Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [19]
“I’ve invited my cousin to watch the film and taste your wine,” Jian later said as we were eating.
I didn’t remember ever meeting his cousin and I wasn’t particularly happy about sharing my expensive wine with someone I didn’t know.
Just then a rather stern and pale-faced man with sparse hair came in and greeted Jian Lin as “Elder Brother.”
“This is my cousin, Dongsheng. This is my good friend from Taiwan, Lao Chen.”
“He Dongsheng, we’ve met before,” I said as we shook hands. “It was at the Macao session of the Prosperous China Conference in 1992; you were the representative from Fudan University.”
“Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng said softly.
Jian Lin looked puzzled. “Do you two know each other?”
“Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng repeated.
We all felt a little awkward. “We met twenty years ago,” I said.
A wealthy Taiwanese named Shui Xinghua—meaning “prosperous China”—had set up a foundation that held four Xinghua, or Prosperous China, conferences in the early 1990s. The idea was to invite a dozen or so promising young people from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to get together and exchange ideas and experiences. In Macao in 1992, He Dongsheng was a mainland delegate and I was a Taiwanese delegate. He Dongsheng was just a young scholar at that time and didn’t give us the impression that he was particularly outstanding, but then later he became a high-ranking official in the Communist Party.
We all raised our glasses to each other, and after that we watched the film. Nobody said a word throughout the entire thing except once when Jian Lin commented, “The woman playing the mother-in-law of the counterrevolutionary was really very young at the time. You can still see her quite often these days on TV.”
During the screening, I took a look at He Dongsheng. He seemed to have fallen asleep. Jian Lin was very conscientiously watching the film—he really did love those old Red Classics.
Never Forget Class Struggle was about an electrical-machinery factory in the Northeast. The workers were all striving to improve production, but then one young worker married a woman with a petit bourgeois family background. She urged her husband to buy himself a suit made of extremely expensive material, costing about 148 renminbi. The young worker’s mother-in-law also urged him to hunt wild ducks during his free time and sell them at a profit on the black market. He took so much time off that his absence from work almost caused a major accident and harmed the national interest. All this was because of a loss of revolutionary vigilance—they had forgotten about the class struggle. At the end of the film, five big, blood-red words filled the screen: NEVER FORGET THE CLASS STRUGGLE!
“Pretty good,” I said, “interesting, but when young people see it now they probably won’t understand it. They’ll need someone to interpret it for them.”
Suddenly He Dongsheng spoke up. “It’s easy to make them work for eight hours, but it’s hard to control them after those eight hours. Old Mao never solved that problem.”
I was rather surprised that He Dongsheng would come right out and call Mao Zedong “Old Mao.”
“Did you know, after Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Openness’ started,” he continued, “there was a magazine in Tianjin called After Work? Eight hours was work time and after eight hours—after work—was leisure time, but nobody knew then what to do with leisure time. Socialism had totally transformed work time, but was unable to handle after-work time, the time after those eight hours of work …”
“After they work eight hours, let capitalism take care of them,” Jian Lin quipped.
“Yes, definitely,” He Dongsheng continued—the alcohol had loosened him up.