Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud. Sun Shuyun

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СКАЧАТЬ scale, the pigeon was always heavier. The vulture was so moved by the noble prince he decided not to eat the pigeon.

      ‘What happened to the handsome prince? Did he die of bleeding?’ I asked Grandmother impatiently, forgetting all about the poem and the clay Buddha. ‘He did not die,’ she said. ‘He was the Buddha in disguise.’ I was so relieved, and got up to take the basin of water away. Grandmother told me many stories like this. At the time I thought that was all they were, tales of animals and heroes. But she was teaching me humility, self-sacrifice, kindness, tolerance: looking back, I can see now how much she influenced me.

      My father left the army in early 1966, when I was three, and the whole family moved with him from Harbin in the far north, where I was born, to Handan. It is a small city, with a history going back to the sixth century BC – the remains of the ancient citadel are still at its heart. It is most famous among the Chinese for the numerous idioms which permeate our language. Everyone knows the phrase ‘Learn to walk in Handan’ – it means if you learn something new, learn it properly, otherwise you are just a dilettante. Father said we were lucky to live in this old, civilized place.

      Father was made head of production in a state timber factory employing 400 people – but there was no production. Hardly had he settled down in his new job, when the Cultural Revolution began. It was to purge the Communist Party of anyone who was not sufficiently progressive, to shake the country out of its complacency, and to revive enthusiasm for the Communist cause. The Red Guards were the front-runners but the real players were the workers. My father’s workforce was busy grabbing power from the municipal government; people fought each other, armed with guns stolen from military barracks. The city and the timber plant were divided into two factions, the United and the Alliance, with the former in control and the latter trying to oust them. My father tried to persuade the two sides to go back to work but nobody listened to him. ‘Chairman Mao says revolution first, production second. How dare you oppose our great leader?’ one of his workers warned him. Eventually, Father joined the United faction: nobody could sit on the fence or they would be targets themselves. All our neighbours were United members.

      My father often told us how much he regretted leaving the army. At least we would have felt safe inside the barracks. Our new home town reminded him of a battlefield, with machine-guns, cannons and explosives going off day and night. In this escalating violence, my mother was about to give birth to her fourth child. Grandmother was happy, her face all smiles. She told Father that all the signs of the pregnancy indicated that Mother would produce a son this time: her reactions were very strong, unlike the previous three times; she insisted on vinegar and pickled cabbage with every meal; her stomach was pointed but not very big; most importantly, two pale marks like butterflies had appeared on her cheeks. My father could not conceal his delight – he did not lose his temper as often as before. He spent many months deliberating on a suitable name and in the end he chose Zhaodong, ‘Sunshine in the East’. To him, a son would be as precious as the sun – but it had a double meaning: all Chinese had been singing ‘East is Red’ in praise of the Great Leader, Chairman Mao, who was like the sun rising in the east to bring China out of darkness.

      The birth was complicated. Almost all doctors had been labelled ‘Capitalist experts’ and sent to the country or to labour camps for re-education; hospitals were taken over by the Red Guards, who were more interested in saving people’s souls than their lives. The constant fighting in the streets and the blockades put up by all the factions made the journey to the hospital impossible. Mother consulted with Father and decided it would be better to use the woman from a nearby village who served as a midwife – experienced if not trained. Unfortunately the baby’s legs came out first and the midwife panicked. She asked Mother to breathe deeply and push hard. The baby reluctantly showed a bit more of itself: it was a boy indeed but there he stuck, seemingly unwilling to come into this turbulent world.

      Then Mother started bleeding heavily. Father was frightened to death and kept asking Grandmother what to do. Grandmother tried to calm him down but her teeth were chattering like castanets. While Father was pacing about like a caged animal, Grandmother knelt down and began to pray loudly to Guanyin, holding tight to Mother’s hand. ‘I have been praying to you for more than fifty years,’ she pleaded urgently. ‘If you have too much to do and can only help me once, please do it now. I need you more than ever. I am begging you.’ She promised she would do anything if the boy was delivered safely: she would produce a thanksgiving banquet for Guanyin for seven days; she would go on a pilgrimage to her place of abode in southern China even if she had to pawn her bracelet, her only piece of jade; she would tell her grandchildren to remember the loving kindness of the Bodhisattva for ever. While Grandmother was praying fervently, the midwife was pulling hard, as if it did not matter if a limb was broken as long as the boy was alive. When he was finally dragged out, he had his arms above his head, looking as though he had surrendered to the world.

      With the baby’s first cry, Father fell on his knees beside Grandmother, thumping the floor with his fist and murmuring softly. He did not stand up until the midwife handed his son to him. He was beside himself: at last he had an heir. He was overcome with gratitude – but to whom? To Heaven, to earth, to Grandmother’s deity, to the midwife? Grandmother was still on her knees, praying. Tired or overwhelmed, Father knelt again beside her, praying too, or at least appearing to.

      Of course Father did not believe for a moment it was the Bodhisattva Guanyin who saved his wife and son. But he was very grateful to Grandmother. Perhaps her prayer did help him psychologically: it gave him a gleam of hope when everything else seemed to have failed; it kept him calm and it had a soothing effect on my mother and the midwife. Some time later when I reported to my parents that Grandmother was muttering her prayer again in our room, my father told me not to tell anybody else. Then he said to my mother: ‘I guess praying is better than killing people and burning factories.’

      After the birth of my brother, my father changed into a different person. He was not as enthusiastic about his job as before. He used to work really hard, going out before I got up and coming home when I was asleep. Now he often drank on his own. He even had time to play with us. He seemed to have lost interest in the revolution that was going on. As a soldier he had killed his enemies, but that was to liberate the country. In the land reform of 1950, tens of thousands of landlords and rich farmers were executed because they were the enemies of the people, threatening the stability of the new China. He did not think twice even when his own father was labelled a landlord, though his family had hardly more than four acres of land and employed only two labourers. He could understand why Mao sent half a million intellectuals to labour camps in 1957 after they had criticized the Party openly and fiercely. But what was it all for now?

      My father often said that in the thirty years of his revolutionary career, he had never seen so much harm done in the name of a cause. He could not understand how an ideal that had inspired so much devotion in him had gone so terribly wrong. He never said much but it was obvious he was losing heart. He did not mind Grandmother praying at home; he even bought her candles for the Day of Ghosts.

      After I entered middle school, my teacher encouraged me to join the Communist Youth League, as an induction into the Party: it was not good enough simply to get good marks; the most important thing was to have the right political attitude – only then could our knowledge be truly useful. Father had insisted that my two sisters join. But when I asked him whether I should follow them, he was vague. ‘There is no hurry. You should concentrate on your studies,’ he told me. I never did join the Youth League.

      In 1982, I gained a place in the English Department in Beijing University. I felt like the old Confucian scholar I read of in the Chinese classics, who finally made it in the imperial exams and wanted to tell the whole world about his happiness. Out of millions, only a few hundred were chosen. I had heard of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which were considerably older, but perhaps no university occupied the unique position of Beijing University, absolutely the academic and spiritual nerve of the country. Perhaps only a Chinese would fully appreciate my good fortune. It was students of Beijing University in 1919 who first created СКАЧАТЬ