One Man

You take a hot bath, then a cold shower, and feel refreshed. You must return to reality by going to see the final performance of your play. With the young actors, you will eat, drink, joke, make lofty pronouncements about human beings, then leave them with the perplexities of being human.

17

It was a tailor-made new society, brand new and shiny, in which everyone was a glorious worker. People were organized into work units so that they could serve the people, even the barefoot peasants who worked in the fields and the bathhouse workers who pared the calluses from people's feet. Outstanding workers were selected as model workers and commended in the newspapers. There were no idlers, begging and prostitution were ba

New people were also created. A perfect model, an ordinary soldier called Lei Feng, who grew up as an orphan under the five-star red flag not knowing what it was to be an individual, selflessly saved others and sacrificed his own life. When this hero of few desires first learned to read, he felt boundless gratitude to the Party for being able to read the Selected Works of Mao Zedong and to write about it. Lei Feng was willing to be a bright, shiny cog in the machinery of the revolution so that citizens could model themselves on him. And everyone had to do just that. He was dubious about this type of new people, but the confession system at the university required that everyone confess their thoughts to the Party. One's own thoughts and those of others, including one's doubts, all had to be reported at special summing-up meetings. He was tricked and frivolously asked if one could be a hero without having to throw oneself on a bag of explosives and getting blown up, and wasn't the function of the engine more important than that of a cog. This instantly sent his fellow students into an uproar, the women students making the loudest protests. He was criticized, luckily only at a class discussion, so it was not too serious. However, he had been taught a sound lesson: a person had to lie. If one wanted only to tell the truth, then there was no point living. It was fundamentally impossible for a person to be pure, but it was only many years later that he was able to comprehend this. He was able to learn through other people's and his own experiences, but only after having personally verified the experiences of others and suffering as a consequence.

You now do not need to take part in compulsory study meetings to confess your words and actions, and you no longer have to repent. You also distance yourself from any new myths that are similar to those. However, at that time he was frustrated and needed to talk about how he felt, so he arranged a get-together with some old schoolmates who were in Beijing and studying at university. They met at the Purple Bamboo Courtyard Park in the western suburbs. From different universities, luckily, they were not directly linked in an association, but only did a bit of writing when they felt deeply moved. All of them had written things like poetry, and simply wanted to come out of the intellectual shackles of the campus to relax. The park had only recently opened to the public and was fairly deserted. A teahouse by the lake sold cakes, but those poor students could not afford to go inside to sit down. However, on the grass in the shade of the trees, farther off, there were some quiet spots without any people. The fresh smell of wheat wafted on the breeze from the fields above the earth embankment, so probably it was May, because the grain was ripe.

Big Head said he wanted to write a play like Mayakovski's Bath-house. He was nicknamed Big Head, because he had won the first prize in a mathematics competition for all middle-school students in Beijing, and also because the cap he wore in winter was two sizes bigger than that of anyone else. Big Head, fortunately, went back to his mathematics and didn't write about any bathhouses or mud baths. However, as two of his articles had been published, in English, in an international students' mathematics journal just before that anticulture Cultural Revolution broke out, he was sent for eight years to herd cattle on a farm. Big Head's problem was not the result of that get-together in the park but came about after he had graduated. He made a flippant comment in the dormitory of his research institute and was reported by a colleague.

It was the reedy Mandarin Jacket Cheng, who got in trouble on that occasion. His nickname came from middle-school days, when he used to wear his father's old clothes that were several sizes too big for his ski

At the get-together, he had talked about Ehrenburg's memoirs, Paris at the begi

You had been living in Paris for a number of years but had never thought to look for that bar. Once, quite by chance, after di

All of you refused to take part in any movements, refused to commit to any ideology, and refused to join any groups. Luckily, those of you at the Purple Bamboo Courtyard Park managed to pull the brake in time. No one reported on the others; otherwise, even if you had not been branded counterrevolutionaries, the things you talked about would have been recorded in your files, and you wouldn't be here today. Afterward, all of you learned to wear a mask, and either extinguished your voice or else hid it deep at the bottom of your heart.