The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  It had been years since Lao Chen had given any thought to all those out-of-town petitioners, but he was sure of one thing: even if there still were petitioners there, Little Xi would not be one of them. That area was close to the prosecutor’s office and the law courts, and Little Xi would stay far away so as not to be seen by anyone who knew her.

  Fang Caodi continued rattling on about everything under the sun while Lao Chen more or less ignored him. In fact, he would not have agreed to dinner if he had known Fang lived so far out of Beijing.

  When they arrived at Miaomiao’s house in Huairou, Fang Caodi introduced him to Zhang Dou, Miaomiao, and their pack of dogs and cats. Then he took Lao Chen into the living room. The four walls were lined with metal shelves on which were piled newspaper clippings, magazines, and other miscellaneous junk. In the middle was a desk, a folding chair, and a camp bed.

  “Lao Chen”—Fang Caodi pointed to the newspapers and magazines—“these things are all the evidence I’ve collected for over two years. They prove what really happened during those twenty-eight days. You’re an intellectual. You’ve spent your whole life seeking truth and beauty. You’ve struggled to uphold what is true … you ought to be able to understand all the work I’ve done on this. Take a good look at it while I fix our candlelit dinner.”

  Lao Chen was left standing by himself, grudgingly, in the room. Miaomiao came in and put a plate of chocolate cookies on top of the desk for him and then abruptly left.

  Lao Chen was feeling bored. He popped a cookie into his mouth, and picked up a few out-of-date periodicals and a couple of small local newspapers, which he flipped through at random. He really couldn’t see how Fang Caodi could discern the true facts of history in them. He went on to look at odd half-pages from editors of the Southern Weekly, Southern Metropolis Daily, and China Youth Daily, and incomplete issues of the Caijing Magazine, Southern Window, and Asia Weekly.

  Lao Chen recalled that everything had been calm in Beijing during that period, there had been no big disturbances; if there had been even one, it would have left some impression on him. From the so-called evidence that Fang Caodi had collected, it would seem that there had been some sort of unrest in other areas of the country, but that was nothing unusual. China is so big that it’s not unusual for there to be some kind of turmoil somewhere every day, he thought. He never looked for that kind of news, and even if it did catch his eye, he would just skip over it. China is such a big country, there are so many things one doesn’t know about. These little bits and pieces of evidence collected by Fang Caodi don’t explain anything. In fact, to say that one whole month has gone missing isn’t strictly accurate, it’s just that people’s recollections of that month are different, he insisted to himself. Furthermore, if you deliberately looked for bad things happening in China, you could find plenty of examples. If you looked only for good things, you’d find a whole panorama of them. Big countries are all like that. Look at the United States or India. What’s so unusual about China? The most important thing today is that the world economy has fallen into a period of crisis everywhere, except for in China.

  Little Xi, where are you? I hope you can put the past to rest, and return to the good life of the present. If you want to live with me, then we can live well together.

  Perhaps it was due to the chocolate cookies, but Lao Chen began to feel better, and he became even more firmly resolved to locate Little Xi.

  As the early-spring evening fell, the atmosphere of their outdoor candlelit dinner was very conducive to happiness. Fang Caodi cooked dish after dish and piled them on the table. He invited Lao Chen to taste them first and asked Zhang Dou to play his Spanish guitar for atmosphere. Nearby in the yard, Miaomiao began dancing with her dogs and cats.

  Lao Chen had a few mouthfuls and thought each dish tasted pretty good. “What part of China are these dishes from?” he asked Fang Caodi.

  “Chop suey vegetables,” said Old Fang. “Look closely, I’m using Sichuan peppers, Hunan black bean sauce, Guangdong shrimp sauce, Thai lemon grass, and our own coriander, sweet basil, lemon leaf, and leeks. They’re all organic. We just pick ’em and eat ’em. And we fertilize them with our own and the cats’ and dogs’ poo.”

  Conversation over dinner was pleasant, and what was most surprising to Lao Chen was when Fang Caodi told him why he admired him so much. Lao Chen had always thought it was because his literary style impressed Old Fang, but Fang Caodi said it was because of something Lao Chen had once said, though he couldn’t remember it. In 1989, when Fang Caodi allowed himself to be interviewed, he insisted that he was genuinely clairvoyant. When he’d seen the military blockade on the road to the Summer Palace in 1971, he’d known the Mao Zedong–Lin Biao incident had happened. When he’d looked out of the window of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions onto Nathan Road and seen a man jump to his death across the street, he’d known that something was about to go wrong in Hong Kong, and, sure enough, the Hang Seng Index collapsed from seventeen hundred points to only slightly over one hundred. In that American commune in 1975, when his hippie friends were beating on pots and pans to celebrate the end of the Vietnam War, he’d had a vision of refugees swarming out of Vietnam, and, of course, his vision became reality. As he went on talking and talking, Lao Chen had interrupted him and asked, “What’s the significance of these premonitions? Did they change anything later?”

  “Lao Chen,” said Fang Caodi, “with that one question you woke me up from my dreams. When I thought about it, my powers of premonition that I thought made me different from other people never had the slightest influence on the world, and never even changed my own fate. They really didn’t have any significance at all.” From that time on, Fang Caodi no longer considered his premonitions to be of any importance and no longer put himself under any pointless pressure. This was all due to that one question of Lao Chen’s. From that he knew that Lao Chen was an extraordinarily talented person.

  “Little brother,” Fang Caodi instructed Zhang Dou, “Lao Chen is far wiser than we are; we should listen to him, you understand?”

  When Lao Chen, who was eating with great gusto, heard Fang Caodi say this, he felt a little embarrassed. He stood up to give Old Fang a hug.

  Lao Chen found he was enjoying the flavors of their long dinner very much, so much so in fact that some of his lost feeling of happiness started to come back. He felt so good that he actually found himself telling his two companions how he’d come to know the insomniac national leader He Dongsheng. He explained how He Dongsheng would sleep through the films Jian Lin showed, but could not sleep at night, and so drove his own car all over town, and when he was pulled over by a traffic cop, he phoned his secretary, who then wiped his ass for him.

  After dinner, Zhang Dou carried on playing his guitar, and Fang Caodi sang Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” Old Fang sang it perfectly in the style of the young Dylan.

  As they continued drinking Yanjing beer and eating cookies, Zhang Dou took out his computer and went on the Internet. Fang Caodi asked Lao Chen to show him how to look up his friend.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” said Lao Chen. “I only have this note.” He took it out of his pocket.

  “What does it mean?” asked Fang Caodi.

  “I think it is maizi busi, ‘the grain does not die,’ in Romanized script,” said Lao Chen.

  Zhang Dou took a look.

  “Let’s go to Henan and look for her,” said Fang Caodi. “I’ll drive. Professor Hu said that church is in Henan—we can find out where exactly when we get there.”

  “Whoa. Don’t get too excited,” said Lao Chen. “That church is called the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground, but I don’t even know for certain that Little Xi is called maizi busi, not to mention whether or not the two names are related.”

  “I found maizibusi!” exclaimed Zhang Dou suddenly. Lao Chen and Fang Caodi gathered around the computer.

  “You just put in maizibusi?” asked Lao Chen.

  Zhang Dou nodded.

 
Lao Chen had only guessed at Chinese characters for maizibusi and had never thought to just look up the Romanized text.

  There was only one link, a post put up two weeks before on the club3.kdnet.net “Cat’s Eye” server:

  Idiot Numbskull, you say you are so brokenhearted you’ll never post another message. Well, I’m pretty brokenhearted too, but I understand—all your thoughtful articles are willfully deleted by the Internet police and maliciously attacked by a gang of “angry youth” thugs (those people in their fifties and sixties who act like thugs when they go on the Internet). You never use malicious language and you always present the facts and make reasonable arguments, so I greatly admire your firm resolve; it encourages me to keep on going. I’m not afraid of the angry youth, and I’m even less afraid of those aging hoodlums. I will persevere to the end because I believe that human beings are rational and that the truth cannot be suppressed forever. Good-bye for now, friend, we’ll meet again in this virtual world. maizibusi.

  “Is that her?” asked Fang Caodi.

  “It certainly sounds like her,” said Lao Chen.

  “From her tone, she’s one of us,” Fang said.

  “From the tone, the writer is not young either,” said Zhang Dou.

  “Where was it sent from?” Fang Caodi asked Zhang Dou.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask someone online to help me find out.”

  When Lao Chen saw that it might be Little Xi, he was so overcome with emotion that he had to sit down and hold back his tears.

  “Let me tell you about those twenty-eight days,” said Fang Caodi as he handed Lao Chen another bottle of beer and sat down in front of him. He took a few deep breaths, like an athlete warming up before a race.

  “That year, just before the Spring Festival, I took a trip to Macau, and on the way back I stayed in Zhongshan in Guangdong for a change of scene. Zhongshan was once a very prosperous area, but people from Hong Kong and Macau were no longer coming to buy houses or holiday there, the factories had shut down, the peasant workers had to stay in the countryside rather than return to work in the city, and university graduates could not get jobs. I had been cooking for a baked-squab restaurant for only a few days when I was let go. I didn’t care, I could just enjoy myself. On the eighth day of the first lunar month, I noticed that the Southern Daily and all the other papers at a newsstand had the exact same headline: ‘World Economy Entering Period of Crisis.’

  “Everybody was feeling worried, the atmosphere became extremely tense, and my landlady came looking for me. ‘Did you register at the police station before you moved in?’ she asked. ‘What kind of age are we living in?’ I asked. ‘Do outsiders have to register to live in Zhongshan?’ She retorted that if I didn’t register I couldn’t stay, and I said she was violating our contract. At this point the neighbors came over—the local authorities had told them to. They actually said that my landlady could pay for me to stay in a small inn, but I could no longer stay in their courtyard, and they made me hand over my room key immediately. I asked for my deposit back and told them I’d move out.”

  “What point are you trying to make?” asked Lao Chen, growing impatient.

  “Paranoia,” said Fang Caodi, “it was like that for at least a week. Everybody said China was going to fall into chaos, the machine of the state was nowhere to be seen, the situation was approaching anarchy. It was lucky the peasant workers had not come back to the city, or there would have been serious trouble. But I should never have left Zhongshan. If a city like Zhongshan was that tightly wound up, I should have known that the farther inland I went the worse it would be. As I made my way over the hills, I felt like a mouse crossing a busy street and I acted quite recklessly. I still wanted to go sightseeing, to visit Jinggangshan, Mao Zedong’s revolutionary base in Jiangxi, as well as Mount Longhu. When I passed Shaoguan and came to the outskirts of a town called Meishang Fork (where the three provinces of Guangdong, Hunan, and Jiangxi meet) the bus was stopped and everybody had to get off. Outsiders were not allowed to enter the town. We were not stopped by police, but by a temporary detachment of townspeople. I slipped away and stayed in a peasant’s house—until two days later when I was picked up by the Public Security police. The peasant had turned me in because the People’s Liberation Army had already begun a general crackdown.

  “Then they discovered,” Fang went on, “that I was carrying an American passport. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be Chinese when I came back from the U.S., but it’s a hell of a lot harder to regain Chinese citizenship than it is for a Chinese to become an American citizen. So I’d registered myself in Beijing as a corporation and hired myself as a manager; I renewed my contract regularly, and so I had a work permit. Once in a while I went to Hong Kong or Macau, but I could return and live indefinitely in China.

  “Back to my being arrested. There was a six-person joint hearing in an office of that Public Security Bureau. There were two Public Security police, two prosecutors, and two judges. One of the prosecutors was a formidable older woman, and one of the judges was a very young woman.

  “ ‘Look at you,’ said the female prosecutor, ‘you don’t look like an American. Say something in English for us.’ I recited a section of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ and I did it quite fluently.

  “But the prosecutor was not having any of it. ‘You’re obviously Chinese. You can’t fool anybody by pretending to be American. Why would an American hide in a peasant’s house? What the hell is an American doing here anyway? There aren’t any tourist attractions or investment opportunities here. You look like an American spy to me.’

  “ ‘Captured foreign spies are to be executed,’ said the male prosecutor.

  “ ‘You have no objections?’ the female prosecutor asked, looking at the young female judge.

  “ ‘He can’t be executed,’ said the young female judge.

  “ ‘Why not?’ asked the male prosecutor. ‘We’re supposed to punish criminals severely and rapidly.’

  “ ‘If we capture an American spy,’ the young judge said, ‘we are supposed to report it to the higher authorities.’

  “The two prosecutors immediately responded that that would take too much time.

  “ ‘Then let’s pass sentence,’ said the male prosecutor.

  “ ‘You can’t pass sentence,’ said the young female judge.

  “ ‘Why can’t we pass sentence?’ asked the male prosecutor. ‘The Americans sent a spy over here, and we Chinese are not happy. Isn’t that so?’

  “ ‘You can be unhappy,’ the young female judge countered, ‘but you can’t be stupid. If he’s a spy, we have to report it to the higher authorities; if he isn’t, we have to let him go.’

  “ ‘Americans no longer have extraterritorial rights,’ said the male prosecutor.

  “ ‘It has nothing to do with extraterritoriality,’ said the female judge. ‘It is not a crime for a Chinese person to carry an American passport in China—and that’s according to our own Chinese law.’

  “The two prosecutors looked very unsettled at what the young judge was saying.

  “ ‘Comrade,’ the female prosecutor said, ‘stop arguing. You know perfectly well you’re wasting police time. They worked so hard to arrest this guy and now you want to let him go. This is a waste of our group’s time, too. And furthermore, you’re interfering with our work schedule. At this rate we won’t be able to reach the target set by the higher authorities.’

  “The other prosecutor nodded in approval, while the two Public Security officials and the other judge had yet to open their mouths.

  “ ‘I can’t worry about that,’ said the stubborn young female judge, ‘I operate on the basis of our national laws. If he’s a spy, report him to the higher authorities. If he’s not a spy, set him free.’

  “The female prosecutor stared fiercely at the young judge. She was so angry she was about to explode, but the men just bowed their heads in silence. I was stunned. Then the female prosecutor shouted, ‘Get him out of here
!’ and they escorted me off the premises. My life and freedom had been saved. Even in a deserted little town like that, China has outstanding talent like that young woman. Even if it’s just for her sake, I cannot allow the world to forget what happened during that lost month.”

  Lao Chen was moved by Fang’s story and longed even more for Little Xi.

  “I knew,” Fang Caodi continued, “I couldn’t keep running around wildly; if I was picked up again, I might really be executed. There was a Daoist temple near the town, and when I recited the names of a few old Daoist monks I’d heard of, the old monk there let me stay. Some other time I’ll tell you about my monastic seclusion and the practice of inedia. You’ve heard of inedia, haven’t you? It basically amounts to fasting. Would you believe that I can practice inedia for fourteen days? We could have a competition and see who can practice it for the longest time …”

  “Forget it,” said Lao Chen, looking at a text message, “you win already. I can’t stand missing a single meal. Finish your story. I need to talk to you about something.”

  “I wanted to practice inedia in the temple for twenty-one days,” Fang went on, “but when I reached the fourteenth day, the old monk came in with a bowl of gruel and told me that I should go outside and see what was happening in the world. What he said made sense, so I went back to the county seat, where the atmosphere was still extremely tense, and the papers announced that there was no end in sight to the crackdown. Fortunately, transport was running again, and so I went to Zhangzhou in Jiangxi. It was eerily quiet. People were avoiding each other’s eyes in the street, just like in Beijing after June 4, 1989. At the beginning of March, the evening papers announced that the crackdown had come to an end, and the following day all the papers carried the same headline: ‘China’s Golden Age of Prosperity Has Officially Begun.’ Now everyone was smiling and taking to the streets to set off firecrackers. So you see, there were twenty-eight days between the time the world economy entered a period of crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy was officially announced. The nation went from potential anarchy and terror to the comparatively lesser fear of a police crackdown. China’s Age of Ascendancy was not announced until after the crackdown, and not, as everybody today says, on the same day that the world economy went into crisis. That’s the end of my story, Lao Chen. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”