Gao Xingjian - One Man

If one views the world through a lens, the world instantly changes, and even the ugliest things can become beautiful. You had an old camera, and, during those years in the countryside, it always went with you into the mountains. For you, it was another eye. You photographed scenes of the mountains, a mountain of bamboo swaying in the wind, green waves like a mass of feathers fixed on the negative as the shutter clicked. At night, you developed the film in your room, and, even though the color was lost, the brilliance of light in the contrasting of black and white was intriguing, as if it were a dream world. You were using expired movie film, a big two-hundredmeter spool, bought through a friend from a film studio before you left Beijing. For thirty yuan, it was virtually a gift. Back in those times, film studios only made news documentaries celebrating the revolution, and it was always with a jubilant fanfare of gongs and drums: the Great Leader inspects the Red Guards, the hydrogen bomb is successfully exploded, and acupuncture is used for anesthesia. Mao's Thought brought victory after victory. By studying Mao's Thought, patients underwent operations on their chests or stomachs, or Mount Everest was climbed and red flags fluttered on the rooftop of the world. The film studios had all gone over to using the overly reddish color film they had started producing in China, but you preferred black-and-white photographs, and could look at them endlessly, without tiring of them.

You looked at the colorless houses of the village, a gray-black roof and a pond in drizzling rain, a log bridge with a hen on it. You were especially fond of the hen. This black creature in front of your camera was pecking on the ground and had cocked its head to look around. Not knowing what a camera was, it stared right at it. Those shiny beady eyes were amazing, and you saw endless meanings in its cocked head and stare.

There was also a photograph of ruins. The insides of the buildings were overgrown with weeds, and the roofs had collapsed. It was a village that had died, and no one since had settled there; it had fallen into total decay and not a trace of the Great Leap Forward of that year remained. That year, all the grain harvested was handed over to the state, and the whole village, including the village Party secretary, was reduced to starving corpses. But the Party was dismissive, and had people put on guard at the county-town bus stop to prevent anyone sneaking in to beg for food. Anyway, the people in the town also had fixed grain rations, and the villagers would not have found anything to beg for. On this mountain, the bigger children all remembered digging up the roots of kudzu vines to fend off hunger; then, when they wanted to shit, having to bend over with their trousers off and getting smaller children to help them dig it out with twigs. The kudzu formed shit pellets that were as hard as rocks, and it was agony to take a shit. All this has been related by the students, and, of course, couldn't be seen in the photograph, but the desolation that could be seen was beautiful. Viewed through the lens of a camera, even disasters could possess aesthetic qualities.

You also captured on camera two lovely young women, the older one eighteen years old, and the younger one fifteen. The older one's photograph was a profile of her deep in thought. Her father was a teacher in the middle school of the county town, and the father of her father, that is, her paternal grandfather, was a landlord. Before she completed middle school, she was sent to this remote mountain. The younger one had been a junior-middle-school student. Her father was a technician in an optometrist's shop in the provincial capital, and, when his daughter decided she wanted to work in the countryside, he couldn't stop her. In the photograph, this younger woman's head was tilted, and she was laughing silly, as if she were being tickled. The two had been working on the mountain for a year, when the primary school reopened and teachers were needed. They were lucky; they no longer had to do manual labor, they became teachers. The two were happy and excited when you told them you wanted to bring your students on a tea-picking excursion. They said to stay at their school, it would be perfect, they had two classrooms so the boys could sleep in one and the girls in the other. The room in the middle was partitioned. The front part was for preparing class work and grading papers. Behind the partition, there was a plank bed-their bedroom; they said you could stay there and they would stay in the village. Before they came to the countryside, while they were at school, they would certainly have denounced their teachers. Yet seeing you, a teacher from the middle school in town, was for them just like meeting a member of their family. They were extremely hospitable, treated you to a meal of steamed salted pork, sauteed eggs, and bamboo-shoot soup, and they talked and chattered nonstop. It was on that occasion that you took the photograph. They were not like the village girls who would hide as soon as you held up the camera, they were self-assured and even posed for you. It was right when the younger woman burst into silly laughter that you pressed the shutter. After you developed and printed the photo, you saw that the older woman had turned her eyes from the camera and looked very sad, and that in the silly laugh of the younger woman was wantonness seldom seen in so young a woman. It was under the thick black branches of an ancient torreya tree by a steep cliff that you took the photograph.

It was April, spring, it was green everywhere, and the tea-picking season was soon to begin. He went in by the hollow in the mountain, and, after crossing a big mountain and a log bridge over a deep river of roaring water that sparkled in the bright sun, arrived at this production brigade specializing mainly in growing tea and bamboo. Halfway up a mountain slope, he found the brigade leader digging holes and planting corn, and they came to an agreement that he would bring thirty students from town to spend ten days picking tea. The students would sleep on the floor in the primary school and would bring their own rice from home. The brigade would provide firewood, vegetables, oil, salt, and bean curd, and the cost for these would later be reimbursed by the school. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, but, as it was not advisable for him to spend the night in the mountains halfway back to town, the two teachers got him to stay the night at the school.

In the mountains, it got dark early, and, when the sun receded to the back of the cliff, the school sports field was already in darkness. The village stockade was shrouded in mist rising from the river, and the men and women on the mountain had stopped work, shouldered their hoes, and gone home. The village started to bustle with activity, dogs were barking, people were talking, and smoke started curling above the rooftops.

Outdoors, the air was heavy with moisture. The older woman got the charcoal fire going, and boiled a pot of water for him to soak his feet. After traveling a whole day on the mountain road, soaking his feet in the hot water relieved his fatigue and was very enjoyable. The other woman brought him her soap. They were grading student assignments by the kerosene lamp, when villagers started arriving after their evening meal. There were men, youths, and young girls. The men mostly sat around the fire, but the youths crowded around the lamp on the table and started playing poker. The two women stacked up the exercise books and put them away. There were a few unmarried village women, but the married women with babies were probably busy at home. Children ran in and out and made an awful racket, while the men flirted and wrangled with the village women. The village women had sharp tongues, and, by comparison, the two women from the city had softer voices and spoke less. However, the student demeanor they had adopted when talking with him earlier had changed. Dirty words occasionally came from their lips, and they would tell anyone off. At night, the primary school served as a community club, and everyone was in high spirits.