Gao Xingjian - One Man

Her eyes narrow as she wickedly asks, "Good in what way?"

"Good in being free," you say.

Everyone cheers, so she raises both arms and pirouettes to show off her supple and beautiful figure. Another, a brash guy, asks, 'What do you think about marriage?"

You say, "Anyone who hasn't been married should get married."

"What about those who've been through a marriage?" he goes on to ask.

You can only say, "Then try a second time." Everyone claps and cheers. The brash guy does not let up and goes on to ask, "Do you have lots of girlfriends?"

You say, "Love is like sunshine, air, and wine."

Everyone rushes up to have a drink with you. With young people, there are none of those rules and etiquette, it's rowdy and a lot of fun.

"Then what about art?" It is the shy voice of a young woman standing a couple of people away from you.

"Art is simply a mode of life."

You say that you are living at this time and in this instant, and do not seek immortality. Epitaphs are erected for the living and have nothing to do with the dead. You have had a lot to drink, and it doesn't matter if you rave on. Writing plays is for enjoyment, and when you write them, you enjoy yourself to the full. You say that working with them was a pleasure and thank everyone.

Your associate director is a slim man, cool-headed and experienced, older than the actors. Speaking on their behalf, he says they all really like this play that you had written ten years ago but had not dated. They hope you will return to stage your new plays. You do not want to disappoint them, and say that the world is not big, Hong Kong can be seen at a glance on the map, and there would be opportunities. Of course, you know quite well that once a bird has flown from its cage, it will not want to fly back into it. You think about the parched high plateau of Central France, where you once looked down from the cliff at the little city with its prominent church spire at the foot of the mountain. Some distance from the highway, a Frenchwoman lay on her back sunbathing naked among the bushes. Her voluptuous arms shading her eyes were a dazzling white in the sun, like the rest of her body. The wind brought with it the screeching of eagles and the flapping of their wings as they circled below your feet, halfway down the mountain. French eagles became extinct a long time ago, and these eagles had been purchased in Turkey, then set free here.

You need to distance yourself from suffering, calmly scan those dim memories, and find in them some bright spots, so that you will be able to investigate the road you have traveled.

They are still young, but do they have to go through your experiences? That is their affair, they have their own fates. You do not take on the sufferings of others, are not the savior of the world, you seek only to save yourself.

You find retelling that period quite difficult, and for you now, he of that time is hard to comprehend. In order to look back, you must explain the vocabulary of those times, restore special meanings to words. For example, the proper noun "Party" was totally different from the word used in the saying "The morally superior person comes together with others but does not form a party." As a child, he often heard his father proclaim this to assert his own moral superiority, but afterward, his father did not dare say this again. At the mention of the word "Party," his father turned solemn and reverent, and his hand shook so badly that liquor spilled from the cup he was holding. If he had not been so terrified, he would not have tried to kill himself. Such was the greatness and might of the noun "Party." The great and mighty nation, moreover, ranked below the Party and, needless to say, the place where persons worked, were paid, and ate meals-the "work unit"-belonged to the Party. Thus, a person's residential permit, grain allocation, housing, as well as personal freedom, were determined by the Party "work unit." However, this did not apply to the enemy, and hence the word "comrade" assumed extreme importance, and everyone used all means to ensure that that word would remain attached to his or her name. To fail to do so made one an "Ox Demon and Snake Spirit," who had to be "purged" from the "work unit" and forced to undertake "reform through labor."

So, whenever the Party decided to initiate a movement to purify the ranks, the people of every work unit fought with a vengeance. Everyone was afraid of being purged: a person could be classified as "Revolutionary Comrade" (twenty-six grades) or "Ox Demon and Snake Spirit" (divided into five big categories). This classification determined whether one had a city residential permit (for people not required to work in agricultural production and who received fixed monthly coupons to buy goods and grain products), whether one had to undergo reform through labor, or whether one was to live or die. And this classification depended on policies that fluctuated according to the bitter infighting of the twenty or so members of the Party Center (usually the Political Bureau and the Secretariat of the Party Center), on their subsequent transmission, and on internal party documents that were inaccessible to people in general. A person's fate was thus miraculously determined with ten thousand times greater accuracy than the prophecies of the Bible. Failure to comply with regulations constituted an error if minor, and a crime if major, and this was accordingly recorded in a person's file.

What was recorded in the file was, of course, not simply a person's life. Wrong words and actions, general political and moral conduct, a person's written thought-reports and confessions, as well as the verdicts and judgments of the Party organization of the work unit, were collected together and placed under confidential supervision by special personnel. A person was tracked from one work unit to another but did not need to imagine ever being able to see the file.

Also, for example, the word "study" was not the dictionary definition of acquiring knowledge or the learning of a particular skill. No, it referred solely to the eradication of thinking that failed to conform to what had been stipulated by the Party at a particular time. Don't laugh! The word "private" was interpreted as "individual," and, by extension, could also mean psychological evil that had to be ruthlessly eradicated. Moreover, the May Seventh Cadre Schools were definitely not schools as generally known in past and present times, in China or elsewhere. Application for enrollment was not necessary, and, once assigned, attendance was obligatory. In the cadre school, people supervised one another while undergoing intensive physical labor designed to snuff out thinking and to punish anyone with an education or capable of reflective thinking. The Party only permitted one kind of thinking, that is, the thinking of the Supreme Leader. At the time, it was the same for Party cadres and ordinary public personnel, including their family members. If one was sent to a cadre school, it was impossible to protest. Like the work unit, the cadre school controlled a person's grain rations, place of residence, and outside travel. There was no possibility of playing truant, like a child, and, furthermore, where could one hide?

All these terms had their own related vocabulary, enough for compiling a dictionary of words and phrases, but you have no intention of exerting yourself compiling such a dictionary just to benefit historical research.

And, on the subject of history, for example, this so-called Cultural Revolution took place just thirty or so years ago, and yet there were numerous revisions prior to the Party Representative Conference official interpretation of 1981. There were considerable changes of course from Mao's Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party edition to Deng Xiaoping's Third Plenum of the Party Central Committee edition, but investigating these changes is, at present, prohibited. Also, the various popular revisions of the history of the Cultural Revolution are all different. Is it the history of the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guard Danian, the history of the Cultural Revolution by Big Li of the rebel faction, or the memoirs of the Party secretary Comrade Wu Tao who fell from political power? Or is it the subsequent appeal by the son of Old Liu who was beaten to death? Or is it the memorial speeches at the ceremony to compensate and exonerate the old commander who starved to death in the political prison he himself had established during the bloody battles? Or is it the history of the suffering of that abstract notion, "the people"? And do "the people" have a history?