by Bei Dao
I scaled up to the ancient classics, owing in large part to my father’s willpower — he forced me to recite classical poems from the Tang and Song, typically over the winter and summer breaks, one poem per day. At an age when children only want to have fun and play, where could one find the carefree, idle mood of the ancients? The curtains swayed as I rocked my head back and forth, chanting a poem: “Moss green on the steps / grass sheen through the screen / Harmonize with the plain-plucked qin / read the golddust sutras / Chats and laughs with goose-winged scholars / who come and go, no empty-headed idiots among them / No din of other winds and strings to irritate the ears / no official records to toil over / Zhuge’s hut in Southern Sun / Ziyun’s pavilion in Western Shu / As Kongzi once said: ‘How could such a room be humble?’”* Concerning those books on the top shelf, everything from their stately grandeur to their thick spines made people wince; it wasn’t until the Cultural Revolution that we consulted them for writing big-character posters. Reading and reading page after page I finally understood why Father placed those books at the summit — it’s so lonely and cold at the top.
3
Around the age of ten I discovered a momentous secret: large stacks of banned books stashed away in the attic space above the corridor between the front door and the kitchen.
The boy was short, the attic high; this proved to be no obstacle as curiosity worked its mischief and, alone at home, I positioned a tall stool on top of two chairs, each balanced on the other. This required an extraordinary degree of precision for all the furniture to fit flawlessly together. It was, essentially, an acrobatic performance without, sadly, any audience present; or it could be said that I played the sole audience member, determined to climb up and see what could be found.
I opened the attic hatch; the smell of dust and old papers blasted me in the face. I often browsed used bookshops where the odor of old paper — refined, remote — smelled like incense, summoning souls from faraway places. But here, maybe from being shut in the dark for so long, the odor emanating from the books smelled a hundredfold stronger; I felt like a prisoner, brimming with hostile aggression, the fumes making me dizzy. Regaining my focus, I held my breath, steadily adapted to the pungent onslaught as well as the dim surroundings, and with swift intuition, it dawned on me that I had found a real treasure trove.
To this day I can still remember the condition of a number of those books, the degree of damage to certain bindings, as well as that very unique odor. They had come from a range of different epochs and regions, each following a different route on its journey. Consider the source of the paper pulp for one — cotton and rice straw mashed together, then add in the differences of temperature and humidity in various locales, the absorption of each season’s fragrances and nourishing flavors. Each book possessed its own life, possessed its own age, birthplace, and name.
My family’s attic library could be divided into four rough categories: first, old editions of Strange Tales of the Tang and Song, Feng Menglong’s Stories to Caution the World (unabridged edition), Investiture of the Gods, and other classic fiction titles of this sort; second, novels published before liberation by authors such as Zhang Henshui, Yu Dafu, among others, who with Mao Dun had been banished to the cold palace, having fallen out of favor largely for their explicitly erotic descriptions; third, assorted fashionable magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, including The Young Companion, Women’s Pictorial, Movie Art Pictorial; fourth, specialized textbooks my mother used during her medical studies, like Physiology and Anatomy and Comprehensive Gynecology.
As is evidently clear, my family lived a cultural double life: The public bookshelf, out in the open for everyone to see, embodied the status quo and mainstream culture; the attic stacks, hidden and sealed off, embodied the illicit and taboo. From that day on, after discovering the secret in the attic, I, too, was thrown into a double life.
Coming home after school, I piled up the chairs and stool, scaled to the heights, popped open the attic hatch, groped my way through the dark, and extracted one title after another, first making a preliminary assessment before transporting them below. After finishing my reading, I’d put everything carefully back before my parents returned home from work.
The attic was deep, my arms short; I wanted to reach into the abyss and so added one more little stool to climb onto. And then with the slightest of slips, rider thrown horse felled, I crashed to the ground, bloodying my nose and bruising my face. Of my early reading experiences, besides the relationship between the public and the hidden, aches and pains unfailingly established their contrary significance. I think this must have been the necessary price to pay for reading banned books.
From the strange tales of ancient times to the novels of the modernist era, depictions of sex were much more depraved and fantastic in those books than in revolutionary fiction, something that actually made sense to me as many sexual taboos had formed fairly recently. Physiology and Anatomy and the other medical books that described the structure and function of female anatomy really made my eyes spring out and my mouth gape open with wonder: The mysteries of birth revealed! And compared with those brilliant May Fourth sanwen (“scattered writings”) prose stylists, a writer like Liu Baiyu simply couldn’t touch them; he was a quack selling fake herbs and nothing more.
The disarray in the attic aroused my father’s suspicions; he installed a lock on the hatch, and yet even this couldn’t dampen the deep resolve inside me. I scoured east and rummaged west, until at last I found the key.
4
My secret attic-reading started at age ten and continued until age seventeen, when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution exploded. For a time, I would still steal the attic’s forbidden fruit while actively participating in the rebellion. Then that Sunday in August arrived when the Red Guards posted the announcement on our building, saying there’d be door-to-door searches, setting a deadline to hand over any “four olds” possessions to the neighborhood committee — do not delay or risk being executed under lawful authority.
We busied ourselves for three days. Father opened up the hatch, brought down the whole hidden library, and piled it into one heap. These books, so central to my upbringing, exposed in the full light of the day, now waited to be delivered to the flames. I imagined them in the fire, the shapes and sounds as the pages curled. While saddened, I unexpectedly felt a stealthy thread of delight.
* * *
* From Liu Yuxi (772–842), “Inscription for My Humble Room.” Lines 3–4 and 5–6 are not in the correct order in the child’s recitation and are interchanged in the original poem.—Tr.
Going to Shanghai
1
During the summer of 1957, the Anti-Rightist Movement spread like wildfire, like roseleaf bramble. Dumbstruck and ignorant, I felt the grown-up world to be a very dangerous place, as if they were all playing hide-and-seek in broad daylight, to the degree that the game was becoming a life-or-death struggle. My older cousin who worked as a teacher at the Conservatory of Music came to visit, and I blurted out the question, “Are you a rightist?” She laughed and didn’t reply; father blew a fuse, saying there was no doubt in his mind that I’d get into serious trouble in the future. A couple of days later, around noon on July 19, 1957, Yu Biaowen, whose family shared the same apartment unit with us, jumped to his death. Although I pondered death quite a bit during my childhood, mulling over its depths, to this day I am still petrified by the explicit implications of the word “zisha” (“to kill oneself”).
It was around this time that Mama decided to request a leave of absence to take me to visit Waigong, her father, in Shanghai. This would be my first trip far from home — imagine my euphoria as I broke each of my fingers counting down the days. This was just when the weeping of the newly widowed Zheng Ayi had been waking me up during the night; the dark shadow of death slowly suffocated each individual within its grasp, but at long last, I escaped.
Waigong had suffered an unfort
unate accident the previous year: Out on the street a soccer ball struck him, a ferocious kick by a mere kid toppled him over, face to the sky, back of the head cracked to the ground, resulting in paralysis on one side of his body and severely diminishing his verbal abilities. He used to be quite robust, loved to exercise, insisted on taking cold showers in the winter. In 1953 Waigong had visited Beijing for a brief stay and roamed the peaks and gamboled in the waters, soaking up all the sights, his characteristic bright smile everlasting in old photo albums.
At Qianmen Railway Station, I saw a locomotive up close for the first time. Enormous wheels connected by steel rods, driver’s cab perched up so high, polished brass tubes shiny and bright next to the tarnished, gloomy boiler, the whole assembly making me quake and quiver with ecstatic delight. The steam whistle shrieked three times, our car violently lurched and rocked for a moment. Sitting beside my mother on the hard seats, I leaned against the window: trees fields villages blurring by. Crossing iron bridge after bridge of different shapes and sizes, each one emitted its own idiosyncratic rolling rumble. Mama bought some roast chicken on the train platform at Jinan Station. The train attendant poured the tea from an enormous pot. We had brought our enamel mugs with us and placed them on the small table, the lids of the mugs vibrating softly with the body of the train, like miniature cymbals. . . .
2
Waigong’s surname was Sun, his given name Haixia (“sea-cloud glow”), courtesy name Shuguang (“dawn light”); he was born in 1880 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. From an early age he received a classical education at a sishu traditional private school, and later matriculated at the Shanghai Telecommunications Institute. Upon graduating, he was assigned to the telegraph office in Hankou, where the Han River converges with the Yangtze, handling service with Europe and the United States He eventually met Huang Xing, the revolutionary leader, and became a member of Tongmenghui, the United Allegiance Society founded by Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing, and others in Tokyo in 1905, an organization that played a major role in overthrowing the Qing dynasty. Before the Wuchang Uprising, Waigong sent Waipo, my grandmother, and their children to stay with some relatives in Yueyang, Hunan Province. During the uprising, he joined a suicide squad, swiftly seized a telegraph station, and transmitted orders from command headquarters to mobilize the revolutionary army without delay. The next day, at a celebratory meeting, my grandfather was honored with a first-class medal for meritorious service and handed one thousand silver yuan coins as a reward. Huang Xing wanted him to work for the revolutionary government as the director of telecommunications, but he graciously declined, leaving instead for Zhongxiang in Hubei where he assumed the directorship of the telecommunications bureau there and used his reward to found the Zhong Qiang Secondary School, working a second job as its principal.
Every morning after the flag-raising ceremony, Waigong personally spoke to the students about current news while promoting democratic and scientific principles. In 1919 during the May Fourth Movement, he organized a public assembly to support the cause and led many protest demonstrations in solidarity with the students in Beijing. In 1927, after the April 12 Incident, local crime bosses, in collusion with the huidaomen secret societies and religious sects, destroyed the county’s party headquarters, the facilities of the Farmers’ Association, along with other institutions, including the telegraph office and Zhong Qiang Secondary School. They also stormed into Waigong’s house, tied up my three uncles, and beat them. My grandfather’s family disguised themselves in rags and mixed in with the masses, drifting with the chaos and out the city gate. Waigong first hid in the telegraph office, then in a wooded grove; under the cover of night, he climbed over the city walls and walked the rugged road all the way to Wuhan.
The central headquarters of the Ministry of Transport and Communications transferred him to Shanghai to help run a few foreign telegraph businesses. Shanghai fell into enemy hands; the Japanese asked him to take over the puppet regime’s central telegraph office. Waigong feigned illness and fled to the Suzhou countryside. The Japanese repeatedly invited him to banquets. Knowing he couldn’t hide forever, he crossed the blockade line, then tossed about until finding his way to Chongqing, where the ministry appointed him as the inspector general of the local telecommunications bureau. He was separated from his family for eight years, removed to a corner of the sky. After the victorious war of resistance, Waigong joined the telecommunications bureau in Chengdu, having been appointed its director. In 1948, the workers in the bureau launched a strike, and with Waigong’s support, sent an open telegram across the nation. He was forced to resign immediately. The Chengdu bureau’s eight hundred workers tearfully sent him off. Returning to Shanghai, he served as the director of the city’s telecommunications bureau after liberation, remaining there until his retirement.
An episode during Waigong’s turbulent career directly concerned me. In early 1946, my mother accompanied Waipo on a flight from Shanghai to Chongqing to visit Waigong. At Chongqing’s Coral Dam Airport, they couldn’t figure out how to use the public telephone and so Waipo let a young man standing in line behind my mother offer his assistance; the phone call quickly went through. The young man had been transferred from Chongqing to Beijing for work; with plane tickets scarce, he and a coworker took turns waiting in the ticket line at the airport. Waipo thought him to be courteous and good-natured upon their first encounter, plus he had the looks of a dashing young man going places. She persuaded him to call on Xiaoyi, my mother’s little sister, in Beijing, with the design of finding a match for her second daughter. That young man, however, would become my father.
When he arrived in Beijing, Father called on Xiaoyi but no one was home; he left a note saying that he’d drop by another time. Then lightning struck — unable to endure a broken heart, Xiaoyi laid down on the railway tracks and killed herself. Out of this tragedy, regular letters passed back and forth between my mother in Shanghai and my father in Beijing. In May 1948, they got married in Shanghai and subsequently moved to Beijing. This is how I came into the world.
How many coincidences lead to the birth of each individual? If there had been no war, Waigong wouldn’t have wandered far from his hometown, Mother wouldn’t have accompanied Waipo on her journey to Chongqing, Father wouldn’t have been transferred for work, there’d be no postwar chaos at the airport, no phone call to make, no Xiaoyi tragedy, no letters passing between Beijing and Shanghai — could I still have been born?
3
Mouth tilted, eyes askew, Waigong would often stare at me blankly, a trickle of saliva dribbling down his chin. Sitting face- to-face, the only way we could communicate involved rubbing the table leg with our slippers, first you then me — a softly sawing zizi gaga noise exchanged — and instantly his opaque eyes lit up like those of a naughty child.
Waipo gave birth to fourteen children, thirteen survived — I had eight uncles and four aunts on my mother’s side. Not long after my birth, Waipo died from lung cancer. Waigong remained a widow for many years before he found another wife — a short lady full of energy and vitality, her glances and expressions strangely changeable. After Post-Waipo appeared, Waigong slowly drifted apart from his children, until his sickness and paralysis, whereupon everyone flocked to his side once again. Staying with my mother at Waigong’s house, I could witness in close quarters the perilous condition of living a tranquil life. Post-Waipo needed an iron will and steady nerves in order to resist the hostility of the clan members; otherwise, she’d have long been swept out the door. The adults never evaded me, even for secret family meetings or private discussions. Shanghainese wasn’t unfamiliar to me; as far as I can remember, my parents spoke the dialect with each other as a kind of secret language. Though I understood it, they had little choice but to switch to Mandarin. During our visit, I immersed myself in my own world and paid no attention to family disputes. From a few fragments of conversation here and there, I learned that Post-Waipo’s greatest offense came down to her mistreatment of Waigong;
that, in fact, they saw her as nothing more than a “Wolf-Waipo.” Living with this Wolf-Waipo, I needed to try my best to assume the role of a most innocent boy.
When he retired as director from the telecommunications bureau, Waigong moved into a residential unit allocated by the state. What was once a traditional shikumen-style terraced building quite popular throughout Shanghai, marked by high brick walls that enclosed a small courtyard in a very narrow alleyway, had become subjected to unceasing division and restructuring according to the changing times, its topography, in turn, growing increasingly complex. Entering the front gate, past the open-air “sky-well” courtyard, a sitting room occupied the space to the left of the stairs, a small kitchen directly under the stairs, a garret-like room called a tingzi halfway up the stairs, and the main bedroom, no more than ten square meters, made up the entire second floor. Waigong and Wolf-Waipo slept in the main bedroom; mother and I squeezed into the tingzi.
Each day Mother would leave Waigong’s place with the grown-ups. Bored out of my mind, I’d stare out the window, the horizon obstructed by colorful blooms of clothes blossoming on lines strung between bamboo poles. A group of boys would congregate regularly in the sky-well, ji ji zha zha chattering nonstop; with no action or excitement to speak of, I began to feel anxious for them. After gnawing an apple down to its core, I handily arced it toward the boys and, bent at the waist, head down, stealthily receded from the window.
Around dusk the next day, I returned with Mother; she went upstairs ahead of me, while the boys slowly surrounded me. They were all of different heights, silent as shadows; a thin, taller one, obviously the leader, demanded to know why I had thrown a fruit pit at them. He tried again, asking me where I was from, but once more I refused to reply. We glared at each other, our faces almost touching; it was as if we were playing the blinking game, who blinked first, no, you did. My mother called me from upstairs, the leader slapped me on the shoulder, the little bros stepped aside to make a path. Whenever I came or went, they always stared at me in silence, no hard feelings, the day’s chattering resumed, a pattern that would repeat itself till the earth expired and heaven fell.