Oracle Bones (65 page)

“Chen Mengjia struck me as remarkably handsome. I remember thinking, a bit incongruously, that he could have been a movie star.”

“I heard from somebody who knew him that the affair was with a Peking Opera actress.”

“Many things were said at that time. They might criticize something personal—that was simply their method. Of course, it was nobody’s business. If his wife didn’t bring this up, why should they?”

“I don’t know if this tallies with what you’ve heard, but it is said that Chen committed suicide over an affair with a movie actress. I certainly do not want to be identified as the source of this allegation. It came to me from X, who heard it from Y in the context of Y’s defense of Z.”

“This is a historical problem and it’s not something for us to talk about.”

“He had a poet’s temperament. If he had an opinion, he said it. He was
xinzhi koukuai
—he had a straight heart and a quick mouth.”

ON THE FOURTH
floor of the Shanghai Museum, I find a permanent exhibition of Chen’s Ming dynasty furniture. There is always something sad about furniture in a museum, and Chen’s collection seems particularly lonely: empty chairs, vacated tables, incense stands that hold nothing. One chair, made of rare yellow rosewood, is decorated with a single carved character:
. “Longevity.” The exhibit label says nothing about the man’s life or death:

THE FURNITURE IN THIS ROOM WAS ORIGINALLY COLLECTED
BY MR. AND MRS. CHEN MENGJIA

Ma Chengyuan is the oldest curator at the museum. He is seventy-five years old, officially retired but still active. When I request an interview, he responds eagerly; he was friends with the oracle bone scholar. The curator tells me that they first met in 1955. In those days, the Shanghai Museum was a much smaller institution; the beautiful new complex was opened in 1996. During the 1950s, Ma and other curators bought bronzes from local antiquities markets, and they often called in specialists to examine the pieces.

“Chen Mengjia visited the museum several times,” Ma says. “He had a cultured air, but he was very straightforward. He always told his true opinions. Eventually, that’s what got him into trouble. He believed that Chinese writing is beautiful, and he opposed the reforms that were proposed in the 1950s. I heard from others that he spoke openly about this during some meetings in Beijing. That was dangerous, because the government was behind the plans to reform writing. In other words, he wasn’t just opposing the writing reform; he was opposing the government. To be honest, I also didn’t like the idea, but I never said anything. All of that was happening in Beijing and I had nothing to do with it.”

Ma continues: “I always enjoyed showing Chen our collection when he visited Shanghai. Sometimes his wife came with him. I think that her personality had changed from before—I heard this from others. She didn’t talk very much. I think there was some kind of pressure on her spirit. I know that they wanted to have a child but couldn’t. At one point they looked into adopting, but it was too complicated—there’s not a tradition of that in our China. And I think
their home was lonely without children. Chen told me once that they couldn’t have children, although he never spoke about it in detail. Of course, I would have been too embarrassed to ask.”

The curator tells me that the last time he saw Chen was in 1963. “By then, he had already had political problems,” he says. “I was visiting Beijing, and I went to his home to look at his furniture. There were so many beautiful pieces, and I remember noticing one in particular, the yellow rosewood chair that has
carved into it. We ate dinner at his home, and he gave me a copy of his new book,
Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists
. You have to understand that that title wasn’t Chen’s choice!

“That was when he first told me that he wanted to give his furniture to the Shanghai Museum. He was very concerned about their protection. He never specifically mentioned that he feared political problems. But I know that any collector would have wanted to live with those pieces. So why did he want to give them to the museum? We can only guess. Later, he wrote a letter about the donation and sent it to me. I still have the letter—I’ll find it for you. And that was the last time I saw him.”

Ma mentions that Chen’s political problems started in the late 1950s. “Some of the younger academics wrote articles criticizing him,” the old man says. “Some of them were very harsh.”

I ask if he remembers the names of any of the critics.

“Li Xueqin,” he says. “He wrote something saying that Chen’s research on the oracle bones was wrong.”

“Was the criticism accurate?”

“No,” says the curator. “And he shouldn’t have written that paper at that particular time. Chen already had enough trouble.”

“What’s Li Xueqin like?”

“Li Xueqin—” Ma shakes his head and thinks for a moment. “
Buhao shuo
,” he says. “It’s not easy to say. But now Li Xueqin is at the top of the field of archaeology. For a period he was Chen Mengjia’s assistant.”

THE CURATOR WON’T
say more about the criticism. He drops the name and leaves it at that, knowing that my curiosity has been raised. He has a reputation for being politically savvy—during the Cultural Revolution, he reportedly saved the museum’s artifacts by covering them with banners of Mao Zedong slogans. Ma knew that Red Guards wouldn’t destroy the Chairman’s words, and the Shanghai collections emerged intact. Today, the museum is considered to be the best in all of China, and Ma is given credit for guiding the institution’s expansion.

There are rumors that the museum actually profited from the Cultural Revolution, when many intellectuals and wealthy people lost their belongings. I ask the curator about this, and he takes the question in stride. “I was also criticized,” he says. “We were just concerned with survival.” He tells a story about a “struggle session” in which the curator and other museum staff were lifted to a height and then dropped onto the marble floor. Ma says that he was bruised but intact; another colleague landed on his head and died. The tale is short but effective: I’m not going to ask any more questions about whether the Cultural Revolution was good for the Shanghai Museum.

Before I leave, the curator photocopies Chen Mengjia’s last letter. The handwritten document is dated January 26, 1966, the year that the scholar committed suicide. The handwriting is beautiful, and there is no mention of fear or political trouble. The characters are arranged as neatly as the furniture in the Shanghai exhibit, and they feel just as empty:

We had a very pleasant talk last time, maybe you’ve forgotten, but it’s a pity that we didn’t record it. You came to my home and the time was too rushed….

That yellow rosewood chair, it might date to earlier than the Ming dynasty, and of course it should be donated to the Shanghai Museum. If you like the other pieces, they can be donated as well. I hope that someone from the museum can come here and pack them up….

IN BEIJING, I
find a copy of the criticism. It was published in 1957, shortly after Chen Mengjia had been named a Rightist and an enemy of the Party. The article consists of a long review of Chen’s book on oracle bones: the chrestomathy. The review is sharply critical of Chen’s scholarship, and then, at the end, the attack becomes personal:

Chen has not presented anything substantial enough to match his arrogance. Chen has an extreme tendency to boast. For example, in the twenty chapters of the book, Chen neglects many essays and theories of other scholars, instead collecting only his own ideas…. This self-boasting attitude should not be accepted by us.

It’s not hard to find more information about Li Xueqin. In the fields of archaeology and history, his name is everywhere—he publishes about oracle bones, ancient bronzes, bamboo documents. He is brilliant and prolific; a
number of scholars tell me that he has the rare ability to do excellent research while also deftly satisfying the Communist Party. One scholar of ancient Chinese tells me bluntly that Li is a “toady”; a number of people mention his criticism of Chen Mengjia.

In recent years, Li has been the director of the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project. Initiated in 1995, and funded by the central government, the project was designed to establish exact dates for China’s early cultures. Previously, the earliest date in Chinese history for which there was ample archaeological and textual evidence was 842
B
.
C
., but the Chronology Project came up with a new timeline. Internationally, the project has been heavily criticized—many foreign scholars believe that the Chinese are attempting to fortify their history in ways that are more nationalistic than academic. Some say that the project was motivated primarily by a sense of competition with the West, which has earlier recorded dates for cultures such as ancient Egypt. During the Chronology Project, academic differences about ancient dates were sometimes resolved by voting—Chinese scholars gave their opinions, and the year with the most votes won. Domestic press reports were often bizarre:

CHINA DAILY (December 16, 1998)—A PROJECT TO BRIDGE gaps in China’s ancient history has made remarkable progress after two years of research. China is world-famous for its 5,000-year history as a civilized nation. Unfortunately, a 2,000-year gap in China’s development has concealed the country’s true age…. The missing 2,000 years include the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties and the time before that dating back to well before 2100
B.C
., says Li Xueqin, history researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing….

The exact time marking the beginning of China’s ancient history will be published late next year, said Li.

AFTER RESEARCHING LI XUEQIN’S
career, I arrange a meeting with a friend who is a Chinese journalist. He works for Xinhua, the Party news service, but in his free time he researches history and archaeology. He uses his official position to access restricted documents and explore forgotten events; someday he hopes he’ll be able to publish it all. He likes to say that his left hand works for Xinhua but his right hand works for himself. We are the same age: early thirties, born in the Year of the Rooster.

I ask my friend for advice about approaching Li Xueqin, and he tells me not
to mention Chen Mengjia. I should arrange an interview on another pretext, and then bring up the criticism.

I ask, “What if he refuses to answer?”

“Well, he might do that. But if you take him by surprise, maybe he’ll respond.”

“What do you think he’ll say?”

“There’s a Chinese saying—‘Like the sun at high noon.’ That’s where Li Xueqin is right now. He’s at the high point of his career. When he looks at that review, I doubt that he thinks, ‘I shouldn’t have attacked my teacher in this way.’ Instead, he probably thinks, ‘Look how much I understood when I was so young.’”

The reporter continues, “Scholars in this country are like that. It’s a very dark group of people—many of them did things that they shouldn’t have done. I’ve heard that after Chen Mengjia killed himself, scholars went through his office, reading his notes, and some of them later published his ideas as their own. There are many scholars who did things like that in the past, but they won’t admit it. The Chinese don’t like to examine themselves in this way. It’s rare for them to admit that they were wrong.”

At the end of the conversation, my friend encourages me to pursue the story; he says that too much history of this sort slips away in China. “This isn’t something that a Chinese journalist can do,” he says. “I couldn’t do it for Xinhua, of course. But as a foreigner, you can do it.”

I MEET LI
Xueqin in his office at Tsinghua University. He is almost seventy years old, with a high forehead and heavy bags beneath his eyes—the face of a hardworking scholar. He wears a gray woolen suit, red tie, and slippers. He tells me that he has spent time in the States, including a sabbatical at Dartmouth; he speaks good English. I have told him that I’m interested in the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project.