Gao Xingjian - One Man

"If the enemy refuses to capitulate, it must be destroyed!" This slogan resounded through the meeting hall. However, the old man had capitulated to the Party over thirty years ago.

"Fight resolutely to the end, there's just one road to death!"

It was also at this venue, four years earlier, that former Party secretary Wu Tao (now among those lined up, head bowed, bent at the waist) had designated this old man to serve as a model for studying Mao's Selected Works. As representative of the working class that had suffered in the past, the old man had railed against his hardships under the old society and sung sweet praises to the new society. The old man also wept and sniveled back then while educating the literary men of the workplace who were not reforming themselves.

"Haul out that dog of a spy Zhang Weiliang who has been communicating with foreign countries!"

Another person was pulled from his seat and dragged before the dais.

"Down with Zhang Weiliang!"

Without being struck, the man collapsed, and, paralyzed with fear, could not stand up. Every person at the meeting kept shouting, for any single person could suddenly become the enemy and could also be struck down.

"Confess all and be treated leniently, resist and be treated harshly!"

These were all Old Man Mao's illustrious policies.

"Long live-Chairman-Mao!"

At the time, there were so many denunciation meetings and so many slogans to shout, but one had to be careful not to make mistakes when shouting the slogans. The meetings were usually at night, when people were weary and tense. However, making a mistake in shouting a slogan instantly made a person an active counter-revolutionary. Parents had to repeatedly instruct their children not to draw anything carelessly, and not to tear up newspapers. The front page of newspapers always had the Leader's portrait on it, so it couldn't get torn, soiled, trodden on, or be hastily grabbed to wipe one's bottom if one was in a hurry to take a shit. You didn't have any children, and it was best that people did not. You only had to control your own mouth, ensure that what you said was always perfectly clear. And, especially when shouting slogans, you had to be vigilant and under no circumstances stumble over the words.

In the very early hours of the morning, on his way home, he cycled past the north gate of Zhongnanhai. Going up the white, arched, stone bridge, he held his breath as he glanced down at the mass of shadows cast by the trees in the hazy streetlights inside Zhongnanhai. Then, coming down the other side of the bridge, he released the gears and coasted down as he breathed out. He had managed to get through today. But what would happen tomorrow?

He got up early and went to work. At the bottom of the big work-place building was a corpse. It had been covered with an old straw mat taken from one of the beds in the living quarters of the building security personnel. The foot of the building and the cement ground were splattered with gray-white brain matter and purplish-black blood from the corpse.

"Who is it?"

"Probably someone from the editorial office…"

The head was covered with the mat. Was there a face?

"Which floor was it?"

"Who can tell what window it was?"

Up to a thousand people worked in the building, and there were several hundred windows; it could have been from any of the windows.

"When did it happen?"

"It must have been just before daybreak."

They couldn't say that it was late at night after the ferret-out meeting.

"Didn't anyone hear it?"

"Stop your babbling."

People paused for a moment but went straight into the building to start work on time. In each of their offices, they looked at the wall with the portrait of the Leader, or else looked at the backs of the heads of the people who had arrived before them. Exactly at eight o'clock, loudspeakers in all the rooms sounded, and the whole building reverberated with the loud singing of "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman." This big beehive was more disciplined than it used to be.

On his desk was an envelope with his name on it. He gave a start. It had been a long time since he had received any correspondence, and nothing was ever sent to his workplace. He stuffed it into his pocket without reading it, but spent the whole morning trying to work out who had written the letter. Was it from someone who didn't know his address? The handwriting was unfamiliar, could it be a warning? If someone wanted to expose him, it wasn't necessary to send him a letter, could it be an anonymous letter of warning? But there was an eighty-fen stamp on it, and local postage was only forty fen, so it had to be from somewhere farther off. Of course, the eighty-fen stamp could be a camouflage. The person must be very kind, maybe it was someone from his own work unit who couldn't contact him directly and had thought up this way of doing it. He thought of Old Tan from whom he had not heard for a long time. But would Old Tan be allowed to write letters? Maybe it was a trap, a snare set for him by someone in an opposition faction, and his actions were being observed right then. He felt he was being spied on, for sure he would be on that third list, still without names, that the army officer had spoken about at the meeting of the ferret-out teams. He became disoriented and started wondering if the people walking in the corridor were watching for abnormal behavior in hidden enemies after that big ferret-out meeting. That was exactly what the army officer had ordered at the meeting the previous night to rally people into battle: "Make sweeping accusations, make sweeping exposures, dig out every single one of those active counterrevolutionaries who are still operating!"

He became aware of the window behind him. Suddenly, realizing how someone could jump just like that, he broke into a cold sweat. He struggled to calm down and to look unperturbed. Those in the office, who had not jumped, all looked unperturbed. Surely, they were also pretending? Those who were not able to pretend, lost control, and had jumped out of windows.

He held out until it was time for lunch. Even people more revolutionary than him had to eat, he thought. Instantly, he realized he had just had a reactionary thought. He had to obliterate such reactionary thoughts, and it was not a question of a single sentence. All that accumulated anger in his heart could foment disaster for him. Indeed: "Disaster springs from the mouth." This famous saying, the epitome of rationality, was the essence of human intelligence in ancient times. What truth do you still want? This truth is absolute, don't think about anything else! Don't even try thinking. But you are a spontaneous being, your affliction is precisely that you always want to be the initiator of your actions, and this is at the root of your endless disasters.

All right, now let's go back to him. That spontaneous being lingered about until everyone had left the office, then went to the lavatory. It was quite normal to relieve oneself before going to eat. He latched the door of the lavatory cubicle and took out the letter. It turned out that the letter was from Xu Qian. "We of this generation that has been sacrificed do not deserve any other fate…" As soon as his eyes fell on these words, he immediately tore up the letter, but, changing his mind, he put the pieces back into the envelope. He noisily flushed the toilet, inspected the cubicle for any stray pieces of the letter, came out, washed his hands, scrubbed his face with water to steady his nerves, then went to the dining room.

Back in his room at night, he latched the door and pieced together the letter. He read it over and over. It was a voice of grief that spoke of despair, but said nothing of the night they had spent in the little inn, or of what had happened after she was intercepted at the wharf. In the letter, she said that this was her only and last letter to him, and that he would never see her again. It was a suicide letter. "We of this generation that has been sacrificed do not deserve any other fate" was how the letter began. She said she'd been assigned work as a primary-school teacher in some remote place in the big mountains of northern Shanxi province, but had refused to go and would not budge from the hostel in the county town. Before her, an overseas Chinese student had been sent to a school in the big mountains, where she was the only teacher. The woman had taken with her by donkey six boxes of trousseau prepared for her in advance by her parents in Singapore. Within a week, she was dead, and no one was able to give the cause of death. If she went, he would never see her again. Qian was crying for help. He was her last link to a bit of hope. It seemed that her parents and her aunt had not been able to do anything to save her.