I said, "Oddly enough, I was affected by the Cultural Revolution. It was the sixties upheaval, and I was in Africa when China was seeking influence there. I read the Thoughts of Mao and the Peking Review. I felt like a revolutionary."
"I had one of those Thoughts of Mao books," a man said. "1 put it away. I don't know where it is. I suppose I've lost it. You don't actually mean you read it?"
To prove my point, I recited, "A revolution is not a dinner party"—from the Little Red Book; and another saying that I often thought of in my traveling through China: "Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it."
A sigh of exasperation went up.
"He set us back thirty years," someone said.
"If you go to the inner part of Peking University you'll see a statue of Mao," one of the scholars said. "But there aren't many around. And on the base where it once said 'Long Live The Thoughts of Mao Zedong' there is nothing but his name."
It was not for me to tell them they were out of touch with the thinking of the Central Committee, which had recently met (September 1986) and passed a resolution that reaffirmed "The Four Cardinal Principles: keeping to the socialist road, upholding the people's democratic dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party, and upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought."
But these people at the lunch were part of a class that has always existed in China—the scholar gentry. They were special and a little suspect and set apart. They were important but no emperor had ever really felt easy with them, and Mao had actually tried to cut them down to size and even humiliate them by sending them into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was a philosophy encapsulated in the remark: If you think you're so smart you can start shoveling that pig shit into the wheelbarrow. And at night these rusticated intellectuals studied the works of Marx and Lenin. It had all worked like a harsh form of aversion therapy, which was why the mood in China was so different now.
"Most of the people in this room would much rather have their child be an underpaid scholar than a rich merchant," Mrs. Lord said. "That's a fact."
I felt it would be rude to mention that the choice wasn't exactly that—between being a merchant or an intellectual; not in a country where 900 million people were peasant farmers.
It was obvious that the sixteen card-carrying intellectuals at Mrs. Lord's were not typical, and they were Westernized enough to like drinking coffee—one of the rarest drinks in China—and to linger after the meal to talk a little more.
Professor Dong Luoshan had recently translated Orwell's 1984— he had actually translated it in the year 1984, which seemed wonderfully appropriate. He had also translated Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Bellow into Chinese, but it was Orwell I wanted to talk about.
He said, "I think it is a very gloomy novel."
"Did it seem familiar to you?"
"You are speaking of the recent past in China," he said, with a wink. "But I tell you the Cultural Revolution was worse. It was much worse."
"Why don't more people write about it then?"
"We are still trying to understand it, and it is a very painful subject."
There is a special category of writing about the Cultural Revolution, known as "wound literature" (Shanghen wenxue), so "painful" was an appropriate word. A popular Chinese writer, Feng Jicai, writes almost exclusively about the Cultural Revolution. But the best book I had read, The Execution of Mayor Yin (1977), by Chen Jo-hsi, had not appeared in China.
"Reading 1984 might get people thinking about it," I said.
Professor Dong inclined his head in a cautioning way and said, "But most people cannot read it. It is a restricted book—it is neican."
It meant "restricted," placing it on a sort of index of books reserved for the exclusive use of people who were sober and trustworthy readers. The average person couldn't read a book that was neican, and there was another phrase neibu for the things they couldn't talk about to foreigners—or at least weren't supposed to. But I seldom found the Chinese cagey; they talked about everything, and usually in a very candid way.
Professor Dong was still talking about 1984 and how only intellectuals could read it. "It is necessary to have special permission to read such books."
He said that bookstores and libraries all had a restricted section. You needed an approved "passbook" to get in and read this reckless and inflammatory stuff. But he said that in practice most people could read the books because they could be loaned from person to person once they were bought. It was the Chinese intellectuals themselves who limited the circulation of such books. The stiff-necked scholar gentry were not in the habit of loaning the books to slobs who might get the wrong idea.
The funny thing was, that after all this explanation, I walked into a public library eight months later, in the south China port of Xiamen (Amoy), and found a copy of Professor Dong's translation of 1984. I asked the librarian whether it was freely circulated and she said, "Yes, of course. Is it any good?"
The really strange and dangerous books, Professor Dong said, were the erotic classics—books like The Prayer Mat of Flesh and Jin Ping Mei. The latter (also known as The Golden Lotus) was written in the Ming Dynasty—say in the fourteenth century—and translations have been available to Westerners for a hundred years or more. Clement Egerton's version, done in the thirties, is regarded as one of the best. It concerns the life of a decadent young merchant and his various sexual encounters.
"Do you actually think that book is harmful?"
"Not to me," Professor Dong said, in the blinkered and superior way that makes Chinese intellectuals the butt of Chinese jokes and the object of a certain amount of Party hostility. And he went on, 'To the ordinary reader it is very harmful. You see, Chinese is not explicit. It is full of innuendo. Jin Ping Mei is like that. It does not say exactly what is happening, so you imagine all sorts of things. I think it should be restricted."
I asked Professor Dong what he was doing at the moment, and he said that he had recently compiled a handbook of English phrases the average Chinese would not find in an English dictionary. He gave as examples "Walter Mittyism" and "Archie Bunker mentality."
He asked what I was doing. I said I had just finished a novel set in the near future.
"No one writes about the future in China. We hardly think about it. There is a little science fiction, but nothing about the future."
"Doesn't anyone think, as Orwell did, that you can comment on the present by writing about the future?"
He said, "We have a saying, 'Use the past to criticize the present.' That is a Chinese preoccupation. There was a mayor in Peking who wrote a play about an obscure figure during the Ming period. People were very shocked. 'You are criticizing Mao!' they said. That mayor was removed very soon after. And he disappeared."
"Had he been criticizing Mao?"
"Of course—yes!"
About half the guests left, but the ones that stayed behind wanted to talk about religion. I said it was not my favorite subject but I would try to answer their questions. Were people in America religious? Why was there a sense of religion in Steinbeck and Faulkner and not in the works of any present-day writers? They were familiar with many British and American authors, but their way of mentioning book titles suggested to me that they might have read them in translation: Dickens's A Story About Two Places and Difficult Years, Hawthorne's The Red Letter, Steinbeck's Angry Grapes, and so forth. I recommended Sinclair Lewis, having just read him on the train. And I asked them about their own writing.