You phoned her seven, eight, or even ten times but the tape always repeated the same string of long convoluted sentences. You could only make out one German word, bitte… no doubt it was asking you to leave a message, but she didn't ever phone back. In her last letter, she said find yourself a happy woman, she can't live with you. It would be too painful, doubly painful, because she wants a secure family, a child, to be a mother. Can a Jewish child of a Chinese father be happy? The Chinese in her letters was odd, and the characters with strokes missing gave an unfamiliar feeling that was unlike her fluent spoken Chinese, which was intimate and sensual, even in the choice of words. When she talked about the body and sex, she was so natural you could feel her warmth, her moistness.
However, her letters were cold and pushed you away from her flesh and her feelings; they were sarcastic and you couldn't help feeling hurt. As far as you could understand, she was over thirty and couldn't drift through the world not knowing if you would meet next in Paris or in New York, while you, an eternal Ulysses, were on your modern odyssey. Just treat it as a beautiful chance encounter, a beautiful encounter among many. She had given you everything you wanted, so let it stop there, she can not be your woman. Like friends, you simply parted, and maybe it's possible for you to remain friends for a long time, but she doesn't want to be your lover. So, find yourself a French filly to play sex games that will gratify your fantasies, someone who will give you inspiration without adding to your suffering. It won't be hard for you to find such a woman, a prostitute, who takes your fancy. But what she wants is peace and security, a home that can give her warmth and love. She is not searching for suffering, but she can't get rid of it, because she lacks security, and it is this, which you can't provide for her.
But you can't find a woman like her, who will listen to you talk about the hells of the world. People don't want to listen to those rotten old truths and would prefer watching made-up disaster and horror films produced in Hollywood. If you were writing a story about sadistic sex, the lovemaking would excite, and you would enjoy a climax, even if there were no one to talk to and you were just talking to yourself. So you may as well continue by yourself in this observation, analysis, reminiscence, or dialogue.
You must find a detached voice, scrape off the thick residue of resentment and anger deep in your heart, then unhurriedly and calmly proceed to articulate your various impressions, your flood of confused memories, and your tangled thoughts. But you find this is very difficult.
What you seek is a pure form of narration. You are striving to describe in simple language the terrible contamination of life by politics, but it is very difficult. You want to expunge the pervasive politics that penetrated every pore, clung to daily life, became fused in speech and action, and from which no one at that time could escape. You want to tell about an individual who was contaminated by politics, without having to discuss the sordid politics itself. Nevertheless, you must return to his state of mind at that time, and to describe this accurately is even more difficult. The many layers of accreted, intersecting happenings in memory can be easily made to capture the attention of readers, but you want to avoid impurities, because it is not your intention to write stories of suffering. You seek only to narrate your impressions and psychological state of that time, and to do this, you must carefully excise the insights that you possess at this instant and in this place, as well as put aside your present thoughts.
His experiences have silted up in the creases of your memory. How can they be stripped off in layers, coherently arranged and scanned, so that a pair of detached eyes can observe what he had experienced? You are you and he is he. It is difficult for you to return to how it was in his mind in those times, he has already become so unfamiliar. Don't repaint him with your present arrogance and complacency, but ensure that you maintain a distance that will allow for sober observation and examination. You must not confuse his fervor with his vanity and stupidity, or hide his fear and cowardice, and to do this is excruciatingly difficult. Also, you must not become debauched by his self-love and his self-mutilation, you are merely observing and listening, and are not there to relish his sensory experiences.
It is he that you must allow to emerge from your memory, that child, that youth, that immature man, that daydreaming survivor, that arrogant fellow, and that scoundrel who gradually became crafty. That you of the past had a conscience, and, while vestiges of kindness remained, he was wicked, and you must not make excuses or repent for him. As you observe and listen to him, you naturally feel an irrepressible sorrow, but you must not let this emotion lead to vagueness or a drifting off into sentimentalism. While observing and examining him unmasked, you must turn him into fiction, a character that is unrelated to you and has qualities yet to be discovered. It is then that writing is interesting and creative, and can stimulate curiosity and the desire to explore.
You do not play the role of judge, and you should not regard him as a victim. In this way, the fervor and the suffering that are destructive to art make way for observation and examination. Of interest is not your judgment or his righteous indignation, your sorrow or his suffering, but, rather, the process of this inquiry.
During the Cultural Revolution, big posters and slogans covered all walls and filled the streets. Slogans covered all the lampposts and were even written on roadways. With more fanfare than at the grand ceremonies for National Day, from early morning to late at night, pamphlets fluttered in the air, as cars with big loudspeakers shuttled back and forth broadcasting songs to extoll Mao's Sayings. Party leaders of various ranks, who previously stood on the viewing platform to review the people, now wore paper hats as they were escorted by the rebelling masses onto open trucks and paraded in public. Some wore tall paper hats that would blow off in the wind, so that both hands were needed to hold them down, while others simply wore an overturned wastepaper basket from the office. But, in all cases, the person wore a placard on the chest bearing his or her name in black characters with a big red "X" through it. When the Cultural Revolution began in the early summer of 1966, middle-school children criticized and attacked principals and teachers like this. Then, by early autumn, Red Guards were hauling out people belonging to the Five Black Categories and attacking them in the same way. By midwinter that year, the old revolutionaries of the
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Party, whose very profession was class struggle, were targeted for attack by the Red Guards. All this followed Mao's blueprint for mobilizing peasant movements, and had been devised by the Great Leader when, starting out from Hunan province, he had absolutely nothing.
Wu Tao was on the dais in the auditorium. Big Li was trying to push his head down, but he was quite stubborn. He had his dignity and, angry about being unjustly treated, refused to lower his head. Big Li punched him, right in his fat belly, and Wu Tao doubled over with pain, his face purple, but he did not raise his head again.
Sitting in the place formerly occupied by Wu Tao, on the dais covered with red tablecloths, he presided over all the denunciation meetings convened by the joint mass organizations. He was confronted by increasingly violent behavior, and he seemed to be sitting on top of a volcano. If he tried to exercise any restraint, he would be forced off the dais in exactly the same way. At the meeting, people's emotions ran high. One by one, each Party committee member was called to stand at the front of the dais, learned how to bow his head, and reported on Wu Tao's words and actions. All their instructions had been from higher up, each admitted errors, and each admitted the same things, but not a single sentence was their own. Chen, the tall, slim deputy secretary of the Party committee, whose stooped gaunt figure made him look like a dried shrimp, had a bright idea and added in his report that Wu Tao had recently told core members of the Party committee: "Chairman Mao doesn't need us anymore."