China Witness (48 page)

I've thought and written a lot to this point, and maybe I haven't expressed myself clearly, but I really don't care, just so long as our hearts have communicated. I know you will understand, and will forgive the deficiencies in my letter.

With best wishes,

Phoebe

31.

30 May 1992

Dear Phoebe
[in English],

I hope you are well. Your letter from Shanghai arrived in due course and I have read it. You have sent me another deeply loving and wonderfully philosophical love letter.

I accept and respect your analysis and reasoning. When I commented on the previous period of your letters to me, that is, on your attitude to the love between us, I used the word "appropriate", as heartfelt praise. Actually, after our conversation at dinner in the Hengshan Hotel, I passed beyond disappointment, became more aware and completely accepted your choice. I also broadly settled on the path my own life was to take, even if there was really no other way! Our letters flew back and forth, and elaborated more fervently our feelings, and these rapidly underwent a most gratifying development from their original basis in friendship. Nevertheless, I never forgot, and never tried to defy, your simple injunction, even though there were times when I cast restraint aside and showered you with tender regards. I believe that what exists between us is a real, yet also "diffuse" love, different from but surpassing a husband-and-wife relationship. I have suddenly remembered a line inscribed at the mountain gate of a monastery on top of Jade Emperor Mountain in Hangzhou: "Not in heaven, yet not of this world" – a realm which is not easy, yet not so very hard, to understand! I understand it like this: especially deep love is love which is deeper than normal love and also completely original, and I value and treasure it all the more for that. I feel and understand at the deepest level your very deep love for me, and offer you my deepest gratitude. To obtain one bosom friend in one's life is surely sufficient! To obtain a bosom friend who loves one so deeply is more than sufficient! I hope, I believe and I will strive to ensure that the especially deep love between us will continue to grow and will have the most wonderful
outcome. It is also best to keep it a secret between us. Incidentally, the only person I have told of our special love, in sketchy terms, is my younger brother. He was delighted for me, and thinks this is a very good thing. I will obey your wishes and not let anyone else in on the secret – this I swear. Let me adapt, albeit inappropriately, a line of poetry:
In a vow are the words of two hearts, our love will last forever
!

About
first love
[in English]. I have never actually enjoyed real first love. The first time I was in love dates back to the spring of 1947, at St John's. She was a fellow student, her name was Chen, and she was very keen on me, and we spent time together for a while, but it was limited to talking and walking around the campus, and we seemed closer than I was with other students. But soon I was told by another student, an underground Party member, that Chen was "essentially not of a very good person" (I clearly remember that phrase) and it was hinted that I should see less of her. So I didn't take it any further. Then in the autumn of 1951, after I had left the Foreign Languages Training Unit, and was recuperating from a lung infection in a convalescent unit in Pudong, Shanghai, I became the Party Secretary of the unit, and the Deputy Party Secretary was a young woman, also convalescing. She had been an underground Party member in Shanghai's Sanzhong area. We were eating, living and convalescing together, and working together too, and gradually we grew close, although we never got to the stage of being open about it. In early spring the next year, I left the convalescent unit and in the beginning we kept in contact, but we gradually stopped because of a certain amount of "pride and prejudice". To be strictly truthful, these were no "sweet first love" experiences, they were brief and painful. Then in 1954, while I was in the Labour Office, I met Ren Dacheng, my late wife, and love was kindled again. However, our courtship did not go smoothly, mainly because her family and fellow workers were putting a lot of negative pressure on her and she didn't want to risk giving rein to her feelings. We married in June 1958, just as the Leftist movement was in full swing, and we didn't dare have a warm and loving home life in case we got labelled "petty bourgeois lovey-doveys". At the same time, her family was just as short of cash as ever, and she and her older sister were the sole support for her five school-age brothers and the parents, so she had to carry on looking after them. In April 1959, when we hadn't been married a year and my wife was about six months pregnant with our son, I was ordered to go and "toughen up" with a year of labour in the countryside, so when the baby came, I wasn't with her. From 1962, she had to do two stints of farm labour and socialist education, one after the other. That was followed by the Cultural Revolution, and I was imprisoned for a year and then "exiled" to Nanjing for six years, which meant that our family life was even more fragmented. Things got much better after the 3rd Plenary Session of the CCP 11th National Congress, and we could get a bit of time to be a family together at home, but from 1979 onwards, she was suffering from cerebellar ataxia, which got progressively worse, and the whole family went around with long faces. We were powerless to help her and she died prematurely in middle age. All that took up more than half my life, so I never really got to enjoy a happy family
time. My memories are mostly of pain in the midst of happiness, and affection which was beyond my reach. Luckily I'm quite a strong character. Although physically puny, I'm strong in spirit! I never let it get me down, or put the blame on anyone else, least of all my sick wife. After all, she suffered more than me, and never had a good life after she married me. Sometimes I found it difficult, especially when she wet and soiled herself, it was really unbearable to deal with, I felt like swearing at her, even hitting her, but I could never bring myself to be that cruel. Sometimes I thought how she could have been a wife to me, and I never got any of that love and affection; but then it wasn't her fault, and besides, I didn't give her anything more or better. So I pulled myself together and faced reality, and didn't let myself get downhearted. Anyway, that's enough of all that . . . you may take it or leave it!

Again, thank you so much for the birthday greetings you sent me. I am deeply moved by all the efforts you made for me, I am such a lucky man, so lucky, so very, very lucky!

I got back here, as arranged, from the Shengsi Islands, on the 28th. I wasn't terribly impressed with them, except for eating twenty different kinds of seafood, which were very tasty.

Well, I'd better stop now, though there's never an end to lovers' talk, but anyway, let it remain unfinished!

With best wishes,

Louis

32.

Evening of 2 June 1992

Dear Louis,

I hope you are well. The first thing I did on my return from Nanjing on the afternoon of the 31st was to read your letter, several times over. I've found lots of advantages in writing love letters. Apart from the ardour you feel when writing them, which unlocks the floodgates of love, allowing it to pour over the loved one, and confers enormous happiness, there's also the fact that you can read them again and again and thus savour their mysteries. This is true delight for the soul. I am so glad that you had a very happy birthday this year!

The article you enclosed in your letter of 23 May was really good . . . full of fervour, and charmingly written. May I also say that the way our love has developed is a credit, in large part, to your skill with your pen. You are so good at cutting to the chase. And your General can only admit defeat, and become your prisoner of war, don't you think?

Your example of the line "Not in heaven, yet not of this world", is really very clever. At the Spring Festival I felt so very fortunate to be receiving your pure, deep
love – perhaps only such a love as an immortal spirit can enjoy! – so incredibly fortunate. Because, for the immortal, there is absolutely none of the murkiness of human relationships, so two hearts can collide without needing to analyse the reasons why. It is only because this love can draw them together at the highest level that this attraction has nothing in common with the naivety of youth, but is mature and wise. Anyway, the way we are imprinted on each other's hearts can't adequately be described in words. Reading your letter of 30 May gave me an even better understanding of your goodness and fortitude. I do so admire you! You have really had a hard time of it for the first part of your life. The problems you faced were considerable, and yet you managed to deal with them very well, and endured. I also admire your unsullied integrity in your job as a bureaucrat. The beauty of such inner qualities is absolutely at one with your handsome and spirited exterior! So I hope you will consign what you regard as your "Treatise on Mediocrity" to the waters of the East Sea – only a mediocre person would regard you as mediocre.

I was in Nanjing to attend the Annual Meeting of the Chinese Universities Foreign Languages Publications at the International Relations Institute, and I saw your old college friend from St John's. He used to work at the institute and is now retired. He remembers you very well.

As I write, I remember what you said about your emotional problems. From what you said in your letter, you missed out on love in the past. This, of course, had a lot to do with the political climate back then, but also perhaps something to do with differences in your and your wife's backgrounds and temperament. I feel that we should let bygones be bygones; we don't have much longer to live, but at least while we are still alive, we should make up for what you missed. And I intend to put all my efforts into that!

As far as our relationship goes, I went to Beijing in April to see my youngest sister, and confided in her about it. She endorsed my own views, and thought it was a sensible course of action. Of course, outsiders can't necessarily fully understand the warmth of the love between us. Only our two hearts can know each other, and let us enjoy that to the full!

With best wishes,

Phoebe

91.

18 December 1992

Dear Louis,

I hope you are well. Today I received another love letter from you. I read it many times, savouring every bit of your news, and it set off ripple after ripple in my heart. It gave me much cause for thought.

To tell you truthfully, since our feelings have become so deep, I have begun to feel rather confused and bewildered. Not long ago, I got letters from my Shanghai sister-in-law and the wife of a cousin in Guangzhou, both saying that I seemed to be bothered about something. I always felt I was someone who could handle conflicts in my life. The word "bother" just wasn't in my vocabulary. But facts are facts. If I think about it carefully, I have to admit I am "bothered", and it's about what to do about us.

I have to admit that in the past, I've been too naive and simplistic, especially about feelings between men and women. I always thought that my original idea was very good, that is, that we could be "lovers", could have a relationship much deeper than friendship, and also be rid of all the hassles that come with marriage. But as our love developed, quite apart from your insistence all along that we could create the loving warmth of a new family, this whole process made even me begin to feel the same need. Especially now that I am about to retire completely and embark on a totally different life, one which is no longer work-centred, where I am on my own too. In my subconscious, how I was going to live in the future was really a big question mark. And I never really thought it through, so that question mark always lurked under the surface. Your latest love letter, by stating that question so clearly, has forced me to face reality, and give the whole thing serious consideration.

First, I think that love between us has brought us extremely close. In your letter you call me the "madly in-love young girl inside the Spring Festival General", and I think you're right, because our love has very deep foundations. Its foundations go back to our youth, when we were fond of each other. Those feelings were based on mutual attraction and affection and, even more, on a similar outlook: we were both from the non-labouring classes, and both had had a regular university education. And we were both progressive thinkers, and had enthusiastically joined the struggle. So when we met again forty years later, and those feelings were rekindled, we could recall all our youthful passion. If you just go by external appearances, we're old, and anyone giving us a glance would just see an old man and an old woman; but I never stop seeing you as the handsome young man that you were, even though if you look carefully, your hair is frosted with white and your face is lined with wrinkles. But I don't see this, because in my eyes, you're still the fine-looking young man that I remember. As our letters have brought our hearts closer, I have come to understand you better, and many such emotional "encounters", including the disasters that have befallen us in our personal lives, have resonated strongly in our hearts and minds. That's why I say I may be falling into love's snare!

And when a man and a woman are in love like this, then they're going to demand something: they will want to spend more time, or even all the time, together. I never realised this before, but what's bothering me now is that I so much want really to be with you completely! But I also have very many misgivings, and I keep having a mental block, which I feel is stopping me from taking that step. I realise from your letter how badly you need a new family, but I'm holding myself back and I don't feel I can answer that need, and this has been both bewildering and difficult
for you. I understand that, so I have encouraged you to find someone else suitable. But now that you've actually started looking for a new partner, it's given me a real feeling of uneasiness which is hard to put into words, mainly because I feel I might really lose you, which I couldn't bear. Previously, when you told me about the woman with five children who got university degrees, I didn't feel like that, because we didn't have such deep feelings for each other then. But I can't see any way out, so of course I feel very distressed. I said to you that my love for you has never altered, and you said to me: "I believe that those are your true feelings." But if you really married again, I would of course take a conscious step back, not because I loved you less, but out of consideration for your happiness. I would rather bury our love deep in my heart, and turn our romance into a beautiful feeling, a memory which will be precious to me forever.