The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  “I’ve had a text message from Hu Yan. She says the Grain Fallen on the Ground underground church is in Jiaozuo in Henan. Old Fang, let’s take a trip to Henan.”

  2.

  THE FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE OF SEVERAL PEOPLE

  The grain fallen on the ground does not die

  Fang Caodi had been all over, north and south of the Yangzi, and as he drove his Jeep Cherokee at high speed along the G4 highway, overtaking every car he came to, he told Lao Chen about some of the strange and fascinating things he had witnessed.

  Fang Caodi said there was a place called Happy Village in the Mount Taihang area of Hebei; everyone in the village was exceptionally happy, but the media had been repeatedly ordered not to report this. Probably because upstream from the village was a huge, secret chemical factory. After he heard about it from a reporter in the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, Fang Caodi went directly to Happy Village. Everyone in the village really was smiling and extraordinarily friendly. They all looked pretty healthy, too. The men wore flowers in their hair, and there were old women sitting around, bare to the waist and sunning their droopy breasts; they didn’t seem to mind at all when strangers walked by. It was a spectacle virtually never seen in China. He followed the river upstream from the village, and after about five kilometers he saw a huge chemical factory with a wide-perimeter barb-wire fence and warning signs all around it. There was no way to get any closer, but he could see small planes flying in and out of what looked like a private landing strip.

  Lao Chen listened to Fang Caodi; he didn’t dare say a word, even though he felt like it, for fear that Fang Caodi would take his attention off the road. He was driving so fast and talking so much that several times they came very close to an oncoming vehicle. Lao Chen vowed that, if he arrived in Henan alive, he’d give thanks to God and Buddha.

  Lao Chen didn’t want to die before he had found Little Xi. If he were to die in an accident, he hoped it would be while holding her hand, and facing their last seconds of life together. If he were to die a natural death, he hoped that Little Xi would be sitting at his bedside watching over him. He wanted to grow old with her. But now she was almost definitely living in her own personal hell, unable to see any way out. He had to give her hope, had to end her loneliness, had to do everything in his power to bring her out of her shell, so that she wouldn’t feel so exhausted.

  He took a bite of one of Miaomiao’s cookies. Outside the window was the unending North China Plain, and inside his heart was full of unending love; he never imagined he could feel this way at his age.

  Driving south from Beijing past Baoding, but before they reached Shijiazhuang, Fang Caodi pulled over to the side of the highway near a slip road.

  “Follow the highway from Shijiazhuang and we’ll be there,” said Lao Chen, looking at the GPS.

  Fang Caodi didn’t respond.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lao Chen.

  “I’m sorry,” said Fang Caodi, “but I’m having a premonition.”

  “A premonition about what?” Lao Chen asked.

  “A premonition,” Fang said, “about that Happy Village I told you about.”

  “What about it?” Lao Chen was outwardly relieved it was nothing to do with Little Xi.

  “I don’t know,” Fang said, “but I’d like to take a look. It won’t take long, it’s not very far.”

  Lao Chen could only agree with him.

  They turned off on the side road and headed west on a paved road for about half an hour, and then went into the hills for about twenty minutes on a gravel road. They got out of the car and walked another half an hour on a mountain road until they reached Happy Village.

  It was completely deserted. Fang Caodi went into each house one by one. “The villagers didn’t even take their farm tools or kitchen utensils,” he said. “It looks pretty suspicious.”

  Lao Chen noticed that all the houses in Happy Village were the typically simple and crude constructions you see in rural North China, especially in Hebei. The peasants of Hebei were not the poorest in China, but Lao Chen believed that of all the rural architecture in China that of Hebei was the most unsightly; they made no stylistic demands, and generation after generation they continued to build crude and simple houses; it was easy to see that the peasants of Hebei didn’t care much about aesthetics. Yet there were colored paintings on the outside walls of every house. The paintings had the flavor of those New Year pictures called nianhua, but their style was much freer, and some of them even exhibited some charmingly sexual poses. In Lao Chen’s present state of mind, he could see feelings of love in the paintings. On one wall was a very colorful life-sized flower. This kind of extra decoration and attempt at adornment was something rarely seen in a primitive Hebei village. These peasants had become graffiti artists, and perhaps Happy Village really lived up to its name.

  Lao Chen thought it would be interesting to meet the peasants who had made the paintings, but some other time. “What’s wrong?” he asked Fang Caodi, who was staring blankly upstream. “Let’s go.”

  “It’s been less than a year,” said Fang, “and they’re all gone.”

  “Don’t ask me to walk another five kilometers upstream,” said Lao Chen. “I can’t even walk one more kilometer.”

  “There must be a road,” said Fang Caodi, “that leads to the chemical factory.”

  “That road probably comes from the Shanxi side,” said Lao Chen, trying to dissuade Fang Caodi from the trip to the factory he knew he was about to suggest. “I can think of a hundred reasons why the villagers moved, and none of them have anything to do with that factory. You shouldn’t always be trying to find some sort of conspiracy.”

  Fang Caodi stubbornly refused to move, so Lao Chen played his trump card. “Old Fang,” he said, “you know that your premonition can’t prevent something from actually happening.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” said Fang Caodi, “let’s go.”

  Wei Xihong, female, from Beijing, also known as Little Xi; most recent Internet name maizibusi; last-known employment: selling ice-cream bars in the Yellow Emperor’s hometown of Xinzheng in Henan Province; previously employed as a ticket seller in three villages claiming to be the original home of the mythical Pangu. Based on this itinerary, her next stop would be either Mount Shennong, named for the legendary founder of agriculture, or one of the various places that claimed to be where the Great Yu parted the waters and created the Chinese continent.

  Indeed, she went next to Jiaozuo, known in ancient times as Huaichuan. There are six old cities in this region, and local legend has it that nearby is the place where Emperor Yandi or Shennong planted the five grains and tasted the hundred grasses. It goes without saying that there are many parks with historical themes in the area, and no shortage of jobs in the tourist trade. She didn’t, however, immediately look for employment, but wandered around somewhat distractedly because Jiaozuo brought back some deeply personal memories.

  She thought of her first posting as a judicial clerk-secretary in that county-level court. And of the pressure on her to agree to all those executions. The examples her colleagues brought up to sway her were of Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, and Luoyang, all of which towns had executed forty or fifty people. Even a backwater like Jiaozuo had executed thirty people. When Little Xi visited Luoyang, Kaifeng, and Zhengzhou, the events of the 1983 crackdown never entered her head. But when she went to Jiaozuo the events of that year appeared right before her eyes.

  Those events had changed her life forever and proved she was not cut out to be a judge in the People’s Republic of China.

  Little Xi stayed in bed for two days in a small inn in Jiaozuo before coming to a decision. She resolved to rid herself of the ghosts of the 1983 crackdown. In the early morning of the third day, she took a small bus toward Wen County, Jiaozuo, and went to the Warm Springs township. She walked around aimlessly until she passed a big house where the front gate was open and a number of friendly-looking, elegant people were milling around in the yard.

&
nbsp; There was a spring couplet pasted on the gate. The top line read: “Heaven bestows the Tree of Life / Faith, hope, and love abide eternally.” The bottom line read: “The Spring of Life gushes from the earth / Body, mind, and soul dedicated completely.”

  Is this a home church? wondered Little Xi. Aren’t they supposed to be underground? How can they be so open?

  At that point, the people in the yard disappeared into the building, leaving only one middle-aged man standing by the gate looking at Little Xi. He took a few steps toward her, and she saw that he was lame. “Please come in,” he said to her. Little Xi walked slowly into the yard with her eyes fixed on the banner on the house front: GRAIN FALLEN ON THE GROUND DOES NOT DIE.

  She thought to herself, I’ve only ever heard that the spirit does not die, or that matter cannot be destroyed, but this says that a grain of wheat never dies—it certainly accords with philosophical materialism.

  The man responsible for the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground was called Gao Shengchan. From his name, meaning “high level of production,” one could easily tell that his parents had been minor local officials who had given their children names like “Production” and “Planning” in accordance with government policies at the time of their births.

  Two years earlier, Gao Shengchan, Li Tiejun, and three others had organized an underground Protestant church in Jiaozuo City. But they soon came into conflict with the government-run Three-Self Patriotic Church, were arrested by the Public Security police on orders from the local Bureau of Religion, and were sent to prison. There they dubbed themselves “grain fallen on the ground,” from Jesus’s parable that if only one grain of wheat fell on the ground and died, it would then give birth to a great deal more wheat. They had already resolved to die for their religion and they grew even stronger in prison; they would never abandon God’s work. After their release, they were all the more resolute. Li Tiejun, who had made some money in business, bought a piece of land in the Warm Springs township, built a big meeting house, and established a Christian fellowship. Four leaders set up fellowships in the villages around Jiaozuo and put into practice Mao Zedong’s policy of “the countryside surrounding the city.” Gao Shengchan traveled between these four fellowships preaching the gospel. Nowadays the Bureau of Religion and the Public Security police no longer bothered them as before. Even more unusual was that almost more people than the fellowships could handle were asking to join their church.

  More than thirty people now participated in the Warm Springs fellowship’s daily witness meetings and Bible-study sessions, and there were upward of two hundred people at their weekend revival meetings. The parishioners introduced new members every day, and some, like Little Xi, just walked in off the street.

  Gao Shengchan had once worried that if the church was too active it might attract the attention of the authorities. But Li Tiejun and the other three leaders had already dedicated their lives to God’s work and they wanted to press forward with no regard for the consequences; there was no way Gao Shengchan could restrain them. For example, when Li Tiejun wanted to put spring couplets with Christian themes up on the church gate, Gao Shengchan opposed this as being too conspicuous. In China there are things that you can do, but you cannot be too loud about doing them, he thought. Gao could not change Li’s mind, and Li Tiejun said that they not only had to have a good product, but they also needed some good propaganda, and the spring couplets were an advertisement. What Li Tiejun said also moved Gao Shengchan: “Our mission is just and honorable, and I refuse to hide our light under a bushel.” In the end, Li had been right. Many people learned about the church from the spring couplets; they came in to listen to the revival meetings and ultimately joined.

  Later on, officials from the Bureau of Religion had come to the church and asked them about their activities. But the officials’ attitude was not at all antagonistic; they didn’t say much, and after they’d gone, nothing more was heard from them. Over the last two years, the government had been keeping a very low profile.

  Gao Shengchan was a graduate of the provincial university. Before going to prison, he’d been a middle-school teacher and an avid reader of the Reading Journal, right up to the moment he came to believe in Jesus Christ. He was an intellectual, not from a peasant background like Li Tiejun and the others, and so he worried a lot more than they did. He was particularly concerned that the government’s lenient policy might not last long, because the number of believers in the whole country was growing very fast, especially in the terms of the membership of Buddhist organizations and Protestant churches. Gao Shengchan had a number in mind: 150 million. Most of them had joined in the last two years, and the so-called home churches accounted for 80 percent of them. Ever since Liberation, except for the worker and peasant classes, there had never been an interest group that made up such a large proportion of the national population. During past crackdowns on the landlords and rich peasants, on the capitalist class and Rightists, it had always been the great majority against a small minority—but now a divided majority of 1.3 billion was faced by a united minority of 150 million religious believers. Surely the Communist Party could not suppress Christianity the way they had the Falun Gong movement? But how could the Communist Party not be apprehensive about so many Christian believers? Gao Shengchan both hoped that the number of Christians would continue to increase rapidly and feared that the Communist Party might turn on them. He prayed to God to give the Christian churches another ten years of peace in which to develop, and swore that he would work in those ten years to see that the number of Christians reached 350 million. That would equal one-fourth of the population, a critical number that he thought would ensure the security of the church.

  In order to protect their long-term development, Gao proposed that each Christian order or sect attend to its own affairs only. The Evangelicals, the Liberals, the Fundamentalists, and the Charismatics should not meet together, and churches within the same sect should not come together too often. He didn’t want the government to have the impression that the home churches were developing into province-wide or even nationwide organizations. Many people who attended the churches didn’t understand his concern, and they criticized him for being insufficiently open, or caring too much for his own church group, or even for trying to set himself up as a supreme leader. Gao Shengchan told them, however, that the main thing was to communicate directly with God and not to communicate with each other.

  Another thing that Gao Shengchan himself could do, however, was to write articles and circulate them to the various believers; this was actually a way of sending information to the government. His most important theme was “God is God and Caesar is Caesar.” He wrote that the Christian church did not seek secular political power; it was a force for social stability, and thus the secular government should not interfere with religion. His hope was that he could influence the government to change its usual policy and accept the idea that politics and religion were separate realms. He wanted to erect a firewall between the political regime and his religion, and that would be of great assistance to the development of religion at this point in time. He also wrote blogs under several names to support those Beijing scholars who advocated the desensitization of religion.

  However, Gao Shengchan didn’t advocate putting extra pressure on the government during the desensitization process, and he was opposed to the demands of urban radical Christian intellectuals for official recognition of the home-church movement and for the legalization, open operation, and free publication of formerly underground churches. He believed that the government could not officially recognize the home churches; desensitization was their bottom line. After desensitization, the best thing would be for the government to act as though it were unaware of the underground churches, and for the Bureau of Religion to act as though it had never heard of any home churches outside of the Three-Self Patriotic denomination. The home churches should not do anything to embarrass the government. If they didn’t cause any trouble, everybody coul
d save face and everybody could function well.

  Gao Shengchan thought that later generations would probably look back and say that this was the purist age of Chinese Protestant Christianity. Because it operated outside the Three-Self Patriotic Church, Protestant Christianity still retained its underground character, and there were very few secular benefits to becoming a member of the church. So most of the new members joined the church with a pure heart; they were practicing faith for the sake of faith. If some church leaders or volunteer workers became corrupt, they were the exception and not the rule. People in China who were genuinely ambitious for fame, profits, or power joined the Communist Party, the so-called democratic parties, commercial-interest groups, organized-crime gangs, or the entertainment industry; comparatively few would choose the religious arena. Even if they did, they would join the government-recognized religious organizations or found a sect of their own; they would not be very likely to join a Protestant denomination. On the other hand, in a country like the United States, where Protestant Christianity was the mainstream religion, the churches could hardly avoid being associated with fame, profit, power, and interest groups. Gao Shengchan hoped that Chinese Christianity could continue to develop underground for a long time so that ambitious characters would not be interested in the home-church movement and Chinese Christians would be able to remain as pure-hearted as they were now.