China in Ten Words (10 page)

The playwright found this most unjust. Those soliloquies were the landlord’s, he explained; they weren’t his. The propaganda team leader tapped the bulging manuscript. “These words in the mind of the landlord—are they your work?”

“That’s right,” he said, “but—”

“If that’s what you write, that’s what you think.” The team leader would hear nothing more.

Our local celebrity changed overnight from a red pen to a black one. In the two years that followed he would often make appearances on the stage in the high school playing field where public sentencing rallies were conducted. There he would play the role of an “active counterrevolutionary,” a big wooden sign over his chest, head bowed, his whole body shaking with terror. Every time I saw him there I would feel a chill at the back of my neck and think to myself what a close shave I’d had. How lucky for me that the landlord in my play had no soliloquy and that my comments at the end of his play had been excised, otherwise a place might have been made for me next to him on the stage.

In those days sentencing rallies would be held in the high school playing field several times each year, to publicly announce the sentence on one or several murderers, rapists, and other offenders. On each occasion a number of landlords, rightists, and counterrevolutionaries would be brought in to serve as supplementary targets. Unbound but with big wooden signs hanging over their chests, they would flank the major offenders, who were trussed up like chickens. Not every landlord, rightist, and counterrevolutionary would participate in every supplementary struggle event, but the playwright was an exception, perhaps because he was so well-known. Every time there was a public sentencing he would appear with his head bowed, placard on his chest, occupying a fixed position on the far right. He was our town’s default accessory target.

A few years later my parents worried themselves sick when I began to write fiction in earnest. Their experiences during the Cultural Revolution gave them cause to fear that their son one day might end up as just another black pen.

P
ankaj Mishra’s eyes gleamed. A wise listener, he smiles quietly and, when he laughs, laughs quietly, too. We were fishers of memory, sitting on the banks of time and waiting for the past to swallow the bait.

The conversation turned to my first career, as a dentist, and my second career, as a writer. Thirty years ago I was working away with my forceps in a small-town hospital, extracting teeth for eight hours a day. From morning to night my job consisted of looking inside people’s gaping mouths, places where you are guaranteed to find the world’s least attractive scenery. In my five years of dentistry, I told Mishra, I must have extracted more than ten thousand teeth. I had just turned twenty then, and during my lunch break I would stand by a window overlooking the street and watch all the bustle below, with a terrifying thought running through my head: I couldn’t spend my whole life doing this, could I? That was when I decided to be an author.

From my window I would often see people from the cultural center loafing about on the main street at all hours of the day, and I was green with envy. “Hey, why aren’t you working?” I asked one of them.

“Walking the street, that is our work,” he replied.

That’s the kind of work I would like to do, I thought. Apart from heaven itself, where else but the cultural center could one find such a cushy job? In China then, individuals had no power to choose their own career: all employment was assigned by the state. After my graduation from high school the state made me be a dentist. For me now to abandon dental work for a loafer’s life in the cultural center required the state’s permission, and for that to happen I had, above all, to demonstrate that I was qualified to make the switch. There were three routes of access to the cultural center: you could be a composer, you could be a painter, or you could be a writer. To compose music or paint pictures, I would have had to learn everything from scratch, so they posed too much of a challenge; writing just required knowledge of Chinese characters, so for me it was the only option.

I completed my primary and secondary education during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, which made for rich experience as I was growing up but also meant that proper study went by the wayside. In high school I would often confuse the bell for the start of a period with the bell that marked its end, and go into class just after it had finished. At the time I knew only a limited stock of Chinese characters, although they served me well enough in my own writing. Years later, when Chinese critics were unanimous in praising my plain narrative language, I would laugh it off: “That’s because I don’t know so many characters.”

When my work was translated into English, a literature professor in the United States told me that my style reminded him of Hemingway, giving me a chance to recycle my joke. “He can’t have had much of a vocabulary either,” I said.

Though I was being facetious, there was some truth there, too. Life is often this way: you may start off with an advantage, only to box yourself in over time, or sometimes you may start with a handicap, only to find it carries you a long way. Or, as Mao put it, “Good things can become bad, and bad things can become good.” Perhaps Hemingway and I both fit that model of bad things becoming good.

At the age of twenty-two I went on pulling teeth and also began to write. The tooth-pulling was to make a living, and the writing was to get out of having to pull more teeth. At first writing actually felt the more arduous of the two activities. But in order to reach cultural-center nirvana, I forced myself to continue. I was young then, and it was no easy matter to persuade my bottom to maintain such constant intimacy with my chair. Outside, on weekends, the sunshine was so enticing, birds were flitting to and fro, girls were laughing so sweetly, friends my age were gadding about, but I sat stiffly at my desk, expending as much energy on getting words out on paper as a blacksmith does beating iron into shape on his anvil.

Years later young people often ask, “How does one become a writer?” My answer is always simply: “By writing.” Writing is like experience: if you don’t experience things, then you won’t understand life; and if you don’t write, then you won’t know what you’re capable of creating.

I have fond memories of the early 1980s. The Cultural Revolution had just finished; magazines that had been banned for ten years were reappearing, and even more new magazines were emerging. A China that had hardly any literary journals suddenly became a China with more than a thousand literary journals. Like hungry babies wailing for milk, a whole array of fiction columns required nourishment. Previously published authors, whether famous or not, could not possibly satisfy the needs of so many publications even if they were to send in all the things they’d written. And so editors were conscientiously reading unsolicited manuscripts; as soon as they stumbled on something good, they would pass it around among themselves, and the whole editorial department would get excited.

It was my good fortune to find myself in this wonderful period when supply and demand were so out of synch. A dentist in a small town, I had no connections with any editors and knew only the addresses of their publications, so I sent my short stories out to journal after journal. In those days one didn’t need to pay for postage; instead one simply cut off a corner of the envelope to indicate that the journal would pick up the tab. What’s more, if a journal decided not to use a story of mine, it would return the manuscript. After I received a rejected manuscript, I would immediately open the envelope, turn it inside out, glue it closed, write the address of a different journal on top, and chuck it into the mailbox—not forgetting, of course, to snip off a corner.

Manuscripts of my stories traveled for free among the various cities of China; they returned to me again and again, and again and again I sent them on their way once more. They must have traveled to even more cities than I would end up visiting myself in the twenty years that followed. We were living then in a house with a small courtyard, and the mailman would simply toss returned manuscripts over the wall. They would hit the ground with a recognizably heavy thump, and my father, inside the house, had no need to step outside to know what had just been delivered. I would hear my name called, followed by a loud “Reject!”

Before long the relationship of supply and demand between literary works and publishing venues moved in a very different direction. As famous and not-yet-famous authors proliferated like flowers in the spring, literary journals were no longer starving infants; in the blink of an eye they became beautiful young ladies, the objects of fervent courtship and intense rivalry. And as literature itself began to slip from its high perch, the wonderful moment proved ephemeral. Publishers could no longer bear the crippling postage costs, and magazines issued announcements to the effect that (a) authors had to put stamps on their submissions and (b) journals would no longer return manuscripts.

Beijing Literature
was the first magazine whose editorial offices I ever visited: a large room lined with desks piled high with submissions from unheralded authors, where the editors sat, quietly reading manuscripts. I noticed how the editors opened envelopes with scissors and studied their contents with great attention. At that point I had yet to publish any of my own work. When I had occasion to visit other magazines’ editorial offices the year after several of my stories had appeared in print, I encountered a very different spectacle. The incoming envelopes on the tables were all addressed to individual editors and sent by authors known to them. Piles of manuscripts sent by unknown writers lay unopened in wastepaper baskets, waiting for recycling agents to come and pick them up, for they were being sold off as scrap, to be pulped in the paper mill and made into more writing paper. I realized then that editors were no longer bothering with unsolicited submissions.

From that point on a young writer, however gifted, no matter how excellent his work, would find it extremely difficult to get published if he was not personally acquainted with an editor. This cruel reality remained in place for many years, until the emergence in China of Internet literature, when a new form of publication allowed talented young authors to break through once again.

Looking back, I rejoice that I was able to catch the tail end of that honeymoon period of the early ’80s. If I had started writing a couple of years later, I think it very unlikely that an editor would have discovered me in those mountains of unsolicited submissions, and I’d still be there in that small-town hospital in the south, brandishing my forceps and extracting teeth for eight hours a day.

I owe the change in my destiny to a telephone call in November 1983. Winter had come to my little town of Haiyan, and I was just about to knock off for the day when a distant call tracked me down. At the time our hospital had just one single telephone, by the registration desk downstairs. It was a traditional dial telephone, and you needed to route calls through the county’s sole telephone exchange in the county post-and-telecommunications office. When my colleague at registration received the call, she ran into the street and yelled my name outside the window of the room where I worked.

As I walked down the stairs I thought it would be one of my friends in the area, setting up a time to play poker or something that evening. But when I picked up the receiver, I heard the voice of the operator in the local telecom office: she told me I had a long-distance call from Beijing. My heart pounded wildly, and I had the feeling that something momentous was about to happen.

In those days one had to wait for some time before a connection was completed, and when I was told there was a call coming in from Beijing, I reckoned it had got no farther than Shanghai and knew it might well encounter further delays before it reached my little town. I ended up having to wait a good half hour, and as I waited so hopefully and impatiently I found it maddening that calls kept coming in for other colleagues. “You’re not to complete this call,” I would tell the callers with all the authority I could muster.

“Why not?” a mystified voice would respond.

“I’m expecting a call from the Politburo,” I would tell them.

Finally the connection was made, and I heard the voice of Zhou Yanru, then executive editor of
Beijing Literature
. The first thing she told me was that she had placed the call as soon as she arrived at her office that morning and it had taken all day to get through. “I had given up hope,” she said, “and was ready to start all over again tomorrow.”

I’ll never forget that conversation. She did not speak quickly, but I felt there was an urgency in her tone and a clarity and correctness to her language. They planned to publish all three stories I had submitted, she said, but one of them needed revision and she wanted me to go to Beijing at once to attend to it.
Beijing Literature
would pick up the tab for my train fare and accommodation—the issue that was of greatest concern to me, since my monthly salary at the time was only 36 yuan. Then she told me I would receive a stipend for each day I spent revising the manuscript, and finally she gave me her office address—7 West Chang’an Avenue—and instructed me to take the No. 10 bus when I got out of the train station. She had no way of knowing that this would be my first trip of any significant distance but went over these details carefully nonetheless, as though coaching a child.

As soon as I put down the phone, I decided to take a bus to Shanghai the following day and then a train from there to Beijing. But immediately I ran into a problem: how to secure a leave of absence from the hospital director? I thought it very likely that he would not agree to let me go, since he had no idea I was writing stories. For a tooth puller to need suddenly to go to Beijing to revise his work—what a preposterous notion! I couldn’t afford to approach him directly about it.

That evening I knocked on the door of a fellow dentist and gave him my leave request, asking him to pass it on to the hospital director when he went to work the following morning. By that time I would already be on the bus to Shanghai; even if the director refused to give me clearance, it would be too late, for the chicken would have flown the coop.