The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  An insomniac national leader

  For more than a year, except for the New Year and other holidays, I’d been going to Jian Lin’s firm’s restaurant on the first Sunday of every month to have dinner, drink red wine, and watch old movies. Jian Lin is the owner of the Capital BOBO Properties Corporation. He is a member of the “old three classes”—the three secondary school classes of 1967, 1968, and 1969 that never graduated due to the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, when the college entrance examinations were reinstated, he went to university. He later became an official and often associated with artists and writers. Then he plunged into business in Hainan and somehow made it big in real estate, but he still has an air of culture about him and regards himself as “a scholar and a merchant.” He likes to discuss national affairs, and every year at Chinese New Year he writes a few traditional-style poems and sends them off to his friends and customers.

  Jian Lin is a workaholic, but two years ago he started a new custom. He began to have dinner with his friends and family and afterward show an old movie—on the first Sunday of every month. At first his movie evenings were very popular, but gradually his relatives cried off, and then his friends wanted to choose the films they liked before they would show up. By the start of winter, Jian Lin and I were often the only ones there.

  After the first time a friend took me along, I became a regular. I had a lot of spare time, I lived fairly nearby and I loved to watch those post-1949 Chinese films. I hadn’t got to see them in Hong Kong and Taiwan, so it was a new experience for me.

  I was the only one who never missed a screening. Jian and I didn’t have any connections on any other level—I didn’t want anything from him and, because I wasn’t especially important, he didn’t have to be on his guard with me; I was the best sort of person for him to have a friendly social relationship with. In the winter, when there was just the two of us, Jian would bring out a bottle of red wine—always the finest-vintage ’82, ’85, or ’89 Bordeaux. Sometimes we’d go through two bottles in one evening. The Taiwanese had started drinking high-quality red wines fifteen years before the mainlanders got in on the act, so I could join him in appreciating his wines, and I would willingly listen to him showing off the enological knowledge he had picked up in books. He had found an ideal wine-drinking partner. But whenever a crowd turned up, I noticed he was pretty parsimonious—for them, he brought out a few bottles of only ordinary vintage. This, to me, indicated our greater friendship.

  The only thing that concerned me was that I couldn’t pay him back. That made me feel like a freeloading literary type. Jian Lin always served Bordeaux, never Burgundy. After looking up Burgundy on the net, I told him about it; he seemed curious and wanted to know more. I hit on a plan. When I want back to Taiwan for the Lunar New Year, I looked up my secondary school classmate Ah Yuan.

  Ah Yuan is the largest collector of Burgundy in Taiwan. When the global economy hit the skids, Ah Yuan’s wealth shrunk, but his Burgundy collection was still intact. I had never asked Ah Yuan for anything before, but this time I asked him to give me two bottles of good Burgundy. He gladly told me to take a few more bottles, but I declined because of customs duties. I took just two bottles, one white wine and one red.

  I sent Jian Lin a short message asking him what was showing the following Sunday. I told him I was bringing a Bâtard-Montrachet 1989 and a Romanée-Conti 1999.

  When I took the two bottles over to the restaurant, there weren’t any other guests, just me and Jian Lin. He carefully examined them, exclaiming, “Great wine, great wine … Let’s open it and let it breathe.”

  “What’s on tonight?” I asked while he gently poured the red wine into a crystal decanter.

  It was the 1964 film Never Forget Class Struggle, directed by Xie Tieli. “Have you ever seen it?” he asked.

  “Are you kidding? If I’d seen it, Chiang Kai-shek would have had me shot.”

  “Those were good times, 1964,” Jian Lin said. “The Three Years Natural Disaster was over, people’s living conditions were beginning to recover, and the Cultural Revolution had not yet started. But in 1959 Old Mao was unhappy. He had nothing to do after resigning his post as National Chairman, so he put out the slogan ‘Never forget the class struggle.’ And this film responded to his call to remind the masses never to forget that there were still class enemies concealed among the people. It was advance notice of the coming Four Cleanups Movement to cleanse politics, the economy, Party organization, and ideology. It was also a prelude to the Cultural Revolution.”

  “I’ve invited my cousin to watch the film and taste your wine,” Jian later said as we were eating.

  I didn’t remember ever meeting his cousin and I wasn’t particularly happy about sharing my expensive wine with someone I didn’t know.

  Just then a rather stern and pale-faced man with sparse hair came in and greeted Jian Lin as “Elder Brother.”

  “This is my cousin, Dongsheng. This is my good friend from Taiwan, Lao Chen.”

  “He Dongsheng, we’ve met before,” I said as we shook hands. “It was at the Macao session of the Prosperous China Conference in 1992; you were the representative from Fudan University.”

  “Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng said softly.

  Jian Lin looked puzzled. “Do you two know each other?”

  “Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng repeated.

  We all felt a little awkward. “We met twenty years ago,” I said.

  A wealthy Taiwanese named Shui Xinghua—meaning “prosperous China”—had set up a foundation that held four Xinghua, or Prosperous China, conferences in the early 1990s. The idea was to invite a dozen or so promising young people from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to get together and exchange ideas and experiences. In Macao in 1992, He Dongsheng was a mainland delegate and I was a Taiwanese delegate. He Dongsheng was just a young scholar at that time and didn’t give us the impression that he was particularly outstanding, but then later he became a high-ranking official in the Communist Party.

  We all raised our glasses to each other, and after that we watched the film. Nobody said a word throughout the entire thing except once when Jian Lin commented, “The woman playing the mother-in-law of the counterrevolutionary was really very young at the time. You can still see her quite often these days on TV.”

  During the screening, I took a look at He Dongsheng. He seemed to have fallen asleep. Jian Lin was very conscientiously watching the film—he really did love those old Red Classics.

  Never Forget Class Struggle was about an electrical-machinery factory in the Northeast. The workers were all striving to improve production, but then one young worker married a woman with a petit bourgeois family background. She urged her husband to buy himself a suit made of extremely expensive material, costing about 148 renminbi. The young worker’s mother-in-law also urged him to hunt wild ducks during his free time and sell them at a profit on the black market. He took so much time off that his absence from work almost caused a major accident and harmed the national interest. All this was because of a loss of revolutionary vigilance—they had forgotten about the class struggle. At the end of the film, five big, blood-red words filled the screen: NEVER FORGET THE CLASS STRUGGLE!

  “Pretty good,” I said, “interesting, but when young people see it now they probably won’t understand it. They’ll need someone to interpret it for them.”

  Suddenly He Dongsheng spoke up. “It’s easy to make them work for eight hours, but it’s hard to control them after those eight hours. Old Mao never solved that problem.”

  I was rather surprised that He Dongsheng would come right out and call Mao Zedong “Old Mao.”

  “Did you know, after Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Openness’ started,” he continued, “there was a magazine in Tianjin called After Work? Eight hours was work time and after eight hours—after work—was leisure time, but nobody knew then what to do with leisure time. Socialism had totally transformed work time, but was unable to handle after-work time, the time after those eight hours of work
…”

  “After they work eight hours, let capitalism take care of them,” Jian Lin quipped.

  “Yes, definitely,” He Dongsheng continued—the alcohol had loosened him up. “Your Old Mao cannot ask people to grasp revolution and increase production twenty-four hours a day. You have to let people go home and have something tasty to eat, buy some nice clothes, and indulge in some petit bourgeois fun. The people want all this and you can’t deny them it. If you don’t let them enjoy themselves, who’s going to work for you? Just having a good life is not too much to ask.”

  Most officials, when they open their mouths, seem to come out only with conventional bureaucratic patter, but what He Dongsheng was saying sounded quite normal.

  He began to grow on me.

  After expressing his opinions, he gloomily sipped his wine.

  “This is very good wine, very good wine,” Jian Lin said again after a while. “It’s better now than it was before. The flavor has completely opened out. We’ve been mixing white and red, and it still tastes great.”

  We all fell silent again. I thought He Dongsheng would leave after the film ended, but he just sat there with us. He didn’t speak anymore and he didn’t touch the huge assortment of snacks that Jian served with the wine. He just kept on slowly sipping his wine. Jian brought out some big cigars, but we didn’t want any, so he was too embarrassed to smoke alone.

  After the bottles and our glasses were all empty, Jian served up some famous Wuyi Dahongpao tea. He Dongsheng didn’t touch it. He didn’t seem to need even any water. It was just about midnight when He Dongsheng stood up and went to the toilet.

  “He suffers from insomnia,” Jian Lin whispered. “He doesn’t need any sleep, and I was afraid he’d stay here forever. I can’t stay up all night; these days I go to bed early and get up early.”

  “I go to bed early, too—I hate staying up all night.” I recalled that He Dongsheng had dozed off during the film.

  “How about I give you a ride home?” said He Dongsheng when he got back.

  “There’s no need,” I replied, “I live nearby. I’ll walk home.” Then, without thinking, I asked, “Is your driver still here?” Of course, as a high official, his driver would always be there.

  I never imagined he would respond the way he did. “At night, I drive myself, I like to drive. Sometimes I drive around until morning; if I’m tired, I take a nap in the car.” He seemed to think that he had said too much, muttered, “I’m going,” and then left.

  I sort of regretted not letting He Dongsheng drive me home. I really didn’t live that close. In the daytime, I would have walked it, but so late at night, I had to take a cab. It was Jian Lin who really lived close, on the top floor of a building in the same neighborhood.

  “We hadn’t seen each other for a long time,” Jian Lin explained, “when I saw him recently at a memorial service for my aunt, and so I thought I’d invite him over.”

  “You’re cousins on your father’s side,” I said, “but your last name is Jian and his is He. Why is that?”

  “My father had two younger brothers who both joined the Revolution and changed their last names. Dongsheng’s last name was originally Jian.”

  Apparently, it was quite common for second cousins in old revolutionary families to have different surnames.

  “What about your other uncle?” I asked.

  “I don’t have much contact with that side of the family,” Jian Lin answered.

  I was uncomfortable delving any further into Jian’s family, so I said, “I never imagined that you and He Dongsheng were related. How high up is he now?”

  “How high?” exclaimed Jian Lin. “Right now he is a member of the Politburo—a veteran of three Party Congresses. That’s no mean achievement.”

  “Does that make him a national leader?” I asked.

  “Strictly speaking, they should be called ‘Party and national leaders,’ ” Jian Lin said. “On the Party side, everyone from the secretaries in the Party Secretariat on up should be regarded as Party and national leaders. That would, of course, include members of the Politburo.”

  Most national leaders I had seen had well-groomed black pompadours and ruddy complexions, and they were always in high spirits. I’d never imagined I would run into a pale, balding, insomniac national leader.

  A titillating spring night

  Standing on the pavement waiting for a cab on that early-spring morning after watching an old film and drinking so much wine, I had lost all desire for sleep. I phoned a friend of mine and went over to her place. I’d first met her over ten years ago when she was still working at the Paradise Club—a popular Beijing nightclub and disco famous for its beautiful and cultured escorts. I am a man of modest appetites, but sometimes I have my desires, and so I looked her up. I figured it was over two years since I’d last seen her, and I hadn’t even thought of her, not until that morning …

  When I returned home from my visit, I still couldn’t get to sleep. I had only one question on my mind: should I send an e-mail to Little Xi?

  Big Sister Song had said Little Xi often changed her e-mail address. So there was no point writing one—her address had probably already changed. And if I did write, I might be inviting trouble. She’d always been the type of woman I like. When she was running the restaurant, I was strongly attracted to her, but there were always too many customers after her. Although we’d known each other for twenty years and could be considered old friends, there’d never been anything sexual between us, not even flirting. She was always surrounded by a circle of men—some of them were her friends and some were suitors; there were also some unsuccessful suitors who then joined her gang of friends. She was one of those women who had only male friends and, at the same time, seemed quite unaware of the fascination she held for men. She actually believed that all her male friends were just mates. I never pursued her romantically, and she never showed any interest in me, either. Later on I thought she had married a foreigner and moved to England, but now it looked like that had fallen through. Anyway, it had been seven or eight years since I’d had any real contact with her.

  I’d been worried about her being a troublemaker. She wasn’t one of those intellectual-style dissidents, but political trouble had been dogging her for decades, all because she was too outspoken and too stubborn. She hated injustice and thus easily offended people. In the past, many people had been willing to help her, including some foreigners. But today foreigners like that have disappeared—none of them want to upset the Chinese Communist Party. Foreigners willing to risk offending the CCP don’t get a visa. Everybody around her was living the good life and couldn’t be bothered with her. They were all avoiding her, and that’s why she’d told me last time that everyone around her had changed.

  After talking to Big Sister Song and Little Xi, I’d felt that Little Xi must be in trouble again. Now I was convinced that she’d been under surveillance there in the park next to the National Art Museum.

  If I hooked up with her, wouldn’t she bring me trouble? My life was so good now; everything was going along smoothly and I felt extremely happy. Why should I risk it? If I saw her and she expressed the least bit of interest in me, I wouldn’t be able to control myself. I found her sexually very attractive, which scared me. I hadn’t felt like this about someone for a long time. If I took an emotional leap and we really got together, I could guarantee that we would not be able to get along. She still imagined me the way I’d been ten years ago, when I’d agreed with her on everything. But I’d become one of those people she said had changed. Our present frames of mind were as different as our understandings of China’s current situation. I was certain that we would never be able to agree on anything. I remembered when Chen Shuibian had run for reelection in Taiwan—many of my male friends supported the Nationalist Party while their wives supported the Democratic Progressive Party, and they split up over this.

  I sat there in front of my computer staring blankly at the piece of paper Big Sister Song had given me.
Suddenly it dawned on me that I had not been able to write a really good novel. Perhaps my life was too peaceful, I just felt too happy. I felt no pressure. Who was it that could tear me away from this excessive feeling of happiness and good fortune? Little Xi, obviously.

  Written on the scrap of paper was the yahoo.com e-mail address feichengwuraook. Next to it were the words “If you’re not sincere, don’t bother, okay?”

  2.

  NEVER FORGET

  Little Xi’s autobiography

  I am Wei Xihong. Everyone calls me Little Xi.

  I don’t know where to start; I don’t know how the world has become what it is. I’m just afraid that many things may be forgotten later, so I want to write them all down and store them in this Google file.

  Somebody is following me. But I haven’t done anything wrong. So why are they on my tail?

  Maybe I’m just too nervous. Maybe there is nobody following me at all, and I’m just overly suspicious.

  If somebody is following me, it’s bound to have something to do with Wei Guo. How did I ever give birth to such a monster?

  Ever since he was born, he has frightened me. He had a face like a little angel, but he lied, ingratiated himself with his teachers, ingratiated himself with anyone who could do him any good, and bullied anyone weaker than he was. His character was just naturally cruel. Okay, so he was like that from childhood. Now he writes letters informing on his classmates, getting them into trouble with the authorities, and persecuting them. He is always spouting empty slogans, pretending to embrace a wonderful idealistic morality.

  Does he have his father’s genes, or my genes, or has he inherited his character from my father? Or is he just the result of the worst possible combination of bloodlines?