The Fat Years

that were once legally published in China are definitely unavailable now, he thought to himself. Books like Little Shu’s collection of CCP members’ writings from 1941 to 1946, Harbingers of History, and Zhang Yihe’s celebrated memoir of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, The Past Is Not a Fog. Yang Xianhui’s 2003 report on the death by starvation of about three thousand Rightists in Gansu, What Happened at Jiabiangou, and Wu Si’s Unwritten Rules, an expose of official corruption, might or might not be available… But bestsellers like Yang Jiang’s The Shower, Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder,” and Reaching the Border of Human Life surely must be available. The Three of Us is even published by the Sanlian. How could they possibly not sell it?

As soon as Lao Chen entered the bookstore, he asked the sales assistant to look up Yang Jiang’s works on the computer. Searching the screen, the assistant said, “There aren’t any.”

The young people of today really aren’t very familiar with books, thought Lao Chen. “Are they out of stock?”

“There are no references here, it looks like we’ve never had them in.”

“Maybe you had them in a while ago?”

“There’s no record of our ever having them.”

“But Baptism is a Sanlian publication!”

“I don’t know about that, but there’s certainly no record on the computer.”

“Where’s the manager?”

“Try the coffee shop on the second floor.”

Lao Chen was a fairly analytical person, and so he began to reflect on the fact that in the last two years he hadn’t read any eyewitness accounts of the history of the Chinese Communist Party, or of the People’s Republic. He hadn’t even touched any memoirs of the Anti-Rightist Campaign or the Cultural Revolution. He’d read only the classic Chinese novels, celebrated works in Chinese classical studies. For a while now, he’d been paying no attention to what nonfiction books and memoirs the Sanlian had on its shelves. He decided to go downstairs and take a good look.

The basement had been redesigned. The section right by the stairs that had once held the Sanlian’s own publications had been replaced by the fiction section, and next to it were sections on Chinese classical studies, religion, entertainment, and popular media. Today there were still plenty of customers in these areas, but their numbers didn’t compare to the customers for bestsellers and business, self-improvement, and travel books on the ground floor. Around the corner of the L-shaped basement, the customers thinned out even further. This was the philosophy, history, and politics section where Lao Chen had felt so suffocated after the New Year reception. Now his head ached like it was going to explode. So he quickly gave up his task and raced back up the stairs, where the pounding gradually let up. He was looking for somewhere to sit down and hurried up to the second-floor coffee shop.

Lao Chen was thinking only of finding a nice secluded seat deep inside the coffee shop, when he was surprised to hear someone call out, “Little Chen!” He turned his head and saw Zhuang Zizhong, the venerable founder of the Reading Journal, sitting there with the Sanlian manager, a couple of vaguely familiar members of the cultural set, and a young woman. At the Reading reception, Lao Chen hadn’t greeted Zhuang Zizhong because of the number of people around him, but this time he couldn’t escape. He felt particularly guilty as he shook Zhuang’s hand enthusiastically and said, “Master Zhuang! I’m so happy to see you here.”

Zhuang Zizhong pointed to the young woman. “This is my wife-my present leadership,” he said jokingly. “You’ve probably not met before.”

“Mrs. Zhuang.” Lao Chen gently shook her hand. “Call me Little Chen.”

“Do you all know each other?” Zhuang Zizhong asked his other companions, to which they all nodded.

“I still have the clipping,” Zhuang went on, “of when Little Chen interviewed me for Mingbao. That was a quarter of a century ago.”

Everyone seemed pretty impressed.

“Sit down, Little Chen,” said Zhuang. “I have something I want to ask you. How did Mingbao report this time on the Central Party leader’s visit to my home?”

The Mingbao Web site was blocked on the mainland, and Lao Chen had not seen the report, but he said anyway, “Oh, about the same as the report in the Beijing News, quite a big spread.”

Master Zhuang beamed.

Lao Chen could not help asking a question that had been playing on his mind. “Master Zhuang, is it true that intellectuals today are genuinely willing to be reconciled with the Communist Party?”

He immediately felt he’d been too frank.

“What do you mean,” Zhuang said, showing no adverse reaction to the question, “are intellectuals willing to be reconciled with the Communist Party? The question should be, is the Party willing to be reconciled with the intellectuals?”

Just then someone else came over to greet Zhuang Zizhong, and Lao Chen took the opportunity to ask the Sanlian manager, “Why don’t you stock any of Yang Jiang’s books?”

“Which Yang Jiang?” asked the manager.

“Qian Zhongshu’s wife, Yang Jiang.”

“Oh,” the manager said, as if he’d suddenly remembered, “you mean that Yang Jiang. Probably because nobody was buying her books.”

Lao Chen’s head began to pound again. He hadn’t read those kinds of books for a while himself, but did it mean that the tastes of the general public had changed, too?

Lao Chen turned to Zhuang Zizhong. “Master Zhuang, I have to leave now to attend to some business. It was wonderful to see you; do take care of yourself.” Then he turned to Mrs. Zhuang and said, “Take good care of Master Zhuang, he’s a national treasure.”

As Lao Chen left the Sanlian Bookstore, he was wondering if he had been too ingratiating, if calling Zhuang Zizhong a national treasure was a bit over-the-top. But then he remembered what the character Wei Xiaobao in Jin Yong’s novel The Deer and the Cauldron always said: “Of all the things that can go wrong, flattery will never go wrong. What does it matter if you make other people happy?”

“Blowing in the Wind”

As soon as Lao Chen got home, he took a couple of aspirins, went to bed, and slept until morning; when he woke up, he still didn’t feel like getting up. At midday, he made some instant noodles, one of the hundred flavors offered by the Master Kong brand, but he didn’t care which flavor he was eating. When he’d finished, he went on to the Dangdang and Amazon China Internet sites to look up Yang Jiang’s works-it was true, there really were no entries under her name.

He went on to look up June 4, 1989, and Falun Gong 1999, and just as he expected, no books on these topics came up. But then he found that there were no books listed either about the Yan-an Rectification Campaign, Land Reform, the 1979 Democracy Wall Movement, the April Fifth Movement, and the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution and Crackdown on Crime Campaign-no books on any of these previously frequently discussed topics of the 1980s and 1990s. The only books that kept coming up were The China Reader: Contemporary China and The Popular Edition of a Short History of China-two standard tomes on modern and contemporary Chinese history, both authorized by the government in the last two years.

Old Fang really could be extremely perceptive, and this time he was right on target. In all the bookstores and even on their Web sites, where they claimed to stock every book in the world, of all the thousands of titles listed, Lao Chen could not find one single book that might explain the true facts about contemporary Chinese history. Why hadn’t he noticed this a long time ago?

During the Cultural Revolution and at the beginning of Reform and Opening, there were very few books in the