Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Yuan’s expression began to warm. “In Harbin,” he said, referring to one of the large cities of Manchuria, “I was a professor of history, ever since the university was reopened twenty-five years ago. I decided to join the Pioneer program. The state promises me land rights if I stay five years. And meanwhile”-he gestured about the sparse, cold room-“I get all this.” He lifted a fork and began chipping leaves from a brick of tea. From a room down the darkened hall came the sound of coughing.

“I met an old relative of yours, Yuan Yi. I want to bring him back to you.”

Yuan’s hand froze in midair as he spun about to face Shan. “You mustn’t!” he cried out, then he seemed to collect himself and turned back to silently sprinkle the leaves into two chipped cups before joining Shan at the table. “Please,” he said in a low, plaintive voice. “He must stay on the mountain. He too is in exile.”

Shan waited until his cup was filled, then spoke through the steam of his cup. “Perhaps you should start with Harbin.”

Professor Yuan Guo had lived most of his life in Harbin, he explained, and had been a graduate student at the university there until it had been shut down by Mao, then worked at a locomotive factory until the university had reopened. He had helped establish the Chinese history department and had married another professor, who had worked in a chemical factory during her reeducation. She had died of cancer ten years later. Yuan had raised his daughter alone, then had retired four years earlier and enjoyed a peaceful existence reviewing old manuscripts in the university library until his daughter Sansan had been arrested for antigovernment activity on the Internet. “She faced a few months imprisonment but Public Security asserted what they called aggravating circumstances. She was identified as ringleader in a group of prodemocracy advocates. All were children of the retired professors in our building. There was a meeting, the kind we used to call criticism sessions. We were found to be politically irresponsible. If Mao had still been alive we would have been branded hooligans and paraded in dunce caps.”

Shan sipped his tea. “My family was sent to the rice paddies for being in the Stinking Ninth,” he said, referring to the most reprehensible of Mao’s infamous list of bad elements, the intellectuals.

Yuan grinned, leaned forward, and began his tale in more detail. They were two old soldiers sharing stories of the war. Yuan had specialized in the history of Imperial China, his wife in Western history. Their daughter had graduated from the university with a degree in anthropology and had been working for a Western computer company for two years when she had been arrested at an Internet café. The café owner had been arrested the week before for failing to record the identification cards of all the Internet users in his café and negotiated his freedom by agreeing to help Public Security snare his customers.

“We were told we could have our children sentenced to long prison terms or we could all join the Pioneer program. Each family in our building was told to report to the train station at three A.M. with no more than a hundred pounds of belongings.”

“Surely not the entire building?”

“We were a special case, a building of professors or retired professors, with children who had grown up well educated and well versed in Internet democracy.” Internet democracy. It was one of the terms of the new age, for those who practiced dissidence anonymously over the Internet. Except the government had learned ways to make sure no one could use the Internet anonymously. “We were contaminating the educational environment, someone in the Party said. They wanted us gone. From the university. From the city. From Manchuria. Some of my colleagues tend to think it was because a land developer in the Party wanted to level the building and erect a high-rise.”

“Everyone agreed to go to Tibet?”

Yuan offered his sad grin again. “We were put on a train. We had escorts. We had no idea where we were going. Nostalgic in a way. Like old times.” He meant the years under Mao when entire city blocks were simply ordered to the new Chinese cities being built in the Muslim and Buddhist lands of western China.

Shan cocked his head in disbelief. “You’re saying the government kept a cell of dissidents intact and just transplanted them?”

“They knew where we were going. A high-altitude wilderness. Barely enough for us to subsist on. They were confident Tibet would break us. We could do no harm here. And the Party had set ambitious goals for the number of new Pioneer settlements. They were having trouble filling their quotas.”

“But the life of a retired professor in Harbin…” Shan’s voice trailed away. Both men knew what he meant. Professors labored their entire careers at low pay because of the privileges they were assured at the end, the comfortable housing, the open access to university resources, the ability to study and write what they wished, the appointment to prestigious committees.

“My daughter Sansan has always been frail. She never would have survived prison. Now we have daily walks in the fresh air. The goats give us milk. She gets stronger every day.”

“Professors and Jade Crows. Quite the socialist experiment.”

“More than ninety percent of us are from Harbin. The others are from the jungles of Yunnan Province.”

“Criminals who bribed their way into exile instead of prison,” Shan suggested.

A sliver of a smile creased the professor’s face. “We prefer to think of them as a tropical social club with wanderlust. The prisons of Yunnan are quite overcrowded I hear.”

“But already they have begun to-” Shan’s words were cut off by new shouting in the street. Yuan darted to his front window.

More police were visible now, pushing apart a stack of trash cans, opening the backs of vehicles. As an officer in grey began walking toward his front door, a small gasp escaped Yuan’s throat. He quickly stepped to his dining table, grabbed a roll of paper, and sank into one of the two easy chairs in the room, hiding the roll in the small of his back as he picked up a book to read. As he did so a thin woman in her late twenties ran out of what Shan took to be a bedroom. A computer screen lit up at her touch and keys rattled as Yuan’s daughter quickly worked the keyboard, then withdrew what Shan took to be a memory card and darted back into the bedroom.

The knob sergeant did not bother to knock or announce himself. He threw open the door and glared at the professor, his eyes full of challenge. “Our house is open to you,” the professor said as he looked up from his book, then went back to reading.

“Of course it is,” the officer spat, then gestured two companions inside and down into the other rooms. He began roaming the main chamber, lifting books, pulling back cushions stacked against a wall. Faint martial tones rose from the darkened corner. Sansan had brought up one of the patriotic Web sites of the Party, where soldiers and factory workers paraded twenty-four hours a day.

The officer opened the closet by the door, then kicked up a corner of the carpet as if he might discover a trapdoor. As he stepped into the kitchen he tapped walls, even opened the refrigerator. “It’s broken,” he announced, lifting out a box of salt crisps and a book.

“It’s never worked,” Yuan said cheerfully. “But it’s a great status symbol. Tibetans never have them.”

The officer nodded his approval. His men appeared. As the three marched out the kitchen door, the officer gave orders to search the little toolshed at the rear of the yard.

“They searched your house twice today,” Shan observed as Yuan stepped to the door, watching the knobs as they entered the shed then, moments later, left his yard. “Was it Public Security both times?”