by Hua Bai
and he turned the spear of his words on us. “But you! I mean you the prisoners. Never dare to hope. The crimes of the Gang of Four are theirs; your crimes are yours. Each one of you will settle his own score! Don’t entertain the idea that you will be released because of their arrest! Quit daydream-ing! It’s true that some of you were arrested for offending Jiang Qing. But to offend Jiang Qing then was to break the law. At that time, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and
Wang Hongwen embodied the party’s leadership, and you
couldn’t offend them simply because they were appointed
by our great leader Chairman Mao to carry out his policies.
They might have smuggled in their own goods, but no one
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could tell the sham from the genuine. Watch out, you prisoners. Do not forget who you are as you listen to the firecrackers. Holidays people take in order to celebrate their victory will be days of suffering for you counterrevolutionaries. In order to cool your heads, I hereby issue an order: no meals for you all day today, not a single grain of food or a sip of water. Scientists have proved that men who don’t eat or drink never become muddleheaded.”
On hearing the order of “no meals today,” the saliva
oozed out from number 95’s mouth, and my limbs turned so soft I had to grab the iron bars to avoid falling. Our stomachs also reacted candidly with their rumbling complaints.
According to the scientists’ observation, as expressed by the warden, we starved prisoners all kept a cool head; he alone was muddleheaded because of his excessive drinking and
eating. He continued to talk nonsense:
“Let’s have a toast, a big, big, big toast! Our party comes to another critical moment, a turning point as important as the Zunyi Conference. Our victory proves the invincibility of Mao Zedong thought and the correctness and greatness of our party. Glorious! Great! Great, great, great! Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long, long live – eh, right. Chairman Mao passed away more than a month ago.” All of a sudden, he realized the contradiction in his words. He was not completely muddleheaded after all. “But his spirit will never die. Long live Chairman Mao’s spirit! Long, long live Mao Zedong thought!” The warden ran about with fists raised
high, shouting slogans at the top of his voice. His clumsy feet soon began to stumble, struggling to keep the huge
body upright. The warden swayed and finally collapsed to the ground. His slippers flew away like a pair of butterflies.
The guards rushed over to lift him and drag him away. Yet his tongue kept going all the time.
“Great – glorious!” (chuckle) “Long live! – You! Let me
immunize you: Do not entertain any dreams! The only
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thing for you – is to serve out your sentences submissively.
Leniency to those who confess and severe punishment to
those who resist.”
The farce ended like that. I could not laugh; nor could
the rest of the prisoners. Were we too numb, or too sober?
Was it because the warden had drugged us? We did not
realize how much information and what profound meanings
his monologue contained until the warden had disappeared with his guards. I had learned for the first time that Chairman Mao had passed away. Although over a month ago I
had seen the guards wearing black armbands, I dared not
associate them with Mao’s death. How could he possibly
die? Just to think of his death was to commit a crime. I had believed it a sort of coincidence: the older guards had all died simultaneously, or the guards, being brothers of the same clan, were mourning for their shared patriarch. The latter convinced me more because the guards all dressed, acted, and yelled the same, including their style of smoking and of blowing smoke rings. Now I realized I had made a
mistake. I wished now I could make up the grief I had failed to show because of my ignorance, but the nerves governing sarcastic humor, excited by the news of the Gang of Four’s arrest, pinched my mourning nerves.
Overnight Jiang Qing and her followers had joined our
ranks, wearing prisoner clothes and having their hair shaved off like us. Perhaps, being a female, Jiang Qing would be allowed to keep her hair, but no supply of French perfume anymore. How could the distance be so close between criminals and the four most, most, most…loyal pupils of Chairman Mao (more superlatives are replaced by “…” to avoid
having readers accuse the author of gaining more royalties for the book); the four most, most, most…thorough proletarian revolutionary statespersons, the four most, most, most… resolute soldiers in following Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, and the four most, most, most…outstanding authorities of the proletarian revolution? Between Zhong-2 7 8
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nanhai and the prison there seemed to exist only a door.
Pushing the door open, one could see prison cells right on the marble steps leading to Tiananmen Square. The difference between heroes and clowns seemed a mere matter of
standing before or behind the screen. We ordinary people’s falling into prison was like falling from a roof; the imprisonment of the citizens of paradise was like falling from heaven. Because the heights from which we and they fell
were vastly different, the terrors each experienced must also be different. How amusing it was for me to measure, from their perspective, the psychological and biological burdens of their sudden, high-speed fall. On the other hand, they had climbed on my back to realize their ambitions. When
they reigned over the nation and had it in their power to kill thousands of people without lifting a finger, had they ever thought one second about us as we struggled like ants to survive?
How would the two events I had just heard affect my per-
sonal life? (I did not want to call them great events, because there were too many great events happening in our era. I measured things simply according to their relation to me as an individual. Therefore, I had not thought of the significance they would have on our national history. Moreover, I was still a cog in the gears of state dictatorship.) If, as the warden had said, we and the Gang of Four each had to serve out his own sentence, and, if the right and wrong of one moment had nothing to do with the next, then the prison
would have to be expanded yearly. In some dozens of years, the area devoted to prisons would cover the whole
9,600,000 square kilometers of Chinese territory. By that time there would be no difference between being inside and outside of prison, between law-abiding citizens and criminals or aliens. Perhaps all inveterate, hateful opponents would become reconciled, playing their joyful game like
A, B, C, D, and E in our neighboring cell number 10046.
Then, humankind would reach its one-world utopia. Truly, 2 7 9
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every road leads to Moscow. I had never thought there was such an easy path to the one-world utopia. Miaohuzhe?
Miaozheyao! [Is that great? Truly great!] The classical interjections I learned in middle school slipped past my tongue.
This proved that my memory had not deteriorated that
much. So I prepared for more suffering.
I gaze at her window. In the past it was pasted over with black paper; now a cloth curtain with tiny blue flowers hangs there.
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Six months had passed since Sunamei
joined the county singing and dancing troupe. When she
was applying makeup before a mirror for a performance or winning thunderous applause from the audience, she forgot Xienami, forgot Ami, forgot Yingzhi, forgot the serpentine mountain path from which she had come as well as the
memories
associated with it, such as the collective dance beat, the laughter of the threshers and the witty remarks they threw each other during harvesting in the millet fields, the gently rolling stones cast on the roof by the axiao at midnight, stealthy steps, and hugging and touching in the dark. But in the still of night when she, although tired, was unable to sleep, or when she was undergoing basic dance
training on a beam, or when she was practicing monotonous musical scales, the scenes of her hometown flowed past her eyes and ears. Memory drowned reality. She grew absentminded, often taking a wrong step, singing out of tune, or sighing in bed. She found it especially hard to control her imaginative recollections during the hours of political study and the criticism meetings. Because she did not quite
understand the Chinese language, she found it even harder to comprehend political concepts, devoid as they were of color, smell, interest, and sexual stimulation. Some criticism meetings seemed to have no end, like rivers flowing on and on. Why hold such long meetings? Sometimes it was simply because a male singer and a female dancer had walked together for a while at night holding each other’s hand. Yet 2 8 1
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at the meeting everyone was enraged, roaring at the pair, some even pounding on the desk. Their stern criticism
made the lad want to hide his head between his legs and the girl wet a stack of kerchiefs with her tears. Sunamei understood neither why those people were so fierce nor what they were shouting. She hated the informer. Look what an ugly scene he had made. Why did he report them to the woman
head of the troupe? And why did she have to lose her temper like that? They dealt with them so seriously, as if the man had attempted to murder the woman and the woman
wanted to eat the man. After the criticism meeting, if the man stood in line for his meal, the woman dared not stand in the same line for fear of the public eye. Once, when
Sunamei dragged her over and made her stand right be-
hind the man, the girl did not dare to lift her eyes, and her face turned ghastly pale in spite of her willingness to be close to him.
After a criticism meeting like that, Sunamei felt de-
pressed for days. She felt it was too hard to be a human being in this world full of prohibitions. What is the meaning of such a bleak existence? People should belong to
themselves. It’s my business whom I want to give my body to. If you want to give yourself to me, okay, if I am willing to accept you. A hand, a foot, even the whole body and the heart, whatever I want to give is for me to decide. Why do others need to interfere? Why are they so angry? The anger over the matter should be exclusively his or hers. It surprised Sunamei most when the next couple was caught and
the earlier victims also roared at them and delivered tedious speeches at their criticism meeting. The meeting went on so long that Sunamei fell asleep. When she woke up, it was
still going on.
But what depressed her most were not other people’s
affairs or the confusion caused by them, but things concerning herself. In her hometown, men’s eyes focused on her
like shafts of light when she was soloing on the stage. Not 2 8 2
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merely their eyes, men’s footfalls and songs followed her wherever she went. Even when Yingzhi was with her in the room, there were still pebbles rolling on the roof and men with a ray of hope waiting outside the wall or gate. But here she could detect only men’s stealthy eyes, which were not candid and passionate like those of Mosuo men. These eyes hid in the darkness or a faraway corner like thieves. When she met their gaze with hers, theirs immediately turned
away or simply died out. It was not men who followed her all the time like a shadow but a female, a Han girl called Jiang Jiying. The very day Sunamei joined the troupe, the head of the troupe assigned her to share Jiang Jiying’s room and said to her: Jiang Jiying is your elder sister, and she will take care of you.
Jiang Jiying was a small girl with thin bones and limbs.
Only her eyes were large. Whether in real life or on stage, she was equally obscure. Yet she always watched over others wisely. She took good care of Sunamei, telling her where to fetch water, where to take a bath, and where to wash
her clothes. And she even bought a brassiere for her and told her, “Girls must wear brassieres.” Although Jiang had almost no breasts herself, she wore a type of brassiere with sponge-rubber padding. When Sunamei first put on her bra, she laughed into the mirror. But soon she felt stifled and cast it aside. Jiang reminded her time and again to wear it.
This matter affected their friendship. Sometimes they didn’t speak to each other for days on end. Jiang was fastidious about many things. For instance, she said when a girl sat in public, she should not open her legs but should keep them tightly closed.
“Why?”
“Ugly.”
“I think it’s pretty.”
“Shameless.”
“What shame is there?”
“A girl is not supposed to behave like that.”
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And, she said, “When a man looks at you, you should not
look back at him.”
“But I want to look back. Why can he gaze at me and I
cannot do the same to him?”
“Because you are a woman.”
“Isn’t a woman human?”
“She is human, but not the same as a man.”
“How do they differ? Is it because a woman does not have a penis?”
Stamping her feet, the embarrassed Jiang screamed, “Oh,
have you no shame? How ugly, how dirty! How could a lit-
tle girl say that word!”
But Sunamei insisted on saying it. Holding Jiang in her
arms, she repeated it many times aloud. In a rage, Jiang slapped Sunamei’s face, and Sunamei slapped hers in return.
Again they stopped speaking to each other. Jiang still followed her around mutely, like a shadow.
A few days later they returned to their speaking rela-
tionship. But soon they quarreled again, this time because Sunamei wanted to ask Manager Tao about the sexual relationship between men and women, but Jiang forbade her to do so.
“Why can’t I ask?”
“Because it’s not a good thing.”
“If it’s not good, why do people do it?”
“Nonsense.”
“If people didn’t do it, where would babies come from?”
Covering her ears, Jiang shouted, “Shame on you!”
“Why shouldn’t I ask about something I don’t under-
stand?”
“Even if you don’t understand, being a girl, you should
never ask.”
Sunamei tried to get rid of her guardian, but not very
successfully. Jiang bought two pairs of panties and asked Sunamei to wear them. When they were dirty, Jiang offered to wash them for her, but did not allow her to dry either the 2 8 4
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panties or the brassiere in the yard. They had to be dried inside.
“Why?”
“It’s bad for men to see them.”
“Why?”
“Because. Please don’t ask.”
“I want to dry them in the yard, in the warm sunlight.”
“No! These things are too dirty.”
“But you’ve already washed them for me. They are now
white as snow.”
“Women’s underwear can never be washed clean.”
Clapping her hands and beating her thighs, Sunamei
laughed, “Men’s underwear is much harder to clean because their bodies sweat oil every day.”
Jiang Jiying was so annoyed with Sunamei she even shed
tears over her ignorance. Jiang reported everything to Manager Tao, even
trifling things the size of a sesame seed. So Manager Tao often talked patiently to Sunamei. Unfortunately, Sunamei could hardly understand what she was saying. The hazy impression Sunamei got from all her speeches was that her behavior and ideas did not suit the social codes.
Sunamei thought to herself: “Why do people have to
make so many codes? If I followed them, what kind of person would I become?” She thought at once of Jiang – the
model Manager Tao set for her – and burst out laughing.
Manager Tao was shocked by her reaction and warned her
severely, “Comrade Sunamei, this is for your own good.”
Although Sunamei had almost checked her laughter, on
hearing the last sentence she had a second bout of laughing.
Angrily turning to look up at the ceiling, Manager Tao used her greatest patience to wait until Sunamei stopped her fit of laughter with tears and a sobbing breath. “A girl should know what is proper and learn to be decent. I believe, with our hard efforts, you will change.” Sunamei finally checked her laughing by pinching her own thigh. Tao Zhengfang
thought her patient teaching had at last produced some
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effect. One cannot be impatient with a girl born in a primitive society. Patting Sunamei’s head affectionately, she made a gesture for Jiang to leave.
Gradually, Sunamei realized that Jiang Jiying had been
sent by the authorities to supervise her, and that all the males in the dancing and singing troupe had been warned
not to associate with her. “So, you are playing games with me in the dark,” she thought. “I’m not stupid.” She started playing hide-and-seek with Jiang. Taking advantage of
Jiang’s sound sleep, Sunamei stole out of the dorm. Jiang woke up at midnight in a cold sweat. She immediately
reported Sunamei’s absence to Manager Tao, who sent out a dozen men to search in town, almost like taking a census.
The county was stirred up with the tale of catching a spy. In the morning, they found Sunamei practicing singing in a
woods on the hilltop overlooking the county. “Why did you all get up so early?” she asked with affected surprise.
