For some time now, as the result of a hypnotic experience, I have tried to explain my relationship with those visions, to halt to the extent possible their occurrence, to recuperate what is still alive in them, to detail every trait of their surroundings.
If I think about my past I discover that I’ve occupied myself in detestable jobs, but at the time I didn’t notice; or in other formidable ones, which I despised at the time and only later was able to adequately appreciate. But there were also others, very few, that are now the source of as much joy as in times past, when I held them. One of them was my collaboration with a program on Radio Universidad de México, coordinated by a dear friend, the Colombian Milena Esguerra. It was called: Ventana abierta al mundo [Open Window to the World], and was made up of interviews, chronicles, and reviews of activities that were supposedly the most important in the great cities of the world. Participating in that Ventana, being a part, if only minimally, of its creation, fascinated me. I felt as if I were in a dream: an apostle of culture, of the opening to the world of my country, and at the same time I lived formidable experiences, dealt with interesting characters, broadened my knowledge, all that. I sent reports from London, Rome, Warsaw, and, even though at times it’s hard for me to believe, from the mysterious and ancient city of Peking.
So upon returning home, after a grueling massage session, I went about reconstructing my first visit to the Temple of Heaven. I recall that my hosts and I stopped to rest during the trek toward the building, midway from the long marble streamer that encircles it, from where we had a marvelous all-encompassing view. To one side, with an arm stretched out toward the immense conical roof covered in glazed tiles of many vivid colors, was Professor Chen, a philologist from the University of Peking, a specialist in French literature. In fact, the greater part of his life had been spent in France. I imagine that, at that moment and with that gesture, he’s providing a description of the building that surely must have gone well beyond my possibilities of reception. I’m in ecstasy. It must be November of 1962. Beside the professor is his son, a student in the Faculty of French Letters, where his father teaches. Both, like all Chinese, are wearing the navy blue uniform of Mao Zedong. Except the fabric of the professor’s is visibly more refined than that of his son’s uniform, and the creases of his pants were perfectly pressed. The student uniform, on the other hand, was as modest as that of the masses that populate the streets.
Another Sunday, the same Professor Chen invited me to visit the Summer Palace, accompanied on that occasion by his wife and son, and after touring the gardens and strolling together to the lakes that surrounded the graceful pavilions, they invited me to eat in the palace restaurant. It was open to the public, the professor told me, but to an extremely reduced public, of six or seven tables. Mrs. Chen informed me that it was the best restaurant in the capital, and perhaps in all China. “The chef here enjoys tremendous prestige,” she said, “he was the head chef of the last empress,” and added with a certain snobbishness: “Yes, sir, the soup that you are eating at this very moment comes from the recipe book of an imperial kitchen, perhaps the one preferred by the dowager empress herself.” It seemed on that day it fell to her to do all the talking; she spoke enthusiastically about the theater—that may have been her profession, I don’t recall—and about their major authors, all important since before the advent of communism: Kuo Mo-jo, Lao She, Ts’ao Yu, whom I read shortly thereafter in English or French translations, and at the end she paid a passionate tribute to the Peking Opera. She grew visibly disillusioned when I told her that I had not seen a single performance during their triumphal tours throughout Europe. She added shortly after leaving the restaurant that the three wonders of China, its most refined achievements, were: the architecture of the Temple of Heaven, to which her husband had accompanied me, the Peking Opera of specific periods—the Ming, the Tang, namely!—which I could still see and hear on stage because they continued to be part of the current repertory. And the third: the delicious cuisine of Szechuan, which we had just eaten. Her son, smiling, said that his mother had been born in Szechuan, and therefore was unable to be objective. We laughed and as we got up from the table the four of us began to applaud.
To end our encounter, we went to have coffee at the home of a married couple who were friends of the Chens and fond of that drink. The host was an architect and, like Professor Chen, had lived a long period of his childhood in France, and his wife, also an architect, was actually French. For this reason, they enjoyed coffee. I was received cordially. The architects were younger than the Chens, and perhaps for that reason the solemn expressions of protocol were tempered in them. And that night I began to realize some things: during Stalinism, the Party ideologues did not follow Soviet methods in an orthodox way; at least in the world of culture, there existed certain oases protected from the venomous darts of the ultra-sectarian members of the party. The two couples with whom I was taking coffee were partisans of, or at least were close to, a political movement similar to European social democracy, whose leader was Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, creator and first president of the Republic of China, shortly before the First World War, and also vice president of the Republic during the communist period, very likely an honorary title, but one that allowed her to protect a number of vulnerable people and to find them respectable jobs. The vice president belonged to China’s richest family of financiers, which were not banned, since some Chinese political and cultural personages, like Chu Teh, the minister of Defense, the hero of the Long March, Chou En-lai, the most powerful vice-president of the republic, came from Mandarin families, the Chinese aristocracy, as did several respected writers of the period: Kuo Mo-yo, Pa-kin, and many others. They all had the opportunity to leave for Taiwan or Hong Kong when the old regime collapsed, or to return to Europe or to the United States, as others did; however, they remained in China and entered into an agreement, perhaps tacit, to be accepted in the country as long as they complied with certain conditions. Moreover, during the year 1962, there existed a group of private industrialists who ran their companies. The condition for enjoying certain guarantees depended, above all, on not having collaborated with the Japanese during their occupation of the country in the Second World War nor having been informers for the government of Chiang Kaishek, nor having betrayed opponents of that regime. Among the efforts of the widow of Sun Yat-sen, which were many, a minor one was the publication abroad in various languages of a propaganda magazine: China Reconstructs, where many non-communist intellectuals were welcomed, as well as some foreigners who had married Chinese citizens, such as the architects in whose home I went to take coffee with Professor Chen and his wife.
The family of Gao Xingjian (his father a high banking official and his mother an amateur actress) belonged to that group of illustrious bourgeoisie before the revolution. An educated couple. When I was in China in 1962, Gao Xingjian was twenty-two years old and had just completed his university studies in French language and literature in Peking. Certainly Professor Chen must have been his teacher in one of his courses, or perhaps Gao met his son at the department. Surely he must have felt the tension that was taking shape that year. The acts of censorship were felling the few branches that still remained of the policy of the Hundred Flowers. It is impossible to know what others think, especially when the environment and history are so radically different, to say nothing of the circumstances. Perhaps the young Gao believed it was a question of temporary measures, that things would not go beyond an acceptable limit, to return later to the correct course. The only certainty is that the now Nobel laureate found a refuge, apparently safe, in China Reconstructs, as a translator or copyeditor, and that in some office of that magazine he changed his conception of literature and, with it, his life. There also worked there a French translator, who went about leaving almost demonstrably in his desk drawer books that were forbidden at the university: Proust, Michaux, Artaud, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet, his favorite. Neither of the two exchanged a wor
d regarding the books. Before leaving, their owner would leave one in a visible place for the Chinese youth, who would pick it up and, after having read it, return it to its place and take another. They never exchanged a word about it. They were revelatory readings. Because of these, among other things, he discovered the existence of the Theatre of the Absurd, which he discovered was not too different from the classical Chinese novel, and that above all it shared a connection with the librettos of the Peking Opera, as abstract as The Bald Soprano, The Maids, or Waiting for Godot. And he learned too that in the novel the most important thing was to work freely within a strict form as well as the adequate use of time. In effect, years later, he wrote a comedy, The Bus Stop, which could be the daughter of Beckett’s Godot.
My collaborations on Peking, looking back on them today, seem like an absolute eccentricity to me. But in those days they had many listeners. Of course we were still before the Cultural Revolution. In Spanish three intelligent and suggestive books had been published on China in succession that were an invitation to visit the country: The Long March by Simone de Beauvoir, Into China by Claude Roy, and Vercors’ Les divagations d’un français en Chine [Wanderings of a Frenchman in China]. The gauche divine of the time! The three had traveled the country and returned absolutely rhapsodic. They had arrived during a time of wonder: that of the Hundred Flowers. The cultural policy had broken free; all styles were authorized, as well as all philosophical currents. It was an astonishing movement, one of human richness and infinite culture. Come and see with your own eyes! they proclaimed.
During my stay in Peking that policy was on the verge of becoming extinct. Although it was true that at the beginning I was able to converse with Chinese intellectuals and sometimes eat with them, it was also true that dangerous symptoms had begun to manifest themselves. A famous writer since the twenties, of great prestige, Ding Ling, a communist since adolescence, had been expelled from the Association of Writers and from the Communist Party for diverging from a Maoist position, and her novels had disappeared from every bookstore and apparently from the libraries. Yes, there were baleful signs, but not even the most delirious imagination could have supposed the monstrosities produced during the Cultural Revolution that erupted a few years later.
During my stay I wrote about writers whom no one knew in Mexico, about plays that seemed nonexistent, invented from beginning to end, and especially about chronicles from the prodigious Peking Opera, an amazing spectacle, so different from everything I knew that it fascinated me from the beginning, moreover, from the moment I crossed the threshold of the old theater where it was staged. In the dramatic theaters I saw interesting pieces by Lao She: Dragon Beard Ditch and another with a lavish staging and a multitude of characters on stage: Teahouse. I visited this author in a most pleasant Mandarin-style home to interview him. I recall that we passed through many wings of the house, each one separated from the others by a marvelous garden, until arriving at a grey and austere room where we chatted and took tea the entire time. That writer could have left China and returned to Oxford, where he was a teacher before the war, to teach Chinese culture, but he preferred to remain at home. He was an elegant old man, prudent in his conversation, but with a formidable sense of humor. Years later I read, with pain and anger, in the newspaper that during the Cultural Revolution savage hordes arrived at his home, destroyed his gardens, his collections of paintings, his furniture, and that he was able to escape through a back door, run to a nearby building of ten or twelve floors, go up to the roof and from there throw himself to the ground. I also saw the dramas of Cao Yu, celebrated since the 30s, with the reputation of a mischievous child, a perennial nonconformist, and I saw one of his plays, Thunderstorm, very much like Ostrovsky’s The Storm, set totally in China, not in the nineteenth but the twentieth century, and not in a hamlet but rather in an urban setting. On one occasion, I don’t recall who invited me, perhaps a devotee of the theater, or an Italian translator who was spending periods of time in Peking, to see another work by Cao Yu, Peking Man, which was produced in a modest hall of the conservatory of dramatic art. It involved, perhaps, the final exam of some student of directing, or an homage to some theatrical personality; what is certain is that it was of extreme quality, the best of all the plays I was able to see, the most intense, the most modest, and the most poignant.
But the most prodigious, the most astonishing were the theaters where the opera performances took place. All of the theaters I attended, with the exception of the chamber theater where I saw Peking Man, were modern buildings, rather anonymous, and with a public that struck a chord of being members of the nomenklatura, with their Mao uniforms, clean and pressed, as if in their Sunday finest, and with ceremonial rigor. In turn, upon entering one of the enormous opera theaters, near one of the capital’s greatest bazaars, one found them to be aged, faded in parts, the curtains and seat covers frayed; all this gave the impression of a shared world, of a hive buzzing with life and humming. The elderly, children, people of all kinds moved from one side to the other to say hello, laughing, speaking boisterously as if they were in the middle of a bazaar. Life revealed itself, frenzied, intense, tumultuous while one found his seats. Only in the instant when the last bell sounded was there a profound silence and everyone, in a second, was in their seat. When the curtain went up to the rhythm of that highly-stylized music, the miracle began. Silk fabrics of every color, characters decorated as with plaster instead of makeup, violently colored masks—some were kings, others tigers and monkeys, warriors and princesses and concubines who love them and whom they also love outrageously—they all leapt across the stage, ran, executed inconceivable pantomimes, circular exercises, flew. When the spectacle began everything was jubilation, a paradise composed of the most refined elements and commoners from whom it was impossible to remove one’s gaze at any time. One needed time after leaving the theater to break free from the hypnotism. I went to the opera at least once a week. Each time I emerged awestricken. I find in my notes some favorite titles: Three Attempts to Steal the Cup of the Nine Dragons, with which I was initiated, Uproar in the Heavenly Palace, Farewell My Concubine, The Drunken Lu Zhishen Wreaking Havoc at the Monastery. I can say that I have never felt such an extreme scenic pleasure as during those evenings. Later I saw those same pieces in Paris, London, Prague, as part of the tours that the Peking Opera does around the world, but it has never been the same. As the relationship with their habitual audience disappeared they were transformed into beautiful and solemn ceremonies, a magisterial act of exoticism of high culture. In short, something else.
Little by little, China was becoming a hell. A few weeks after arriving I could no longer take strolls with Professor Chen, and when we met by chance in some restaurant, we greeted each other courteously and exchanged a few hollow words so not to cease being polite. To say that the climate was bad gave the sensation of speaking in code. When I went to the office of China Reconstructs, where my interviews with the writers who interested me were arranged, I’d speak to the French translators only in passing, in a cautious neutrality. Cultural life was being extinguished. There was a single thought, Mao’s. Things seemed to have reached their nadir, but that wasn’t true. Not completely! I was already far from China when the catastrophe happened. Suddenly, a terrible specter spread throughout the country, leaving no nook and cranny untouched. The international press printed monstrous news. The Cultural Revolution had erupted! The greatest schism in Communist China. From high functionaries, who seemed to possess broad powers, to modest artisans, all were banned, paraded through the streets with offensive signs hung around their necks to be insulted, spat upon, and kicked by a frenzied mob. A book in a foreign language found in a room served as the trigger to imprison its owner and his relatives; an antique art object meant that its owner had not been able to reject a life of feudal lords. Like hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Gao Xingjian was banished from the capital, imprisoned and later exiled to a remote corner of the country, so that the forced labor of the camps mi
ght reeducate him. He remained there five years. In the interviews I’ve read he speaks little of that time. As always happens in an authoritarian State, where decisions are made only within the leadership, one fine day the governing group, led by the widow of Mao, collapsed with a roar. The inquisitors became the guilty. The “Gang of Four” and their countless cronies were tried and condemned to death or to life in prison. The punished returned home and to their labors. They were received at their institutions as innocent victims persecuted by a sect of devils, the most perverse of the country. Gao Xingjian returned to Peking, to his job as copyeditor and translator at China Reconstructs. By that time, the only thing that interested him was writing. Theater, above all, but also novels. So in 1977 he quit the magazine and joined the Union of Writers. His situation was ambiguous. The prestige of martyrdom protected him: he was a living example of the crimes of the recent past, he could allow himself attitudes that frightened others. In 1978 he delivered lectures on the Theatre of the Absurd at the Association of Chinese Actors; the hall filled every night, but at the end no one dared speak. In 1981 he published an essay on the stylistic methods of modern literature that sparked a fierce debate.
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