Becoming Inspector Chen

by Qiu Xiaolong

  At first, Chen Cao had hardly any knowledge of his father’s ordeal, except that neighbors started to call him Old Black Monster Chen, instead of the Mr Chen they had respectfully used before, even though his hair turned white overnight in 1966. In Shanghai, people would often address middle-aged or elderly people by their family names preceded with the character lao, meaning ‘old’, and young people by their family names preceded with the character xiao, meaning ‘little’. In their case, the neighbors simply called the old one Old Black Chen, and Chen, still so young, Little Black Chen. Some took pity on the kid, however, so more often than not it was simply shortened to Little Chen.

  All the while things were becoming more and more heated in China. In Qufu, Shandong Province, the Confucian temple was demolished overnight. The bodies of Confucius’s great-grandchildren were dug out of the graves in angry denouncement. The Red Guards in charge there thought about fetching Old Black Chen over to the temple as a live target for the revolutionary mass criticism, but a rival group of Red Guards broke out in an armed power struggle with the first group and the plan was scrapped.

  Still, the revolutionary mass criticism went on as before in the college where Old Black Chen had taught. One evening, Little Chen saw him lurching back home with a sudden limp and, on another evening, almost falling to the floor with his face covered in undisguisable large bruises like a rotten persimmon. And with his family gone to bed, the old man still had to work and rework something called a ‘guilty plea’ under the broken lamp late into the night three or four evenings a week.

  The ritual of guilty plea writing came as a new development in the mass criticism against the class enemies, who then had to confess and repent their sins and crimes, which in Old Black Chen’s case focused on his advocating the Confucian doctrine that Chairman Mao had vehemently denounced. That would have been difficult, Little Chen imagined, since Old Black Chen was known as a brilliant scholar in the field, and those Confucianist ideas must have been so familiar to him. According to the People’s Daily, Confucian was a monstrous ‘counter-revolutionary’ in feudalistic China about two thousand years earlier, looking to the past in a vain bid for the salvation of the decaying Zhou dynasty. And that was that.

  But Old Black Chen would have been seen as too bookish, and instead of letting him off the hook easily, the Red Guards demanded him to denounce the ‘atrocious crimes’ from the bottom of his black heart and soul again and again until their proletarian satisfaction. Little Chen, often called ‘Black Puppy Chen’ in elementary school, was too overwhelmed by the waves of humiliation and discrimination against him to worry about what might have been happening to his father.

  In the second year of the Cultural Revolution, Old Black Chen suffered acute retinal detachment, so the college revolutionary committee told him not to come to work any more. A broken man, he left not without a touch of relief. At least there would be no more revolutionary mass criticism.

  But that gave rise to another problem. Under the proletarian dictatorship, sick leave benefit was possible only for the proletariat, not for an ‘unreformed bourgeois intellectual’. In other words, neither pay nor medical insurance for Old Black Chen. Because of his class status, the pay for his wife’s job at the middle school was drastically reduced too, and far from enough to support the whole family. Back home, he came to the realization that he had to have the eye surgery as soon as possible … and then return to work as a janitor at the college.

  He managed to check into the Shanghai ENT Hospital, accompanied by Little Chen. Presumably it would take just one or two days for the surgery, and then about a week or two for recovery at home.

  Things at the hospital turned out to be very different, however. With a considerable number of experienced doctors and nurses condemned as ‘black monsters’ and disqualified for work, and with those remaining too busy struggling for survival, the patients had to go through an unexpectedly long waiting period for operations.

  On the third day, Little Chen was shocked by a message that came home through the neighborhood phone service: ‘A family member of Bed Seventeen has to hurry over to the hospital for revolutionary mass criticism.’

  ‘Bed Seventeen’ referred to Old Black Chen, his bed being so numbered in the hospital ward. The message came from a Red Guard organization called ‘Fierce Wind and Thunder’, its name derived from a Mao poem. That threw the Chen family into a panic.

  How could Old Black Chen have gotten into trouble in the hospital? And for that matter, why should his family member go there as well? All seemed totally inexplicable and ominous to Little Chen.

  His mother had just suffered a nervous breakdown, so the job was up to him. The realization hit home with a splitting headache. Having heard stories about family members being mass criticized together with the targets, he shuddered at the prospect. As a ‘black puppy’ he had given up any dream of becoming a Red Guard, going to college, or getting a decent job in socialist China, but those were worries for the future, unlike the revolutionary mass criticism of the present.

  His mother served him a bowl of mint-flavored green bean soup, his favorite snack in summer, but it helped little with the headache. He rose to leave for the hospital with a reluctance bordering on resentment.

  Along the way, Little Chen tried to figure out the possible cause of his father’s trouble. The Red Guards at the college were unaware of the surgery, so they could not have reported anything to those at the hospital. And the old man should have known better than to reveal anything to the people there.

  Little Chen cudgeled his brains out thinking, without success, as he sweated in a bus packed like a bamboo steamer of tiny soup buns. At the hospital stop, he stumbled down, drained like one of the broken buns.

  Instead of heading to the ward, he decided to pay a visit first to the office of the hospital revolutionary committee.

  As it turned out, the Fierce Wind and Thunder organization consisted of patients rather than hospital staff members, who were hardly capable of protecting themselves, and were like ‘the clay statues in a temple drifting across the river’ in an old Chinese proverb. The organization had popped up in response to Chairman Mao’s call for the proletarian dictatorship to be enforced in every corner of Chinese society. The head of Fierce Wind and Thunder, who gave orders in the name of the Cultural Revolution, was a patient surnamed Huang on Bed Thirty-Five in the next ward. It was said that Commander Huang suffered from esophageal cancer at an advanced stage. He was a man in his mid-forties, wearing a red armband on his T-shirt sleeve and a white gauze pad around his throat.

  ‘It’s our Party’s policy to be humanistic even toward the sick class enemies, but not for an unremorseful one,’ Commander Huang began, his voice hissing with a sudden metal sharpness. ‘Until he truly repents his crimes to the full, he deserves no medical treatment in the hospital here. Don’t ever think he could get away so easily.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ Little Chen said in a respectful hurry. Under normal circumstances, it might not be too big a deal for Old Black Chen to write and rewrite the guilty plea a couple more times, but if Commander Huang refused to approve the plea, it meant that no doctor would be allowed to perform the surgery on the old man. That would mean he had to stay here for weeks, or even months. As it was, they could hardly make ends meet at home, not to mention the hospital expenses.

  Little Chen kept nodding like a wound-up robot. It was an inhuman role to play, pretending he had no feelings of his own.

  Once again, those Confucian maxims his father had taught him proved to be totally irrelevant. There are things a man should do, and things a man should not do. But what the hell were the things in question? For another, A gentleman is worried not, but a low class man nervous all the time. But being a young boy, he had been constantly nervous of late.

  As for the crime Commander Huang was accusing his father of, he still had no clue. In an English book on Neo-Confucianism written years earlier by Black Chen, an old family friend had recently d
iscovered several paragraphs praising Wang Yangming, a Neo-Confucianist scholar of the Ming dynasty, so he told them in haste to hide the book away. With the ideas of Wang Yangming being advocated by Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, those paragraphs could have been considered as evidence and condemned as a serious political crime during the Cultural Revolution. But how could Commander Huang have come to know anything about them? No, Chen decided, that wasn’t the reason for the trouble.

  ‘Instead of repenting the bourgeois lifestyle of his in the United States,’ Commander Huang continued huskily, as if whistling through a broken steel pipe, ‘he actually has the nerve to brag and boast about it in the hospital. He has to write a new guilty plea.’

  ‘Yes, I will definitely help him write a soul-searching, guilty-pleading statement,’ Little Chen said. ‘Please give me some specific details, Commander Huang, so I can make him dig deeper into his black heart and come to terms with the very root of the evil.’

  ‘Well, he talks as if he alone knew how to make a milk-powder drink,’ Commander Huang said, ‘thanks to the bourgeois extravagance he enjoyed in the United States before 1949. Who the hell is he to look down on the Chinese working class people?’

  Sirens pierced the back of Little Chen’s mind. At home, his father had said little about his life in the US, for fear of ‘advocating the American bourgeois lifestyle’. And the grudge he bore against his father for bringing him into the black class family background made it more difficult for the father to open up to the son. More often than not, Old Black Chen wrapped himself in a cocoon of silence. During the so-called three years of natural disasters in the early 1960s – when more than thirty million Chinese people died of starvation because of the Big Leap Forward movement launched by Chairman Mao – his father must have been starved into a delirious recollection of a special campus canteen experience he had enjoyed in the early 1940s. As a work-and-study student with a part-time job at the American college canteen, he could have as much milk as he liked, seven days a week. It was not necessarily fresh milk; occasionally, he caught glimpses of a blonde waitress making a milk-powder drink behind the counter. But that part of the story appeared even more exotic to the son, who listened to it like a fairytale, mouth watering all the time. After all, the family did not have a single bottle of milk for years.

  But could the old man have been so stupid as to talk about it in the hospital?

  By the side of Bed Seventeen, however, he could not bring himself to complain at the sight of his much-changed father: unshaven, blindfolded, unable to find a pen with his fumbling hand.

  So that was one of the reasons Commander Huang wanted a family member at the hospital. To help, Little Chen realized, noticing a jar of milk powder on the bedside table for the patient at the next bed.

  He drew in a deep breath, trying to gather the details of the incident that had landed his father in trouble. Those days, milk powder was a rarity, and Bed Eighteen was lucky enough to have a jar, but he did not know how to properly mix it, resulting in an inedible mess. So Bed Seventeen shared with Bed Eighteen the knack of stirring the milk powder first with a little cold water before pouring in hot water, mentioning his experience in the American college canteen by way of explanation. Sure enough, the little trick made all the difference. Bed Eighteen talked to others about the secret recipe with such great gusto that it soon spread out of the ward. The same evening Commander Huang made enquiries into it, and detected the problem with his ever-present alertness for anything new in the class struggle.

  For Little Chen, whatever the possible cause of the problem, the far more pressing issue was how to rewrite the plea, which had to be acceptable to Commander Huang. It would not do to just add apologies, however truthfully contrite, for the bourgeois decadence of a cup of milk-powder drink. He re-examined his father’s ejected piece, which began, rather bookishly, about how he had dreamed of a college education in the States but couldn’t afford the tuition. So it was just with a stroke of luck that his application for a work-and-study program got through, and he managed by working at the school canteen in a part-time job with acceptable pay and free milk.

  That part of his experience as a work-and-study student at the American college had never been shared at home. The pen trembling in his hand, Little Chen came to see the problem with the plea in the eyes of Commander Huang. The attempt to portray himself as a hard-working student who happened to learn through fortuitous circumstances the trick of making a milk-powder drink was unacceptable.

  As his father, the ‘unreformed, unrepentant bourgeois intellectual’, started dictating the new piece, Little Chen decided not to follow his words too closely. Such a piece was bound to be rejected again. In his elementary school, in a big-character guilty plea posted on the front wall, one of his ‘black monster teachers’ had condemned himself so eloquently, Little Chen recalled, like a Sichuan chef generously throwing handfuls of peppers into the wok.

  ‘I am totally rotten, black from heart to toe. For my crime, I should be trodden underfoot, unable to turn over for hundreds of years. For fattening myself on the poor people, I deserve to be cut thousands of times …’

  As it goes in a proverb, a dead pig does not have to worry about the scalding water, which cannot make it any more dead. So why worry about piling up those revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, clichés?

  He included the milk powder part, of course, as the early but unmistakable sign of his father’s decadent indulgence in the West. So his eventual turning into a counter-revolutionary Confucianist scholar was anything but accidental.

  About forty-five minutes later, Little Chen finally plodded to the conclusion, jotting down an exclamation mark and nodding to himself, when he heard an announcement coming through a loud speaker in the ward: ‘Bed Seventeen and his family member come out to the hospital reception hall.’

  There, the first thing Little Chen saw was a long red banner stretched across the half-deserted hall: The Hospital Revolutionary Mass Criticism.

  Apparently, Huang had seized upon his availability to have the event arranged in addition to the guilty plea, for the blindfolded target was unable to go through the ritual without somebody taking him by the hand. Little Chen turned over the plea to Huang, who stuffed it into his pant pocket without taking a look, and gestured him to take his position beside his father, whose neck was presently weighed down with a heavy blackboard showing his name crossed out in colored chalk. There were two other patients standing aligned with him, each sporting a similar blackboard.

  ‘Lower your heads and plead guilty to our great leader Chairman Mao!’ Commander Huang hissed out the command.

  Standing aside, Little Chen found his head hung low in spite of himself, though without a blackboard around the neck – the only difference between father and son. The humiliation overwhelming, the former soon became too weak to stand still, putting a hand on the latter’s shoulder for support.

  Little Chen tried imagining himself into a human crutch, stiff, motionless, unbreakable, without thoughts or feelings. But he was not that successful.

  It was perhaps because of his throat problem that Commander Huang did not say anything else, stepping off to return with a chair and sitting like a bamboo pole throughout the ritual.

  At the end of the longest hour imaginable, he stood up to wave the people away.

  Little Chen decided to stay on by his father’s side, believing there could be more rewriting for him to do in the hospital. He felt utterly exhausted. There was no point going home and then hurrying back.

  But by the time he finally left the hospital around seven thirty that evening, he still had not heard anything from Commander Huang.

  No message the following morning either. Around noon, he double-checked with the neighborhood phone service. Inexplicably, still no message whatsoever from the hospital.

  On the third day, a phone message came through: his father was being sent into the operation room and would be released home the next day.

  So Commander
Huang must have given his approval to the guilty plea; failing that, the doctor would not have moved ahead with the surgery.

  It was then surely to the credit of Little Chen. The new guilty plea, with all the creative words and phrases thrown in without his father’s knowledge, had worked.

  But then some other possible scenarios came up. Commander Huang might have relented at the sight of a child trembling beside his father during the mass criticism; alternatively, he could have suffered an unexpected turn for the worse in his own condition. Whatever interpretation, with the Cultural Revolution engulfing the whole country, it was after all nothing but a storm in a cup of milk-powder drink.

  ‘Unlike your bookish father, you know how to read people’s minds like a sleuth, and what to write. Indeed an impossible mission you have done,’ his mother said, subscribing to the scenario that held out the laurel to Little Chen.

  ‘A sleuth?’ He repeated the word without knowing its meaning.

  It was the first time he gained confidence in himself, in writing of all things, which might enable him to sway those people otherwise above and beyond him.

  Fall of a Red Guard

  Toward the middle of the second year of the Cultural Revolution, Chen caught a nasty flu at elementary school. His father had been labeled a ‘black monster of unreformed intellectual’ in early 1967 and thrown into ‘isolated investigation’ at the college, where no family members could visit. That meant, ironically, that Chen did not have to worry about writing guilty pleas for the old man any more. His mother, overwhelmed in the black shadow of it, along with all the extra work pushed onto her as punishment at the middle school, was unable to take him to the neighborhood hospital on the corner of Jinling and Songxia Roads. Recovering from a recent nervous breakdown, she nonetheless insisted that he had to see Doctor Zhang, one of the most experienced doctors there.