MCLC: Yan Lianke on amnesia (4)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: James McMath <mcmathja at gmail.com>
Subject: Yan Lianke on amnesia (4)
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Stumbled across this - anecdote #6 is perhaps relevant to the discussion
on amnesia. 

James McMath

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Source: NY Review of Books
(4/4/13):http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/04/fang-lizhi-man-wh
o-changed-china/

‘Hi! I’m Fang!’ The Man Who Changed ChinaPerry Link
<http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/perry-link-2/#tab-blog>Forrest
Anderson/Getty Images

Fang Lizhi

In China in the 1980s, the wordrenquan (“human rights”) was extremely
“sensitive.” Few dared even to utter it in public, let alone to champion
the concept. Now, nearly three decades later, a grassroots movement called
weiquan (“supporting rights”) has spread widely, and it seems clear that
China’s rulers are helpless to reverse it. Even people at the lowest
levels of society demand their rights. No one brought about this dramatic
change single-handedly, but arguably no one did more to get it started
than Fang Lizhi, the Chinese astrophysicist, activist, and dissident, who
died a year ago this week. We were friends for many years; here are eight
of my favorite memories of him.

1.
In the fall of 1988, when I was working in Beijing for the scholarly
exchange office of the US National Academy of Sciences, my friend Orville
Schell asked if I would like to meet Fang Lizhi and his wife, Li Shuxian.
Fang had been expelled from the Communist Party a year earlier, and I had
admired his trenchant speeches on human rights and democracy; of course I
wanted to meet him. With Orville as intermediary, we all accepted an
invitation to dinner on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Festival, at the
classic old-style courtyard home in Beijing of Zhang Hanzhi (a former
English tutor of Mao Zedong and widow of Qiao Guanhua, who had served as
foreign minister for Mao from 1974-1976). About eight people sat around an
outdoor table. What struck me about Fang was how quiet he was. He seldom
spoke—although it was clear that he was listening because he occasionally
burst out in joyous laughter. I knew that Fang had been a high-ranking
academic official and perhaps I was expecting someone who spoke with a bit
of guanqiang (“official flavor”) or other stylized self-presentation. Not
Fang. “Hi! I’m Fang!” That was it.

2.
On February 26, 1989, George H. W. Bush, on his first visit to China after
his election as president, invited a large number of Chinese and Americans
to a Texas-style barbecue at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing.
Fang and I and our spouses were among the invitees, and we shared a car to
the event. A few hundred yards before we reached the hotel, a swarm of
police surrounded the car, talked with the driver about his “speeding,”
and, after we had all exited the car and begun to walk toward the hotel,
pulled Fang and his wife aside to tell them that, despite the printed
invitation they held in their hands, they were “not on the invitation
list.” (We did not know it at the time, but that same afternoon, Deng
Xiaoping had made it clear that Fang should be prevented from attending.)

Showing little sign of upset, Fang proposed that we take a taxi to the US
Embassy to confirm the invitation. Before our taxi had moved eight blocks,
it was stopped by another swarm of police, this time for a “defective tail
light.” Undeterred, Fang proposed that we wait at a public bus stop to
catch a bus to the embassy. As a bus approached, about one hundred yards
before it reached the stop we could see someone flag it down and say
something to the driver. The bus then went by without stopping. About
thirty others were waiting at the stop, and they shouted. Some cursed. We
waited for a second bus, and the same thing happened.

Finally, Fang looked at me and said, “We are the problem here. We have to
leave. It isn’t fair to these laobaixing (“ordinary folk”). It’s the end
of the day and they’re trying to go home.” So we left the bus stop and
headed for the embassy on foot. Here we were at the focal point of a drama
that involved a US president and China’s top leader. Police were swarming
and odd events kept occurring. A few hours later the incident was in
headlines around the world. But Fang? He was worried that laobaixing
couldn’t catch a bus.

3.
About two hours later, on that same night of February 26, 1989, we had
walked to the gate of the US ambassador’s residence at 17 Guanghua Road in
Beijing. Several police were there, and they told us “no one is inside.”
We gave up on attending the banquet, but we still needed to get home. By
chance, we met a Canadian diplomat named David Horley and his wife, who
were out for an evening walk in the diplomatic quarter. The Horleys well
knew who Fang Lizhi was, and they invited us to their apartment to offer a
snack, a couch, and use of a telephone. At the gate of the Horleys’
apartment building, a policeman demanded to know the identity of the
Chinese visitors. Horley began explaining his rights as a diplomat to
invite into his residence anyone of his choosing, but the niceties of
international law plainly were floating over the head of the Chinese
policeman. Fang took another tack. He took out his Chinese ID card from
his pocket, stepped forward right in front of the policemen, held the card
in two hands in front of his chest, about four inches beneath his chin,
and said in a sharp, clear voice: “Fang…Li…Zhi!”

This was surprising. I think it surprised even the policeman, who let us
in without further questions.

4.
In May, 1989, while student demonstrators were in the streets of Beijing
calling for democracy, I listened as a Western journalist interviewed
Fang. At the end, the interviewer asked if there were a way he could
pursue follow-up questions if necessary. Fang said “sure,” and gave the
reporter his telephone number.

“We’ve heard that your phone is tapped,” the reporter said. “Is it?”

“I assume so.” Fang grinned.

“Doesn’t that…bother you?” the reporter asked.

“No,” said Fang, “for years I’ve been trying to get them to listen to me.
If this is how they want to do it, then fine!”

5.
On the morning of the horrific June 4 massacre, 1989, I rode my bicycle to
the homes of several Chinese friends in Beijing. I wanted to hear what
they had to say, and I wanted to offer help if they thought I could be of
use. At Fang’s apartment his wife answered the door. She was trembling
with rage. “They’re mad! They’ve really gone mad!” she kept repeating in a
hoarse whisper. Fang, sitting at his desk, maintained equanimity, but it
seemed it was a struggle for him too. Friends had been telephoning, urging
Fang and Li to flee, because word was already out that they were numbers
one and two on the government’s list of people responsible for the
“counterrevolutionary rebellion.” But Fang said, “This is my home. I have
done nothing wrong. Why should I leave?”

Several hours later, after further urging from friends, the two did leave,
but those surprising words have stuck in my mind. In a situation where
fear, anger, or confusion would have overwhelmed most people, Fang clung
to first principles: I have a right to stay in my home.

6.
Late at night on June 6, 1989, American diplomats invited Fang Lizhi and
Li Shuxian, who were still in acute danger, to take temporary refuge in
the US Embassy. In the fall of 1988, in Beijing, I had introduced Fang to
Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review, who then published an
article by him 
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1989/feb/02/chinas-despair-and-ch
inas-hope/> in early 1989. During Fang and Li’s stay at the embassy—which
would in the end last more than a year—Silvers invited him to write
another essay and asked me to translate it. When the essay reached my
hands, I was surprised at Fang’s argument. He wrote
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1990/sep/27/the-chinese-amnesia/>
 that the 1989 democracy movement and the June Fourth massacre would soon
be forgotten in China. How could this be? The shocking events had been
broadcast to the entire world and the reverberations were still fresh.
Soon forgotten?

But Fang observed that demands for liberalization had risen in the 1956
Hundred Flowers movement, in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, and again
in 1989—and each time the protesters began anew. No group knew the history
of protest in its own country or about the progress that predecessors had
made. This was, Fang argued, because the Communist Party of China has a
program for erasing the memory of protest, and it works. They were now
applying it again, and it would likely work again. Indeed, many young
Chinese today have only vague notions that something happened in 1989, and
what they do “know” is a highly distorted government-sponsored version of
events. Fang was right.

7.
In 1992 Fang accepted a position as professor of astrophysics at the
University of Arizona, and Fang and Li Shuxian settled in Tucson. On
October 25, 2007, their younger son, Fang Zhe, was killed at a highway
intersection when an elderly driver ignored a stop sign. Thriving and
handsome one moment, gone the next. A vivid image of Fang Lizhi at his
son’s memorial service is burned into my memory. Li Shuxian was seated,
weeping. Friends and relatives were seated, weeping. I was seated,
weeping. But Fang Lizhi, host of the event, stood at the front of the
room—straight, silent, aware. Can there be anything more painful for a
human being than the death of one’s child? But there he was, tall, unbent.

8.
Less than a year before he died, I wrote Fang urging him to write more
essays, because he had literary flair. In response he sent me an essay
about a boyhood prank. In the 1940s he lived in the neighborhood of a
famous opera singer named Cheng Yanqiu. He and some mischievous friends
had the bright idea of prying some gooey tar from the roadway and
inserting it into the casing of Mr. Cheng’s doorbell button so that, once
pushed, the button would stick and the bell would not stop ringing. Then
they retreated to hide and watch the fun when someone pushed the button.

What struck me in reading this essay was that a boy had pulled that prank,
but a seventy-five-year old had sent me the essay—and the two Fangs in
essence were the same. In traditional Chinese literati culture, tongxin (a
“childlike heart”) is a virtue that one works to preserve. Fang had such a
heart, and did not even have to work hard to maintain it.

________________________________________
This post is adapted from comments made at a memorial service for Fang
Lizhi last year, and is published in conjunction with China File
<http://www.chinafile.com/>.
April 4, 2013, 11:30 p.m.