Read China in Ten Words Online

Authors: Yu Hua

Tags: #History, #Asia, #China, #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Political Science, #Globalization

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BOOK: China in Ten Words
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When I grew up and exchanged stories about the Cultural Revolution with friends from other parts of China, I would often mention this man, only to find they knew of similar individuals in their home districts—sometimes more than one. So I began to suspect that our small-town hero just made it all up, for surely it wasn’t so easy to shake Mao’s hand. I think our man was probably squeezed into a thick scrum of people packed together on Tiananmen Square during one of the chairman’s grand inspections, watching Mao in the far, far distance as he stood on the Gate of Heavenly Peace and waved his hand in greeting. He dimly saw Mao’s hand and imagined himself shaking it—and when everyone in our town became convinced this had happened, he became convinced of it, too.

In those days Mao Zedong’s portrait shimmered like the sun on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, its dimensions quite out of proportion to the size of the gate. Almost every day I would see his awe-inspiring image on one wall or another of our little town, and almost every day we would sing a song that went:

I love Beijing’s Tiananmen
Splendid under morning sun
.
Our Great Leader Chairman Mao
Leads us forward, on and on
.

I used to have a photograph of myself when I was fifteen, standing in the middle of Tiananmen Square with Mao’s huge portrait visible in the background. It was taken not in Beijing but in the photography studio of our town a thousand miles away. The room in which I was standing cannot have been more than twenty feet wide, and the square was just a theatrical backdrop painted on the wall. When you looked at the photo, you might almost have believed I was really standing in Tiananmen Square—except for the complete absence of people in the acres of space behind me.

This photograph crystallized the dreams of my childhood years—and, indeed, the dreams of most Chinese children who lived in other places than Beijing. Almost all studios then were equipped with this same tableau of Tiananmen, designed to satisfy our vicarious desires, for to us in the provinces the Gate of Heavenly Peace might just as well have been Mao Zedong’s front door. Hence that picture—now lost, I regret to say—of me standing at the entrance to Mao’s imagined home.

My yearning for the Gate of Heavenly Peace was simply an extension of my eagerness to see Mao. During the Cultural Revolution a documentary featuring Mao and Tiananmen would be filmed every year on National Day, October 1. Often by the time the newsreel made it to our little town it would be well into winter. I would head off down the street in my lumpy padded jacket as a bitter night wind blew in my face, then sit down in the unheated cinema and watch the grainy images of autumnal Tiananmen, where Mao was waving to the marchers.

What left the deepest impression on me from the National Day newsreels was the pyrotechnics display that took place after nightfall, when Mao and his colleagues sat down at a table so groaning with fruits and pastries it made my mouth drool. Fireworks illuminated the square as brightly as day: for me as a boy this was the most exhilarating scene of all. In our town major holidays were celebrated by letting off a few firecrackers at most, and to see so many fireworks explode in the sky for so many minutes, even if it was only on the screen, was enough to leave me speechless with wonder.

In later documentaries Prince Sihanouk, then recently deposed as ruler of Cambodia, appeared, smiling infectiously at Mao’s side, along with the prince’s onetime prime minister, Penn Nouth, who would cock his head and nod obsequiously as they spoke. Already well into my fantasy-rich adolescence by this time, I became quite besotted with Sihanouk and Penn Nouth’s lovely young wives; every time they showed up in National Day footage, I thought to myself, “Now things are getting interesting!” The daytime parade and the after-dark fireworks had lost their appeal; Sihanouk and Penn Nouth had become the two men I envied most in the world, particularly the latter—clearly over the hill, I thought, and not even capable of holding his head up straight, but still with a lissome beauty at his beck and call.

I owe my most lasting memories of Mao to the ceiling of my house. We would have seen right up to the roof tiles if every year my father hadn’t pasted a new layer of newspapers over them to prevent dust, to make our ceiling more presentable, and to give us a feeling of insulation. My childhood was spent under this canopy of newsprint: I could read all the headlines from my bed, although the text itself was impossible to make out. When Mao first appeared on my ceiling, he had Liu Shaoqi standing next to him, but before long Liu had disappeared, to be replaced by Lin Biao, who soon performed a vanishing trick as well; finally Mao was joined by a young Cultural Revolution militant named Wang Hongwen.
§
In the National Day photo spread, the people by Mao’s side kept changing; Mao alone remained constant from one year to the next. As the newspapers were refreshed annually, I was witness to Mao’s physical decline; his increasing senility on my bedroom ceiling was brought to an abrupt halt when the paper stopped printing a photograph of Mao on National Day and replaced it with the generic image displayed everywhere in the country.

One morning in September 1976, when I was in my second year of high school, we all stood to attention as usual before the start of class and barked in chorus to the official image of Mao above the blackboard: “We wish Great Leader Chairman Mao eternal long life!” Then we sat down and began to read aloud a paragraph in our textbook. In those days all essays used the exact same phrases to describe Mao: “Glowing with health, radiating vigor.” This language had been introduced in the textbook during my first year of elementary school, and it appeared without the slightest alteration in the one we used ten years later. No sooner had we finished reciting these lines than the school’s PA system interrupted us with a sudden blare. It instructed all staff and students to assemble at once in the auditorium; an important broadcast would follow at 9 a.m.

We picked up our chairs, all one thousand of us, and shuffled into the auditorium, where we sat down and waited. Half an hour passed, and at nine o’clock funereal music sounded. I instantly had a grim sense of foreboding. Two senior leaders of the Communist Party had died that year—first Zhou Enlai, then Zhu De, just a few days before—so we knew what was coming.

The long dirge came to an end, and a grief-stricken voice began to intone a slow litany of titles: “The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, the National People’s Congress, the National Political Consultative Conference.…”

It seemed to take forever to get to the obituary notice issued by these supreme organs of power. Another ponderous, doleful recitation began: “Great Leader, Great Teacher, Great Commander, Great Helmsman.…” Finally, after this long string of epithets, came the real substance: Chairman Mao Zedong had passed away after a long illness. Even before the final words, “aged eighty-two,” the auditorium was already seething with moans and wails.

Our leader was dead. My eyes too filled with tears, and I wept like the thousand others. I heard heartrending screeches and earthshaking howls, people gasped for breath and choked in anguish—and then my mind began to wander. Grief no longer held me in its sway; my thoughts started moving in another direction entirely. If it had been just a few people weeping, I would certainly have felt sad, but a thousand people all weeping at the same time simply struck me as funny. I had never in my life heard such a cacophony. Even if every living variety of beast were to send a delegate to our auditorium and they were all to bellow in unison, I thought to myself, they surely could not make a stranger chorus than the din of a thousand people crying their heads off.

This untimely fancy might have been the death of me. I couldn’t help but smile, and then I had to fight back the laugh that was pushing its way out. If anybody were to see me laughing, I would be labeled a counterrevolutionary on the spot and life would not be worth living. Hard as I tried to bottle up my laughter, it insisted on spilling forth, and knowing I couldn’t stifle it any longer, I desperately threw myself forward, hugging the back of the chair in front of me, and buried my head in my folded arms. Amid the weeping of a thousand people I was in the throes of uncontainable mirth, my shoulders heaving, and the more I tried to stop myself from laughing, the more the laughs kept coming.

My classmates, through a curtain of tears, saw me sprawled over a chair, racked by agonizing spasms of grief. They were deeply moved by my devotion to our fallen leader, and later they would say, “Yu Hua was more upset than anyone—you should have seen the way he was crying.”

*
lingxiu


Mao Tsetung Poems
(Peking: Commercial Press, 1962), p. 62.


In the spring of 2011, the exchange rate of the Chinese yuan stood at about 6.5 yuan to the U.S. dollar.

§
Liu Shaoqi, appointed China’s head of state in 1959, was denounced early in the Cultural Revolution as the Communist Party’s “biggest capitalist roader” and in 1968 was dismissed from all his positions. Lin Biao became Mao’s second-in-command in 1969 but perished in a plane crash in 1971 after what was said to be an unsuccessful coup attempt. Wang Hongwen rose rapidly through party ranks and in 1973 was elevated to third place in the hierarchy.

reading

S
ince I grew up in a time and a place where there were no books, it’s hard to say just how I began to read. But sorting through my memories, I find my earliest reading
*
experiences fall into four sequences.

T
he first dates back to the summer following my graduation from elementary school, in 1973. By then we were into the seventh year of the Cultural Revolution, and the bloody street battles and savage house lootings were now well behind us. Cruelties perpetrated in the name of the revolution seemed to have worn themselves out, leaving life in our small town in a quiescent state, stifled and repressed. People had become more timid and circumspect than before, and although the newspapers and radio broadcasts carried on promoting class struggle day after day, it seemed ages since I had seen a class enemy.

At this point the town library, which had been mothballed for so long, finally reopened. My father managed to wangle a reader’s card for my brother and me, to give us something to do during the tedious vacation. Thus began my reading of fiction. In China then, practically all literary works were labeled “poisonous weeds.” Works by foreign authors such as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Balzac were poisonous weeds; works by Chinese authors like Ba Jin, Lao She, and Shen Congwen were poisonous weeds; and with the falling-out between Mao and Khrushchev, revolutionary literature of the Soviet era had become poisonous weeds, too. Since the bulk of the library’s holdings had perished in all the Red Guard book burning, there was very little left to read. The fiction shelf featured only twenty-odd titles, all so-called socialist revolutionary literature of the homegrown variety. I read all these books in turn:
Bright Sunny Skies
,
The Golden Road
,
Ox-field Strand
,
Battle Song of Hongnan
,
New Bridge
,
Storm over Mine Shaft Hill
,
Spring Comes to the Land of Flying Snow
,
Glittering Red Star.…
My favorites were
Glittering Red Star
and
Storm over Mine Shaft Hill
, for the simple reason that their protagonists were children.

This kind of reading has left no traces on my life, for in these books I encountered neither emotions nor characters nor even stories. All I found was grindingly dull accounts of class struggle. This did not stop me from reading each book through to the end, because my life at the time was even more grindingly dull. “A starving man isn’t picky,” we say in Chinese, and that sums up my reading in those days. So long as it was a novel, so long as there were still some pages to go, I would keep on reading.

A few years ago two retired professors of Chinese in Berlin told me about their experience during the Great Famine of 1959–62. They were studying at Peking University at the time, and the husband had to return home early to deal with a family emergency. Two months later he received a letter from his wife. “Things are awful here,” it said. “The students have eaten all the leaves off the trees.” Just as the famished students stripped the campus trees bare, so I devoured every one of those grim, unappetizing novels on the library shelf.

The librarian was a middle-aged woman very dedicated to her profession. Every time my brother, Hua Xu, and I returned a book, she would inspect it meticulously and not let us borrow another until she had satisfied herself that the returned volume had suffered no damage at our hands. Once she noticed an ink spot on the cover of the book we were returning and held us responsible. No, we had nothing to do with that, we told her—the ink spot had been there all the time. She stuck to her guns, insisting she always checked every book and there was no way she would have missed such a glaring stain. We began to argue, an activity known at the time as “civil struggle.” Hua Xu was a Red Guard, and he saw civil struggle as a wimpy sort of activity; “martial struggle” was more the Red Guard style. So he picked up the book and threw it in her face, then gave her a clip across the ear for good measure.

After that we all went to the local police station, where the librarian sat in a chair for a long time, drenched in tears, while Hua Xu strolled back and forth in a show of calm indifference. The station chief did his best to console the woman, at the same time cursing out my brother and telling him to sit down and behave. So Hua Xu sat down and crossed his legs nonchalantly. The station chief was a friend of my father’s, and I had once asked his advice about what to do in a fight. He had sized me up briefly—I was a puny little boy—and then given me the following tip: nip in before your adversary is ready and kick him in the balls. “What if it’s a girl?” I asked.

“Boys don’t fight with girls,” he told me sternly.

My brother’s demonstration of Red Guard fighting prowess lost us our reader’s card. But I found this no cause for regret, because by then I had read all the novels in the library. The problem was that the summer vacation was far from over and my appetite for reading was sharper than ever.

At home all we had was the dozen or so medical books my parents had acquired in the course of their professional training, plus the four-volume set of
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
and
Quotations from Chairman Mao
—the Little Red Book, a compilation of sayings culled from
Selected Works
. I fingered these books listlessly, waiting for some chemistry to develop, but even after much turning of pages I found I had not the slightest inclination to read them.

So I had no choice but to leave the house and, like a man with a rumbling stomach on a search for food, I went off on a hunt for books. Dressed in a pair of shorts and a tank top, with flip-flops on my feet, I roamed the sunbaked streets and greeted every boy I knew with the call, “Hey, got any books at home?”

The other boys, all dressed exactly like me, gave a start when they heard my inquiry, for it was most likely the first time they had ever been asked such a question. They would nod their heads: “Yeah, we do.” But when I ran to their houses, full of excitement, all I saw was that familiar four-volume edition of
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
—always a new, unopened set. This taught me a lesson, and so the next time one of my respondents told me he had books at home I stuck out four fingers. “Four books, you mean?” When he nodded, my hand would drop to my side. “New books, right?” I would ask. When he nodded once more, I could not conceal my disappointment. “Oh, not
Selected Works
again!”

Later I changed my opening question. “Got old books?” I would ask.

The boys I met shook their heads—with one exception. This boy blinked, then nodded. “I think so,” he said.

“Four books?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Just one, I think.”

But that could mean the Little Red Book. “Has it got a red cover?”

He thought for a moment. “Gray, I think.”

Now I was getting somewhere. His threefold iteration of “I think” raised my confidence enormously. I clapped my sweaty hand on his sweaty shoulder and treated him to such an endless stream of compliments that he was practically purring with pleasure by the time we got to his house. There he bustled about, moving a stool in front of the wardrobe, then groping around on top of the wardrobe until he finally got his hand on a small book caked with dust, which he presented to me. I immediately felt uneasy, for it was a pocketbook much the same size as
Quotations from Chairman Mao
. When I scraped away the thick layer of dust that coated the jacket, my heart sank at the sight of a red plastic cover—it was the Little Red Book.

All my efforts outside having proved fruitless, I had no choice but to try to tap latent potential at home—to “increase internal demand to stimulate growth,” to borrow today’s catchphrase. I had a cursory glance through the medical books and then put them right back on the shelf, completely failing to notice the wonders concealed inside their covers and so postponing by two years my discovery of their secrets. After that, all that was left was a brand-new set of
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
and a dog-eared copy of the Little Red Book. That was the situation typical of every household then:
Selected Works
was simply political ornamentation, and it was the Little Red Book that was taken up for study on a daily basis.

I passed over the Little Red Book and opted for
Selected Works
instead. This time I began to read it carefully and in so doing found something I had missed before, which opened up a whole new world. From then on
Selected Works
was seldom out of my hands.

In summertime then everyone ate outdoors. First we would splash a few basins of cold water on the ground, in part to cool things off, in part to keep the dust in place, and then we would bring out a table and stools. Once dinner was served, we children would walk back and forth with our rice bowls in our hands, inspecting the dishes on other tables as we ate up the food in our own bowls. I was always quick to finish my meal; then, after putting down bowl and chopsticks, I would pick up
Selected Works
and read it avidly by the light of the setting sun.

The neighbors all sighed in wonder, impressed that at such a tender age I was already so assiduous in my study of Mao Zedong Thought. My parents brimmed with pride on hearing so much praise. Privately they began in hushed voices to discuss my future, lamenting that the Cultural Revolution had restricted my educational opportunities, for otherwise their younger son would surely be well on his way to becoming a university professor.

In reality Mao Zedong Thought had completely failed to engage me. What I liked to read in
Selected Works
was simply the footnotes, explanatory summaries of historical events and biographical details about historical figures, which proved to be much more interesting than the novels in our local library. Although there was no emotion to be found in the footnotes, they did have stories, and they did have characters.

T
he second phase of my early reading dates to my high school years, when I began to read poisonous weeds. Some books had somehow managed to escape the bonfires—spirited away, perhaps, by true literature lovers—and these fortunate survivors began surreptitiously to circulate among us. Every one of these books must have passed through the hands of a thousand people or more before they reached me, and so they were in a terrible state of disrepair, with easily a dozen or more pages missing from the beginning and the same number missing at the end. So I knew neither the books’ titles nor their authors, neither how the stories began nor how they ended.

To not know how a story began was not such a hardship, but to not know how it ended was a painful deprivation. Every time I read one of these headless, tailless novels I was like an ant on a hot wok, running around everywhere in search of someone who could tell me the ending. But everybody was in the same boat, for the versions other people had read were also missing pages at the beginning and end, and though sometimes I met people who had read a few more pages than I had and could brief me on developments in that portion of the book, they still did not know the final denouement. Such was our experience of reading: our books were constantly losing pages as they passed through the hands of several—or several dozen—readers. It left me disconsolate, mentally cursing those earlier readers who had been able to finish the book but never bothered to stick the pages that had fallen out back in.

How these stories without resolutions made me suffer! Nobody could help me, so I began to think up endings for myself. “The Internationale” puts it well:

No one will grant us deliverance
Neither god nor emperor
To create happiness for man
We depend on our own labor
.

Every night when I went to bed and turned off the light, my eyes would blink as I entered the world of imagination, creating endings to those stories that stirred me so deeply tears would run down my face. It was, I realize now, good training for things to come, and I owe a debt to those truncated novels for sparking creative tendencies in me.

The first foreign novel I ever read was another headless, tailless thing, without author or title, beginning or end. In it for the first time I encountered sexual descriptions; they made me anxious and fearful. When I reached one of these passages, I would raise my head in alarm and glance all around. Only when I was sure nobody was watching would I continue reading, my heart in my mouth.

With the end of the Cultural Revolution, literature staged a comeback, and bookstores were packed with new editions of literary works. I must have bought countless Western novels then, and one night I picked out Maupassant’s
Une Vie
for bedtime reading. Well into the story I suddenly shouted, “So this is the one!” It was the same book that, years earlier in headless, tailless form, had me shaking like a leaf.

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