China in Ten Words Part 2

In this poster, one quote from the girl's confession particularly caught my eye. After her first time, she said, she "couldn't sit down." This expression made me hot all over, and set all kinds of thoughts running through my head. That evening I called my friends together and we sat down on the riverbank, sheltered by a row of willow trees as the moonlight shone down between their swaying fronds. "Do you want to know something?" I asked in a hushed tone. "What happens to a girl after she's done it with a man?"

"What?" they asked, a quaver in their voices.

"She can't sit down," I said mysteriously.

"Why not?" they gasped.

Why not? I didn't have a clue either. But that didn't stop me from telling them with airy condescension, "Once you get married, you'll understand why not."

When I look back on this episode now, I realize that for me the big-character posters functioned primarily as a form of erotica. But strange to say, my readings in erotica reached their climax not in the street but in my own home.

Since my parents were doctors, we lived in a dormitory for hospital staff. It was a two-story building, six rooms up and six rooms down, a common staircase connecting the two floors, just like the two-story cla.s.sroom buildings in school. Eleven hospital staff were housed in the building, two rooms being occupied by my family-Hua Xu and I downstairs, my parents upstairs. The bookshelf in their room was where they kept their small collection of medical reference works.

Hua Xu and I had the job of taking turns cleaning the room upstairs, and we were under instructions to do a thorough job of dusting the shelf. I tended to give it only the most cursory wipe, never imagining that those dull-looking tomes might conceal startling wonders. Browsing through them the summer I'd finished elementary school, I had seen nothing special. But my brother had.

I was in the second year of middle school by this point, and he was in the second year of high school. There were several days in succession when, with my parents away at work, Hua Xu would sneak upstairs with some of his cla.s.smates and some strange cries would come from my parents' room.

Downstairs, hearing all this commotion, I began to suspect something fishy. But when I ran upstairs, I found Hua Xu and his friends chatting happily, as though nothing untoward was happening. Though I looked around carefully, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. As soon as I was back downstairs, the weird noises started up again. And those sounds continued for a good couple of months as my brother's cla.s.smates trooped up there day after day-I think all the boys in his year must have made the trip at one time or another.

This convinced me that my parents' room must hold some awful secret. One day, when it was my turn to do the housecleaning, I inspected every corner of the room as minutely as a detective, but my search drew a blank. Then I transferred my attention to the bookshelf, suspecting something had perhaps been slipped inside one of the books. I took each book down and turned its pages one by one. As I began to work my way through Human Anatomy the wonder suddenly came into view: a color plate ill.u.s.trating the female genitalia. If I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, I could not have been more transfixed. I hungrily studied every detail of the photograph, as well as the entire written commentary.

I have no idea whether I too gave a shout of astonishment on my first glimpse of the color plate, for I was too stunned to be capable of noting my reaction. What I do know is that after all those acts of pilgrimage by Hua Xu's cla.s.smates, it was now my cla.s.smates' turn to troop upstairs, their turn to make those strange, involuntary cries that came from somewhere deep inside.

The final reading cycle began in 1977. Now that the Cultural Revolution was over, previously banned books could be published once again. When the works of Tolstoy, Balzac, and d.i.c.kens arrived in the local bookstore for the first time, this caused as much sensation as if today a pop star were sighted in some celebrity-deprived suburb: everyone ran to spread the word and craned their necks to see. Given the limited number of volumes in the first consignment shipped to our town, the bookstore posted an announcement that customers would have to line up for a book coupon. Each person was ent.i.tled to only one coupon, and each coupon ent.i.tled one to purchase only two books.

I remember vividly the scene outside the bookstore that day. Before daybreak there must already have been a good two hundred people in a line outside the bookstore. To be sure of getting a coupon, some had arrived the night before, plunking their stools down outside the door, where they sat in a neat rank and pa.s.sed the night in conversation. Those who arrived at dawn that morning soon realized they were very late. They remained hopeful nonetheless and joined the long queue.

I was one of these Johnny-come-latelys. When I dashed to the bookstore that morning, I ran the whole way with my right hand in my pocket, clutching tightly a five-yuan note-a princely sum for me at the time-and because only my left arm was swinging freely, I ran with an odd leftward lurch. I thought I would be among the first, only to find that there were at least three hundred people ahead of me. Behind me more continued to arrive, and I could hear them muttering with dismay, "Can you believe this? Up so early and we end up late!"

As the sun rose our a.s.sembly was divided into two camps: those who had not slept and those who had. People in the first camp, having endured a night on their stools, felt that their coupons were in the bag, and so for them the issue was: which two books to buy? People in the second camp had run to the bookstore after a good night's sleep, and their question was: how many coupons would be issued? Rumors flew. The stool-sitters at the front predicted there would be a hundred coupons at the most. This notion was roundly rejected by the people standing in line, some of whom thought two hundred coupons a more likely figure, although those behind disagreed-there should be more than that, they said. Coupon estimates continued to rise until someone forecast a total of five hundred. We unanimously ruled this out. There were fewer than four hundred people in line, so if they issued five hundred coupons, then all the trouble we had gone to in queuing up would seem ridiculous.

At seven o'clock the door to the New China Bookstore slowly opened. An exalted, almost mystical sensation surged through me at that moment. Although it was just a shabby old door creaking open on dirty hinges, I could almost see a splendid curtain being drawn aside on a stage, and the bookstore clerk who emerged appeared in my eyes to have the poise of a theater impresario. This transcendent feeling, alas, did not last long. "Fifty coupons only!" the man shouted. "The rest of you can just go home."

Those of us standing in line felt a chill pa.s.s through us from head to toe, as though a bucket of cold water had been dumped on our heads in full winter. Some drifted away, disconsolate; some grumbled and moaned; some cursed for all they were worth. I stood rooted to the spot, my right hand still clutching the five yuan, and watched, bereft, as the people at the front filed cheerfully into the store to collect their coupons. For them, the fewer the coupons, the greater the value of their sleepless vigil.

Many of us remained huddled outside the bookstore and watched as people came out, proudly brandishing their purchases. We would gather around somebody we knew and enviously reach out a hand to touch their reprints of Anna Karenina, Le Pere Goriot, and David Copperfield. Having lived so long in a reading famine, we found it a matchless pleasure just to feast our eyes on the new covers of these cla.s.sics. Some generously held the books up to our noses and let us sniff their subtle, inky smell. For me that odor was a heady scent.

Those immediately behind No. 50 were anguish personified. They let loose an endless stream of foul language, and it was hard to tell whether they were cursing themselves or cursing something else. My neighbors and I in the last third of the queue felt only a pang of disappointment, whereas those who had only just missed out on a coupon were like people who see the duck they have cooked flap its wings and fly away. Particularly No. 51: just as he was putting his foot inside the door he was told the coupons were all gone. He stood there for a moment, then shuffled off to one side, head down, clutching his stool to his chest, watching blankly as others marched out with their books and we gathered around to touch and sniff them. He was so strangely silent that I turned my head several times to look at him; it seemed to me he was watching us with a look of total nonrecognition.

Later I heard some gossip about this No. 51. He had played cards with three buddies until late the previous night, then come to the bookstore with his stool. In the days that followed he would greet his friends with a rueful refrain: "If we'd stopped just one round sooner, I wouldn't have been No. 51." And so for a little while No. 51 became a catchphrase in our town: if someone said, "I'm No. 51 today," what he meant was "I've had such rotten luck."

Now, thirty years later, we have moved from an age without books to an age when there is an excess of them-in China today, more than two hundred thousand books are published each year. In the past there were no books to buy, whereas now there are so many that we don't know which ones to buy. Once Internet outlets began to sell books at a discount, traditional bookstores soon followed suit. Books are now sold in supermarkets and newspaper kiosks, and pirated books are peddled by traveling salesmen by the side of the road. Once we saw pirated books only in Chinese, but now we see them popping up in streets and alleys in English as well.

The book fair that takes place every year in Beijing's Ditan Park is as lively as a temple festival. It combines book sales with lectures on cla.s.sical literature, demonstrations of folk arts, photography exhibitions, free film showings, and cultural performances, along with fashion, dance, and magic. Banks, insurance companies, and a.s.set management firms promote their financial products. Loudspeakers blare music one minute, lost-person bulletins the next. In this cramped and crowded s.p.a.ce, writers and scholars attend book signings while quack doctors take pulses and dispense advice, scribbling prescriptions just as rapidly as the authors sign their books.

A few years ago I was involved in just such a book signing. An incessant din drummed in my ears, as though I were in a factory workshop with machines humming and roaring around me. In a row of temporary tents was piled a huge variety of books, and booksellers held microphones to their mouths and hawked their wares much as small vendors in a farmers' market call out the prices of vegetables and fruit, chickens and ducks, fish and meat. What was most memorable for me was to see bundles of books worth several hundred yuan being sold off for a throwaway price, for 10 or 12 yuan. No sooner did one salesman yell, "Bundle of books for 20 yuan," than another would counter with an even more attractive deal: "Rock-bottom prices! Cla.s.sics for 10 yuan a bundle!"

Even the book vendors found this a bit unbelievable. "What kind of bookselling is this?" they said to themselves. "We might as well be selling wastepaper!"

So their sales pitch would take a different line: "Come and get it! For what it costs to buy wastepaper you can get yourself a bundle of cla.s.sics!"

I cannot, however, let this story end amid the calls of the auctioneers at the Ditan Book Fair. I want to go back to that scene outside the bookstore in 1977. Although that morning thirty-odd years ago left me empty-handed, I see it now as the point when I began to embark on a true reading of literature. Within a few months new books did arrive on my shelves, and now my reading was no longer subject to the vagaries of Cultural Revolution politics. Instead, it grew abundant and replete, flowing on continuously like the Yangtze's eternal surge. "What have these thirty years of reading given you?" I am sometimes asked. It is no easier to answer that than to articulate one's reaction to a boundless ocean.

I did once sum up my experience in the following way: "Every time I read one of the great books, I feel myself transported to another place, and like a timid child I hug them close and mimic their steps, slowly tracing the long river of time in a journey where warmth and emotion fuse. They carry me off with them, then let me make my own way back, and it's only on my return that I realize they will always be part of me."

One morning several years ago, my wife and I were walking in the old town of Dusseldorf when we stumbled upon the home of Heinrich Heine, a black house in a row of red houses, even older, it seemed, than the old houses around it. It made me think of a faded photograph where you see a grandfather from another era with his sons on either side of him.

That morning took me back to my early childhood, to the hospital grounds where I lived and to an unforgettable moment I experienced there.

For my family to live in hospital housing was quite a common circ.u.mstance in China in those days, when the majority of urban employees were housed by their work units. I grew up in a medical environment, roaming idle and alone through the sick wards, lingering in the corridors, dropping in on elderly patients who knew me, asking new inmates what was wrong with them. First, though, I would wander into nurses' stations and grab a few swabs soaked in alcohol to wipe my hands. I didn't have showers very often then, but I would scrub my fingers with alcohol at least ten times a day, and for a while I must have had the world's cleanest pair of hands. Every day too I breathed the smell of Lysol; many of my cla.s.smates loathed its odor, but I liked it and even had a theory that, since Lysol is a disinfectant, then breathing its fumes would be good for my lungs. Today I still find myself favorably disposed toward Lysol, because that's the smell that surrounded me as I grew up.

My brother and I often played outside the operating room where my father toiled. Next to it was a large empty lot where on sunny days laundry was hung out to dry. We liked to run back and forth among the damp cotton sheets, letting them slap our faces with their soapy scent.

This memory, though happy, is dotted with bloodstains. When my father came out of surgery, his smock and face mask would be covered in blood. A nurse would often emerge with a bucket-full of b.l.o.o.d.y bits and pieces cut from the bodies of his patients-which she would dump in the adjacent pond. In the summer the pond gave off a sickening stench, and flies settled on it so thickly one might think it had been covered with a black wool carpet.

In those days the housing block had no sanitary facilities, just a public toilet across the yard, next to the morgue. Neither of these structures had a door, and I got into the habit of taking a peek inside the morgue every time I went to the toilet. The morgue was spotlessly clean; a concrete bed lay underneath a little window, through which I saw leaves swaying. The morgue stands out in my memory as a place of unimaginable serenity. The tree that grew outside its window was noticeably greener and more luxuriant than the others around it, but I do not know if that was because of the morgue or because of the toilet.

I lived ten years of my life opposite the morgue, and it's fair to say that I grew up amid the sound of weeping. Patients who had died would lie in the morgue the night before their cremation. Like a roadside rest stop where one breaks a long journey, the morgue silently received those time-pressed travelers as they moved from life to death.

Many nights I would suddenly wake from sleep and listen to the desolate wails of those who had lost their loved ones. During those years I must have heard every kind of weeping there is, and the longer the weeping went on, the less it sounded like weeping-especially as dawn approached, when the cries of the bereaved seemed particularly sustained and heartrending. To me those cries conveyed a mysterious intimacy, the intimacy of depthless sorrow, and for a time I thought of them as the most stirring songs I had ever heard. Only later did I learn that it is under cover of night that most people pa.s.s away.

In those days there was no relief from the searing heat of summer, and often I would wake from an afternoon nap to find the entire outline of my body imprinted in sweat on my straw bed mat; sometimes I perspired so heavily it bleached my skin white.

One day, when curiosity impelled me to step inside the morgue, it felt as though I had exchanged torrid sunshine for chilly moonlight. Although I had walked past the morgue on countless occasions, this was the first time I had ventured across its threshold, and I was struck by how refreshingly cool it was inside. When I lay down on that clean concrete bed, I found the ideal place for an afternoon nap. On many baking afternoons that followed, if I saw that the morgue was not otherwise occupied, I would lie on the slab and savor its soothing coolness; sometimes in my dreams I would find myself in a garden full of blooming flowers.

Since I grew up in the Cultural Revolution, my education had made me a skeptic in matters of the spirit. Not believing in ghosts, I had no fear of them either. So when I lay down on the slab, it did not carry connotations of death. What it meant to me was a cool haven, an escape from the sweltering summer.

There were, however, several awkward moments. Sometimes I had just fallen asleep on the slab when I was awoken by cries and screams, and realized that a dead person was about to visit. Hurrying off as the weeping got closer and closer, the concrete bed's temporary occupant made way for its overnight guest.

All this happened a long time ago. Growing up is, in a sense, a process of forgetting, and later in life I completely forgot about this macabre but beautiful childhood moment: how on a stifling-hot summer afternoon I lay in the morgue, on the slab that symbolized death, and there experienced life's cooling caress.

So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: "Death is the cooling night." That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me.

If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.

*yuedu.

writing.

Pankaj Mishra had been asked to write a piece about me for the New York Times Magazine and came to Beijing in November 2008. We spent hours talking together, sometimes in the warmth and comfort of indoors, sometimes venturing outside for a walk in the icy wind. When we ate out, I made a point of introducing him to different regional cuisines, and on his departure my new vegetarian friend complimented me on my skill in selecting dishes. "Well, it's not much of a skill," I told him. "I just order all the vegetarian dishes a restaurant has on its menu."

If Mishra was grateful to me, I too was grateful to him. "To recall one's past life," Martial wrote, "is to relive it." In the s.p.a.ce of that short week, Mishra had me revisit my writing career, and thus bestowed on me a life relived.

"My writing* goes back a long way," I told him-such a long way, in fact, that it seems to emanate from another world. When I cast about for examples of my juvenilia, my thoughts skip quickly over my old composition books and gather instead on the big-character posters that were then pasted everywhere. Those primary-school compositions are not worth mentioning, because they had only a single reader, my bespectacled Chinese teacher. I prefer to start with the big-character posters that I auth.o.r.ed, for they were the first works of mine to be displayed to the world at large.

In the Cultural Revolution era we were even more pa.s.sionate about writing big-character posters than people are today about writing blogs. The difference between the two genres is this: The posters tended to be tediously alike, basically just a rehash of articles in the People's Daily, their text riddled with revolutionary rhetoric and empty slogans, blathering endlessly on and on. Blogs, on the other hand, take a mult.i.tude of forms-self-promoting or abusive, disclosing intimate details here and carried away by righteous indignation there, striking affected poses right and left-and they dwell on every topic under the sun, from society and politics to economics and history and goodness knows what else. But in one respect the two genres are much the same: writing big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution and keeping a blog today are both designed to a.s.sert the value of one's own existence.

As a little boy in primary school I was terrified of big-character posters. Every morning as I headed off to cla.s.s with my satchel on my back I would nervously scan the walls on either side of the street, checking to see if my father's name appeared in the headlines of the latest batch of posters.

My father was a surgeon and a low-level functionary in the Communist Party. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution I had personally witnessed the disgrace of several of my cla.s.smates' fathers who were officials; they were denounced for being "power holders following the capitalist road." Activists in the revolutionary rebel faction beat them till their faces were black-and-blue, and they were forced to wear wooden signs over their chests and tall dunce caps on their heads. I would see them every day with brooms in their hands, trembling with fear as they swept the streets. Pa.s.sersby would give them a kick if they felt like it, or spit in their faces. Their children naturally shared the ignominy, being constant b.u.t.ts of their cla.s.smates' insults and targets of their discrimination.

I lived on tenterhooks, anxious that my father might suddenly suffer a similarly awful fate, bringing me down with him. What made things worse was that my father had a landlord pedigree, for his family had once owned some thirty acres of land, which defined them as landlords pure and simple. Fortunately my grandfather had been a slacker with no ambitions to improve himself; all he knew how to do was to party and play around, and so every year he would sell off a piece of land here and there to pay for his extravagant lifestyle. By 1949 this wastrel had managed neatly to burn his way through the whole estate, and in so doing he sold off his landlord status. If he had held on to his land, he could hardly have avoided being shot when the country was liberated. So my father reaped the fruits of the family shame, dodging the nasty stigma of being a "landlord's brat." My brother, Hua Xu, and I, needless to say, were equal (though more distant) beneficiaries of my grandfather's spendthrift ways.

Nevertheless, my father's inglorious family history remained a source of anguish for me. Bad things are bound to happen sooner or later, and one morning Hua Xu and I finally saw on the way to school the big-character poster that I had most been dreading. My father's name was emblazoned across the t.i.tle, accompanied by two condemnatory labels: "runaway landlord" and "capitalist-roader."

I was a fainthearted, fearful boy, and I'm sure my face must have completely paled at the sight of this headline. I told my brother I couldn't summon up the courage to go to school-I was going to stay home and lie low. Hua Xu shrugged the whole thing off, saying there was nothing to worry about, and marched off toward school as though without a care in the world. His nerve held only for a hundred yards or so; at that point he turned around and came marching back. "d.a.m.n it, there's no way I'm going to school either," he muttered. "I'm going to lie low, too."

Such was the backdrop to the creation of the first big-character poster to which I ever signed my name. With his life now at such a low ebb, my father chose both to stage and to perform in an exhibition of political theater, one that enabled the entire family to experience the Chinese New Year in full revolutionary style. Other households, having skimped and saved the whole year through, were able to indulge themselves for once in some lavish meat and fish dishes, but our meal instead consisted of "remembering the bitter to think of the sweet." What that meant was mixing rice husks and weeds together and boiling them until soft, then kneading them into dumplings. In the old days "chaff dumplings" had been eaten only by the very poor, and for us to eat them on the most festive evening of the Chinese calendar was to taste the bitterness of the old society and savor the sweetness of the new.

I held one of these chaff dumplings with two hands and nibbled it cautiously. It was bland and tasteless, but I could feel the coa.r.s.e husks scratching my throat as I swallowed. It hurt to eat them, and I told my parents so. My father put the best possible face on this. "It's good if it hurts," he a.s.sured me in a doctor's upbeat tone. "That just shows you're seeing the benefits of remembering the bitter to think of the sweet."

My brother and I didn't realize that our father, in his misfortune, was performing a revolutionary show, for which he had selected this ideal occasion of New Year's Eve. A few days later, in the confessional materials that he submitted to his inquisitors, he made a great song and dance about this revolutionized Spring Festival, as a way of expressing his boundless loyalty to Mao Zedong and the Communist Party. After we had all swallowed our chaff dumplings and my mother had cleared away the dishes, my father spread open a huge sheet of paper, bigger even than the table, and we set to work writing a big-character poster. "Denounce the selfish and criticize the revisionist"-such was the theme of the hour. "Tonight, this last day of the year," my father told us gravely as he ground ink in the ink stone, "we must do a thorough job of criticism and self-criticism."

Hua Xu and I found this prospect invigorating and were both eager to be the first to address the topic. Neither of us was willing to yield ground to the other, so determined were we to demonstrate our prowess in self-criticism. My parents said I should go first: my brother, being two years older, ought to allow me this opportunity to shine. But, blinking desperately, I found myself unable on the spur of the moment to quite put a finger on my selfish, revisionist thinking. As I hesitated, Hua Xu restively pressed to speak, only to be overruled by my parents. They began to coach me, telling me that a few minutes earlier, when I felt that my throat was sore, that was actually selfish thought rearing its head. This took a big weight off my mind, but I still felt anxious. "Could that count as revisionist thought, too?" I asked.

My parents conferred. This did seem to be undoubted evidence of pet.i.t bourgeois att.i.tudes muddling my mind, and bourgeois rubbish was a sure sign of revisionism. They nodded. "Yes, it counts."

So, selfishness and revisionism-it was all there. I could breathe easily at last. Now it was Hua Xu's turn. He announced proudly that he had once found a two-fen coin in the street but failed to hand it in to the teacher, instead buying himself two pieces of candy. My parents nodded solemnly. This act of my brother's, they declared, was very similar to mine, an error that combined both selfishness and revisionism. Next up was my mother, and after her effort to combat selfishness and criticize revisionism it was my father's turn. Our parents mentioned only a few peccadillos that were neither here nor there, leaving Hua Xu and me quite disappointed. My father's performance was a particular letdown, for his self-criticism made no mention of being a runaway landlord and a capitalist-roader. My brother at once challenged him on this score. "Are you a runaway landlord?" he asked sternly.

My father, stone-faced, shook his head. The family had lost all its property before Liberation, he said, and during land reform they were cla.s.sified as middle peasants. Why, if not for those thirty acres they had once owned, my mother chimed in, they would have ended up as poor peasants. Hua Xu raised his right hand gravely. "Can you swear to Chairman Mao that you're not a landlord?"

My father raised his hand with equal gravity. "I swear to Chairman Mao, I am not a landlord."

I wanted a share of the action, too. "Well, are you a revisionist?" I asked.

Again he shook his head. It was true he had joined the party before Liberation, he said, but all these years he had been engaged purely in technical work-a surgeon all along-so he didn't count as a power holder pursuing the capitalist road.

Following Hua Xu's cue, I raised my hand. "Can you swear to Chairman Mao? "

Again he raised his hand. "I swear to Chairman Mao."

Then we watched as he wrote the big-character poster. It skimmed over major issues and dwelled only on trivia, but it was our first effort at self-criticism, written on the eve of the Chinese New Year, no less. My father signed his name at the end, then proffered the brush to my mother, who signed her name and pa.s.sed it on to my brother. I added my name at the very bottom.

Next we began to discuss where to display our poster. Let's put it outside our front door, I said-that way the neighbors can admire our New Year's Eve accomplishment. No, it should go up next to the cinema box office, Hua Xu argued-big-character posters had more readers there. Our parents must surely have been inwardly cursing us little devils, because for them this was purely a show, designed to display their revolutionary spirit and political awareness; they had not the slightest desire to have others view the poster. Moreover, this New Year's Eve poster had considerable practical value, providing material for a splendid pa.s.sage in my father's exculpatory statement.

However dismayed our parents may have been to hear our suggestions, they simulated a warm sympathy for them, nodding vigorously and commending our initiative but pointing out that there was a problem with putting the poster up outside, for this would make it impossible for us to see it at all times. We ourselves were the objects of criticism in this poster, they explained patiently, so it should be placed on view in our own house, alerting us constantly to our past errors and ensuring that in the future we would always stick closely to Chairman Mao and travel far on the correct path.

In those days we had not yet moved to the hospital dormitory and lived in a house in a little street named Sunnyside Lane. It was one big room, divided into two by a part.i.tion made from a bamboo lattice over which old newspapers were pasted. My parents slept in the inner sanctum, while my brother and I shared a bed by the door. We felt they had a point and agreed to put up the poster inside the house, but we insisted on one thing: it must be stuck at the head of our bed, not theirs. This was a condition to which they happily consented.

Not long afterward my father was sent down to the countryside. With a medicine chest on his back he roamed from village to village, dispensing medical care to the peasants. By the time the rebel faction realized they had let him slip from their grasp and sent people to fetch him back, he was nowhere to be found. The simple country folk had hidden him for his protection, and so by great good fortune he avoided the revolutionary violence of the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.

That glorious poster maintained its position above our bed for a good year or more, but as it gathered dust and its paper yellowed and tore, it slipped down the wall and under the bed, where we forgot all about it. At the beginning, however, the last thing I did before I went to bed and the first thing I did after I woke up was to look with awe at my spindly signature at the bottom of the poster.

Five years later I entered middle school and there began to write big-character posters on a large scale; this time I wrote them myself and didn't just append my signature at the end. In the Cultural Revolution the most ill.u.s.trious writing group came from two universities: Peking and Tsinghua. Its nom de plume was Liang Xiao, a play on words for "Two Schools." In imitation of Liang Xiao, I recruited three cla.s.smates to form a writing team that took its name from a famous film of the period called Spring Shoots.

This was when the Huang Shuai incident was making headlines all over the country. Huang Shuai, a twelve-year-old, had criticized a teacher in her diary. She wrote: Today XX did not observe cla.s.sroom protocol and caused some disruption. Teacher called him to the front. "I really feel like giving you a good whack on the head with my pointer," he told him. That's not the right thing to say, is it? A pointer is to be used for teaching purposes, not to hit pupils over the head with. I hope you will patiently correct students if they make mistakes and be more careful about what you say in the future.

When the teacher saw the diary, he hit the roof, convinced the girl was bent on undermining his authority. In the weeks that followed he subjected Huang Shuai to constant criticism and told her cla.s.smates they should have nothing to do with her. Lonely and forlorn, she resorted to writing a two-page letter to the Beijing Daily. She protested: I am a junior Red Guard who loves the party and Chairman Mao. All I did was write what I thought in my diary, but the teacher just won't let it go. For so many days now I have been unable to eat, and when I try to sleep, I have nightmares that make me cry. Just what is this terrible mistake I have committed? Surely we young people in the age of Mao Zedong can't be expected to be slaves to the oppressive old educational system with its notions of "teacher's dignity"!

In mid-December 1973 the Beijing Daily published Huang Shuai's letter and excerpts from her diary. Later that month the People's Daily reprinted the whole article as the top lead on the front page, adding an editorial comment for good measure. The Central People's Broadcasting Service reported the story, too. Huang Shuai was a celebrity for a time, an anti-establishment hero and role model to students all over the country. But good times don't last. Three years later, with the death of Mao and the fall of Madame Mao and her cronies, Huang Shuai fell from heaven into h.e.l.l, labeled at sixteen a lackey of the Gang of Four. Big-character posters criticizing her sprouted up everywhere, and her parents came to grief as well. Her mother wrote a long self-denunciation, and her father was arrested, emerging with his name cleared only in 1981. In that era, destiny did not rest in one's own hands; everyone found himself swept along in the current, and n.o.body knew whether fortune or fiasco lay ahead.

In late 1973, as the campaign to criticize "teacher's dignity" swept through Chinese schools, the big-character posters I wrote under the name of Spring Shoots caused quite a stir in my school and I enjoyed a fleeting reputation as a "red pen." Red being the color of revolution and black the color of counterrevolution, a "red pen" was a politically correct author, in contradistinction to the "black pen," purveyor of politically suspect works.

Three cla.s.smates and I wielded our brushes energetically in round-the-clock writing sessions, copying revolutionary phrases verbatim from the People's Daily, Zhejiang Daily, and Shanghai's Liberation Daily. Before the week was out we had completed close to forty big-character posters, which we plastered over the walls of our school. In them we fiercely criticized every member of the teaching staff, with one exception: the teacher of Chinese, with whom I had quite a good relationship. He would often slip me a cigarette, and every time I swiped a few cigs from my father I would make sure to repay his generosity.

In those days the working cla.s.s was the leader in all things, and in every work unit (except for factories, military bases, and rural villages) a workers' propaganda team had been installed. When one of these teams moved into our school, its leader became, in effect, the top administrator. He was a worker in his fifties, and as he perused our posters he scribbled away in his notebook and greeted me with a smile. "Good job! Good job!" he enthused.

Little did I realize that those forty posters our Spring Shoots group had cooked up served to bolster his revolutionary credentials. The chairman of the county revolutionary committee heaped praise on him, declaring that our school was in the top rank of schools in our county in its dedication to the movement to emulate Huang Shuai's anti-establishment spirit and critique teacher's dignity and might indeed be among the top schools in the entire province.

The workers'-propaganda team leader earnestly recorded the names of all the teachers we had criticized, only to discover that the teacher of Chinese had been overlooked. He was not at all happy about that, for this revealed a blind spot in the campaign. He summoned the blind spot to his office and there banged on the desk and burst into a stream of expletives, expounding his belief that the only thing that could possibly explain the absence of criticism was that this blind spot was oppressing and mistreating his students.

Our teacher sought me out, grim-faced. He led me to a secluded corner beyond the school walls and handed me a cigarette, which he lit with a match. "Why didn't you write a poster about me?" he asked plaintively.

I sucked on my cigarette. "You've got no shred of teacher's dignity," I told him.

"How can that be?" He became agitated. "Teacher's dignity-I'm dignified from head to toe!"

"You're always giving us cigarettes," I objected. "You treat us on an equal basis. I don't see that you have any teacher's dignity at all."

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry and had no choice but to tell me about his harrowing interview with the propaganda team leader. Now I understood. I promised I'd get a poster criticizing him done that very evening and he'd see it as soon he got up in the morning.

I was as good as my word. After dinner I summoned my writing-group partners, and we wrote away in the cla.s.sroom until late that night. We had allotted one poster each to the other instructors, but we went one better with the teacher of Chinese and wrote two full posters about him. Then, clutching the posters, we went to his home, and as he slept soundly inside we conferred about where to stick them up. Originally I thought we would stick them to his door, but there wasn't room there for both of them, so the best we could do was post one on each side.

The following morning the teacher ushered me once more to a quiet spot outside the school-not to thank me, as I was expecting, but to lodge a complaint. I shouldn't have stuck the posters outside his door, he said, for the propaganda team leader would never see them there, and they would just make him a laughingstock among the neighbors. Much better to stick a poster up right outside the team leader's office. Seeing me nod, he raised another sore point: why did I have to write two posters about him when one was good enough for the others? Well, that was to elevate him to a higher category, I told him.

"No, no, I don't want to be higher than anyone else," he said. "Equal treatment-that's all I want."

"All right, then," I agreed. "We'll go the extra mile and write a new poster for you."

"What about the ones outside my door?" he asked.

"Just tear them down when you get home."

"How could I dare do that?" the teacher practically howled. "You come take them down yourself," he whispered.

Then he coached me on what to say when I came at lunchtime to carry out this mission. I nodded and rea.s.sured him that everything would be done just as he instructed. He groped around in his pocket, brought out a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and handed me one. He took a few steps, then stopped, turned around, and gave me the rest of the pack.

As promised, I finished writing the poster before the end of the morning session and posted it outside the team leader's office. Then my a.s.sociates and I marched over to the teacher's house, shouting his name outside his door. He deliberately lingered inside and failed to emerge, and only after the neighbors had rushed out to watch the excitement did he venture forth, bowing and sc.r.a.ping. "Listen up!" I scolded. "We've written another poster about your teacher's dignity, an even more powerful critique than these two here, and we put it up in the school. Go and read it right away!"

He trotted off obediently toward the school. We made a great show of tearing down the posters outside his house, explaining to the neighbors that they lacked sufficient depth, not like the newly written poster stuck up in the school, which we welcomed them to read.

In my final years in high school I continued to write, but I suddenly lost interest in big-character posters. Instead I tried writing a play, which I suppose counts as my first literary work. I must have spent the best part of one semester writing a one-act play, about nine or ten pages long. I revised it several times, then copied it out carefully onto squared writing paper. Its subject matter was very popular at the time: a landlord, having seen all his property confiscated after Liberation, was bitterly resentful and tried to sabotage socialist reconstruction in the countryside but was caught in the act by the clever and resourceful poor and lower-middle peasants.