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  DR. BETHUNE’S CHILDREN

  DR. BETHUNE’S CHILDREN

  A novel

  Xue Yiwei

  Translated from the Chinese

  by Darryl Sterk

  Copyright 2017 © Xue Yiwei

  Translation 2017 © Darryl Sterk

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced for any reason or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Prepared for the press by Timothy Niedermann

  Cover design: Debbie Geltner

  Cover illustrations: Cai Gao

  Layout: WildElement.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Xue, Yiwei, 1964- [Bai qiu en de hai zi men. English]

  Dr. Bethune’s children / Xue Yiwei ; Darryl Sterk, translator.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988130-51-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988130-52-1 (EPUB).--

  ISBN 978-1-988130-53-8 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-988130-54-5 (PDF)

  I. Sterk, Darryl, translator II. Title. III. Title: Doctor Bethune’s

  children. IV. Title: Bai qiu en de hai zi men. English

  PS8646.U4.B3513 2017 C895.13›6 C2017-902038-2

  C2017-902039-0

  The publisher is grateful for the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, of the Canada Book Fund and of the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) for its publishing program.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

  Linda Leith Publishing

  Montreal

  www.lindaleith.com

  Dedicated to

  Yinyin and Yangyang,

  whose deaths unveiled the mystery of must.

  “You see, Pony, why I must go to China.”

  Norman Bethune, farewell letter to his last lover,

  January 8, 1938

  “Comrade Bethune’s spirit, his utter devotion to others, without any thought of self, was shown in his great sense of responsibility in his work and his great warm-heartedness towards all comrades and the people … …A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.”

  Mao Zedong, “In Memory of Dr. Bethune,”

  December 21, 1939

  “You are all Dr. Bethune’s children.”

  Yangyang’s mother, in conversation with the narrator, November 18, 1974

  Author’s Note to a Canadian Colleague

  You may be aware that Norman Bethune was married and divorced twice in his life, both times to the same woman. Before their first marriage, Dr. Bethune promised his future wife that, though their union might make her life “a misery,” it would “never bore” her. Both marriages were childless.

  Almost five years after his second divorce, he said farewell to all his lovers and joined the communist cause in China, “making light of travelling thousands of miles” as his great friend, Mao Zedong, put it. Dr. Bethune never anticipated that this would be a road from which he would never return. Nor did he ever imagine that his relationship with China would turn him into an icon.

  Dr. Bethune became one of the most idolized foreigners in China, ranked closely behind the four great revolutionary mentors—Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. And, unlike his previous marriages, his marriage to China blossomed and bore fruit. As a “noble-minded” man, a “pure” man, a man who displayed “an utter devotion to others”—as his great friend famously described him— this Canadian doctor posthumously begot tens of millions of children with his spirit, rather than his semen, at the other end of the earth from the nation of his birth.

  We are all Dr. Bethune’s children, the madwoman once said to me. Thirty years have passed since that day, and I still tremble at the memory, for she had identified what all members of my generation have in common.

  I’ve long wanted to write the story of Dr. Bethune’s children, but I have always hesitated. I knew the facts but felt unable to explain them. I feared that the cruel limits of reality would confine my imagination and restrict my freedom of expression, so I waited, deferring the re-emergence of the past and postponing the realization of what it had meant.

  Then I heard that the madwoman had died. This saddened me—I felt sorrow for her son, Yangyang, and her adopted daughter Yinyin, especially—but it also inspired me. In that moment, reality and imagination became one, and I now knew how to tell the story of Dr. Bethune’s children.

  Most of us are still alive and living in China, some in positions of great influence. But the three of his children who appear in my novel are exceptions. Two are no longer living, each having died an unnatural death for reasons related to their spiritual father. Yangyang committed suicide just before the end of the dark period in China’s past known as the Cultural Revolution, while Yinyin died as one of the “accidental casualties”—this was the government’s term—on another grim day, June 4, 1989. I am the only survivor of the three, and I fled China in the early 1990s, taking these memories of pain and loss with me. My journey took me in the opposite direction from that of the legendary doctor. I reached Vancouver via Hong Kong and eventually settled in Montreal, a city Dr. Bethune lived in for eight years. I’ve been here ever since, inhabiting the past and the present, both of which are haunted by the spectre of Dr. Bethune.

  I came across a farewell note in Dr. Bethune’s papers addressed to his last lover, the artist Marian Scott. “You see, Pony, why I must go to China,” his note begins. And this, to me, is the great mystery in his life—and in the lives of all his children. Why must Dr. Bethune go to China? Why must? Through my writing I was starting to understand this mystery, which could not be approached in any other way.

  My dear colleague, we write in different languages, but this must is our shared inspiration. It is sure to stimulate the same surprise in both of us, allowing our imaginations to transcend the boundaries of language and discover a wider and stranger space for literature.

  China and Canada have Norman Bethune in common, and Dr. Bethune’s Children can become part of both our collective memories. This is the reason I am writing this book, a book for China and Canada to read—and read together.

  Contents

  A Foreign Country

  A Dog

  A Spectre

  A Piece of Work

  A Man Who is of Value to the People

  A Great Saviour

  A Memorable Evening

  A Separatist

  A Notebook

  A Beam of Light

  A Flashlight

  A Lie

  A Statue

  A Contrast

  A Hero

  A Bride

  A Former Actress

  A Little Girl

  A Note

  A Celebration

  A Mother

  A Stage

  A Secret

  A Father

  A War

  A Silence

  A Chinese Class

  A Question

  A Terrible Accident

  A Miracle

  A Lottery Ticket

  A Lo
ng-Distance Call

  A scholar of Chinese history, I am now living in Montreal. My research on education in the Japanese-occupied territories in China prior to World War II has been well received, and some of my newspaper columns have attracted some attention. My Montreal Gazette article on Dr. Bethune, in particular, prompted people to rethink this extraordinary figure, who is fading from popular memory both in Canada and in China.

  A few months ago, a publisher in Beijing invited me to write Dr. Bethune’s biography, saying he wanted an “authentic” biography based on papers I had read in the Norman Bethune archive. This biography was planned for release on November 12, 2009, the seventieth anniversary of Dr. Bethune’s death.

  I accepted the publisher’s proposal to work on the biography, but I took exception to his insistence on authenticity. I think there must be bias in every biography. To a great extent, a bias, or even a lie, is a form of authenticity in a work of literature. I pointed out in my Gazette article that the Norman Bethune “archive” can be divided into two parts, one of which is preserved in China and the other here in Canada. The Chinese part is derived from the famous memorial by Mao Zedong, which all the “children of Dr. Bethune” had to memorize. It finds a source in the power of the imagination. Dr. Bethune’s Chinese archive is more authentic to Chinese readers than the archive preserved here at McGill University in Canada—and it’s more meaningful, as well. Dr. Bethune’s Chinese papers are part of Chinese history, part of Chinese culture, part of the modern Chinese mindset. Instead of exaggerating the superficial contradictions between the two archives, I believed that, in the biography I was about to write, I should seek to discover the inner links between them, in which a kind of historical authenticity is concealed.

  Even though my philosophy of history was unfathomable to my publisher, he respected my creative freedom. He anticipated that my bias and the Dr. Bethune archives on which I was about to draw would bring the biography great success.

  The first two months of preparatory work led to some good results, and I had soon completed a third of the research. I was so satisfied, so gratified, that I was not aware of the coming of winter. But winter did come, as I discovered when I heard my neighbour’s moans in the wee hours one night. My neighbour is a gorgeous Lebanese woman. Her boyfriend was transferred to Hong Kong three years before. She visited him in Hong Kong in the summer, and he came to Montreal on vacation in the early winter. They enjoyed making love in the middle of the night, a sensitive time for me, when I was almost ready to fall from fragile slumber into deep sleep. Her moans of pleasure lasted a long time, exciting me physically but depressing me mentally. They evoked in me a dejected nostalgia. I bemoaned the absurdity of my existence.

  I knew that this would continue, night after night, and that the result would always be the same. The next day, all day long, I would be in a daze, incapable of focusing on my research and writing. I tried to reset my circadian clock so that I could get a sound sleep, inured to my neighbours’ behaviour, but it didn’t work. What I thought of as my neighbours’ remarkably robust “combat capability” eventually defeated me. Classic symptoms of depression soon appeared. I began to lose my passion for the biography. I lost my appetite. What’s more, I started to suffer auditory and visual hallucinations. One night, not long after I went to bed, a sharp pain shot through the back of my head, towards the right side, followed by another stabbing pain, and then another, even more intense. It was a migraine. Soon my neck got so stiff I couldn’t turn my head. I struggled to get up and put on my clothes, and then dragged myself toward the Jewish General Hospital, about two kilometres away.

  Sitting in the Emergency waiting room, I could still hear my neighbours’ wild moans, which gave me sadness of a very particular kind in the intervals between the stabs of pain from my migraine. Beset by hot and cold flashes, I felt I was drifting away from the present, away from life, away from myself.

  I was distracted me from my neighbours’ moans when a shabby old woman in ragged clothes walked into the waiting room, dragging a little cart filled with empty bottles and old newspapers behind her. I thought she looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She walked toward the reception window, as if in her own world, speaking neither English nor French, muttering a slew of what seemed to be profanities at the hospital employee behind the window. The employee didn’t even lift her head. And that didn’t bother the old woman at all. She turned back and went on cursing to the air for a while before dragging her little cart away.

  “She loiters here every day, that mad old woman,” I heard the employee explain in a loud voice through the window to an approaching patient. Another throbbing pain assaulted the back of my head, again on the right-hand side. I strained to turn my neck to look towards the entrance of the waiting room, where I’d last seen the old woman as she walked out.

  It couldn’t be. Was I imagining it? I closed my eyes in shock. I realized I wasn’t asking myself this question. I was asking Dr. Bethune, who had just appeared before my eyes. His spectre had started visiting me two months earlier and would look at me with a lost expression, making me hesitate between belief and doubt. I always closed my eyes.

  Now an intense impulse squeezed the pain of out my head. I wanted to talk to him, to tell him everything that we, his children, had experienced, everything to do with the impact he had had on our lives. It had been nearly forty years since I first heard his name, and this was an impulse I had never felt before. Yes, there he was in front of me. I could see his expression clearly, even with my eyes closed. He looked so much like the portrait stuck on the wall of my elementary school classroom. “Can you tell me where I’ve seen that woman before?” I asked softly.

  This was the first time I’d addressed him directly, in the second person. I had known about him for forty years, and I had always felt a connection with him, but I had never felt as close to him as I did at that moment. Using the second person gave me a deepened sense of intimacy. I was excited, thrilled. A miracle followed: the pain in my head stopped, just like that. Memories of the past flooded in. I had so many things I wanted to say, to tell him, but I wanted to address him directly. Biography or some other form of writing about him suddenly seemed so distanced, so inauthentic. I had to speak to Dr. Bethune face to face, to write to him as you. Only in this direct, personal manner could I present our mysterious yet magnificent relationship.

  I walked out of the waiting room, full of gratitude. My steps were light. I felt a sense of clarity. I had changed completely from the man who came into the waiting room. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible.

  I just wanted to get back to my apartment, turn on the computer, open up a new file, and save my memories on the hard drive. I wanted to start talking to you.

  It is November 18, 2007. So many years have passed. “Dear Dr. Bethune. . . .”

  A Foreign Country

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I have just returned from the hospital. On my way home, I swung into the supermarket at the corner of Côte-des-Neiges and Queen Mary.

  You’re probably wondering what a supermarket is. There will be many more unfamiliar words that may be obstacles in the way of your understanding my story. I will do my best to avoid such obstacles, but there’s no way I can avoid all of them. I’ve been wondering if I should stop and provide a simple definition every time such a word appears, but I think this would be impractical, disrupting my train of thought and our conversation. In fact, most of these unfamiliar words will not stand in the way of your understanding. And etymology will guide you. A supermarket, for example, is obviously a kind of market. Context should help, too. To make it easier for you, I will make a list of all the new words, a custom dictionary you can consult if you get stuck.

  It has been nearly seventy years since your departure, which is long enough for a language to change dramatically, not to mention a city. Yes, I live in Montreal now, but it is certainly not the same Montreal as the city you lived in. The building
s, the streets, the residents’ complexions and languages, people’s memories and desires—all are very different from the ones you once knew.

  The differences between the two cities with the same name have also been accentuated by your departure and my arrival. Nearly seventy years ago, when you left Montreal, you had become a well-known figure here, but you had not gained national recognition, let alone international fame. You became a legend in your home country because you left and never came back again. And my arrival in Montreal bore witness to the legend you had created. Montreal is a city of migrants, and I am one of the myriad foreigners who live an expatriate life here. Though one of many, I am still special, because of you. I came here because of you, because of your presence in China, because of your experience in China as a foreigner. Sometimes I feel I am just your reflection, wavering on the river of time. Were this city not your city, I would not be here now—no way. I remember the farewell note you sent to your “Pony,” the note you wrote after boarding the passenger steamer bound for China. I can highlight our connection by imitating your sentence structure. “You see, Dr. Bethune, why I must live in your city?” I am one of the countless children you begot in China. You are the father we all keep searching for.

  I sometimes wonder if I am the only one who came to this city because of you. The special connection between us often makes me imagine your life in this city—operating on a patient, delivering a political speech, painting a self-portrait, even making love to your anxious wife or one of your various lovers. And I imagine you reclining on a comfortable sofa reading Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow. (Who now remembers Edgar Snow?) I know it is this book that stimulated your interest in my country and inspired you to join the revolutionaries trapped in the barren northwest after the Long March. I imagine how you pictured your life as foreigner in my country. Did the China you had imagined conflict with the China you found in reality? You were reborn in my imagination. This is very significant to me, since it was you that made me come to this city. One day, when I was sitting in a bookstore, the expression on your face as you were packing up to leave Montreal appeared to me. You certainly did not know that you would never come back to Montreal. No worry or anxiety showed on your face. I imagined you putting the famous typewriter into a shabby crate.