by Bei Dao
One Spring Festival afternoon in 1959 remains a vivid memory in my mind to this day. The boys of our building complex had split into two warring factions — one group defended the courtyard gate, the other took advantage of the rock garden’s “mountainous” topography to launch an assault. Double-Kick Crackers and an array of firecrackers big and small catapulted and slingshotted across the battlefield, shuttling back and forth in a riotous weave, creating an earsplitting havoc, deafening bliss. Our defenses consisted of dustpans for shields. Soon a thick cloud of niter smoke filled the air, as if we were in an ancient city under siege, until the day darkened . . . until the voices of our parents beckoned us in....
After that we practiced our maneuvers annually, as if we were preparing for a war with real guns and live combat. The day the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution broke out I remembered the pungent smell of toilet-paper smoke the night I set off my first firecracker. The revolution unleashed a tremendous amount of energy (converted into violence that reeked with blood); countless boys and girls served as the source of that energy. They seemed to have grown up overnight, disguises shed, games and toys tossed far, far aside.
Eating something
With my little brother
With my little brother and sister, 1956
Siblings portrait, 1959
With my sister at Three Never Old Hutong No. 1, 1958
Rowing in Beihai Park
Rowing with my little brother
Furniture
1
In may 1948, my parents married in Shanghai and moved to Beijing, first to Dongdan Duofu Alley, and then to Dong Jiao Min Alley, the former foreign legations quarter. Father worked at Central Trust of China while Mother stayed home for a period of time. Daily life passed prosperously, as evident from the furniture we gradually purchased: Simmons spring mattress, dressing table, large armoire, hardwood dining table with chairs, and so on, all evoking entrenched petit bourgeois tastes.
A rocking cradle was my first abode, the furniture surrounding me as lofty and grand. I rocked and rocked my way out of the cradle, then wove between the legs of tables and chairs, until one day I stood tiptoe peering over the tabletop to glimpse, at last, the horizon.
From Dongdan Duofu Alley we moved to Fuqian Street, then to Fuwai Avenue, until finally settling at Sanbulao Hutong No. 1. During our migrations, pieces of communal furniture burst into our lives like strangers. They included two writing desks — one dark brown with three drawers across, the other a pale yellow “heavy-at-one-end” desk with a large drawer that could hold files and which belonged to my father, who used it to lock up all of our family’s secret documents — in addition to a bookshelf, two chairs, and two beds. Communal property assumed the unmistakable appearance of military communism, penetrating the interiors of each and every household; its unit market price followed that of sheet iron. Rental fees for this property were automatically deducted each month from my father’s paycheck.
The establishment of communal furniture led the way for privatized furniture, both undergoing a very long transition period during our growing years. I never could have imagined that this wholly unattractive communal furniture would be so sturdy and durable, demonstrating its indomitable spirit while at the same time opening the door to the privatized furniture of bourgeois tastes, and then suddenly disappear from our lives in the blink of an eye.
The first sign of revolt involved the Simmons springs, each coil struggling free of the mattress, breaking out east, popping out west. Not to mention sleeping with the springs pressed painfully against one’s legs and back, along with the creaking zhiga zhiga all night, as if the tireless twangs of a broken qin zither. But how to find someone to fix it, overwhelmed by the difficult times, when even food and drink weren’t a given.
After asking around, it was said that a small factory purchased old mattress springs, five kuai for one. Father became ecstatic after hearing the unexpected news and spent one weekend taking out the springs and changing the planks on the bed. Altogether there were twenty-eight springs; on the black market, a single spring could be exchanged for a head of white cabbage. Borrowing a flatbed pedicab from his workplace, he left in high spirits and returned in low spirits — apparently the information was wrong: five kuai not for one spring but for all of them. He piled the springs onto the balcony; wind blew rain poured rust bloomed, until finally they were sold to the scrap yard nearby for some fruit candies, which we three children shared.
Next in line to revolt were the springs of the four dining chairs, echoing the others from a great distance; perhaps they were manufactured in the same factory as the Simmons mattress, their allotted time now up at once. Father took five pieces of plywood, sawed and nailed, and suppressed a rebellion. Although the five boards couldn’t be said to please the eye, one could perch firmly on the seat. Then the Cultural Revolution subsumed everything and there was no chance to lacquer them; the chairs remained bare, though through the years a butt-shaped stain darkened the wood.
2
As the eldest son, I learned how to do the household chores early on, helping Qian Ayi to prepare the vegetables, wash the dishes, light the fire, sweep the kitchen. What always bewildered me were the glass doors of the old hutch cabinet — no matter how or how much you washed them, nothing worked; wipe the glass to a shine with a wet cloth and once the water streaks dried the glass would darken again. I longed to see my parents come home after work and stand before the cabinet with delightful astonishment, so much so that I even used soapy water and scouring powder to scrub and scrub, but my efforts ended in failure. This seriously affected my mood. Only later did I learn it was actually called “crow-black glass,” and made that way to deliberately hide things from view. For many years my mood stayed like this darkened glass — no matter what scrubbed it made no difference.
When I started middle school, I finally got a drawer with a lock, causing a most wonderful feeling inside me — I had my own secrets to keep now. Early on I wrote poems like this: “Use a drawer to lock up your secrets, / Leave commentary in your favorite books.” Writing felt like pure ecstasy. In my locked drawer I kept my allowance, notebook, report card, New Year’s cards, and my first short-story attempts, plus a photograph of my secret love, Cousin Mei, though really it was only a group photo of my extended family standing in front of the Nine Dragon Wall in Beihai Park.
Furniture cycles from birth to old age, sickness unto death, just like a human being. By my second year of middle school, they suddenly turned old — the rails of the five-level dresser broke, open drawers impossible to close; bookshelves wobbled, sagging under the unrelenting weight of the classics; chairs creaked zhiga zhiga, grumbling about their own fate as well as humanity’s; the thick glass covering the dining table cracked and looked like a Balkanized state. My father used adhesive plaster to patch it up, but the plaster quickly lost its effectiveness and it began to give off a rancid odor.
The appearance of plastic overlay had a revolutionary significance, my father among the earliest ones to comprehend this little fact — the interior-decoration movement that would eventually spread across the nation still far beyond the horizon. One day, Father returned from the hardware store with some scraps of plastic overlay, their yellowed condition reminiscent of excrement, which was probably why he could buy them at such a steep discount. He used some latex glue to join four of the scraps together, took some editions of the classics along with various household items to press it flat, and a few hours later the experiment proved a success. Plastic overlay seemed much more durable and longer lasting than glass. My father felt utterly pleased with himself, and with emboldened unrestraint purchased more and more scraps until he had covered nearly all the dressers, kitchen cabinets, nightstands, and tabletops in plastic.
For twenty-five kuai, my father recruited a leather sofa chair from our neighbor U
ncle Zheng; enormous and unwieldy, its proportions beyond any standard furniture made for public or private use, it was like stuffing a cushion for a giant to curl up on between my parents’ wardrobe and bed. It also proved to be a dubious business deal: soon a spring stretched outward from the middle of the leather cushion, looking like a lead-the-cow morning glory in full bloom; unable to hide in the open, each spring one after another popped up, rising here once buried there. The leather also started to flake off, peeling away like an gigantic orange.
The dressing table was my family’s only other extravagant piece of furniture, no doubt born sometime before me. On either side of the large mirror sat two small cabinets, between which a connecting glass passageway looked like a rectangular fish tank; the glass top had long since shattered, the vanity stool had also flown away without wings. The large mirror had turned hazy with the passing years, as if it suffered from amnesia, only reflecting the springtime of my mother’s youth. With its back turned to the age, its presence troubled me, especially during the Cultural Revolution when it essentially existed as proof of guilt.
My parents were sent off to a cadre school. One day off from my forced manual labors, I borrowed a tricycle cart, hauled the dressing table to the Dongdan Antique Market, and sold it for thirty kuai, a heavy burden lifting from me. I used the money to treat my brothers to a meal at the Old Moscow; we commemorated our fleeting youth that had passed by in a blink.
3
When my parents returned from the cadre school, our home resumed its usual Lebensordnung. The furniture resembled a bunch of drunkards, leaning to the left, tilting to the right, and my father continued his repairs, spreading his plastic overlay patches all over the place.
We also purchased our building’s first nine-inch black-and-white television set (outside of the CAPD secretary-general’s family), causing an ever-so-quiet entertainment revolution. The television found its place against the north wall in the outer room, centered on top of the plastic overlay of the five-lever dresser and replacing the plaster bust of Chairman Mao. Whenever a movie started, the neighbors would swarm inside, carrying a wooden stool or folding chair. Those were happy times of communal bonding. As each family, one after the next, acquired their own television set, a calmness cooled through our house.
Television began to alter our lifestyle — first, the viewing position made our waist ache, back sore, and forced us to move to a bed, where we became wholly dependent on cotton padding. Then just as our necks turned rigid and our vertebrae warped, Little Qu appeared. He lived in Building Six, worked as a public servant for the municipality, his wife a ticket seller on the trolleybus. His ordinary Mongolian face always displayed a smile as he let out a soft heh heh, eyes asquint, as if spying an oasis through a sandstorm. Little Qu told us that the times had changed, television must be watched from a sofa, and he proposed to help us acquire a pair. He proceeded to show us a simple sofa he had made himself, as cozy as it was economical. This happened during the nationwide subtract-communality-from-the-people era, and to have it instantly flip into addition made my father and me a little giddy.
I went with Little Qu to the hardware store in the Xinjiekou district and bought shoulder poles, springs, hemp rope, canvas, and other sundry items of various shapes and sizes. Every evening after work Little Qu would come over. This was grueling coolie labor that demanded a quick mind and skillful hands, and I could only play the role of the helper. With his singular eye precise as a plumb line, he sawed the shoulder poles in half, used a carpenter plane to sand them evenly, and coated each with three layers of colorless lacquer; after waiting for the lacquer to dry and turn as diaphanous as a cicada’s wing, he used long screws and latex glue to fasten the poles together in a crisscross pattern, then tied layer upon layer of springs tightly onto the frame with the hemp rope, draped the structure in canvas, and covered it with colorful bath towels. He even cleverly built two tea tables to insert between the sofa pair.
Sitting on the makeshift sofa, I’m not sure why but a sudden cling-to-life-fear-of-death feeling came over me, as if sitting on the Sovereign King’s dragon throne. Of course it brought many benefits — receiving guests no longer resembled a business meeting, sitting face-to-face a dignified distance apart. The crux of the issue was that, because of the sofa, our relationship with television changed, that at the center of modern life a correspondence formed between the television set and the sofa, the two not only becoming desirable but a bare necessity. In due course, those neighbors with a television set came in thronging succession to seek enlightenment, busying Little Qu relentlessly as he worked away, always happy, never tiring. And so this new wave set free by the makeshift sofas’ link to the television set transformed the life ways of the whole apartment complex.
4
Since the day I met Lin Dazhong, my feelings of inferiority have only deepened; this despite the fact that he was primarily a peddler of nineteenth-century art and literary theory. Lin’s eloquent words flowed out of his mouth like a torrential stream, sentences trailing clouds of smoke, lilting in the thick fog. When poor he smoked Cannons, when rich he smoked cigars. For a brief burst, the Xidan Department Store sold Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigars, that metal cylinder of the highest-grade brand-name tobacco cost a mere one yuan. It must have been part of Cuba’s strategy to export revolution. With a Cuban cigar in his mouth, Lin Dazhong spewed out even more mountainous fogs of discourse.
One night at my home, assuming the mask of the intellectual Vissarion Bellinsky while puffing on his Romeo y Julieta, Lin Dazhong declared that no matter in the name of aesthetics or freedom, all of our family’s shabby, ragged furniture should’ve been thrown out a long time ago. With a graceful gesture he calmed my rage, saying, furthermore, that it was imperative to think about reversing the family’s steady decline, which presented, really, only one solution: build a bookcase. As I motioned toward my teetering, ramshackle shelves, he checked me with another firm gesture. “I’m talking about a respectable bookcase, one with glass doors to pull open and a modern-style feel that would then, and only then,” he said, “properly symbolize the sanctity of knowledge.”
Fully convinced of his argument, I proceeded to persuade my parents. There was a pile of hefty lumber heaped in a hallway of our house, ready for use. Li Dazhong started to draft some blueprints, measure the wood, but first he appointed himself head architect and asserted his need to hire a few unskilled laborers. In those days there were plenty of idling brothers who’d fight over fixing a house or making some furniture, and once called on, always on call. I found Sun Junshi and Li Sanyuan. Sun was of medium height and stocky; Li was tall, over one meter ninety-three, and strong as a horse — they both frequented the same literary arts salon. Lin Dazhong handed over his blueprints, lit up a Cannon, turned, and disappeared.
Each morning around ten thirty the two arrived at my house for work. First they brewed some tea for themselves and sat down for a chat; at the moment, they were in the middle of reading Animal Farm. Sometime after eleven they’d rise and get to it. The first step involved cutting the lumber into eight-centimeter thick planks. I helped move the lumber to the courtyard, tied a piece to a tree; the two bros retrieved a huge whipsaw and began to saw and chat — “All animals are comrades” was discussed — and in a wink, noontime arrived. I hurried inside to cook up some noodles along with a few dishes, and poured us cups of sorghum liquor. Both bros had unusually large appetites, especially Li Sanyuan who could eat for three. Once Sun started on the liquor, his white face turned into a red face. By the time the conversation reached “All animals are born equal, but there are some animals even more equal than other animals,” it was past three in the afternoon and we were ready to get back to work. Before daylight erased into blackness, we drank two more rounds of tea. Naturally, some more dishes to go with more liquor had to be whipped up for dinner, and by the time our talk turned to “Four legs are good, two legs are bad,” Sun’s red face had deepened to purple.
We sawed the wood planks for more than two weeks while witnessing my family’s rapid conversion to ruin — our rations of nonstaple foods emptied, our jug of cooking oil bottomed out, and yet the engineering project still seemed far from completion. Mother grew more and more worried; Lin Dazhong tried to console her, saying that the manufacturing process was entering the final phase.
One day, Lin Dazhong brought over a roll of dark-brown wood-grain paper; he rolled up his sleeves, brushed sheet after sheet with glue, positioned each sheet carefully on the pieces of wood, then finished it off with a layer of colorless lacquer. On the second day, after he conducted a detailed inspection, the bookcase was finally assembled and moved into place. Once the glass doors were mounted, the bookcase stood before us with an imposing grace. We dried our cups with a toast to the sanctity of knowledge.
Who knew that this modern bookcase would deteriorate so fast? The wood-grain paper bubbled up, the planks warped from the dampness, the glass doors jammed — its appearance grew distorted and its functionally changed accordingly, books replaced with hats and shoes and junk, until at last it was moved into the kitchen and stuffed with pots and pans. Nevertheless, this bookcase bobbed about in the drifting tides and persevered through each ordeal, enduring a decade of multiplying changes that involved our whole nation.