The Fat Years (24 page)

During those seven days, however, the people felt like they were in purgatory; every day was too long, and by the seventh day they had put up with as much as they could stand and were about to go to pieces. As you can imagine, various criminal elements were keen to do their worst, so the population felt terrorized. There was almost mass hysteria. It looked as if total anarchy would soon break out—a fight of neighbor against neighbor to protect one’s life and property. People had just one hope in their minds—that the machine of state would soon go into action.

Fang Caodi had also begun to think by then that if the situation didn’t improve soon, China really would collapse into total chaos.

On the eighth day of the troubles, the fifteenth of the first lunar month, a small detachment of the People’s Liberation Army entered the township where he was and received an enthusiastic welcome from the populace.

Zhang Dou said this was the way he had heard it, too. On the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, two years earlier when the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing to restore order, the people of Beijing turned out in full force on the streets to welcome them. That afternoon the Public Security Bureau, the armed police, and the People’s Liberation Army issued a joint communiqué that a crackdown had begun. Zhang Dou didn’t have a Beijing residence permit and didn’t dare go out on the streets; instead, he hid out at home for three weeks.

Little Xi wondered whether she herself had actually gone out to welcome the People’s Liberation Army troops. Then she really
must
have lost her marbles. Maybe it was because she heard a crackdown was coming that she lost control of herself and went berserk that afternoon.

Fang Caodi told Little Xi that once the crackdown started, any suspicious person would have been locked up. He himself was turned in by a peasant and taken to the local Public Security Bureau, where he was almost sentenced to death. Luckily for him, there had been a young female judge who stood her ground against her colleagues and insisted that they handle his case on the basis of the law and the constitution. She had saved his life.

Little Xi wept profusely that night as she recalled in sorrow everything she had been through. The crackdown of 1983, and the People’s Liberation Army tanks rolling into Beijing in 1989 to suppress the students, had frightened her to death and left her with an immense feeling of frustration that called into question her life choices and her abilities. But now she felt she could sense her original vitality returning. From her online disputes with those middle-aged “angry youths” where she expressed her own opinions about the government, to defending peasants’ land rights with the fellowship, through to listening to Fang Caodi tell his story of a young female judge who argued strongly for right and justice, Little Xi felt that she was growing stronger and stronger, that she had finally found her true self again.

Whose idealism is the most radical, Fang Caodi’s or Little Xi’s? The answer is Little Xi’s. What do we mean by radical? The original classical meaning of radical is
root
(from the Latin
radix
), to find the essential root of something. Fang Caodi has a plain and simple sense of justice, of working on behalf of Heaven’s Way; added to his naturally stubborn character, this sense of justice spurs him on to search tirelessly for that missing month. Little Xi’s sense of justice is more abstract, more philosophical. The socialist and internationalist education that she received as a child engraved the bright words
equality, justice, friendship,
and
mutual aid
firmly on her heart. She really didn’t understand the hypocrisy of the Chinese Communist Party. In college she studied the Roman and Napoleonic law that was taught again after the Cultural Revolution ended. During the 1980s and 1990s she was baptized in the tide of Enlightenment values such as Reason, Liberty, Democracy, Truth, and Human Rights. Both romanticism and rationalism made deep impressions on her, and she adopted the idealism of a typical contemporary Westernized Chinese intellectual. Although her idealism is not without its blind spots and intrinsic limitations, due to all of the above, we know that Little Xi is more radical, and hers is a radicalism that will remain steadfastly loyal to the end.

Think about it. What was it that sustained Little Xi for the past few years as she underwent such great suffering and social marginalization? We have already read how she was the female host of an intellectual salon in the 1980s and 1990s. During those years, she mainly listened to the views of prominent personalities of the time, and very rarely offered her own opinions. In the last two years, though, when the intellectuals appeased the government or were “harmonized,” Little Xi rose up in opposition and threw herself into solitary combat. Without a backward glance, she argued strongly for truth and justice, expressing her opinions on the Internet. This process forced her to clarify her own thoughts and use rational arguments to state her case in the face of her opponents, who used emotive language, rhetoric, populism, and even violence. She’s become increasingly dispassionate and clearheaded. We should not, therefore, make the mistake of thinking that Little Xi is still the weak legal clerk-secretary with a sense of justice that she used to be, or
a Petöfi Club salon woman, or an unemployed and helpless mother who cannot even control her own son, or a crazy woman who scurries around like a frightened animal. She is already an obscure but genuine public intellectual, though she would never consider herself as such. This is her armor, her vocation, the air she breathes to live, her loveliness and her repulsiveness. She is willing to endure the greatest suffering, hardship, and personal humiliation as long as it brings her closer to the truth
.

After staying at Miaomiao’s house for a couple of days, on the weekend Lao Chen went back to his Happiness Village Number Two apartment, changed into a set of clean clothes, and went to Starbucks for a latte grande. On Sunday evening, he attended another one of Jian Lin’s old-movie screenings. In recent months only Jian Lin, He Dongsheng, and Lao Chen had been present at these monthly soirées. To tell the truth, these screenings had become events that Jian Lin organized just in order to accommodate his cousin, the Party and national leader He Dongsheng. Lao Chen was simply a guest necessary to keep He Dongsheng company. If Lao Chen didn’t go, and there were only the two cousins there, it would be rather embarrassing and hard to continue the screenings. For friendship’s sake Lao Chen felt he had a responsibility to attend. He explained patiently to Little Xi and Fang Caodi why he had to be there, and besides, he said, he had become rather addicted to hearing He Dongsheng give his long monthly lecture apropos the subject of the film.

The film they saw that night was
Setting Sun Street
from 1981, and the wine they drank was more of the 1989 Château Lafite. Jian Lin had instructed a broker to buy five cases of this at auction, so, for the next few months to come, they would probably be drinking this same vintage. Of course, Lao Chen could hardly complain about drinking 1989 Château Lafite every month.

The film had been shot in a district around the Buddhist Setting Sun Temple on Liang Guang Road on the edge of Beijing’s Second Ring Road. The film depicted the lives of a number of ordinary people at the start of the Reform and Opening era, and from it you could see the new market-economy model. One of the characters depicted was a conman pretending to be from Hong Kong, who wore a showy white suit, spoke a fake Cantonese, bragged, and extorted money and sex. Young Chen Peisi played an unemployed youth, euphemistically called “a youth waiting for work,” who raised pigeons and whose favorite phrase was “Byebye, all!”

When the film had finished, He Dongsheng recited a poem by the Yuan dynasty poet Ma Zhiyuan:

Then he went on: “The market economy can spur on people’s initiative and enthusiasm, but sometimes it looks chaotic, like it isn’t working. The key thing is to have a firm grasp of its regular rhythms—the government should not manage anything, but it has to manage everything. It taxed the mental capacity of two generations, with us going back and forth and round and round, working ourselves to death—even now I break out in a cold sweat dreaming about it at night.”

Lao Chen almost laughed out loud. He was thinking that He Dongsheng would not even have gone to bed at midnight and, even if he did, he would have insomnia. How could he dream back to an earlier time? After that brief reverie, Lao Chen pretended to listen to He Dongsheng’s long-winded lecture about the many political confrontations that had occurred during the thirty-plus years of Reform and Opening. Lao Chen was really thinking about Little Xi, whom he had not seen for a mere two days.

At the end of his speech, He Dongsheng said, “There will always be flies, but we can’t stop eating just because there are flies around.” Then he went quiet, and the three of them just drank their wine in silence as usual until midnight.

He Dongsheng went to the toilet and then asked Lao Chen if he wanted a lift home. Lao Chen was afraid that He Dongsheng would want to cruise the streets again and keep him up too late, so he politely declined.

He Dongsheng left and Lao Chen stayed behind. Jian Lin told him he was going to London to attend a wine auction and to buy himself a few cases of Burgundy. Lao Chen was happy to see that Jian Lin was over Wen Lan. When he took his leave, Jian Lin said “Byebye, all!” in the manner of the film actor Chen Peisi.

It was an early summer evening, and Lao Chen was feeling particularly good—his feeling of happiness was back again. As he started to walk home he thought to himself that before he went back to Miaomiao’s house, he had to remember to pack up and take along his big bag of cholesterol-lowering oatmeal. He came out of Jian Lin’s apartment complex, turned a corner, and had just reached the street, when he was startled by a big black SUV pulling up next to him. He thought he recognized He Dongsheng’s car, but he noticed that it was Fang Caodi driving. Little Xi and Zhang Dou were in the backseat, and the three of them were shouting at him to get in.

“Hurry!” they yelled.

“Whose car is this?” Lao Chen asked as he opened the passenger door.

“Just get in,” they said.

Lao Chen hadn’t fully got his mind around what was going on before he was already in the car and it was taking off down the street.

“Isn’t this He Dongsheng’s car?” he asked after a while. “How come … ?”

Lao Chen looked around at the backseat and saw that Little Xi and Zhang Dou had a man pinned down on the floor under their feet. He stared at them, speechless.

“Lao Chen, calm down,” said Little Xi. “Everything’s been arranged. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“He’s fine,” said Zhang Dou. “I used the best brand of chloroform; puppies and kittens get no side effects from it; the worst he might have is a headache for a couple of hours.”

“He won’t wake up for at least two hours,” chimed in Fang Caodi as he drove along. “No matter how loudly we speak, he won’t be able to hear a thing. I’ve tried this chloroform myself. It puts you out completely for over two hours and it’s perfectly reliable.”

“Have you all gone crazy?” shouted Lao Chen, glancing in terror at He Dongsheng.

“We won’t hurt him,” said Little Xi. “We just want to ask him some questions.”

“After that, we’ll set him free,” said Fang Caodi.

“You really are crazy!” said Lao Chen in dismay. “We’re fucked! Really fucked!”

“Shit!” said Fang Caodi suddenly. “Trouble up ahead!”

Lao Chen turned back to look through the windshield. Traffic police were conducting vehicle checks. “Now we’re really fucked!” he said, paralyzed in his seat.

“Everybody sit up straight …” said Fang Caodi. He looked like he was going to ram the roadblock.