The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  It was a good thing he took some money, because when the train south reached Guangzhou, Fang Lijun had to stay there a week, waiting to join in the quota for Hong Kong passengers. In Shenzhen, he had to wait two more days before entering Hong Kong. Without a passport or an identity card, carrying only a transit pass, Fang Lijun finally went through customs at Luo Wu station, where they took his pass and allowed him to enter Hong Kong.

  When Fang Lijun went to the American consulate in Hong Kong to apply for a visa, he ran into a technical problem: he had not entered Hong Kong illegally, but he had left China only on a transit pass, therefore he was not eligible to be a political refugee, and the Americans could not immediately issue him with a visa. He would have to apply formally for a visa on the grounds of family reunification, with his father.

  Fang Lijun found temporary lodgings in a cheap guesthouse in the Chunking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui. He stayed there the better part of a year while the American visa process dragged on. While living in that guesthouse he certainly broadened his horizons. He met backpackers and small-business operators from as many as fifty different countries. There was an American hippie who was tired after spending several years in Goa and was now going back to America to join a hippie commune and continue to live his carefree, self-reliant life. Fang Lijun was extremely envious of him.

  Eventually Fang Lijun went to Los Angeles and met his now quite elderly father whom he hadn’t seen since he was a small child. When Fang Lijun’s father had run with Sheng Shicai and the Nationalist Party, he had harmed quite a few people. He was very afraid that someone would take revenge on him, and so he hid at home in Monterrey Park most of the time. He built a high wall around his house and even installed an iron door to his bedroom. The father had remarried, and Fang Lijun lived with them less than a month. Then he took his father’s advice and moved to Texas, to the Houston Chinatown, to seek help from one of his father’s former subordinates. He worked as an accountant on the second floor of this man’s furniture and antiques store. There was a teenage daughter, and the two families fondly hoped that Fang Lijun would marry her. She, however, was completely Americanized, and when she got wind of what her parents were up to, she refused even to eat with Fang Lijun at the same table. He took his meals alone in the shop’s storage room. This certainly was not the kind of American Chinatown life he had imagined.

  A few months later, Fang Lijun made contact with his hippie friend and left Houston for New Mexico to join the commune. It was located on a large piece of agricultural land where the members cultivated fresh organic vegetables. They also made their own clothes, raised bees, and made jam and candles. They felt like they were self-sufficient, but their seeds, raw materials, tools, and other everyday high-tech items, and their medicines, like Fang Lijun’s corticosteroids for his asthma, were all purchased in the city.

  Living on a farm, they could not escape hard physical labor. Those hippies were all from middle-class urban families and they found it pretty tough going. But Fang Lijun was used to hard work in China and he was good at it, and could fix just about anything without a lot of talk. Because of all that, he was very well liked on the commune and he spent many happy years living there.

  Unfortunately, in time the commune began to split up due to squabbles between the hippies, and then the whole movement started to wane and most of the members drifted away. The great majority of communes were unable to keep going after the Vietnam War ended, and Fang Lijun’s commune was no exception. There were no new members coming in and although some of the old-timers came back, they soon left again. In the end only Fang Lijun and an older woman everybody called “Mom” remained. “Mom” was resolved to stay on with Fang Lijun. There were only the two of them, and as the years went by they were pretty much the same as a traditional husband and wife.

  One day in the early 1980s, “Mom” told Fang Lijun that she was getting too old to be a hippie anymore and she wanted to go back east and live with her daughter. So the two of them shut off the water and electricity, boarded up the windows, and took a train across the United States to Maryland, where they split up. Fang Lijun headed north to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. There he ended up as a cook in a self-service chop suey joint in Boston’s Chinatown. The boss liked him a lot, too, and he worked there for several years.

  One day Fang Lijun suddenly decided to go to the Harvard-Yenching Library, and from then on he was hooked. He worked only in the evening at the restaurant, and in the daytime he jogged from Boston Chinatown to Cambridge to read the Chinese periodicals in the Harvard Library. That was when he started writing letters to the editor at Mingbao—that was me, Lao Chen.

  In 1989, he really did return to the mainland, and in 1992, when Deng Xiaoping made his celebrated “southern tour” to promote economic development, Fang Lijun left China again—he always moved against the mainstream.

  Back in America, Fang Lijun sent me a letter telling me that he was doing odd jobs in New York’s Chinatown. At the time I was back in Taiwan working for the United Daily and I heard that the China Times Weekly News had set up an editorial office in New York. I casually recommended Fang Lijun to them, and they actually brought him in to act as an editorial assistant there. In no time at all, they promoted him to assistant editor. Fang Lijun wrote and thanked me profusely, and I really did feel a special sense of accomplishment. I knew that Fang Lijun, as an experienced and knowledgeable jack-of-all-trades, was perfectly suited to being an editor for a news magazine.

  The next time I received a letter from him, Fang Lijun was in Nigeria in West Africa. He later told me that he had always kept in touch with a Nigerian he’d met in the international guesthouse in Chunking Mansions, and he’d invited him to Africa. When Fang Lijun was young, he had always dreamed about going to friendly states like Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania and making a contribution to their development. So he went without the slightest hesitation. It turned out that his Nigerian friend wanted to trade with China. He asked him to be his partner. Fang Lijun thought of all those red, white, and blue fabric bags the Chinese use to carry goods and other things when traveling. They could buy them in China, ship them to Nigeria, and sell them all over West and Central Africa.

  Those red, white, and blue cloth bags were a big hit with the Africans, and so Fang Lijun’s partner wanted them to set up their own factory and make the bags themselves in Lagos. After making money in the Nigeria–China trade, Fang Lijun visited Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania, but he didn’t want to end his days in Africa. He went back to live in China with a plan to set up a small Cantonese restaurant just outside Li Jiang City in Yunnan.

  Luckily for him he was too slow. The restaurant plan came to nothing long before Li Jiang was devastated by the great earthquake of February 3, 1996. Fang Lijun then traveled all over western China. I remember he predicted that when China started to develop its tourist trade, too many people would come and ruin China’s scenic and historic spots.

  He traveled for seven or eight years, visiting Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan, and Sichuan. He went on foot, by train, by long-distance bus, hitching rides on passing trucks—he even had a ride on a military transport plane. If you show him any piece of cloth embroidered by any of the minority peoples, Fang Lijun can tell you right off if it was produced by the Tong of Guangxi, the Yao, or the Miao or Hmong from the Southwest, and probably exactly where they made it. Whenever his money ran low, he would sign on as a cook in tourist areas. Because the tourists never came back, he told me, it was just like fooling the foreigners in American Chinatowns with half-Chinese, half-foreign “Chinese cuisine.”

  In 2006 he moved to Beijing, said he wanted to see what it would be like to be an Olympic volunteer. When we met again I learned that he had changed his name many years before from Fang Lijun to Fang Caodi. According to him, one day he was walking past the Temple of the Sun in Beijing, when he saw many parents picking up their children from the Fangcaodi, or “fragrant grass,” Elementary School, and so
he decided to change his name to Fang Caodi. That’s just Old Fang’s logic—no logic at all. With his advanced age and his complicated history, I wonder if the Olympic Committee accepted his application.

  I closed the notebook. After I published my Comprehensive Cultural Guide to Beijing well ahead of the Olympics, I wanted to write stories only about contemporary China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. I didn’t want to discuss past events anymore. I didn’t even want to look at the historical materials on the KMT–CCP Civil War, Land Reform, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward that caused thirty million people to starve to death, the Four Clean-ups or Socialist Education Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, the Tiananmen Massacre, the Campaign to Suppress the Falun Gong, and so on and so on … I just wanted to forget all those things.

  If I could rid my mind of it, a new subject would come to me. My own interests had completely changed, and I didn’t believe that the new generation of Chinese readers wanted to read about all the wounds and scars of the past sixty years. I really wanted to write only about new people and new things, to write about the Chinese people’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.

  3.

  FROM SPRING TO SUMMER

  A French crystal chandelier

  Little Xi didn’t return my e-mail, so my happy life could continue. I went to the 798 Art District to participate in the opening ceremony for an exhibition of paper-cutting installation art by women from the Northwest. My friend from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was the academic cocurator, and she’d invited me to be one of the ten speakers at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. In my three-minute talk, I summarized the Taiwan New Communities Movement of the 1990s and discussed how Taipei artists and local craftspeople had worked hand in hand to bring cultural production in villages back to life. I spoke so well I got a little emotional myself. The curator also said this exhibition was a fine example of the vitality of Chinese folk culture.

  A lunch was held at the nearby Golden Chiangnan restaurant, and I was placed at the same table as the representative of the China National Cultural Renaissance Foundation. The Foundation had sent only an assistant secretary-general. He told me how one of their most important projects was assisting Chinese around the world to locate and retrieve national treasures that had been stolen from the Summer Palace and other sites. Besides that, the Foundation was working to revive China’s ancient rites throughout the entire nation by, for example, providing financial subsidies to many elementary and middle schools to carry out initiation ceremonies at the beginning of every school year, usually requiring students to bow and pay their respects to their teachers. The Foundation was also working hard to have various traditional-style rituals declared “national statutory ceremonies.”

  After eating a few main dishes, I went to the toilet and by the time I returned a big group of people had crowded around my table to listen to the Foundation’s representative, so I decided to move to another table.

  My Chinese Academy of Social Sciences friend, Hu Yan, was sitting at a table with a French woman from UNESCO and a Thai who was with the One Village One Craft Association. I thought that if I joined them, I’d have to speak English and that would be too much like hard work, so I decided against it. I went over to the Northwest-delegation table, where there were many empty seats because the reporters were all over at the Renaissance Foundation representative’s table interviewing him. Only three elderly ladies who were paper-cutting artists, two female elected village heads, and a Bureau of Culture deputy chief from a prefecture-level city were still at the table. The Northwestern women all looked very honest and kindhearted. My Academy friend always let me see the good side of China. Even though, rationally, I realized that this was not the whole story, emotionally I still liked to meet such good people.

  The person I really wanted to chat with was the village head, who was only just twenty years old. She was sitting rather far away from me, and I realized I could not understand her rural Mandarin anyway. All I could do was talk to the deputy chief. She came from a place called Dingxi in Gansu Province. It was originally one of the poorest places in China, but with a few years’ hard work after Reform and Opening, it finally lifted itself out of poverty. She told me how a few years earlier the government had convinced the peasants to organize specialist cooperatives and implement dedicated planting schemes, pushing Dingxi to develop into a major potato-producing area. All the Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s outlets in the country used Dingxi potatoes exclusively. She also told me how the local leadership, at a time of rail-transport difficulties, used their connections to provide a special train to get the local products to market on time. And also how they organized surplus labor to go to Xinjiang to pick cotton during the cotton-harvest season.

  I learned a lot from her, and so I asked her very seriously if she could summarize for me why Dingxi was able to be so well governed while so many places with better local conditions were still unable to rise above the poverty level. “Dingxi is very fortunate, we have leaders who know how to work hard and get things done.” I could sense that what she said was very practical and very simple: it’s all about people, she implied. If the government officials are willing to work hard to make things happen, the common people can make the rural economy hum. That is to say, if the present Communist Party cadres had a slightly higher standard of morality and were willing to work harder on practical projects, the Chinese people would be able to live well. As lunch broke up, I thanked her and she said she hoped that members of the Beijing cultural and academic worlds would come to little Dingxi and give them some guidance. I hypocritically told her that I would certainly find time to visit Dingxi.

  Feeling very happy after lunch, I went back to the 798 Art District to browse around. Today’s 798 Art District is not like the 798 Art District of ten years ago. Now it apes fashionable foreign trends and tries to combine the bohemian and the bourgeois. That’s why it has been criticized for becoming increasingly gentrified, commercialized, and kitschy. No matter how you look at it, though, having a 798 Art District is still better than not having one. You can’t find another art district on this scale anywhere else in the world. When the foreigners see it they are all amazed and their impression of China suddenly changes, from China as a backward country to China as the most creative country in the world.

  In the last two years art and design had become so hot that all the important international art galleries had come to China to set up shop. Famous schools, such as New York’s Parsons New School of Design, London’s St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, and Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts had also established campuses close to the 798 Art District.

  Every time I came to 798, I always took a look at what was on at the Dragon Gate Gallery. This gallery had an extensive collection of French Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings, including some small works by famous masters and, more importantly, many works by lesser known figures of that period.

  Their collection is really worth looking at, and it suits my increasingly conservative tastes, I pondered. China now matches Japan as a major collecting country for these French Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings because there is a group of rich collectors who are fascinated by French painting of that age.

  The Dragon Gate Gallery had real elegance. The chandelier hanging in the major salon was not made from Chinese materials—it was a genuine Baccarat-crystal chandelier.

  As I was looking at that chandelier and ruminating on how the style and temperament of Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings were not quite in sync with Baccarat crystal, a man and a woman came toward me, not exactly holding hands but shoulder to shoulder and talking and laughing. I tried unsuccessfully to avoid them. The man was Jian Lin, my movie-night friend. When he noticed me, he quickly said, “Lao Chen, let me introduce you to Professor Wen.”

  “It’s been a long
time, Wen Lan,” I said as we shook hands.

  “Yes, a very long time, Master Chen,” said Wen Lan.

  “You two know each other?” said Jian Lin, surprised.

  “Master Chen is famous in Hong Kong cultural circles,” said Wen Lan.

  Wen Lan had probably forgotten that I’m Taiwanese. She was dressed expensively but not vulgarly, rather elegantly glittering.

  “Can I swap cards with you?” asked Wen Lan.

  “I forgot to bring any,” I lied.

  “I have his phone number,” offered Jian Lin.

  Wen Lan didn’t give me her card.

  “Lao Chen, this is a very nice gallery,” said Jian Lin, “but Professor Wen thinks the prices are even higher than in Paris.”

  “The prices are unreasonably high,” Wen Lan said with an air of authority.