that it's not at all so-'
'What do you know? This is no game, you're not a child anymore, don't lose your head without knowing how you lost it!'
His uncle wanted to cough again, and sprayed his inhaler down his throat again.
'It's impossible to read anything, and there's nothing to do.'
'Observe, can't you observe?' His uncle said, 'I'm an observer. I close my door and don't go out. I don't join any faction and just watch the circular enactment of people rising to power and falling from power.'
'But I have to go to work. I'm not like you, Uncle, you can stay at home because you have to convalesce,' he said.
'You can keep your mouth shut, can't you?' his uncle retorted. 'Your mouth is on your own head!'
'Uncle, you've been convalescing at home for a long time. You don't know that once a campaign starts, you have to take a stance. It's impossible not to get swept up in it!'
This old revolutionary uncle of his, of course, knew very well, and gave a long sigh. 'These are chaotic times. In the past, people could hide in the old forests on remote mountains or go to a monastery and become monks…'
Only then was his uncle quite frank with him: it was the first time they discussed politics together. No longer treating him as a child, his uncle said, 'I've had to use my illness to escape the winds of political change. Following the Great Leap Forward, antirightist tendencies in the inner Party became entrenched, and since then, I have stood aside. I've not involved myself with what has been happening for seven or eight years, and only through this have I been able to prolong my feeble life.'
His uncle also spoke about his former commander, Yuan, who was in die upper echelons of the Party. During the Civil War, he and Yuan were willing to die for one another. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Yuan paid him a visit when passing through. He sent the guard outside and told his uncle, 'Something big is about to happen in the Party Center, and it is unlikely that we will meet again.' He left behind a brocaded bedcover and said it was to commemorate their final farewell.
'Tell your father that no one can save anyone; get him to do whatever he can to protect himself!'
These were the last words his uncle said to him as he escorted him to the door. Not too long afterward, this uncle, who was not very old, came down with influenza and was admitted to the army hospital where he had an injection. A few hours later, he was wheeled into the morgue. His former commander, that revolutionary Yuan Xun, who had been incarcerated, also died a year later in the army hospital. But it was many years later that he read about this in a memorial article exonerating Yuan. As revolutionaries in those very early days, they could not have imagined that, even without making a bid to seize power, they, too, would see themselves staring death in the face because of the revolution. It was impossible to know whether or not they had regrets.
Then why did you rebel? Did you go up to the grinding machine to ensure that there would be plenty of mincemeat filling for pancakes? Looking back on those times, you can't help asking him.
He says he had no choice, circumstances did not allow a person to be a dispassionate observer, and he knew he was just a pawn in the movement. He suffered terribly, not because he was fighting for the Commander-in- Chief, but simply in order to exist.
Then couldn't you have found some other means for just surviving? For example, by simply being an obedient citizen, going with the flow, living for today and not being concerned about tomorrow, changing with the political climate, saying what people wanted to hear, pledging allegiance to whoever was in power? you ask.
He says that was even harder, it needed much more effort than being a rebel. It needed much more thinking; one needed to be constantly working out the unpredictable weather, and could a person accurately predict heaven's temperament and mood? His father was one of the common people and he did just that, and when it came to the crunch, he ended up swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. His father's demise was not very different from his old revolutionary maternal uncle's. There was no clear goal to his rebelling. It was simply due to his instinct to live, but he was like a praying mantis putting up a foreleg to stop a cart.
Then, perhaps, you were born a rebel, or at least born with a rebellious streak?
No, he says, he was gentle by nature, like his father. It was just that he was young, at an impressionable age, and very inexperienced. He couldn't follow the road of his father's generation, but didn't know what road to take.
Couldn't you have escaped?
Where could he escape to, he asks you instead. He couldn't escape from this huge country, and he couldn't leave that big beehive-like workplace where he got his salary. That beehive allocated his city residence permit, his monthly grain coupons (fourteen kilos), oil coupons (half a kilo), sugar coupons (quarter of a kilo), meat coupons (half a kilo). It also issued his annual fabric coupons (nine meters), his salary scale-based industrial certificates (2.05 certificates) for buying a watch, a bicycle, or everyday commodities such as wool, and even determined his citizen status. If he, this worker-bee, left the beehive, where could he fly? He says there was no other option, he was just a bee whose refuge was this hive. As the hive was infected with madness, what else was there to do except wildly buzz around, attacking one another?
But did wildly buzzing around save your life? you ask.
He was already buzzing around. If he'd known all this earlier, he wouldn't have been an insect. He smiles sardonically.
An insect that can smile is somehow grotesque. You go right up to take a good look at him.
It's the world that is grotesque, not the insect that has taken refuge in the hive, the insect says.
34
Beyond the pass at Shanhaiguan it got cold early, and he had run into chilly winds blowing down from the northwest. The bicycle, hired in the county town, was impossible to ride against the wind, and even pushing it was hard. At four o'clock in the afternoon it was already dark, when he reached the place where the commune was located, but the village he was going to was a further ten kilometers away. He decided to stay the night in the cart station, where the peasants stopped for a break with their donkey- and horse-carts. He forced himself to eat a bowl of hard sorghum along with the two strips of salted turnip that had gone bitter, then stretched out on the woven rush mat on the earthen kang. In weather like this, the villagers didn't take their carts out, so he had to himself a communal kang that could accommodate seven or eight people. His letter of introduction from the nation's capital seemed to have made an impression, because a special effort had been made to heat the kang for him. However, as the night wore on, it got so hot that the lice on him were probably oozing oil. Even after he had taken off everything except his underpants, he was still sweating, so he got up, sat on the edge of the kang, and smoked, as he pondered the real possibility of seeking refuge somewhere in a village during these chaotic times.
He was up early. There was still a strong north wind, so, leaving the clumsy, heavy-duty bicycle at the cart station, he set off on foot against the wind, and, after three hours, arrived at the village. He asked from house to house whether there was an elderly woman with such-and-such a surname who was a primary school teacher. People all shook their heads. There was a primary school in the village with one teacher, a man, but his wife had given birth and he had gone home to look after her.
'Who else is at the school?' he asked.
'There hasn't been a class for more than two years. It wasn't really a school, so the production brigade converted it into a store-house. It's piled high with sweet potatoes!' the villagers said.
At this point, he asked for the Party secretary of die production brigade, to get someone in charge.
'The old one or the young one?'
He said he wanted a villager who was in charge, so, naturally, the old one was better, he would be sure to know about things. He was taken there. The old man, a bamboo pipe clamped in his teeth, was weaving a rattan basket. Without letting him explain why he had come, the old man mumbled, 'I'm not in charge, I'm not in
