by Fang Lizhi
In September 1990, Fang’s intellectual independence showed again in an essay he wrote for The New York Review of Books called “The Chinese Amnesia.” Robert Silvers, editor of the Review, had solicited the piece, and Fang had drafted it while still inside the embassy. Silvers asked me to translate it, and when I read it I was startled. Fang had written that the 1989 democracy movement and the June Fourth massacre might soon be forgotten in China. What? How could that be? The shocking events had been broadcast to the entire world and the reverberations were still strong. Forgotten? Fang’s analysis was that Chinese demands for liberalization had risen in prerevolutionary Yan’an in the 1940s, in the 1956 Hundred Flowers movement, in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, and again in 1989—and in each case the protesters began anew. No group knew the history of protest in its country or about the progress that its predecessors had made. This happened, Fang wrote, because the Chinese Communist Party has a program for erasing the memory of protest—and it works. Party leaders will be applying it again, he predicted, and it will likely work again. I set my skepticism aside and translated the essay.
It turned out that Fang was right. Many young Chinese today have only vague impressions that something happened in 1989, and when they do feel that they “know” something, it is often colored by their government’s grotesquely distorted version of events. Fang wrote his amnesia essay at a time when most people, including me, were writing about indelible memories. It was the scientist’s empiricism, not sentiment or mystical vision, that had given him clairvoyance.
The agreement between the Chinese and American governments in releasing the Fangs provided that after six months on the small island they could move elsewhere. They loved their stay in Cambridge, but they left England in January 1991 and traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, where they had a long-standing invitation to return to the Institute for Advanced Study. They had visited there five years earlier and this time stayed exactly a year, until January 1992, when they moved to Tucson, where Fang had been appointed professor of physics at the University of Arizona.
In his twenty years at the University of Arizona, Fang would publish 162 papers on astrophysics. (Most were coauthored with others, usually his students.) He resumed teaching as well, and to judge from tributes that colleagues wrote after his death, he taught with gusto. He even volunteered to be a freshman adviser. Once, when his department came up short of teaching staff and needed to cover another course, he simply volunteered to do it outside his normal teaching load. His department chair, Sumit Mazumdar, recalls a hospital visit to Fang in 2011. Fang had been suffering from “valley fever,” a rare lung disease caused by a fungus found in the deserts of the American Southwest. The medications that are the standard treatment for the malady have side effects, and patients often need several months, or even a year, to recover, after which residual effects can linger. Fang had a severe case of valley fever, and he had to make several visits to emergency rooms and ICUs through the late summer and fall of 2011. At the time Mazumdar visited him, he had lost sixteen pounds in less than a week and could barely walk. Yet Mazumdar found it hard to divert his conversation with Fang to any topic other than “Can you find a substitute teacher?” After he was released from the hospital, Fang spent two weeks in a nursing home and went home in late November. He began to feel a bit better over the Christmas break and, optimistically, signed on to teach full time again beginning in January 2012. Mazumdar reports that simply to walk from the parking lot to his classroom was leaving Fang short of breath, yet he still didn’t want to hand off any teaching.
An anecdote from another of Fang’s colleagues, Alexander Cronin, shows how Fang’s intelligence and creativity—and his puckish wit—extended to his teaching of physics. During an oral exam for a Ph.D. candidacy, Cronin writes:
[Fang] had a twinkle in his eye. He clearly enjoyed phrasing simple, elegant questions that gave students a chance to show what they knew. He asked about the electric field inside a uniformly charged sphere. Then he asked a classic question about the electric field inside a spherical cavity (a void) with no charge that was arbitrarily located somewhere off-center but inside the uniformly charged sphere. After some vector addition, this question has a simple answer: a uniform field is found in the void. Then came Fang’s gotcha: please repeat this analysis for two voids. The student asked for clarification, then went on to reach a correct but cumbersome answer. The punch line as Fang ended the session was that “two voids” is not the same as “one plus one void.” It struck me as a deep question about how and when to apply the principle of superposition. Fang enjoyed this and the student did, too.
Fang could not publish inside China at any point during his time in Arizona. Even his articles on pure science were banned. The three Chinese characters “Fang Lizhi” could not appear in juxtaposition in any book or article. He could have used a pseudonym but chose not to. Despite these barriers, he maintained close contact with physics colleagues in China. He mentored graduate students and young professors at a distance, using Skype and other electronic means, and he welcomed the applications of Chinese graduate students to work with him in Arizona. Some of those students have gone back to China and are now leading figures in their fields.
Finances could be a big problem for Chinese graduate students in the United States in the 1990s. In addition to living expenses and school fees, there were subventions that had to be paid in order to publish scientific papers in international journals. These subventions could run to as much as one or two thousand dollars per paper, and Chinese students had little choice but to pay them, because they were the lifeblood of future careers back in China.
Fang looked for ways to help his strapped students, and one of his methods deserves special note. His younger son, Fang Zhe, came to the United States not long after his parents arrived.1 Shortly after his arrival in the U.S., a group of friends and admirers of the family donated to a Fang Zhe education fund and presented it to the parents. But Fang Lizhi reasoned that his own son did not need the money as much as others did. “If other Chinese students can do on-campus work, our son should, too,” he told Li Shuxian. “Besides, Fang Zhe has us to back him up; parents in China can’t do backup.” With Li’s agreement, Fang went back to the creators of the Fang Zhe fund and persuaded them to establish a general scholarship for students from mainland China: one student, for one year, would get about $15,000. The donors agreed and the plan went ahead. Fang and Li decided for the time being not to tell Fang Zhe what they had done. When Fang Zhe died in a car accident in 2007, he still had never heard.
Meanwhile, Fang continued with his human rights activity. In the 1990s he served as cochair of Human Rights in China (HRiC), a group based in New York whose director was the physicist turned rights activist Xiao Qiang. Xiao had been a student of Fang in the 1980s at the University of Science and Technology of China. A number of other distinguished Chinese dissidents in exile—the journalist Liu Binyan, the writer Su Xiaokang, the law professor Guo Luoji, and others—joined Fang on the board of HRiC. In the early 2000s, though, the executive leadership of the group changed hands, and the new leaders turned toward a focus on international activities such as lobbying foreign governments, attending conferences around the world, and so on. They seemed, in the view of the Chinese board members, to be losing contact with the people struggling on the ground inside China. Some of the board members felt awkward that their reputations were being used to raise funds that were not being well spent. In a tribute to Fang after his death, Su Xiaokang put it this way:
[HRiC], perched in its offices high in the Empire State Building, was bringing in ever more funding, year by year, and paying corporate-level salaries to its staff, but was also becoming ever more separated from actual human rights conditions in China. Fang was not the sort of person who wanted to be an ornament. One day he gathered me and the other board members from China and said, “They don’t seem too willing to work with us, so there’s not much reason for us to hang around.” That led to a mass
resignation of the Chinese board members, who set up a new group called China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) and began running it on a shoestring.
The CHRD shoestring thrived, primarily because it soon became the overseas office of the network in China called the “rights support web” (weiquanwang), a loosely linked group that reported on human rights and sometimes took action as well. CHRD and weiquanwang conceived, wrote, and disseminated Charter 08, the pro-democracy manifesto that was published in December 2008 and eventually led to both a long prison sentence and a Nobel Peace Prize for the literary critic and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.
Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian traveled to Oslo in December 2010 to attend the award ceremony for Liu Xiaobo’s prize. Liu was in prison then, and the Chinese government denied travel permission to any of his friends and relatives whom they suspected of heading for Oslo. But Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, was able to send out an invitation list of people who were living overseas, and Fang and Li were naturally included. The day before the ceremony, in frigid weather, a group of people from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, CHRD, and elsewhere—I among them—went to the gates of the Chinese embassy in Oslo to deliver a letter of protest. Fang declined to join. “You will meet, at most, a minor factotum, a person with neither will nor ability to make any difference,” he said. Fang preferred to use his time in Oslo to learn about the Vikings. Bold pirates, they. What did they do? How, so early in technological history, could they do it? Readers of this book will understand how these inquiries arise from Fang’s sometimes Olympian view of human history, and especially from his interest in the history of technology. Much more worthwhile than a factotum. The day after the Nobel ceremony, Fang led Li Shuxian, Su Xiaokang, CHRD chair Renee Xia, and me on an expedition to the Viking Ship Museum outside Oslo.
The generally smooth course of Fang Lizhi’s and Li Shuxian’s lives in Tucson was marred by one horrible tragedy. On October 25, 2007, their son Fang Zhe was killed at a highway intersection when an elderly driver ignored a stop sign. Thriving and handsome one moment, gone the next. Li Shuxian later wrote a long poem called “A Roadside Shrine for My Son Zhe,” the final lines of which are:
Clouds, low on the horizon, of a kind you seldom see in Arizona, silhouette my heart
On a country road in Pinal County
At that heart-searing crossroads
Next to a horse-farm fence
I see the telephone pole; it’s made of wood
On its southeast edge, a scar from the crash remains
And a few steps beyond, tire ruts remain as well, at the bottom of a gully
Here is where my son’s soul departed
Here is where he bled
Here I can hear—can I?—the tiny reverberations of the sound of the last breath that he took.
I flew to Tucson for Fang Zhe’s memorial service, and an image of Fang Lizhi at the event is vivid in my memory. As I entered the large hall, I saw Li Shuxian in the first row, seated and weeping. Friends and relatives were seated, also weeping. Soon I, too, was doing the same. But Fang Lizhi, the host of the event, stood at the front of the room—straight, silent, aware. Can there be anything more painful for a human being than the death of one’s child? But there he was, tall, unbent.
Less than five years later, Fang’s own memorial service took place in that same room. Valley fever normally does not lead to death. When Fang died, he had been out of the hospital for more than four months and, although weak, was working daily on his teaching and research. Beginning about March 20, 2012, he began to feel worse than usual. He visited his primary care physician on April 3. On the morning of Friday, April 6, he reluctantly decided to call the university to postpone a class that he was set to teach. He then went to his computer, opened Skype, and began to work on plans for a conference on general relativity scheduled for July in Stockholm. He was on the organizing committee and was to give a major address. Suddenly he coughed loudly, then died, still sitting, the conference materials still in his hand. An autopsy could identify no specific cause of death.
News of Fang’s passing spread quickly on the Chinese Internet. Students he had taught in the 1980s, along with other admirers of his eloquence, wrote their accolades. Here are two:
Some call him China’s Sakharov, and that’s fine. But to me, Fang and the Communist Party are more like Galileo and the Roman church. An astrophysicist against powerful and arbitrary authority; the authority persecutes the physicist, but the physicist gets the truth right.
Fang shows us a better way to be Chinese in the modern world. To be Chinese does not have to mean “supports Bashir al-Assad at the UN” or “puts a Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison.” We can be better. Teacher Fang is our example.
State Security noticed, and soon all Fang tweets on weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) disappeared after posting. The 1989 warrant for Fang’s arrest had never been dropped, so it was still the official government view, when Fang died, that he was wanted for the crime of “counterrevolutionary incitement” and as “the biggest black hand behind the June Fourth riots.”
Fang’s older son, Fang Ke, invited me to say a few words at Fang’s memorial service. Since time was short, I settled for a list of eight of Fang’s most salient virtues, pairing each with an anecdote from my personal memory. For the virtue of independence, I told the story of how he wrote in 1990 that “forgetting” the Tiananmen massacre would become a problem even though everybody else, including me, assumed the events to be unforgettable. For the virtue of strength, I recalled his astounding composure at Fang Zhe’s memorial. The other six virtues, with associated memories, were:
Modesty. I had met Fang in the fall of 1988, when I was working in Beijing for the scholarly exchange office of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. My friend Orville Schell arranged an invitation to dinner on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Festival at the classic old-style courtyard home in Beijing of Zhang Hanzhi, a former English tutor of Mao Zedong and the widow of Qiao Guanhua, who had served as foreign minister for Mao from 1974 to 1976. About eight people sat around an outdoor table. What struck me about Fang was how quiet he was. He seldom spoke—although it was clear that he was listening, because he occasionally sent a peal of joyous laughter through the air. My expectations of Fang may have been shaped by what I knew of Liu Binyan, Fang’s fellow victim in the 1987 campaign against “bourgeois liberalism.” Liu was handsome, imposing, somewhat Lincolnesque, and had charisma that could fill a room of any size. Or perhaps it was because I knew that Fang had been a high-ranking academic official that I expected someone who spoke with some guanqiang (“official flavor”) or other stylized self-presentation. But no. Fang had no façade of any kind. “Hi! I’m Fang!” That was it.
Empathy for common people. I recalled again what I had seen on February 26, 1989, when the police blocked Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian (and my wife and me) from attending President George H. W. Bush’s Texas barbecue in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping had made it clear that he would not attend if Fang did. After we were stopped for “speeding” and our car ordered away—and after the taxi that we then boarded was blocked as well (for a “defective taillight”), Fang proposed that we line up at a public bus stop and catch a bus to the embassy. A bus approached, but about a hundred yards before it reached our stop, someone flagged it down and said something to the driver. The bus then swooshed past us without stopping. About thirty other people were waiting at the stop. They shouted at the bus; some cursed. A few minutes later a second bus swooshed by in the same way. Fang looked at me and said, “The problem here is us. We have to leave. It isn’t fair to these laobaixing [“ordinary folk”]. It’s the end of the day and they’re trying to go home.” With that we left the bus stop and headed for the embassy on foot. So there we were, at the focal point of a drama that involved a U.S. president and China’s top leader. Police were swarming and odd events kept occurring. A few hours later the incident was in headlines around the world. But Fang? He was worried that the laobaixing couldn’
t catch a bus. It was unfair.
Courage. About two hours later that same night, we had arrived by foot at the gate of the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Beijing. A clutch of policemen barred the way. What to do? By chance, we met a Canadian diplomat named David Horley and his wife, who were out for an evening stroll. The Horleys, who knew who Fang Lizhi was, invited us to their apartment for a snack, a couch, and use of a telephone. At the gate of their apartment building, a policeman demanded to know the identity of the Chinese visitors. Horley began an explanation of his rights as a diplomat to invite to his residence anyone of his choosing, but it was obvious that the niceties of international law were floating over the head of the Chinese policeman. Fang took a different tack. He removed his Chinese ID card from his pocket, stepped forward right in front of the policeman, held the card in two hands in front of his chest, about four inches beneath his chin, and said in a sharp, clear voice: “Fang … Li … Zhi!” Even the policeman was startled. We entered.
Wit. In May 1989, while student demonstrators were in the streets of Beijing calling for democracy, I listened as a Western journalist interviewed Fang. At the end, the interviewer asked if he could follow up, if necessary. Fang said “sure” and gave the reporter his telephone number.
“We’ve heard that your phone is tapped,” the reporter said. “Is it?”