by Xue Yiwei
“What man-made disaster?” my wife asked.
The fortune teller, shaking his head, said all he saw was darkness, that he could not see what was happening in the darkness.
“What about my child?” my wife asked. “What will happen to the child if I don’t survive?”
“He’s your child,” he answered, obscurely. “He will stay with you.”
What my wife told me was disturbing, making that horrible night even more horrible. “Nothing’s going to happen to us,” I said, trying to comfort her. I emphasized “us” intentionally, instead of saying “you.” “Don’t mind what the fortune teller said,” I added.
At a loss, she nodded. She told me that her friend regretted having brought her to that fortune teller. My wife comforted her friend by saying that she never believed anything a fortune teller had ever said. But this time she truly believed the fortune teller’s words. On her way back to her friends’ house that day, she had decided to write a novel based on her life.
“Why a novel and not a memoir?” I asked.
“Because my life in itself would seem fake. I want to package it in fiction to make it more believable,” she said.
I liked this odd explanation. “Nothing’s going to happen to us,” I said. I rubbed her shoulders, comforting her.
My wife cared even more about what the fortune teller had said after her pregnancy was confirmed. She quickened the pace of her writing, eventually producing thirty-two interrelated stories. In the meantime, she sent a revised version of her first story to a well-regarded avant-garde literary magazine, that had just told her that it would be printed in the July issue.
“Can I take a look at your manuscript?” I said. “I can’t wait any longer.”
My wife held me tight. “You can’t?” she said, mischievously.
I asked her to be serious. “I really want to read it right here, right now,” I said.
“On a night like this,” my wife said. “We all need some entertainment to lighten up.”
Of course, I fully understood the importance of the kind of entertainment she was alluding to. Since the last time, the day before my wife’s pregnancy was confirmed, I had not had any desire for sex. It had been two months. My life had been taken over by news reports, insecurity, fear. I felt depressed, and I was exhausted, physically and mentally. I can’t go on like this, I thought.
I gazed at my wife desperately. “I have imposed a curfew on my groin,” I said, not knowing if I was making a sarcastic comment about the current political situation, or just mocking myself.
My wife laughed. “Come on,” she whispered tenderly in my ear. “Let’s break the curfew, just this once.” Her fingertips were gliding over my chest, recalling my memories of sexual desire.
But my body was not aroused at all. My fear made me nervous. I could not feel any instinctive passion. All I could feel was shame. “Aren’t you afraid that the child might know?” I asked, embarrassed, trying to use this excuse to relieve the pressure of my shame.
“I want him to know,” my wife said, stubbornly. “He should know how he came into the world.”
I needed another excuse, not the one I had used in April, when I quoted the first line of “The Waste Land” to brush her off. I thought of the topic she had just avoided. I asked her to give me time. I asked her to let me read her work first. “Then we can celebrate its publication,” I said.
My wife saw through this. “If you read the whole story, we will not have time to celebrate,” she said. She got a manuscript from the drawer of her desk. It was the prologue to her novel. She said the prologue could stand on its own and would be published along with the first story. She said I could read the prologue, which was entitled “The Past at Present.”
When I left China, I took this amazing manuscript along in my backpack. My wife’s words have evoked my deepest respect for her life and my guilty conscience over her death. From that historic afternoon when I first saw her to that historic night when I unknowingly bid her farewell, my understanding of her inner trauma was so superficial. That is my lifelong regret.
Dear Dr. Bethune, you do not yet know what role you played in our relationship, do you? You were our matchmaker. Forty years after you left the world, it was you who brought her into my world. “She can also recite ‘In Memory of Dr. Bethune.’” Yangyang’s mad mother’s quavering voice on that historic afternoon still echoes in my ears.
To show my deep gratitude for you, dear Dr. Bethune, please let me, on behalf of all your children, transcribe this incredible story for you.
Her life changed completely overnight. It was 1976. She had no idea what was going on. A group of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army had taken her to a noisy tent. She was surrounded by some doctors and nurses who were treating her. It was the first time she had had medical treatment without her parents present. “Where are they, my father, my mother, and my brother?” she asked in a weak voice.
“Stop asking such silly questions,” one doctor said, weeping. “You should know better.”
A few days later, she was placed in a group of children who had all been told not to ask silly questions.
“We are going to take an airplane,” the middle-aged woman who took care of them said in a lively tone.
Few of the children reacted to the woman’s words. But the girl asked, in a trembling voice, “Why are we going to take an airplane?”
The woman, facing her, shouted, “You are going to have a new home soon. Each of you. You are flying to your new home.” She emphasized the word flying.
None of the children seemed excited.
She stared out of the window all the way to the airport, at the ruins of the city. She still had no idea what had happened. She still wanted to know where her parents and brother were.
The middle-aged woman turned up the transistor radio in her hand, trying to distract the children from the ruins. Suddenly, she cried, “Nadia Comăneci! What a beautiful name!” She walked up and down the aisle, telling us excitedly, “She is from our sister state of Romania. Her achievement is our achievement,” her voice drowning out the sound of the radio. “Let’s give this pretty big sister a big hand! Let’s give our socialist sibling a big hand!”
Not even one child applauded.
Only several months later would she realize what had happened that night. She would realize that she had been through one of the most severe natural disasters in the history of her socialist fatherland, one of the most severe earthquakes in world history. She would realize that, not as fortunate as she was, her family members had perished with about two hundred-and-forty-thousand others. She would also realize what people were talking about on the radio. The very first perfect score in the history of gymnastics. She not only came to realize the existence of the Olympics, but also heard the name of the host city for the first time. The name would become an integral part of her life, part of her. Every time she entered her hometown in a nightmare, she would always hear voices from the ruins talking about that North American city. She would be awakened in shock by that pleasant-sounding name: Montreal! Montreal! Montreal! That pleasant-sounding name would become a mark of her identity as an orphan.
Dear Dr. Bethune, I wonder how you feel after reading this. Its bold, direct style is completely different from that of your own writings. You were not a revolutionary in terms of literary style, but the style of this piece is quite revolutionary. Do you like it? Even if you like this kind of writing, I am sure it is difficult for you to enter this little girl’s world. She escaped by accident from the most dreadful disaster. She heard by accident about the city where you lived and I was going to live.
When I entered my wife’s maze-like world, her head was leaning against my chest. I could not see her face and had no way of knowing whether she was looking at her right hand, which was caressing my abdomen. From her breathing, I could hear her desire for me. I
was deeply moved by her writing style. I could not help reading it again. Not surprisingly, the second, closer reading inspired an impulsive desire in me, a desire for intimacy. I did not want to leave that world. I wanted to hide in the deepest and warmest corner. Finally, I felt it. I felt my body awakening. Putting the sheets of paper down, I held my wife’s face in my hands. I had a lot of questions in mind, but did not ask even one. I gazed at her curiously, as if she had become another woman. She seduced me with a charm that I had never experienced. “Do you like it?” she asked in a whisper. I seemed not to have heard her anxious voice. Burying my head in her breasts, I sucked hard on her nipples.
Her body had also been suppressed for two months, and now her nipples could finally stand erect with dignity. It was a moment she had been waiting for. She closed her eyes in satisfaction. My tongue was like a sail, tacking sensitively around her desire, and her body was like a tenacious tide that appealed to me with a rare amplitude. I knew gigantic tidal waves would soon overwhelm us. It suddenly occurred to me that my wife’s quivering body was a literary work in a new genre, with countless details awaiting my exploration. I did not want to miss out on a single one. “I want to read every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark, every space.” I said, making forceful entry into the labyrinth of her body. I had a liberated craving for knowledge. “I want to read you,” I said. “Every part of you.”
As tears trickled down from the corner of my wife’s closed eyes, she asked, anxiously, “Do you like it? Do you like it?”
My wife would never know that her story was not published. One day before I left Beijing, I received a letter from the editor of the magazine, saying that times had changed and it would be “inopportune” to publish anything so forthright. Inopportune was the word that same editor had chosen to refer to the massacre that occurred in the centre of Beijing in 1989 at Tiananmen, beside the mausoleum of your great friend. However, the editor complimented my wife on her talent, calling her “promising.” He encouraged her to persevere in writing, saying that good works would stand a chance of being published “in the future.” He could not have known that the future had flatly rejected his promising author.
Dear Dr. Bethune, I can’t keep on writing, for I can no longer see the words on the screen. Those words are now swimming around like a school of hungry goldfish. I remember the night when we got married, and my wife woke up terrified from a nightmare about her father’s goldfish bowl. She told me that her father was famous for rearing goldfish in her hometown of Tangshan. However, two days before the earthquake, all his fish suddenly died. He called this unfathomable occurrence a “fiasco.” “He never knew the actual cause of the fiasco,” my wife said sadly, pressing her naked body against mine.
A Man Who is of Value to the People
Dear Dr. Bethune, I just came back from the lookout by rue Camillien Houde on Mount Royal. From there you have a bird’s eye view of the eastern half of Montreal. The most conspicuous landmark is of course the Olympic Stadium. Like my wife, I heard about the Olympics and about this bilingual city in North America as the host of the games in 1976. The Mandarin pronunciation of the city’s name, méng tè lì ěr, was very pleasing to the ear. To me it sounded like the name of a woman who could be trusted. And the Chinese translation of the name carries the meaning of “utter devotion to others,” which seems to hint at its essential connection to you.
But it was not until 1989 that I happened to learn of your connection to the city. In that year, my wife’s best friend invited us to go to Hankou to spend Spring Festival with her family. That was the first Spring Festival we spent as a married couple. You also spent one Spring Festival in China, so you should know of the importance of the festival in Chinese people’s lives. It is a festival for family reunions. But because of our marriage, we were cut off from both our families. We became “homeless.” So we gladly accepted the invitation. We had no idea that it was the only Spring Festival we would spend together. I had no idea that during that Spring Festival, my wife would hear from the fortune teller that a great disaster was looming over her.
On the train back to Beijing, we started talking to a Canadian sitting across from us. He taught in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, so of course we talked about you, dear Dr. Bethune, and I learned for the first time of your connection to Montreal. In the past, we had always just connected you with Canada. The mention of Canada would make us think reflexively of you, and vice versa. In the Chinese people’s lexicon, your name is a synonym for Canada. That conversation linked you for the first time to a city. At the time, I did not know that city had already been linked to my wife through the disaster that would orphan her. Neither did I know that that city would be the next stop in my life’s journey. It might even be the last stop. Your past, my future, and her imagination. This is the way the city took us in and gave us refuge in the maze of time.
I had noticed my wife’s interest in Montreal, which I thought a bit strange. But I would never have connected her interest in Montreal with her childhood trauma. I remember at the time, on the train, she asked what the Olympic Stadium looked like, and that the Canadian took from his bag a postcard with that very building on it. He gave it to us. I remember my wife looked it over, then looked at me, charmed. “It is totally different from what I had imagined,” she murmured.
I wanted to know what she had imagined of that building and of the entire city of Montreal. Later on, looking down from the lookout on Mount Royal, I felt an even more intense desire to see that. I felt lonely. I have lived in this city for so many years without knowing whether my life was anything like what she had imagined.
Dear Dr. Bethune, did you, too, feel a deep sense of loneliness in this city? Now I know you not only divorced the same woman for the second time in Montreal, but also met the love of your life there. Did the consolations and tortures of love have any impact on your politics? This is a question that has always troubled me. You became a Communist Party member in Montreal, left the city to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and came back to hatch the idea of a Chinese adventure. Was there any necessary relationship between all this and the women in your life? How could your “Pony” see that you must go to China?
I think I’ve gotten off topic. The reason I mentioned the rue Camillien Houde was that I wanted to discuss the person it is named for.
Camillien Houde, the most controversial mayor in Montreal’s history. He won his third election the year before you went to China. But I’ve never seen any mention of him in the Norman Bethune archives. I know you were willing to throw yourself into revolution, but in spite of this, did you ever vote in a democratic election?
That was the year when you were at your political nadir. You were despondent. You were called back from Spain. Crowds welcomed you on the streets of Montreal as a hero, but you knew that you had already lost the trust of the Communist Party, the “organization.” How or why did you lose the trust of the organization? Was it something you did in Spain? And was losing the trust of the organization similar to losing a women’s trust? Now I think these are meaningless questions. The important thing was that you were called back from the front line of the Spanish Civil War in 1937. This is what might be called a historical necessity. Had you not been called back, you would not have walked in to your great friend’s cave the following year, and you would not have died in the Wutai Mountains the year after that. And had you not died in China, you would have left hundreds of millions of children spiritual orphans.
I understand your sadness and disillusionment. The crowds that gathered to welcome you home seem not to have brought you consolation or comfort. But you should know that your appearance changed so many people’s fates. Bob’s father went to Spain and died on the battlefield because of you. Bob may have been the youngest person in the crowd that welcomed you that day. At the time he was only six. Now, over seventy years later, he preserves the memory, perhaps the only one who does. And
maybe one of the reasons he’s lived so long is to pass this memory on to me, one of Dr. Bethune’s children. That evening, when he talked to me about you, about your place in his memory, I felt once again the mystery of life and understood even more clearly why I must come to this mysterious city.
The welcome the crowds gave you must have reminded you of a similar welcome two years previously, when you returned from a visit to the Soviet Union. Historians think that it was that visit that confirmed your faith in communism once and for all. You became a communist, someone who, in your great friend’s words, “is of value to the people.”
Dear Dr. Bethune, I have many questions about your visit to the first socialist country. What did you see in a country in which Stalin would soon carry out the Great Purge? Your political transformation reminds me of the author of Animal Farm. Like you, the English liberal Eric Blair went to Spain to fight against capitalism and for the socialist cause. He left because he was wounded in action. He never went to the country Stalin ruled, but he relied on his imagination to get to the truth (that it was metaphorically an animal farm) and critique it from a liberal perspective as the author George Orwell. But how is it possible that one person’s imagination could get closer to the truth than another person’s observation?
In fact, quite a number of figures of your generation saw the terror and the blood behind the political symbolism of the colour red. Sometimes I think you were inured to that because of your profession, which made you less sensitive to blood than philosophers and literary writers. Perhaps I should not compare you to Western intellectuals who lived in the same era as you. For you belonged to the future. You belonged to China. You did not see the darkness in the Soviet Union. You saw only the future of Red China, where you would become a star to light up the sky. Who was Gide? Who was Rousseau? Who was Hemingway? Who was Zweig? And who was Freud? At a time when all of us could recite your “spirit” by heart, none of us had heard any of these other names, intellectuals with ideas to contend with. In Red China, you ruled over all Western intellectuals to become a role model for an enormous number of Chinese people. Your image was pasted on both sides of our classrooms. You changed our thinking, and you inspired our thoughts. You took part in our daily lives.