by Rob Schmitz
I choose to ride with the electric scooters. I can usually pedal fast enough to keep up with them, and their riding habits—traveling as an integrated unit like a peloton in the Tour de France—help protect me. Each morning’s ride requires a constant awareness of my surroundings. Despite the appearance of vehicular pandemonium, many drivers possess a conditioned athlete’s mental focus, behaving according to the unspoken rules of the road. They move in concert with one another as they speed and swerve down the Street of Eternal Happiness, a system disguised as chaos.
ON A COLD DAY in the winter of 2012 I ascended 2nd Floor Your Sandwich’s spiral stairway to warm up with a cup of coffee in a corner booth. The branches of the plane trees outside were like nude, brittle chopsticks, pointing in all directions, making scraping sounds across the second-floor windows whenever a freezing wind came swirling down the street.
On a shelf in the middle of the sunny dining room sat CK’s accordion, a massive black instrument with “Polverini” engraved across the front in elegant cursive. The shop was empty that day, so CK heaved it off the shelf, slumped into a sunlit booth, bowed his head, and pressed the air release button, slowly opening the bellows. The instrument exhaled, a sigh so deep it seemed to be coming from CK himself. The day before, his head chef had quit in a fury, taking half the waitstaff with him. If any customers arrived today, CK and Max were on their own.
He paused for a moment, and then launched into a furious, fast-paced ballad, his fingers racing across the keyboard. He closed his eyes as the melody took shape, expanding and contracting the instrument with a fluid motion, his fingers moving so quickly they seemed to have minds of their own. It was a patriotic song from his childhood, and as his head bobbed back and forth, memories suddenly came to him, driving the song forward, faster and faster.
CK WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD when it dawned on him: killing himself wasn’t going to be easy. For two straight months, he had explored his options each day after school. Swallowing sleeping pills should be the most comfortable way to do it, he thought, but the pharmacist wouldn’t sell them to him. “You’re too young,” she said. Walking off the roof of his family’s apartment building was a possibility. Nah, he concluded: too painful. “I realized I didn’t have the courage to jump,” he said.
There was another problem. He rarely had a moment alone. The boy was an only child with overbearing parents and a nai nai—his maternal grandma—who left his side only when he used the toilet. Each day he ate a porridge breakfast seated inches from them. At the school down the dirt road from his family’s rural home, teachers took over. After that, it was back to nai nai and his parents for homework, music lessons, and a vegetables-and-rice dinner. He couldn’t even steal a minute alone at bedtime: nai nai slept on a thin bamboo-matted bed beside him.
One afternoon while his father was writing at his desk, CK took a final, determined inventory of his family’s cold, bare apartment. Outside, the air was thick with the exhaust of neighboring chemical and mining-equipment factories. He walked through the apartment, quietly foraging for household objects with the most promising life-ending potential. His quest ended in the only room where he had a reasonable excuse to be alone: the bathroom. He settled on a straightedge razor he discovered in his father’s shaving kit. One night before turning in, he slipped the folded razor into his pajamas pocket.
It was a chilly autumn evening. Moonlight filled the room. The night was quiet, save for nai nai’s steady breathing and the occasional train in the distance. It announced itself with a soft, sustained horn blast, followed by the soothing rumble of freight rolling along track before dissipating into the silence. As he waited for his grandmother to fade into deep sleep, CK thought about his family.
FROM AN EARLY AGE, the boy had listened to his father talk about “the system.” He was never sure what the words actually meant, but he could usually predict when his father was about to utter them. His father had a way of pausing before he said the words, pronouncing the phrase slowly and deliberately, making them stand apart from the rest of a sentence so the boy would take note.
“You see, Kai Kai, you just can’t fight…the system.” The phrase was imprinted onto the boy’s memory in italics.
After a difficult day at work, his father would return home and sit his son down, a ready audience for his rants. The system didn’t allow him to choose his career. The system didn’t reward intelligence. The system discouraged individual talent. You could never get ahead in the system. “Zhongguode guoqing buhao!”—“China’s state of affairs is terrible!” his father would rage.
“My father thought he was an intellectual,” CK said. “He wasn’t happy with his job and the fact that he didn’t choose what he wanted to be. He knew he was smarter than others. He wanted to succeed based on his talents, but he couldn’t. The system wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t think my mother was very smart, and that frustrated him, too. He didn’t like his colleagues at work, and he hated China.”
When CK tried to ask questions, his father shushed him, continuing his tirade. Eventually, CK felt it made little sense to talk in a home where no one listened. So he stopped talking altogether.
CK didn’t have any brothers or sisters. He was born in 1981, two years after the implementation of China’s planned-birth policy. His shared living quarters with his mother, father, and nai nai were on the top floor of a run-down four-story brick building assigned to them by the city railway bureau, his grandmother’s work unit. The stairwells were littered with garbage. CK’s father employed the system’s propaganda of the day—Leader Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations campaign and President Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents slogan—to describe the place. “He called it a ‘three no-managements’ area: nobody cleaned it, nobody administered it, and nobody cared about it.”
The same could be said for the city where CK grew up. Historically, Hengyang, as far from Shanghai as New York is from Chicago, was a place to avoid. Located in the central province of Hunan, it made brief appearances in Chinese records beginning fourteen hundred years ago, when Tang dynasty emperor Gaozong punished a rebellious assistant by banishing him to administer the city. Later, emperors used an appointment there again and again as retribution for other dodgy high-ranking court officials, all sent to govern a far-flung municipality on the edge of the empire, from where they were seldom heard again.
Modern times hadn’t been much better for the people of Hengyang. On a freight rail map of China, the north–south and east–west lines crisscross there, creating an X in the heart of the country. It’s one of the region’s most important centers of heavy industry. Chemical factories abound, as do coal, lead, and zinc mines. The air was polluted and rancid, but there were jobs: CK’s grandmother worked at the railway bureau, his mother at a phosphate fertilizer factory, and his father at the Hengyang City Number Two Construction Company.
CK’s parents were born in the early 1950s alongside the birth of Communist China. Their generation grew up with the Party’s schizophrenic campaigns, revolutions, and counterrevolutions that left tens of millions dead, persecuted, and imprisoned. There was rarely a calm moment in those years. Survival depended on a keen ability to adapt to an ever-changing political environment, understanding that, like someone caught in a riptide, you must resist the urge to swim against a much stronger force. There was always the possibility of patiently maneuvering your way to safety, but you first had to cede control to the system.
As teenagers, CK’s parents were sent to the countryside to farm for several years, a fate typical for city kids under the policies of Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Mao dreamed of a China where urbanites worked alongside farmers in a proletariat utopia; but when he died in 1976, his dreams went with him. Most “sent-down youth” promptly dropped their hoes and returned home to their families. Upon their arrival, the Party stepped in again, assigning them jobs at local state-owned enterprises. By the time they turned thirty, CK’s parents hadn’t yet made a single career decision for themselves.
“WOULD YOU LIKE to draw or play the violin?” CK’s parents asked him one day in 1985. The three sat at the dinner table, the adults searching the boy’s face for an answer. His father had always aspired to be a writer or a musician. He was convinced that had he mastered an artistic skill as a boy, he might have been able to wrest some control from the system that had robbed him of any choice in how he made a living. Pushing his son into the arts would serve as a safety net in case China’s economy took another treacherous turn someday, he reasoned.
CK’s parents had whittled the boy’s options down to skills other family members had shown talent for. The boy’s grandmother was a gifted illustrator. His father had once happened upon an erhu—a two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument vaguely similar to the violin—in the garbage, and had taught himself how to play. The two choices were clear.
“Draw or play the violin,” his father demanded, staring at his son. The boy thought for a moment.
“Draw,” he replied.
His parents turned away from him, whispering to each other, before turning back to him. “You will play the violin,” announced his father.
CK had just turned four.
CK’S LESSONS started when his family shelled out six months’ salary for a new violin. They ended a couple of years later when the government launched a series of reforms that privatized parts of China’s economy. This put employees at the most inefficient state-owned enterprises, such as Hengyang City Number Two Construction Company, on the chopping block. CK’s father lost his job, and with that went money for the violin teacher. The family scrambled for an alternative, and someone remembered that an uncle owned an accordion. A new instrument was chosen. CK’s uncle taught the boy the basics for half a year until one night when an electrical fire burned down the government-owned shop where the man worked. CK’s uncle was the manager, so the government held him responsible and sent him to prison.
“It wasn’t his fault,” CK’s father said about the incident; “it was the system’s fault.”
CK’s dad, who had no idea how to play the accordion but plenty of time to learn, took over as instructor. It didn’t take long for CK’s knowledge to surpass his father’s, and practice became a subtle power reversal as son began to instruct father. Lessons turned tense at unpredictable moments, with CK’s father screaming and slapping his son for any perceived misstep.
CK’s father was insecure, temperamental, and so scrawny he looked feminine. His mother was calm and confident, with the strong hands of a peasant. The Chinese say such characteristics often spring from childhood. CK’s father grew up in the city, while his mother was raised on the shores of Dongting Lake in the Hunan countryside. She seemed to have absorbed the resolute stillness of its serene waters. “She was somehow more masculine,” CK said. “She demanded self-esteem and independence.”
CK’s father hit his mother, too. CK sometimes heard screaming from their bedroom at night. He usually noticed a spattering of purple bruises on his mother’s face and arms at breakfast the next morning. As he got older, the boy would try to step in between his parents at the height of these arguments. “I would try to protect her, but he was too fast,” he said.
CK spoke of his father not with bitterness, but with the resignation that the Chinese often feel toward people they despise yet also love out of duty. It wasn’t his father’s fault, he says, nor was it the system’s. It was his father’s spleen.
The Chinese believe the spleen is the receptacle for a person’s temperament and willpower. This belief is immortalized in the Chinese character for spleen: , or pi. Add in the Chinese character for energy, , qi, and together piqi—literally “spleen energy”—comes to mean “temperament” in Mandarin. Many Chinese believe that any damage to the spleen threatens your piqi, making you unable to control your emotions. When CK’s father was a boy, he was punched so hard in a fistfight that his spleen ruptured. CK said once his dad had injured his spleen, his piqi had been lost forever.
In the spring of 1989, CK’s father ratcheted up his politically inspired rants. CK was eight, too young to understand the news of student protests and hunger strikes from Beijing. There were whispers of democracy and the possible end of one-party rule in China. Hundreds of miles away in Tian’anmen Square, protesters had erected a white statue, the Goddess of Democracy, that towered over a sea of students. She held aloft a torch with both hands and her gaze was fixed on the oversized portrait of Mao hanging at the entrance to the Forbidden City, and, beyond that, to China’s current patriarchs ruling the country from inside their guarded compound, like a mother protecting her children from the tyranny of their father. But the students had swiftly assembled the goddess from metal, foam, and papier-mâché in just four days, and they were pitting it against a style of governance that had lasted millennia. It was hardly a surprise when China’s patriarchs prevailed, employing their brute strength to kill thousands, silencing the discussion about the system—a system that would endure.
In the aftermath of the Tian’anmen crackdown, CK was again forced to play audience to his father’s political tirades. “I was a kid and I didn’t understand much of it,” he told me, “I just felt depressed. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to be stuck at home, left to face my father.”
Soon after, CK’s mother sought an audience of her own. She sat him down and delivered some news. “Ma’s going to be staying somewhere else from now on,” she told him. “How about every Wednesday or Thursday I come back here to see you?”
At the time, divorce was uncommon in China. Marital strife was typically worked out behind closed doors, moderated by older generations to ensure the family unit—the backbone of Chinese culture—remained unbroken. CK’s mind raced. His classmates would soon find out. His teachers would know. He would have to live alone with his father, with only his grandmother as buffer. CK’s father stepped into the room. Would his father blame his mother’s departure on the system, too? the boy wondered. Family, he concluded, was the only system that mattered.
“I want to go live with Mom,” CK announced.
His father didn’t pause. “It’s been decided,” he said. “You’ll live with me.”
THE FIRST SONG CK learned on the accordion was “Caoyuan Gechang Mao Zhuxi,” or “The Grasslands Sing for Chairman Mao.” CK obediently mastered it, playing the refrain over and over like a machine under the stern watch of his father, who was always ready to strike the boy at any hint of attitude. Between lessons, his father would complain. “Your mother is no good,” his father told him, “how could she leave us?”
At school, it seemed everyone had learned about his parents’ separation. His classmates asked questions, wondering what it was like to have parents who lived apart. His teachers used the news to embarrass him in front of other students when he wasn’t paying attention in class. CK began to feel anxious. He yearned to isolate himself from his classmates and his family: to become chouli—detached. “The only quiet time to myself that I had was my walk between home and school. I was basically walking from one source of pressure to the other.”
CK LAY AWAKE that autumn evening of his eleventh year, staring at the ceiling, far from chouli as nai nai’s breathing grew deeper. He felt the weight of the folded straightedge razor pressing lightly on his thigh through his pajamas. When he was certain nai nai was asleep, he sat up in bed and withdrew the razor from his pocket. He unfolded it. He took a breath. Holding the handle firmly in his right hand, he pressed the blade to the inside of his left wrist.
He penetrated skin, cutting into flesh. He watched as blood rose to the surface. He began making swift cutting motions, pressing left to right again and again. He was bleeding, but it wasn’t the geyser he’d expected. He switched hands and tried the other wrist. The family matriarch continued to doze peacefully beside him. His blood seeped into his pajamas, but the wounds kept clotting. He couldn’t find a vein. And his wrists began to hurt. “I continued to cut, but it was useless. I couldn’t see well, and my wrists were so thick,”
CK told me.
CK slowly folded up the razor and returned it to the pocket of his bloodstained pajamas. This is just too difficult, he thought to himself before falling asleep.
THE BELLOWS OF THE ACCORDION expanded and compressed like the lungs of a runner in mid-sprint. The fingers of CK’s right hand frantically raced up and down the keyboard, staccato bursts of treble notes trickling over a shifting landscape of bass controlled with a swift mechanical reflex of his left fingers, the two sides chasing each other. CK’s eyes were still closed in concentration. A freezing wind blew down the Street of Eternal Happiness, sending the branches outside clattering against the windows of the shop. All appeared to be in harmony, but then CK hit a wrong note. Then two. He opened his eyes, looked at me, and laughed, giving up.
“Wow. What was that?” I asked him.
“ ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy,’ ” he said, still laughing.
The song was a revolutionary epic that opened one of eight Beijing operas allowed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It borrowed heavily from Water Margin, a fourteenth-century Chinese novel known as one of the four classics of Chinese literature. Party leaders turned the novel’s tales into musical propaganda—a portrayal of a proletariat hero to rouse the masses in support of the system.
CK shook his head, embarrassed he had forgotten how to play a song he had spent his childhood practicing.
“I used to play traditional Chinese songs, but I later discovered I didn’t like to play them,” CK told me, wiping sweat off his forehead to reveal two bright, oval brown eyes that seemed larger than they were because of his face, which had become thinner in recent weeks. “I preferred something different. It took me a while to realize I can play my own songs.”