Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [36]
Now I’m twenty-four. When I was twenty-two, I formulated my ten-year plan, and have been fulfilling it step-by-step, but I must not get too self-satisfied. What was Chairman Mao doing when he was thirty years old? He was one of the five members of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. With this in mind, I know that I have to work much harder.
PS: The “SS” in the SS Study Group refers to two Germans (even though one of them was a Jew) whose last names begin with S. The Group started up by studying their ideas on politics, theology, and philosophy, but later on it was no longer of any importance who they were.
PPS: I suffer from one minor annoyance—unfortunately Little Xi is my “mother.” She’s the one uncertain element in the progress of my project. I have to eliminate this uncertainty. If we were still living under Chairman Mao, she would certainly long since have been condemned as a counterrevolutionary element. But our government has grown much too lenient. I asked my superior in the Ministry of State Security to lock her up in a mental hospital for a long time, but he told me not to worry about her. He said everything was under control; and they wanted to let her move around freely to monitor those she came into contact with. I had no choice.
Searching for a lost month
I’m Fang Caodi and I’m making this recording.
I finally found a true brother. His name is Zhang Dou. He is twenty-two years old, from Henan Province, and he lives in the village of Huairou outside Beijing. I’m sixty-five years old, so I have the right to call him younger brother and to occupy the rank of elder brother, ha, ha.
Just like me, he remembers everything about that lost month, those twenty-eight days between the time when the world economy went into crisis and China’s “Golden Age of Ascendancy” officially began. Two years of searching has told me that this is very rare and extremely important.
He also has asthma just like me and has been taking corticosteroids for many years. This has led me to the bold hypothesis that our not suffering from memory loss has something to do with our asthma. Ha! This is wonderful news. It proves that within the boundaries of our nation, there are as many people who still remember what happened that year as there are suffers from chronic asthma. It’s just that they don’t know of each other’s existence. If I can bring together a hundred or a thousand of these asthmatics, then I can prove to all our nation’s people that that month did in fact exist. Ha!
Last Friday evening, I went to Wudaokou to see a friend, and the outdoor equipment store on the ground floor of his apartment building was being cleared out and cleaned. I went in to look around and under a pile of junk I noticed an old copy of the popular liberal paper Southern Weekly from that lost month. It must have been the last issue they came out with before being forced to stop publishing. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a great treasure, so I just bought a few things and then took the paper along with them. When I compared the printed version of the Southern Weekly with the online version, as I expected there were many discrepancies. For example, the printed version carried an article critical of that year’s crackdown, but in the online version it had been deleted and replaced by an article explaining why Western universal values are inappropriate for China. I don’t know why, but when I saw how the Southern Weekly had been defiled and distorted so that it was now opposed to universal values, I burst out laughing. I forgot that the coffee shop was full of other customers.
That lone issue of the Southern Weekly was my document No. 71—evidence for the true historical existence of that missing month.
Even more fortunately,