Age of Ambition (44 page)

“Wait,” I said. “Is this a bad idea—spiritually speaking?”

Han considered the question, and said, “You should be fine because you're a foreigner and you don't believe in this.”

I wasn't sure what I believed anymore. But it was too late anyway; Han was already stuffing handfuls of pink rat poison into the holes in the roof. He said his work was covered by a one-year money-back guarantee. “If the weasel comes back, call me,” he said.

The ceiling was silent again. Two weeks later, the scratching returned—stronger this time. The aroma was intense—the smell of revenge, I thought—but I never again called Han the exterminator for his money-back guarantee. Instead I bought an electric fan to air out my office, and I learned to live with the weasel above.

*   *   *

Of all the neighbors, none was closer to us than the Confucius Temple; it shared a wall with our kitchen. The shrine was one of the city's most tranquil places, a secluded compound built in 1302, with ancient trees and a tall wooden pavilion that loomed above our house like a conscience. In the mornings, I brought a cup of coffee outside and listened to the wake-up sounds next door: the brush of a broom across the flagstones, the squeak of a faucet, the hectoring of the magpies overhead.

It was a small miracle that the temple had survived at all. Thousands of shrines across the country once existed to venerate Confucius, the philosopher and politician who was born in the sixth century
B.C.E.
He acquired a place in Chinese history akin to that of Socrates in the West, in part because his ideology encouraged order and loyalty. “There is government,” Confucius said, “when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.” Confucius linked morality to the strength of the state: “He who exercises government by means of virtue may be compared to the North Star, which holds its place while all other stars turn around it.” Chairman Mao believed in “permanent revolution,” and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he exhorted young Red Guards to “Smash the Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Zealots denounced Confucius for fostering “bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks,” and one of Mao's lieutenants gave the approval to dig up his grave. Hundreds of temples were destroyed. By the 1980s, Confucianism was so maligned that the historian Ying-shih Yu called it a “wandering soul.”

One morning in September 2010, I heard a loudspeaker crackle to life inside the temple walls. It was followed by the sound of a heavy bell, then drums and a flute, and a narrator reciting passages from the classics. The performance lasted twenty minutes, and then it was repeated an hour later, and an hour after that, and again the next day. The wandering soul, in one form or another, had been stirring. Beginning in the eighties, when it became clear that something would eventually fill the “spiritual void,” the Party was determined to have a hand in filling it. The old proletarian virtues (revolution, class consciousness) were obsolete. The leaders needed a new moral vocabulary suited to the Party in Power, a way to link themselves to the glories of their ancient civilization. China needed a morality and a politics for the New Middle-Income Stratum. The Party was intrigued by the renaissance of Confucius among Chinese communities in Singapore and Taiwan. He was, after all, an indigenous moral icon, firmly embedded in China's “national studies.” In Beijing, Confucius was rehabilitated.

The government opened more than four hundred “Confucius Institutes” around the world to teach Mandarin language and history. (Abroad, scholars complained that the Confucius Institutes stifled discussion of controversial issues such as Tibet and Taiwan.) Proponents of the Confucian revival argued that it would defend China from Western “egoist philosophy,” and they had taken to comparing the city of Qufu, the philosopher's hometown, to Jerusalem. Near the cave where Confucius was said to have been born, a five-hundred-million-dollar museum-and-park complex began construction; plans called for a statue of Confucius that would be nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In its marketing, Qufu called itself “the Holy City of the Orient.” In 2012, it received 4.4 million visitors, surpassing the number of people who visited Israel. The Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius unveiled new traditions, including encouraging couples to renew their wedding vows in front of a statue of the sage. To give him a fresher image, historians unveiled what they called a “standardized” portrait: a kindly old man in a Chinese robe, with his hands crossed at his chest.

Universities unveiled high-priced courses for entrepreneurs who sought “commercial wisdom” in the classics. National Studies Web, a site devoted to Confucian thought, went public on the Shenzhen stock exchange, and some enterprising Confucians launched the International Confucius Festival, sponsored by a Confucius-themed wine company, in which thousands of people filled a local stadium in his hometown, giant balloons floated overhead bearing the names of ancient scholars, and a Korean pop star in an abbreviated outfit delivered a rock performance.

Just as America's conservative movement in the 1960s had capitalized on the yearning for a postliberal retreat to morality and nobility, China's classical revival drew on a nostalgic image of what it meant to be Chinese. It conjured images of a simpler past, recorded in the idealized stories of ancient Chinese history, of noble knights and honest rulers who acted with moral clarity and purpose. Young nationalists such as Tang Jie organized events in which they visited the Confucius Temple dressed in classical scholars' robes and reenacted rituals that most people had long forgotten, if they knew them at all.

The Confucian revival found a market. The biggest surprise best seller of recent years was a collection of Confucian lectures delivered by Yu Dan, a telegenic professor of media studies who served as a political adviser to the Party. She wrote, “To assess a country's true strength and prosperity, you can't simply look at GNP growth and not look at the inner experience of each ordinary person: Does he feel safe? Is he happy?” Skeptics mocked it as Chicken Soup for the Confucian Soul, but Yu became the second-highest-paid author in the country.

A few days after I heard the sounds inside the temple, it convened a celebration of Confucius's birthday for the first time since the Communists came to power in 1949. The event featured speeches by government officials and professors, and a group of children recited passages. I figured that this would probably signal the end of the musical performance—but, in fact, the show played on, and it acquired a regular schedule: every hour, ten to six, seven days a week, rain or shine. The sound echoed off the walls of the Alley of National Studies, and what had begun as a novelty gradually wore grooves into the minds of my neighbors. “I hear it in my head at night,” Huang told me one afternoon. “It's like I've been on a boat all day and I can still feel the rocking.”

His face brightened with an idea. “You should go tell them to turn down the volume.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you're a foreigner. They'll pay attention to you.”

I wasn't sure I wanted the kind of attention that comes from complaining about China's most famous philosopher. But I was curious about the show, and I arranged to visit the head of the temple, a man named Wu Zhiyou. He was not what I expected; Wu looked less like a theologian than an actor who'd play the kindly father in a Chinese soap opera: in his midfifties, he had a large, handsome face, a perfect pair of dimples in his cheeks, and a resonant voice that sounded somehow familiar. Before being posted to run the temple, Wu had spent most of his career in the research office of the city's Propaganda Department, and he had a mind for marketing. Of the performance, he said, “This show has attracted people from all levels of society—Chinese and foreigners, men and women, well-educated and less-educated, experts and ordinary people.”

I asked if he was very involved in the production. “I'm the chief designer!” he said, eyes shining. “I oversaw every detail. Even the narrator's voice is mine.”

The show had been conceived under demanding circumstances, he said. Confucius had been gone for more than two thousand years, but Wu had been given only a month to organize the performance. He hired a composer, recruited dancers from a local art school, and selected lines from the classics to give it some shape. “You need ups and downs and a climax,” he said, “just like a movie or a play. If it's too bland, it would never work.”

I got the sense that Wu was savoring the chance to bring Confucius to the stage. “In junior middle school, I was always the student leader of the propaganda section of the student council. I love reading aloud and music and art.” In his spare time he still did cross-talk comedy routines, the Chinese version of stand-up. Wu, it seemed to me, had succeeded in making the Confucius Temple into his own community theater. He had plans for the future. “We're building a new set that will have ceramic statues of the seventy-two disciples. And we need more lighting. Then, maybe, I can say it is complete.”

Wu checked his watch. He wanted me to catch the three o'clock show. Before I left, he gave me a book on the history of the temple, and said, “After you read this book, your questions will no longer be questions.”

The stage was in front of a pavilion on the north side of the compound. It had been fitted with stage lights. The cast consisted of sixteen young men and women in scholars' robes; each song-and-dance routine was named for a line from the classics, and they took an upbeat interpretation: “Happiness” was based on the line “Good fortune lies within bad; bad fortune lies within good,” and the stage version omitted the ominous half. The finale, “Harmony,” linked Confucius and the Communist Party. A pamphlet explained that it conveyed the “harmonious ideology and harmonious society of the ancient people, which will have a positive influence on the construction of modern harmonious society.”

*   *   *

I read the book that the temple director gave me, and the details about ancient events impressed me: It recorded who planted which trees seven hundred years ago, and it contained lively portraits of people from the temple's history in a section called “Anecdotes of Elites.” But the book was conspicuously silent on some matters, including the years between 1905 and 1981. In the official history of the Confucius Temple, most of the twentieth century was blank.

During my time in China, I had learned to expect renderings of history that felt like the drop-outs in an audio recording, when the music goes silent and resumes as if nothing happened. Some of those edits were ordained from above: the Party barred people from discussing the crackdown at Tiananmen or the famine of the Great Leap Forward because it had never repudiated or accepted responsibility for them, nor had it dealt with the question of what changes might prevent their happening again. For a long time, ordinary Chinese were willing to aid in the forgetting, not only because they were poor and determined to get on with their lives, but also because many had been victims at some moments and perpetrators at others.

But there were other books about the Confucius Temple, and these filled in the blanks—especially about the night of August 23, 1966. It was the opening weeks of the Cultural Revolution, and the order to “Smash the Four Olds” had devolved into a violent assault on authority of all kinds. That night, a group of Red Guards summoned one of China's most famous writers, Lao She, to the front gate of the Confucius Temple.

He was sixty-seven years old and one of China's best hopes for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had grown up not far from there, in poverty, the son of an imperial guard who died in battle against foreign armies. In 1924 he went to London and stayed for five years, living near Bloomsbury and reading Conrad and Joyce. He wore khakis because he couldn't afford tweeds. In 1939 he published
Rickshaw Boy
, about an honest, independent-minded young rickshaw puller whose encounters with injustice turn him into, in Lao She's words, a “degenerate, selfish, hapless product of a sick society.” Lao She became to Beijing what Victor Hugo was to Paris: the city's quintessential writer. The Party named him a “People's Artist.” He resented being asked to produce propaganda, but, like many, he was a loyal servant who poured criticism on his fellow writers when they fell out with the Party.

Now he was the target. A group of Red Guards—mostly schoolgirls between thirteen and sixteen years old—pushed him through the gates of the temple and forced him to kneel on the flagstones beside a bonfire, surrounded by other writers and artists under attack. His accusers denounced him for his links to the West. They shouted, “Down with the anti-Party elements!” and used leather belts with heavy brass buckles to whip the old men and women before them. Lao She was bleeding from his head, but he stayed conscious. For three hours this went on, until, at last, he was brought to a police station, where his wife retrieved him.

The next morning, Lao She rose early and walked northwest from his home to a quiet pond called the Lake of Great Peace. He read poetry and wrote until the sun had set. Then he took off his shirt and draped it over a tree branch. He loaded his pockets with stones and walked into the lake.

When his body was discovered the next day, his son, Shu Yi, was summoned to collect it. The police had found his father's clothes, his cane, his glasses, and his pen, as well as a sheaf of papers that he had left behind. The official ruling on his death explained that Lao She had “isolated himself from the people.” Since he was a “counterrevolutionary,” he was not allowed to be given a proper burial. In the end, his widow and children loaded his spectacles and his pen into a casket and buried it.

I wondered about the son, Shu Yi, who had gone to retrieve his father's body. He would be in his seventies now, older than his father was when he died. I asked around and discovered that he lived only a few minutes' walk from my house. He invited me over. His apartment was cluttered with books and scrolls and paintings in a way that reminded me of the fortune-teller's shop. Shu had white hair and a heavy, kind face. As we talked, a soft breeze blew in the window from a nearby canal. I asked if he had ever learned more about his father's state of mind at the end.