Gao Xingjian - One Man

"Those are my private letters and have nothing to do with my work," Wu said.

"We're going to examine them. They will be recorded, and if there are no problems they will be returned," he retorted.

What he wanted to say, but did not, was that they had actually been very polite.

"This is… the second time in my life!" Wu hesitated as he said this.

"Have Red Guards already been here?" he asked.

"I am referring to forty years ago. When I was an underground agent for the Party…" Wu's eyelids wrinkled as he gave a bitter smile.

"But didn't your people also search homes when you tyrannized the masses? I doubt that your people were as polite as us," he said with a grin.

"That was the doing of Red Guards in your workplace. Our Party committee did not decide all that!" Wu insisted.

"But the name lists were supplied by the political department! Otherwise, how would they have known whose homes to search? Why didn't they search your home?" he asked, staring at Wu.

Wu kept quiet. He was, after all, experienced in the ways of the world and he even silently escorted them to the gate of the courtyard. But he knew Wu Tao hated him and that, if reinstated, the old scoundrel would have him sent to hell straight away. He had to find enough evidence to get Wu branded as the enemy.

After returning to the workplace building, he spent the whole night going through Wu's letters and found a family letter referring to Wu as his elder cousin. The letter said, "The People's Government is magnanimous and has been lenient in meting out punishment. However, it is hard for me, because I am sick and have old folks and young children at home. I hope that you, Elder Cousin, will be able to speak on my behalf to the local government authorities." Clearly, this relative had problems with his political history and was seeking Wu's help, but he put the letter into a document envelope and wrote on it "examined." Something had psychologically prevented him from taking the matter further.

In those times, he hardly went home, and just slept in the office that served as the headquarters of their rebel group. Day and night, there were big and small meetings, liaising with, then breaking off with various people's organizations, and endless internal squabbles within their rebel group. Everyone seemed to be like ants in a hot frying pan, frantically running around and advocating rebellion. The old Red Guards announced they had rebelled against the Party committee and were now known as the Red Revolutionary Rebel Column, and even the political cadres had established their own Battle Corps. However, as people scrambled to find some way out, they were all much the same in their switching of loyalties, betrayal, opportunism, revolution, and rebellion. Once the original network of order and authority had been thrown into disarray, restructuring occurred in all parts of this beehive-like workplace building, and countless secret plots were not confined to this one floor.

At all the denunciation meetings of the various people's organizations, Wu Tao would, without fail, be hauled out for criticism. Daman 's crowd was savage. Not satisfied with Wu Tao just having to wear a placard, bowing, and hanging his head, they pulled back his arms, forcing him to his knees until he fell flat on the ground-just as they had dealt with Ox Demons and Snake Spirits a few months earlier. Robbed of their political authority by the rebel group, they were reduced to asserting their authority on the person of Wu Tao, this old Party secretary who, discarded by the Party, had become a useless old dog whose bad odor, people feared, might rub off onto them.

One day, after a snowfall, he saw Wu Tao at the back of the workplace building. He was digging up snow that had become packed solid from people walking on it. Wu heard someone coming and quickly moved out of the way. He stopped and asked, "How are you?"

The old man held onto his hoe, and, panting for breath, repeated, "Fine, fine. You don't use physical violence, but they do."

Wu had put on a miserable look just to get on good terms with him, he thought at the time. It was a year later that he began to pity this old man for whom nobody dared to show any concern. The old man swept the yard with a big bamboo broom every morning, always head bowed and wearing a dirty, old, blue jacket with patches. Nobody who went by even so much as glanced at him. Obviously, he had aged a great deal, his shoulders drooped and the skin around his eyes and on his cheeks had become flaccid. It was only then that he began to feel sorry for Wu Tao, although he didn't ever speak to him again.

The struggles that allowed for only one survivor turned everyone into enemies, and hostility blanketed people like an avalanche. Waves of intensifying winds pushed him to confront one party bureaucrat after another. He did not hate them as individuals, but he wanted to have them branded as the enemy. Were they all enemies? He could not decide.

"You are being too soft on them! They showed no mercy when they oppressed the masses. Why don't you have the whole lot of those accomplices hauled onto the dais?" Big Li was reprimanding him at an internal meeting of the rebel group.

"Can you overthrow all of them?" He paused, then retorted, "Can one totally reverse things so that every person who had unjustly denounced others is branded the enemy? People have to be allowed to correct their errors. To win over the masses, some thought has to be given to a strategy for differentiating how people are to be treated."

"Strategy, strategy, you're just an intellectual!" Big Li, bad-tempered and pushy, said this with derision.

"Why are we joining up with and taking in just about anyone who comes along? The rebel group isn't a plate of stir-fried vegetables!

That's the rightist opportunist line, and it will snuff out the revolution!" This older sister, a Party member, had recently joined their command department and she was challenging him. She had studied the history of the Party and was quite radical. The "correct line" struggle had started within the rebel group. "The revolutionary leadership authority must be firmly controlled by authentic leftists and not by opportunist elements!" This Party-member older sister of the rebel group was all worked up and her face was like a red rag.

"What are you getting up to!" He banged the table. Being in this motley group had made him tough, but he was worried.

He could not remember how he got through those days and nights of so much endless argument, righteous anger, inflammatory revolutionary words, lust for personal power, stratagems, plotting, collusion and compromise, indignation with ulterior motives, unthinking recklessness, and wasted emotions. Unable to resist, he allowed himself to be manipulated into arguments to challenge the conservative forces and also into endless quarrels within the rebel group.

"Political power is vital for the revolution. If we don't seize power, our rebelling will be so much wasted effort!" Big Li, enraged, also banged the table.

"Can you hold onto power if you don't unite with the majority?" he retorted.

"Unity will only last if it is unity created by struggle!" Little Yu held up Mao's little red book of Sayings to shore up his own weak class origins. "We can't listen to you, because at critical times the intellectuals will always waver!"

They all regarded themselves as blood-lineage proletariat and believed that this red country should belong to diem. Revolution or rebellion, it finally came down to seizing power. This fact was so simple that it surprised him. But, at the time, he did not know what he wanted, and even his rebelling was a path he had strayed onto by mistake.

"Comrades, Chen Duxiu failed to seize political power at a critical point of the revolution! He was a rightist opportunist!" The Party-member older sister dismissed him with this reference to Party history, then began shouting slogans to the people at the meeting.