from my short story, The Cleanest Pig in China:
Anything I know about those times, I know because my father sent me a story for my birthday, last year, when his email was up and running. He can’t speak or write English, of course, so the standard international keyboard is useless. Typing in Chinese is possible but, for him, too complicated. Fortunately his computer has a very old pirate version of Photoshop and that software enables him to write his story on paper, in Chinese pictograms, and then scan the page as a picture. He can even add little doodles if he wishes. Then, he attaches these picture-pages to an empty email. This is how his ‘words’ tell it; the translation is, of course, mine:
When Huan Yue hanged herself, it was truly a shock to me and a devastation to your mother. We found her in a manner that I don’t need to describe but it is important to say to you that she remained an elegant woman even in death. She had placed her favorite silk scarf over her face and her agony remained hidden and there were no unseemly aspects to her body, as you sometimes hear rumored about hanging deaths. The gods of death were gentle with her and when we found her she was simply there, hanging and dead. I will never forget the weight of her body when I lifted her down: she was both light – for she was a thin and delicate woman – and immense, as though death had transformed her into iron. This was how the years of the Cultural Revolution began for me: with a death. As you know, I have never been as outwardly religious as your Mother, but I must admit that when I was wrapping Huan Yue’s body, I was reminded of those stories about Jesus in his shroud. Perhaps death has always had this spiritual quality; I have always believed that the dead body was our first mystery as a people - not specifically Chinese, but as primitive people becoming human beings. Over the years, I have helped to bury countless sad souls who have starved to death. But, even in these turbulent times, I have been lucky to see and touch very few of those who took their own lives or who were dead as a result of violence done to them. Your mother was never the same after her sister’s death. If Huan Yue in death became iron, your Mother, in life, became steel. She closed up in the face of the violence and the outrage. When I was taken, she believed I had been killed. She told me later that she had to be dragged by the Guard to my public interrogation. I never blamed her for that! After all, what could she do? Suddenly the world erupted and no one could make any sense of it! Looking back, it has not become any easier to do so. What is there to say about that day the Red Guard came? I was accosted in my studio by four vicious children – yes, I think of them that way, although I imagine they were actually 18 or 19, possibly in their early twenties. They immediately slapped me around and I don’t think I recovered my breath for several years! They were not drunk or even having a good time – no, they were very serious. Fiercely serious! And they came prepared with a large placard on which my name was written and, ominously, crossed out. My ‘crimes’ were listed: ownership of the factory, foreign travel and the use of prostitutes – all aspects of my life before the Liberation! The largest text was reserved for a slogan; it read: BOURGEOIS DESIGN IS A CRIME! As you know from pictures you may have seen – not of me, of course, but of others – these placards were hung about our necks and we were forced to stand and bow for hours and hours while we were denounced. As they hung the placard on me, I read the slogan denouncing bourgeois design. I was too scared to say what I was thinking: ‘I agree! I want to do design work that is useful to ordinary people! I don’t want to do the ridiculous crap that my company felt it had to do in earlier times. Nor do I want the factory to churn out the endless miles of drab, poorly made uniforms! Let’s work together… etc. etc.’ Of course, I was too terrified to even think, let alone say these words to the maniacal children who had me at their mercy. I’m sure mercy was as foreign to them as my bourgeois designs!
[Here my Father placed the small sketch of a laughing man, meaning: a joke.]
We – my fellow bourgeois designers – were very small fish. We were not the traitorous party members, not irritating teachers, not greedy show-offs, not nasty administrators refusing entry to schools and jobs. We were mostly guilty of once upon a time wearing fancy suits and silk ties. Perhaps I underestimate our crimes because it is true that our family had owned things. And I must admit that my time in re-education cured me of wanting to own things. Today, ownership has made a comeback, hasn’t it? But, for me, my angry young ‘teachers’ were correct: ownership is ill-advised.
[Here my Father placed the small sketch of a bird with a man’s head, meaning: a confession. It’s a clever image, is it not? To confess is to be able to fly, to be cleansed by air and magic. (That is why a false confession is such a desecration.) But I have no confession and the only magic left for me is passion. If passion is flying, it is the flight of a kite, held by a string. It is not the body of flesh that we want to fly. It is that other body, the one that flies out from our hearts in times of peril.]