MRS YOU: Other things I can't be certain about, but we're of one mind about the price we paid in those years for our work, and for the motherland.
XINRAN: Have the two of you ever had arguments?
MRS YOU: Oh yes, we've had arguments.
XINRAN: What do you argue about?
MRS YOU: Sometimes our opinions are different, or our ideas of family life.
XINRAN: In the family? Over the children? Or about life in general?
MRS YOU: He's a northerner, I'm a southerner, sometimes our tastes in food are different – he likes spicy things, I like sweet things – but we aim for agreement in big matters and agree to differ over smaller issues.
XINRAN: Who gives way most, you or him?
MRS YOU: Well, it's usually me who gives way… It's a miracle he's still here, he's had a lot of narrow escapes, he's been in car accidents,
XINRAN: You really are very strong, with a life like this, full of scares and alarms, but never complaining. If someone were to ask you what kind of man Teacher You is, as a comrade, as a wife, as friend, how would you reply?
MRS YOU: He's very strong, he's a very loyal friend, very practical, and in the time of the Cultural Revolution he didn't make wild statements about other people in order to clear himself.
XINRAN: Is he a good husband?
MRS YOU: Ah… [laughs]… he's a good husband.
XINRAN [also laughs]: Is he a good father?
MRS YOU: You can only call him just about average, because none of the children have grown up into people of accomplishment. None of them have his deep scholarship, none could ever equal him.
XINRAN: If I were to describe a woman like you in three sentences, what three sentences do you think could give the best picture of you?
MRS YOU: I'm really not very outstanding. I have ambition and I've struggled.
XINRAN: But especially as a woman?
MRS YOU: Ah, hmm…
XINRAN: As a woman, as a wife, as a mother, as a grandmother.
MRS YOU: I don't know what to say. I want to make it up to them by being a mother and grandmother to them. And I don't know if they're grateful for what I've given up, coming to live in this out-of-the-way place. I want to go to the Old People's University too; I want to play mah-jong, take part in singing contests, sing songs, go on trips to scenic spots. But because I didn't do a good job of raising them before, now I'm retired I want to repay the debt I owe my children through my grandchildren. These aren't very grand ideals, but they come from the heart.
XINRAN: They are words from the heart that I've come on a journey of thousands of miles to hear. I have two questions – I don't want your answers now but I hope you'll think them over. One is: what are the three most bitter and three most happy things in your life? The second question is: you are so successful, you are one of the people who created an era; in the eyes of people nowadays, in the eyes of the young, was it worth it? Please consider these questions.
MRS YOU: I'll think about them, I won't be able to sleep for thinking about them.
XINRAN: I think you must have already spent more nights than you can count thinking about these questions. In fact, once we've given ourselves an answer, we can relax a bit, and sleep a bit easier, at least we won't be disturbed by dreams full of anxiety or sleepless nights. You have a rest now – I'll see you in a bit when we eat.
MRS YOU: Then you try to rest for a while too, don't wear yourself out.
When I invited Teacher You in for his interview, his first act on entering the room was to apologise, in a typical Chinese 'great man' way, for his wife: 'very naive', 'no notion of other people's time', 'endless nattering' and a series of similar 'errors'. Although I did not accept his apologies, I did not contradict him either. The first reason for this was that I no longer had the confidence to debate the rights and wrongs between Chinese men and women; the second was that we didn't have the time to discuss this question of 'whether a woman could be great, wise and clever in the eyes of her husband', for which no woman has ever had a clear answer since the beginnings of the women's liberation movement. I was one of the many women who had been 'taught' by this kind of very successful man; I knew that no matter who you were, in those men's eyes, you would never, ever be able to distance yourself from their preconceived notions of 'women and their bad habits'.
Teacher You was a man with many honours after his name, most of which were to do with geophysics and oil, but also including a few government posts. This is another very 'Chinese' phenomenon: many name cards in China come folded into three sections, with rows of 'honours and positions', high-ranking and important offices jostling for space. Sometimes I used to think that they must have three heads and six arms each – how else could they have enough time in the work unit to live out all these parallel existences? A person with so many titles is bound to be a great achiever. However, sometimes you will notice that the majority of the work units to which those titles belong share an address, and can be found in the same unit of the same block of flats: so does the sitting room perhaps count as an organisation? And the kitchen and the bathroom as two companies?
Teacher You's professional titles were all at a national level, yet I could feel a kind of 'emptiness' in all of his titles; a feeling that things didn't quite meet in the middle; a sense that there was no successor to carry on his work. This was the 'hunger' of modern China's oil business, the 'thirst' of modern China's geophysics.
I don't understand the science or history of petroleum, but since the USA and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003 I have seen the madness and cruelty to which petroleum can drive humanity: the men with guns shouting out for freedom and democracy, with never a thought for the children who cannot say in the morning if they will live to see nightfall, and nobody to console the aged mothers left without help or support in the middle of a racial war; and I have seen those oil-drunk 'liberators' racing to divide up the 'liberated' oilfields. Humankind has barely progressed from the primitive plundering, religious battles and power struggles of the last century; nowadays the evils that spring from hunger and desire have just learned to dress themselves in names like 'justice and democracy'. I worry that oil will cause my own rapidly developing country to turn to crime in its turn. So I wanted very much to know what those petroleum titles represented.
XINRAN: Teacher You, the first time I heard about you, I learned that you had very many titles. Please tell me something about the ten titles that you personally consider the most important, if you don't mind?
YOU: I'll tell you the simple truth: I only recognise a few of those titles. I have been Deputy Commander and Chief Engineer of the Yinchuan Petroleum Prospecting Command Office, and Deputy Head of the China Petroleum Prospecting Bureau, and then in 1979 Zhao Ziyang made me Head of the China Petroleum Prospecting Bureau. Now, although I wear many 'hats', according to national policy I am classed as retired. When I was still in post, there were many local factors involved in some of my transfers. For example, I was once made head of a local law court in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. When the Petroleum Bureau found out, they said: 'You can't go to work in the regions – you belong to us! So the boss of the Petroleum Bureau came with me to the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Regional Office and got me transferred back. Later on the government of another province wanted me to head their Fossil Fuel Bureau, but the Party organisation didn't allow it, and I was transferred back out again that same night.
The Chinese system of employing people is far from perfect; there is a lack of professional knowledge and imagination both in the plan as a whole and the way it is regulated and carried out.
