China in Ten Words Part 3

In our town there lived a well-known red pen, quite a bit older than me, who had made a name for himself by publis.h.i.+ng a great many poems and essays extolling the Cultural Revolution in the mimeographed magazine of the local cultural center. Through a cla.s.smate's good offices I managed to make the acquaintance of this small-town celebrity, and I respectfully presented him with a copy of my play and invited his comments.

A few days later, when I went to visit him for the second time, he had read my play and had also written a lengthy paragraph of comments in red ink on the final page. He returned the ma.n.u.script to me with a very self-important air. I'd find his comments at the end, he said, and there was nothing much to add, except for one point he wanted to emphasize: there was no psychology in my play-no soliloquies, in other words. Soliloquies, he informed me, were the sine qua non of playwriting.

I was about to take my leave when he brought out a three-act play that he had recently completed. It dealt with the same kind of story as my own: a landlord bent on sabotage, only to be apprehended by poor and lower-middle peasants. As he thrust the bulky ma.n.u.script into my hands he asked me to pay special attention to how he handled soliloquies. "Particularly the landlord's soliloquies," he preened. "They're so graphic."

I carried both ma.n.u.scripts home. First I carefully read his comments on my play. They were all criticisms, basically, apart from a few words of praise at the end, when he said I wrote smoothly enough. Then I carefully read his play. I couldn't see what was so great about it either; those landlord's soliloquies of which he was so proud were merely formulaic phrases in which the landlord talked about how he intended to wreak havoc on socialism, and the graphic language consisted simply of some dirty words with which his remarks were interlarded. Such were the standard conventions of the time: workers and peasants never used swearwords; bad language was the preserve of landlords, rightists, and counterrevolutionaries. I felt, nonetheless, that I ought to compliment him, for he was somebody of considerable stature in our town. I paid him a reciprocal courtesy, fetching a red pen and writing a long paragraph of comments in the blank s.p.a.ce on the final page. My comments were basically all favorable, and I waxed especially lyrical when it came to the landlord's soliloquies, which I praised to the skies, saying that such brilliant writing really had no match in the world. Only at the very end did I add a criticism to the effect that the organization was a bit loose.

When I returned his ma.n.u.script, I could tell from the look in his eyes that he was looking forward to my puffery and adulation. I made a number of flattering remarks that made him chuckle. Then suddenly he was in a fury-he had noticed my commentary on the last page. "You dare to write something on my ma.n.u.script?" he roared.

I was taken by surprise, never having imagined that my reciprocity would provoke such anger. "You wrote on my ma.n.u.script, too," I protested timidly.

"What the f.u.c.k!" he shouted. "Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am?"

He had a point. He was a name and I was a n.o.body. Seeing the criticism that ended my commentary, he flew into a towering rage. "You're way too big for your boots!" he cried, giving me a kick. "You have the gall to tell me the organization is loose?"

I hurriedly retreated a couple of paces and pointed out that there were many respectful comments as well. He bent his head to read more closely, and when he saw how I fawned over his landlord's soliloquies, his anger visibly subsided. He sat down in a chair and had me sit down, too. After reading my comments through from start to finish, he seemed to recover his composure. He did, however, start grumbling that my having written in red pen made it impossible to give the script to anybody else to read. I suggested he tear out the last page and rewrite the ending on a new sheet of paper-I even offered to do the recopying. He waved his hand to decline. "Forget it, I'll do it myself."

A smile of contentment began to appear on his face. Two officials from the cultural center had read his play, he confided, and they were tremendously impressed; there was a veritable flood of good reviews. I remained skeptical. How could the reaction of two people be called "a flood of good reviews," I wondered. But I feigned delight nonetheless. The workers'-propaganda team leader at the county cultural center was currently reviewing the play, he went on. As soon as it was given the all-clear, the county Mao Zedong Thought Publicity Team would start rehearsals; after five nights at the county playhouse the play would move to the provincial capital and compete in the Popular Arts Festival.

The small-town big shot's complacency continued for a few more days before his career took a nosedive. The propaganda team leader at the cultural center was an uncultured boor whose education had ended at primary school. After reading the landlord's soliloquies, he came to the conclusion that their author must be a counterrevolutionary bent on sabotaging socialist reconstruction. To him the landlord's soliloquies were nothing more and nothing less than the author's soliloquies.

The playwright found this most unjust. Those soliloquies were the landlord's, he explained; they weren't his. The propaganda team leader tapped the bulging ma.n.u.script. "These words in the mind of the landlord-are they your work?"

"That's right," he said, "but-"

"If that's what you write, that's what you think." The team leader would hear nothing more.

Our local celebrity changed overnight from a red pen to a black one. In the two years that followed he would often make appearances on the stage in the high school playing field where public sentencing rallies were conducted. There he would play the role of an "active counterrevolutionary," a big wooden sign over his chest, head bowed, his whole body shaking with terror. Every time I saw him there I would feel a chill at the back of my neck and think to myself what a close shave I'd had. How lucky for me that the landlord in my play had no soliloquy and that my comments at the end of his play had been excised, otherwise a place might have been made for me next to him on the stage.

In those days sentencing rallies would be held in the high school playing field several times each year, to publicly announce the sentence on one or several murderers, rapists, and other offenders. On each occasion a number of landlords, rightists, and counterrevolutionaries would be brought in to serve as supplementary targets. Unbound but with big wooden signs hanging over their chests, they would flank the major offenders, who were trussed up like chickens. Not every landlord, rightist, and counterrevolutionary would partic.i.p.ate in every supplementary struggle event, but the playwright was an exception, perhaps because he was so well-known. Every time there was a public sentencing he would appear with his head bowed, placard on his chest, occupying a fixed position on the far right. He was our town's default accessory target.

A few years later my parents worried themselves sick when I began to write fiction in earnest. Their experiences during the Cultural Revolution gave them cause to fear that their son one day might end up as just another black pen.

Pankaj Mishra's eyes gleamed. A wise listener, he smiles quietly and, when he laughs, laughs quietly, too. We were fishers of memory, sitting on the banks of time and waiting for the past to swallow the bait.

The conversation turned to my first career, as a dentist, and my second career, as a writer. Thirty years ago I was working away with my forceps in a small-town hospital, extracting teeth for eight hours a day. From morning to night my job consisted of looking inside people's gaping mouths, places where you are guaranteed to find the world's least attractive scenery. In my five years of dentistry, I told Mishra, I must have extracted more than ten thousand teeth. I had just turned twenty then, and during my lunch break I would stand by a window overlooking the street and watch all the bustle below, with a terrifying thought running through my head: I couldn't spend my whole life doing this, could I? That was when I decided to be an author.

From my window I would often see people from the cultural center loafing about on the main street at all hours of the day, and I was green with envy. "Hey, why aren't you working?" I asked one of them.

"Walking the street, that is our work," he replied.

That's the kind of work I would like to do, I thought. Apart from heaven itself, where else but the cultural center could one find such a cushy job? In China then, individuals had no power to choose their own career: all employment was a.s.signed by the state. After my graduation from high school the state made me be a dentist. For me now to abandon dental work for a loafer's life in the cultural center required the state's permission, and for that to happen I had, above all, to demonstrate that I was qualified to make the switch. There were three routes of access to the cultural center: you could be a composer, you could be a painter, or you could be a writer. To compose music or paint pictures, I would have had to learn everything from scratch, so they posed too much of a challenge; writing just required knowledge of Chinese characters, so for me it was the only option.

I completed my primary and secondary education during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, which made for rich experience as I was growing up but also meant that proper study went by the wayside. In high school I would often confuse the bell for the start of a period with the bell that marked its end, and go into cla.s.s just after it had finished. At the time I knew only a limited stock of Chinese characters, although they served me well enough in my own writing. Years later, when Chinese critics were unanimous in praising my plain narrative language, I would laugh it off: "That's because I don't know so many characters."

When my work was translated into English, a literature professor in the United States told me that my style reminded him of Hemingway, giving me a chance to recycle my joke. "He can't have had much of a vocabulary either," I said.

Though I was being facetious, there was some truth there, too. Life is often this way: you may start off with an advantage, only to box yourself in over time, or sometimes you may start with a handicap, only to find it carries you a long way. Or, as Mao put it, "Good things can become bad, and bad things can become good." Perhaps Hemingway and I both fit that model of bad things becoming good.

At the age of twenty-two I went on pulling teeth and also began to write. The tooth-pulling was to make a living, and the writing was to get out of having to pull more teeth. At first writing actually felt the more arduous of the two activities. But in order to reach cultural-center nirvana, I forced myself to continue. I was young then, and it was no easy matter to persuade my bottom to maintain such constant intimacy with my chair. Outside, on weekends, the suns.h.i.+ne was so enticing, birds were flitting to and fro, girls were laughing so sweetly, friends my age were gadding about, but I sat stiffly at my desk, expending as much energy on getting words out on paper as a blacksmith does beating iron into shape on his anvil.

Years later young people often ask, "How does one become a writer?" My answer is always simply: "By writing." Writing is like experience: if you don't experience things, then you won't understand life; and if you don't write, then you won't know what you're capable of creating.

I have fond memories of the early 1980s. The Cultural Revolution had just finished; magazines that had been banned for ten years were reappearing, and even more new magazines were emerging. A China that had hardly any literary journals suddenly became a China with more than a thousand literary journals. Like hungry babies wailing for milk, a whole array of fiction columns required nourishment. Previously published authors, whether famous or not, could not possibly satisfy the needs of so many publications even if they were to send in all the things they'd written. And so editors were conscientiously reading unsolicited ma.n.u.scripts; as soon as they stumbled on something good, they would pa.s.s it around among themselves, and the whole editorial department would get excited.

It was my good fortune to find myself in this wonderful period when supply and demand were so out of synch. A dentist in a small town, I had no connections with any editors and knew only the addresses of their publications, so I sent my short stories out to journal after journal. In those days one didn't need to pay for postage; instead one simply cut off a corner of the envelope to indicate that the journal would pick up the tab. What's more, if a journal decided not to use a story of mine, it would return the ma.n.u.script. After I received a rejected ma.n.u.script, I would immediately open the envelope, turn it inside out, glue it closed, write the address of a different journal on top, and chuck it into the mailbox-not forgetting, of course, to snip off a corner.

Ma.n.u.scripts of my stories traveled for free among the various cities of China; they returned to me again and again, and again and again I sent them on their way once more. They must have traveled to even more cities than I would end up visiting myself in the twenty years that followed. We were living then in a house with a small courtyard, and the mailman would simply toss returned ma.n.u.scripts over the wall. They would hit the ground with a recognizably heavy thump, and my father, inside the house, had no need to step outside to know what had just been delivered. I would hear my name called, followed by a loud "Reject!"

Before long the relations.h.i.+p of supply and demand between literary works and publis.h.i.+ng venues moved in a very different direction. As famous and not-yet-famous authors proliferated like flowers in the spring, literary journals were no longer starving infants; in the blink of an eye they became beautiful young ladies, the objects of fervent courts.h.i.+p and intense rivalry. And as literature itself began to slip from its high perch, the wonderful moment proved ephemeral. Publishers could no longer bear the crippling postage costs, and magazines issued announcements to the effect that (a) authors had to put stamps on their submissions and (b) journals would no longer return ma.n.u.scripts.

Beijing Literature was the first magazine whose editorial offices I ever visited: a large room lined with desks piled high with submissions from unheralded authors, where the editors sat, quietly reading ma.n.u.scripts. I noticed how the editors opened envelopes with scissors and studied their contents with great attention. At that point I had yet to publish any of my own work. When I had occasion to visit other magazines' editorial offices the year after several of my stories had appeared in print, I encountered a very different spectacle. The incoming envelopes on the tables were all addressed to individual editors and sent by authors known to them. Piles of ma.n.u.scripts sent by unknown writers lay unopened in wastepaper baskets, waiting for recycling agents to come and pick them up, for they were being sold off as sc.r.a.p, to be pulped in the paper mill and made into more writing paper. I realized then that editors were no longer bothering with unsolicited submissions.

From that point on a young writer, however gifted, no matter how excellent his work, would find it extremely difficult to get published if he was not personally acquainted with an editor. This cruel reality remained in place for many years, until the emergence in China of Internet literature, when a new form of publication allowed talented young authors to break through once again.

Looking back, I rejoice that I was able to catch the tail end of that honeymoon period of the early '80s. If I had started writing a couple of years later, I think it very unlikely that an editor would have discovered me in those mountains of unsolicited submissions, and I'd still be there in that small-town hospital in the south, brandis.h.i.+ng my forceps and extracting teeth for eight hours a day.

I owe the change in my destiny to a telephone call in November 1983. Winter had come to my little town of Haiyan, and I was just about to knock off for the day when a distant call tracked me down. At the time our hospital had just one single telephone, by the registration desk downstairs. It was a traditional dial telephone, and you needed to route calls through the county's sole telephone exchange in the county post-and-telecommunications office. When my colleague at registration received the call, she ran into the street and yelled my name outside the window of the room where I worked.

As I walked down the stairs I thought it would be one of my friends in the area, setting up a time to play poker or something that evening. But when I picked up the receiver, I heard the voice of the operator in the local telecom office: she told me I had a long-distance call from Beijing. My heart pounded wildly, and I had the feeling that something momentous was about to happen.

In those days one had to wait for some time before a connection was completed, and when I was told there was a call coming in from Beijing, I reckoned it had got no farther than Shanghai and knew it might well encounter further delays before it reached my little town. I ended up having to wait a good half hour, and as I waited so hopefully and impatiently I found it maddening that calls kept coming in for other colleagues. "You're not to complete this call," I would tell the callers with all the authority I could muster.

"Why not?" a mystified voice would respond.

"I'm expecting a call from the Politburo," I would tell them.

Finally the connection was made, and I heard the voice of Zhou Yanru, then executive editor of Beijing Literature. The first thing she told me was that she had placed the call as soon as she arrived at her office that morning and it had taken all day to get through. "I had given up hope," she said, "and was ready to start all over again tomorrow."

I'll never forget that conversation. She did not speak quickly, but I felt there was an urgency in her tone and a clarity and correctness to her language. They planned to publish all three stories I had submitted, she said, but one of them needed revision and she wanted me to go to Beijing at once to attend to it. Beijing Literature would pick up the tab for my train fare and accommodation-the issue that was of greatest concern to me, since my monthly salary at the time was only 36 yuan. Then she told me I would receive a stipend for each day I spent revising the ma.n.u.script, and finally she gave me her office address-7 West Chang'an Avenue-and instructed me to take the No. 10 bus when I got out of the train station. She had no way of knowing that this would be my first trip of any significant distance but went over these details carefully nonetheless, as though coaching a child.

As soon as I put down the phone, I decided to take a bus to Shanghai the following day and then a train from there to Beijing. But immediately I ran into a problem: how to secure a leave of absence from the hospital director? I thought it very likely that he would not agree to let me go, since he had no idea I was writing stories. For a tooth puller to need suddenly to go to Beijing to revise his work-what a preposterous notion! I couldn't afford to approach him directly about it.

That evening I knocked on the door of a fellow dentist and gave him my leave request, asking him to pa.s.s it on to the hospital director when he went to work the following morning. By that time I would already be on the bus to Shanghai; even if the director refused to give me clearance, it would be too late, for the chicken would have flown the coop.

But this colleague of mine proved reluctant to accept the commission, fearing that it might get him into trouble. It was my job to get things squared away, he kept repeating. On my return, I countered, I would present him with a box of Beijing's famous dried fruit and a packet of the biscuits that Empress Dowager Cixi had most adored. Hearing this, my colleague couldn't help but drool, for these things at the time were gourmet items on everybody's wish list. Prudence was no match for temptation: he agreed to wait till I was safely on the bus, then drop off the request. My scheme had succeeded through bribery, we would say today-or through a sugar-coated bullet, as we would have put it then.

The day I entered the editorial offices of Beijing Literature, the staff were having their lunch break. w.a.n.g Jie (the editor who had discovered me in a huge pile of unsolicited ma.n.u.scripts) sat me down on a shabby old sofa, poured me a cup of tea, and slipped out. A moment later an old lady with a ruddy complexion pushed open the door. "You're Yu Hua?" she said.

This was Zhou Yanru. She asked me to change the ending to my story, for it was rather bleak and she wanted things to end happily. She who had never seen capitalism told me, who had never seen capitalism either, "Socialism is bright. Only capitalism can be so dark and dismal."

I revised the ma.n.u.script in two days, following her instructions to the letter. To me at the time, getting published was more important than anything else. Never mind creating an upbeat ending-if she had asked me to make the whole story sparkle with light from start to finish, I would have put up no resistance. Zhou Yanru, very pleased, complimented me on my cleverness, then told me not to rush home. I should have a good look around the capital while I was there.

At that time I had no idea I would later make my home in Beijing, so I felt this was a priceless opportunity and roamed everywhere, trying to take in all the sights. China's tourist industry was still in its infancy then, and during my whole time in the Forbidden City I saw only a dozen or so sightseers-such a contrast with today, when visiting a heritage site feels more like attending a ma.s.s rally. I took a long-haul bus to the Great Wall and climbed the steep slope at Badaling. There the bitter wind from Mongolia blew so hard it felt like several hands slapping me on the face over and over again. I met only one other tourist on the Great Wall: as I climbed up toward the beacon tower he was coming down. I greeted him and suggested he join me on another climb, but he shook his head vigorously. "Way too cold," he said with a s.h.i.+ver.

When I descended and entered the run-down little bus station, the tourist I had just seen was huddled in a corner, still s.h.i.+vering. There was no sign of the bus that would take us back to the city, so I sat down next to him and began s.h.i.+vering, too.

After all my excursions I asked w.a.n.g Jie where else was worth seeing. She mentioned a few places; I said I had been to them all. "Time to go home, then," she said with a smile. She went off and bought my train ticket, sat at the desk and totted up my expenses, then went to the business office to collect my money. I discovered then that not only would the two days I'd spent revising my ma.n.u.script be reimbursed but the days I'd spent sightseeing would be, too. When I traveled back south on the train, I had more than 70 yuan in my pocket, a princely sum to me at the time, and it gave me an unabashed sensation that I was the richest person in the world.

w.a.n.g Jie also provided written confirmation that I had revised a ma.n.u.script for Beijing Literature. It was not until I was back in Haiyan that I realized the importance of this doc.u.ment, for the first thing that the hospital director said to me when he saw me was: "Do you have any proof?"

I came back to find my little town all in a tizzy, for I must have been the first person in the history of our district to have been summoned to Beijing to make revisions to a ma.n.u.script. The local officials came to the conclusion that I must be some kind of genius, and they said they could not have me go on extracting teeth but should put me to work in the cultural center. That's how, after a complex transfer procedure, with seven or eight red seals of approval stamped on my papers, I finally gained entry to the cultural center that I had dreamed of for so long. On my first day of work I made a point of showing up two hours late, only to discover I was the first to arrive. I knew then this was just the place for me.

That is my most beautiful memory of socialism.

A few years ago a Western reporter asked me why I abandoned the profitable world of dentistry for a writer's paltry income. What he didn't realize is that China at the time had just started to initiate reforms, and it was still the era of socialist egalitarianism-everyone eating from the same big pot. All employees in cities and towns got paid exactly the same, no matter what kind of work they were engaged in. I was a pauper in the cultural center, but I had been a pauper as a dentist, too. The difference was that a dentist was a pauper mired in drudgery, whereas now I was a pauper who enjoyed freedom and fulfillment.

Many years have pa.s.sed since then, but my love of writing remains undiminished. All of us have countless desires and emotions that we cannot express, inhibited as we are by mundane realities and rational instincts. But in the world of writing these suppressed desires and emotions can find an unrestricted outlet. Writing tends to promote physical and psychological health, I feel, for it can make one's life complete. To put it another way, writing enables me to claim owners.h.i.+p of two lives, one imaginary and one real, and the relations.h.i.+p between them is like that between sickness and health: when one is strong, the other is bound to fall into decline. So, as my real life becomes more routine, my imaginary life is all the more br.i.m.m.i.n.g with incident.

After his visit to Beijing, Pankaj Mishra sent me an e-mail, perhaps from his home in London, perhaps from his home in New Delhi, or perhaps from some corner of the world that I have never heard of. "Why is it that your early short stories are so full of blood and violence," he asked, "when this tendency is not so evident in your later work?"

It's not easy to respond to this kind of query, not because it has no answer but because it has too many. Mishra, as a novelist himself, must know I could offer any number of reasons. I could talk eloquently on the subject for days on end, until my tongue was sore, only to find there was still more to say, yet more answers clamoring for attention. Experience tells me that too many answers are the same as none at all; perhaps only one can const.i.tute a real answer. So I will supply just a single explanation, one that I think may be the most important; whether it is the true answer is impossible to know.

It's your experience while growing up, I believe, that shapes the direction of your life. A basic image of the world is planted deep in your mind, and then, like a doc.u.ment in a copy machine, it keeps being reprinted again and again throughout your formative years. Once you reach adulthood, whether you're successful or not, whatever you accomplish can only partially revise that most basic image; it will never be entirely transformed. Naturally some revise the image more and some revise it less. Mao Zedong, I'm sure, made more revisions than I have done.

It's my conviction that the bloodshed and mayhem of my work in the 1980s were shaped by my experiences as a child. I was just entering primary school when the Cultural Revolution began, and I had just graduated from high school when it ended. In my early years I witnessed countless rallies, denunciation sessions, and battles between rebel factions, not to mention a constant stream of street fights. For me it was a regular occurrence to walk down a street lined with big-character posters and run into people with blood streaming down their faces. That was the larger context of my childhood, and the smaller context was equally b.l.o.o.d.y. My brother and I were used to running around in hospital corridors and patient wards, inured to screams and sobs, to pallid faces and last gasps, to blood-soaked gauze tossed on the floors of sickrooms and hallways. Sometimes, if the nurse had stepped away from her station outside the surgery door, we would quickly slip in, unchallenged, to observe an operation. We watched, entranced, as our father, wearing transparent gloves, slipped his hands through the abdominal incision and rummaged around in the patient's organs and intestines. "Get out of here!" he would yell when he discovered us, and we would scamper away.

From 1986 to 1989 was my peak period for writing about blood and violence. In one of his books the critic Hong Zhigang lists eight stories I wrote during these years and comes up with no fewer than twenty-nine characters who die unnatural deaths within their pages. During the day as I worked on my stories, there were bound to be gruesome slayings and people dying in pools of blood. At night as I slept, I would dream I was being hunted down and killed. In those nightmares I would find myself friendless and alone, and when I wasn't searching frantically for a hiding place, I'd be desperately fleeing down a highway. Typically, just as I was about to come to a bad end-as an axe was about to sever my neck, for example-I would awake with a start, dripping with sweat, my heart pounding, and it would take me a minute to pull myself together. "Thank G.o.d that was just a dream!" I would cry with relief.

But at daybreak, when I sat down at my desk and began to write, it was as though I had forgotten all about my nighttime trauma, and what poured forth from my pen was yet more bloodshed and violence. A new cycle of retribution would commence, and at night when I slept I would dream once again that I was on somebody's death list. Life in those three years was so frenzied and so hideous: by day I would kill people in fiction, and by night I would be hunted down in dreams. As this pattern went on repeating itself I worked myself to the edge of nervous collapse but continued heedlessly to immerse myself in the agitation of writing, a creative high that took its own toll.

This went on until one night when I had a very protracted dream. Unlike the other nightmares, from which I always awoke before the moment of death, in this one I experienced my own annihilation. Perhaps I was just so tired that day that the prospect of my death failed to frighten me awake. It was this prolonged nightmare that enabled me to recover a true memory.

Let me say more about this memory. Although there was no shortage of violence during the Cultural Revolution, small-town life was basically very dull and confining. So whenever an execution took place, the little town on Hangzhou Bay where I grew up would buzz with excitement, as though it were a public holiday. Trials at the time, as I have noted, culminated in a sentencing rally on the high school playing field. The prisoners awaiting punishment stood at the front of the stage with a big sign on their chests identifying their crime: COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY/MURDERER, RAPIST/MURDERER, ROBBER/MURDERER, and so forth. Behind them sat the members of the county revolutionary committee. On either side were arrayed the ancillary targets of struggle, like landlords and rightists, "historical" counterrevolutionaries and "active" counterrevolutionaries. The convicted prisoners stood, heads bowed, as a representative of the revolutionary committee delivered into the microphone an impa.s.sioned indictment of their crimes and announced their sentences. If an offender was trussed up and had two armed guards towering over him, this meant he was earmarked for execution.

From my early childhood, I witnessed one after another of these rallies. Squeezed among the crowd of townspeople who packed the playing field, I would listen to the strident harangues that blared from the loudspeaker. The judgment took the form of a prolonged critique, starting off with sayings of Mao Zedong and quotations from Lu Xun, followed by paragraphs consisting largely of boilerplate borrowed from the People's Daily, verbose and flavorless. My legs would be aching when I finally heard what crime the person had committed. The sentence itself was brief and to the point, consisting of just five words: "Sentenced to death, execution immediate!"

There were no courts in China during the Cultural Revolution, nor any appeals after sentencing, and we had never in our lives heard of such a thing as the legal profession. After the penalty was announced, there was no chance of lodging an appeal. Prisoners were taken directly to the execution ground and shot.

When the words "Sentenced to death, execution immediate" were read out, the prisoner was hauled off the stage by the guards and shoved onto the back of an open truck lined with two rows of soldiers armed with loaded rifles-always a grim and chilling sight. The truck would set off for the beach, where the executions took place, with hundreds of locals streaming along behind, some on bicycles, some on foot, all flooding toward the sh.o.r.e in a dense black horde. During my childhood years I don't know how many prisoners I saw who crumpled at the knees when they heard their death sentence and had to be dragged forcibly onto the truck.

Once I witnessed this from just a few feet away. The prisoner's hands, tied behind his back, were a ghastly sight, because the cord had been tied so tightly and for such a long time that it had cut off the circulation. His hands had not turned white, as one might imagine they would, but dark purple, almost black. Only later, when I picked up some medical knowledge in the course of my dental training, did I realize that flesh so discolored is damaged beyond recovery. Before this man was shot, his hands were already dead.

We children couldn't possibly run fast enough to keep up with the truck, so often we would try to make an educated guess about which direction it would take, reasoning that if last time the executions were conducted at North Beach, then this time there was a good chance they would be at South Beach. As soon as the rally started we would make a dash for the sh.o.r.e, so that we could stake our claim to plum positions. But sometimes we would arrive at South Beach to find there was absolutely no one there and realized we had run to the wrong place; by then we had no chance of making it to North Beach in time.

On a few occasions we guessed right and so got a grandstand view of the executions. This was the most shocking sight in all my childhood. Armed soldiers formed a semicircle to prevent the spectators from coming too close. The soldier designated to perform the execution would kick the prisoner in the back of the legs, making him drop to his knees. The soldier would take a few steps back, to stay outside the range of blood spray. Then he would raise his rifle, take aim at the back of the prisoner's head, and fire. I was struck by how such a small bullet had such enormous force-more than that of a large shovel-for it would knock the prisoner down to the ground in a second. After that first shot the executioner would go forward to confirm that the prisoner was dead; if still alive, he would need a second bullet. When the soldier turned the body faceup, I would see something that made me shake all over: the entry wound was just a little hole, but where the bullet came out the other side the prisoner's face was shattered beyond recognition, and what had been a forehead was now a gaping crater, as big as the bowl out of which I ate my meals.

Now I need to return to that long and terrifying dream, the nightmare in which I experienced my own destruction. It happened late one night in the final weeks of 1989. I dreamt I was trussed up with cord, a board over my chest, standing at the front of the stage in the high school playing field, two armed guards behind me, landlords, rightists, and counterrevolutionaries arrayed as understudies in the wings, although the "black pen" I mentioned earlier was curiously absent from their ranks. Below the stage was a.s.sembled an inky cloud of people whose voices clattered like rain on a sidewalk. Through the loudspeaker I heard a solemn, censorious voice denouncing my various crimes, for it seemed I had committed multiple murders, of varying degrees of depravity. Finally there came the words: "Sentenced to death, execution immediate."

No sooner was the sentence read than the soldier behind me took a step forward, slowly raised his rifle, and pointed it at my head. He was standing so close, the muzzle b.u.t.ted my temple. Then I heard a loud bang as he pressed the trigger. The impact of the bullet knocked me off my feet but, strangely, I was somehow able to stand up again and even heard a buzz of noise from below the stage. My head had been split wide open, like an egg that's been cracked, spilling both the white and the yolk. With my empty eggsh.e.l.l of a head I wheeled around to face the executioner and gave a roar of rage. "h.e.l.l, we're not at the beach yet!" I cried.

Then I woke, drenched in sweat and heart pounding as always. But now, unlike the earlier occasions, I did not rejoice at the pa.s.sing of the nightmare, for recovered memories began to torment me. The high school playing field, the sentencing rally, the hands that died ahead of time, the truck and the soldiers armed to the teeth, the shootings on the beach, the bullet so much stronger than a shovel, the little hole at the back of the skull and the gaping cavity in the forehead, the blood slick on the sand-these awful sights replayed themselves endlessly in front of my eyes.

I began to search my conscience: why was I always dreaming at night of being hunted down and killed? Surely it was the result of my writing so much about violence and bloodletting during the day. A karmic law of cause and effect was at work, I became convinced. And so in the hollow of the night-the early hours of the morning, perhaps-under my quilt damp with cold sweat I issued myself a dire warning: You've got to stop writing this kind of story.

Since then twenty years have pa.s.sed, but when I look back, I still feel a pang of fear. I had pushed myself to the edge of a mental breakdown, and if I had not experienced that particular nightmare and recovered those lost memories, I might have continued to wallow in blood and gore until I'd reached the point of no return. If that had happened, then I would not now be sitting in my home in Beijing, rationally writing these words; instead I might well be slumped in some ramshackle psychiatric hospital, gazing blankly into s.p.a.ce.

Sometimes life and writing can actually be very simple: a dream can trigger memory's recall, and everything changes.

*xiezuo.

Gang of Four was the name given to a radical faction influential in the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution, consisting of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and w.a.n.g Hongwen. Removed from office in October 1976, they were subsequently jailed. The campaign against the authority of teachers served a radical agenda by counteracting the efforts of Zhou Enlai and others to restore order to the educational system.

lu xun.

One day in May 2006 I was sitting in the departure lounge of Copenhagen's well-run airport, surrounded by travelers of multiple nationalities murmuring away in their various languages. I gazed out through the plate-gla.s.s windows at the Norwegian Air jet that would soon fly me to Oslo, and my eyes were drawn to the huge portrait on its tail. Whose portrait is that? I wondered. No immediate answer presented itself, and the tantalizing question kept me rooted to my seat. The face looked strangely familiar, with rather long, tousled hair and a pair of old-fas.h.i.+oned spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose.

As boarding began I rose and joined the line at the gate, and soon I had claimed my window seat, still puzzling over the ident.i.ty of the man on the tail. Just as the plane lifted off from the runway I suddenly realized who he was, for I had seen the very same picture inside a Chinese edition of Peer Gynt: it was Henrik Ibsen. Watching Copenhagen gradually slip away behind me, I couldn't help but smile. The world has seen any number of great writers, I thought to myself, but Ibsen must be the most frequent flier among them.

I landed in Oslo one hundred years after Ibsen's death. The streets were shrouded in a gentle drizzle, and banners imprinted with that same portrait fluttered on both sides of the road, creating two columns of identical portraits-countless Ibsens, near and far, gazing at me in the rain from behind their round spectacles, as though they had a message to impart.

My first meal in Oslo was in a restaurant that Ibsen had often patronized. It had that patina of age one encounters so often in Europe, with round pillars and an exquisite fresco on the high ceiling. To mark the centennial a small round table had been set out near the door; on it lay a black top hat and a just-drained gla.s.s of beer, foam still lining its lip. A walking stick stood propped against a vacant chair, suggesting that Ibsen had just stepped away from his table and might return to his seat at any moment.

In the days that followed I did not enter the restaurant again, but I would often pa.s.s it as I set off for an engagement or returned late at night. Each time I would pause to take stock of the montage inside and discovered that a subtle change took place during the course of the day: in the morning the gla.s.s would be full, but by the evening it would be empty, with that circle of foam around the lip. My curiosity about Ibsen's world made me wonder if he would have been equally curious about mine-if his phantom at the restaurant table might notice a Chinese author coming and going and wonder, "What has this man written?"

It made me think of our own Lu Xun, for it was he who introduced Ibsen's name to Chinese readers in essays written in cla.s.sical Chinese and published in the monthly periodical Henan in 1908, just two years after Ibsen's death. Later, in 1923, Lu Xun would give his famous lecture at Peking Women's College of Education, prompted by Ibsen's play A Doll's House, in which he considers what kind of future faces its heroine, Nora Helmer, when she leaves her husband and strikes out on her own. "What happens after Nora leaves?" Lu Xun asked. "Ibsen sheds no light on this-and since he is dead, we cannot ask him. Even if he were still alive, he would not owe us any answers." As a reader of A Doll's House Lu Xun then answered the question himself: after Nora leaves, "she has only two real choices: she can either descend into prost.i.tution or she can return to her husband-the only other option being to die of hunger." In Lu Xun's view, for women to deliver themselves from submission and dependency, they needed to gain economic equality with men. Lu Xun continued with typical acerbity: Money is an unseemly topic that may well be deplored by gentlemen of lofty principle. But I tend to think that people's views differ not only between one day and the next but also before and after meals. When people admit that money is necessary to feed oneself but still insist on its vulgarity, then one can safely predict that they still have some undigested fish or meat in their systems. They'd sing a different tune, I'm sure, if you made them go hungry for a day.

The portrait of Ibsen on the tail of the plane and its reappearance fluttering on the banners in Oslo streets made me conscious of Ibsen's special status in Norway. He obviously enjoys an exalted reputation in many places, but I have a vague sense that in Norway "Ibsen" does not simply signify the author of cla.s.sic works but is freighted with a meaning that goes well beyond the scope of literature and biography. In this respect it is similar to the "Lu Xun" of my childhood-that is to say the "Lu Xun" of the Cultural Revolution years. With this thought in mind, when I gave my lecture at the University of Oslo, I told some stories about Lu Xun and me.

The Cultural Revolution was an era without literature, and it was only in our Chinese textbooks that one could catch a faint whiff of literary art. But the a.s.signed texts were confined to the works of just two authors: Lu Xun's stories and essays and Mao Zedong's poetry. In my first year of primary school I believed innocently that there was only one prose author in the world, Lu Xun, and only one poet, Mao Zedong.

In his own day there was surely no author with more highly developed critical instincts than Lu Xun. When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, it claimed that a new society had been inaugurated and in the same breath demanded that the old society be relentlessly condemned. Thus it was that Lu Xun's scathing works were wielded as whips to lash and scourge the supine form of China's past. From an early age we were taught that the despicable old society was "cannibalistic," and Lu Xun's first short story, "Diary of a Madman," was presented as Exhibit A: a fictional story that recorded a madman's ravings about "eating people" was interpreted, to suit the political agenda of the time, as a true statement of social realities. The other stories by Lu Xun adopted as compulsory schoolroom texts-"Kong Yiji," "New Year's Sacrifice," "Medicine," and so on-were likewise read purely as models of how to go about exposing the evils of the old society.

Of course, Mao Zedong's high regard for Lu Xun was a key factor in all this, enabling the writer to enjoy a stellar reputation in the new society, hailed as a threefold great: great author, great thinker, and great revolutionary. Lu Xun died in 1936, but his influence reached its apogee during the Cultural Revolution (which began in 1966) when it was second only to that of Mao himself. In those days almost every essay-whether printed in the newspaper or read out in a radio broadcast or handwritten on a street-side big-character poster-would always, after its obligatory quotations of Mao Zedong, cite some a.s.sertion by Lu Xun. Denunciations issued in the name of the people would borrow lines from Lu Xun. The confessions of landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists would borrow lines from him, too. "Chairman Mao teaches us" and "Mr. Lu Xun says" were the standard political tags punctuating speeches and articles throughout the land.

There was something paradoxical about the use of that prefix "Mr.," for during the Cultural Revolution this form of address was thoroughly debunked as a Bad Thing a.s.sociated with feudalism and the bourgeoisie. Lu Xun alone was permitted to enjoy this feudal/bourgeois t.i.tle, others being known simply as Comrade or, failing that, Cla.s.s Enemy.

Lu Xun at this time was no longer a controversial author; the intense attacks of which he had once been the target were now a thing of the past. Like the sky washed clean after a storm, this new "Lu Xun" was fresh and radiant. "Lu Xun" had changed from an author to a catchphrase, one that represented eternal correctness and permanent revolution. For a full ten years from primary school through high school, in one textbook after another I glumly read and rehashed the writings of Lu Xun but never could make much sense out of them; I felt only that they were dark, depressing, and utterly tedious. Apart from the occasions when I was putting together a pa.s.sage of revolutionary invective, where I found it necessary to quote him, the rest of the time his work was basically incomprehensible to me. As a catchphrase, in other words, Lu Xun had his uses, but as a writer I found him a deadly bore. For this reason Lu Xun's writings do not figure at all in my childhood experiences, only Lu Xun the catchphrase.

During my Cultural Revolution years I made the most of this powerful "Lu Xun" phrase. My experience of growing up consisted largely of revolution and poverty, with a good deal of endless argument thrown in. For me argument was a luxury that provided mental nourishment in a life of deprivation.

One argument pitted me against a primary school cla.s.smate, the question at issue being: when is the sun closest to the earth? Early morning and late afternoon, he said, for that's when the sun looks biggest. Midday, I said, for that's when the sun is hottest. The two of us began to engage tirelessly in a marathon debate: every day no sooner would we meet than we would reiterate our hypotheses and reject each other's views. After talking this kind of nonsense for goodness knows how long, we began to seek support in other quarters. He took me off to see his sister, who listened to our competing theories and immediately sided with her little brother. Still a couple of years short of p.u.b.erty, she did not even bother to interrupt the game she was playing. "First thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon," she said, kicking her shuttlec.o.c.k. "Of course that's when the sun is closest."

I was not about to throw in the towel and insisted we go and consult my brother. He was naturally just as determined to stand up for his sibling and did so in no uncertain terms. "You better watch yourself," he said, waving both fists in my cla.s.smate's face. "If I hear you say morning and afternoon one more time, you're going to get a taste of these."

I found Hua Xu's response disappointing, for I wanted to be vindicated by truth, not by brute force. Off we went in search of slightly older children. Some supported the other boy, some agreed with me; the argument raged back and forth with no clear winner. By the time this had gone on for a year or so, the older children had all served as umpires to our quarrel at one time or another, and they were getting tired of it. Just the sight of us approaching them bickering would make them yell, "Get lost!"

The scope of this acrimonious debate thus confined itself ultimately to two partic.i.p.ants only: him and me. Later my cla.s.smate's views underwent further refinement, and he found more reasons to cast doubt on my "heat theory": if temperature is the decisive criterion, he said, does that mean the sun is closer to earth in the summer and farther away in the winter? I countered by questioning his "observation theory": if visually confirmed size is what counts, then does this mean that on a rainy day the sun has got so small as to completely disappear?

We continued to squabble until the day that I brought in Lu Xun as my ally; that brought him to his knees soon enough. In desperation, I had resorted to bluff. "Mr. Lu Xun has said it, at midday the sun is closest to the earth!"