Red Moon

TA SHU 4 laojia Ancestral Home

My friends, I am back in Beijing, my hometown. I’m heavy with the weight of this world. Walking the warm summer nights, under big blurry stars, I can smell hot pots steaming on the air. As I walk the streets of my district I come upon trees that seem to be in blossom, cherries or peaches or apricots—just a single tree, here or there among all the leafy branches—looks like spring came late to these trees. But of course they are silk blossoms, that is to say plastic fabric blossoms, tied by people to trees in the depths of the winter, to give passersby a gift of the spring still some months away. Now some have been left up year-round. The city as artwork. I think it’s something they started to do up north in Xi’an, and now have brought here. Chairman Mao would have been proud to see such evidence of the energy of the Chinese people. Not that Mao Zedong was any great lover of nature, despite the occasional line of praise in his poems. Actually there is one of his poems that I like a lot, called “Return to Shaoshan,” which was his ancestral home. It goes like this:

Very nice. But notice, my friends, how even in that fine poem, the world for him is a place made by humans. Maybe that was how you had to see it then.

Mao wanted things for the Chinese people; that we can say for sure. In fact his urge to modernize fast, to reduce the suffering of the masses, resulted in utmost catastrophe for both nature and people. Millions of people dead, millions more lives destroyed. Just try something! A great leap forward, yes! Oh—thirty million people dead? Twenty-five thousand square kilometers of farmland poisoned? Try again! Try a cultural revolution, sure! Destroy the lives of an entire generation? Destroy half the physical remnants of Chinese history? Oh well! Try again!

No. Love him as we must, China was lucky Mao died when he did, putting an end to his experiments. Lucky also that Deng survived to replace him, coming back twice from banishment to the countryside, and ending up in charge of the Party. Very skillful feng shui indeed! You can’t help but love Deng, and be amused at his famous judgment on Mao, “seventy percent good, thirty percent bad.” I know the jokers and wags have ever since been whittling that formulation downward until Mao’s work is now sometimes said to be “fifty-one percent good, forty-nine percent bad,” which is where it has to stop before people get in trouble for revisionism and a nihilistic view of Party history. Deng himself could of course be subjected to a similar downtrending judgment, having ordered the violent end of the Tiananmen demonstrations. Maybe everyone ever in power would deserve such an equivocal judgment. Or everyone alive! Just try not to dip below fifty percent! You’ll find it’s not that easy.

Anyway, I like in particular Deng’s motto “Cross the river by feeling the stones.” That’s a true feng shui instruction, it could have been taken right out of the Dao de jing, it sounds like one of those Chinese proverbs older than time. And spoken by a man who had actually forded real streams, and so knew what he was talking about. Oh yes, Deng the geomancer! A man who stood tall though only four feet eleven inches in his bare feet. Commanding a billion people and yet still very grounded, very close to the earth.

Then from Deng we felt our way over stones to Xi, the next great core leader. I admired Xi Jinping. He worked hard at poverty reduction, and land restoration, and reducing corruption in the Party. No matter what else happened in his twenty years at the top, he focused on these three things. For me, making landscape restoration a great national priority was Xi’s best move, because it had never been a Party priority before, maybe not even a Chinese priority, I don’t know. But when Xi focused on that, he also improved by that effort food safety, water supplies, and public health, in just the ways that Chinese people were demanding. He only did these things to keep the Party in control, some people say, and that might be true, although I don’t know why people think they can read his mind like that. And besides, whatever his motivation, the good that came from it was real. So real that now I am walking the streets of my city in the summer and the stars swim overhead, and the air in my lungs feels like mountain water. That’s something.

Of course it is still a very tough town, and now riven by conflicts of all sorts. The coming Party congress is going to be particularly nasty, I fear. The problem with having great core leaders like Mao and Deng and Xi is that when they’re gone, the ones who come after them all want to do the same thing, be tigers just as big as they were—but the new guys aren’t as good. They fight each other like street dogs to take over power, and suddenly we find ourselves engulfed in the Great Enterprise again, even though it isn’t yet time for dynastic succession. Although it’s true that even just the ordinary imperial succession from one emperor to the next often led to chaotic times in Chinese history. When tigers fight it’s the people who bleed. And now here we are again, with Xi Jinping gone from power almost twenty years, and no one since who has managed to take his place, or do even half so well. So now we’re all in danger, crushed under the weight of the elite’s ambitions just as thoroughly as I am now crushed by Earth’s inexorable pull. The gravity of history—sometimes I get so tired of it. I wonder what it will take to achieve escape velocity from all that deadweight, and fly off into a new space.

Make a note to cut all that last part, about the situation now. Actually not sure if any of this try will be suitable for the program. Must stick to Beijing as a place. Not a good time to test the censors. Forget it! Say no more! With redoubled effort walk on, walk on!