To the right of the entrance, there was a booth with tiny cans of red and black paints and worn-out brush pens for rent. He picked up a cardboard box containing two cans and an almost brush-bare pen.
Next to the booth, a silver-haired woman sat hunched over a small table, which displayed bundles and bundles of netherworld money-in denominations of millions and billions. There was more wealth there than was held by most of the world’s bankers, and all in “cash” too. She sat there counting, and recounting, in dead earnest, wearing a pair of polka-dotted oversleeves for the job. A crow flapped overhead, cawing. She looked up, gazing ahead at things unseeable to others, her elbows ceaselessly rubbing against the table edge, still counting. Behind her, shadows and memories appeared to be lurking.
He decided not to buy a bunch from her. For one thing, he didn’t think his late father, a neo-Confucianist scholar, would have liked it, despite the filial piety it symbolized.
Checking the cemetery map in his hand, he wound his way uphill, making several turns. Before him were tombs heaped upon tombs, looking almost like overgrown shrubs and stretching all the way to the peak. It was a different sort of population explosion.
It took him more than ten minutes to locate his father’s grave. With the tombstone dust-covered and half buried in wild weeds, the paint peeling off, the grave looked lonely. Apparently, not very much maintenance had been done. He squatted down and, out of his backpack, he pulled a tiny broom and a mop. He started grave-sweeping, dusting the stone and pulling at the weeds that had grown around the stone. He felt as if he was engaged in a belated effort to redeem something, and he soon became sweaty, his knees inexplicably weak.
He pulled some incense out from his backpack, lit a bunch, and stuck it into a weed-filled crevice. He bowed three times. With the incense spiraling up, he dipped the brush pen into the can of red paint and traced the characters of his father’s name on the tombstone. He did the same with his mother’s name, but in black paint, which indicated that she was still alive. The logic of the colors and what they represented in the netherworld confounded him.
When he stood up and looked around him, he noticed a striking difference between the older tombs and some of the newer ones. The newer tombs were impressive-larger stones carved from better material and placed on bigger plots. They also seem to have been better maintained, with the weeds recently cut and the shrubs freshly trimmed.
Were China’s materialistic, money-oriented values now taking hold even among the dead?
His father’s tomb had been constructed shortly after the Cultural Revolution. At the time, it might have looked as good as anyone else’s. But not now.
The incense burned down, leaving a tiny pool of ash. Chen wondered whether he should light another bunch in the hope that the father might protect the son in trouble.
He took out his camera, having promised his mother pictures. Looking around, he hesitated. Then he decided that he didn’t have to include those luxurious graves in the background. Instead he took a few close-up shots of the old tombstone with the newly repainted characters.
He lit a cigarette and stood there for a long while, the pine trees rustling in a fitful breeze. He remembered something he’d thought about during his last visit here-about the politics of being red or black in Chinese political discourse. Those terms, red and black, were like balls in a magician’s hand. Now the red songs, popular during the Cultural Revolution, were becoming popular again. Lost in his reverie, Chen started to mentally assemble the pieces he knew of his father’s life…
His father, the neo-Confucianist scholar, had suffered horribly toward the end of his life. During the Cultural Revolution, his beliefs made him a target. Now, all these years later, the Party had started talking about Confucius again. So they were portraying him as a great sage of Chinese civilization, a sort of cultural basis for the present-day “harmonious society.” There was even a new movie about Confucius, which included a lurid scene of a beauty seducing the sage. Ironically, in a TV lecture, a young political scholar managed to portray Confucian ideals as aligning with the “socialist realities with Chinese characteristics,” quoting long paragraphs from Chen’s father’s work out of context. And not long ago, a statue of Confucius made an unexpected appearance in Tiananmen Square-close to the Mao portrait that hangs high on the Tiananmen Gate.
An entire cultural value system, however, was not something that could be quickly raised up or quickly removed like a statue. The return of Confucius into the public sphere got on the nerves of the Maoists. After only one week, the statue disappeared from the square, as quickly and unexpectedly as it had appeared. Chen shuddered at the thought of the power struggle at the very top that was evident in these signs.
All politics aside, Chen had let his father down terribly. That realization struck home as he stood there at his father’s grave, surrounded by the eerie quietness of the cemetery. Chen had tried to justify his career choice to the spirit of his father, who had envisioned for him an academic path. In Chen’s defense, it was a time-honored tradition, thus arguably proper and right, for an intellectual to secure an official position. It was through those positions that the intellectual served his country. However, those positions required an unquestioned loyalty to the emperor, himself empowered with a mandate from heaven. According to the Confucian doctrine, the ruler can ask anything of the subject, even his life, and the subject cannot say no. For years, Chen avoided thinking about these things, justifying his compromises with the belief that he was doing something good for his country. It had not been easy.
Chen no longer knew what the right thing to do was-certainly not that morning.
To be able to accomplish anything in today’s society, he’d had to maintain his position as chief inspector. Chen had spent his career maneuvering carefully, constantly aware that in China’s one-party system, the Party’s interests were paramount. Anything good he could accomplish had to be in line with the interests of the country’s authorities. Ultimately, that was how he’d survived so far.
With his position at the bureau lost, his survival in the system was in question. The water of China’s politics was too deep for him. This trip to Suzhou was partly the result of his sudden sense of impotence, and partly a temporary vacation from his troubles.
Out of nowhere, a black bird flew by, seemingly about to alight on the tombstone. Instead, it circled in the air, then flew away. Chen shuddered again, reminded of Cao Cao’s poem:
The moon bright, the stars sparse, / the black bird flies to the south, / circling the tree three times / without finding a branch to perch itself…
It was his father who had first recited this poem to him and told him about Cao Cao, the ambitious prime minister during the Three Kingdoms period. Ironically, Cao Cao, who had intended to be a scholar, ended up being a politician. At least he had been a successful politician.
So what could his father say to him now?
In his confusion, a number of Confucianist quotes mixed with fatherly advice floated to the top of his mind. “Living in a poor lane, Yan Hui is still happy, though others may feel miserable… At forty, one may no longer be that easily confused… Heaven revolves vigorously, a man should unremittingly improve himself and things around him…” And then, in his father’s voice, “At the very least, you have to take care of yourself…”
There was no point in this sort of speculation. He might as well focus on doing something concrete.
For instance, something about his father’s grave.