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Save the People's Children
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16633 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1989 |
3,714 Words |
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Jerry Dennerline
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Perhaps there are still children who have not eaten men. Save the children…." Thus raves Lu Xun's madman at the close of a story written in 1918 that shocked the Chinese world of letters and anticipated the spirit of May Fourth. That day seventy years ago saw the beginning of student movements in modern China and of the New Culture Movement, a rejection of premodern China that continues to dominate China's intellectual climate. "A Madman's Diary" dared a new generation to stand up and say that traditional Chinese values were nothing but a transparent cover for a world in which "people eat people." It also warned students that they could be persecuted for their sincerity, even hounded to death and tossed into the pit. The madman in the story is cured, after all, and embarks on a proper official career, leaving the diary behind, where it serves as "a subject for medical research." The sick world of man-eating hypocrites rolls on.
With the spectacle and the terror of Tiananmen Square still fresh in our memory, it is hard to think about anything Chinese without drawing appropriate lessons. China's children stood up in Tiananmen, and now they are undergoing the cure. People must "eat people" in order to survive. Such is the nature of things in the real world. Nothing ever changes, really. But can one ever forget that moment of madness when everyone stood up at once, and the "truth" was revealed?
Bai Hua's China
Bai Hua's novella Oh! Ancient Channels anticipates the latest Beijing protest as clearly as Lu Xun's did the first one. Finished in 1980, as China emerged from the Mao era and entered the era of democracy and reform, it troubles us with the thought that certain unappealing aspects of traditional authoritarian Chinese society have survived forty years of revolution quite well. After all we've been through, cries the narrator, "Why? Why? Why!"
Why must it be so? If we believe in Bai Hua's characters, the answer becomes clear. The protagonist, Ren Zhichu, an old peasant with many traditional peasant opinions, is influential in his community because no one tells the truth the way he does. "Exposed rafters rot first," after all, is a principle reconfirmed countless times in Chinese history and countless times in Ren Zhichu's lifetime. The lesson? Avoid politics.
Ren Zhichu is not the first Chinese peasant to survive by doing so and that, of course, is the tragedy. The traditional peasant mentality, far from being replaced by a revolutionary peasant mentality as Mao claimed, has been reinforced by the imperial mentality of China's new rulers. The narrator apologizes for telling yet another peasant story--"there are some who, upon hearing 'peasant,' immediately feel their interest fade"--and then proceeds to reveal the true nature of the famed peasant base of modern China.
At first glance, then, Bai Hua's China appears to be totally traditional. Ren Zhichu occupies the local "imperial palace," waiting for good rulers to rule China so that the people can live in peace. His homely wisdom rings true, as wave after wave of political frenzy sweeps over Liujia Fields: The revolutionary vanguard? "I've never heard of an official who could listen to anything but what went into his ears smoothly." The Great Leap Forward? "In China all still use the plow our ancestors used several thousand years ago, a plowshare is only a foot
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