while my brother and I shared a bed by the door. We felt they had a point and agreed to put up the poster inside the house, but we insisted on one thing: it must be stuck at the head of our bed, not theirs. This was a condition to which they happily consented.

Not long afterward my father was sent down to the countryside. With a medicine chest on his back he roamed from village to village, dispensing medical care to the peasants. By the time the rebel faction realized they had let him slip from their grasp and sent people to fetch him back, he was nowhere to be found. The simple country folk had hidden him for his protection, and so by great good fortune he avoided the revolutionary violence of the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.

That glorious poster maintained its position above our bed for a good year or more, but as it gathered dust and its paper yellowed and tore, it slipped down the wall and under the bed, where we forgot all about it. At the beginning, however, the last thing I did before I went to bed and the first thing I did after I woke up was to look with awe at my spindly signature at the bottom of the poster.

Five years later I entered middle school and there began to write big-character posters on a large scale; this time I wrote them myself and didn’t just append my signature at the end. In the Cultural Revolution the most illustrious writing group came from two universities: Peking and Tsinghua. Its nom de plume was Liang Xiao, a play on words for “Two Schools.” In imitation of Liang Xiao, I recruited three classmates to form a writing team that took its name from a famous film of the period called
Spring Shoots
.