“I really want to… hear that old song again.” Shen Qian’s voice was fading. “I haven’t heard it in such a long time. Can you… sing for me?”
I knew the song she was talking about: “Rain, Hail, or Shine,” by the Taiwanese singer Wakin Chau. We used to sing it all the time when we were in high school. I had forgotten most of the lyrics, and the best I could do was to recall a few fragments about love, about the pain and pleasure that dreams brought us, about regrets. I sang, my voice trembling, tears flowing down my face, and my cracked voice not sounding musical at all.
But Shen Qian moved her lips along with mine. She could no longer make any noise, but she was lost in the silent music of yesteryear. The rays of the setting sun shone through the window and fell upon her, covering her gaunt face with a golden glow.
We sang together like that for a long, long time.
The years of starvation finally came to an end. The Soviet Union and China repaired their broken bond and trade began to grow. The Soviet Union provided us with a great deal of assistance, and the domestic economy slowly recovered. But I was now almost sixty and felt much older. I resigned from the position of department chair, thinking I’d use what little time was left to write a few books. But I was nominated assistant dean of the university and became a standing committee member for the China Writers Association. In addition, I was picked as a delegate to the National People’s Congress. I was too busy to write.
One day, I received a call from Mao Dun, the Minister of Culture.
“The Premier has asked you to attend a diplomatic function. There’s a group of avant-garde Western writers visiting, and he thinks you know one of them.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know the details. I’ll send a car for you.”
That evening, a car took me to the Beijing Hotel, which had one of the country’s best Western-style restaurants. Many important people were in attendance, including the Premier himself, who gave a welcome address. As I surveyed the foreign visitors, I recognized the writer I was supposed to know right away. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
After a series of boring speeches and a formal dinner, finally the time came to mingle and converse. I walked up to that man and said, in my terrible French, “Bonsoir, Monsieur Sartre.”
He gazed at me curiously through his thick glasses and gave me a friendly smile.
I switched to English and introduced myself. Then I told him how much I admired L’Être et le néant and how I had written papers on it. I had never expected to see him in China.
“Well.” Sartre quirked an eyebrow at me. “I never expected anyone in China to be interested in my work.”
I lowered my voice. “Before the Cultural Revolution, your work was very popular in China. Many people were utterly entranced by your words, though they—myself included—could not claim to truly understand your philosophy. However, I’ve always tried to understand the world through it.”
“I’m honored to hear that. But you shouldn’t think so highly of my words. Your own thoughts about the world are the most precious thing—really, thinking itself is the only thing that is important. I must admit I’m surprised. I would have expected you to be a socialist.”
I smiled bitterly. “Socialism is our life, but this form of life has turned me and many others into existentialists. Perhaps in that way the two are connected.”
“What is your thought on existentialism?”
“To quote you, ‘L’existence précède l’essence.’ The world appears out of an essenceless abyss. Other than time, it depends on nothing, and it has no meaning. All meaning comes after the world itself, and it is fundamentally absurd. I agree with this. The existence of the world is… absurd.”
I paused, and then, gaining courage, continued with the puzzle that had plagued me for years. “Look at our world! Where does it come from? Where is it headed? When I was born, the Internet had connected all parts of the globe, and high-speed railways crisscrossed the country. The store shelves were full of anything one might desire, and there were countless novels, films, TV shows…. Everyone dreamed of a more wonderful future. But now? The web and mobile phones have long disappeared, and so has television. We appear to live in a world that is moving backward. Is this not absurd? Perhaps it is because our existence has no essence at all.”
“Sir,” said a smiling Sartre, “I think I understand what is troubling you. But I don’t understand why you think this state is absurd.”
“If the existence of the world has meaning, the world must advance, don’t you think? Otherwise what is the point of generation struggling after generation? The world appears to be a twisted shadow of some reality.”
Sartre shook his head. “I know that the Chinese once had a philosopher named Zhuangzi. He told this story: If you give a monkey three nuts in the morning and four nuts in the evening, the monkey will be unhappy. But if you give the monkey four nuts in the morning and only three in the evening, the monkey will be ecstatic. In your view, is the monkey foolish?”
“Uh… yes. Zhuangzi’s monkey is a byword for foolishness among the Chinese.”
A mocking glint came into Sartre’s eyes. “But how are we different from the monkey in that story? Are we in pursuit of some ‘correct’ order of history? If you switch happiness and misfortune around in time, will everything appear ‘normal’ to you? If evil exists in history, does it disappear merely by switching the order of events around?”
I felt like I was on the verge of understanding something, but I couldn’t articulate it.
Sartre continued, “Progress is not a constant. It is merely a temporary phase of this universe. I’m no scientist, but the physicists tell us that the universe expands and then collapses and then expands again, not unlike the cosmic cycles envisioned by your Daoist philosophers. Time could easily flow in another direction… or in one of countless directions. Perhaps events can be arranged in any of a number of different sequences, because time may choose from an infinite set of options. Remember the aphorism of Heraclitus: ‘Time is a child playing dice; the kingly power is a child’s.’
“But so what? Whichever direction time takes, what meaning does all this have? The world exists. Its existence precedes essence because its very existence is steeped in nothingness. It is absurd regardless of the order of the events within it. Perhaps you’re right—had time picked another direction, the universe would be very different: humanity would progress from darkness to light, from sorrow to joy, but such a universe would not be any better. In the end, joy belongs to those who are born in times of joy, and suffering belongs to those born in times of suffering. In the eyes of God, it makes no difference.
“Some say that if war were to break out between the Soviet Union and the United States, the world would end. But I say the apocalypse has long since arrived. It has been with us since the birth of the world, but we have become inured to it by familiarity. The end of the world comes not with the destruction of everything, but with the fact that nothing that happens around us has any meaning. The world has returned to primordial chaos, and we have nothing.”
Sartre stopped, as though expecting me to say something. My mind was utterly confused, and after a long while, I said, “What, then, is the hope for humanity?”