The Language of Solitude

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  Yin-Yin heard people coming down the floor, voices. The door opened.

  She had promised herself she would stay calm.

  Two men walked in, closed the door, locked it. One was handsome and young, probably her brother’s age. They were not in uniform but rather in worn suits. The other man was older, with a grim face and a scar on one of his cheeks. She noticed his unusually large hands. He looked intimidating.

  “Sit down,” he said, pointing to the bed.

  Yin-Yin hesitated. For the first time it occurred to her that they could physically harm her. Two men, one woman, alone in a room. A bed. There was nobody nearby to help her. No matter how loud or how long she would scream.

  “I. Said. Sit. Down.”

  Reluctantly she obeyed.

  “Who are you?” she wanted to know.

  “None of your concern,” he replied.

  “I did not do anything wrong.” She sounded more intimidated than she had intended to. As if she had made a mistake. There was nothing to justify or apologize for.

  “Who do you think you are?” he yelled without warning. “What is right or wrong is not decided by you. It is decided by the authorities. By the party. Do you understand?”

  Yin-Yin said nothing, turned her head, and stared at the wall.

  “Do you understand?” he repeated with a sharp, terrifying voice.

  She started to tremble.

  The man came closer. “Look at me. I am asking you something.”

  Yin-Yin did not move. She closed her eyes, prepared for an assault, a slap or worse. He would hit her in the face. The other man said something quiet she did not get; the older man waited a few seconds and then stepped back.

  “We have a few things to talk about and we expect you to cooperate. It is in your own interest.” The young voice was surprisingly soft, almost gentle.

  She opened her eyes, relieved, and looked at him. A hint of a friendly smile on his face.

  “You are a musician, right?” he asked in a cordial tone.

  “Yes.”

  “An artist.”

  She nodded, not sure what he was aiming at.

  “Who is your favorite composer?”

  “Schubert. Mozart.” She did not think these names meant anything to him, but she was relieved to talk about music. “And of course Beethoven.”

  He gazed at her for a while without saying anything. “Is it true that you suffer from mood swings?”

  “No,” she replied confused.

  “Never?”

  “I am sometimes unhappy, because I am not sure if I’ve got enough talent as a musician. I work hard and I am never satisfied with the results. If you want to call that mood swings . . .”

  “Never satisfied? Must be depressing.”

  “Sometimes.”

  He looked around as if he were searching for something. “You missed,” he said finally, “a few classes last fall.”

  “I was not feeling well.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had some issues.”

  “What issues?”

  She shrugged.

  “Some people told us you are mentally unstable.”

  “Who said that?” Yin-Yin asked, surprised.

  “Teachers. Students. Lu, your roommate.”

  “They are all lying.”

  “We found sleeping pills next to your bed.”

  “I rarely use them,” she protested. “It is because of my Mom’s illness . . .” She stopped and suddenly understood what they were getting at. Declaring her insane and putting her in a mental institution would be a legal way of getting rid of her. She could spend years in a psychiatric ward without ever being evaluated by an independent psychiatrist. The whole purpose of this conversation was to remind her of their power.

  There was more than a hint of a pleased smile on his face. He knew she had understood.

  “To change the subject: Whose idea was it to put all those things online?”

  “Mine.”

  “Yours? According to your brother’s and father’s cadre files, you have never been interested in politics.”

  “I am not. This is not about politics,” she answered him back. “This is about justice, about—”

  “Everything is about politics,” the older man interrupted her angrily. “We can put you in jail for the rest of your life.”

  “What for?”

  “For whatever we want!” he shouted.

  His colleague gave him a sign to calm down.

  There was silence in the room. Prison or mental institution, as long as they wanted, for whatever reason they wanted. It was the plain truth, and Yin-Yin felt something crumble inside her.

  “Are you part of a foreign organization?” the younger one wanted to know.

  She shook her head.

  “Who was helping you?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Are you getting money from abroad?”

  “Why are you asking these questions? Can’t you imagine that a Chinese woman my age has the courage to act on her own?”

  “I can’t imagine somebody so smart doing such stupid things. Why are you ruining your life? Imagine never being able to perform in public again . . . No orchestra would be prepared to take you.”

  Count on paying the highest possible price and then ask yourself if, when it’s all said and done, it will be worth it.

  “Think about your family.”

  “I do. That’s why . . .” She did not finish the sentence.

  “You did not think it through, smart-ass,” the older man said suddenly. “Who will care for your mother if something happens to you or your father?”

  “What should happen to my father?” she asked.

  “Da Long could be”—the man paused for a moment—“arrested, for instance.”

  He was right: She had not thought it through. She had considered only what they could do to her, but never imagined they would use her sick mother to blackmail her. “What do you want from me?”

  “Answers. Names.”

  She looked at them for a long time and took a deep breath. There was no way back.

  “My name,” she said very slowly, “is Wu Yin-Yin. The answer is justice.”

  Maybe it was her tone, maybe the men were just getting tired of her, maybe it was their usual strategy for an interrogation, but both made aggressive steps in her direction.

  “You are making one mistake after another,” the younger one said without a trace of gentleness left in his voice, “and your whole family will pay for them.”

  They left and came back the next morning. The same questions and answers over and over again.

  After a few days they took her to another building, a kind of guesthouse for a business or for the district authorities, locked her up on the sixth floor, and put guards outside her door, who brought her meals three times a day, never saying a word. A bigger, brighter room with a bed, two chairs, and a large closet. From the locked window she could see fields lying fallow and factories and houses in the distance.

  The most difficult thing was not knowing. And the helplessness. Imprisoned without charge. Nobody hinted at what crime she had committed, exactly. What they planed to do with her. How long she was to stay in this room. Days? Weeks? Months? They had taken away all power over her own life, and she could bear it only by exercising the utmost self-control. She had to limit her emotions to what was absolutely necessary.

  A kind of hibernation of the soul.

  XVII

  * * *

  Xiao Hu lay in bed with his arms and legs spread out wide. He closed his eyes and counted to eight, breathing deeply as he did so, feeling his lungs expanding and filling with oxygen; he held his breath for a moment and then started counting again, letting the breath sigh out of his body. He was meant to do this breathing exercise two dozen times every morning and evening; it was important not to think about anything while doing it, his colleague—who had been practicing yoga regularly ever since a trip to India a few months ago—had wa
rned him. It was an old meditation exercise that was supposed to help prepare for the day ahead, create strength, and enable him to work with full concentration. Xiao Hu was skeptical. He found it difficult not only to lie still but also to breathe peacefully and unhurriedly. The air seemed to want to enter and leave his body quickly and automatically. It was even more difficult for him to think of nothing. He tried to fix his mind’s eye on an image, but regardless of whether he thought about the Jin Mao Tower in the light of the setting sun or his new Bose sound system or a woman’s breasts, it lasted mere seconds before one thought after another coursed through his head again.

  He had been doing these exercises for two weeks now but had not seen any improvement in his ability to concentrate; as a result, he’d decided to give it two more weeks—if nothing changed, then he would stop doing them.

  After the final breath, he stretched with relief, felt for his spectacles on the nightstand, and stood up. His iPhone showed that it was 5:15 and displayed four new text messages, which he scanned: greetings from friends in America and Canada. He drew the curtains open; a narrow red stripe on the horizon announced the dawn. Xiao Hu’s gaze wandered through the living room, with its open-plan kitchen. He had deliberately furnished the apartment sparsely: a narrow Ikea couch in front of a flat screen TV on the wall, a small dining table with four chairs, a low shelf for the sound system and a few books, that was all. An excess of space. For someone who had lived in 160 square feet of space with his parents and sister when he was a child, who had not even had his own bed and who had shared a kitchen, dining room, bathroom, with five other families, there was no greater luxury.

  He switched on the espresso machine, pulled on his sportswear, turned on the television, got onto the exercise bike, and pressed the Medium Sweat button. It started with a fifteen-minute warm-up, during which Xiao Hu watched the morning news while pedaling lightly. The incline grew steeper. He had to pedal energetically; he felt his heart pounding and the first pearls of sweat on his brow, then the damn impulse to cough rose again. A gray-brown cloud of smog had been lying low over the city for days, obscuring the tops of the skyscrapers; he felt as if it was coming through the chinks in the imperfectly sealed windows into his apartment. The poor-quality air had made his asthma worse and worse in the last few years. He managed with some effort to suppress a coughing fit.

  Xiao Hu thought about his sister and her disappointed face when he had told her about his conversations at the party conference in Hangzhou. He had tried everything and achieved nothing. During a break in a meeting, he had spoken to a district chairman from Yiwu, but he had waved him away. The two employees of the province governor, whom he knew well, had also not wanted to be told anything about Sanlitun. A sensitive subject. No press, no comment, even internally. Instructions from Beijing. There were rumors about problems in some factories but no one knew any details. Their advice: stay away.

  The urge to cough grew stronger. He took a deep breath and expelled a hard, dry cough that hurt his chest and throat. Xiao Hu coughed and spluttered more and more violently until even his head hurt and he had to get down from the bicycle. He had done eighteen minutes—pathetic—or just about half the mountain setting.

  Xiao Hu had a shower, ate a warmed-up croissant, and left for the office. In his calendar, he had a meeting with the head of his department at ten o’clock and lunch with a fellow party member from Hunan Province at one p.m.

  Just before noon, Weidenfeller rang, in a panic about Yin-Yin’s whereabouts.

  Xiao Hu did not know when he had last had such a shock. Maybe it was when he was little. Once, when he had not been able to swim, he had fallen into a pond and had sunk in the water for several endless seconds until his father had pulled him out with a strong grip. The fear that had overcome him as he gasped for air and had felt only water fill his mouth. The panic with which he had flailed his arms, looking for something to hold on to: a reed, a plank, a hand. That was what he felt like now. He felt a piercing sensation in his guts, a pain that immediately spread through his whole body. He sensed that something terrible had happened, that Yin-Yin had done something that was not just foolish, but something from which there was no going back, and that she was sinking deeper and deeper. It was impossible to foresee the consequences, but this time there would be no hand to pull her out. For a moment, he felt as though he was losing control over his own life.

  He tried not to let any of this show. He calmed Weidenfeller down and reassured him that they would have news that afternoon. He would make a few phone calls and soon find out where Yin-Yin was. He called a close contact in the mayor’s office, for whom he had recently secured a lucrative life insurance deal at a special rate, and asked him where his sister, Wu Yin-Yin, born on December 19, 1978, in Panzhihua, Sichuan, was.

  The man rang him back ten minutes later and said he hadn’t been able to find out anything.

  His cell phone was reminding him with monotonous beeping about his next appointment. Yin-Yin had to wait. This lunch was too important to cancel at short notice.

  Xiao Hu had reserved a table by the window in a small restaurant on the Huangpu riverbank. The party functionary from Hunan was around his age, pleasant, and very ambitious, an up-and-coming district secretary whom Xiao Hu had met at a conference in Beijing the previous year. Since then, the man had been to Shanghai several times; they had enjoyed a few evenings out in restaurants and karaoke bars. On his last visit, the man had offered to sell him an empty piece of land in a suburb of Changsha, the provincial capital, that would be designated as land for construction in the next year; the decision had been made by the district government, but had not yet been officially announced. The value of the land would multiply twenty or thirty times overnight—it was a sure thing. But Xiao Hu was hesitant. The party functionary expected something in return, of course, but had not given any indication as to what that might be. If Xiao Hu was not able to return the favor, he would be beholden to him, and he was determined not to place himself in that kind of debt, no matter how tempting the opportunity was. He either had to find a diplomatic way of turning down the offer or put the district secretary off until the man indicated what he wanted in return from Xiao Hu. But even then he would not feel comfortable with the deal. Until now, he had managed, for the most part, to avoid getting tangled up in the tightly woven mesh of favors, gifts and reciprocal gifts, bribes, obligations, secret talks, and agreements within the party that blanketed the whole country. It was not easy: if he were to reject the proposition, word would get around and make most of the party cadres mistrust him. No one, and he was no exception, could afford to be the odd one out in the party. The nail that sticks out is hammered in, as the proverb went.

  The lunch went as he had anticipated. They talked animatedly about the rising stock market index, about the booming property prices in Shanghai, about the chances of Yao Ming becoming the most valuable player in the NBA that season, about the pluses of the new VW Passat, and only at the end did the man from Hunan casually mention his wife’s sister. A gifted young lawyer whom Xiao Hu simply had to meet. She wanted to move to Shanghai, and needed a job urgently. And she wanted to buy an apartment too. China Life had invested in several building projects and surely had excellent contacts to the building companies . . .

  The party functionary did not have to say more. Xiao Hu nodded; he had understood; he promised to give it some thought.

  On the way back to the office he felt even more anxious than before. He rang his secretary and asked her to cancel an unimportant meeting at three p.m., citing an unexpected appointment. He walked down the river promenade, heading to Starbucks for an espresso. The air quality was worse than it had been the day before; he coughed violently and was glad when he reached the air-conditioned café. A job in his department and buying an apartment at a discount: both of these things were not very difficult for Xiao Hu to arrange. His company was always looking for new young lawyers anyway. Would it be reprehensible of him to employ the young woman from Hun
an? It was a good deal, no doubt about it, but it depressed him nonetheless. He was one step further in a direction that he did not want to go in. To many party functionaries it would sound naïve, dishonest, or incomprehensible, but he had not become a member of the Communist Party of China to get rich, even though he had nothing against the wealth he had acquired.

  He had been happy and proud when they had asked him to join the party while he was at college. What an honor. From the one hundred and sixty-four law students in his year they had invited three people. Three! The Communist Party of China was not a sports club that anyone could join or leave at will. Only the best were good enough for the party; it was composed of the country’s elite. He had not had a moment’s hesitation, even though he knew his parents would have their reservations. At the time, he simply ignored them, submitted his application, and studied into the night; he was one of the first to step into the library in the mornings and one of the last to leave in the evenings; he graduated with the highest possible grade, hoping to bring honor to the party.

  He passed the obligatory probation period without a hitch, and the initiation ceremony was short and simple. He wrapped the red party book in transparent plastic film that very night. He got an unimportant job as a lawyer in the city administration of Shanghai and was promoted after six months. Xiao Hu suspected that there was someone keeping an eye on him and championing him, without making himself known. From then on his ascent was swift. Training, conferences, seminars. The teachings of Mao. The teachings of Deng Xiaoping and of Jiang Zemin. The role of the Communist Party in the media and the judiciary. It had not occurred to him before that to seriously question it. Politics in the last thirty years had been too successful for that. Of course there were always cases in which he had a different opinion from what the official party line demanded, but these were never on fundamental issues. He saw corrupt party members whom he would have taken firmer measures against, had he any say. He saw the gap between rich and poor grow wider, but was this the party’s failure? His friend the neurologist Zhou claimed that anyone who was not rich now had themselves to blame. Anyone who didn’t make it now would never make it. After the Cultural Revolution the whole country had started from practically zero, and anyone who did not make use of the many chances that came his or her way practically every day was simply too stupid. Everyone had the choice.