Dr. Bethune's Children Read online

  When I read your Canadian archive, I discovered that your interest in China was narrow. I could not see any sign that you were influenced by Pearl S. Buck, for instance. Her view of China was totally different from Edgar Snow’s. Both were partial views of China. In fact, there are countless such partial views of China, including your China, my China, Snow’s China, Buck’s China, and on and on. There is always another China, a different China, or even the opposite China. And what you must know is that the China you experienced is strikingly different from the China that thinks of you as an icon.

  In 1938, while you were isolated in war-stricken China, Pearl Buck’s bestselling book from the early 1930s, The Good Earth, was still fascinating Western readers. By that time, she had left China and returned to the United States for good, but she was a bridge connecting China and the world, and her support for the Chinese struggle had attracted a lot of attention in the West. In October, 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This has since been considered one of the worst decisions the Swedish Academy ever made. Western colleagues made fun of it, while Chinese intellectuals condemned it, criticizing Buck for having had a shallow understanding of the Chinese situation.

  On the very day that Pearl Buck received the prize in Stockholm, you were operating on the injured in a village that had just been ravaged. Both Buck’s reception speech and her Nobel lecture focused on China. In the reception speech, she predicted that China would win the war against the Japanese invaders, a victory for which you, dear Dr. Bethune, were devotedly working on the frontier. What a contrast! The prophet was fêted with applause and flowers, while the practitioner was plagued by boredom and loneliness. How lonely you were, in that mountainous area in north China! Every day the same—no news, no newspapers, no letters. You didn’t know if Roosevelt was still the president of United States. You didn’t know that Hitler was Time’s “Man of the Year.” Not to mention who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. You didn’t know whether your comrades in Montreal and in Yan’an still remembered you. You didn’t know whether your lovers were still missing you or still complaining about you.

  The same war that brought you loneliness brought honour to Pearl Buck, but her good fortune wouldn’t last. After the communists seized power in 1949, she was accused of being a “slanderer” and “a running dog of American imperialism,” and was tossed into the dustbin of history, while you became a rising star over Mao’s new China.

  Dr. Bethune, the difference between your two fates in China is rooted in the contrast between the two Chinas you each knew. She had lived in cultural and urban China, and you, in revolutionary and rural China. Your China emerged victorious. More ironically, Buck had lived in China for more than four decades and had put in many good words for China in English and in her fluent Chinese, while you lived in China for less than two years, and your letters to your comrades in Canada included many complaints. You once criticized the “too strong curiosity” of the Chinese, for all the packages you received had been opened.

  But Buck ended up being a slanderer, while you became a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people. This is the irony of history.

  Because of you, dear Dr. Bethune, we felt great respect for Canada. Also because of you, we had great admiration for doctors. And it was because of you that we held internationalism in high esteem. You left the world in 1939, but in the 1970s you were still living in our hearts and our lives. Though Pearl Buck outlived you, by the 1970s she had not only been abandoned by China, her second homeland, but was also ignored in her own motherland, the United States. In 1972, she was eager to join the delegation of President Nixon’s historic mission to China, but her request was refused.

  The elderly Sinophiles I have met in Montreal were all devoted readers of Pearl Buck. And their knowledge of China was mostly derived from her work. Even Bob, who sees you as an icon, has praised Buck as an extraordinary writer. He says that the China she portrayed was more authentic than the China he actually saw. He couldn’t imagine how it happened that she now has such lowly status and has left no traces behind.

  The year 1938 was deeply meaningful for both of you. You began the last part of your life’s journey, and she reached the peak of her literary career. In your imagination, war-torn China was a paradise, where the pain in your individual life could in some measure be assuaged. But did you know of Proust’s pessimism about paradise? “The only true paradise is a paradise we have lost,” he wrote. Such a sentiment might have comforted you in the hell of suffering that your personal paradise had turned out to be. Both of you, you and Pearl Buck, endured the ironies of history, which is what makes the contrast between your fate and hers so endlessly fascinating to me.

  A Hero

  Dear Dr. Bethune, you have heard me say that my neighbour’s moans during sex excited and perturbed me. Sometimes, I heard the moans in summertime, when her boyfriend could not have been in the city. Sometimes I heard my neighbour fighting violently with a man and crying hysterically. The conflict soon subsided, however, and the pleasure of lovemaking cancelled out the violence of the fights.

  When trapped in barren Chinese or foreign or alien villages, lonely and anxious, I wonder if you ever comforted yourself by masturbating. If so, who did you think about? Your first lover? Your last lover? Or the “impossible lover” you married and divorced twice? Perhaps it was one of the merry female students you amazed at what you called “the most unique university in the world”—the revolution university in Yan’an? Or some mirthless widow living on the other side of the village? Forgive me for asking you such a personal question. Your answer either way would not affect my opinion of you. It might reflect a little on your noble-mindedness, but it would not stain your purity too much.

  Your affirmative answer to this question would be a breakthrough, breaking a taboo in the Chinese father-son relationship. It would bring us closer. Because I would like to tell you that hearing my neighbour’s moans, I could not help but imagine a body shape to match those moans. I was enticed by that ever-changing body shape. My hands would follow my imagination around my body. I would start to touch myself. My hands would start from my chest, fall passionately into the two sides of my body and meet between the legs. Ah! I still remember the first time I strove to move my wife’s hands onto my private parts. She was resistant, and her hands were sweaty. She hesitated, fearful, but soon I could just let go, because she no longer needed my guidance. She understood herself, and me. I felt the freedom she had just granted her fingers with the whole of my being. Now, only my hands are left. Lonely hands. It feels strange. I have to imagine them as someone else’s, like my neighbour’s. Time begins to flow in reverse. Oh, my fearless youth!

  History will not care how masturbation has affected the progress of civilization. History has no interest in the travails of the flesh. Thank goodness for that. So your loneliness can be forgotten. Your reputation can remain scandal-free and unblemished. In our collective memory, you are a hero, pure and noble-minded, without the frailties and foibles that plague the rest of humanity. We idolized your spirit so much that we’ve forgotten that you had a body, that you were still a man of flesh and blood.

  In the second year of high school, we had a class called Physiological Hygiene once a week for forty-five minutes. In this class, we were supposed to learn the basics about the various parts of the body, including the male and female genitalia. This was a chance to learn about our bodies and those of other people, the only such chance that we children of Dr. Bethune had during our elementary and high school years. Only Dumb Pig had no need for this class. He had already learned all that needed from the pictures in The Barefoot Doctor’s Manual and his practice of peeping into the women’s area of the public bath.

  The school did not, however, manage to find a willing teacher for this class until the week after midterms. He was a retired politics teacher with a very strong accent. Coming from his mouth, sheng soun
ded like xin, and zhi sounded like ji. When he pronounced shengzhiqi (genitalia), therefore, it sounded like xinjiqi (new machines). He was a dedicated teacher, following the textbook faithfully, starting at the head. Once he’d explained the digestive system to us, however, he split the class into two. He brought the boys to the teacher’s conference room, where he explained the structure and partial functions of our “new machines” (skipping their most important role, of course), while the girls stayed in the classroom to study on their own, without discussion.

  Even though this teacher’s lectures were not offensive in any way, the school received many complaints from parents. The parents thought that this extraneous class distracted us from our proper studies. Some parents even went so far as to threaten to transfer their children to schools that did not require this “immoral” class. The pressure was such that the school cancelled the class and didn’t arrange for a final exam. In the end, we all received full marks on our report cards for this class, which satisfied all the parents.

  I found it strange that my neighbour’s sounds of pleasure never made me think of the girlfriend I lived with a few years ago. Unlike my wife, my girlfriend would shriek in satisfaction when she reached orgasm. However, her cries didn’t excite me the way my neighbour’s moans excited me, and they didn’t move me the way my wife’s silence had moved me. We lived together for nearly four years. It was a haphazard and alienated lifestyle, though, and often made me yearn for life in another city, an imaginary city, or a remembered city.

  I missed my wife more and more. After so many years without her, I was increasingly aware of her significance in my life, even though her silence had made me unable, when she was alive, to ascertain how she felt about our lovemaking. I asked her over and over again if it felt good. She would shake her head or nod her head. So, sex with her was like a soliloquy, with only my monologue pushing the plot. When she did orgasm, she bit her lower lip hard, refusing to make any sound. I had to track the changes in her expression carefully. She would frown and shake her head forcefully, as though undergoing unspeakable torture. This was the peak of her pleasure.

  “If you could guide me with your voice,” I said to her once, “I would be able to focus better, and we would have more pleasure.”

  “I can’t,” my wife said.

  “But we need to communicate,” I insisted.

  “This in itself is communication,” my wife said.

  “I mean verbal communication,” I said. “You should allow me to hear your pleasure and let me derive a deeper pleasure from yours.”

  “I cannot,” my wife said.

  “Why not?” I asked, feeling uneasy.

  My wife looked at me, at a loss. She didn’t answer my question, but her eyes suddenly grew wet, which flustered me.

  I never dared ask her again. I grew used to that sort of silent lovemaking. In truth, the first time I was in bed with my girlfriend, I wasn’t at all used to the sounds she made. Those weren’t the sounds of guidance, but of warning. They warned me that my future would be lonelier than before.

  That night, when I had finished reading my wife’s story, we made love more passionately than we ever had before. After that, my wife told me the reason she couldn’t say anything in the story about our lovemaking. She said that she did include some hints originally, in the first versions of her novel, but in the end, she decided to strike them out.

  I never thought that her silence would have anything to do with her tortuous memoir. She began to explain, recalling the night of the earthquake.

  “It was really hot that evening,” my wife said. “I slept fitfully.” Her fingers caressed my chest.

  I rubbed her shoulders with my palms, waiting for her to continue.

  “I heard my parents making love. It was the first time I’d heard that, and I didn’t know what the sounds meant,” my wife said. “Actually, the sounds my mother made caused me to shudder in terror. I was afraid she would die. And then, the entire world shook, and I don’t remember what came after. When I woke, I was caught between two prefabricated panels, unable to move. All I could smell was blood and dust. Tortured moans came from all around me. I tried my best to listen, wanting to hear my mother’s voice, even making the sounds that had made me shudder. But the sounds around me grew weaker and weaker. And I myself became weaker and weaker. I fainted again. When I woke, I was surrounded by soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.”

  I held her tightly. “You were right to delete it from your work,” I said.

  My wife curled in my embrace, her face glowing with satisfaction. “I’m very happy I could tell you,” she said.

  “And hereafter, one climax after another,” I teased.

  My wife caressed the what she called “the little hero”—her term of endearment—that had so bravely ventured into her depths just before. “Don’t hide,” she said naughtily. “Just once more?”

  Neither of us could have imagined it would be our last time.

  A Bride

  Dear Dr. Bethune, Yangyang and I spent the last summer vacation of his short life together when I took him to my hometown. Since moving to the provincial capital I hadn’t been back, and I missed my relatives and the scenery there.

  Yangyang had a special mission on this trip, and he told me to bring the flashlight I had kept for several months by this time. He said he wanted to take it so far away from our city that it could never come back. The first evening in my hometown, we bound the flashlight to a brick and drowned it in the historic river that flows through the town. And before letting go, Yangyang said in a seemingly careless tone, “This is the way some people commit suicide.”

  I didn’t feel surprised at the time by his mention of suicide, but it did make me feel that the flashlight was something with a soul.

  “From now on nobody will know it ever existed,” he said.

  We were staying at my aunt’s house. When we came in, her family called on Yangyang to recite “In Memory of Dr. Bethune,” because they had heard from me about his extraordinary gift. Yangyang’s exemplary performance won a round of applause, and I felt proud of my great saviour and best friend.

  Every evening during those two weeks, we went to the fields outside the town to catch frogs, and during the day our main activity was swimming in the river. Dear Dr. Bethune, did you know your great friend was a great poet? We would swim and recite his stirring lines, which all your children know:

  Remember still

  How, venturing midstream, we struck the waters

  And waves stayed the speeding boats?

  What a delightful moment! We had totally forgotten about the flashlight that had sunk to the bottom of this same river.

  We had a fun time. We talked a lot, every day, about our parents, teachers, and classmates. One day we talked about you. We were tired of swimming and were resting on the riverbank. “Do you believe Dr. Bethune was a real person?” Yangyang suddenly asked. He was staring at the sand that was slowly flowing through his fingers.

  I looked at him. “Why ask such a strange question?” I asked. “If he wasn’t, why would Chairman Mao write a memorial to him?”

  “Is everything you write true?” Yangyang asked. “Like the things in your diary?”

  I looked down in shame. The only way to avoid a lie was not to reply.

  “Nothing in my diary is true,” Yangyang said.

  This shocked me. Writing a diary was homework in Chinese class. Our homeroom teacher asked us to turn our diaries in every Friday. Then, on Monday afternoon, she would note who had written well, who had improved, and who had not. The worst was always Dumb Pig. And Yangyang’s was always the best. The most improved pupil varied.

  “There’s nothing true in my diary, either,” I admitted. But why, I wondered, did the teacher admonish the rest of us for writing untruthfully, but not him?

  “Because I write well,” Yangyang said.
“If you write well you won’t give the impression you’re lying.”

  I didn’t want to argue with him. “Chairman Mao would never lie,” I said firmly.

  “Everyone lies,” said Yangyang, just as firmly. “Our parents and teachers lie to us.”

  “You mean Chairman Mao would also lie to us?” I asked this warily.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Yangyang said. “I just see how selfish people around us are, and sometimes I doubt that there are really people like Dr. Bethune.”

  I looked at him in amazement, not knowing how to react.

  “Why isn’t there anyone noble-minded around us?” Yangyang asked. “Or anyone pure?”

  I’d never thought about this before.

  If the conversation had continued, Yangyang might have even spoken of his notebook, his secret notebook, in which he wrote things that were true. But we were interrupted when a scantily clad, filthy-looking woman passed us, then suddenly stopped, as if she had discovered something. She looked back, surprised, then bounded right up to us and stared at me. After a few seconds, she reached out, pointing at me and said, “The singer!”

  Yangyang nudged me with his elbow. “She seems to know you,” he said in a low voice.

  “But who is she?” I asked. I didn’t know her at all. She looked like a madwoman. How could she know me?

  The woman started jumping around and clapping. “Encore! Encore!” she shouted, giggling.

  Yangyang gave me a signal, and we grabbed our dry clothes and ran off.