China in Ten Words by Yu Hua Read Free Book Online Page A

small town in a quiescent state, stifled and repressed. People had become more timid and circumspect than before, and although the newspapers and radio broadcasts carried on promoting class struggle day after day, it seemed ages since I had seen a class enemy.
    At this point the town library, which had been mothballed for so long, finally reopened. My father managed to wangle a reader’s card for my brother and me, to give us something to do during the tedious vacation. Thus began my reading of fiction. In China then, practically all literary works were labeled “poisonous weeds.” Works by foreign authors such as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Balzac were poisonous weeds; works by Chinese authors like Ba Jin, Lao She, and Shen Congwen were poisonous weeds; and with the falling-out between Mao and Khrushchev, revolutionary literature of the Soviet era had become poisonous weeds, too. Since the bulk of the library’s holdings had perished in all the Red Guard book burning, there was very little left to read. The fiction shelf featured only twenty-odd titles, all so-called socialist revolutionary literature of the homegrown variety. I read all these books in turn: Bright Sunny Skies , The Golden Road , Ox-field Strand , Battle Song of Hongnan , New Bridge , Storm over Mine Shaft Hill , Spring Comes to the Land of Flying Snow , Glittering Red Star.… My favorites were Glittering Red Star and Storm over Mine Shaft Hill , for the simple reason that their protagonists were children.
    This kind of reading has left no traces on my life, for in these books I encountered neither emotions nor characters nor even stories. All I found was grindingly dull accounts of class struggle. This did not stop me from reading each book through to the end, because my life at the time was even more grindingly dull. “A starving man isn’t picky,” we say in Chinese, and that sums up my reading in those days. So long as it was a novel, so long as there were still some pages to go, I would keep on reading.
    A few years ago two retired professors of Chinese in Berlin told me about their experience during the Great Famine of 1959–62. They were studying at Peking University at the time, and the husband had to return home early to deal with a family emergency. Two months later he received a letter from his wife. “Things are awful here,” it said. “The students have eaten all the leaves off the trees.” Just as the famished students stripped the campus trees bare, so I devoured every one of those grim, unappetizing novels on the library shelf.
    The librarian was a middle-aged woman very dedicated to her profession. Every time my brother, Hua Xu, and I returned a book, she would inspect it meticulously and not let us borrow another until she had satisfied herself that the returned volume had suffered no damage at our hands. Once she noticed an ink spot on the cover of the book we were returning and held us responsible. No, we had nothing to do with that, we told her—the ink spot had been there all the time. She stuck to her guns, insisting she always checked every book and there was no way she would have missed such a glaring stain. We began to argue, an activity known at the time as “civil struggle.” Hua Xu was a Red Guard, and he saw civil struggle as a wimpy sort of activity; “martial struggle” was more the Red Guard style. So he picked up the book and threw it in her face, then gave her a clip across the ear for good measure.
    After that we all went to the local police station, where the librarian sat in a chair for a long time, drenched in tears, while Hua Xu strolled back and forth in a show of calm indifference. The station chief did his best to console the woman, at the same time cursing out my brother and telling him to sit down and behave. So Hua Xu sat down and crossed his legs nonchalantly. The station chief was a friend of my father’s, and I had once asked his advice about what to do in a fight. He had sized me up