Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [26]
In 1992, Deng Xiaoping made his “southern tour” in support of continued economic Reform and Openness, and then Beijing’s financial conditions started to improve. At that time we worked particularly hard on our business and didn’t go in for any more “salon” activities. My mother and I read up on some new recipes, remodeled the restaurant inside and out, trained a new cook from Guizhou, and business gradually picked up, but it was exhausting work. My mother handled the lunch crowd while I took care of my son in the daytime, then I handled the dinner crowd. Gradually some of our old customers started drifting back. They would talk for hours, taking from five thirty to midnight to eat dinner. Sometimes I would sit beside them and listen, but I would close up shop at midnight—no more talking until dawn. Freedom of speech at the dinner table slowly returned in the late 1990s. By listening to them talk and by reading some of the banned books from Hong Kong they gave me, I slowly began to understand what modern Chinese history had really been like, especially the things that my mother and father had been through.
Our Taiwanese and Hong Kong compatriots also started coming back, along with some foreigners. Peter, or Pi-te as we used to call him, arrived around the middle of 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China. I called him Little Pi. He was slightly younger than me and very shy. He was a reporter stationed in Beijing, working for a foreign news agency, and he especially liked me to tell him about the Tiananmen democracy movement of 1989. After we’d known each other for a year, he very formally asked me to be his girlfriend. I thought he was decent, and nobody else seemed to be after me at the time, so I agreed. I knew that I wouldn’t be with him for a lifetime—I didn’t love him that much—so I refused to move in with him. Later, when he was transferred home, he asked me to marry him, but I turned him down.
At that time all my friends loved to discuss contemporary politics and criticize the government. That’s why I cannot adapt to today’s situation. Suddenly in the last two years, since China’s so-called Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began, not only has everybody stopped criticizing the government, but they have all become extremely satisfied with the current state of affairs. I don’t know how this transformation came about. My mind is a complete blank because I recently spent some time in a mental hospital and the medicine they gave me has left me muddleheaded. My mother tells me that one day I came home and started shouting, “They’re going to crack down again! They’re cracking down again!” She says I didn’t sleep all night and kept mumbling to myself. Early the next morning, I went out into the courtyard and started cursing the Communist Party, cursing the government, and cursing our neighbors, shouting that the law courts are all bullshit. And the courtyard was full of representatives of the Chinese legal system! Not long after that, I fainted, and when I woke up I was in a mental hospital. My son, Wei Guo, said he had arranged it all. He said he had saved my life by preventing me from shouting all that crazy nonsense. Otherwise, if a crackdown really did start, they would probably shoot me in the head.
When I was discharged, everybody around me had already changed. When I asked them what had happened while I was in the hospital, they wouldn’t tell me. I don’t know if they were feigning ignorance or if they really didn’t remember. What astonished me most was their reaction when I started to talk about the past, especially the events around June 4, 1989. They didn’t want to talk about it; their faces went blank. When we talked about the Cultural Revolution,