Dr. Bethune's Children Page 5

  And on top of all that, you left some important living fossils in various strata of the Chinese language. Certain terms have new meaning because of you. You are therefore one of the sources of meaning in modern Chinese. You are both the signifier and signified. Your relationship to Chinese is an issue historians of language have never discussed. I will discuss this in detail in your biography, if I ever pen it.

  I seem to have gotten off topic again. Let us keep on discussing the former mayor of Montreal. I don’t know whether this mayor—who was called the “people’s mayor” —read in the paper the day after May Day about your return to Montreal from Spain. If he had read this news, would he have been jealous of your popularity?

  And if he lived into the 1960s, his jealousy would have been even more intense. Because your popularity as the “people’s doctor” would have put his popularity as the “people’s mayor” to shame. On the other side of the world, there are not only streets named after you, but also hospitals and schools and even an honorific, for at the time, our best doctors were described as “a good doctor in the mould of Dr. Bethune.” Even more important, you had us, your hundred-million-strong posterity, Dr. Bethune’s children.

  However, the mayor knew what his people thought of him, while you didn’t know what your people thought of you. The honour you received was posthumous. In 1939, the year that you left this world, George IV, king of England, the father of the present Queen Elizabeth II, came to Canada. He came to persuade Canadians to stand with the other citizens of his empire against fascism. In the company of Mayor Houde, he passed through the city of Montreal. People lined the streets. The king’s self-absorption was deflated by a humorous remark from the mayor, who said, “Your Majesty, some of these people are here to see you.” This was the mayor’s witticism, which also reflected his self-confidence. He knew of the passion Montrealers felt for their mayor, “the people’s mayor.”

  The king of England was unable to persuade the people of Montreal. More accurately, he was unable to persuade the “people’s mayor.” After war broke out, Camillien Houde appealed to Montrealers to resist the draft. He was not willing to send his constituents to foreign lands to save others, to kill and be killed. He just wanted to do his duty by his own people, not by other nations nor by “history.” Is such a person to be labelled “a man who is of value to the people,” like you?

  Your situation was totally different, dear Dr. Bethune. You were a revolutionary, a man who wanted to do his duty by history. So, you went wherever a war was being fought. War was your home, your love, your true love. The First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War. Your life’s story could be divided into chapters by war. You might be able to defend your participation on the basis of your profession. You were a doctor after all. You could say that in every war you fought you were there to save people, not to kill. But if the “people’s mayor” pointed out that the people you saved would go on to kill, what would you say in your defence?

  The fate of Camillien Houde was a matter of “historical necessity.” Because of his anti-war views, he was arrested by the federal government and spent the war that changed the world in jail. He was released towards the end of the war. The nations he had urged his own people not to go to war to save ended up winning the war. But he, too, ended up a winner, without having to fight—he was elected mayor of Montreal for a fourth term in 1944.

  The end you met seems arbitrary, by contrast. You cut your finger accidentally during an operation. The wound got infected, and you died. At the time, it was an ordinary tragedy, until your great friend wrote that short eulogy for you—and described you as a noble-minded and pure man, a man who is of value to the people. Until he won the civil war (which we call the War of Liberation) and founded the new China. Until in 1966 he launched another unprecedented people’s war, known as the Cultural Revolution. Only then was your immortality assured. That last revolution was the particular background against which your children grew up. That revolution gave you a place in our culture, our language, our consciousness. You became a political icon in China. You conquered the most populous people in the world.

  A main road in my hometown was once named after you. It passed in front of the mayor’s office. And the most intense military clash between different factions of the Red Guards at the climax of the Cultural Revolution happened in that same spot. Yangyang’s father was an eyewitness. One day, he recreated the drama of the scene that day for us. “It was huge! Like it was happening in a movie,” he said, in a state of nervous excitement. That particular clash led to the deaths of 168 people, including fifteen bystanders.

  In order to prevent their blood from besmirching your name, dear Dr. Bethune, the road was renamed Harmony Boulevard. In the 1980s it was renamed again. Prosperity Boulevard.

  A Great Saviour

  Dear Dr. Bethune, had you foreseen the tragedy that would befall him thirty-six years after you departed this world, would you have been so determined and in such high spirits when you came to China?

  His name was Yangyang. His mother was our math teacher, who called her way of finding the lowest common denominator, which she was so proud of and which I could never understand, “the best method.” And his father was “the least busy person in the world,” as Yangyang put it the first time he ever took me to his home. He also told me his father had just come back from the May Seventh Cadre School and was waiting for his next work assignment. He said his father had been doing “labour training” at that school for the past four years. To Yangyang, his father was a stranger. Except for waiting every day for the Municipal Revolutionary Committee to send the work assignment notice, he had nothing else to do. He talked very seldom, Yangyang also told me, and he was very serious.

  I was a transfer student to Class 3 of Grade 3. I had come with my mother from a small county seat in a hilly area in the south to the provincial capital to reunite with my father. My parents used their connections to get me into this particular elementary school. There were sixty-one students in our class, so the classroom was crowded. On my first day, I was assigned a seat in the last row. Ill at ease, I did not leave my seat at all. When I was called by the math teacher to stand up to compare fractions, everyone laughed at my accent. My classmates turned their heads to look back at me, I noticed, except for one boy sitting immediately in front of me.

  The next day, after Chinese class, that boy turned and asked if I needed to go to the bathroom. When I nodded my head, the boy indicated I should go with him. “You didn’t go to the bathroom the whole day yesterday,” he said. His mention of yesterday made me very nervous. I worried that the next thing he was going to mention was my accent. I followed behind him, not saying a thing.

  “How many times a day do you usually pee?” the boy asked me at the urinal.

  I had never counted. Even if I had, I would never dare tell him, afraid that he would laugh at my accent.

  The boy sneered at the urinal. “Look at all the maggots,” he said.

  This came as no shock. There had been even more maggots in the urinal of my previous school, and they would crawl out of the trough. What shocked me is what my classmate said next.

  “To them, we humans must look ugly,” he said with the utmost seriousness.

  I found his comment provocative, but I still did not speak. After I sat down the day before, I hadn’t listened to the teacher’s comments on my answer. I stared at your image on the wall of the classroom, dear Dr. Bethune. I imagined you heard my classmates’ laughter, even that you were laughing at my accent along with everybody else. The thought made me unhappy. On the way home, I blamed myself for not listening to my mother’s recommendation that I use Mandarin, the standard language, in the new school, because Mandarin was considered superior not only to my hillbilly dialect but also to the local provincial dialect. The reason I had not done so was that, with my accent, my Mandarin was not standard at all. Had I spoken Mandarin, my classmates
would not only have laughed at me for being dumb. They would also have despised me for being pretentious.

  The boy glanced over at me and said, “If you don’t speak, you’ll never . . .” He didn’t finish, because he was peeing too hard.

  I was grateful for his concern, but I did not express my gratitude. I had to be careful.

  When we were leaving the bathroom, he told me that our math teacher was his mother. He also said that her method of finding the lowest common denominator was hardly the best. For him to criticize his mother in this way in front of a stranger made me uncomfortable. Right then the bell for class sounded. We ran to the classroom, stopping to catch our breath before going in. “My name is Yangyang,” he said, panting.

  From this first experience in the bathroom blossomed our fateful friendship.

  Two weeks later, when the class was divided into “Groups for Studying Chairman Mao’s Works,” Yangyang asked me to join his group. At the end of term, every pupil had to pass a recitation test, reciting in Mandarin what were called the Old Three—three famous essays by your great friend: “Serve the People,” “In Memory of Dr. Bethune,” and “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved Mountains.” The study groups were formed so we could help one another prepare.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, while writing these essays, your friend was only the leader of the communists, whose future was far from certain. He had entertained you once in his cave at the communists’ barren, isolated base in northwest China. You must have had a sense of his situation. But by the time we recited those essays, he had done away with all his enemies and was the supreme leader of China and a major player on the international stage. He was a key figure in the Cold War. Cold War? To you this must be another neologism. With your prodigious experience of war, dear Dr. Bethune, can you imagine what kind of war a cold war is?

  In “The East Is Red,” the most popular song of the time, your great friend was described as the great saviour of the people. This great saviour was a great strategist during the Cold War, dialectically turning our friends, especially the boss in Moscow, into enemies, and our enemies, like the Japanese and American imperialists, into our friends. As a result of these fundamental changes, he broke the stalemate of the Cold War and rebuilt the world order. So, in our hearts, he was not only the great saviour of all Chinese people, but also a saviour of people all over the world. Yangyang once noted that “The East Is Red” contradicts “The Internationale,” which clearly says “there have never been any so-called saviours.” His mother was not pleased with his discovery. She warned him to not always use logic to tackle such a sensitive matter.

  When asked to recite in Mandarin—my Achilles heel—I could not distinguish between /n/ and /ng/, the two tricky phonemes, and often made embarrassing mistakes as a result. For instance, the pronunciation of star is /xing/ and the pronunciation of new is /xin/ without /g/. So the pronunciation of new star, as in a new Hollywood star, is /xinxing/. But I pronounced it as /xingxing/, which is the same as the pronunciation of chimpanzee. “How many chimpanzees live in Beverly Hills?” my classmates used to ask, making fun of my hick Mandarin.

  In memorizing the three essays, the main problem for me was not actually pronunciation, because pronunciation was not what we were evaluated on. The problem wasn’t the essay entitled “Serve the People,” either. My problem was with the other two essays, starting with the first sentence of “In Memory of Dr. Bethune,” which goes, “Comrade Norman Bethune, a member of the Communist Party of Canada, was more than fifty years old . . .” I now know that your great friend got your age wrong. When you made light of travelling thousands of miles, you were not yet forty-eight years old. This mistaken piece of information gave me the impression that you were already an old man when you came to China. So I imagined you being about the same age as the foolish old man who moved mountains. This seriously interfered with my recitation, because I always confused those two essays.

  Yangyang had a nearly photographic memory. Memorizing these three essays was no sweat to him. “He can even recite it in reverse,” our homeroom teacher once said, when she was praising his talents at the school assembly. He often represented the school at community or municipal recitation competitions, and he made the school proud every time.

  In the month before the test, the four pupils who were the worst at recitation were compelled to stay in the classroom to receive “enhanced training.” Naturally, I was one of the four. Our homeroom teacher—the Chinese teacher—monitored us, sitting sat on the podium and making us stand in front of her and recite, one by one. If we made a single error or got stuck, we had to stand at the back of the classroom, facing the wall, practicing the problematic sentence thirty times. Then we would wait for her to call us up to stand in front of her and start reciting all over again.

  That was how it went the first three days, but on the fourth day there was a significant change. First the teacher called Big Eyes to the front. He had just recited the first two sentences from “In Memory of Dr. Bethune” without making a mistake when she lost her temper. She said she could not stand our obtuseness anymore and was no longer willing to waste her time on us. She said she had something “more important” to do. She would come back in two hours and check on our progress. Then she locked the classroom and went to do that something “more important.”

  It was the same every day after that. She would leave the classroom after our enhanced training started and came back to check on our progress two hours later.

  This kind of enhanced training was seen as the concrete expression of a teacher’s responsibility. And our teacher was praised by the principal and given the title of the “Most Responsible Homeroom Teacher.” Our principal was a gallant looking man, a bit like the Minister of Foreign Affairs at that time, which inspired our nickname for him, Foreign Affairs. And of course we called his office the Office of Foreign Affairs.

  The enhanced training ceased to be effective from the fourth day on, as we no longer focused our energy on recitation. Most of the time we spent arguing about why the teacher always had something more important to do at that time and what the hell it was. Our argument was put to rest by a discovery made by the boy we called Dumb Pig.

  Dumb Pig was the naughtiest boy in the class and the worst at recitation. He was also the only pupil who had never passed the recitation test. The nickname Dumb Pig was the teacher’s idea. We had never heard her use his real name, so we all called him by this same nickname. Anyway, Dumb Pig’s discovery was that after locking the classroom door, the teacher would go to the Office of Foreign Affairs. He said he had discovered this through the crack over the back door to the classroom.

  We found this extremely interesting. The next day, when the teacher walked out of the front door, we rushed to the back door, which was never opened and was blocked by the last row of desks. We stuck our eyes over the crack. We saw the teacher walk past, obviously headed towards the Office of Foreign Affairs. But the crack constricted our field of vision, not allowing us to see all the way to the office at the end of the hall. We all accused Dumb Pig of making up stories. But he rebuked us as our teachers did. The eyes are merely windows on the soul, he claimed. To find out the mysteries of the world, you have to rely on more than what you can see with your eyes; you have to use your imagination.

  Dumb Pig was considered the most sexually knowledgeable pupil in our class. He often bragged that he had climbed the camphor tree located outside the public bath not far from his home to watch the women bathing. To prove his claim, he often shared the special discovery he had made. He said don’t believe your eyes when you see a woman’s bosom lifted up, because every breast sags in the bathroom. Every time I heard Dumb Pig talk about women, I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, impressed with how mysterious women were and chagrined that I had never witnessed anything like that. Another time Dumb Pig was dragged to the podium by our homeroom teacher because he had not heard her explanation of the beginning of the story e
ntitled “A Chicken Clucked in the Night,” which deals with the class struggle. Instead, he had been drawing a picture of a woman’s genitalia in the textbook. And after class, he was even dragged down to the Office of Foreign Affairs. When Foreign Affairs asked him what he had drawn, Dumb Pig replied, “What my female classmates pee with.” When Foreign Affairs asked him how he knew what it looked like, Dumb Pig replied that he had learned it from The Barefoot Doctor’s Manual.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, you probably have never heard of the barefoot doctors, but I don’t think you would find the term hard to understand. They were like the medical personnel given rudimentary training in the makeshift medical school you helped build in the Wutai Mountains—doctors who wandered in rural villages, sometimes without any shoes, representatives of your great friend’s concern for the health of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants. The Barefoot Doctor’s Manual was the only medical book available to them when he launched the Cultural Revolution.

  The next day, we all seemed focused on memorization, pretending that we had lost interest in Dumb Pig’s discovery. He opened his Little Red Book unenthusiastically, as if preparing to practise, just like the rest of us. But then he burst out laughing. He said he had just figured out why our teacher called what she had to do something “more important.” “Her words are completely correct,” he said. “Because she is going to ‘serve the people.’”