by Fang Lizhi
Nearly forty years later, in 1981, I was visiting Kyoto University when a Japanese friend invited me to a performance of the tea ceremony. The hostess of the ceremony was a lover of Chinese calligraphy, and she insisted that I leave a few characters behind to commemorate the occasion. This caused me to remember that childhood exercise sheet that had once floated its way to Japan, and the memory helped me reattach to the particle of skill I had once possessed and to use it to satisfy the sincere request of this hostess.
Toward the end of the war, Japan’s control was growing obviously weaker. By the time I was in the fourth and fifth grades, only one Japanese person was still at our school. Maybe the rest had all been drafted. This last Japanese person lived—alone—inside the school. He seemed to have no function in the Japanese system and he showed no trace of the arrogant-occupier attitude. When the Japanese surrendered he quietly disappeared. Only later did we learn that he was an “antiwar element” whom the Japanese authorities didn’t trust to be a soldier. They permitted him only to teach Japanese in elementary school.
When I was in fourth grade, the meaning of abstract words like “fairness” and “justice” was just starting to come to me, and I could make only a bit of sense of recondite phrases like “the Imperial Army has turned an advance [won a battle]” or “all fighters became shattered jade [were badly defeated].” I still had no clear social or political awareness. I hadn’t begun to mature in these ways, and I lagged far behind most of my classmates in them.
When I was in fourth grade, my brother was in sixth, and we were in the same school. We had parallel nicknames: “Big Square Bean” for him, “Little Square Bean” for me. (Fang means “square.”) But our peer groups were entirely different. His group were budding activists. They knew how to make their own projection slides, and from time to time they put out their own little hand-copied newspaper. Its content did not reach to the big political and social issues of the day; it was limited, understandably, to the concerns of schoolchildren. But still, compared to the imperial droning we heard every Saturday on the exercise field, this was freedom—the real thing. In later years several of those youngsters in my brother’s group rose to high positions. One became a minister of culture. Another was a deputy minister for film and television. Quite a few others reached the level of bureau chief or Party secretary. Their unusual gifts emerged early, one might say. To this day, this group of government ministers, university presidents, and Party secretaries holds elementary school reunions.
I was not part of a group like my brother’s, but I used to have two good friends, Bai Daquan and Gu Bei. I say “used to” because, although I have never forgotten their names, I have completely lost touch with them and have no idea where they are. These two, Bai and Gu, were more than just good friends; we were secret sworn brothers.
Swearing brotherhood was nothing too unusual at the time. It was a gang culture that pervaded most of China—although in Beijing, where the imperial authority was strong, it was weaker than elsewhere. Beijing had no Blue Gang or Red Gang as Shanghai had, and no Elder Brother Society like the one in Sichuan. The brothers and sisters of the Boxers did arise briefly in Beijing, it is true; but the Boxers had the support of the imperial authority so were not “secret” in the classic sense. Short of forming gangs, though, the practice of swearing brotherhood or sisterhood was common in Beijing, even in elementary schools. Even the top leader in the country, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, entered a sworn-brother relationship with his deputy commander Feng Yuxiang, and when the Communist Red Army passed through the Yi region on its famous Long March in the 1930s, the front commander Liu Bocheng opened a vein to exchange blood and swear brotherhood with the tribal leader Xiaoyedan. With sworn relationships as conspicuous as this (even between a “slave chieftain” and a Communist?), it is hardly strange that their allure spread all the way down to us schoolchildren. We wanted to give it a try.
I can remember that afternoon in spring—I think it was in April—when Bai, Gu, and I made a secret visit to an obscure temple in Houhai Park to perform our brotherhood vows. We didn’t ask what religion the temple belonged to, because that didn’t matter; what mattered was only that a deity with notary power be available to witness our vows. In our ceremony, each of us placed a small paper card, on which we had inscribed the year and month of our birth, on the altar in front of the statue of the god; then we bowed to the god in unison and solemnly pronounced the words, “Not born on the same day, month, and year, but wish to die on the same day, month, and year.” That did it; now we were sworn brothers. I can’t remember whether we burned incense. I do remember that we began saying we were just like Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, the three famous heroes of Three Kingdoms lore, who swore brotherhood in a peach garden. In fourth grade we had yet to open The Romance of the Three Kingdoms; the lore came just from hearsay.
Another thing that I picked up from adults as a fourth-grader was newspaper publishing. Unfortunately I produced only one issue. There were no copying machines at the time, but I could use gelatin offset plates, which were what people used in those days to make a few copies of something. The technology was simple: using special ink, you wrote down on a piece of paper what you wanted to print. You then pressed that paper, ink side down, onto a gelatin slab and waited about half an hour for the ink to soak in. That gave you a gelatin master onto which you could press sheets of blank paper to produce copies. It worked for a dozen or so copies before the ink ran out. In my father’s work at the Ministry of Railways he had to copy all kinds of charts and reports, and so he could take home a lot of used—but in many cases still usable—gelatin offset plates.
At first I just used the plates as toys. I experimented with different printing techniques, comparing the results. Then it dawned on me: Hey, I could print my own newspaper! It would look better—more official—than the newspaper the sixth-graders were doing, which was hand-copied or, at best, carbon-copied. So I appointed myself editor, copywriter, and publisher of the official newspaper of the fourth-grade class. I named the paper Universal Truth Will Win and wrote a lead article titled “Universal Truth Is Sure to Win.” The issue also carried some news items about our class and about the school as a whole. It included a copyright page—just like the big, formal newspapers—that listed “Fang Lizhi, Editor,” and so on. The spread was two A4 sheets of paper, about 11 by 17 inches. The distribution system consisted of my going to my classmates and handing them copies. But after this most satisfying of launches, the paper ceased publication. It was, like my “ceremony of swearing brotherhood,” a one-shot deal.
Both events—swearing a brotherhood and publishing a newspaper—can be seen as a child learning to imitate adult behavior. The model in one case was from the third century A.D., and in the other from the twentieth century, but the impulse to imitate was similar.
When I grew older I came to realize that “universal truth will win” meant something different from what I had originally thought. I had picked up the phrase from my environment, where it was a product of the Japanese invasion. Here’s what happened: The main Japanese slogan in China was “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” in which the word “co-prosperity” was a euphemism for the glaring fact of invasion. The cover was threadbare, though, so some of the Chinese who had opted to cooperate with the Japanese invented more palatable phrases, of which “universal truth will win” was one.
As a fourth-grader I had nowhere near the sophistication needed to perceive these subtleties, and I fell for the ploy. Every time we children went to Zhongshan Park I saw those famous words of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, tianxia wei gong—FAIRNESS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD—carved into a grand stone monument. The character gong (公), for “public” or “fair,” was the same that appeared in gongli zhansheng, “universal truth will win.” That coincidence made it even less likely that a fourth-grader could see the perfidy of the phrase.
“Universal truth will win” is hardly the only example of how the word gong has been abused in modern Chin
a. In 1958, Mao Zedong said his new communes would be yi da, er gong, “first, big; second, public”; and in the 1980s people were told to insist on the gongyouzhi, “system of public ownership.” Gong has popped up all over modern China, deceiving not just fourth-graders but adults of many kinds as well. The word can mean “public” in words like gongping (公平), “fair,” and gongren (公认), “publicly acknowledged,” but it can also mean “lord,” with a clear connotation of “male,” in words like wanggong (王公), “king,” or gonghou (公侯), “prince.” Hence a phrase like gongli (公理), “principles that are gong,” can mean either “principles accepted by all” or “principles of the sovereign.” A phrase like gongyouzhi (公有制), “system of gong ownership,” can be understood either as “system of ownership by the public” or “system of ownership by the ruler.” So what exactly did Mao’s slogans mean? The people who invented them kept this detail under their hats. If the slogans fooled somebody, that was the fault of the fooled. Anyone who had to get by in China, or to understand its society, had to master these subtle ambiguities. Such mastery is immeasurably more difficult than memorizing a few thousand Chinese characters, which elementary school students do, because this word mastery requires more than memorization and more, even, than rules of rational inference. It requires an exquisite sensitivity to foul odor, trained many times more finely than even that of a hound dog.
This is why, in retrospect, I feel that my mistake in using the phrase “universal truth will win” can be forgiven.
In the end, the Japanese “universal truth” failed. I can remember the scene when news of the war victory reached me. It was on August 15, 1945, about eight o’clock in the evening. School was out for summer recess. I was with a group of boys about my age under a streetlight, playing a game of our own invention, when a shout rang out: “Japan has surrendered!” Someone listening to a radio broadcast of the Japanese emperor’s surrender edict apparently felt an urge to go to the window and yell the news.
I can’t remember any spontaneous outpourings of joy over the matter. It may be that there weren’t any, because, if there had been, we schoolboys, who were always eager for such zest, would have been right there. Yet that shout of “Japan has surrendered!” in fact did not divert us much. It caused us to take a break from our game to get clear on what “surrender” meant, and then we just kept playing. It is worth noting a sharp contrast here with the people who had fled to the interior of China during the war. They often speak of their extreme and unforgettable excitement at the moment of Japan’s surrender. I have seen scenes of such public exuberance myself in any number of documentary newsreels. Every time I saw or heard about these scenes I felt deeply embarrassed that my own reaction had been so different. I also felt anger: How could Beijing people be such inert duds? Even in victory they couldn’t come out onto the streets and give a few shouts? I had to admit—although I didn’t want to—that long-term exposure to occupation had caused Beijingers, at least in part, to accept a slave mentality.
And that was not new. Beijing had long led the country in the proportion of the population with a slave mentality. Even by the time I went to college in 1952, it was easy to find in the city servants and errand runners left over from Qing times. Some imperial eunuchs of various ranks were still around. Beijing slang has a colorful phrase for the insuperable sluggishness of people in this subculture: “Three fists can’t pound out a silent fart.” And indeed, to extend the hyperbole, one could wonder whether even a Hiroshima or Nagasaki atom bomb could pound out more than something like “It is heaven’s will.” I remember when Allied aircraft filled the skies in the days after Japan’s surrender. Warplanes by the hundreds—P-51 Mustangs and B-29 Superfortresses—whistled and droned overhead, but some Beijingers, as they viewed the spectacle, said only that it reminded them of how crows fill the skies during winters. Now there’s a silent fart for you.
It might seem paradoxical that by 1945, Beijing was also famous as a fount of discontent. It was where all of the important social and political movements of the preceding five decades had originated. To those of us who had grown up in Beijing, though, there was no paradox—we knew that there were two different Beijing communities and that they seldom spoke to each other. Beijing activism did not arise from native Beijing culture; it all came from students, scholars, and others who came into Beijing from elsewhere. Beginning with the reforms of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao and the execution of Tan Sitong in the late 1890s down to the May Fourth movement in 1919 and to the March 18 massacre in 1926, none of the people who were killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile were native Beijingers; they were all from outside. The two groups in the city—the students and scholars, centered at the universities, and the traditional servants and lackeys, centered in the old imperial district—did not interact much. The main reason why the victory over Japan stimulated little excitement in Beijing was that the people in the university culture were still in the interior of China, in Chongqing and elsewhere, where they had fled from the Japanese. I was in Beijing throughout—from primary school to high school to college—and I have a very clear memory of the return of the activist culture after the watershed year of 1945.
In the fall of 1945, I was entering sixth grade. The first new concept we were all taught that fall was that China was now “restored”; we were receiving Restoration Education. During the past five years we had been getting slave education, and Restoration Education was something wholly different. It was different, too. The students and scholars who returned from the interior brought with them a new spirit.
My clearest memories of the new spirit are from music class. Until then, music had been my least favorite subject. I had music classes in each of my first five years in school but was always bored. The Fang household didn’t have much music at home, either. All my father could do was intone a few poems in crusty old Hangzhou dialect: “I feel the moment, while flowers spill my tears; I grieve to depart, while birds chill my heart,” and so on. He oscillated his head slightly to the left and then to the right to mark his rhythm—all very conscientious, but hardly inspiring. Mother knew some new-style songs from the May Fourth era, but it was forbidden to sing them under the Japanese occupation, and we wouldn’t have dared to, in any case. Meanwhile the songs we learned in school were all in Japanese style, and I couldn’t help feeling that they had something in common with my father’s intoning of poetry. They had no melody, and no half-steps—just a recitation of syllables in a regular lilt. Forty years later I found some support for my youthful impression that Japanese singing resembled my father’s. I heard Nō drama in Japan and was told that its style of singing, which had originated in the chanting of poetry, had been imported from China during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618–907). Singers of Nō, like my father, wagged their heads back and forth as they chanted. The angle of inclination was a bit different from my father’s, but that’s all. But then I thought, “So what?” After a thousand years, a bit of angle slippage could be pardoned.
According to an ancient Chinese proverb, listening to good music leaves one so smitten that one can no longer appreciate the taste of meat. I had always thought this to be an exaggeration—something, perhaps, thought up by a person who had eaten too much meat. But the music classes we got after Restoration opened my eyes to a whole new world of music. It was not a world that could take the place of meat eating—but neither could meat eating, in whatever amount, take the place of it. Our new music teacher was from Chongqing. He suffered severe sinusitis, which gave him a heavily nasal voice, and he often had to blow his nose during class. But he really sang well. For me, accustomed to the Tang Dynasty style of chanting, to hear his Western-style bel canto voice was to be startled that a human being could make such sounds. He was a strict teacher. To be sure that nobody could hide in the anonymity of the chorus, he made us sing one by one and made us repeat certain notes over and over so that he could pick out our mistakes and correct them. If I can sing at all today I owe it to him; more important,
I began at that point to enjoy listening to song. Eventually I developed a bad habit, which many of my fellow astronomers, both Chinese and foreign, are familiar with: I sing in my sleep. The seed of this bad habit was planted by that teacher with the sonorous nose.
But he planted another seed, and this other one was incomparably more important to me. He taught us the song “On the Taihang Mountains,” which begins:
The sun’s red rays emblazon the morning sky,
As the spirit of freedom pours into song.