Gao Xingjian - One Man

While you were still in China, a former student, who had gone on to graduate from university, was sent on a job to Beijing and paid you a visit. When you asked him about Secretary Lu, he said that he had died. You asked how he had died.

"Sickness, I suppose," he said. But he had only heard this.

You had never met Lu's wife. It was said that she taught at the regional teachers' college, but that she was often on sick leave because of psychological problems. She stayed with her daughter, but that could have been a means of self-preservation, to avoid being implicated. Also, a woman might not necessarily have been able to endure the life of a recluse in the mountains.

Afterward, you had a dream. The village did not have houses that were close to one another or huddled around a small street and a few lanes. It was desolate, and the houses were scattered and far apart. The school was on a hill, and it was empty. The windows and doors were all wide open. You went to look for Lu; his home looked like a village dwelling, but stood all alone, with no other houses around.

There was an iron padlock on the door. It was in the afternoon, and the setting sun was shining on the orange earthen walls. You were not sure what to do, but seemed to have come to him to work out a way of getting you out of this place. You didn't want to spend your whole life, grow old, and die in this empty school. They had told you to guard the school, grade endless homework books. You had no time to look up to think about your own affairs, although you were not sure what, in fact, you wanted to think about. As you stood before the mud wall looking at the padlock hanging on the door, you heard behind you the sound of the wind rising from the paddy fields. It was late autumn, after the harvest, and only grain stubble remained…

The first time he ever saw the great man at such close range was in Tiananmen Square, midway between the Imperial Palace and Qianmen, behind the Memorial of the Heroes of the People. The recently completed mausoleum, constructed with heavy-duty steel-reinforced concrete, was said to be capable of withstanding nuclear bombs and point-nine earthquakes. In the crystal casket, Mao's head was really big, it was clearly swollen, and this could be seen in spite of the heavy makeup. He was five meters away, and filing past in the queue only allowed two or three seconds. There was no time to articulate what was on his mind.

He felt that he had things to say to the old man. Of course, not to the corpse of the Leader of the people in the crystal casket, but to Mao wearing only a bathrobe. Whether he had just got out of bed with some woman friend, or had just got out of the swimming pool, was not important; moreover, that such a great leader had numerous women friends shouldn't be held against him. He simply wanted to speak to the old man after he had taken off his Commander-in-Chief army uniform and his Great Leader's mask. You really lived fully as a human being, and it must be admitted that you possessed individuality, that you really were a Superman. You succeeded in dominating China, and your ghost still hovered over more than one billion Chinese. Your influence was so powerful that it spread to all parts of the world, and it was pointless to deny this. What he wanted to say was, you could kill people at will. What he wanted to tell Mao was, you made every single person speak your words.

He also wanted to say that history would fade into oblivion, but, back in those days, he had been forced to say what Mao had dictated, therefore, it was impossible for him to eradicate his hatred for Mao. Afterward, he had said to himself that as long as Mao was revered as leader, emperor, god, he would not return to that country. However, what gradually became clear to him was that it was impossible for a person's inner mind to be subjugated by another, unless that person allowed it.

What he finally wanted to say was that although it was possible to kill a person, no matter how frail the person was, that person's human dignity could not be killed. A person is human because this bit of self-respect is indestructible. When a person's life is like an insect's, is the person aware that an insect also possesses its own insect dignity? Before an insect is trampled or squashed to death, it will pretend to be dead, struggle, or try to run away in order to save itself, but its insect dignity can't be trampled to death. People have been killed off like the grass under the blade, but does the grass under the blade seek to be forgiven? People are clearly inferior to grass. What he wanted to prove was that, as well as life, people have human dignity. If preserving one's human dignity is impossible, and one isn't killed and doesn't commit suicide, then, if one does not want to die the only option is to flee. Dignity is an awareness of existence, and it is in this that the power of the frail individual lies.

Once one's awareness of existence is extinguished, the apparition of existence, too, is extinguished.

Enough of all this, all this nonsense. But he had sustained himself precisely through this nonsense. Now, when he could finally speak these words openly to Mao, the old man had already been dead for some years, so he could only address them to Mao's spirit or shadow.

Mao was wearing a bathrobe, he had probably just come out of the swimming pool. He was tall and had a fat belly. His high-pitched voice was somewhat like a woman's, and he had a thick Hunan accent. His kindly benign face was just as it was in the unchanging oil portrait on the wall in Tiananmen Square. To look at, he was an amiable person. He liked smoking, was a chain smoker, and his teeth were stained black from tobacco. He smoked specially manufactured Panda-brand cigarettes with a pungent aroma. Mao also liked richly flavored foods, for example, fatty pork with chili, a point that had not been fabricated in the memoirs of his doctor.

"Friend," Mao said. Mao sometimes addressed people as "friend" and not always as "comrade" because he had many young women friends, and, of course, he couldn't be ranked with them. The only man in China who succeeded in having Mao address him as "friend" was Lin Biao. Later, when it was said that Lin Biao's plane went down at Ondorhaan in Mongolia while he was fleeing the country, the Party took the unprecedented action of making photographs of the plane wreckage public. Among foreigners, there was Nixon.

Mao had a lot to chat about with him, and, once they started talking, it went on for three hours. At the time, Mao, close to eighty, was being kept alive with injections, and talked and laughed with great gusto, so that even that intelligent Jew, Kissinger, while not adoring him, greatly admired him.

When Mao said "friend," he certainly couldn't have been addressing him, but he went forward regardless. What he wanted to ask was, "Did you really believe in the Utopian state of Marx's communism, or did you just use it as a front?" Back then, he had naively asked this question, but he wouldn't have asked it later on.

"There are more than a hundred political parties in the world, and most of them no longer believe in Marxism-Leninism," Mao said in a letter to his wife, Jiang Qing, during the early part of the Cultural Revolution. The letter, clearly also addressing the entire Party, was not bedroom talk between husband and wife, but, afterward, it was used as important evidence to purge Mao's widow, and was presented before the entire Chinese people.

At the time, he preferred to think that since Mao had said this, probably he believed it. So, the old man did want to create this sort of a paradise on earth, if it didn't count as hell. That was what he also wanted to ask at the time.

"It was only the initial stage," Mao said.

Then when will the next stage come about? he reverently asked.