The Fat Years (11 page)

I closed the notebook. After I published my
Comprehensive Cultural Guide to Beijing
well ahead of the Olympics, I wanted to write stories only about contemporary China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. I didn’t want to discuss past events anymore. I didn’t even want to
look
at the historical materials on the KMT–CCP Civil War, Land Reform, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward that caused thirty million people to starve to death, the Four Clean-ups or Socialist Education Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, the Tiananmen Massacre, the Campaign to Suppress the Falun Gong, and so on and so on … I just wanted to forget all those things.

If I could rid my mind of it, a new subject would come to me. My own interests had completely changed, and I didn’t believe that the new generation of Chinese readers wanted to read about all the wounds and scars of the past sixty years. I really
wanted to write only about new people and new things, to write about the Chinese people’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.

L
ittle Xi didn’t return my e-mail, so my happy life could continue. I went to the 798 Art District to participate in the opening ceremony for an exhibition of paper-cutting installation art by women from the Northwest. My friend from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was the academic cocurator, and she’d invited me to be one of the ten speakers at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. In my three-minute talk, I summarized the Taiwan New Communities Movement of the 1990s and discussed how Taipei artists and local craftspeople had worked hand in hand to bring cultural production in villages back to life. I spoke so well I got a little emotional myself. The curator also said this exhibition was a fine example of the vitality of Chinese folk culture.

A lunch was held at the nearby Golden Chiangnan restaurant, and I was placed at the same table as the representative of the China National Cultural Renaissance Foundation. The Foundation had sent only an assistant secretary-general. He told me how one of their most important projects was assisting Chinese around the world to locate and retrieve national treasures that had been stolen from the Summer Palace and other sites. Besides that, the Foundation was working to revive China’s ancient rites throughout the entire nation by, for example, providing financial subsidies to many elementary and middle schools to carry out initiation ceremonies at the beginning of every school year, usually requiring students to bow and pay their respects to their teachers. The Foundation was also working hard to have various traditional-style rituals declared “national statutory ceremonies.”

After eating a few main dishes, I went to the toilet and by the time I returned a big group of people had crowded around my table to listen to the Foundation’s representative, so I decided to move to another table.

My Chinese Academy of Social Sciences friend, Hu Yan, was sitting at a table with a French woman from UNESCO and a Thai who was with the One Village One Craft Association. I thought that if I joined them, I’d have to speak English and that would be too much like hard work, so I decided against it. I went over to the Northwest-delegation table, where there were many empty seats because the reporters were all over at the Renaissance Foundation representative’s table interviewing him. Only three elderly ladies who were paper-cutting artists, two female elected village heads, and a Bureau of Culture deputy chief from a prefecture-level city were still at the table. The Northwestern women all looked very honest and kindhearted. My Academy friend always let me see the good side of China. Even though, rationally, I realized that this was not the whole story, emotionally I still liked to meet such good people.

The person I really wanted to chat with was the village head, who was only just twenty years old. She was sitting rather far away from me, and I realized I could not understand her rural Mandarin anyway. All I could do was talk to the deputy chief. She came from a place called Dingxi in Gansu Province. It was originally one of the poorest places in China, but with a few years’ hard work after Reform and Opening, it finally lifted itself out of poverty. She told me how a few years earlier the government had convinced the peasants to organize specialist cooperatives and implement dedicated planting schemes, pushing Dingxi to develop into a major potato-producing area. All the Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s outlets in the country used Dingxi potatoes exclusively. She also told me how the local leadership, at a time of rail-transport difficulties, used their connections to provide a special train to get the local products to market on time. And also how they organized surplus labor to go to Xinjiang to pick cotton during the cotton-harvest season.

I learned a lot from her, and so I asked her very seriously if she could summarize for me why Dingxi was able to be so well governed while so many places with better local conditions were still unable to rise above the poverty level. “Dingxi is very fortunate, we have leaders who know how to work hard and get things done.” I could sense that what she said was very practical and very simple: it’s all about people, she implied. If the government officials are willing to work hard to make things happen, the common people can make the rural economy hum. That is to say, if the present Communist Party cadres had a slightly higher standard of morality and were willing to work harder on practical projects, the Chinese people would be able to live well. As lunch broke up, I thanked her and she said she hoped that members of the Beijing cultural and academic worlds would come to little Dingxi and give them some guidance. I hypocritically told her that I would certainly find time to visit Dingxi.

Feeling very happy after lunch, I went back to the 798 Art District to browse around. Today’s 798 Art District is not like the 798 Art District of ten years ago. Now it apes fashionable foreign trends and tries to combine the bohemian and the bourgeois. That’s why it has been criticized for becoming increasingly gentrified, commercialized, and kitschy. No matter how you look at it, though, having a 798 Art District is still better than not having one. You can’t find another art district on this scale anywhere else in the world. When the foreigners see it they are all amazed and their impression of China suddenly changes, from China as a backward country to China as the most creative country in the world.

In the last two years art and design had become so hot that all the important international art galleries had come to China to set up shop. Famous schools, such as New York’s Parsons New School of Design, London’s St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, and Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts had also established campuses close to the 798 Art District.

Every time I came to 798, I always took a look at what was on at the Dragon Gate Gallery. This gallery had an extensive collection of French Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings, including some small works by famous masters and, more importantly, many works by lesser known figures of that period.

Their collection is really worth looking at, and it suits my increasingly conservative tastes, I pondered. China now matches Japan as a major collecting country for these French Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings because there is a group of rich collectors who are fascinated by French painting of that age.

The Dragon Gate Gallery had real elegance. The chandelier hanging in the major salon was not made from Chinese materials—it was a genuine Baccarat-crystal chandelier.

As I was looking at that chandelier and ruminating on how the style and temperament of Impressionist and Postimpressionist oil paintings were not quite in sync with Baccarat crystal, a man and a woman came toward me, not exactly holding hands but shoulder to shoulder and talking and laughing. I tried unsuccessfully to avoid them. The man was Jian Lin, my movie-night friend. When he noticed me, he quickly said, “Lao Chen, let me introduce you to Professor Wen.”

“It’s been a long time, Wen Lan,” I said as we shook hands.

“Yes, a very long time, Master Chen,” said Wen Lan.

“You two know each other?” said Jian Lin, surprised.

“Master Chen is famous in Hong Kong cultural circles,” said Wen Lan.

Wen Lan had probably forgotten that I’m Taiwanese. She was dressed expensively but not vulgarly, rather elegantly glittering.

“Can I swap cards with you?” asked Wen Lan.

“I forgot to bring any,” I lied.

“I have his phone number,” offered Jian Lin.

Wen Lan didn’t give me her card.

“Lao Chen, this is a very nice gallery,” said Jian Lin, “but Professor Wen thinks the prices are even higher than in Paris.”

“The prices are unreasonably high,” Wen Lan said with an air of authority.

“Let me see,” I said, and abruptly walked away.

I no longer felt like looking at paintings, but I suddenly thought of three words to describe Wen Lan’s elegant manner—Baccarat-crystal chandelier.

Let me explain. There was a time when I was ready to marry Wen Lan. I had already bought an apartment in Hong Kong for us. Then I learned that she was going to marry someone else.

In the autumn of 1991, I went to the mainland to interview an old academic couple who were living under house arrest after the events of 1989. A number of their students from Beijing Normal University had come to visit them. These young people were not so selfishly concerned with their own futures as to avoid visiting their professors in their time of trouble.

The most striking one among them was Wen Lan, a senior-year student, pretty, easygoing, and cultured. She made me feel romantic.

She asked all the students to note down their phone numbers for me, and I knew she did it just so that I would be able to contact her.

I invited her out and we took a walk around Houhai Lake. Her mother was Shanghainese and her father a Beijinger. He edited a journal on theory and worked in the Central Propaganda Department in Shatan. Wen Lan loved Western literature, was concerned with national affairs, and was extremely beautiful—to me she was perfect.

“What is the meaning of existence?” she once asked me. I flailed around trying to think of something profound. Then, I remember, she quoted Jean-Paul Sartre: “We must take responsibility for our own lives.” I was in love.

I went back to Hong Kong for a few days and then contrived a reason to return to Beijing. She said she wanted to go abroad, and I screwed up my courage to ask her to marry me. She laughed and cried, and I thought she had agreed. I told her that we would have no problem living on my salary. I had permanent-resident status in Hong Kong, and she could apply to get it as well.

She asked me how long after we were married would she become a permanent resident and I told her if I got help from friends, probably about two years. During that time she could have a multiple-entry pass to live in Hong Kong for short periods, and I could go to Beijing frequently on assignment. We would be together quite often, and besides, I said, “Meeting after a short separation is like a second honeymoon.” She seemed excited and full of expectation. We said we’d get married the following summer so she could finish her studies first. I asked her if I should meet her parents and she said she’d arrange it for my next visit.

I thought I was the luckiest guy getting married to such a gorgeous Beijing woman, and she was eighteen years younger than me. After I returned to Hong Kong, I happened to see an advertisement for properties in Taikoo Shin, so I quickly placed a down payment on the apartment I’ve mentioned before, and started to build a nest for two.

After completing the paperwork on the flat, I made a long-distance call to Beijing. Wen Lan’s father answered and told me she had gone to Germany. “When will she be back?” I asked, and he abruptly replied, “After she gets married! Don’t call her anymore!”

I hurried to Beijing and phoned her classmates who’d been at the professors’ when I’d first met Wen Lan. They said they were really not close friends and hadn’t kept in touch since that night.

I remembered that Wen Lan had said her major was French, but she was also studying German at the Goethe Institute. I rushed over there to look up her records. I found out she had withdrawn from her studies. A secretary who knew her told me she was going to marry a part-time German teacher who worked at the institute. She wouldn’t tell me his name. I pushed my way into the dean’s office. The dean was a well-known China expert with a Chinese wife, so he probably had some understanding of the wiles of Chinese women. He listened very patiently to my story and said he could not give me Wen Lan’s German contact information, but he promised that if I wrote her a letter he would forward it to her.

I went into an empty classroom and sat there, staring blankly, for a long time. I picked up my pen several times wanting to write her a few words, but I just couldn’t think how to start.

Three months later I received a letter from Wen Lan. She told me she was married to a German who had been her German teacher, an executive in a German firm in Beijing, and it had been love at first sight. The two of them were living in Germany and they were very happy together. She didn’t say which city they lived in and she didn’t apologize—it was as if nothing had ever happened between us. She explained herself in only one sentence, the theme of which was that she was like a sparrow that wanted to fly away on the wind and was impatiently longing to spread its wings today, because tomorrow would be too late.

Before 1992, a mainland bride married to a man in Hong Kong had to wait two years before she was granted permanent residence in Hong Kong. (After 1992, she would have had to wait
five
years.) This inhuman discrimination policy was a violation of basic human rights and a disgrace to Hong Kong. If Wen Lan had married me, she would definitely have had to wait two years to live in Hong Kong, so I didn’t blame her for choosing to marry a German. I even understood why she had chosen to “ride a donkey while searching for a horse.” What I was genuinely indignant about was that she had so thoroughly misled me and hadn’t even bothered to tell me anything about her change of heart. I realized that she was a woman who cared only about her own personal advancement, and had no concern for other people.