The Fat Years

“You know I’m what the Hong Kong people call a ‘woman of the Dao’-a junkie?”

I was taken aback. I would never have known.

“I don’t use needles. If the customers saw them, they wouldn’t like it.”

“What kind of drugs do you take?” I asked.

“Whatever I can find that can be taken orally,” she said.

“Write them all down for me later. I’d like to know what they are,” I said with a certain caution. “Go on. What happens after you take the drugs?”

“When I take drugs, sometimes I feel really high, but sometimes I feel down, right? And sometimes I become extremely aware of my surroundings. At those times, I can see that the world has changed, that everybody around me is not quite right.”

“How are they ‘not quite right’?” I asked.

“They’re just not right,” she said, “they’re different from before, including you, Lao Chen, they’re all too… they all feel too happy. I can’t explain it, but they’re different from before. It’s not the sort of crazy high like when people like me take drugs. It’s a kind of very mild and very small high.”

I was trying hard to understand what she meant. I thought I did, but I was not sure.

“My boyfriend and I can’t stand it,” she went on. “He’s from Australia. He used to write travel guides for backpackers and he’s been in China for twenty years. He says that the Chinese mentality transforms itself every few years. It changed in 1992 with Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour; in 1994 with economic macro-control; in 1997 with the return of Hong Kong; in 2000 when China entered the WTO; in 2003 after the SARS epidemic; in 2008 with the Olympic torch and the opening ceremony; and now again in the last five years. He says in the past the leading countries in the National Happiness Index were always countries like Nigeria, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Their people all reported feeling especially happy. You wouldn’t even know how far down the list China was then, but suddenly for the last couple of years China has ranked as number one. Over a billion people all report being very happy! Don’t you think there is something wrong with the Chinese? How can they be so happy?”

Being with this foreign boyfriend, I thought, has definitely given her a different perspective.

“My boyfriend also takes drugs,” she continued. “Once we got high and had a big discussion about Jane Austen. It was fantastic. After that we became very close. You remember that year when there was a big crackdown? When I was living in Wangjing district? I knew someone might report me to the police, so I hid in my boyfriend’s place in the diplomatic quarter. I didn’t dare go out for several weeks-otherwise, who knows if I’d still be alive today. You see, you probably don’t remember?”

“My memory of that period is very hazy…” I said.

“Today, a normal person doesn’t remember,” she said, “those of us who remember are the abnormal ones. This is why my boyfriend and I can’t stand it. For the past two years in Beijing, it’s been harder and harder finding the gear we need. It’s like there are fewer and fewer dealers. Early this year, we went to a mountainous region of Yunnan to see if things might be a little better there. We discovered that the people there were a little more like us. Of course we ran into a lot of junkies and some of them were really evil, but there were some nice ones as well. And then there were the mountain people-none of them had that small-small form of high that the plains people have. My boyfriend calls that small-small high ‘high lite-lite.’ Sometimes he exaggerates and says that everybody now looks like those happy revolutionary workers or soldiers and peasants in those Cultural Revolution posters. Living among them, you probably don’t notice it. It’s not like that just in Beijing, but everywhere we went all over the country, everybody is high lite-lite, except in those mountainous areas or far off in the Northwest. My boyfriend and I talked it over for a long time and finally decided to move to Yunnan near National Highway 320, along the border with Myanmar.” She went silent and waited for me to react.

“I know someone who feels the same as you two do,” I said. “She can’t stand high lite-lite either.”

“Really?”

“She takes antidepressants.”

“Maybe antidepressants have the same effect,” Little Dong said thoughtfully.

“Maybe so,” I said. “She is that second road I’ve just asked the tarot cards about.”

Part Two

1. WANDERING BACK AND FORTH

The Age of Satisfaction

The Age of Satisfaction!”-Zhuang Zizhong, one of the venerable founding editors of the Reading Journal, often pondered this term. He heartily congratulated himself on having lived long enough to see this day, on having survived China’s various Ages of Trouble to bear witness to this Age of Happiness-China’s Golden Age of Prosperity and Satisfaction. He often told himself the most important thing in life was to live for as long as possible. All the other founding editors of the Reading Journal were dead and gone, and he was one of the few remaining greats. All the glory belonged to him now.

During the spring festival, the Politburo member in charge of cultural propaganda visited him at home and even brought along a CCTV reporter. Although this could not compare with earlier times when the celebrated Ji Xianlin received visits from the president, it was still a great event in the cultural and publishing world. Zhuang Zizhong was neither a great classical scholar nor a prize-winning novelist. A few years earlier, if you had heard that a Politburo member was going to visit the home of the aged founder of a scholarly journal, you would have said it was a joke. From this event, we could see how much importance this current Politburo attached to intellectuals and thinkers; this was something we had not seen since the end of the 1980s.

At the beginning of the Reading Journal New Year reception, Zhuang Zizhong modestly told everyone that all the honor was due to the Reading Journal itself. All the efforts of successive editors over more than thirty years had not been in vain, and the Reading Journal had finally received positive recognition from the leaders of Party Central. He recalled how the Party had for some time misunderstood the journal and censured it for its tone and direction, and later when they had patched things up with the Party, the latter still didn’t genuinely trust the journal. All that had changed in the last two years. First off, all the previous chief editors and assistant editors had miraculously and harmoniously been cooperating with one another. Then all the journal’s writers, who previously had held a variety of positions on how the nation should be ruled, suddenly reached a unified consensus. After the new joint editors organized a wide- ranging discussion seminar on “China’s New Prosperity” two years earlier, the Reading Journal again regained its briefly lost place as the leading scholarly journal of the nation’s cultural and intellectual world. It also came to be seen by the Party leadership as extremely important.

Zhuang Zizhong had made ten national policy suggestions concerning China’s New Era of Prosperity:

a one-party democratic dictatorship;

the rule of law with stability as the most important element;

an authoritarian government that governs for the people;

a state-controlled market economy;

fair competition guaranteed by state-owned enterprises;

scientific development with unique Chinese characteristics;

a self-centered harmonious foreign policy;

a multiethnic republic ruled by one sovereign ethnic group of Han Chinese;

post-Westernism and post-universalism as the nation’s chief worldviews;

the restoration of Chinese national culture as the world’s unrivaled leader.