China in Ten Words (13 page)

Discussion evolved into argument, and argument escalated and expanded. In school, throughout the day, we debated for all we were worth, and like election candidates canvassing for votes we each went off to talk others around. Some supported him and some supported me, and the boys in our year were soon divided into two camps: the Earth Destruction School and the Earth Survival School. As time went on everyone else got tired of the argument, leaving just the two of us to carry the torch. Our classmates would shake their heads in despair, and our two competing earths became a standing joke.

One day our argument resumed in the middle of a game of basketball. By this time we had been arguing for months and both felt a need to wrap it up, so there on the court we agreed to consult the chemistry teacher and accept her judgment as the final authority. Off we went, still arguing so contentiously that my companion forgot he was holding the basketball under his arm. “Hey, hey!” the other boys cried. “Forget about your two earths, just give us the ball back!”

The chemistry teacher was a new arrival at the school, a woman in her thirties who came to us from a city in north China. We thought her very exotic because she spoke perfect standard Mandarin, unlike the other teachers, who in class or out spoke only the local dialect. We tracked her down in the staff room, and after patiently listening to both points of view, she announced her verdict. “The peoples of the world are all peace loving,” she told us. “How could they ever think of tying atomic bombs together and detonating them all at once?”

It had never crossed our minds that the chemistry teacher would cut the ground out from under us and put such a damper on our long-standing argument. We retreated from the staff room in disarray, exchanging discomfited looks and then unceremoniously dismissing her opinion. “To hell with her!” we cursed.

We returned to our argument, as obstinate and determined as ever. Forced to desperate remedies once more, I repeated my earlier ploy. “Mr. Lu Xun has said, even were one to tie all the atom bombs in the world together and detonate them, it would not destroy the earth.”

“Mr. Lu Xun said that, too?” He eyed me suspiciously.

“You don’t believe me?” I decided to brazen it out. “Do you really think I would make up something Mr. Lu Xun said?”

My unflinching confidence put him on the defensive. “No, you wouldn’t dare do that,” he said, shaking his head. “Nobody would ever dare make up something Mr. Lu Xun said.”

“Of course not,” I said, suddenly stricken with misgiving.

He nodded. “That ‘even were one to’ sounds a lot like Mr. Lu Xun.”

“What do you mean, ‘sounds a lot like’?” I retorted, now flushed with victory. “Those are Mr. Lu Xun’s words exactly.”

My classmate slunk off to lick his wounds, confounded by his unfortunate tendency to always get on the wrong side of Mr. Lu Xun. A few months later, however, I had quite a scare when I realized what a glaring anachronism I had committed—Lu Xun having died almost ten years before the first atomic bomb was dropped. After several days of anxiety I decided that preemptive action was required. “Last time I misquoted Mr. Lu Xun,” I told my classmate. “What he was talking about was bombs, not atomic bombs. What he actually said was: ‘Even were one to tie all the bombs in the world together.…’ ”

The boy’s eyes lit up. “Bombs and atomic bombs are not the same thing at all!” he said, elated.

“Yes, I can see that.” Given the necessity to discourage further inquiries, I had no choice but to acknowledge that I was wrong. “I think you’re right. If all the atomic bombs in the world were tied together and detonated, the earth surely would be blown to smithereens.”

Our two marathon arguments thus resulted finally in a 1–1 tie. That, of course, is a matter of little consequence, just as the arguments themselves are of no great interest. The real point that emerges here is what absolute authority the phrase “Lu Xun” enjoyed during the Cultural Revolution era.

T
he story of Lu Xun and me continued to unfold, and in the following episode only he and I were involved. I have gone through some wild passages in my life, and in one of them I put Lu Xun’s short story “A Madman’s Diary” to music.

I was then in my second year of middle school, which would make it 1974, when the Cultural Revolution had entered its final stages and life continued in its straitjacket as everyone’s apathy deepened. I would play basketball during math class and stroll about on the playground during chemistry or physics, and there was nothing to stop me. But after getting sick of the classroom, I got fed up with the playground, too. I would scowl with frustration at the length of each day. Freedom was simply tiresome, for there was nothing I could do with it. It was at this point I discovered music or, to be more precise, I discovered numbered musical notation, and so in a music class that was just as boring as math I found renewed pleasure in life. As passion returned I began to write music.

It was not music itself, I should point out, that enchanted me, but its numerical notation. I’m not sure why that was—perhaps it was simply that I knew absolutely nothing about notation. It was quite different from those Chinese or mathematics textbooks I leafed through, which I understood if I could be bothered to try. Musical notation, on the other hand, was a complete mystery to me. All I knew was that this was how those familiar revolutionary songs presented themselves in print, spilling across the paper like a bizarre cipher, dimly relating a story in sound. Ignorance engendered mystery, and mystery became allure, triggering my creative instincts.

Learning the system of numerical notation was not part of my plan. Rather, I began my musical composition—the only music I will ever write in my life, I’m sure—simply utilizing the outward trappings of that system, taking as my theme Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.” First of all I copied Lu Xun’s story onto a new homework notebook; then I inserted notational symbols underneath the text just as the mood took me. I must have written practically the longest song tune in the world, a tune that nobody could perform and nobody would ever be able to hear.

I expended a great deal of energy on this project over a period of many days, filling up every last line of my notebook and quite wearing myself out in the process. Throughout I remained in total ignorance of the principles underlying numbered notation. Although I was now in possession of a brand-new opus that took up a whole notebook, I had not advanced one step closer to music and had not the slightest idea what kind of sound my score would produce. I simply felt that it looked a lot like a song, and that in itself was a great source of satisfaction.

I will always have a soft spot for that long-lost composition book and its world’s-longest song. My random notation recorded notes higgledy-piggledy, in a meter that was equally chaotic; but it also recorded my existential predicament in the final stages of the Cultural Revolution, a life made up of equal parts stifled instincts, dreary freedom, and hollow verbiage. What made me settle on “A Madman’s Diary”? I have no idea. All I know is, after I had written its score, I was unable to find any other literary materials that lent themselves to musical accompaniment and had no choice but to turn my attention to other genres: mathematical equations and chemical reactions. In the days that followed I filled up another composition book with the scores I wrote for them—equally arbitrary meters and haphazard notes, which, if ever performed, would surely make a noise this world has never heard. In hell, I grant you, such sounds may well be part of the ambience, and when I tried to imagine the music I had produced, I tended to hear only the shrieking of ghosts and the howling of wolves. But now and then I would entertain another possibility: that, like a blind cat stumbling on a dead mouse, I had actually struck it lucky, that by some amazing fluke I had written music fit for heaven’s ears.

In retrospect, perhaps it’s not so strange that I chose “A Madman’s Diary” for my compositional experiment, for that title is an apt description of my approach to recording a tune.

A
fter the Cultural Revolution I found it curious that Mao Zedong had held Lu Xun in such high esteem. It was as though these two men were connected psychologically by a secret passageway, for although distance separated them in life and death, they still seemed to maintain a capacity for intercommunication. Both were men of tenacious purpose and restless urges. Mao Zedong praised Lu Xun for his indomitable spirit, but Mao himself had just as firm a backbone, never giving ground in conflicts with the United States and the Soviet Union, although they were stronger than China. And both men, at the deepest level, were fundamental and extreme in their views, vehemently rejecting the Confucian doctrine of the golden mean.

Every great author needs great readers, and for Lu Xun to have such an influential reader as Mao Zedong may have been his good fortune, or it may have been his bad luck. During the Cultural Revolution Lu Xun changed from an author’s name to a fashionable political catchphrase, and the man’s scintillating and incisive works were submerged under a layer of dogmatic readings. In that era people constantly had “Mr. Lu Xun says” on their lips, in such a familiar tone that you might have thought all Chinese were distantly related to Lu Xun, but very few of them understood him as Mao had. And so, although Lu Xun’s reputation reached its pinnacle during the Cultural Revolution, true readers of his work were few and far between. “Mr. Lu Xun says” was really just a way of jumping on the bandwagon.

After the Cultural Revolution Lu Xun was no longer a sacrosanct term in our vocabulary—he reverted to being an author and returned to controversy. Many continued to honor Lu Xun, but there was no shortage of people who took to bad-mouthing him. Such attacks took a different form from those Lu Xun had faced during his own lifetime, now adding sensational elements to the mix as some showed an avid interest in Lu Xun’s personal affairs: the four women in his life, his poor showing in bed, his abnormal sexual psychology.…

With the rise of China’s market-based economy Lu Xun’s commercial value keeps being exploited constantly. The characters and places in his stories have been put to work as names for snack foods and alcoholic beverages and tourist destinations; they serve to designate private rooms in nightclubs and karaoke joints, where officials and businessmen, their arms wrapped around young hostesses, sing and dance to their hearts’ content.

Some people directly employ Lu Xun as a cheerleader for their products. In the city of Wuhan, for example, a shop specializing in the popular delicacy known as stinky bean curd features Lu Xun in its advertising. The sign at its entrance reproduces a classic photograph of Lu Xun smoking, the difference being that the cigarette in his mouth has been digitally erased and replaced with a skewer of stinky bean curd. The proprietor of the shop declares proudly that he and his staff all hail from Lu Xun’s hometown of Shaoxing and explains his advertisement as standard practice in China today, drumming up business by exploiting the buzz surrounding celebrity.

The fate of Lu Xun in China—going from being an author to being a catchphrase and then back again—reflects the fate of China itself, and in Lu Xun we can trace the zigzags of history and detect the imprints of our social upheavals.

A
t the university in Oslo my stories were not quite over. For a time, I told my audience, I was firmly convinced that Lu Xun was a terribly overrated writer whose awesome reputation was nothing more than a by-product of Chinese politics.

In 1984 I was working in the cultural center of a southern town and beginning to write my own stories. In the hallway outside my office stood a large table, under which were stacked works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Lu Xun. With the passage of time these once-sacred texts had ended up piled in heaps like wastepaper and coated with a thick layer of dust. Lu Xun’s books were in the outermost stack, and I would often stub my toes on them as I went in and out of the office. Glancing down at the dusty gray volumes on the floor, I couldn’t help but rejoice at their misfortune, thinking to myself, “That guy’s days are over, thank goodness!” On one occasion I stumbled over the books and almost landed flat on my face. “Damn it!” I cried. “You’re finished, man, but still you try to give me a hard time!”

As the Cultural Revolution ended I had just graduated from high school. In the years that followed I read huge numbers of books but not one word of Lu Xun. When I myself became an author, Chinese critics expressed the view that I was an inheritor of the Lu Xun spirit, a label I found irksome, for I took it as a put-down.

In 1996 I was given an opportunity to reread Lu Xun. A film director was planning to make a movie based on some of his stories and asked me for some ideas on how to approach the adaptation, for a generous fee. Being short of cash at the time, I promptly agreed. Then I realized I didn’t have any of Lu Xun’s works on my shelves, so I went to a bookstore and purchased a copy of his collected short fiction.

That evening I turned on my desk light and began to read these tales that had so frequently been my required reading and from which I had always felt so estranged. The first story was that same “A Madman’s Diary” that I had put to music in my teenage years. Since then I had completely forgotten the plot, and now I reread the story with a fresh eye. Early on, when the madman senses that the whole world is acting abnormally, he makes the following remark: “Otherwise, why would the Zhaos’ dog look at me that way?”

This gave me quite a shock. This Lu Xun fellow knew a thing or two, I thought to myself, to be able to capture a man’s lurch into insanity in just one sentence. Other, less talented authors sometimes want a character to lose his senses, but even after they have lavished thirty or forty pages on charting this development, their character still comes across as perfectly sane.

“Kong Yiji” was the third story I read that night. It had appeared over and over again in my Chinese textbooks, but it was not until I was thirty-six years old that I really understood what it was saying. As soon as I finished it, I phoned the director and told him I hoped he would give up on the idea of adapting the stories for the screen. “Don’t spoil things,” I told him. “Lu Xun doesn’t deserve that.”