A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  Her home was overcrowded, being occupied by her immediate family, her extended family, and by a dozen of what she described as “neighbors,” the latter being nonrelatives assigned to live on her parents’ property by the state housing authority. Since there was insufficient shelter in Beijing to accommodate the city’s burgeoning population, home owners were expected to share their living space with tenants designated by the state. Landlords such as her parents were in no position to resist, nor did they dare to complain. If they had complained, they would have risked being branded as bourgeois elitists at a time when Chairman Mao was extolling the virtues of proletarianism and promoting a class-leveling campaign, one offering equal opportunities for the privileged and better-educated elements to learn firsthand from the peasants what it was like to exist on the lower level of the social order. Revolutionary committee leaders and other zealots set all the standards when it came to public and private behavior and expressionism, and they heckled, harassed, and otherwise silenced manifestations of dissent and nonconformity. As the firstborn child of parents with an advanced education and diminishing influence, Madam Sun served as her family’s representative and hostage during the Cultural Revolution.

  As she recounted her story, I did not perceive in her manner, nor in her words as translated by Sharline Chiang, any indication of disapproval toward the authorities who had exercised such vast and arbitrary control during the Cultural Revolution. I found her lack of expressed resentment surprising even as I recalled reading that Chinese people hardly ever revealed their inner feelings to outsiders, and I also reminded myself that my wonderment about her seeming stoicism might be based on the fact that, residing in New York, I regularly lived among crowds of chronic complainers. More lawyers and psychiatrists probably thrived in New York than anywhere else in the world. I also thought that her apparent absence of self-pity or contentiousness might represent her confidence and fortitude, her determination not to be humbled by an ill-tempered and punitive period in Chinese history, during which she and millions of her countrymen were subjected to deprivation, social humiliation, and no doubt betrayal from many others whom they had trusted.

  What little I knew about the Cultural Revolution had come from history books and novels written by Americans or Chinese exiles, and such accounts were more or less in accord with how the Cultural Revolution would later be summarized in the Times by its correspondent Howard W. French—a “decade-long descent into madness.” Yet out of this madness, and perhaps because she recognized it for what it was, Madam Sun had adjusted and endured; and now I imagined her, together with millions of other middle-aged and elderly Chinese survivors of Mao’s demented decade, as being part of the backbone of a transforming China, and I recalled Friedrich Nietzsche’s comment: “What does not kill you will make you stronger.”

  Immediately after we had finished dinner, Li Duan apologized for having to leave, explaining that he wished to return home and spend time with his young son. It was shortly after 7:00 p.m. He asked if Sharline and I would accompany Madam Sun to her door, and I was happy to oblige. It afforded me an opportunity to see her neighborhood and perhaps receive an invitation into her home.

  As our taxi proceeded slowly through the traffic of Chang’an Boulevard in the direction of the Oriental Plaza and the Forbidden City, Madam Sun pointed to a large white modern building on the north side of the boulevard; it was the Jianguo Garden Hotel and she said that this was where she had come to watch the televised broadcast of the World Cup match in California. “I would have preferred to watch the match at home,” she said, “but the sports association had invited all the players’ mothers to be guests of the hotel and attend the Mother’s Hope Dinner on the evening before the game. The dinner was held in a private room in the hotel and everybody was very enthusiastic and friendly. The mothers were from different parts of China, and had been brought to Beijing on planes, buses, and trains. The coach’s wife was there and also some Chinese reporters. Most of us were meeting for the first time, but we suddenly felt very close because of our daughters being bonded to one another and to all of us, as well. A child leaves home and the mother’s heart must follow.

  “After dinner we went to our rooms, but I don’t think anybody slept much that night. At three a.m. we were awakened and met for breakfast in a hall where a large television screen was set up, and soon we saw our daughters wearing their red uniforms, representing China, playing soccer, and running up and down the field. There was no score; they started taking penalty kicks. The tension was terrible, and when Liu Ying’s kick was blocked, I began to feel tears in my eyes. Everybody was now crying, each for our own reasons. I cried for my daughter’s pain and my pain. Everyone tried to console me, but I just wanted to go to my hotel room. I did not want the others to see more of how I felt.”

  Our taxi had turned off the boulevard and we were now passing through an alleyway that was crowded with pedestrians and bicyclists and was lined on both sides by gray stone walls that were about seven feet high and were cracked and crumbling in many places. Within a matter of moments we had moved from a city of modern hotels and office towers to what my guidebook described as a classically antiquated Chinese neighborhood in which millions of walled-in residents occupied centuries-old single-story homes with lattice-arched entranceways opening out to an ancient alleyway called a hutong.

  Although relatively few people during the dynastic period had ever ventured into the Forbidden City, there were many hutongs leading toward it, traveled no doubt by traders and servants and various kowtowing opportunists who wished to congregate in the proximity of power and who eventually established communities along the fringes of the imperial preserve. Into one such community came a certain attorney from southern China in 1911 to conduct his practice and acquire a house on favorable terms in the wake of the abdication of the emperor. After the attorney had taken title to the house, he welcomed into it his boundfooted wife, who was conveyed through the hutong in a bridal sedan, an enclosed chair with poles in the front and back hoisted by two carriers. The address of the house—74 Wuding Hutong—was where Madam Sun, the late attorney’s granddaughter, directed our taxi driver to stop.

  She asked if we wished to come in, and after I had paid the driver, Sharline and I followed her toward the unpainted swinging exterior doors of the entranceway. The overhanging latticework was falling apart and the double doors lacked the decorative clasps and intricate carving that I had seen in picture books memorializing hutongs and their quadrangle houses with slanted tiled roofs and inner open courtyards. In the days prior to the Cultural Revolution, when Mao saw these houses as reflecting bourgeois values and his Red Guards often vandalized them, the courtyards were typically graceful areas of serenity in which flowers and trees were grown, caged birds sang, goldfish swam in aquariums, and family members communicated with one another while their children played. To whatever degree this is an idyllic image of the past chosen for publication in a picture book by a nostalgic editor opposed to Beijing’s present-day urban renewal campaign and the land developers’ eagerness to replace the hutongs with wider thoroughfares and demolish the old-style houses in favor of high-rises, I must say that I was unprepared for the wretched scene that greeted me as Madam Sun led us into what had once been a courtyard, into what I imagined had once been an arbor of congeniality. Now the area was overrun with weeds and dilapidated brick shacks that housed what Madam Sun had earlier referred to as her “neighbors.” Some of the occupants stood outside their doors watching us quietly, while others were busily engaged in chores—removing laundry from the clotheslines, tinkering with rust-covered bicycles, stacking circular chunks of coal with holes in the middle resembling oversize bagels. In one corner of the yard was an outhouse with corrugated tin walls and a leaky tiled roof covered with a tarpaulin secured in place by an overlay of heavy wooden planks and several bricks.

  After Madam Sun had acknowledged her neighbors with a nod, she turned left and headed toward a rectangular building on the east
ern side of the original compound, which was where she now lived in two adjoining rooms. In one room was a table, a couple of carved wooden chairs, and an armoire, on top of which was an old suitcase that she identified as belonging to her late grandmother. As a young girl, Madam Sun used to wash her grandmother’s gnarled feet and help her hobble around; whenever Madam Sun saw the distinctive waddling walk of Charlie Chaplin in silent-era films, she was reminded of her.

  In the other room was a mahogany-framed bed, a bureau with a mirror, and a potbellied stove, from which a metal pipe rose to an aperture near the ceiling, funneling coal fumes to the outdoors. Although Liu Ying no longer lived at home—she shared an apartment with another soccer player near the women’s stadium in southern Beijing when not traveling with the team—she regularly returned home for overnight visits, and whenever she did, she slept on the cot that Madam Sun pointed to in the far corner of the room. Next to the cot was a cedar chest, and near it was a plastic compartmentalized container holding loafers, sneakers, and cleated soccer shoes. Hanging on the wall above the cot was a four-by-three-foot poster featuring a broadly smiling Michael Jordan.

  “My daughter is now in Guam, competing in the Asia Cup,” Madam Sun told us. “She telephoned last night. She telephones a few times a week no matter where she is. All the team members have cell phones, given to them by one of their sponsors, the Ericsson company. Now that she has a cell phone, I talk to her more than when she used to live here. But she was barely a teenager when she went off to room and board at the soccer academy, returning home only on weekends.” Madam Sun recalled that during the weekend of the Tiananmen Square trouble in 1989, as the bloodshed began on Saturday night, June 3, and continued through the following morning, Liu Ying was staying at the family home. She was then fifteen. “My son was out walking on Saturday night and saw a lady get hit with a stray bullet,” Madam Sun recalled. “I myself could hear the gun noises and lots of people screaming and shouting. The noise carried throughout our neighborhood. It didn’t disturb Liu Ying, however. She lay on that cot all night, sleeping peacefully through all that noise and commotion. She was not aware of anything until we told her about it the next morning, and then she said, ‘Oh, Mom, why didn’t you wake me?” Later on Sunday, the two of us took a walk around the neighborhood and we saw vehicles turned upside down, and lots of rubble everywhere. Most of the people were very fearful and confused.…”

  As we sat listening to Madam Sun, we were joined by an elderly but agile gray-haired woman who came in carrying a pot of steaming tea and three cups on a tray. As she smiled, the many wrinkles on her broad face deepened. She was wearing a gray worsted Mao-style jacket and a long sweater vest knitted in a pattern of beige and gray concentric squares. After she had poured the tea and handed a cup to each of us, she sat down on the bed next to Madam Sun, who, with seeming pride, introduced her as her mother. Her name was Zhang Shou Yi. She had turned seventy-five a few years earlier and had worked until then.

  With some prompting on my part and no interruptions from her daughter, Madam Zhang began to speak to us about her youthful days in Beijing in the aftermath of the emperor’s abdication. She was born in 1921 in a well-maintained courtyard house along a hutong a few miles west of where we now were. Her father ran an antiques business and also held a minor position within the local administration. As a child, she heard stories describing how the young emperor, sequestered for more than a decade behind the vermilion walls of the city he no longer influenced, idled away many hours pedaling his bicycle around the stone pathways of the preserve. While her formal education was perhaps superior to that of most of her neighboring female contemporaries, she had no special ambition beyond being married to a man of her father’s choosing. Shortly after she had turned twenty-three, deemed to be an advanced age for a young woman harboring marital expectations, her father told her that he was in contact with an attorney who had a twenty-three-year-old son who was a worthy candidate for a marital arrangement. The son was in college, studying to become an engineer. While it was not then customary for young women to be introduced to prospective spouses, Madam Zhang told us that in her case, which she thought illustrative of the early twentieth century’s modernizing tendencies—which had already freed many millions of Chinese women from a thousand-year-old tradition of crescent-footed dependence—she was permitted to have a meeting with her future husband prior to the actual ceremony. Fortunately for her, she liked him immediately.

  Married in 1943, and moving into the courtyard house of her husband’s family at number 74 Wuding Hutong, she would have six children. Three of her children—four including Madam Sun—and their children were also residing within separate quarters on the compound at the time of my visit, although I did not meet them. Madam Zhang told me that, in addition to herself, there were now twenty-six people lodged within her property—eleven family members and fifteen neighbors. She had a two-room suite on the northern side of the courtyard, which was the side customarily reserved for elders. Her bedroom was slightly more spacious than any other, and, of the five television sets hooked up on the property—two within the quarters of her neighbors—her newly purchased twenty-five-inch-screen Peacock model was the most reliable and emitted the most clearly delineated images in color.

  It was this set that she had been watching as Liu Ying competed in the China-U.S.A. World Cup final. Madam Zhang and four members of her family—two of her sons and their wives—had gathered around the set in the early-morning hours, joining together in calling out words of encouragement toward a tiny red-shirted figure of a girl who wore number 13 and was shown running up and down the field, amid her teammates and opponents, focusing her attentions upon a soccer ball on the other side of the world.

  On that morning, Liu Ying’s twin sister and her brother were watching the game in the latter’s bedroom, while their nearby neighbors were doing so in their courtyard dwelling. On the other side of the wall, within the rows of homes that lined the hutong, there were hundreds and perhaps thousands of other television viewers. Lights could be seen glowing in countless windows during the predawn darkness as the game began, and throughout the four-hour telecast the quiescence that usually accommodated late sleepers on Sundays, at least along the back streets of the city, was now penetrated by the lively commentary of a play-by-play announcer in California and by the soaring and syncopated sounds of people in China venting their responses through the raised windows of their homes—cheering, jeering, clapping, sighing, and finally voicing their displeasure and disappointment when the game was over and the Chinese team had been defeated by the Americans. As I have mentioned, more than 100 million people in China reportedly viewed the telecast. Nowhere was the final score more silently and sadly accepted than within the household at number 74 Wuding Hutong.

  After turning off her television set and veiling it with a black cotton dustcover, Madam Zhang tried to comfort and reassure her kinsmen, who sat around her, most of whom seemed to be stunned. “It is a part of life,” she said. When a few of her neighbors came in from the courtyard, she repeated, “It is a part of life.” Throughout the morning, everyone remained within the walls of the compound. And then the telephone in Madam Zhang’s anteroom began to ring, and her younger brother got up to answer it.

  “Please let me speak to my mother,” said the sobbing voice of Liu Ying. She was calling from Los Angeles.

  “I’m sorry, she is not here,” her uncle said, explaining that her mother had gone off to watch the game with the coach’s wife and other women at a hotel, but he did not know the name of the hotel.

  “Then let me speak to my brother,” she said. As soon as her brother picked up the receiver, she began to cry: “Oh, it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault.…”

  A day later, after the team had gotten off the plane in Beijing, Liu Ying’s mother, along with the mothers of the other players, stood waiting in the marble-floored lobby of a reception hall near the airport while the arriving group of young women wearing red warm-up suits as
cended from ground level via an escalator. After tossing their carrier bags to the floor, the young women ran with their arms outstretched and tears in their eyes to be embraced by their mothers. As they greeted one another, a chorus of sibilant sounds was heard through the lobby—Mei shi, mei shi, ni mei shi ba: Ni ye mei shi ba?—words not easily translated, my interpreter explained to me, but words meant to comfort, to express concern and regret while at the same time stressing positiveness and reassurance.

  Still, as Madam Sun told us during our interview, the players and their families were not sheltered from the fact that millions of people in China had been let down by the outcome of the World Cup match. When Liu Ying’s twin sister, Liu Yun, returned to her job in the department store on the day after the telecast, she was approached by many customers and coworkers, who asked, “What happened to Liu Ying? How could she have messed up when it was so important?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the sister replied, saying repeatedly, “please accept my apologies.”

  But such criticism subsided on the following day after there were stories in Chinese newspapers and on television claiming that the United States team had won the game unfairly, blaming the American goalkeeper for moving improperly in front of the net before Liu Ying had begun her penalty kick. Some of these reports were accompanied by photographs purporting to show Briana Scurry in the act of committing an infraction. Liu Ying’s brother, Liu Tong, saw the photos and stories while surfing on the Internet, and, after printing them out, he distributed them to members of his family and several people he knew in the neighborhood.

  Later in the week, the Chinese soccer players and the coaching staff were invited to the Great Hall to be greeted by President Jiang Zemin and receive medallions identifying them as honored citizens of the People’s Republic. The women were uniformly attired in gray skirts and jackets, white blouses, and black pumps. As President Jiang walked toward Liu Ying and placed a ribboned medallion on her shoulders, he smiled and told her, “Don’t worry, there will be another day, and you will have another opportunity.”