Oracle Bones (78 page)

He said that after the political struggles finally ended, he didn’t see Lucy again until 1980.

“We didn’t even mention Mengjia’s name,” Wu said softly. “That would have been one of the hardest things for me to say—if I had said I was sorry about what had happened. I knew how futile and meaningless those words were, and I was glad she didn’t mention it. She didn’t cry. She was very strong-willed.”

AFTER THE CULTURAL
Revolution, Lucy Chao suffered from schizophrenia. Eventually, she recovered enough to teach and write, and during the 1980s she translated the first complete Chinese edition of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
. In 1990, she visited her alma mater, the University of Chicago, to lecture on her translation. The following year, the university granted her its Distinguished Achievement Award. She died in 1998, the year before I moved to Beijing.

My glimpses of the woman had been secondhand. Some were brutal—Mengxiong’s memory of her seated in the courtyard, having her head shaved by Red Guards. Wu Ningkun described her refusal to talk about the past, but there had been moments when the façade slipped. Elinor Pearlstein, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, had escorted Lucy on a tour of the institute during her visit in 1990. Pearlstein told me that the old woman was charming and buoyant until they came upon some of the Shang bronzes that her husband had researched in the 1940s. Once Lucy saw the artifacts, she became so emotional that she had trouble speaking. She said that her copies of Mengjia’s book—
Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists
—had been taken away during the Cultural Revolution.

From the beginning of my research, I had known that it was too late to discover what had really happened to Chen Mengjia. His tale had disappeared
with the old political campaigns, and he was of a lost generation: the educated elite who had struggled through the last century. Today’s China was a story of the future, and it was moved by the new middle class; pragmatism had replaced the idealism of the past. The boomtowns and the migrants mattered—young people like Emily and William Jefferson Foster, finding their way in a changing country. As a reporter, it helped to be young, too. The work required energy and freedom; it was necessary to keep pace with everybody who was on the move. I traveled light: I had no family, no permanent home, no office. My bureau fit in a pocket—a chop and a few sketchy licenses.

But the longer I pursued Chen Mengjia’s story, searching out old memories, the more I appreciated the survivors. That generation had wandered, too—they had fled war and famine and politics, and they had tried to reconcile Western ideas with Chinese traditions. Most of them had failed, but they hadn’t lost their dignity, and somehow a spark of their idealism had survived. I recognized it in young people like Emily and Willy, who, despite the overwhelming pragmatism of their era, still cared about right and wrong.

And somehow the members of the earlier generation had achieved a stability of their own. One way or another, they had all come to rest, and there was something calming about that. After every interview with an older person, I returned to the world of daily events—the overnight cities, the breaking news—with a different perspective. All of this will pass with time.

Each elderly person handled the memories in his own way. Professor Shih worked patiently in Taiwan, excavating his old Anyang field notes. Wang Jun collected an old woman’s lies in a manila folder; Mengxiong had joined the Communist Party. Li Xueqin had climbed the tower of academia, but he wasn’t too proud to regret the criticism that he had written as a young man. And Old Mr. Zhao—sometimes, when others accused him of disrespecting his sister and the memory of his brother-in-law, I wondered if the destruction of the courtyard had been some form of cosmic retribution.

But each story has several points of view, and in Beijing I had also met a former student of Chen Mengjia’s named Wang Shimin. Wang had served as an intermediary in the negotiations between Old Mr. Zhao and the Shanghai Museum, and he said that nobody should blame the man for accepting money for the furniture. “He had the right to do that,” Wang told me. “And to be honest, other people shouldn’t judge whether it’s good or bad.” I saw his point: instead of trying to decide who was in the wrong, it was far more important to understand how the political campaigns had damaged lives and friendships and families. And I understood why Old Mr. Zhao preferred to play tennis instead of dwelling on bad memories. That was true for all of them—I never met a sur
vivor whose response seemed foreign. The historical events were unimaginable, as if they had come from another world, but the people’s reactions were perfectly understandable. Recovery, in all its varied forms, is simply a human instinct.

But I particularly respected Wu Ningkun’s calmness. His memoir hadn’t been a best seller, but he had put the past in order. For any writer, that’s a fundamental motivation, especially for somebody who has suffered. Writing could obscure the truth and trap the living, and it could destroy as well as create. But the search for meaning had a dignity that transcended all of the flaws.

During our conversation, the old man said that he had no regrets about his life. “If they hadn’t had the Cultural Revolution or the anti-Rightist campaign, then I might have been a better scholar,” he said. “I might have produced a couple of books about English or American literature. But so what? There are already so many books.
A Single Tear
might be more important.”

WE WERE STILL
drinking brandy when Li Yikai returned to the apartment. She had attended a local Catholic Church function—the ordination of sixteen new deacons—and she wore a gold cross around her neck. When she heard her husband talking about the past, she shook her head.

“Maybe it’s because of age, but I’m so forgetful,” she said. “I forget where I put things, and I forget the new things. But I still remember all the old things. Sometimes I can even remember the details, the date, the time. My daughter says, how can you remember all of these details?”

Wu Ningkun laughed and sipped his brandy.

“Such as the date my husband was arrested,” she continued. “April seventeen, 1958, in the afternoon, at two o’clock. I’ll always remember the time. And I remember the three visits I made to the prison in Hebei.”

I asked Wu how he had kept his spirits up during the years in jail and labor camp.

“I used to think of Du Fu, Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas,” he said. “Do you know the one Dylan Thomas wrote when his father was dying? That line—‘twisting on the racks.’ From ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion.’ It had to do with the way we behave, the way we should behave. Although we were suffering, although we were being tortured, death shall have no dominion. You know, I heard Dylan Thomas recite his own poems in Chicago. I think it was in 1950. It was very touching.”

I asked Wu if he had spoken with the Welsh poet.

“No, I was just in the audience,” he said. “And he was more than half drunk. He didn’t know how to take care of himself. He was suffering—life was such a burden to him, I suppose.”

WHEELCHAIR RAILS, WHITE
walls, blue carpet. Outside of the retirement home, I stood blinking in the afternoon light. Before me stretched a strip mall of Americana: Burger King, Safeway, Hollywood Video, Lido Pizza, Cincinnati Cafe. I wandered into a convenience store, bought a drink, and returned to a bench in front of the retirement home. The public bus was scheduled to arrive in a few minutes. Three old ladies sat on a bench nearby. They weren’t waiting for anything but a conversation.

“Is it good?” one of them asked. I nodded and put down the drink.

“Watch your figure,” another woman said dryly. She had a heavy New York accent.

“Who did you come here to see?” the third one asked.

“Wu Ningkun,” I said. “Mr. Wu and his wife, Mrs. Li. Do you know them?”

“Of course!”

“Everybody knows Mr. Wu!”

I asked why, and the three old women stared at me as if I were an idiot.

“Because of his book, and because he went to the University of Chicago,” a woman said, matter-of-factly. Her words sounded familiar—the flat accent of the Midwest. I asked if they had read the book, and then I realized that that was another dumb question. In this particular corner of Reston, Virginia, Wu Ningkun was a hometown author.

I asked the women what they had thought of the memoir.

“I liked it,” said one.

“He had a hard life,” said the Midwest.

“Especially when they threw him into a labor camp,” said New York.

The bus pulled up; the door hissed open. Suddenly the image was clear: three elderly sisters, spinning, weaving, snipping. I paused, unsure how to end the conversation.

“You better get on that bus,” said New York, and I did.

IN THE LIBRARY
of Peking University, a friend helped me find a two-volume Chinese version of
Leaves of Grass
. It had been published in 1991, and the title page prominently listed Lucy Chao as the translator.

In 1994, Kenneth M. Price, an American Whitman scholar, visited Lucy in Beijing. Their conversation was published in the
Walt Whitman Quarterly
. During the interview, Price asked how she had translated the first stanza of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” in which a long sentence builds for twenty-two lines before the subject and verb appear.

Lucy answered, “There is no way of keeping the sentence together as one sentence because I must say that, though I want to be faithful, I also want my Chinese to be fluent.”

I reread Whitman’s original, and then I picked up the Chinese volume. Using a dictionary for the hard characters, I did my best to bring the woman’s last three lines back into English:

I, the singer of painful and joyous songs, the uniter of this life and the next,

Receiving all silent signs, using them all, but then leaping across them at full speed,

Sing of the past.

An oracle-bone scholar once said: Those are the notes. We have to provide the music ourselves.

Sources

IN
RIVER TOWN
, I USED THE PSEUDONYM “ANNE” FOR EMILY, BECAUSE
of concern about how people in Fuling might react to my writing. In the years since, I realized that I erred on the side of caution, and for
Oracle Bones
I decided to do away with the pseudonym (and to restore her to the appropriate Brontë). I apologize for any confusion; my only excuse is that the political climate in China creates many uncertainties for a writer.

In English publications, the oracle-bone scholar’s name is sometimes written as Ch’en Meng-chia. For this book I have used the standard Pinyin, Chen Mengjia.

The city of Beijing was known as “Beiping” during the Kuomintang period, when Nanjing became the capital. For the sake of clarity, I have used only one city name, “Beijing,” throughout this book.

I have not included footnotes, because they are distracting in a work of narrative nonfiction, and the vast majority of my research involved personal interviews and observation. But I also benefited greatly from written materials, and I want to identify the sources that were most useful to each section.

“The Underground City”

Clifford, Nicholas R.
“A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880-1949.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

I am grateful to David N. Keightley, who allowed me to read and quote his unpublished letters from China.

“The Middleman”

For information about the NATO bombing and subsequent protests, I consulted accounts in the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Far Eastern Economic Review
, the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and the
Observer
in London. The Chengdu protests are described in Craig Simons’s Master’s dissertation (“He Who Climbs On a Tiger Might Have Trouble Getting Off: Chinese Nationalism, Protest and Control.” Harvard University, 2001).

For Uighur history, I depended most heavily on one book:

Benson, Linda.
The Ili Rebellion: The Moslem Challenge to Chinese Authority in Xinjiang 1944-1949.
Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1990.

“The Written World”

Sima Qian.
Historical Records
. Translated by Raymond Dawson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Galambos, Imre. “The Evolution of Chinese Writing: Evidence from Newly Excavated Texts (490-221
BC
).” Dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 2002.

“The Voice of America”

Heil, Alan L., Jr.
Voice of America: A History
. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.