25 Jun 11 A Decade of Disaster. Lu Wenfu.

Lu Wenfu

The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China. Wenfu Lu.

A Decade of Disaster…. June 25, 2000

I want to review The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China by focusing on one jewel of a story by Lu Wenfu (1928-), who suffered long and hard from the horrors of the communist regime and understands in his fiction, as in the writings of Fang Lizhi, Wei Jingsheng, and Harry Wu, that Chinese communism’s most egregious crime is its stifling of the human spirit. As a young man, he fought in the Red army against the Koumintang and dreamed of the “happy society” socialism would usher in. Like so many writers, in 1957, he was denounced as a Rightist, during the Hundred Flowers purge and the Great Leap Forward, and sentenced to manual labor to reform his thinking. After three years of running a machine lathe, he was deemed reformed and allowed again to write. Then, in 1965, Mao took China down the violent path of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Lu Wenfu was once more denounced and sentenced, this time, to the life of a mechanic. He later wrote of his experience during the Cultural Revolution:

“I was ’struggled against,’ forced to confess my crimes and paraded through the streets with a placard around my neck. I was already numb to the pain, and worried about when this disaster for my country would end.”

Finally, in 1969, he was sent out to the countryside where he farmed for several years. For more than a decade, Lu Wenfu wrote nothing until after the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976. What little was left of the traditional culture had been trashed; the ruthless persecution of “stinking intellectuals” like Lu Wenfu had been encouraged by Mao himself; thousands of Taoist and Buddhist temples and relics had been destroyed; millions of lives ruined; perhaps as many as 400,000 individual human beings murdered.

In 1979, Lu Wenfu wrote his brilliant short story “The Man from a Peddler’s Family.” Into it he poured all the sufferings of his life. The story begins with the protagonist, Mr. Gao, reflecting on Zhu Yuanda, a seller of wonton. Thirty-two years ago, Mr. Gao had heard for the first time the sound of his bamboo clapper, announcing the advance down the lane of the little kitchen stove on its carrying pole, figuratively “calling or relating something.” Zhu Yuanda came from a long line of street vendors, generation after generation, reaching back into the distant dynasties. Following in the footsteps of his father, he continues the family trade. At the time, apparently 1947, Mr. Gao is out of regular work and must sit up late at night, in an unheated room, grading student notebooks for a bare existence. After the Beijing Opera let out late, Zhu Yuanda would bring him “a little warmth,” a hot bowl of wonton to his “main customer.” Though formerly friends, after the liberation of 1949, Mr. Gao, now a cadre, considers Zhu beneath him. Occasionally, he would still hear the clapper, “calling, saying something.” Gao remembers, as the Anti-Rightist campaign and Great Leap Forward raged, “I never bought anything from him and I wouldn’t allow my wife or children to go. I believed that buying his things was aiding the spontaneous rise of capitalism.” The Anti-Rightist struggles continue, disturbing Gao, until, in what may be an allusion to Buddhism, he ponders how “The world seemed out of joint.” Lu Wenfu is clearly suggesting there is something more to the business of the clapper than just petty bourgeois capitalism.

Yet Mr. Gao goes through his own internal struggles and battles. For a time he attempts to correct or reform Zhu Yuanda, and later tries to ignore or forget him, hoping to save his own skin from the social upheavals. They had, though, formerly shared “a genuine affection,” one that Gao cannot entirely forget despite his position within the communist order. Back and forth, he meditates on Zhu, finding him sometimes to be a capitalist, at others, one of the proletariat: “And then a thunderclap split the earth. The bugles of the Cultural Revolution were sounded, announcing the end of all capitalism.” Gao himself becomes implicated in the madness and is “publicly criticized and denounced.” He manages to avoid his own destruction but happens past Zhu Yuanda’s house one day to find it and him in the midst of a horde of Red Guards smashing the “Evil Den of Capitalism.” Gao, himself a cadre, knows better. He knows Zhu is a simple, decent man attempting only to feed his father, mother, wife, and four children, by, as he says, “my own efforts.” In brilliant words, Lu Wenfu undercuts with scathing irony the pious, radical beliefs of decades of revolutionaries like Lu Xun, when Gao thinks, of the Red Guard’s destruction of everything Zhu Yuanda owned, “How could a noble theory produce such piracy as this!” The worst offense is when the “wonton carrying-pole was dragged out,” “a thing of exquisite workmanship,” a thing redolent of the past, of the best of Chinese traditions, and shamelessly hacked into splinters. Zhu’s family is reduced “to picking up garbage in the streets” in order to make ends meet. Lest the reader imagine Zhu was an exception, Lu Wenfu emphasizes that the seller of wonton was only one of many on the same street who suffered when he mentions the hot water boiler, the cobbler, the barber, and the flatbread seller as all meeting the same pitiless fate.

Like hundreds of thousands of real human beings, Zhu is sent to the countryside for reeducation. Eight years go by. Gao hears nothing of Zhu. Unexpectedly one day Gao hears that Zhu’s sons are working in a local factory and later that Zhu himself is back. Before leaving, Zhu had given Gao the only thing that had somehow escaped destruction, the bamboo clapper. Gao, imagining he’ll now want to return to his old business, begins to anticipate it. In a moment of fantasy, Gao remembers how as a young man he heard the sound of the clapper coming up the lane and thinks that now people will hear again Zhu Yuanda’s approach: “Their lives, too, demand that there be others bringing them warmth and convenience. It had taken me more than twenty years to learn this elementary lesson.” It had actually taken more than thirty years, and I wonder if Lu Wenfu is not hoping here that China itself has finally learnt the lesson after its “decade of disaster.” I myself am not so sure. No longer interested in his clapper or selling wonton, Zhu longs only for an iron rice bowl for his children and himself. As Zhu leaves, Gao watches him walk down the street and poignantly thinks, “In these past years I and others had hurt him. We had stifled so much spirit.” All the dreams and theories brought to naught by the broken stature of a ruined man. As in other modern Chinese writers, such pathos takes place against a social background intentionally drained of Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist morality and transcendence.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: China, Chinese communism, Cultural Revolution, Fang Lizhi, Gourmet and Other Stories, Great Leap Forward, Harry Wu, Lu Wenfu, Modern, Wei Jingsheng

23 Jun 11 Human Rights in China. Fang Lizhi.

Fang Lizhi

Bringing Down the Great Wall: Writings on Science, Culture, and Democracy in China. Fang Lizhi.

Fang Lizhi and Human Rights in China, April 13, 2000

Since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Fang Lizhi has often been regarded as the foremost advocate of human rights in China. As one might well imagine, his championing of democracy and human rights has a long history going back as far as thirty years before Tiananmen Square. In 1957 he argued political ideology had nothing to contribute to scientific inquiry, which initially led the Chinese government to identify him as someone in need of correction. From time to time, several other clashes with the government took place. In 1986 the communist authorities believed he helped start the pro-democracy student demonstrations of that year. In 1987 he was dismissed as vice-president of the University of Science and Technology in Anhui province and thrown out of the Communist Party. His dismissal was clearly in retaliation for his fearless pro-democracy speeches throughout China and statements in the foreign press.

Although he did not participate in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, the government accused him of counterrevolutionary activities and of instigating the demonstrations. When the bloody crackdown began, he realized his life was in danger and fled with his wife to the US embassy in Beijing. Forced to live in the embassy for an entire year before being allowed to leave China, he wrote four scientific papers and a number of acceptance speeches for the international awards that he increasingly began receiving in recognition of his heroic defense of democracy and human rights. Since his release, he has taught at Oxford, Princeton, and the University of Arizona, where he is now a tenured professor.

Before turning to his ideas on democracy and human rights, I believe it is important to understand why Albert Einstein is a significant influence on Fang Lizhi. As a prominent fellow scientist, one might well imagine Fang Lizhi to respect and appreciate Einstein’s scientific achievements. More surprisingly though, he finds in Einstein’s progressive social and political ideals an example of a public role for the scientist that he clearly thinks inspiring and worthy of emulation. Einstein of course had the experience of fleeing the Nazis and was always very politically involved in the struggle for a just social order. Especially during the last decade before Einstein died in 1955, he was an active spokesman for human rights and the United Nations, which he felt the Member States had nevertheless failed properly to design and support.

Fang Lizhi, then, conceives of himself, and must be seen properly in the light of, a universal struggle for human freedom and peace. In his 1992 book Bringing Down the Great Wall: Writings on Science, Culture, and Democracy in China, he often quotes Einstein not only on scientific matters but also on social and political ones as well. I quote only one reference in support of this fact: “Einstein’s concept of world citizenship was profound. . . . in the years ahead, the human race will have to come to grips with this idea as well” (249).

Let’s come to grips now with Fang Lizhi’s statements on China. He himself has criticized the tendency in China and the West to conceive of China “as totally different from any other civilization in the world” and that therefore “universal principles of human rights don’t fit China’s experience” (New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1992). Far from unique despite its huge population, he insists “the Chinese people want the same freedoms as everyone else.” Instead of accepting and even defending what he calls a “double standard” when it comes to China, Fang emphasizes the world community should “uphold human rights as a universal standard.” The suppression of Falun Gong and other dissidents continues to cry out to the world for justice.

The exemplary quality of Fang Lizhi’s appeal to the world community can be discerned in the following excerpt from “Patriotism and Global Citizenship,” originally an interview taped in Beijing in February of 1989 just before the spring turmoil leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre:

Human rights are not the property of a particular race or nationality. . . . These are fundamental freedoms, and everyone on the face of the earth should have them, regardless of what country he or she lives in. I think humanity is slowly coming to recognize this. Such ideas are fairly recent in human history; in Lincoln’s time, only a century past, it was just being acknowledged in the United States that blacks and whites should enjoy the same rights. In China we are only now confronting such an issue. (247)

Here is the voice of a Chinese intellectual we ought to remember the next time the excuse of 1.2 billion people surfaces. Here is a voice of universal human importance reminding us of our own history and responsibilities and what we ourselves at times forget in exchange for business with China. On a number of occasions, Fang Lizhi has criticized the West and particular leaders for believing that trade with China is more important than human rights. With a striking clarity of moral vision, fearing for the long-term stability of Asia, he has pointed out that fascist Germany and Japan both had productive economies that far from resulting in liberal democracy ended in widespread regional and global destruction and misery for millions of people.

Having just read Fang’s writings before leaving for China as a Fulbright Scholar in early June of 1994, I sat in a lecture room of Beijing University with his words and ideas resonating at times in my mind. The lecturers represented a variety of points of view on Chinese history and culture. Those who were obviously presenting the party line scared or appalled me with their distortions of modern Chinese history and their defense of the abuse of human rights on a scale that is almost unbelievable. For those few who managed to find the humanity to affirm the truth about China’s century-long tragedy of violence and chaos, no matter in how careful and guarded of a way, I felt the deepest respect. Here were voices of heroism, reminiscent of the noblest Confucian scholarly traditions, who had the courage to speak the truth in a country in which many were still too afraid, and for good reason. One of my lasting impressions of China is that many individuals were palpably afraid to speak freely about issues of social, political, or public importance.

I was truly shocked and deeply moved by the revelation that the lecture room in which I and thirteen other Fulbright scholars sat every day for two weeks was used as a prison cell for twenty Beijing University professors during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution. Three times a day, they were forced to bow down to Mao’s picture. Even more shocking and disturbing was to hear words, in the very same room, from some of my American colleagues, shamelessly supporting the Chinese communist revolution, as though China would be the country finally to get communism right. The Chinese setting highlighted for me the betrayal of democracy, at tax payer’s expense, among some of my own nation’s elite in an overwhelmingly devastating way. How could the words of Fang Lizhi not resonate in my mind?

We need soberly to remember the violence and oppression when we study or trade with China and remember that the moral, religious, philosophical crisis of China is fundamentally the modern one East and West share.

Frederick Glaysher

 

Tags: Beijing, China, Chinese, Democracy, Demonstrations, Falun Gong, Fang Lizhi, Human Rights, Massacre, Tiananmen Square

09 Mar 09 Soaring above Mt. Tai

It was an arduous, overwhemling journey from Bagan, Burma, up over Lhasa, Tibet to Dunhuang. Sun Wukong was my able guide, having traveled the way, though a different route. He led the Persona into the Mogao Caves, his guiding presence understood a fellow seeker. From there, he took the Persona to Chang-an, where Du Fu led him up the many stairs of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, taught him a sweeping view of China, coming down from that tower, a different man. In the courtyard, Bai Juyi lifted him up to Mt. Tai and the Azure Clouds. I imbibed the beverage of the Three Vinegar Drinkers, savored its harmonizing nature.

Not yet back to the moon, but closer, heading east, into the rising sun.

Frederick Glaysher

Tags: Bai Juyi, Chang-an, China, Du Fu, Dunhuang, Frederick Glaysher, Mt. Tai, Sun Wukong, Three Vinegar Drinkers, Tibet