Stories

by Susan Sontag

  It’s not that I’m afraid of getting simple, by going to China. The truth is simple.

  I will be taken to see factories, schools, collective farms, hospitals, museums, dams. There will be banquets and ballets. I will never be alone. I will smile often (though I don’t understand Chinese).

  Second half of unidentified quote: “The personal problem of the individual has become a subject of laughter for the Gods, and they are right in their lack of pity.”

  “Fight individualism,” says Chairman Mao. Master moralist.

  Once China meant ultimate refinements: in pottery, cruelty, astrology, manners, food, eroticism, landscape painting, the relation of thought to written sign. Now China means ultimate simplifying.

  What doesn’t put me off, imagining it on the eve of my departure for China, is all that talk about goodness. I don’t share the anxiety I detect in everyone I know about being too good.

  —As if goodness brings with it a loss of energy, individuality;

  —in men, a loss of virility.

  “Nice guys finish last.” American saying.

  “It’s not hard for one to do a bit of good. What is hard is to do good all one’s life and never do anything bad ….” (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Bantam paperback edition, p. 141.)

  A teeming world of oppressed coolies and concubines. Of cruel landlords. Of arrogant mandarins, arms crossed, long fingernails sheathed inside the wide sleeves of their robes. All mutating, peaceably, into Heavenly Girl & Boy Scouts as the Red Star mounts over China.

  Why not want to be good?

  But to be good one must be simpler. Simpler, as in a return to origins. Simpler, as in a great forgetting.

  X

  Once, leaving China to return to the United States to visit their child (or children), my father and M. took the train. On the Trans-Siberian Railroad, ten days without a dining car, they cooked in their compartment on a Sterno stove. Since just one breathful of cigarette smoke was enough to send my father into an asthmatic attack, M., who smokes, probably spent a lot of time in the corridor.

  —I am imagining this. M. never told me this, as she did tell me the following anecdote.

  After crossing Stalin’s Russia, M. wanted to get out when the train stopped in Bialystok, where her mother, who had died in Los Angeles when M. was fourteen, had been born; but in the 1930s the doors of the coaches reserved for foreigners were sealed.

  —The train stayed for several hours in the station.

  —Old women rapped on the icy windowpane, hoping to sell them tepid kvass and oranges.

  —M. wept.

  —She wanted to feel the ground of her mother’s faraway birthplace under her feet. Just once.

  —She wasn’t allowed to. (She would be arrested, she was warned, if she asked once more to step off the train for a minute.)

  —She wept.

  —She didn’t tell me that she wept, but I know she did. I see her.

  Sympathy. Legacy of loss. Women gather to speak bitterness. I have been bitter.

  Why not want to be good? A change of heart. (The heart, the most exotic place of all.)

  If I pardon M., I free myself. She has still not, after all these years, forgiven her mother for dying. I shall forgive my father. For dying.

  —Shall David forgive his? (Not for dying.) For him to decide.

  “The problems of individuals are fading away …”

  XI

  Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached. I have always been detached (in part). Always.

  —Oriental detachment?

  —pride?

  —fear of pain?

  With respect to pain, I have been ingenious.

  After M. returned to the United States from China in early 1939, it took several months for her to tell me my father wasn’t coming back. I was nearly through the first grade, where my classmates believed I had been born in China. I knew, when she asked me to come into the living room, that it was a solemn occasion.

  —Wherever I turned, squirming on the brocaded sofa, there were Buddhas to distract me.

  —She was brief.

  —I didn’t cry long. I was already imagining how I would announce this new fact to my friends.

  —I was sent out to play.

  —I didn’t really believe my father was dead.

  Dearest M. I cannot telephone. I am six years old. My grief falls like snowflakes on the warm soil of your indifference. You are inhaling your own pain.

  Grief ripened. My lungs wavered. My will got stronger. We went to the desert.

  From Le Potomak by Cocteau (1919 edition, p. 66): “Il était, dans la ville de Tien-Sin, un papillon.”

  Somehow, my father had gotten left behind in Tientsin. It became even more important to have been conceived in China.

  It seems even more important to go there now. History now compounds my personal, individual reasons. Bleaches them, displaces them, annihilates them. Thanks to the labors of the greatest world-historical figure since Napoleon.

  Don’t languish. Pain is not inevitable. Apply the gay science of Mao: “Be united, alert, earnest, and lively” (same edition, p. 81).

  What does it mean, “be alert”? Each person alertly within himself, avoiding the collective drone?

  —All very well, except for the risk of accumulating too many truths.

  —Think of the damage to “be united.”

  Degree of alertness equals the degree to which one is not lazy, avoids habits. Be vigilant.

  The truth is simple, very simple. Centered. But people crave other nourishment besides the truth. Its privileged distortions, in philosophy and literature. For example.

  I honor my cravings, and I lose patience with them.

  “Literature is only impatience on the part of knowledge.” (Third and last quote from unnamed Austrian-Jewish sage who died, a refugee, in America.)

  Already in possession of my visa, I am impatient to leave for China. To know. Will I be stopped by a conflict with literature?

  A nonexistent conflict, according to Mao Tse-tung in his Yenan lectures and elsewhere, if literature serves the people.

  But we are ruled by words. (Literature tells us what is happening to words.) More to the point, we are ruled by quotations. Not only in China, but everywhere else as well. So much for the transmissibility of the past! Disunite sentences, fracture memories.

  —When my memories become slogans, I no longer need them. No longer believe them.

  —Another lie?

  —An inadvertent truth?

  Death doesn’t die. And the problems of literature are not fading away …

  XII

  After walking across the Luhu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River between Hong Kong and China, I will board a train for Canton.

  From then on, I am in the hands of a committee. My hosts. My gracious bureaucratic Virgil. They control my itinerary. They know what they want me to see, what they deem proper for me to see; and I shall not argue with them. But when invited to make additional suggestions, what I shall tell them is: the farther north the better. I shall come closer.

  I hate the cold. My desert childhood left me an intractable lover of heat, of tropics and deserts; but for this trip I’m willing to support as much cold as is necessary.

  —China has cold deserts, like the Gobi Desert.

  Mythical voyage.

  Before injustice and responsibility became too clear, and strident, mythical voyages were to places outside of history. Hell, for instance. The land of the dead.

  Now such voyages are entirely circumscribed by history. Mythical voyages to places consecrated by the history of real peoples, and by one’s own personal history.

  The result is, inevitably, literature. More than it is knowledge.

  Travel as accumulation. The colonialism of the soul, any soul, however well intentioned.

  —However chaste, however bent on being good.

  At the border between literature and knowledge, the soul’s orchestra bre
aks into a loud fugue. The traveler falters, trembles. Stutters.

  Don’t panic. But to continue the trip, neither colonialist nor native, requires ingenuity. Travel as decipherment. Travel as disburdenment. I am taking one small suitcase, and neither typewriter nor camera nor tape recorder. Hoping to resist the temptation to bring back any Chinese objects, however shapely, or any souvenirs, however evocative. When I already have so many in my head.

  How impatient I am to leave for China! Yet even before leaving, part of me has already made the long trip that brings me to its border, traveled about the country, and come out again.

  After walking across the Luhu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River between China and Hong Kong, I will board a plane for Honolulu.

  —Where I have never been, either.

  —A stop of a few days. After three years I am exhausted by the nonexistent literature of unwritten letters and unmade telephone calls that passes between me and M.

  After which I take another plane. To where I can be alone: at least, sheltered from the collective drone. And even from the tears of things, as bestowed—be it with relief or indifference—by the interminably self-pitying individual heart.

  XIII

  I shall cross the Sham Chun bridge both ways.

  And after that? No one is surprised. Then comes literature.

  —The impatience of knowing

  —Self-mastery

  —Impatience in self-mastery

  I would gladly consent to being silent. But then, alas, I’m unlikely to know anything. To renounce literature, I would have to be really sure that I could know. A certainty that would crassly prove my ignorance.

  Literature, then. Literature before and after, if need be. Which does not release me from the demands of tact and humility required for this overdetermined trip. I am afraid of betraying so many contradictory claims.

  The only solution: both to know and not to know. Literature and not literature, using the same verbal gestures.

  Among the so-called romantics of the last century, a trip almost always resulted in the production of a book. One traveled to Rome, Athens, Jerusalem—and beyond—in order to write about it.

  Perhaps I will write the book about my trip to China before I go.

  The story begins in a crowded place, something like a Greyhound bus station, only more refined. The main character is an intrepid young woman of irreproachable white Protestant ancestry and even, regular construction. Her only visible fault was mirrored in her name, Miss Flatface.

  Buffeted by mechanical stares, Miss Flatface decided to enter upon a career of venery. The spirits of Ben Franklin and Tom Paine whispered hoarsely in her ears, beckoning and forbidding.

  Miss Flatface lifted up her skirts. A gasp was heard from one and all. “No sex, no sex,” the crowd chanted. “Who could inspire desire with that face?”

  “Try me,” she murmured bravely, backing against a white tile wall. They continued to taunt her, without moving.

  Then Mr. Obscenity bounded into the room, wearing white knickers, a plaid shirt, and a monocle. “The trouble with you fellows,” he said, leering at Miss Flatface, then ripping open her nylon blouse without bothering to undo the buttons, “is that you’ve got principles. Too aesthetic by far, that’s what’s wrong with you.” He gave Miss Flatface a shove for emphasis; she stared, surprised, her eyelids fluttering. “Mild as any sucking dove,” he added, seizing her left breast and aiming it at the enrapt spectators.

  “Hey, I’m her husband, you know,” said a sturdy young fellow—Jim was his name—who separated himself from the crowd. “Miss Flatface is only her maiden name. Back home she’s plain Mrs. Jim Johnson, proud wife and mother of three, Den Mother, Vice President of the PTA at the Green Grove School—that’s where our kids go—and Recording Secretary of the local League of Women Voters. She has 9 and ¾ books of King Korn trading stamps and a 1962 Oldsmobile. Her mother—that’s my mother-in-law—would be mad as hell if I let you get away with this.” He paused. “If I let you get away with this, Mr. Obscenity, sir.”

  “That’s better,” said Mr. Obscenity.

  “Jim,” Miss Flatface called out crossly. “It’s no use, Jim. I’ve changed. I’m not coming home.”

  Something like a chariot, drawn by a team of roan horses, pulled up before the frosted-glass doors. Mr. Obscenity vaulted into his seat and, with a gesture that admitted of no refusal, summoned Miss Flatface to hers. Above the clatter of hoofs, as they sped away, moans and giggles could be heard.

  Back home, Miss Flatface—formerly Mrs. Johnson—had been renowned for having the cleanest garbage on the block. But in the place to which Mr. Obscenity had spirited her, nothing seemed amenable to the laws of sanitation as she had known them. Overripe peaches were languidly let fall, half eaten, onto the whitewashed wood floors. Sheets of sky-blue legal-size paper were scrawled with drawings of the male and female genitals, crumpled, then hurled into a corner of the room. Wine stains flourished on the damask tablecloths, which were never changed. A faded lipstick-smeared magazine photo of Marlon Brando was pinned to the inside of the closet door; the windowsills remained undusted; there was barely time for Miss Flatface to brush her teeth once a day; and the condition of the bed—particularly that of the pillow, bristling with tiny feathers—was not to be believed.

  From her window Miss Flatface could see the ocean, and a carrousel and a roller coaster called The Hurricane, and small figures—grouped in twos and in families—sauntering along the boardwalk. It was summertime, and several greasy fans about the room roiled the air without vanquishing the heat. Miss Flatface longed to bathe in the ocean, though she would not have dreamed of washing off the pungent body smells that Mr. Obscenity relished. Her craving for cotton candy was more easily satisfied. Practically no sooner had she voiced a wish for some than there it lay, wrapped in newspaper, at her door. But when she was only half through, merrily pulling off wads of the pink fuzz with her unnecessary teeth, Mr. Obscenity leaped on the bed and took her. Amid the twanging of bedsprings the cardboard cone swathed with the sticky mess fell unnoticed to the floor.

  Sometimes people dropped in for dinner. While Mr. Obscenity presided at one end of the oak trestle table, various swarthy figures bandied talk of Communism, free love, race mixing. Some of the women wore long gold earrings. Some of the men had pointed shoes. Miss Flatface had a notion of foreigners from movies. What she hadn’t known about was their dreadful table manners, such as the way they tore off chunks of bread with their fingers. And the rich garlicky stews and foamy custards did not always agree with her. After dinner there was usually a good deal of solemn belching. Miss Flatface happily joined in.

  Though sometimes unnerved, as much by the pulpy confusion of foods as by the tenor and momentum of the conversation, Miss Flatface had by now a good deal of confidence in Mr. Obscenity. He, whatever the state of his guests, was always immaculate and neatly buttoned. Her confidence was further increased by the mimeographed pages in the clipboard that Mr. Obscenity often carried and frequently consulted, even at the dinner table. This augurs well, thought Miss Flatface. There is some system here.

  Hearty and ready for fun at the drop of a hat—that was how Miss Flatface tried to think of the guests. When lewd plaster statuettes were passed around the table, her neighbor might nudge her in the groin to express enthusiasm. Occasionally a pair of guests would sink beneath the table, which would shudder for a while until the flushed and disheveled couple reemerged.

  Observing that Mr. Obscenity seemed to wish to show her off to his friends, Miss Flatface resolved to be as friendly as possible. One day, she hoped, there would be nothing that he might ask of her that she could not do.

  “Nice little woman you got there,” observed one of his black chums, a man everyone called Honest Abe. He flicked his cigar ash into a gold-plated diaphragm that served as an ashtray, and tilted back in his chair.

  “Take her,” said Mr. Obscenity with a genial wave of his hand. Then he jotted something on the clipboard
.

  “Well I dunno,” said Honest Abe. He rubbed the fringe beard that decorated his chin, musing.

  Miss Flatface wondered. Was this big black Honest Abe afraid of slim Mr. Obscenity? Or did he find her undesirable?

  “Ain’t much of a face …”

  That settled it! Tears got ready behind Miss Flatface’s eyes.

  “And white women ain’t good for my blood. That’s what the Prophet says.”

  “Abe!” said Mr. Obscenity, menacingly.

  “Yes, Mr. Obscenity. I mean yeah, boss. I mean yes, sir.”

  Honest Abe hoisted his great bulk wearily from the table, dropping his napkin, scattering breadcrumbs from his lap to the floor. “Well, little woman, let’s see what you and me can do. Can’t do you no more harm than it does me.” He chuckled.

  Miss Flatface rose eagerly. She felt the faint tingling in her stomach. The spirits of James Fenimore Cooper and Betsy Ross whispered in her ears, beckoning and forbidding. “It’s my duty, isn’t it?” she asked Mr. Obscenity, wishing to quell the last flecks of doubt that soiled her perfect resolution. “The national will, I mean. The national purpose. And the national presence.”

  “You must do what you have to do,” said Mr. Obscenity coldly. “This, after all, is the American dilemma.” He made a notation on his clipboard and turned back to his guests.

  Honest Abe carefully removed his maroon velvet jacket and hung it on the back of his chair, then unstrapped the transistor radio that nestled in his armpit.

  So that’s where the music was coming from, thought Miss Flatface.

  Their union took place in a bathtub whose hard white enamel surface had been draped with gaily colored bath towels, blue and purple and brown and yellow, like the tent of a sheik. Over the faucets someone had considerately, perhaps even reverently, laid the Stars and Stripes. They do smell different, Miss Flatface had the presence of mind to observe. But it’s a nice strong smell. I wonder why I was so afraid of them when I went into that candy store late one night to buy a pack of Luckies, or in the movie-theatre balcony (I was just a kid then) when that big one sat down beside me. Seeing them in the newsreels rioting and throwing bricks in their own dingy streets, it makes you afraid. There seem to be so many of them. But one at a time they’re not so frightening once you get really close. They deserve all the rights they can get, she concluded.