Gao Xingjian - One Man

There was the sound of fire-engine sirens down below. Big Li had got help just in time. The helmeted fire-fighting detachment, followed by the brother rebel group from the print factory in a truck, had arrived. They entered the building with a big flag in a show of might. Each faction had its own strategies, and this was how armed battles flared up in the universities, factories, and workplaces. If they were backed by the army then guns and cannons were deployed.

He first read it in a stenciled pamphlet. Mao had received the rebel-faction heads of the five universities of Beijing in the Great Hall of the People, and said, "You, little generals, have now committed errors." It was like the emperor saying to his generals that it was now time for them to step down. The "little general" Kuai Dafu, who had distinguished himself in purging old revolutionary warriors on behalf of the Commander-in-Chief, proving himself as a student leader, immediately understood the implications and broke into tears. The old man had used a poster at Peking University to ignite the flames of the Cultural Revolution, and now, to extinguish that mass movement he had initiated, he again started on a university campus. Half a million workers directed by Mao's security corps drove onto the campus of Tsinghua University.

That afternoon, on hearing this news, he rushed there and was witness to workers, led by army personnel, taking the solitary building opposite the gymnasium, the last stronghold of the earliest university rebel group, the Jinggang Mountain Militia. Worker propaganda teams, wearing red armbands, sat on the ground side by side, in circle upon circle around the building and the sports field, for a considerable distance. In the last rays of the setting sun, two big red banners were lowered from the windows of the top floor. Written on them in black were the words: "Plum blossoms flower in the snow unvanquished, Jinggang Mountain people are brave enough to ascend the scaffold!" Each of the words was larger than a window, and the banners stretching several floors down swayed in the wind. A group of forty or fifty army personnel and workers crossed the space in front of the building, went up the steps to the main door, then, after a while, finally went in and cut off the water and electricity. He mingled with the crowd of thousands of workers and onlookers watching in silence, and he could hear the two banners flapping in the wind.

After almost an hour, the big red banner on the right dropped from the top of the building and slowly floated down. As it fell on the stairs at the front of the building, the other banner also dropped. Instantly, shouts of "long live" went up from the crowds. Then the loudspeakers, drums, and cymbals of the worker propaganda teams started up in full force. The students who had also shouted "long live" when they were rebelling, now held a white flag as they filed out like surrendering prisoners of war with their hands raised and head bowed. An even larger number of workers entered the building, dragging out several heavy machine guns, as well as wheeling out a flat trajectory gun that didn't seem to have any ammunition.

It was a simple takeover, although on the previous night, when the worker propaganda team drove onto the campus, students had thrown a homemade hand grenade in the dark and injured several workers. This was probably an act of frustration. The Great Leader they were protecting had finished using them and had discarded them. Children discovering an adult has tricked them throw tantrums; it was nothing more than that.

He realized that the chaos would soon come to an end, and could see that his own fate would not be any better. So, on the pretext of doing a survey, he immediately left Beijing again.

"Go back!"

When he visited his maternal uncle on his way through Shanghai, he received his first warning.

"Go back where?" he asked. He told his uncle about his problem, the unsettled case of his father's hidden gun. "Even if I had a home, I wouldn't be able to go back!"

Hearing this, his uncle started coughing, and, taking out his inhaler, sprayed it down his throat.

"Go back to your workplace and just get on with your job!"

"The whole workplace is paralyzed and there's nothing to do. So, by saying that I was conducting an investigation, I was able to leave Beijing and do a bit of traveling."

"What investigation?"

"Aren't they investigating old cadres? I've investigated the histories of some old cadres and have discovered that it's not at all so-"

"What do you know? This is no game, you're not a child anymore, don't lose your head without knowing how you lost it!"

His uncle wanted to cough again, and sprayed his inhaler down his throat again.

"It's impossible to read anything, and there's nothing to do."

"Observe, can't you observe?" His uncle said, "I'm an observer. I close my door and don't go out. I don't join any faction and just watch the circular enactment of people rising to power and falling from power."

"But I have to go to work. I'm not like you, Uncle, you can stay at home because you have to convalesce," he said.

"You can keep your mouth shut, can't you?" his uncle retorted. "Your mouth is on your own head!"

"Uncle, you've been convalescing at home for a long time. You don't know that once a campaign starts, you have to take a stance. It's impossible not to get swept up in it!"

This old revolutionary uncle of his, of course, knew very well, and gave a long sigh. "These are chaotic times. In the past, people could hide in the old forests on remote mountains or go to a monastery and become monks…"

Only then was his uncle quite frank with him: it was the first time they discussed politics together. No longer treating him as a child, his uncle said, "I've had to use my illness to escape the winds of political change. Following the Great Leap Forward, antirightist tendencies in the inner Party became entrenched, and since then, I have stood aside. I've not involved myself with what has been happening for seven or eight years, and only through this have I been able to prolong my feeble life."

His uncle also spoke about his former commander, Yuan, who was in die upper echelons of the Party. During the Civil War, he and Yuan were willing to die for one another. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Yuan paid him a visit when passing through. He sent the guard outside and told his uncle, "Something big is about to happen in the Party Center, and it is unlikely that we will meet again." He left behind a brocaded bedcover and said it was to commemorate their final farewell.

"Tell your father that no one can save anyone; get him to do whatever he can to protect himself!"

These were the last words his uncle said to him as he escorted him to the door. Not too long afterward, this uncle, who was not very old, came down with influenza and was admitted to the army hospital where he had an injection. A few hours later, he was wheeled into the morgue. His former commander, that revolutionary Yuan Xun, who had been incarcerated, also died a year later in the army hospital. But it was many years later that he read about this in a memorial article exonerating Yuan. As revolutionaries in those very early days, they could not have imagined that, even without making a bid to seize power, they, too, would see themselves staring death in the face because of the revolution. It was impossible to know whether or not they had regrets.

Then why did you rebel? Did you go up to the grinding machine to ensure that there would be plenty of mincemeat filling for pancakes? Looking back on those times, you can't help asking him.

He says he had no choice, circumstances did not allow a person to be a dispassionate observer, and he knew he was just a pawn in the movement. He suffered terribly, not because he was fighting for the Commander-in-Chief, but simply in order to exist.