by Bei Dao
In 424, the Ge family. As the secretary-general of the CAPD, Ge Zhicheng was the building’s chief magistrate; each day, a swanky car picked him up and dropped him off. When he had worked in Shanghai as an elementary-school teacher, he had been active in the underground movement, then after liberation moved to Beijing to become an official in the Ministry of Education. Outside of his commuting routine, he lived a secluded life, rarely showing his face as if he were still in the underground. His wife, Hua Jin, worked as the party branch secretary for Beijing Middle No. 8. After meeting their adopted child, Ge Jiaduo, for a while he never said a word to any of us despite our promptings, and so we called him Ge Bushuo (“Ge Doesn’t Speak”). They owned the only private telephone in the whole building.
In 422, the Mu family. Mu Shaoliang used to be the senior editor at Commercial Press; he had a weak constitution and suffered from an assortment of illnesses; during the Cultural Revolution he was violently beaten, and passed away in 1969. There were two dragons and two phoenixes in the family — the phoenixes had long flown far away, marrying early. The young widow, Fang Jianmin, gentle and reserved, raised her two sons alone. Mu Dingyi, the older brother, was my age and later tested into Beijing Middle No. 8. The younger brother, and youngest in the whole family, Mu Dingsheng (or, Little Jing), was skillful with the brush and eventually won the country’s highest prize for calligraphy, his talents whisking him away from a factory to the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature. For a time, we were as close as comrades-in-arms; and later, he helped cut the mimeograph stencils of our underground literary magazine, Today.
6
A boy entering the springtime of adolescence often needs someone to go to for advice, someone akin to a spiritual guide or psychotherapist, the best person to fill this role being an experienced woman.
We called Pang Bangben, of apartment 434, Big Bro. He joined the army in 1951, continuing to paint while he served, then went on to university, eventually becoming an art teacher at a secondary school. After being violently beaten as a “rightist” in 1957, he worked for the Beijing Public Security Bureau as a “rightist” painter, setting up a studio that made traffic signs. During the Cultural Revolution he was banished to the Auto Repair and Assembly Plant at Xingtai, Hebei Province; his design for a big-rig truck looked more or less like the standard space-alien combat vehicle you see in sci-fi films today.
Big Bro’s wife, Sun Yufan (Big Sis), was a Japanese “war orphan” — born in the north, in Dalian, she was abandoned by her parents in 1945 when they evacuated the country, so she was adopted by another Chinese family. She had just turned thirty then, her skin dark, her eyes large and prominent compared to her small nose and mouth. Big Bro’s photography skills were first-rate and his portrait of Big Sis made her look like a movie star: with a red-checkered scarf wrapped around her head, she leaned airily against a white poplar, the whole image affecting an intensely Russian mood.
Apartment 434 was the building’s largest residence with two bedrooms plus a sitting room; Big Sis, always sick in bed, took over the small sitting room; a thick curtain kept out the clamor of the outside world. An exceptionally good listener, she could point to and elucidate the crucial points of a problem with a turn of three words and two phrases, making one feel wholly assured and wholly submissive to her will.
One clear and crisp winter afternoon at the start of 1970, my siblings and I helped Big Sis take the children in our building on an outing. From Three Never Old Hutong No. 1 we all embarked, chatting and laughing, piling onto the No. 14 bus. We arrived at Zhongshan (Sun Yat-Sen) Park, found a spot on the dried, yellow grass to form a circle, and swatted a volleyball around. Big Sis wore a black turtleneck sweater, and like a coach shouted out tips and instructions. The day grew dark; we strolled to the Hotel Novotel to eat dinner at the Western-style restaurant there. That would be the only clear impression she’d leave me with of herself outdoors.
Kang Cheng, Yifan, and I were as inseparable as a figure and its shadow; Big Sis called us the Three Musketeers. Trying to visit her wasn’t easy — one first had to wait for Uncle Pang to return from the cadre school and face him; one also had to endure the nosy nattering of Qian Ayi, who eventually returned to her hometown in Yangzhou; Big Bro, ordinarily at the auto plant in Xingtai, came home during leave once or twice a month.
Pang Bangxuan, Big Bro’s little sister, returned to Beijing from the Inner Mongolia rural production team during winter fallow. She had been in her second year at Beijing Normal University, a year above us, and hung out with one beautiful and smart friend after another. One of them, Sister Song, a professional soprano singer knocked the Three Musketeers over, our adoration drawing us into an emotional crisis. As the dust settled, wounds slow to heal, we lined up to visit Big Sis for a private talk; she guided each lost lamb through the maze of his feelings.
Wind-borne rumors from the neighborhood committee spread that Big Sis was “luring in and corrupting the youth”; we had no choice but to lie low and take shelter from the headwinds. Big Sis was like a commissar, educating via positive reinforcement, always encouraging me to be proactive and optimistic, and make a contribution to society; she thought my poems too pessimistic, too gloomy, that they should extol the homeland, extol the proletariat — the workers, peasants, soldiers. Somehow coming from her mouth these words didn’t sound annoying. Her voice was a little husky, almost a whisper, and possessed a kind of hypnotic power.
After I got married I saw less of Big Sis; from time to time, when visiting my parents, we’d sit and chat at her place. Fine wrinkles appeared around her delicate little mouth — the etchings of time.
In the summer of 1997, while living in Davis, California, I received a letter from my brother saying that Big Sis, suffering from a heart disease, had passed away, and that during the last few months of her illness she had only read one book: a poetry book of mine that she kept by her pillow.
7
In order to situate Three Never Old Hutong No. 1’s position in Beijing’s social landscape of the time, one needs to consider the “grand courtyard” and the “hutong alley.” The cultural politics of these two spaces differed sharply. In general, the “grand courtyard” existed as an exclusive outdoor area for those in high office to receive strangers, while the “hutong alley” existed as an all-inclusive space for local residents from rivers to lakes far and wide; the “grand courtyard” symbolized power, the “hutong alley” zigzagged through the whole of history.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as this; high officials, in fact, preferred a life of seclusion in the hutong. So, for instance, the tenants around our grand courtyard were mostly lower-level cadres, and yet the big shots of the democratic parties imitated the ruling party by stealthily wandering the hutongs, sharing water through parched times, so that even if one were a sacked official, one could eat and drink as well as before, just like a so-called last aristocrat.
The grand courtyard was often classified according to a three, six, nine, and so on hierarchy that had something to do with being a spare part of the state machinery. Although the status of the democratic parties rose in specific historical periods, they were basically seen as defective goods, thus Three Never Old Hutong No. 1’s awareness of its own shortcomings. This embodiment of class consciousness was passed on vocally, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, as people would introduce themselves with so much hot air: “Of Party Central!” “Of the Planning Commission!” “Of the Navy Yard!” When it fell to our turn, as if sucking a jujube, a garbled sound would emerge: “Of Sanbulao — ”
In those days, multiple-story housing was still uncommon in the city and Sanbulao Hutong No. 1 instantly became a landmark building for the neighborhood; one could see it many kilometers away from any circumferential point. At Hong Shan Temple Elementary School, most of the students came from the lowest strata of society. Going to a classmate’s house to play, parents would ask me where I lived and my friend would ru
sh to reply: “That big building, Three Never Old!” Usually the parents would roll their eyes and size me up — in the presence of the state machinery’s spare parts and surplus defective goods, there could be no distinction between civilians.
The maze carved out of hutong lanes, puddles of water after an early-summer rain, the fragrance of pagoda tree flowers and the crepuscular streetlamps, for a boy growing up in Sanbulao, these things filled me with longing. Compared to the rigid structure of the multistory complex, out there the wild freedom of the masses lived on. Summertime by the public taps, half-naked men and women joked with animated gestures, as if on an impromptu opera stage, while children chased each other with glee. Follow a wall around a corner then turn into a little courtyard with a crooked house, piles of broken roof tiles strewn about. That was another kind of life: From grandparents to grandchildren, three generations crowded together in one place, talk interspersed with swears and curses, yet beneath the coarse surface ran deep attachments and an unwillingness to part, plus the sincere concern of neighbors left and right. . . . From the abyss of the hutong alleys looking back toward our big building, I actually felt a vague hostility. This must have been related to a rebellious phase of adolescence: the multistory complex stood for the authority and order of my father.
Children of the grand courtyard who ventured into the depths of the hutong were braving the winds of the narrow passes — one false move and you could be confronted with taunts, jeers, and even a beating, unless you had a few true hutong friends.
Guan Tielin attended the same elementary school as me, and for a while we were quite close. His family lived nearby in a dead-end little courtyard alley, most of the natural light blocked by our huge building. Tielin’s mother died young from an illness; his father, a fireman, worked three shifts and wasn’t home much. Their old copper washbasin, dented and scarred, made the deepest impression on me — it looked like a family heirloom. After school, Tielin would light the stove, boil some water, pour the boiling water into the copper basin, test the temperature with his fingers, then slowly submerge both of his hands into the scalding water while closing his eyes with contentment.
Once I boasted to him about my father’s wondrous skill with a brush. Tielin stared at me incredulously. How did this relate to his father? He sunk into a deep silence. Fighting fires and writing words are fundamentally nonequivalent — in a raging fire, to climb higher means risking your own life. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing his father.
I’ve forgotten the name of my other hutong friend. He was in the same class as me in elementary school; he lived on the Houhai riverbank. His father, a street peddler, set up a stall that sold candy, as well as needle and thread, while running a small-scale gambling business on the side. A series of wooden boxes were arranged into a grid, pasted with window paper, and after handing over two fen, you stabbed a box with your finger, the probability of winning or losing about fifty-fifty, the prize a piece of candy or marble or some other little bauble. I always played with a winner’s mind-set, which was actually quite easy: the peddler’s son leaked the game’s secrets to me in advance.
8
I was seventeen the year the Cultural Revolution erupted. At Beijing High No. 4, I felt like I was in the heart of a storm — in the throes of a math-physics-chemistry crisis, final exams around the corner. Then the school suddenly announced that all classes were dismissed, the term over; I cheered with relief, flitted about like a joyful sparrow, for the failure of the bourgeoisie educational system as well as for my own victory leaping over the math-physics-chemistry barrier. For me, the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution seemed like a carnival. Waking up each day I felt unsteady, worried that Chairman Mao might alter his plan and wait until one day, only as an eminent old man, he would make his final heartfelt decision to close the school gates forever.
The rebel movement quickly divided: Those students born into families with “good” class backgrounds became the main force of the army; the rest of us were excluded. Loafing around at home, it was hard not to get a bit depressed; I turned to help my little brother and sister write big-character posters, criticizing teachers for leading us down the “white road” of academia, yet it was far from stimulating — in this unprecedented historical hurricane, teachers existed as mere baby shrimp and not much more.
I became king of the children, and analyzing the situation with some of the younger boys of the compound, we found a big fish: Chen Xianchi of building No. 8. We had heard he once worked for the Kuomintang secret service and after liberation spent a few years in prison, his case a typical slice of “counterrevolutionary history.” I rounded up five or six boys and we rushed over to his apartment. Rapping open the door, I first read aloud some quotations of Chairman Mao: “Everything is reactionary: If you don’t strike, then he won’t fall; like sweeping the floor, wherever a broom can’t reach, the dust won’t flee of its own accord.” Without us lifting a finger, Chen Xianchi fell to the floor, his hands cupping his voter’s card to show that he, too, was one of the people.
Without any explanation, we pulled and pushed and escorted him to the entrance of building No. 4, where we forced him to sit on a stool. I went home to retrieve some hair clippers, and surrounded by my entourage, pushed his head down. With the first touch of his greasy hair, I actually swooned a little; then after hesitating for a moment, I settled my nerves and buzzed the matted mess from his forehead around and down the back, opening out vertical windrow grooves. The hair clippers didn’t work so well; only after several passes did the base of a groove expose blue-green scalp. This popular “yin-yang head” hairstyle was very fashionable back then. In fact, I discovered that the hair clippers were functioning fine, the real problem had to do with my right hand — it couldn’t stop shaking. I had no choice but to put the clippers down, use my left hand to grip my right hand, and pretend nothing was wrong, while continuing to shout out orders.
Droopy-headed Chen Xianchi straightened his faded Sun Yat-Sen suit and brushed off the loose hair. He calmly looked around after his initial panic, his eyes narrowing in the realization that this whole performance was merely some mischief carried out by a gang of Mao’s little children. His contempt infuriated us; right away, we convened a mini struggle session with only a few passersby and kids to witness the lively scene. Chen Xianchi didn’t assume the infamous “vapor-trailing airplane position” — head bowed, waist bent, arms straight out to the back, three “I don’t know”s for every question. We shouted slogans at him: “Down with Chen Xianchi!” “If the enemy doesn’t surrender, demand his annihilation!”
We first locked him in the boiler room, but fearing he might do some damage there moved him to the basement of building No. 8. We took turns guarding him, organizing a three-shift system, delivering meals and accompanying him to the bathroom, all the while afraid that he would escape, or even worse, that he’d commit suicide. Two days passed; we were exhausted, troops crushed horses downed, yawns reaching to the skies; it seemed we had no choice but to release him.
We brought him out of the basement; it looked like he had been imprisoned for a long time, skin wan, eyes squinting as he raised his head to look at the sun. I first read aloud some quotations of Chairman Mao: “Policy and tactics are the lifeblood of the party; all leaders and comrades must adequately take note, and truly, truly never act with an impulsive heart or careless thought.” And then some stern warnings for him not to be defiant in word or deed, and that he must check in with us regularly.
After that, bumping into him on the street was like meeting a ghost; I tried to give him as wide a berth as possible.
Many years later I happened to read Golding’s Lord of the Flies: His bold vision, alas, had been a ruthless reality for us.
9
The carnival soon turned into a bloody tragedy: Hua Jin, the wife of our building’s chief magistrate, Ge Zhicheng, was thrown into the makeshift prison inside Beijing Middle No. 8, where
she had been working as the party branch secretary; after enduring endless beatings and insults, she hung herself in the early morning of August 22nd that summer. Soon after that, Beihang University Red Guards raided Yifan’s house, forcing his father to return to his ancestral home in Sichuan Province.
Three Never Old Hutong No. 1 became the primary target for searching and confiscating homes for virtually the whole of Beijing. Consider building No. 3’s Zhao Junmai — this fellow had been imprisoned by the Kuomintang mayor of Changchun city during the Liaoshen Campaign in the 1948 civil war; each day he performed his sword dance in the courtyard, floating on air, as if practicing his ascension to heaven. The day the Red Guards raided his house he tried to resist and was nearly beaten to death on the spot. It seemed as if he had completed his preparations for his ascension.
An announcement posted at the entryway to each building declared that every resident was a counterrevolutionary, that on such and such a day each home would be searched, no one exempted . . . and before this takes place, immediately hand over any of the “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits) . . . anyone who resists will be killed under lawful authority. Thereupon, we first voluntarily raided our own home, delivered any books and objects suspected of being among the “four olds” to the neighborhood committee, including an ivory mahjong set, which many years later my father would still mention with a pain in his heart. Doomsday arrived — the threaten-to-search-and-confiscate Red Guards vanished — neither a shadow nor a trace, just our empty fears remained.
One summer evening, it was our family’s turn for night duty at Sanbulao’s reception hut. Old Wu, who used to watch the front gate, had been swept away — as a fugitive “rich peasant,” he had been sent back to his hometown. Tall and lanky, bald and slightly hunchbacked, Old Wu wore a coarse-woven work shirt draped over black Burma-crotch pants, his body like a bow stored in a cloth sack. A strong Hebei accent streamed out of his mouth, making his voice exceptionally loud; those who watched the gate after him couldn’t match his roar, even with a megaphone.