One Man’s Bible. Mabel Lee

Someone else was coming down the stairs. Old Liu pretended not to know him and hurried downstairs and out the front door. He quickly followed to avoid anyone else recognizing him, but when he got outside Old Liu had vanished. The sky was filled with flying dust, it seemed to be one of Beijing’s early-spring dust storms, but he couldn’t be sure if it was spring or autumn. He was wearing a single layer of clothing and felt cold. Suddenly he remembered that Old Liu had jumped out of the office building and had been dead for years. He must quickly escape. He went to stop a taxi on the street to take him to the airport but realized that the customs officials would immediately see from his documents that he was a public enemy. He was troubled about having become a public enemy and even more troubled that he had no place to stay in this town where he had spent more than half of his life. He arrived at a commune in the suburbs to see if he could rent a room in the village. A peasant with a hoe took him to a shed covered with thin plastic, and pointed his hoe at a row of cement kang inside. The place must have been a cellar for storing cabbages in winter, which they had converted with a layer of cement. Probably there has been some progress, he thought. He had slept on the ground at the reform-through-labor farm in a big communal bed: the ground was spread with straw and people slept one next to the other, each with a forty-centimeter bed space, not as wide as these kang. Here, it was one person to a kang, much larger than the single cement lot in the cemetery where he had buried the ashes of his parents together, so there was nothing for him to complain about. Inside, he found more kang downstairs. If he rented, he would choose a downstairs kang where it was more soundproof. He said his wife liked singing. Good heaven! There was a woman with him. … He woke up. It had been a nightmare.

      He had not had that sort of nightmare for a long time, and if he had dreams they didn’t have much to do with China. Abroad, he met people from China and they would all tell him to go back and have a look: Beijing has changed a lot, you wouldn’t know it, and there are more five-star hotels than in Paris! When people said it was possible to make a fortune in China today, he would ask if they had made a fortune. And if they went on and said that surely he thought about China, he would say both of his parents were dead. What about being homesick? He had already committed such feelings to the grave. He had left the country ten years ago and refused to think about the past. He believed he had broken with it a long time ago.

      He was now a free-flying bird. This inner freedom had no attachments, was like the clouds, the wind. God had not conferred this freedom upon him, he had paid dearly for it, and only he knew just how precious it was. He no longer tied himself to a woman. A wife and children were burdens too heavy for him.

      When he closed his eyes his mind began to roam, and only with his eyes closed did he not feel others watching and observing him. With his eyes closed, there was freedom and he could wander within the female cavern, a wonderful place. He once visited a perfectly preserved limestone cave in the Massif Central of France. The tourists entered one after the other, holding onto the iron rail of their individual cable cars. The huge cavern, illuminated by orange light, had layers of walls with twisting folds and numerous wet, dripping stalactites and stalagmites. This deep fathomless cavity created by nature was like a huge womb. In this dark natural cavern he was minute, like a single sperm, moreover an infertile sperm, roaming about happy and contented; this was a freedom that exists after release from lust.

      Before he had sexually awakened, as a child, he would travel on the back of the goose in the children’s books his mother had bought for him. Or, like Andersen’s homeless waif with a bronze pig, he would mount the bronze pig to roam the noble mansions of Florence at night. But he could still remember that his first experience of female warmth didn’t come from his mother but from a servant called Mama Li who used to bathe him. He would splash around naked in the tub, then Mama Li would grab him and carry him against her warm breasts to his bed, scratch him where he itched, and coax him to sleep. This young peasant woman didn’t worry about taking a bath and combing her hair in front of him when he was a child. He could still remember her big white breasts hanging like pears, and her oiled, shiny, waist-length black hair. She used a bone comb to smooth out her hair and folded it into a big bun that was tied into a net and then fixed onto her head. At the time, his mother had a hairdresser’s perm, and combing it wasn’t as much trouble. As a child, the cruelest thing he saw was Mama Li being beaten up. Her husband came to look for her and wanted to drag her off, but she clung desperately to a leg of the table and wouldn’t let go. The man grabbed her hair by the bun and banged her head on the floor until blood from her forehead dripped onto the tiles. Even his mother could not stop the man. Only then did he find out that Mama Li had fled from the village because she couldn’t endure her husband’s bullying. But she wasn’t able to buy her freedom even by giving the man her indigo print bag with the silver coins and a silver bracelet in it, all of her wages for several years of work.

      Freedom is not a human right conferred by Heaven. Nor does the freedom to dream come at birth: it is a capacity and an awareness that needs to be defended. Moreover, even dreams can be assailed by nightmares.

      “I warn comrades to note that they want to restore capitalism. I am talking about the Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, high up, and down below, from the Party Center down to provincial cadres! Where they exist in the Party Center, we must relentlessly drag them out, we must safeguard the purity of the Party and not let the glory of the Party be sullied! Are there any here among you? I would not dare to vouch that there are not. Aha, you thousands gathered at this meeting, are all of you so pure and clean? Are there none groping for fish in muddy waters, colluding with higher ups and jumping down below? They want to confuse the battle lines of our class struggle; I urge all comrades to be on the alert and to sharpen their eyes. All who oppose Chairman Mao, all who oppose the Party Center and all who oppose socialism must be dragged out!”

      As the voice of the official on the platform died down, everyone starting shouting slogans:

      “Exterminate all Ox Demons and Snake Spirits!”

      “I swear to protect Chairman Mao with my life!”

      “I swear to protect the Party Center with my life!”

      “If the enemy refuses to capitulate, it must be destroyed!”

      All around him people took the lead in shouting, and he, too, had to shout out loudly so that he could be heard; he couldn’t just make a show by raising his fist. He knew at this meeting that anyone who behaved differently from others would be noticed, and he could sense that he was being observed, arrows were pointing at his back, and he was sweating. He felt for the first time that maybe he was the enemy, and that very likely he, too, would be destroyed.

      Maybe he belonged to the class that had to be destroyed. Then what class did his deceased parents belong to? His paternal great grandfather wanted to be an official, donated a whole street of properties, but still couldn’t manage to buy himself the black silk hat worn by officials. He went berserk, got up one night and torched everything, including the house he had kept to live in. That was during the Qing Dynasty, before his father was born. His maternal grandmother had mortgaged all the property left by his maternal grandfather, and was financially ruined by the time his mother was born. Neither of his parents had been involved in politics. However, his father’s younger brother had performed a meritorious deed for the new government by stopping a sum of money at the bank from going to Taiwan, and that was how he had earned the title of Democratic Personage. They were all salaried workers, did not want for food and clothing, and lived comfortably, but they also lived in fear of losing their jobs. They had all welcomed the New China, and believed that the new nation would be better than the old one.

      After “liberation,” when the great armies of the “Communist bandits”—later called the “Communist Army,” later still called the “Liberation Army,” and then later officially named the “People’s Liberation Army”—entered the city, both his parents felt liberated. Incessant war, bombing, fleeing as refugees and fear of robbery all seemed to have gone forever. His father did not like the old Nationalist government. His father had been a branch manager in a state-run bank, but in his father’s own words, his failure to understand the nepotism and infighting cost him his job. Following that, for a while, he worked as a journalist with a small newspaper, but when it closed down, he could only sell off property in order to survive. He remembered