Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [27]
I also started to suspect that the antidepressants the hospital had given me were having serious side effects.
Now I go on the Internet all day and argue with people under several different names.
I discovered that the nationalistic “angry youth” on the Internet are actually not all youths. Some of them are in their fifties and sixties. They grew up during the Cultural Revolution and heeded Old Mao’s call for young people to engage with important national affairs. None of them went to college. They work at the most menial jobs in society and haven’t had the benefits of the Reform and Opening policies. Now they are laid-off or retired and they have learned how to go on the Internet, where they can find like-minded people and a place to vent their anger and dissatisfaction. Their language is the language of the Cultural Revolution, they especially revere Mao Zedong, are especially nationalistic, anti-American, and bellicose. The cultural enlightenment movement of the 1980s and the ideological polemics of the 1990s have had no influence on them. Their mode of thinking remains an unreconstructed Maoist Chinese Communist Party mode of thinking. I love to contact them, to join their patriotic forums, old-classmates’ Web sites, and argue with them. I present the strict facts and employ reasoned arguments, and I argue exclusively from the point of view of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. This infuriates them, and they all attack me.
I know only that in doing this I am reminding everyone that they should never forget that the Chinese Communist Party is not the great, glorious, always correct party of their propaganda.
Of course I am also telling myself never to forget this lesson.
Naturally my postings are very quickly deleted by the Internet police; sometimes they block me completely and I cannot even post them. But their posts are never ever deleted.
Wei Guo must have found out about my Internet activities and turned me in to the authorities. That’s why I’m being watched.
I feel very lonely. I don’t trust anyone except my mother. A while ago, I ran into the writer Lao Chen, at the Sanlian Bookstore. He used to come to the old restaurant quite often to talk, and the impression he gave me was that he was one of us. He’s also Taiwanese, so I latched on to him and jabbered on for quite a while before I realized that I hadn’t seen him in ten years, and he might not be the person he was back then. The Taiwanese and Hong Kong people of today are not like the Taiwanese and Hong Kong people back then. How could he be the same? Eventually I found some excuse and left. I didn’t think that he would look up my mother’s new restaurant, and then get my e-mail address from her. My mother must still be hoping that I’ll find a man and stop doing what she believes are crazy things. She still has another mistaken idea: she thinks I cannot get along with mainland-Chinese men, so she is always introducing me to Taiwanese and Hong Kong men. What can I tell her? I’m such a bad daughter, still relying on her to support me at my age.
My poor mother, she has to deal with Wei Guo every day and take care of him for me. Even when she wants to send me an e-mail, she doesn’t dare use our home computer. She has to walk a long way over to an Internet café for fear that Wei Guo will find out where I am. She never gives up on anyone—if I have inherited any good traits, they all come from her.
Should I take a gamble and answer Lao Chen’s e-mail? I’m really longing for someone whom I can talk to face-to-face, but everyone I’ve met in these last two years