Dr. Bethune's Children Read online

  My answer displeased Foreign Affairs. He exchanged a look with my homeroom teacher and the police officer, and then asked another question, “What time two days ago?”

  “In the afternoon,” I replied.

  “Where?” the policeman chipped in.

  “Here,” I replied. “At school.” It was a reply I had rehearsed. I would never mention the air-raid shelter. They all exchanged another look. Then Foreign Affairs asked if I had noticed anything strange in my friend’s conduct lately.

  I pretended to really think it over, and said no.

  Then he asked me whether my friend had told me where he was going.

  Again, I pretended to think it over, and said no.

  My terse negatives angered Foreign Affairs. He reminded me that as the inheritor of the revolutionary cause I should not lie to the Party.

  “Do you know what that means?” my homeroom teacher butted in to ask.

  I nodded. Of course I knew what Foreign Affairs meant. But I would not give in to his demand. If he kept on asking questions like what was the last thing that Yangyang said to me, I would lie to the Party. “I’m not lying,” I assured him.

  Foreign Affairs indicated that I could leave. But just as I was about to step out the door, he stopped me. “Don’t tell anyone what we talked about here today,” he said.

  Getting ready to leave with me, my homeroom teacher patted me on the shoulder. “Do you understand what that means?” she asked.

  But what if other people ask me what we talked about? I thought. I knew Foreign Affairs meant that I had to lie to other people. This was the Party’s demand. “I won’t say a thing,” I said. I noticed my homeroom teacher nod at Foreign Affairs.

  When we left the office, my teacher stopped and told me in a serious tone that Yangyang had gone missing on Saturday. She sounded upset and then she started sobbing. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never imagined the homeroom teacher would get so emotional in front of me. I did not know how to reassure her. I looked up and down the hall, hoping some other teacher might happen to come to comfort her.

  What a relief it was when she finally stopped sobbing. She wiped away the tears with a hanky and then repeated the very first question Foreign Affairs had asked. The only difference was that she used “he” instead of “your friend” to refer to Yangyang. Why didn’t they refer to Yangyang by name? It was as if Yangyang had committed some sort of awful crime.

  I replied in the same way as I had to Foreign Affairs.

  She asked me the same follow-up questions, and I answered the same way.

  Our homeroom teacher did not look disappointed. She patted me on the shoulder and praised me as an honest child. When we came to the geography classroom, her attitude hardened. She pointed a finger at me and said, “Don’t tell anyone what we talked about today.” Then she pushed open the classroom door and motioned for me to enter.

  I returned to my seat. I felt exhausted. I looked in a daze at the main point of the lesson that our geography teacher had just written on the blackboard: “Tibet is an inseparable part of China.” She urged us to memorize it, because it would be on the final exam. Then she drew a map of China on the blackboard and said in a heuristic tone, “Look, our great fatherland looks like a fighting cock. If Tibet splits away, what would it look like?”

  This was clearly a rhetorical question, but Dumb Pig couldn’t resist. “Like a fighting cock without a butt,” he said.

  The whole class burst out laughing. Only I sat there expressionless and still.

  The geography teacher’s face went bright red, and she looked very uncomfortable. Mercifully, the bell sounded just then, and she hurried to gather up her lesson plan and teaching aids. Before leaving she said, “So we must never let the Dalai Lama’s reactionary clique succeed!”

  The class responded in unison, “Never!” Then everyone burst out laughing.

  The geography teacher tore out of the classroom without announcing the end of class.

  I seemed to hear Yangyang’s laughter, as though he were still among us. I reached towards his empty seat. “Are you there?” I asked hopelessly. My tears dripped from my cheeks on to the textbook. For a moment, the whole world was drowning in my tears.

  That evening, Yangyang’s father came to our home. His manner was strange, and he was clearly agitated. My mother had been unwilling to let him in, but he walked right up to me and asked me the same questions as Foreign Affairs and our homeroom teacher. The strange thing was that he, too, used “he” instead of his son’s name. I gave him the same replies. My replies saddened him. “I know my child,” he said, shaking his head. “He couldn’t have told you anything. He didn’t trust anyone.”

  I didn’t want to correct him. I didn’t want to say anything.

  When my father saw Yangyang’s father to the door, he comforted him, saying that Yangyang would surely return soon, but then he went on to complain about Yangyang’s immaturity. “Children should always tell their parents where they are going,” he said in a loud voice, likely wanting to be sure I would hear.

  My father’s words were of no comfort to Yangyang’s father. They made him even more agitated. “It’s not his fault,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s my fault, all my fault.”

  The next day, our mathematics class was changed to a study period, because the teacher, Yangyang’s mother, was absent. Our homeroom teacher had us copy your great friend’s two most recent poems ten times each. I didn’t copy a single word. All I could think about was Yangyang. I remembered a lot of details of the times we’d spent together. I hoped he would come back from the distant place to which he had gone and sit in front of me again.

  The next day, a substitute teacher taught us mathematics. She told us that Yangyang’s mother had something else to do and would not be able to teach us for the time being. This was obviously a lie. The truth was that Yangyang’s mother would never teach again. She had lost her mind. She had become what my mother would forever afterwards call “that madwoman.”

  In the months that followed, I saw her twice, from a distance, but I never got close. I avoided her, in fact, until one afternoon, catching sight of me, she came over to me and touched me on the head. It was a moment in which life and death encountered one another in my life.

  Yangyang’s body was discovered two weeks after he disappeared, hanging from a rusty frame in an abandoned warehouse. My mother told me that the body had decomposed and smelled so bad that the security guards decided to go in and find the cause.

  “What did it smell like?” I asked in terror. I thought of my discussion of death with Yangyang on Graveyard Hill.

  My mother’s face contorted in disgust. She glanced at me and said, “They said it smelled worse than shit.”

  A Statue

  Dear Dr. Bethune, if I told you I had just returned from Concordia, you would scratch your head, because Concordia is a name that does not exist in your memory of this city. What is it, where is it, and why would I go there? Concordia is the second English university in Montreal. Its main building is less than a kilometre from McGill, which you knew well. Just west of the main building of Concordia, there is a tiny park with a small statue. When I say I returned from Concordia, what I mean is that I returned from visiting the statue.

  It is a statue of you, the only memorial to you in this city. The tiny park where it stands is just a few metres from an entrance to the green line of the Metro, so that thousands of people walk past your statue every day. Very few stop and look at you with a faraway expression on their faces, the way I do. And even fewer know about your legacy, about the millions of spiritual children you left behind in China.

  Compared with the human passers-by, who mostly ignore you, the pigeons pay close attention, and I find that more upsetting. A battle rages among the birds vying for control of the top of the statue, and the temporary victor perches on your head. Its victory makes
it so proud of itself, so relaxed, and your face is soon covered with shit.

  Last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about death. For a while, I even felt that my body was giving off an odour worse than shit. I could not get to sleep, as an intense cold wind beat against my window, against the darkness that surrounded me. I thought about your statue. On such a nasty evening, not even pigeons would want a place on your head. It must be so lonely. You must be so lonely. Death must be so lonely. Our bodies will all go rotten in the end. I cannot imagine that smell worse than shit. To me, the word is just a description that ensured that my mother’s expression of disgust is stored in my memory for ever. Troubled by my mother’s expression, I thought of death the whole night.

  When I got up this morning, I had an intense urge to stand in front of your statue again. So I went to Concordia. I was disappointed, because the park is now a construction site, and I could not see your statue. I asked a construction worker, who told me that your statue was so dirty that it needed to be cleaned and restored. It would only be re-erected next spring. The word restored made me think of revolution, partly because both words start with the same letters, partly because in the lexicon of the communist culture I grew up with, restoration has almost the same meaning as counter-revolutionary, which is a word I’m sure you dislike.

  Your statue was a present from the Chinese government to the Canadian people, a symbol of the normalization of relations between China and Canada. The government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau—whom my neighbour Claude thinks of as a totalitarian ruler—restored your status by acknowledging your Canadian nationality. In addition to being an idol in a foreign country, you became a legend among your own people, too, thus becoming a bridge between the most populous country in the world and the country with the second largest area.

  I’ve always thought it strange that I have no recollection of the normalization of relations between China and Canada. I only learned of Pierre Elliott Trudeau much later on. But I do have a vivid memory of the normalization of Sino-American relations, which happened soon after. In 1972, just after Nixon and his crafty secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, visited China, a lot of political jokes circulated in China. These jokes showed us the soft side of the American imperialists. It was a charming chapter in my childhood. We told those jokes again and again, finding them endlessly funny.

  I remember talking to Yangyang about those jokes soon after we became friends, discovering that the versions we had heard were about the same as the versions circulating in the provincial capital. We all knew that Nixon had been interested in the basic means of transportation of the Chinese people, the bicycle, which we were sure was a Chinese invention—and we were confident he could never have seen such a vehicle before going to Beijing. The joke went that he made a request to Premier Zhou Enlai, hoping to take a sample back to America so he could show it to his own people. Yes, the ignorance of the American president and his curiosity gave us a good feeling about American imperialism.

  Another joke showed the wit of the Chinese leadership. At a state banquet one evening, Nixon suddenly had to go to the washroom, appearing as if he was suffering from indigestion. Dr. Kissinger, who understood what this visit to the washroom was really all about, made sure the president could go to the bathroom alone, with no bathroom staff in attendance. Remembering that Nixon had just read a CIA report saying that the wine glasses at the banquet table were made out of a special shatterproof material unknown to American science, Dr. Kissinger knew that Nixon had stuffed a glass up his sleeve.

  In the bathroom, the American commander-in-chief racked his brains to work out the best plan of action. Even though that glass was supposedly as strong as stone, he still treated it as though it were fragile. In the end, he succeeded in finding a safe place for it, a place that not only offered privacy but was also as soft as a bird’s nest.

  When Nixon returned to his place at the banquet with a relieved look on his face, Dr. Kissinger got to his feet and clinked glasses with our premier, expressing the hope that relations between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China would always remain friendly.

  When Nixon returned to his presidential suite, he rushed to the bathroom, unbuckled his belt, and was about to get out the Chinese national secret he had just stolen when he heard his wife exclaim in surprise. He buckled his belt again and rushed out of the bathroom to discover that the First Lady had found a single wine glass on the bed. Beside it was a note handwritten by our premier himself, which read: “Revered Mr. President, Sino-American relations must be built on a foundation of mutual trust. There should be no secrets between us. On behalf of Chairman Mao, I only hope that your digestion returns to normal as soon as possible, just as relations between our two great nations have now normalized. And this wine glass should go with another one — its ‘brother.’ Let the twin be a symbol of the friendship between our two great countries, never to be separated again.”

  Such jokes were passed around our cloistered world. They displayed not only the humour of the Chinese people but perhaps our excessive self-confidence as well. And they did give us a basic understanding of the American president, too, so we were hardly surprised by Watergate. Who could be surprised when a president who had stolen a wine glass was discovered to have wiretapped his opponents?

  Many years later, I finally realized that the bicycle is in fact a Western invention. The last Emperor, a Bertolucci film, includes a scene of Puyi, the last emperor of China, as a teenager riding around the Forbidden City on what was supposedly the first bicycle ever imported to China— a present from his Scottish tutor. I also learned, later on, that Americans had produced unbreakable wine glasses long before their president’s historic visit to China. These later realizations did not, however, detract from my appreciation of the jokes or of the Chinese confidence and wisdom that inspired them.

  I feel sorry for Canadian politicians. They failed to stimulate our imagination and our creativity like their American counterparts. Now I think that one of the main reasons concerns you, dear Dr. Bethune, for you became a symbol of Canada. Your great spirit made us look upon Canada with great respect and tremendous seriousness, causing our wit to wilt.

  I miss you, Dr. Bethune. I miss you the same way I miss my own childhood, the same way I miss my childhood companion, Yangyang. I hope your statue will be quickly restored and returned to the park. I don’t know where the pigeons that usually surround you will winter. Sometimes they remind me of Oscar Wilde’s famous children’s story about a statue and a bird, “The Happy Prince”—even though I know that before you became a statue you weren’t a prince, nor were you the least bit happy. When I learned from the archive just how unhappy your last few months in China were, I cried. I even felt our celebration of your life is a kind of insult to you. I know that what you really needed were women, coffee, correspondence, and news of the outside world. For instance, you should have known, before you cut your finger, that World War II had broken out. And you should have known who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, and why.

  On the way back from Concordia, I thought of a story Yangyang told me. His father had given a plaster statue of Chairman Mao to his mother as an engagement gift. It always sat on the desk in their one-room home. On the morning of Yangyang’s eighth birthday, when he was arranging his pencil case, he accidentally knocked it over, and it shattered on the red tile floor. His mother rushed over and, seeing the shards, slapped Yangyang on the face, yelling, “How dare you! This is an counter-revolutionary act!”

  That afternoon, when Yangyang returned from school, his mother was waiting for him. She had gone and bought a portrait of Chairman Mao to hang on the wall, and she ordered Yangyang to kneel in front of it, making “the most sincere” apology to the great saviour and begging for his forgiveness. Yangyang remained kneeling a total of two hours, humiliated and hungry. He knew he wouldn’t get anything to eat later on, either, for his mother had dumped the
birthday dinner she had prepared the day before down the toilet. He also knew he could not, as a counter-revolutionary, ask for anything to eat. After two hours of repentance, Yangyang went right to bed, still feeling humiliated and hungry. He told me he learned two things from this incident. First, that hunger isn’t as scary as he had imagined. Second, that our most fearsome enemy was not the Soviet revisionists—the Polar Bear—or the American imperialists—the Paper Tiger. The fiercest enemy we had was time—the torture of hours, minutes, and seconds.

  Yangyang recorded the details of his life in different ways in his notebook. He did not mention how he was punished on his eighth birthday, but he did add a mysterious ending to the story. He wrote that he lay awake the most of the night and saw his mother take the fragments of the plaster statue out of the drawer where she had put them, and wrap them in a cloth. He thought she was going to throw them out, but instead she started hammering on the cloth until the fragments turned to dust.

  Yangyang never asked his mother why. He did not know if she did it out of fear or out of hate. In fact, he didn’t let his mother know he saw anything that night. He didn’t mention the ending when he told me this story, either.

  Dr. Bethune, this little story might give you an idea of the environment in which your spiritual children grew up. After you died, your great friend became God for us, all the Chinese people. In every Chinese city, there were many statues of him. Unlike your statue, his were always huge. And, interestingly enough, I never saw pigeons dare to shit on the top of his statues. This showed the wisdom of Chinese pigeons. They knew the consequence of counter-revolutionary crime: “The criminal is sentenced to execution, to be carried out immediately!” This was the frightening announcement we all heard at the public trials we participated as part of the school curriculum.

  A Contrast

  Dear Dr. Bethune, I have a question for you. Had you read any books about China before you read Edgar Snow’s bestselling book, Red Star Over China? Or, to put it another way, besides communists like Mao, did you ever develop any interest in other Chinese people, such as Cixi, the Empress Dowager; Puyi, the last Emperor; Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China; the rebels of the Boxer Rebellion; or the fake foreign devil who was a xenophile in Lu Xun’s story, “The True Story of Ah Q.”