Part 2 (1/2)

In this poster, one quote from the girl's confession particularly caught my eye. After her first time, she said, she ”couldn't sit down.” This expression made me hot all over, and set all kinds of thoughts running through my head. That evening I called my friends together and we sat down on the riverbank, sheltered by a row of willow trees as the moonlight shone down between their swaying fronds. ”Do you want to know something?” I asked in a hushed tone. ”What happens to a girl after she's done it with a man?”

”What?” they asked, a quaver in their voices.

”She can't sit down,” I said mysteriously.

”Why not?” they gasped.

Why not? I didn't have a clue either. But that didn't stop me from telling them with airy condescension, ”Once you get married, you'll understand why not.”

When I look back on this episode now, I realize that for me the big-character posters functioned primarily as a form of erotica. But strange to say, my readings in erotica reached their climax not in the street but in my own home.

Since my parents were doctors, we lived in a dormitory for hospital staff. It was a two-story building, six rooms up and six rooms down, a common staircase connecting the two floors, just like the two-story cla.s.sroom buildings in school. Eleven hospital staff were housed in the building, two rooms being occupied by my family-Hua Xu and I downstairs, my parents upstairs. The bookshelf in their room was where they kept their small collection of medical reference works.

Hua Xu and I had the job of taking turns cleaning the room upstairs, and we were under instructions to do a thorough job of dusting the shelf. I tended to give it only the most cursory wipe, never imagining that those dull-looking tomes might conceal startling wonders. Browsing through them the summer I'd finished elementary school, I had seen nothing special. But my brother had.

I was in the second year of middle school by this point, and he was in the second year of high school. There were several days in succession when, with my parents away at work, Hua Xu would sneak upstairs with some of his cla.s.smates and some strange cries would come from my parents' room.

Downstairs, hearing all this commotion, I began to suspect something fishy. But when I ran upstairs, I found Hua Xu and his friends chatting happily, as though nothing untoward was happening. Though I looked around carefully, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. As soon as I was back downstairs, the weird noises started up again. And those sounds continued for a good couple of months as my brother's cla.s.smates trooped up there day after day-I think all the boys in his year must have made the trip at one time or another.

This convinced me that my parents' room must hold some awful secret. One day, when it was my turn to do the housecleaning, I inspected every corner of the room as minutely as a detective, but my search drew a blank. Then I transferred my attention to the bookshelf, suspecting something had perhaps been slipped inside one of the books. I took each book down and turned its pages one by one. As I began to work my way through Human Anatomy the wonder suddenly came into view: a color plate ill.u.s.trating the female genitalia. If I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, I could not have been more transfixed. I hungrily studied every detail of the photograph, as well as the entire written commentary.

I have no idea whether I too gave a shout of astonishment on my first glimpse of the color plate, for I was too stunned to be capable of noting my reaction. What I do know is that after all those acts of pilgrimage by Hua Xu's cla.s.smates, it was now my cla.s.smates' turn to troop upstairs, their turn to make those strange, involuntary cries that came from somewhere deep inside.

The final reading cycle began in 1977. Now that the Cultural Revolution was over, previously banned books could be published once again. When the works of Tolstoy, Balzac, and d.i.c.kens arrived in the local bookstore for the first time, this caused as much sensation as if today a pop star were sighted in some celebrity-deprived suburb: everyone ran to spread the word and craned their necks to see. Given the limited number of volumes in the first consignment s.h.i.+pped to our town, the bookstore posted an announcement that customers would have to line up for a book coupon. Each person was ent.i.tled to only one coupon, and each coupon ent.i.tled one to purchase only two books.

I remember vividly the scene outside the bookstore that day. Before daybreak there must already have been a good two hundred people in a line outside the bookstore. To be sure of getting a coupon, some had arrived the night before, plunking their stools down outside the door, where they sat in a neat rank and pa.s.sed the night in conversation. Those who arrived at dawn that morning soon realized they were very late. They remained hopeful nonetheless and joined the long queue.

I was one of these Johnny-come-latelys. When I dashed to the bookstore that morning, I ran the whole way with my right hand in my pocket, clutching tightly a five-yuan note-a princely sum for me at the time-and because only my left arm was swinging freely, I ran with an odd leftward lurch. I thought I would be among the first, only to find that there were at least three hundred people ahead of me. Behind me more continued to arrive, and I could hear them muttering with dismay, ”Can you believe this? Up so early and we end up late!”

As the sun rose our a.s.sembly was divided into two camps: those who had not slept and those who had. People in the first camp, having endured a night on their stools, felt that their coupons were in the bag, and so for them the issue was: which two books to buy? People in the second camp had run to the bookstore after a good night's sleep, and their question was: how many coupons would be issued? Rumors flew. The stool-sitters at the front predicted there would be a hundred coupons at the most. This notion was roundly rejected by the people standing in line, some of whom thought two hundred coupons a more likely figure, although those behind disagreed-there should be more than that, they said. Coupon estimates continued to rise until someone forecast a total of five hundred. We unanimously ruled this out. There were fewer than four hundred people in line, so if they issued five hundred coupons, then all the trouble we had gone to in queuing up would seem ridiculous.

At seven o'clock the door to the New China Bookstore slowly opened. An exalted, almost mystical sensation surged through me at that moment. Although it was just a shabby old door creaking open on dirty hinges, I could almost see a splendid curtain being drawn aside on a stage, and the bookstore clerk who emerged appeared in my eyes to have the poise of a theater impresario. This transcendent feeling, alas, did not last long. ”Fifty coupons only!” the man shouted. ”The rest of you can just go home.”

Those of us standing in line felt a chill pa.s.s through us from head to toe, as though a bucket of cold water had been dumped on our heads in full winter. Some drifted away, disconsolate; some grumbled and moaned; some cursed for all they were worth. I stood rooted to the spot, my right hand still clutching the five yuan, and watched, bereft, as the people at the front filed cheerfully into the store to collect their coupons. For them, the fewer the coupons, the greater the value of their sleepless vigil.

Many of us remained huddled outside the bookstore and watched as people came out, proudly brandis.h.i.+ng their purchases. We would gather around somebody we knew and enviously reach out a hand to touch their reprints of Anna Karenina, Le Pere Goriot, and David Copperfield. Having lived so long in a reading famine, we found it a matchless pleasure just to feast our eyes on the new covers of these cla.s.sics. Some generously held the books up to our noses and let us sniff their subtle, inky smell. For me that odor was a heady scent.

Those immediately behind No. 50 were anguish personified. They let loose an endless stream of foul language, and it was hard to tell whether they were cursing themselves or cursing something else. My neighbors and I in the last third of the queue felt only a pang of disappointment, whereas those who had only just missed out on a coupon were like people who see the duck they have cooked flap its wings and fly away. Particularly No. 51: just as he was putting his foot inside the door he was told the coupons were all gone. He stood there for a moment, then shuffled off to one side, head down, clutching his stool to his chest, watching blankly as others marched out with their books and we gathered around to touch and sniff them. He was so strangely silent that I turned my head several times to look at him; it seemed to me he was watching us with a look of total nonrecognition.

Later I heard some gossip about this No. 51. He had played cards with three buddies until late the previous night, then come to the bookstore with his stool. In the days that followed he would greet his friends with a rueful refrain: ”If we'd stopped just one round sooner, I wouldn't have been No. 51.” And so for a little while No. 51 became a catchphrase in our town: if someone said, ”I'm No. 51 today,” what he meant was ”I've had such rotten luck.”

Now, thirty years later, we have moved from an age without books to an age when there is an excess of them-in China today, more than two hundred thousand books are published each year. In the past there were no books to buy, whereas now there are so many that we don't know which ones to buy. Once Internet outlets began to sell books at a discount, traditional bookstores soon followed suit. Books are now sold in supermarkets and newspaper kiosks, and pirated books are peddled by traveling salesmen by the side of the road. Once we saw pirated books only in Chinese, but now we see them popping up in streets and alleys in English as well.

The book fair that takes place every year in Beijing's Ditan Park is as lively as a temple festival. It combines book sales with lectures on cla.s.sical literature, demonstrations of folk arts, photography exhibitions, free film showings, and cultural performances, along with fas.h.i.+on, dance, and magic. Banks, insurance companies, and a.s.set management firms promote their financial products. Loudspeakers blare music one minute, lost-person bulletins the next. In this cramped and crowded s.p.a.ce, writers and scholars attend book signings while quack doctors take pulses and dispense advice, scribbling prescriptions just as rapidly as the authors sign their books.

A few years ago I was involved in just such a book signing. An incessant din drummed in my ears, as though I were in a factory workshop with machines humming and roaring around me. In a row of temporary tents was piled a huge variety of books, and booksellers held microphones to their mouths and hawked their wares much as small vendors in a farmers' market call out the prices of vegetables and fruit, chickens and ducks, fish and meat. What was most memorable for me was to see bundles of books worth several hundred yuan being sold off for a throwaway price, for 10 or 12 yuan. No sooner did one salesman yell, ”Bundle of books for 20 yuan,” than another would counter with an even more attractive deal: ”Rock-bottom prices! Cla.s.sics for 10 yuan a bundle!”

Even the book vendors found this a bit unbelievable. ”What kind of bookselling is this?” they said to themselves. ”We might as well be selling wastepaper!”

So their sales pitch would take a different line: ”Come and get it! For what it costs to buy wastepaper you can get yourself a bundle of cla.s.sics!”

I cannot, however, let this story end amid the calls of the auctioneers at the Ditan Book Fair. I want to go back to that scene outside the bookstore in 1977. Although that morning thirty-odd years ago left me empty-handed, I see it now as the point when I began to embark on a true reading of literature. Within a few months new books did arrive on my shelves, and now my reading was no longer subject to the vagaries of Cultural Revolution politics. Instead, it grew abundant and replete, flowing on continuously like the Yangtze's eternal surge. ”What have these thirty years of reading given you?” I am sometimes asked. It is no easier to answer that than to articulate one's reaction to a boundless ocean.

I did once sum up my experience in the following way: ”Every time I read one of the great books, I feel myself transported to another place, and like a timid child I hug them close and mimic their steps, slowly tracing the long river of time in a journey where warmth and emotion fuse. They carry me off with them, then let me make my own way back, and it's only on my return that I realize they will always be part of me.”

One morning several years ago, my wife and I were walking in the old town of Dusseldorf when we stumbled upon the home of Heinrich Heine, a black house in a row of red houses, even older, it seemed, than the old houses around it. It made me think of a faded photograph where you see a grandfather from another era with his sons on either side of him.

That morning took me back to my early childhood, to the hospital grounds where I lived and to an unforgettable moment I experienced there.

For my family to live in hospital housing was quite a common circ.u.mstance in China in those days, when the majority of urban employees were housed by their work units. I grew up in a medical environment, roaming idle and alone through the sick wards, lingering in the corridors, dropping in on elderly patients who knew me, asking new inmates what was wrong with them. First, though, I would wander into nurses' stations and grab a few swabs soaked in alcohol to wipe my hands. I didn't have showers very often then, but I would scrub my fingers with alcohol at least ten times a day, and for a while I must have had the world's cleanest pair of hands. Every day too I breathed the smell of Lysol; many of my cla.s.smates loathed its odor, but I liked it and even had a theory that, since Lysol is a disinfectant, then breathing its fumes would be good for my lungs. Today I still find myself favorably disposed toward Lysol, because that's the smell that surrounded me as I grew up.

My brother and I often played outside the operating room where my father toiled. Next to it was a large empty lot where on sunny days laundry was hung out to dry. We liked to run back and forth among the damp cotton sheets, letting them slap our faces with their soapy scent.

This memory, though happy, is dotted with bloodstains. When my father came out of surgery, his smock and face mask would be covered in blood. A nurse would often emerge with a bucket-full of b.l.o.o.d.y bits and pieces cut from the bodies of his patients-which she would dump in the adjacent pond. In the summer the pond gave off a sickening stench, and flies settled on it so thickly one might think it had been covered with a black wool carpet.

In those days the housing block had no sanitary facilities, just a public toilet across the yard, next to the morgue. Neither of these structures had a door, and I got into the habit of taking a peek inside the morgue every time I went to the toilet. The morgue was spotlessly clean; a concrete bed lay underneath a little window, through which I saw leaves swaying. The morgue stands out in my memory as a place of unimaginable serenity. The tree that grew outside its window was noticeably greener and more luxuriant than the others around it, but I do not know if that was because of the morgue or because of the toilet.

I lived ten years of my life opposite the morgue, and it's fair to say that I grew up amid the sound of weeping. Patients who had died would lie in the morgue the night before their cremation. Like a roadside rest stop where one breaks a long journey, the morgue silently received those time-pressed travelers as they moved from life to death.

Many nights I would suddenly wake from sleep and listen to the desolate wails of those who had lost their loved ones. During those years I must have heard every kind of weeping there is, and the longer the weeping went on, the less it sounded like weeping-especially as dawn approached, when the cries of the bereaved seemed particularly sustained and heartrending. To me those cries conveyed a mysterious intimacy, the intimacy of depthless sorrow, and for a time I thought of them as the most stirring songs I had ever heard. Only later did I learn that it is under cover of night that most people pa.s.s away.

In those days there was no relief from the searing heat of summer, and often I would wake from an afternoon nap to find the entire outline of my body imprinted in sweat on my straw bed mat; sometimes I perspired so heavily it bleached my skin white.

One day, when curiosity impelled me to step inside the morgue, it felt as though I had exchanged torrid suns.h.i.+ne for chilly moonlight. Although I had walked past the morgue on countless occasions, this was the first time I had ventured across its threshold, and I was struck by how refres.h.i.+ngly cool it was inside. When I lay down on that clean concrete bed, I found the ideal place for an afternoon nap. On many baking afternoons that followed, if I saw that the morgue was not otherwise occupied, I would lie on the slab and savor its soothing coolness; sometimes in my dreams I would find myself in a garden full of blooming flowers.

Since I grew up in the Cultural Revolution, my education had made me a skeptic in matters of the spirit. Not believing in ghosts, I had no fear of them either. So when I lay down on the slab, it did not carry connotations of death. What it meant to me was a cool haven, an escape from the sweltering summer.

There were, however, several awkward moments. Sometimes I had just fallen asleep on the slab when I was awoken by cries and screams, and realized that a dead person was about to visit. Hurrying off as the weeping got closer and closer, the concrete bed's temporary occupant made way for its overnight guest.

All this happened a long time ago. Growing up is, in a sense, a process of forgetting, and later in life I completely forgot about this macabre but beautiful childhood moment: how on a stifling-hot summer afternoon I lay in the morgue, on the slab that symbolized death, and there experienced life's cooling caress.

So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: ”Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me.

If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.

*yuedu.

writing.

Pankaj Mishra had been asked to write a piece about me for the New York Times Magazine and came to Beijing in November 2008. We spent hours talking together, sometimes in the warmth and comfort of indoors, sometimes venturing outside for a walk in the icy wind. When we ate out, I made a point of introducing him to different regional cuisines, and on his departure my new vegetarian friend complimented me on my skill in selecting dishes. ”Well, it's not much of a skill,” I told him. ”I just order all the vegetarian dishes a restaurant has on its menu.”

If Mishra was grateful to me, I too was grateful to him. ”To recall one's past life,” Martial wrote, ”is to relive it.” In the s.p.a.ce of that short week, Mishra had me revisit my writing career, and thus bestowed on me a life relived.

”My writing* goes back a long way,” I told him-such a long way, in fact, that it seems to emanate from another world. When I cast about for examples of my juvenilia, my thoughts skip quickly over my old composition books and gather instead on the big-character posters that were then pasted everywhere. Those primary-school compositions are not worth mentioning, because they had only a single reader, my bespectacled Chinese teacher. I prefer to start with the big-character posters that I auth.o.r.ed, for they were the first works of mine to be displayed to the world at large.

In the Cultural Revolution era we were even more pa.s.sionate about writing big-character posters than people are today about writing blogs. The difference between the two genres is this: The posters tended to be tediously alike, basically just a rehash of articles in the People's Daily, their text riddled with revolutionary rhetoric and empty slogans, blathering endlessly on and on. Blogs, on the other hand, take a mult.i.tude of forms-self-promoting or abusive, disclosing intimate details here and carried away by righteous indignation there, striking affected poses right and left-and they dwell on every topic under the sun, from society and politics to economics and history and goodness knows what else. But in one respect the two genres are much the same: writing big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution and keeping a blog today are both designed to a.s.sert the value of one's own existence.