Dr. Bethune's Children Read online

  To this day I don’t know why the pupil the teacher considered the stupidest in the class could be so smart as to know how to apply the title of Chairman Mao’s essay to real life. From this incident, I also understood your great friend’s remark that “the lowly are the most intelligent,” and his mastery of dialectics. It was often said that Mao learned dialectics from Marx, but it’s really in the essence of Chinese culture. For instance, we have a saying, “The great wisdom often appears foolish,” and this certainly applied to Dumb Pig.

  This reminds me that it is dialectics that allowed your great friend to “make a sound in the East and strike in the West” and to “turn bad things into good things.” With such a strong intellectual weapon, he won all political struggles. He did not use dialectics in the essay about you, though. He highlighted your “utter devotion to others without any thought of self,” thereby contrasting selfishness and altruism. Would you agree with this assessment?

  As exam day got closer, I became more and more dissatisfied with you and the foolish old man who moved mountains. You two were always inseparable, and I mixed you up into a single person who did not care about my exam. But I was concerned about or, more accurately, worried about my test. One day in class the teacher said that an inability to recite the three essays reflected not a lack of intelligence but rather a moral problem. She said it was a sign of moral turpitude not to be able to do this. I didn’t really know what moral turpitude meant, but I knew it was something very, very bad. I did not want my behaviour to be characterized as moral turpitude. In retrospect, it’s odd that I never blamed you at the time. Dear Dr. Bethune, had you not chosen my country and, especially, had you not died in my country, “In Memory of Dr. Bethune” would not exist, and we would not have had to memorize so much. I would have only had to memorize one essay about an old man. Indeed, maybe I should blame you. Why did you make light of travelling thousands of miles to come to China, anyway?

  Yangyang resolved to drag me out of the linguistic labyrinth that your great friend had constructed. Every time I was kept in school for enhanced training, he insisted on staying with me. The teacher did not disapprove. She even praised him as a model of serving the people and utter devotion to others.

  Yangyang thought of a lot of different ways to help me avoid mixing up the two old men. The most useful method was a picture he drew of one tall old man and one short old man with serious expressions standing side by side. The tall one was twice as tall as the short one. When I was memorizing “In Memory of Dr. Bethune,” he covered the lower half of the tall man’s body with a piece of newspaper. In this way, he totally covered up the short old man. And when I read about the foolish old man, he covered up the tall old man’s upper body. In this way, I could only see the short old man’s body from head to toe. At the same time the lower half of the body of the tall one would accentuate the physical features of the short one.

  This picture was a great help to me. I even discovered that the upper half of your body is unnecessary. All I needed was half of that picture—the lower half of your body—and the body of the foolish old man, and I could avoid mixing you up. To make sure it worked, Yangyang hid behind the teacher whenever she was testing me on my memorization. When I got stuck, he prompted me, exaggerating the shape of his mouth and his gestures in an effort to make his meaning clear. There was only one occasion when I nearly misunderstood.

  The day that I passed the test, I said to Yangyang, “You are my great saviour.”

  My great saviour had saved me and ensured that I would not be guilty of moral turpitude. I will always be immeasurably grateful to him for this.

  A Memorable Evening

  Dear Dr. Bethune, our most responsible homeroom teacher failed one day to appear on time to let us out from our enhanced training. We were listening to Yangyang tell the thrilling story of an espionage network called the Plum Flower Party, not realizing that the two hours had already passed.

  Then Dumb Pig heard his maternal grandmother calling him. Only then did we realize it had gotten dark without our teacher returning to check on our progress after doing whatever was more important.

  The grandmother kept calling his name, and Dumb Pig ran to the window, yelling in response. Then it was our turn. We all crowded to the window and cried, “Help! Our teacher has locked us in the classroom!”

  The old woman didn’t know how to help us. She paced up and down in a state of agitation.

  Dumb Pig placed his palms together, looked up at the sky, and declared, “Chairman Mao, you are the great saviour of the people. Please hurry up and save your poor people!”

  His overacting amused us.

  Soon we heard others’ voices. First was the mother of Only Girl (she was the only girl in enhanced training). Then Big Eyes’s older sister. Then I heard my father’s voice. We were so excited that we started shouting to the people downstairs. Dumb Pig yelled himself hoarse. But he seemed to be the only one who wasn’t really worried. Then he stopped yelling. He said he could crawl down the drainpipe outside the window. “And what about us?” cried Only Girl, as if Dumb Pig would really do as he had said. Then she cursed him. For a moment, Dumb Pig did not know how to respond. Yangyang started laughing. In the end, embarrassed, Dumb Pig sat on one of the desks. “In contrast to Dr. Bethune, our teacher’s misconduct shows her utter devotion to self without any thought of others,” he said angrily, once again displaying his talent for applying what he had learned from the Old Three. “Tomorrow we should go to the Office of Foreign Affairs to lodge a complaint.”

  On the way home, I sat on the back of the bicycle and listened to my father recount the complicated rescue operation. The parents had found the school caretaker, who had copies of all the classroom keys, but he said he was not allowed to open a classroom door without the teacher’s permission. He said it was school policy. He lay on a wicker couch, uninterested in what had happened. Only when the parents demanded he take action did he get up and take a tattered old notebook out of a drawer. In it he found the homeroom teacher’s address on the other side of the city.

  My father rode forty minutes to get there, and only when she opened the door and saw him did our homeroom teacher realize she had forgotten to go back to the classroom to check on our progress after finishing something more important. She did not seem surprised or sorry. Quite the opposite. She blamed us for wasting so much of her time. She said we had better memorize the three essays before the weekend, or she would not let us into class the following week. She did not return to the school with my father, as he had hoped; she just gave him the classroom key. My father politely asked her whether he should ride back with the key after opening the door. While she was hesitating, her husband interrupted and said my father could take the key to school the next day. Our teacher gave him a look to tell him to butt out. Then she thought it over and ended up repeating what he had said.

  So that’s how we were rescued. When the door was unlocked, Only Girl’s mother rushed in, stood in front of her, and slapped her twice on the cheek. Dumb Pig’s grandmother grabbed him by the ear. Big Eyes’s older sister shoved him twice from behind. My father didn’t lay a finger on me, but he did blame me for wasting so much of his time. Then he warned me that if I couldn’t memorize the essays by the weekend, I wouldn’t be allowed home the following week.

  When we came out, all the parents said we should be ashamed about what had happened that day. They all said the teacher had done right in locking us in the classroom after school for enhanced training, that it would benefit our studies. They all said that they should not have had to come to rescue us. They all said that our homeroom teacher was the most responsible in the school.

  Only Yangyang’s parents hadn’t come. I was so envious!

  The following morning, during our political study period between the second and third class, Foreign Affairs reported on the events of the previous evening. He criticized us harshly for not actively studying
the works of Chairman Mao. He stressed that our passivity was the intellectual cause of this serious incident. His forceful voice shook the intercom over the front door of the classroom. We lowered our heads in shame.

  The political study period was a most important activity in the school. In that half-hour, nobody could leave the classroom. We learned a lot in that period that we could not have learned in class. After criticizing us as “regressive elements,” Foreign Affairs went on to assert that this was by no means an accident. It was no isolated event. In fact, it had exposed a serious problem, which was that pupils were less and less earnest in their study of the glorious works of Chairman Mao. This merited a high degree of vigilance among all pupils and teachers. In the long term, we were in danger of succumbing to moral turpitude. He even said that if we did not arm ourselves with the power of Mao Zedong Thought, our minds might be taken prisoner by capitalist ideology, and we might very well be hijacked by class enemies. At the end of the announcement, Foreign Affairs announced the unanimous decision of the Revolutionary Committee of our school: the pupils who had been locked in the classroom would have to write a two-page “self-examination” within three days. He explained that our self-examinations should not have to waste ink on the incident as it happened. We should focus our attention on the intellectual cause of the incident. It would be up to Foreign Affairs to vet our examinations. If we did not write penetratingly enough, he would require us to revise or even rewrite.

  In the Chinese class that followed, our homeroom teacher repeated the core of Foreign Affairs’s announcement in her own words. She explained in particular that Yangyang had stayed on with us because of his noble nature of utter devotion to others. He did not belong with us regressive elements and did not need to write a self-examination. I looked up and saw Yangyang looking back at me, making a face. I took some small comfort from the fact that I had not incriminated my great saviour.

  We never blamed you, dear Dr. Bethune, but later on I did formulate the following hypothesis: If you had not come to China, making light of travelling thousands of miles, that unforgettable evening would never have happened. I did not blame you. I knew you had any number of reasons to cite in defence of your fateful (and fatal) decision. For instance, you might say it was because of history, not because of you. Indeed, history! We were all victims of that mysterious history.

  A couple of years later, two days before leaving me forever, Yangyang took me to an air-raid shelter beside the school field. In the past, I had only been there during air-raid drills, which were always held during political study time, and always impromptu. The alarm just went off, and Foreign Affairs interrupted his report to yell that Soviet Revisionist Elements had finally launched an attack. Sometimes he expressed himself metaphorically by saying the “Polar Bear” had come, which made the announcement even more dramatic. We flooded out of the classroom and lined up in the corridor, and then our teacher led us out of the school building, across the field, and into the air-raid shelter. These were the happiest moments in our elementary school life. I even hoped that the Polar Bear might change its proclivities and appear once a week, not just once a month.

  On that spring evening in 1976, however, when Yangyang and I walked out of the air-raid shelter, I had a sense that something serious was about to happen. I was trembling, sensing that a familiar distance had become a long road. Even today, I sometimes imagine I am still on that road, that I haven’t reached the end. This was the most painful evening of my life. I vowed I would never tell anyone about my experience. You are the only one who knows the secret that goes back almost thirty-two years. And, dear Dr. Bethune, it is a secret about you.

  I don’t know how long we stood there. It seemed like forever. When we walked out of the shelter, it was dark out. Yangyang asked if I still remembered the evening we were locked in the classroom during enhanced training. I said I would never forget. “I don’t think you’ll ever forget this evening, either,” Yangyang said. “This is the last evening we will ever spend together.”

  I did not understand. But I was very afraid. I had already felt afraid when we were walking towards the air-raid shelter. Yangyang hadn’t stopped talking. He even asked if I had heard any news about the martyr’s bride. I was frightened. I didn’t understand most of what he said.

  Before we walked out of the shelter, Yangyang took a notebook out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You have to take care of it,” he said, “forever.”

  I had known Yangyang had a secret notebook. He said it was his life. His giving me his notebook made me all the more afraid. “What do you mean by ‘forever’?”

  Yangyang smiled. “‘Forever’ means that it belongs to you from now on.”

  I felt even more afraid. “But I remember you said it was your life,” I reminded him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Soon it will be all that’s left of me.”

  The plastic red cover of Yangyang’s notebook has become brittle, and the gold lettering of the quotation from your great friend has faded, but the words are still legible. Those are the most famous words from the memorial that your great friend wrote for you. Dear Dr. Bethune, every time I flip through Yangyang’s “life,” I have to pause at your “utter devotion to others without any thought of self.” I have always treasured this notebook. Here it is in front of me now, beside my “typewriter.” On a quiet North American night, I am gazing at your spirit. It’s so far away, yet so near. There it was on that evening, here it is tonight. It confuses me and fills me with awe.

  A Separatist

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I imagine you probably considered yourself a Canadian rather than a Québécois, when you were here in Montreal. Claude makes a distinction between Canada and Quebec. He’s another neighbour of mine, one of my two close neighbours, Bob being the other. Claude and Bob have both lived in the building for nearly thirty years, but they don’t really know each other. The reason is that they have different mother tongues. Claude’s is French, and he believes that native English speakers like Bob are the progeny of invaders. Your great friend taught us to care about class struggle on a daily basis. In Quebec, in lieu of class struggle, language conflict has become the primary contradiction in social life.

  Claude loves travel and women, just like you. He told me he’d made two round-the-world trips, and planned to make a third before he died. He also told me he had slept with fifty-three women from different places, of various ethnicities. His sex life is therefore characterized by “multiculturalism,” an integral part of the Canadian identity since the 1970s. That may be the only thing Claude has in common with Canada. He was once married, for ten years, to a woman who was the thirty-first. She was a Hungarian who had moved to Montreal with her parents after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (another political event that you would find embarrassing). After he found out that she had had an “abnormal relationship” with one of his students, he divorced her. The divorce, however, did not lessen Claude’s opinion of her. He always said she was the woman he was most obsessed with in the entire world.

  Judging from the variety of his sex life, Claude could probably, like you, be called an “internationalist.” But in Canada he’s not even a “federalist.” He not only refuses to admit he is a Canadian, but also refuses to admit that Quebec is a province in Canada. To him, Quebec is mon pays—my country. He is a separatist. You must have been familiar with this word when you plunged into the Spanish Civil War.

  Back when I was in China, I heard about the separatist movement in Quebec and the referendum that almost made Quebec independent at the end of the last century. However, it was not until I met Claude that I myself ever experienced separatism.

  Unlike most diehard separatists, Claude does not blindly oppose everything and everyone foreign; he’s just hostile towards native English speakers. He is concerned about what is going on in the world. He often invites me to restaurants and is more generous even than most of my Chinese friends. For sure, I have
to listen closely to his political opinions over the meal. In fact, listening to his analyses of political situations is a “necessary and sufficient condition” of his generosity. What he cares about most is, of course, the political situation in his country and in neighbouring Canada, or to be exact, in the “Great Cause” of Quebec independence. But he is also interested in the politics of other regions in the world, including China. When important congresses are held in Beijing, such as the National People’s Congress, I get to enjoy feasts for lunch, so long as I can put up with his superficial understanding of the politics of my native country.

  It is never easy to get along with Claude. His temper is the opposite of Bob’s. When I talk to Bob, I can say anything I want, but I’ve learned to be tight-lipped with Claude. One time, I unthinkingly mentioned the former prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. I told Claude I had spotted something in the bookstore, a travelogue about China that Trudeau had written before he became prime minister. At this, Claude became restless and completely lost his appetite, pushing his plate away. “Why are you interested in a book written by that kind of person?” he asked in an accusatory tone, staring at me.

  “Because I’m interested in how he saw China then,” I replied calmly. “That is what China was like when I was a child.”

  Claude stared at me with a mixture of fury and pain in his eyes. “He was a dictator,” he said. “Do you have any idea what he did to my country? He rolled his fucking Canadian tanks onto the streets of Montreal! That was the darkest day in the history of mon pays.”