China in Ten Words by Yu Hua Page B

wondered. But I feigned delight nonetheless. The workers’-propaganda team leader at the county cultural center was currently reviewing the play, he went on. As soon as it was given the all-clear, the county Mao Zedong Thought Publicity Team would start rehearsals; after five nights at the county playhouse the play would move to the provincial capital and compete in the Popular Arts Festival.
    The small-town big shot’s complacency continued for a few more days before his career took a nosedive. The propaganda team leader at the cultural center was an uncultured boor whose education had ended at primary school. After reading the landlord’s soliloquies, he came to the conclusion that their author must be a counterrevolutionary bent on sabotaging socialist reconstruction. To him the landlord’s soliloquies were nothing more and nothing less than the author’s soliloquies.
    The playwright found this most unjust. Those soliloquies were the landlord’s, he explained; they weren’t his. The propaganda team leader tapped the bulging manuscript. “These words in the mind of the landlord—are they your work?”
    “That’s right,” he said, “but—”
    “If that’s what you write, that’s what you think.” The team leader would hear nothing more.
    Our local celebrity changed overnight from a red pen to a black one. In the two years that followed he would often make appearances on the stage in the high school playing field where public sentencing rallies were conducted. There he would play the role of an “active counterrevolutionary,” a big wooden sign over his chest, head bowed, his whole body shaking with terror. Every time I saw him there I would feel a chill at the back of my neck and think to myself what a close shave I’d had. How lucky for me that the landlord in my play had no soliloquy and that my comments at the end of his play had been excised, otherwise a place might have been made for me next to him on the stage.
    In those days sentencing rallies would be held in the high school playing field several times each year, to publicly announce the sentence on one or several murderers, rapists, and other offenders. On each occasion a number of landlords, rightists, and counterrevolutionaries would be brought in to serve as supplementary targets. Unbound but with big wooden signs hanging over their chests, they would flank the major offenders, who were trussed up like chickens. Not every landlord, rightist, and counterrevolutionary would participate in every supplementary struggle event, but the playwright was an exception, perhaps because he was so well-known. Every time there was a public sentencing he would appear with his head bowed, placard on his chest, occupying a fixed position on the far right. He was our town’s default accessory target.
    A few years later my parents worried themselves sick when I began to write fiction in earnest. Their experiences during the Cultural Revolution gave them cause to fear that their son one day might end up as just another black pen.
    P ankaj Mishra’s eyes gleamed. A wise listener, he smiles quietly and, when he laughs, laughs quietly, too. We were fishers of memory, sitting on the banks of time and waiting for the past to swallow the bait.
    The conversation turned to my first career, as a dentist, and my second career, as a writer. Thirty years ago I was working away with my forceps in a small-town hospital, extracting teeth for eight hours a day. From morning to night my job consisted of looking inside people’s gaping mouths, places where you are guaranteed to find the world’s least attractive scenery. In my five years of dentistry, I told Mishra, I must have extracted more than ten thousand teeth. I had just turned twenty then, and during my lunch break I would stand by a window overlooking the street and watch all the bustle below, with a terrifying thought running through my head: I couldn’t spend my whole life doing this, could I? That was when I