On a recent afternoon, my roommate Tom (a nice guy from Minneapolis and my fellow intern) and I took a trip to what is Chengdu's second most famous tourist spot after the panda breeding and research center - Dufu's Thatched Cottage Park. The park is filled with lovely flora which, with the bugs, provide shelter from Chengdu's nearly ubiquitous traffic noise. Couples, mothers with young children, and the occasional Waiguoren (outside-country-person) like myself wander through the greenery and along the wooden walkways that criss-cross the lotus-filled marshes. One is surprised from time to time by the life-size, iron statues of a sturdy man in contemplation that are sprinkled throughout the park. The depicted man is Dufu, a Tang Dynasty poet regarded as one of the finest figures in the history of Chinese characters. He made his home in Chengdu, on land that is now part of the park, for about five years in the middle of the 8th century CE. His original thatched cottage is of course long rotted and gone, but in recent years the government has built a model of his home and surrounded it with an impressive array of artistic exhibits, excavation sites, traditional buildings and shops. It is a nice place to visit - quiet and full of interesting examples and reminders of China's cultural history. And for this reason it is also a melancholy place, even a tragic one.Forty years ago there began in China a time of self-loathing more severe than anything in the country's long history. It was not the burning of books that marked the Cultural Revolution as unique - there have been numerous examples of Chinese rulers enforcing intellectual closure to buffer their authority. Even beyond the autocratic use of power, there are long traditions of disgrace, shame and self-reproach in China. Importantly, however, even shame had always been couched within a framework of tradition. The shame of an official who had failed his emporer, or of a wife who had been disloyal to her dead husband, for instance, was, if not rational by our standards, still in some important ways meaningful. With the Cultural Revolution, the shame of the Chinese turned inward upon itself, upon the posts and joints of Chinese identity, and what resulted was a period of cannibalization (or, more precisely, the culmination of a much longer period of cannibalization) that all but killed one of the most gracious, sensitive and beautiful cultures in the world.
Most of China's literary antiquities were burned. Buildings were demolished and cultural relics destroyed. Intellectuals of all stripes, including most of the leadership of the Communist Party, were humiliated, beaten and sent to the countryside for reeducation through manual labor. In a country which had for more than two thousand years prized the orderly structure of Confucian philosophy, students beat their teachers, children turned on their parents and ignorance was openly praised as a characteristic higher than knowledge. The only traditional virtue which went unquestioned was loyalty to the emporer. It was a time of absurdity, of the nihilism bred of unchecked ego, and in ten years it touched almost every life in China. (I did read about a Buddhist mountain hermit in central China who, as of 1989, still had not heard of Mao Zedong.)
Where are the echoes of the Cultural Revolution? Where does all of that suffering reverberate? I look for it in the faces of the grandparents, the postures of the parents and the behavior of the children. How will China's 20th century karma come due, for itself and for the world?
When Dufu left his home land and came south some 1300 years ago, he did so to try and find peace. Like many other Chinese before and after him, he came to mountain-ringed Sichuan in the hope of escaping the interminable wars of northern China. He did find a few years of peace in his thatched cottage here in Chengdu, and he used the time to write. Below is one of his poems.
When Dufu left his home land and came south some 1300 years ago, he did so to try and find peace. Like many other Chinese before and after him, he came to mountain-ringed Sichuan in the hope of escaping the interminable wars of northern China. He did find a few years of peace in his thatched cottage here in Chengdu, and he used the time to write. Below is one of his poems.
Looking around today at the endless malls of Chengdu, the seeming totality of Chinese consumerism, I believe that the echoes of the Cultural Revolution and of all the traumas undergone by 20th century China are almost too visible to see. In asking the 'whys' of China's postmodern vacuity, its seemingly complete transformation into a westernizing economic juggernaut with little care for its own environment or traditional culture, it is perhaps instructive first to inquire what this new state of mind, this new national psychology, is not. The answer to that is quite simple - it is not war.
"The Chariots Go Forth to War"
The chariots go forth to war,
Rumbling, roaring as they go;
The horses neigh and whinny loud,
Tugging at the bit.
The dust swirls up in great dense clouds,
And hides the Han Yang bridge.
In serried ranks the archers march,
A bow and quiver at each waist;
Fathers, mothers, children, wives
All crowd around to say farewell.
Pulling at clothes and stamping feet,
They force the soldiers' ranks apart,
And all the while their sobs and cries
Reach to the skies above.
"Where do you go to-day ?" a passer-by
Calls to the marching men.
A grizzled old veteran answers him,
Halting his swinging stride:
"At fifteen I was sent to the north
To guard the river against the Hun;
At forty I was sent to camp,
To farm in the west, far, far from home.
When I left, my hair was long and black;
When I came home, it was white and thin.
Today they send me again to the wars,
Back to the north frontier,
By whose gray towers our blood has flowed
In a red tide, like the sea--
And will flow again, for Wu Huang Ti
Is resolved to rule the world.
"Have you not heard how in far Shantung
Two hundred districts lie
With a thousand towns and ten thousand homes
Deserted, neglected, weed-grown?
Husbands fighting or dead, wives drag the plow,
And the grain grows wild in the fields.
The soldiers recruited in Shansi towns
Still fight; but, with spirit gone,
Like chickens and dogs they are driven about,
And have not the heart to complain."
"I am greatly honored by your speech with me.
Dare I speak of my hatreds and grief ?
All this long winter, conscription goes on
Through the whole country, from the east to the west,
And taxes grow heavy. But how can we pay,
Who have nothing to give from our land ?
A son is a curse at a time like this,
And daughters more welcome far;
For, when daughters grow up, they can marry, at least,
And go to live on a neighbor's land.
But our sons? We bury them after the fight,
And they rot where the grass grows long.
"Have you not seen at far Ching Hai,
By the waters of Kokonor,
How the heaped skulls and bones of slaughtered men
Lie bleaching in the sun?
Their ancient ghosts hear our own ghosts weep,
And cry and lament in turn;
The heavens grow dark with great storm-clouds,
And the specters wail in the rain."
Rumbling, roaring as they go;
The horses neigh and whinny loud,
Tugging at the bit.
The dust swirls up in great dense clouds,
And hides the Han Yang bridge.
In serried ranks the archers march,
A bow and quiver at each waist;
Fathers, mothers, children, wives
All crowd around to say farewell.
Pulling at clothes and stamping feet,
They force the soldiers' ranks apart,
And all the while their sobs and cries
Reach to the skies above.
"Where do you go to-day ?" a passer-by
Calls to the marching men.
A grizzled old veteran answers him,
Halting his swinging stride:
"At fifteen I was sent to the north
To guard the river against the Hun;
At forty I was sent to camp,
To farm in the west, far, far from home.
When I left, my hair was long and black;
When I came home, it was white and thin.
Today they send me again to the wars,
Back to the north frontier,
By whose gray towers our blood has flowed
In a red tide, like the sea--
And will flow again, for Wu Huang Ti
Is resolved to rule the world.
"Have you not heard how in far Shantung
Two hundred districts lie
With a thousand towns and ten thousand homes
Deserted, neglected, weed-grown?
Husbands fighting or dead, wives drag the plow,
And the grain grows wild in the fields.
The soldiers recruited in Shansi towns
Still fight; but, with spirit gone,
Like chickens and dogs they are driven about,
And have not the heart to complain."
"I am greatly honored by your speech with me.
Dare I speak of my hatreds and grief ?
All this long winter, conscription goes on
Through the whole country, from the east to the west,
And taxes grow heavy. But how can we pay,
Who have nothing to give from our land ?
A son is a curse at a time like this,
And daughters more welcome far;
For, when daughters grow up, they can marry, at least,
And go to live on a neighbor's land.
But our sons? We bury them after the fight,
And they rot where the grass grows long.
"Have you not seen at far Ching Hai,
By the waters of Kokonor,
How the heaped skulls and bones of slaughtered men
Lie bleaching in the sun?
Their ancient ghosts hear our own ghosts weep,
And cry and lament in turn;
The heavens grow dark with great storm-clouds,
And the specters wail in the rain."
Adapted from The Hundred Names: A Short Introduction to the Study of Chinese Poetry with Illustrative Translations by Henry H. Hart. University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1933. Copyright © 1933 The Regents of the University of California.
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