China in Ten Words by Yu Hua

was as good as my word. After dinner I summoned my writing-group partners, and we wrote away in the classroom until late that night. We had allotted one poster each to the other instructors, but we went one better with the teacher of Chinese and wrote two full posters about him. Then, clutching the posters, we went to his home, and as he slept soundly inside we conferred about where to stick them up. Originally I thought we would stick them to his door, but there wasn’t room there for both of them, so the best we could do was post one on each side.
    The following morning the teacher ushered me once more to a quiet spot outside the school—not to thank me, as I was expecting, but to lodge a complaint. I shouldn’t have stuck the posters outside his door, he said, for the propaganda team leader would never see them there, and they would just make him a laughingstock among the neighbors. Much better to stick a poster up right outside the team leader’s office. Seeing me nod, he raised another sore point: why did I have to write two posters about him when one was good enough for the others? Well, that was to elevate him to a higher category, I told him.
    “No, no, I don’t want to be higher than anyone else,” he said. “Equal treatment—that’s all I want.”
    “All right, then,” I agreed. “We’ll go the extra mile and write a new poster for you.”
    “What about the ones outside my door?” he asked.
    “Just tear them down when you get home.”
    “How could I dare do that?” the teacher practically howled. “You come take them down yourself,” he whispered.
    Then he coached me on what to say when I came at lunchtime to carry out this mission. I nodded and reassured him that everything would be done just as he instructed. He groped around in his pocket, brought out a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and handed me one. He took a few steps, then stopped, turned around, and gave me the rest of the pack.
    As promised, I finished writing the poster before the end of the morning session and posted it outside the team leader’s office. Then my associates and I marched over to the teacher’s house, shouting his name outside his door. He deliberately lingered inside and failed to emerge, and only after the neighbors had rushed out to watch the excitement did he venture forth, bowing and scraping. “Listen up!” I scolded. “We’ve written another poster about your teacher’s dignity, an even more powerful critique than these two here, and we put it up in the school. Go and read it right away!”
    He trotted off obediently toward the school. We made a great show of tearing down the posters outside his house, explaining to the neighbors that they lacked sufficient depth, not like the newly written poster stuck up in the school, which we welcomed them to read.
    In my final years in high school I continued to write, but I suddenly lost interest in big-character posters. Instead I tried writing a play, which I suppose counts as my first literary work. I must have spent the best part of one semester writing a one-act play, about nine or ten pages long. I revised it several times, then copied it out carefully onto squared writing paper. Its subject matter was very popular at the time: a landlord, having seen all his property confiscated after Liberation, was bitterly resentful and tried to sabotage socialist reconstruction in the countryside but was caught in the act by the clever and resourceful poor and lower-middle peasants.
    In our town there lived a well-known red pen, quite a bit older than me, who had made a name for himself by publishing a great many poems and essays extolling the Cultural Revolution in the mimeographed magazine of the local cultural center. Through a classmate’s good offices I managed to make the acquaintance of this small-town celebrity, and I respectfully presented him with a copy of my play and invited his comments.
    A few days later, when I went to visit him for the second time, he had