Enigma of China(2)

To those on the outside, it looked like a promotion for Chen, but not in the Party power structure. Some “leading comrades” in the city government, not considering Chen “one of them,” didn’t want him to be the head of the bureau. They were uncomfortable with the prospect of Chen’s taking on such a key position.

So the meeting at the Writers’ Association gave him an excuse to not attend the routine Tuesday political studies meeting at the bureau. It would only drive him nuts to sit there while Li mouthed all the political phrases from the Party newspapers.

The subsiding applause pulled him back from his wandering thoughts. Now came the question and answer period. After that, it would be time for the meeting of executive members that they had scheduled weeks earlier.

Chen got up and walked out of the conference hall and out into the building’s secluded garden. The association was located in a mansion built by a wealthy businessman in the thirties, then seized by the Party after 1949. For many years, the mansion had been used as the office complex for the Writers’ Association.

He walked through the garden, coming to a stop by a tiny pond. He gazed at the white marble angel posing in the middle of the water. It was nothing short of a miracle, he mused, that the statue had survived the Cultural Revolution.

It was all because of Old Bao, the doorkeeper for the association, who, as an ordinary worker, was “politically glorious” and trusted by the Red Guards back then. One dark night during the Cultural Revolution, he moved the statue home in stealth on a tricycle and hid it under his bed. When the Red Guards came to smash anything “bourgeois and decadent,” the nude statue, which was on the top of their list, was inexplicably gone. They questioned everybody except Old Bao, who was wearing a red armband and shouting revolutionary slogans more loudly than anyone. The disappearance of the statue remained a mystery for more than a decade, until after the Cultural Revolution ended. Then Old Bao moved the statue back to its original site in the garden. When people asked him why he had taken such a risk, he simply said that it was his responsibility as doorkeeper to keep things in the mansion from being damaged or destroyed.

Looking up from the pond, Chen saw a man waving at him from the visitor registration desk near the building’s entrance. It was none other than Young Bao, the only son of Old Bao. When the old man was about to retire in the midnineties, his son was without a job. Thanks to Chen’s suggestion that the son succeed the father, Young Bao came to sit at the same desk, with the same register, with a cup of tea—possibly the same cup—just as Old Bao had for years.

Chen was waving back at Young Bao when he heard footsteps. He turned around to see An, the newly elected head of the association, approaching.

An was a swarthy, medium-built woman in her midforties. She had written a prize-winning novel portraying the vicissitudes of Shanghai from the point of view of an unfortunate, helpless woman who had fallen prey to the relentless changes of the time. The novel was made into a movie, but An had not done anything close to that level since then. Perhaps, Chen contemplated, it was no wonder. In her new position, she enjoyed the privileges of a ministry-ranking Party cadre. She wouldn’t want to write anything that could jeopardize that.

“Party Secretary Chen,” she said jokingly. It was conventional for people to add one’s official title to one’s name and to delete the deputy as well.

“Come on, An,” he said. “I felt ashamed listening to that lecture as a policeman, let alone as a deputy Party secretary for the police bureau.”

“You don’t have to talk about that with me, Chen. Back in college, you intended to be a poet, not a cop, but when you graduated, you were state-assigned to the police bureau. It’s a story that we all know well. Still, there’s no denying that you’ve done well at your present position. There’s no point discussing that, either.”

What she did want to discuss with him was a series of lectures being sponsored by the association. All of them were to be delivered by its members, and given the excellent location of the association here, there was no worry about there being a decent turnout. Not only that, there was the possibility of collaborating with Shanghai Oriental TV. Recently, lectures about Chinese classics had become popular. People were too busy making money to read the classics, but when relaxing in front of the TV, they enjoyed lectures with easy explanations and vivid images in the background—like fast food.

“A critic compared these lectures to infant formula, which the audience swallows without having to digest,” Chen pointed out.

“It’s better than nothing.”