and could fix just about anything without a lot of talk. Because of all that, he was very well liked on the commune and he spent many happy years living there.
Unfortunately, in time the commune began to split up due to squabbles between the hippies, and then the whole movement started to wane and most of the members drifted away. The great majority of communes were unable to keep going after the Vietnam War ended, and Fang Lijun’s commune was no exception. There were no new members coming in and although some of the old-timers came back, they soon left again. In the end only Fang Lijun and an older woman everybody called “Mom” remained. “Mom” was resolved to stay on with Fang Lijun. There were only the two of them, and as the years went by they were pretty much the same as a traditional husband and wife.
One day in the early 1980s, “Mom” told Fang Lijun that she was getting too old to be a hippie anymore and she wanted to go back east and live with her daughter. So the two of them shut off the water and electricity, boarded up the windows, and took a train across the United States to Maryland, where they split up. Fang Lijun headed north to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. There he ended up as a cook in a self-service chop suey joint in Boston’s Chinatown. The boss liked him a lot, too, and he worked there for several years.
One day Fang Lijun suddenly decided to go to the Harvard-Yenching Library, and from then on he was hooked. He worked only in the evening at the restaurant, and in the daytime he jogged from Boston Chinatown to Cambridge to read the Chinese periodicals in the Harvard Library. That was when he started writing letters to the editor at
In 1989, he really did return to the mainland, and in 1992, when Deng Xiaoping made his celebrated “southern tour” to promote economic development, Fang Lijun left China again-he always moved against the mainstream.
Back in America, Fang Lijun sent me a letter telling me that he was doing odd jobs in New York’s Chinatown. At the time I was back in Taiwan working for the
The next time I received a letter from him, Fang Lijun was in Nigeria in West Africa. He later told me that he had always kept in touch with a Nigerian he’d met in the international guesthouse in Chunking Mansions, and he’d invited him to Africa. When Fang Lijun was young, he had always dreamed about going to friendly states like Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania and making a contribution to their development. So he went without the slightest hesitation. It turned out that his Nigerian friend wanted to trade with China. He asked him to be his partner. Fang Lijun thought of all those red, white, and blue fabric bags the Chinese use to carry goods and other things when traveling. They could buy them in China, ship them to Nigeria, and sell them all over West and Central Africa.
Those red, white, and blue cloth bags were a big hit with the Africans, and so Fang Lijun’s partner wanted them to set up their own factory and make the bags themselves in Lagos. After making money in the Nigeria-China trade, Fang Lijun visited Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania, but he didn’t want to end his days in Africa. He went back to live in China with a plan to set up a small Cantonese restaurant just outside Li Jiang City in Yunnan.
Luckily for him he was too slow. The restaurant plan came to nothing long before Li Jiang was devastated by the great earthquake of February 3, 1996. Fang Lijun then traveled all over western China. I remember he predicted that when China started to develop its tourist trade, too many people would come and ruin China’s scenic and historic spots.
He traveled for seven or eight years, visiting Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan, and Sichuan. He went on foot, by train, by long-distance bus, hitching rides on passing trucks-he even had a ride on a military transport plane. If you show him any piece of cloth embroidered by any of the minority peoples, Fang Lijun can tell you right off if it was produced by the Tong of Guangxi, the Yao, or the Miao or Hmong from the Southwest, and probably exactly where they made it. Whenever his money ran low, he would sign on as a cook in tourist areas. Because the tourists never came back, he told me, it was just like fooling the foreigners in American Chinatowns with half-Chinese, half-foreign “Chinese cuisine.”
In 2006 he moved to Beijing, said he wanted to see what it would be like to be an Olympic volunteer. When we met again I learned that he had changed his name many years before from Fang Lijun to Fang Caodi. According to him, one day he was walking past the Temple of the Sun in Beijing, when he saw many parents picking up their children from the Fangcaodi, or “fragrant grass,” Elementary School, and so he decided to change his name to Fang Caodi. That’s just Old Fang’s logic-no logic at all. With his advanced age and his complicated history, I wonder if the Olympic Committee accepted his application.
I closed the notebook. After I published my
If I could rid my mind of it, a new subject would come to me. My own interests had completely changed, and I didn’t believe that the new generation of Chinese readers wanted to read about all the wounds and scars of the past sixty years. I really wanted to write only about new people and new things, to write about the Chinese people’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.
3. FROM SPRING TO SUMMER
A French crystal chandelier
Little Xi didn’t return my e-mail, so my happy life could continue. I went to the 798 Art District to participate in the opening ceremony for an exhibition of paper-cutting installation art by women from the Northwest. My friend from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was the academic cocurator, and she’d invited me to be one of the ten speakers at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. In my three-minute talk, I summarized the Taiwan New Communities Movement of the 1990s and discussed how Taipei artists and local craftspeople had worked hand in hand to bring cultural production in villages back to life. I spoke so well I got a little emotional myself. The curator also said this exhibition was a fine example of the vitality of Chinese folk culture.
A lunch was held at the nearby Golden Chiangnan restaurant, and I was placed at the same table as the representative of the China National Cultural Renaissance Foundation. The Foundation had sent only an assistant secretary-general. He told me how one of their most important projects was assisting Chinese around the world to locate and retrieve national treasures that had been stolen from the Summer Palace and other sites. Besides that, the Foundation was working to revive China’s ancient rites throughout the entire nation by, for example, providing financial subsidies to many elementary and middle schools to carry out initiation ceremonies at the beginning of every school year, usually requiring students to bow and pay their respects to their teachers. The Foundation was also working hard to have various traditional-style rituals declared “national statutory ceremonies.”
After eating a few main dishes, I went to the toilet and by the time I returned a big group of people had crowded around my table to listen to the Foundation’s representative, so I decided to move to another table.
My Chinese Academy of Social Sciences friend, Hu Yan, was sitting at a table with a French woman from UNESCO and a Thai who was with the One Village One Craft Association. I thought that if I joined them, I’d have to speak English and that would be too much like hard work, so I decided against it. I went over to the Northwest- delegation table, where there were many empty seats because the reporters were all over at the Renaissance
