The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (6 page)

The week before my aunt left for our new house in Hong Kong, I spent all my free time with her. Despite our growing differences we still had a deep affection for each other and tried our utmost to avoid thoughts of parting. Only once did she let go. She had come into my room to tell me something, but as she walked back to the door, she suddenly spun around and spread her arms against the opening as if to stop me from running out of it.

“Ling-ling, come with me!” she pleaded. Her face, once plump and commanding, now sagged like a dried, slightly squashed pumpkin. I felt a surge of pity for her, but I knew
that what she asked was already impossible. I could not share the life she wanted to lead in Hong Kong any more than she could live her old life in the new Shanghai. The Western world was boycotting the new China. Foreign ships no longer called at the ports. The cinemas were running out of their store of American movies and eventually would cease showing them altogether. Nearly all the foreigners had either left or were leaving. The party-going and hobnobbing among the wealthy and influential had ended. Austerity was the watchword. Shanghai, resilient and adaptable, was learning new ways, but for people like my aunt and uncle it was hard, almost impossible, to change.

“Auntie, I'll come to you as we agreed, when young Bob Lu leaves.”

“I hope so,” was all she said with a deep sigh.

My aunt left Shanghai in the autumn of 1949. When the train started moving I ran along beside it on the platform waving frantically, hardly seeing for the tears in my eyes. For a second I had the urge to jump on it and go with her.

On October 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was formally established at a great meeting in Peking. By the end of the year, the Guomindang had withdrawn from the mainland completely. I left St. Ursula's at Christmastime, armed with my high school diploma, and Ma Li immediately made an appointment for me to see one of the leading officials of her theater. His name was Wang Sha; he was a playwright who now devoted most of his time to theatrical administrative work and helping younger playwrights.

Ma Li met me at the theater entrance and led me to a corridor of offices backstage. She knocked on a door, put her head in, and without ceremony said to the person inside, “Comrade Wang Sha, here is Guan Ling-ling whom I told you about.” I was surprised at the familiar way she addressed him, but she whispered, “He hates formality.”

“Please come in.”

“I hope I'm not interrupting your work.” I looked
around as I entered to see a workroom more than an office, with well-stocked bookshelves around the walls, an old, greyish-white, cloth-covered table piled with papers and magazines, his desk, and a few plain wooden chairs. That was all.

“No, I was expecting you. Come in.” He stood up to greet me. He was lightly but strongly built with slightly bowed shoulders and a shock of black hair topping a high-browed, thin face. He seemed quite pleasant-looking. “Please sit down,” he said, indicating a chair next to his desk. “So what work would you like to do?”

“This will be my first job,” I apologized.

But he put me at ease: “We have quite a few young people doing work for the first time.”

“I have no college training. I just finished high school at St. Ursula's.”

“Not many of us here have had any sort of college education. Some have only completed junior high or elementary school. You are well educated compared to most. I imagine you can read classical Chinese as well as English?”

Feeling more confident, I admitted that I could. “I love to read. I read a lot.”

“That's fine. How about starting work in the library? There's a great deal to do there. We're going to hold a series of discussions about the role of art and the artist in society. We'll be inviting well-known artists, writers, actors, and others to join us. You can take notes at the meetings and then help to write up the final report. How's that?”

I couldn't have wished for anything better. I thanked him and rushed off to find Ma Li and tell her of my good fortune.

That's how I became a cadre. White-collar employees of all kinds—ministers, department heads, industrial managers, clerks, typists, doctors, artists—working in state institutions or organizations, did not like to be called officials, for that smacked too much of the old society, so a new word had been coined for them—
ganbu
, “doers” or “cadres.”

The work in the library was not demanding—simply cataloging and stacking the books and magazines as they came in. I put my name down for a playwrighting course to start shortly. Combing the library shelves, I read voraciously, growing more and more involved in the craft of writing and its problems. And I looked forward to meeting some of the writers whose work was beginning to affect me.

The day of the first discussion meeting I came early. From my place at the note-taker's table in front of the platform I had a close-up view of all the speakers. All those we invited promised to attend and the list was like a
Who's Who
of the modern literary world—Ba Jin, whose novel
Family
had led countless young readers to rebel against the feudal family system and its arranged marriages; Lao She, who wrote
Rickshaw Boy
and, influenced by Dickens, created a whole gallery of portraits of the underprivileged, the common people of China; Cao Yu, whose play
Thunderstorm
brought modern Chinese drama to maturity. Mao Dun's
Midnight
gave such a truthful and biting picture of my uncle's business world that I felt sure he knew many of our friends. He was the newly appointed Minister of Culture and was preparing to go to Peking, but he said he would come if he could.

Wang Sha, it seemed, knew everybody. He had a nod and greeting for us humble note takers even as he settled the most eminent of authors in their places. I liked his way of dealing with people.

“In this open forum,” Wang Sha proclaimed, beginning his remarks, “everybody should be heard. We are here to help the Party Committee of the theater hammer out its guidelines. To decide, for example, what kind of new plays we should write and what old plays we should stage.”

“I think the theater should take the
Yanan Talks
as its guideline,” a man in his mid-thirties with a ruggedly handsome face interposed from the back of the hall.

I was glad that I had done my homework before the meeting. The talks he cited took place in 1942 in the then Communist headquarters in Yanan. The Party's Chairman,
Mao Ze-dong, had spoken at this forum, and his two addresses were regarded as the key exposition of the Party's cultural policy.

Wang Sha responded immediately: “The
Yanan Talks
call on writers to write from the Communist point of view. The writers in Yanan then were either Communists or intended to accept this philosophy. But the situation has changed. Most of us here tonight are not Communists and therefore probably do not wish to subordinate ourselves to Party discipline. Does that mean that we will not be allowed to write until we have agreed to write as instructed by the Party? Does that mean that we should not stage any plays written from a non-Communist standpoint? For example, Mr. Cao Yu's plays?”

“That would definitely rule out my
Metamorphosis
,” Cao Yu added with a self-deprecatory smile.

“Why should it?” inquired Feng Xue-feng, a well-known Communist critic, jerking his white-haired head. He spoke with a nervous intensity that dated from the imprisonment in a Guomindang jail which had wrecked his health. “Why shouldn't your play be staged? Because its hero is a Guomindang commissioner? Because no one who has worked for the Guomindang government should be depicted as a hero? Now look here, I was locked up in one of the worst Guomindang concentration camps. Shang-rao Concentration Camp. Yes, that's right.” He thrust his body violently forward as if he were about to get at some invisible opponent. “I hope that nobody will accuse me of apologizing for the Guomindang if I say there are good, decent people working in that government. We should write about real individuals, not stereotypes.”

Cao Yu, whose penchant for dramatic tricks was a feature of his playwriting, suddenly gave an unexpected twist to the drama of the moment. “I wrote the
Metamorphosis
during the Second World War; the drama school I taught in evacuated to a small backwoods town, far away from Japanese air raids, and the stifling atmosphere there reminded me of the settings in Chekhov's plays. I had always been an admirer of Chekhov, but it was only then that I began to feel deeply for his characters, people who are constantly chasing after rainbows—not even real ones,
but just imagined ones. I realized that some people need dreams to chase or they would find life unbearable. That was when the hero of
Metamorphosis
took shape in my mind. The hero happens to work in the Guomindang government, nothing more—this way he can fit into the story. He is a Chekhov character of my invention. Instead of simply daydreaming he takes it upon himself to turn a dream into a reality. When I finished that play I felt free of that stage in my past. It was a good feeling.”

That was when Ai Qing, acclaimed as one of the best of the contemporary poets, woke up, or at least seemed to wake up. He had been sitting for quite a while with his eyes closed; now he opened them wide as if perplexed to find himself in such company. We had not known he was in town so we had not invited him, but hearing of the session from theater friends, he came anyway. He spoke in his soft, sleepy voice.

“To regiment and impose restrictions on writers, Communists or not, is to kill their creative urge. I have been writing for years. But many of my poems—and some I consider the best—have never been published and never will be if some people have their way. The reason is simple: I was told first in Yanan and then in Peking, ‘They are not revolutionary. Why do you waste your time describing a cloud lit by the morning sun?'

“Sometimes when I take these poems out and recite them to myself I feel like an actor playing in an empty theater. Without lights. Without an audience. With neither applause nor hisses; surrounded by emptiness that responds to nothing I say or think. When people are constantly telling me to write this or that I feel my brain drying up. If this goes on, one fine day it will be as dried up as the orange peel that old wives use to make herb medicine.” This quiet outburst caused a considerable stir; he was a Communist and had spent the war years in Yanan.

He was just about to resume his seat when on the spur of the moment he pulled out a sheet of paper and began to read aloud a poem, the very one describing the cloud in the morning sky. When he finished, the audience applauded
noisily while he himself bowed ostentatiously to all the prettiest actresses.

As he replaced the poem in his pocket he reminisced, “I wrote that on the first day I returned to Shanghai from Paris. It was in 1932. Or was it ‘31? Anyway, on the third day the French Concession police arrested me. In those days I hadn't a thought in my head but poetry, but they said that my poem about the cloud was obviously revolutionary because the sun tinted the cloud red and furthermore nobody but a Communist would go all the way to Paris just to study poetry. It took years to convince them that I had gone to Paris to study painting and the information they had got from their Guomindang spies was wrong. It was shameful. The Guomindang government handed over their own innocent people to the foreigners who occupied our land, and treated not only them, but their top boss, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, like dirt. However, they had put ideas into my head. What they didn't like, I liked, and I became a Communist.”

When he finally sat down, he leaned his tall frame over to speak to a neighbor and his movement revealed a short, middle-aged man in the seat behind him.

“Who's that?” I asked Dai Shi, another note taker sitting beside me.

“Chen Bo-da,” she whispered. “He is one of Chairman Mao's chief secretaries. Now be quiet. I think he is going to speak.”

“Did we invite him? When did he come in?” I turned to ask Ma Li, who was sitting behind Dai Shi.

“No, we didn't. But he likes to play the inspector-general incognito.”

“Comrades, I find the meeting most interesting. Everybody speaks out what is on his mind. May I do the same?” The newcomer spoke modestly, but I couldn't help thinking it was a bit forced. He must have known that most people in the room knew who he was. “I personally believe that if a writer takes a firm Party or pro-Party stand, he will produce a better book or play.” Then he praised Mao Dun's
Midnight
as the most effective satire in modern Chinese
literature directed against the bourgeoisie. “Comrade Mao Dun, will you tell us how you wrote that novel?” It was a shrewd move. Mao Dun was a formidable figure among Chinese intellectuals. It would be quite useful to set him up as a revolutionary proletarian writer.

Mao Dun rose slowly and stood for a moment as if debating with himself. With a smile on his elfish face, he declined the role assigned him and said, “I must be frank. I was hard up at the time. I borrowed money from a friend and tried my luck on the Shanghai stock exchange. I lost every cent I had and was worse off than before. When a publisher suggested I do a book about the business world and pay off my debts that way, that's exactly what I did!”