China in Ten Words by Yu Hua Read Free Book Online

funereal music sounded. I instantly had a grim sense of foreboding. Two senior leaders of the Communist Party had died that year—first Zhou Enlai, then Zhu De, just a few days before—so we knew what was coming.
    The long dirge came to an end, and a grief-stricken voice began to intone a slow litany of titles: “The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, the National People’s Congress, the National Political Consultative Conference.…”
    It seemed to take forever to get to the obituary notice issued by these supreme organs of power. Another ponderous, doleful recitation began: “Great Leader, Great Teacher, Great Commander, Great Helmsman.…” Finally, after this long string of epithets, came the real substance: Chairman Mao Zedong had passed away after a long illness. Even before the final words, “aged eighty-two,” the auditorium was already seething with moans and wails.
    Our leader was dead. My eyes too filled with tears, and I wept like the thousand others. I heard heartrending screeches and earthshaking howls, people gasped for breath and choked in anguish—and then my mind began to wander. Grief no longer held me in its sway; my thoughts started moving in another direction entirely. If it had been just a few people weeping, I would certainly have felt sad, but a thousand people all weeping at the same time simply struck me as funny. I had never in my life heard such a cacophony. Even if every living variety of beast were to send a delegate to our auditorium and they were all to bellow in unison, I thought to myself, they surely could not make a stranger chorus than the din of a thousand people crying their heads off.
    This untimely fancy might have been the death of me. I couldn’t help but smile, and then I had to fight back the laugh that was pushing its way out. If anybody were to see me laughing, I would be labeled a counterrevolutionary on the spot and life would not be worth living. Hard as I tried to bottle up my laughter, it insisted on spilling forth, and knowing I couldn’t stifle it any longer, I desperately threw myself forward, hugging the back of the chair in front of me, and buried my head in my folded arms. Amid the weeping of a thousand people I was in the throes of uncontainable mirth, my shoulders heaving, and the more I tried to stop myself from laughing, the more the laughs kept coming.
    My classmates, through a curtain of tears, saw me sprawled over a chair, racked by agonizing spasms of grief. They were deeply moved by my devotion to our fallen leader, and later they would say, “Yu Hua was more upset than anyone—you should have seen the way he was crying.”
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    * lingxiu
    † Mao Tsetung Poems (Peking: Commercial Press, 1962), p. 62.
    ‡ In the spring of 2011, the exchange rate of the Chinese yuan stood at about 6.5 yuan to the U.S. dollar.
    § Liu Shaoqi, appointed China’s head of state in 1959, was denounced early in the Cultural Revolution as the Communist Party’s “biggest capitalist roader” and in 1968 was dismissed from all his positions. Lin Biao became Mao’s second-in-command in 1969 but perished in a plane crash in 1971 after what was said to be an unsuccessful coup attempt. Wang Hongwen rose rapidly through party ranks and in 1973 was elevated to third place in the hierarchy.

reading
    S ince I grew up in a time and a place where there were no books, it’s hard to say just how I began to read. But sorting through my memories, I find my earliest reading * experiences fall into four sequences.
    T he first dates back to the summer following my graduation from elementary school, in 1973. By then we were into the seventh year of the Cultural Revolution, and the bloody street battles and savage house lootings were now well behind us. Cruelties perpetrated in the name of the revolution seemed to have worn themselves out, leaving life in our