The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  Lao Chen’s head began to pound again. He hadn’t read those kinds of books for a while himself, but did it mean that the tastes of the general public had changed, too?

  Lao Chen turned to Zhuang Zizhong. “Master Zhuang, I have to leave now to attend to some business. It was wonderful to see you; do take care of yourself.” Then he turned to Mrs. Zhuang and said, “Take good care of Master Zhuang, he’s a national treasure.”

  As Lao Chen left the Sanlian Bookstore, he was wondering if he had been too ingratiating, if calling Zhuang Zizhong a national treasure was a bit over-the-top. But then he remembered what the character Wei Xiaobao in Jin Yong’s novel The Deer and the Cauldron always said: “Of all the things that can go wrong, flattery will never go wrong. What does it matter if you make other people happy?”

  “Blowing in the Wind”

  As soon as Lao Chen got home, he took a couple of aspirins, went to bed, and slept until morning; when he woke up, he still didn’t feel like getting up. At midday, he made some instant noodles, one of the hundred flavors offered by the Master Kong brand, but he didn’t care which flavor he was eating. When he’d finished, he went on to the Dangdang and Amazon China Internet sites to look up Yang Jiang’s works—it was true, there really were no entries under her name.

  He went on to look up June 4, 1989, and Falun Gong 1999, and just as he expected, no books on these topics came up. But then he found that there were no books listed either about the Yan-an Rectification Campaign, Land Reform, the 1979 Democracy Wall Movement, the April Fifth Movement, and the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution and Crackdown on Crime Campaign—no books on any of these previously frequently discussed topics of the 1980s and 1990s. The only books that kept coming up were The China Reader: Contemporary China and The Popular Edition of a Short History of China—two standard tomes on modern and contemporary Chinese history, both authorized by the government in the last two years.

  Old Fang really could be extremely perceptive, and this time he was right on target. In all the bookstores and even on their Web sites, where they claimed to stock every book in the world, of all the thousands of titles listed, Lao Chen could not find one single book that might explain the true facts about contemporary Chinese history. Why hadn’t he noticed this a long time ago?

  During the Cultural Revolution and at the beginning of Reform and Opening, there were very few books in the bookstores, and everyone knew that the true facts were being suppressed. But today, thought Lao Chen, there is a profusion of books everywhere, so many they knock you over, but the true facts are still being suppressed. It’s just that people are under the illusion that they are following their own reading preferences and freely choosing what they read.

  Continuing his web search, he discovered he couldn’t find anything by using key phrases like “June 4, 1989,” “Tiananmen Incident,” and so on. Even the items that came up on the Cultural Revolution were terrible—just a load of nostalgic guff for an adolescence spent in the brilliant sunshine of the glorious past. The few items that discussed the history of the Cultural Revolution were only simplistic, officially sanitized versions.

  Lao Chen was aghast. No wonder young people today cannot even say who belonged to the Gang of Four, he thought, and people born after 1980 have never even heard of Wei Jingsheng, the early dissident who called for democracy as the Fifth Modernization, or Liu Binyan, the most celebrated People’s Daily investigative reporter of the 1980s; and no wonder whenever the June 1989 student leader Wang Dan lectures overseas about the Tiananmen Massacre, there are always Chinese overseas students in the audience who jeer at him. Today’s younger generation has no way of knowing.

  What a tremendous generation gap in knowledge of contemporary Chinese history there is. For people in their fifties and sixties, these important events are part of their general knowledge. When they get together now, they still talk about them, and they even have several books and periodicals about those times that are no longer available. Because they share this knowledge, they really haven’t noticed how they’ve become increasingly marginalized. They ceased representing the mass of society long ago. There is no longer any channel for them to pass their understanding on to the younger generation. Lao Chen reflected on Lu Xun’s “counterfeit paradise” and “good hell.” In a good hell, people are aware that they are living in hell and so they want to transform it, but after living for a long time in a fake paradise, people become accustomed to it and they actually believe that they are already in paradise.

  All this was quite obvious to him—Lao Chen himself was a living example, he had to concede. In the last couple of years, he’d had no stomach for reading about China’s painful contemporary history; all he’d wanted to read were famous Chinese classics and romantic fiction. He hadn’t realized that history had been rewritten and the true facts had been airbrushed away. Lao Chen was a writer of fiction, someone who told stories. He also knew that reality could be regarded merely as a construction, and that history was subject to different interpretations. Truth itself could be a field of contested knowledge. Nevertheless, when it came to lying with one’s eyes wide open, squinting to deliberately alter reality, distorting the true facts of history without the least scruple, and nakedly falsifying the records—Lao Chen had to feel at least a twinge of uneasiness.

  But it was only a twinge.

  If Lao Chen had not been a reporter, he probably wouldn’t have felt any need to respect historical reality. Most people don’t care much about the truth, he pondered. There is, in fact, no way for the average person to care about these things—the price of maintaining a firm commitment to truth is too great. Besides that, the true facts are often painful to recall, and who doesn’t prefer pleasure to pain?

  At this point Lao Chen wanted to lay down the heavy burden of history. Can we really blame the common people for their historical amnesia? he asked himself. Should we force the younger generation to remember the suffering of their parents’ generation? Do our intellectuals have a duty to walk through a minefield in order to oppose the machine of state?

  Who has the leisure time to mess around looking up those few historical facts? And furthermore, it’s not that all eyewitness accounts and historical memoirs have been banned; there are plenty of books still available. Only those books that contradict the Chinese Communist Party’s orthodox historical discourse are totally banned.

  Lao Chen then considered a new concept: “90 percent freedom.” We are already very free now: 90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough? The vast majority of the population cannot even handle 90 percent freedom, they think it’s too much. Aren’t they already complaining about information overload and being entertained to death?

  The more he thought about it, the more Lao Chen felt he was right. He had a very long list of unread books that he wanted to read, including Chinese classical studies, such as the twenty-four official histories, and classic European fiction, such as the nineteenth-century Russian novels. He regarded these as the high point of Western fiction, but because the reading priorities of Taiwan and mainland China had been different back then, while mainland intellectuals of his generation read the fiction of imperial Russia, Lao Chen read American fiction. Lao Chen felt somewhat guilty about being a writer of fiction without having read the great Russian novels. He had always told himself that one day he would make up for this literary lacuna. Now old age is approaching, so what am I waiting for? It’s enough for me to have these classics, I don’t need too much freedom.

  And furthermore, when the national situation permits, the state can always relax its restrictions and permit up to 95 percent freedom. Maybe we already have 95 percent? That would be very little less than in the West. Western nations also have some restrictions on freedom of speech and action. The German government restricts neo-Nazi organizations, and many states in the United States deny homosexuals the freedom to marry. Th
e only disparity is that, theoretically, the power of Western governments is given to them by the people, while in China the people’s freedom is given to them by the government. Is this distinction really that important?

  Now even his cleaning lady tells him, “Things are much better today than they were before.”

  It’s all that bloody Fang Caodi’s fault, grumbled Lao Chen, with his nonsense about a missing month and Yang Jiang’s books being unavailable—he’s messed with my mind.

  Now Lao Chen had only two worries, both of his own making: what to write about in his next novel, and how to find his long-delayed love.

  He phoned his friend Hu Yan from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

  Hu Yan had also come to understand that she should stay at home and rest at the weekend and not go to work. She was reaching late middle age, her children were all in university, and she didn’t need to work so hard, or so her husband had been telling her for some time.

  She also knew that she could never expect to finish all her projects. Things were very different for her now. In the past, her research projects had not been considered important, she couldn’t find funding, and the projects often got her into trouble. But now she could be considered as a leader in her field, and research on rural society and culture had become an important field of study.

  She remembered that in the early 1990s, when she’d been investigating in southeast Guizhou how the girls of minority peoples were unable to attend school, she had had to rely on money donated from Taiwan and Hong Kong to fund the project. In the mid-1990s, when she’d studied the lack of access to schools for the children of peasant workers in urban areas, Beijing academic circles had deprecated such projects, and various levels of government had resisted and even tried to suppress her investigations. It was not until 2000 that things took a 180-degree turn, when the central government announced its new rural policies. Local administrators all had to develop corresponding policies, and so they sought out many academic specialists for consultation. Hu Yan received large government grants to investigate construction and the circulation of goods and capital in rural areas, grants large enough to make many of her colleagues jealous.

  In more recent years, while conducting field research, Hu Yan had become aware of an interesting phenomenon: the very rapid growth of Protestant churches. According to the figures in a 2008 survey, the combined number of adherents to the Protestant “underground churches,” to the government-sanctioned Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Church, and to the Catholic Patriotic Church was 50 million, but in Hu Yan’s mind the figure should have been 100 million; this 100 percent increase had all taken place in the last two years. But Hu Yan was concerned that she already had so many big projects in hand, more than she could handle; she wondered whether it would be worth the trouble to study informal rural churches. Especially because the sociology of religion was not her specialty, and if she successfully set up a project and obtained government funding, even more people would be green-eyed with jealousy. The gossip and innuendo bruited around would be pretty nasty—accusations of academic hegemony or intellectual imperialism would be the most polite of the lot.

  Hu Yan had always maintained a good reputation and had never provoked any academic gossip, and so she had to seriously consider the consequences of pursuing her research on the underground church movement. The temptation was too great, though. Out of China’s 1.3 billion people, 100 million were Christians—one out of every thirteen—the government could not but consider them important. Hu Yan knew the underground church movement was soon to become an extremely hot social topic. How could she stand not to forge ahead with such research?

  Late one Sunday afternoon, while her husband was in the kitchen cooking dinner and singing revolutionary songs, Hu Yan was in her study trying to figure out how to launch this research. Just then she received a call from Lao Chen. He needed her input on something. They arranged to meet for lunch at the Sichuan restaurant next to the Academy.

  The following day, Lao Chen took Fang Caodi with him to see Hu Yan explaining that if he wanted to know the real situation in China, he could do no better than ask Hu Yan. “Nobody knows more about the lower strata of society than she does,” he told him. “If Hu Yan says she has not heard of something, then that something does not exist.”

  “When I remember something,” Fang Caodi said peevishly, “no matter what anybody says, I won’t forget it.”

  Lao Chen also had another important reason for seeing Hu Yan. A few days earlier, she had sent him an e-mail with a report about research on Chinese Christian underground churches, and he wanted to ask her what she thought about maizi busi, “the grain does not die.”

  Over lunch, Hu Yan explained what she was working on: helping the government draft policies for the administration of agricultural cooperatives and rural financial institutions, and investigating the social effects of the circulation of goods and capital in rural areas.

  “If you sum it up simply,” Lao Chen asked, looking for a straight answer, “is the situation in the countryside getting better or worse?”

  “Of course there are still problems,” answered Hu Yan, “but overall we’ve entered a period of positive feedback.”

  Having asked for and received this conclusive answer, Lao Chen was perfectly satisfied and content. He’d visited several cities in China and he knew that first-, second-, and third-level cities were all extremely prosperous, even county-level cities were all developing very nicely. The urban people were living well and the government’s goal of a moderately good standard of living had been easily achieved. What Lao Chen was not so sure about was the rural situation. He had visited only villages near major cities and had never lived in the proper countryside for any length of time. Every so often he would phone Hu Yan and ask her if the rural situation was getting better or worse, as if he were making a long-distance call home and gaining peace of mind on hearing that things were indeed improving. Secure in the knowledge that the rural situation was now better, Lao Chen told himself that on the whole China was constantly improving, and so he could go on living his good life with a clear conscience. As far as asking for the details of the positive feedback Hu Yan had mentioned, Lao Chen didn’t need information overload; he would leave that to the experts.

  “Professor Hu,” Fang Caodi asked, interrupting Lao Chen’s musings, “what do you think about the time between when the world economy entered a new period of crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began?”

  Hu Yan looked like she didn’t quite understand what Fang Caodi was saying.

  “I mean that month in between,” Fang went on, “twenty-eight days, to be precise.”

  “The front page of the People’s Daily reported,” Hu Yan said very patiently, “that the world economy entered a period of crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began on the same day. That was the day that the American dollar lost one-third of its value in one go, and the Chinese government announced its New Prosperity Policy, or NPP. Everybody knows this. I don’t know, Mr. Fang, how you arrive at this twenty-eight-day figure.”

  Fang Caodi was silent, and Lao Chen thought to himself, Old Fang, this time there is nothing you can say.

  Lao Chen asked about the report Hu Yan had written on her research on the Christian underground church movement.

  “We recommended,” Hu Yan said, “that the central government desensitize the question of religion—that is, abandon their sensitivity to religion. We advised the government not to treat it as a question of ‘the enemy versus us,’ or not even as a ‘contradiction among the people.’ They should normalize the question of religion—that is, they should regard religion as a normal part of life. We should learn a lesson from previous policy and not make another mistake like the 1999 suppression of the Falun Gong.”

  “They absolutely should not,” Fang Caodi chimed in, “they absolutely should not make that same mistake, it would be too evil.”

  Hu Yan nodded her agreement.<
br />
  “Hu Yan.” Lao Chen finally came to his main question. “What do you think about the words maizi busi, the ‘grain does not die’?”

  “I’m not too familiar with the Christian Bible,” said Hu Yan, “but I think this statement is from the Gospels, something like ‘the grain that falls upon the ground does not die.’ All Christians are aware of this passage. There is an underground church in Henan Province that is called the luodi maizi, the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground.”

  “Where in Henan?” Lao Chen asked quickly. “Find the exact location for me, will you?”

  “No problem.”

  After they had parted from Hu Yan, Fang Caodi said, “Professor Hu is a good person, but she is not one of us.”

  “Thank God,” said Lao Chen, “that there are still people in the world who are not like you.”

  “I could tell from her expression,” Fang Caodi said, “she was so happy. And as I expected, she didn’t know about that lost month.”

  “Fang Caodi,” Lao Chen urged him, “forget all about that so-called lost month. It’s not worth it. Life’s too short; just look after yourself.”

  Fang Caodi didn’t answer. Lao Chen knew that no matter how clever he was, he could never change Fang Caodi.

  Once they were sitting in the car, Fang Caodi said, “Lao Chen, do me the honor of coming to Miaomiao’s house to have dinner with Zhang Dou, Miaomiao, and me, okay?”

  Lao Chen didn’t much want to go there, but since he might need his help to find Little Xi and he didn’t have anything else to do, he agreed.

  His acceptance pleased Fang Caodi. “This whole area,” he said, pointing to Chang-an Boulevard as he started the car, “used to be full of out-of-town petitioners come to state their grievances to the government. I once went over there specially to see if I could find any people like me among that big crowd of people. What do you think happened? There isn’t even a single petitioner anymore, and the shacks they used to live in on the Southside have all been demolished. At first I was thinking maybe that friend of yours was hiding there.”