Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [24]
At that point the retired army officer who had been assigned with me said, “The hooligan intentionally injured others. His sentence was too light and out of step with the spirit of Party Central.”
“Then we’ll just change the sentence to execution and say he made it onto the list.” Turning to me the deputy chief added, “Female comrade, you should not be so kindhearted.” His reprimand really knocked me back—that’s how weak I was.
That weekend we shot ten people in the back of the head. I was ashamed of my cowardice and felt so angry about my compromise. What good is the law? Is this a society that practices the rule of law? I debated with myself. When I returned from the execution grounds that day, I set out on a path from which there could be no return.
In the next round, the court secretaries went together with the district police officers to various locations to investigate cases and arrest people. Then we took the accused to the Public Security Bureau in the county seat for trial. I had already made up my mind: for any crime that didn’t deserve capital punishment, I would say so outright. Since there would be a record that one of the two judicial representatives was opposed to the death sentence, the others in the group would be unable to insist on it and would have to change the sentence. But in this way there would be fewer death sentences, and everybody would be afraid of criticism from higher up. Members of my work unit phoned me and tried to dissuade me from acting the way I was, but I just ignored them.
Later on, I came to know that even if I had not had an “accident,” my work unit was already planning to transfer me. One night in the county seat, an army vehicle ran into me. This was a common occurrence. In rural areas, army vehicles sped around like crazy and often ran into people. If civilians were killed or injured, they just had to accept their fate. But even though it was a common occurrence, usually if an army vehicle ran into a member of the Public Security authorities, there would be endless wranglings back and forth between these and the military. In my case, however, the army took me straight to Number 301 Hospital, and afterward my work unit didn’t inquire further into the incident.
After leaving the hospital, I handed in my resignation and became a person without a work unit. And my mother didn’t have a bad thing to say about it.
I became a privately self-employed person by opening a small restaurant with my mother. We mostly served her Guizhou-style goose. In the 1980s, Beijing was a fascinating place, the heart of an era full of promise. Our first regular customers were natives of Guizhou, especially scholars and writers who had moved to Beijing. They brought other Beijing writers, artists, and scientists and foreigners to eat and to talk. My mother loved to entertain guests and I loved the excitement. Everybody called me Little Xi. We expanded our restaurant and renamed it The Five Flavors. In the autumn of 1988, I met Shi Ping and fell in love.
He was a poet. There is nothing at all poetic about me, but we both cherished genuine sentiment. Shi Ping said that someday he would certainly receive the Nobel Prize for literature, and I said I would certainly accompany him to Sweden to attend the award ceremony. That was the happiest time in my entire life.
We didn’t really have too much time alone together, though, because Shi Ping liked to spend time with his poet and artist mates. There were quite a few women around him, but, surprisingly, I didn’t mind.
Every night The Five Flavors was full of our intellectual and artistic friends debating issues, drafting and signing manifestos, competing jealously for each other’s affections, getting drunk and throwing up. The police visited us frequently, but my mother was very adept at getting rid of them.
In the spring of 1989 Shi Ping and a group of his friends went to Lake Baiyangdian and stayed a few days—they had been “sent down” there during the Cultural Revolution. I came back to