by Bei Dao
The two of us first met at the time of the 1946 victory of the war of resistance; because of the war, my parents had been forced to live apart from each other for seven or eight years; I accompanied Mother on a flight to Chongqing to visit Father. At Coral Dam Airport, we wished to make a phone call but didn’t know how to dial through; by chance, an attractive young man there was about to make a call, and my mother told me to ask him for assistance — this person turned out to be Zhao Jinian.(From my mother’s interview)
In Beijing on the eve of liberation, my father used his position of power to help his older cousin in the underground party gather intelligence throughout the whole city, such as the locations of food stores, and so on. One night, the Kuomintang military police were carrying out house-to-house searches and a confrontation with the police captain resulted in his arrest and overnight confinement. At the time, my mother was pregnant with me. As my father related the story, he couldn’t sleep in the prison cell and spent the whole night awake, longing for the birth of his child, as well as the birth of a new China.
6
Father loved to read, but at most he could be regarded as maybe half an intellectual. He had mixed literary tastes, claiming to be a “fan” of Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Zhang Henshui, Ai Wu, and Ru Zhijuan. And then the assorted magazines he subscribed to over the years, from Red Flag, Harvest, People’s Literature, to Cinematic Arts, Study Russian, Folk Arts, and Wireless — it was very difficult to discern the direction and depths of his interests.
What my father was, however, down to the marrow of his bones, was a technology fetishist. Thus the Peony combination radio and four-speed record player he bought during the Great Famine, bringing The Blue Danube into our depressing lives. Then the Cultural Revolution sparked his new passion, diverting his struggles toeing the political line to a connecting wire: the transistor radio.
From the winter of 1967, he rushed between a variety of equipment shops, buying piles of electronic components. Our home became a workshop, expanding from desk to dining table, spots to eat quickly disappearing. Consulting a stack of reference books he had borrowed, he soldered red and green wires onto an electrical board. Jabbing the tip of the soldering iron into the rosin released a faint zhi zhi along with thick wisps of smoke. Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night, the lamp would be on, his crooked shadow hunched on the wall, clouds and mist swirling in the air. After repeated tests, grumblings and mutterings transformed into an opera’s orchestral interlude — the whole house sighed with relief.
At long last the project entered its final phase: Father took three-layer plywood boards and constructed a wooden box, fixed a little speaker into it, stuffed the rat-stomach-chicken-intestine jumble of wires inside it, added a lid, and, with much solemnity, handed it to me as if it were a family heirloom. I packed the transistor radio into my book bag, and on the way to school it broadcast the model opera Red Detachment of Women; but because of a loose or defective wire, or because of a bad connection or problem with the angle of the antenna, the transmission started and stopped, on then off again, and only incessant slapping could carry the revolution through to the end. By the time I arrived at school there was no chance to show it off before the whole thing fell apart.
It was in the summer of 1975 that our family bought the nine-inch black-and-white Red Lantern television set, which caused such a sensation in our building, our family the first to have one save for the one in the home of Min Jin’s Secretary-General Ge Zhicheng. The flood of neighbors into our house after dinner each day, the cheerful laughter and chatting. It was as if everyone were reading the same illustrated storybook. When a climactic moment coincided with signal interference, Father would promptly rescue the show, swiveling the antenna around, determined to restore the picture to normal, mission accomplished, but the enemy had already been shot and killed. To aid the audience in the back row, he put a magnifier window in front of the screen, deforming the picture and distorting the figures.
Reform and opening up came at an opportune moment, as Father’s passion for technology pointed the way. From old-style turntables and tape recorders to mono sound and answering machines, then on to the four box-type stereo-sound speakers — the audio revolution advanced us into a state of semi-deafness. At the same time, Father spared little energy for the color television and video recorder. Once the computer age dawned, however, his soul got sucked up and absorbed. His fingers tapped the keys in time with each upgrade, walking straight ahead as a faithful consumer on the front lines. Trying to catch the last train of the new age in his old age, he still harbored some regrets, telling me that if he were twenty years younger, he’d certainly switch to the computer trade. Clearly he overestimated himself — that world simply cannot be soldered together with an electric iron.
7
After liberation, my father worked at the main branch of the People’s Bank, and in 1952, by helping to establish the People’s Insurance Company, became one of the founders of new China’s fledgling insurance industry. As summer turned to autumn in 1957, he moved to the CAPD, serving as the deputy secretary in the central propaganda department, a completely hollow and thankless position. The true heart and soul of the organization lay with the party branch secretary. Its former incumbent was one Wang Susheng, an extremely bookish man who treated others with sincere enthusiasm; he visited our house frequently, where he talked about everything under the sun. Toward the end of 1950, Wang Susheng was demoted for his “rightist” inclinations and transferred to Harbin; at some point during the Cultural Revolution he committed suicide.
Wang’s successor, Xu Shixin was the archetypal smiling tiger. Still, his exceptional Ping-Pong skills were undeniable, his ferocious smashes, his swift and stinging attacks no opponent could withstand. Though not an upper-echelon party official, he effectively controlled this small, small kingdom, everyone respecting him from a distance, guarding their words and acting prudently.
One summer day, while we were playing Ping-Pong at the CAPD, Xu Shixin challenged a few of us to a competition. With his vertical paddle grip, he’d slice a low backspin shot, then smack a quick loop drive, chameleon-like, defending then attacking. He crushed each one of us in rapid succession, our heads hanging down with funereal airs.
Xu Shixin brought the crestfallen troops into the conference room and closed the door, saying he just wanted to have a casual chat with us. We exchanged a few pleasantries and then he quickly got to the point, asking us what our fathers did at home, what our fathers talked to us about. We may have been young, but we were fully aware of his viciousness and played the fool. As I didn’t get along with my father, I voiced a few complaints about, for instance, his strict educational methods. Xu Shixin encouraged me to continue, but the words faded from my lips and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Xu Shixin concluded by saying, “Your parents’ generation belonged to the old society; it’s hard for them not to bring over old thoughts and old habits, and in order to help them reform their ideology, we need the cooperation of you Young Pioneers.” He ended by warning us three times that his meeting with us must remain confidential, that we shouldn’t tell our parents about it and from now on we should keep in close contact with him about matters. Finally, he left us with, “This is the trust the party has in you.”
After the meeting, Xu Shixin asked me to stay behind. He mumbled something to himself, then inquired if I had in my possession a fountain-pen pistol. I stared at him totally stupefied. He said that the local police had been investigating the whereabouts of an alleged fountain-pen pistol. Two or three months ago, to frighten my little brother, I claimed that my fountain pen was actually a silent pen pistol, and with a wave, shot a bullet into the wall above his bed (I had surreptitiously put a hole there beforehand). This really spooked my brother, which made me feel one hundred percent pleased with myself. Obviously, my actions amounted to nothing more than a prank, a case of turning the not-real into the real. As far as the local police stepping i
n, a likely deception, too, though Xu Shixin obviously nosed his way into a hodgepodge of information channels. After I explained myself, Xu Shixin tousled my hair and said, “I’m convinced you’re telling the truth,” and added, “You did well today.”
At home I felt like a traitor and couldn’t look my father in the face. When he asked me what was wrong, I told him we had played Ping-Pong with Xu Shixin, and each one of us had lost.
8
My parents visited me in America in the fall of 1999; I often drove them around on outings. One day, on our way back to my place, my father mentioned something in passing that felt like a punch in the face. Both my parents sat in the backseat while I drove, and I tried to see my father’s expression in the rearview mirror. After dinner that evening, Mother went to bed first while my father and I sat facing each other across the dining table. I picked up the thread we had left in the car; it seemed as if he had been waiting for this moment, too, to clear the air.
As the titular head of the CAPD’s propaganda department, the widely renowned, pioneering writer Xie Bingxin (popularly known as Bing Xin)* hardly listened or bothered to inquire about anything when Father, as deputy secretary, gave her regular work updates. Basic bureaucratic protocol required these updates from my father, though he actually had another task, too: writing reports about the details of his conversations with her to pass on to the organization. Every two or three weeks he’d call on her, first making an appointment over the phone, usually for an afternoon to converse over tea. Afterward at home, he’d recollect the details of their discussion in a written report.
As my father remembered it, most of the intelligentsia actively accepted “ideological thought reform” to be carried out in two basic ways: a small study group or a private talk. An individual of Xie Bingxin’s character naturally became a primary target for “ideological thought reform,” the content of her private discussions with others relayed to the organization, a practice as inalienable as the principles of heaven and earth.
This made me wonder: What sort of heartfelt truths could my father have actually drawn out? Father shook his head and said, “Xie Bingxin wasn’t so pure in deed as in her earlier days. As her name suggests, her heart, xin, had already turned to ice, bing.” Each time they spoke, stride by stride, she fortified her camp, always on the alert, nothing leaking out. Only once did she reveal anything significant in front of my father: “Those of us who have been overtaken by the wind rustling the grass blades are like snails, first stretching out our feelers to test the air.” In her heart she seemed to know what this meant, and tried to persuade my father to send a message to the organization that they needn’t bother about these trivial thoughts.
It was a late-autumn night, a night like chilled water, insects chirped in the backyard, the refrigerator hummed. I urged Father to write everything down, to give an account for himself and for history — this wasn’t just a typical individual’s experience; it touched on an extraordinary historical moment, it touched on the complicated and tangled relationship between the intelligentsia and the revolution. He nodded his head and said he’d think about it some more. The matter was thus set aside, and never mentioned again.
I started to write poems in the early 1970s. Father returned to the capital on his days off from the cadre school in Hubei. Xie Bingxin came up in one of our conversations and he told me she was still living in Beijing, in the residential housing for the Central Institute for Nationalities. After he returned to the cadre school, I went to call on her.
A small, slight grandmotherly figure opened the door and asked who I was; I said I was Zhao Jinian’s son, and that I had come to ask her advice about something. Bing Xin led me into the sitting room and steeped a pot of tea. Her husband, Wu Wenzao, appeared; he stopped for a moment to greet me and then went out. She had rolled up her smoothly combed gray hair into a bun, her face full of wrinkles, her eyes unusually bright; she wore a blue padded ao jacket with buttons down the front, black cloth shoes, her appearance clean and neat. I sat down and took out my poetry manuscripts, including my first efforts Because We’re Still Young and Songs of Fire, and a few other drafts of poems. Her overall assessment was positive, and she suggested revisions to specific words and phrases. As her enthusiasm grew, she brought me into her study, sat down at her desk, and from the bookcase behind her extracted the Grand Dictionary of Chinese Characters, using a magnifying glass to lock down the precise meanings of each word.
For a short while after that we met up every now and then. Bing Xin even wrote a poem in reply to Because We’re Still Young, subtitled “For a Young Friend.” Perhaps poetry and youthfulness allowed her to be completely unguarded with me. Perhaps this, too, along with my father’s antagonizing role, let me draw her into a widening vortex so many years after her encounter with my father. From link to interrelated link, who can clearly discern the world’s karmic chain?†
Father . . . your spirit in the sky . . . would surely understand me . . . to say the things you want to say. That night we arrived at a silent understanding: To speak the truth openly, no matter if the truth might wound us.
9
Father said, “Life is a continuous picking up and dropping off.”
Nineteen sixty-nine, no doubt a year of transformation. I was assigned to work at the Beijing No. 6 Construction Company in early spring; I picked up my little brother and dropped him off at the production and construction corps on the Mongolian border; Mother was sent to the cadre school in Xinyang prefecture in Henan; one of her colleagues brought my little sister to another cadre school that autumn; Father stayed behind to tend to things, until the end of the year when he was sent to the cadre school in Shayang County in Hubei. Not a year had passed and, the dear ones gone, the chambers empty, the five members of our family had been split up and scattered to five different places, carbon paper a necessity for writing letters in quadruplicate.
Zhenkai was assigned to the Beijing No. 6 Construction Company to work as a manual laborer. His first time leaving home and his parents were naturally very anxious. The evening before his departure, our family of five went to a dairy shop in Xinjiekou for a little send-off party with some milk and dessert. As Zhenkai packed his things, we were afraid he’d be too cold and let him take our family’s only sheepskin overcoat. The next morning, the day of his departure, we all sent him off at the front gate. I wanted to see him one more time, to make sure he would get on the bus at Chong Yuan Temple, and so not long after he left, I quickly hopped onto a trolleybus; I saw him waiting at the bus stop but didn’t approach him, just watched from afar as he boarded, and afterward returned home, tears in my eyes. (From my father’s notebook)
At the construction site in Hebei’s Yu County, I set off explosives to blast open a mountain, making way for a new power plant. That summer I received a telegram from Father: “Shan Shan’s sick return quickly”; I asked for leave, bought some fresh eggs from a local villager, and returned to Beijing in one of the construction transport trucks. Shan Shan had been running a persistent high fever, her diagnosis juvenile rheumatoid arthritis; by the time I got home her fever had subsided.
That single week passed like a stolen moment. Beijing City, a vast emptiness, deserted, hardly a single visitor in Beihai Park. We rowed a boat, snapped photos, ate lunch at the Hall of Rippling Water. Father ordered crispy fried meatballs for me, and for Shan Shan braised fish in brown sauce. He drank a bottle of beer and, a little tipsy, said to the waitress, “This is my son and daughter . . . as you can see my good fortune overflows.”
Each year we were given twelve days of home leave, plus holidays, which gave me something to look forward to during the misery of my daily life. My first days off I went to visit family in Henan and Hubei Provinces, then traveled around a bit, wandering through mountains, playing in waters. Later the same year I set out from Mother’s cadre school in Henan, and together with Shan Shan, went to visit Father in Shayang. The second year I journeyed alone f
rom Henan to Hubei; at the time, Father had been transferred from the cadre school to work in the fields, and was living with a family in a local village.
I had been living on the Five-Stars Farm No. 3 Production Team in Gaoqiao Village. One day I was working in the fields and someone came to tell me that Zhenkai had arrived. I hurried back to the residence, and from a distance I could see him squatting by the pond, washing my clothes. He had taken my bedsheets, clothes, everything to wash, and had even swept up my pigsty of a room. That evening, my landlord asked his son to go buy some tofu, treating Zhenkai like a guest of honor. For three meals a day the local peasants only ate pickled leeks — tofu was very precious indeed. Zhenkai had brought three cans of meat. The next day, we walked together to town and ate at a tiny restaurant there; I alone inhaled the three cans of meat. Zhenkai watched me devour my food wolf-and-tiger style, and felt pity for me; although he didn’t say anything, I could see it in his expression. (From my father’s notebook)
At the end of autumn in 1971, Father came back to the capital for a few days. On the eve of his return, I cooked up a few small dishes, father and son drinking and chatting. I brought up the recent September 13 Incident, the questionable circumstances of Vice Chairman Lin Biao’s plane crash in Mongolia, the more I spoke the more emotional I became. Father simply parroted assent. Intoxicated, we passed out across the desk from each other. Early the next morning, I woke up and discovered my father staring blankly at the ceiling; a long duration passing before he opened his mouth, repeating the same warning over and over to me — to avoid provoking a fatal disaster, I mustn’t speak carelessly beyond the walls of the house. For the first time ever, out of an alcoholic stupor, father and son formed a political alliance.