Riding the Iron Rooster

But these people at the lunch were part of a class that has always existed in China—the scholar gentry. They were special and a little suspect and set apart. They were important but no emperor had ever really felt easy with them, and Mao had actually tried to cut them down to size and even humiliate them by sending them into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was a philosophy encapsulated in the remark: If you think you're so smart you can start shoveling that pig shit into the wheelbarrow. And at night these rusticated intellectuals studied the works of Marx and Lenin. It had all worked like a harsh form of aversion therapy, which was why the mood in China was so different now.

"Most of the people in this room would much rather have their child be an underpaid scholar than a rich merchant," Mrs. Lord said. "That's a fact."

I felt it would be rude to mention that the choice wasn't exactly that—between being a merchant or an intellectual; not in a country where 900 million people were peasant farmers.

It was obvious that the sixteen card-carrying intellectuals at Mrs. Lord's were not typical, and they were Westernized enough to like drinking coffee—one of the rarest drinks in China—and to linger after the meal to talk a little more.

Professor Dong Luoshan had recently translated Orwell's 1984— he had actually translated it in the year 1984, which seemed wonderfully appropriate. He had also translated Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Bellow into Chinese, but it was Orwell I wanted to talk about.

He said, "I think it is a very gloomy novel."

"Did it seem familiar to you?"

"You are speaking of the recent past in China," he said, with a wink. "But I tell you the Cultural Revolution was worse. It was much worse."

"Why don't more people write about it then?"

"We are still trying to understand it, and it is a very painful subject."

There is a special category of writing about the Cultural Revolution, known as "wound literature" (Shanghen wenxue), so "painful" was an appropriate word. A popular Chinese writer, Feng Jicai, writes almost exclusively about the Cultural Revolution. But the best book I had read, The Execution of Mayor Yin (1977), by Chen Jo-hsi, had not appeared in China.

"Reading 1984 might get people thinking about it," I said.

Professor Dong inclined his head in a cautioning way and said, "But most people cannot read it. It is a restricted book—it is neican."

It meant "restricted," placing it on a sort of index of books reserved for the exclusive use of people who were sober and trustworthy readers. The average person couldn't read a book that was neican, and there was another phrase neibu for the things they couldn't talk about to foreigners—or at least weren't supposed to. But I seldom found the Chinese cagey; they talked about everything, and usually in a very candid way.

Professor Dong was still talking about 1984 and how only intellectuals could read it. "It is necessary to have special permission to read such books."

He said that bookstores and libraries all had a restricted section. You needed an approved "passbook" to get in and read this reckless and inflammatory stuff. But he said that in practice most people could read the books because they could be loaned from person to person once they were bought. It was the Chinese intellectuals themselves who limited the circulation of such books. The stiff-necked scholar gentry were not in the habit of loaning the books to slobs who might get the wrong idea.

The funny thing was, that after all this explanation, I walked into a public library eight months later, in the south China port of Xiamen (Amoy), and found a copy of Professor Dong's translation of 1984. I asked the librarian whether it was freely circulated and she said, "Yes, of course. Is it any good?"

The really strange and dangerous books, Professor Dong said, were the erotic classics—books like The Prayer Mat of Flesh and Jin Ping Mei. The latter (also known as The Golden Lotus) was written in the Ming Dynasty—say in the fourteenth century—and translations have been available to Westerners for a hundred years or more. Clement Egerton's version, done in the thirties, is regarded as one of the best. It concerns the life of a decadent young merchant and his various sexual encounters.

"Do you actually think that book is harmful?"

"Not to me," Professor Dong said, in the blinkered and superior way that makes Chinese intellectuals the butt of Chinese jokes and the object of a certain amount of Party hostility. And he went on, 'To the ordinary reader it is very harmful. You see, Chinese is not explicit. It is full of innuendo. Jin Ping Mei is like that. It does not say exactly what is happening, so you imagine all sorts of things. I think it should be restricted."