"Bai Hua is in trouble again." Those are the first words I heard Bai Hua say. He had just come into the lounge of the Jin Shan Peterochemical Company guest house where the Chinese Writers Association was holding its First International Conference on Contemporary Chinese Literature. Jin Shan is a small company town a two-hour bus ride--down narrow, bumpy roads--from Shanghai.
As Bai Hua came into the room, a number of Chinese writers and foreign scholars were sitting around a large, rectangular table drinking beer and getting acquainted or renewing old friendships. Leo Ou-fan Lee and Howard Goldblatt were there from the United States. Wang Zengqi, a writer some fifteen years older than Bai Hua, and several other Chinese writers were present at the time. One of them said something about Bai Hua as he came through the door. It was a jocular remark about his "stirring up trouble again" and was intended as a compliment to a friend and fellow literary reformer.
Bai Hua heard his name mentioned and made his reply with a self-depreciating smile as he sat down at the table with the rest of us. His self-deprecation was poor camouflage for his obvious satisfaction at being hailed once again for being "in trouble." Someone else then went on to make the half-joking, half-flattering remark that "Bai Hua wouldn't be Bai Hua if he wasn't in trouble."
There was no Second International Conference on Contemporary Chinese Literature. Scheduled to be held this past august at Peking University, it was canceled due to the Tiananmen massacre. The Jin Shan conference was the brainchild of Bai Hua's friend and fellow literary reformer Wang Meng, who was minister of culture at the time. He is rumored to have been removed from office last July as part of the purge of intellectuals under way in China since the massacre. Being "in trouble" is no joking matter; it is deadly serious. Virtually all of the best Chinese writers and intellectuals are in trouble today.
Looking across the table at Bai Hua, I decided to size up this man about whom I had read and written so much. He was fifty-six then. Slender, with rough, handsome features, deep lines on his face, and hair that was nearly white, he looked quite comfortable in a light brown business suit. As he sat back, relaxed, and joined in the intellectual banter about literature, politics, and, as always in any gathering of Chinese literati, personalities, it was obvious that he loved to drink, smoke, make jokes, gossip, and generally bask in his hard-earned glory as a literary gadfly frequently under fire from the conservative literary bureaucracy.
I concluded that as a personality Bai Hua was a very likable man, a regular guy, someone who could tell stories of his past exploits in the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution with the best of them, but not a deep thinker. I had already concluded from reading his works that where literature and art were concerned, he was a man of serious but limited vision, a firm believer in the traditional Chinese concept of wen yi tai dao, "using literature as a vehicle for the way." He advocated and practiced writing socially critical fiction, drama, and poetry in a realistic mode reminiscent of nineteenth-century European literature. Nothing he said at the Jin Shan conference modified my view of his literary limitations.
A day or two after this
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