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By Root 1224 0

main article, “The Leviathan Has Arrived,” introduced the seventeenth-century Western political philosopher Thomas Hobbes; the general theme of the article was that given a choice between anarchy and dictatorship, people will always choose the latter. Another article was a retrospective report describing how the government had failed miserably during the 2008 riot of over ten thousand people in Wan-an in Guizhou Province, when the police were accused of covering up the death of a young girl; in the Tujia ethnic region of Xiangxi in Hunan, I found an incomplete clipping from the Southern Weekly; it was an advertisement on how to use a made-in-China radio—because at that time many people were afraid that the power supply would fail and they would not be able to watch TV or surf the net, so they bought radios. On the reverse side of that advertisement was an article discussing the 1983 crackdown on criminality.

As time went by, media evidence was harder and harder to come by. That’s why I was so ecstatic when I found that late-February Southern Weekly with its clear evidence of that missing month.

I became much more anxious to find people like myself. I made a list of all the people I knew. The ones I believed always to have a clear understanding of things I called clearheaded people. I went to talk to these clearheaded people one by one, but came back disappointed every time. Am I like the lone survivor on earth whom we see in those apocalypse movies? But the heroes in those films are always destined to find other survivors later on. I relied on that idea to persist resolutely in my search.

Finally I met Zhang Dou. We both believe that this is only a beginning. Out of more than a billion Chinese people there must be many more like us.

I told Zhang Dou I’d been going to his home every day to see if Miaomiao and the dogs and cats needed anything. I like his kind and smiling Miaomiao and her pets more and more. Zhang Dou said that when he got out of the hospital I could come and live with them. Ha! I was quite excited. I need a safe place to store my accumulated evidence. I hope Zhang Dou gets out of the hospital soon.

A supplementary tape recording: I spent a few days visiting several big hospitals pretending to be sick but actually taking a look at their asthmatic patients. I tried to raise the issue of the missing month, but I was disappointed because none of them remembered it. I thought everyone taking corticosteroids would be just like Zhang Dou and me, but I was mistaken. I told Zhang Dou about my discovery, but I also told him that we must not give up. “We absolutely must not forget how lonely we used to be. As long as there might be Chinese people who have not forgotten that month, we definitely have to look for them.”

To prevent us forgetting, here is another supplementary tape: Last week on New East Road I ran into Lao Chen, a former journalist for Mingbao and the United Daily. I remembered that he used to be one of my clearheaded people who once helped me out with something important. Is he still a member of the clearheaded group? From the look in his eyes, I think the chances of him still being one of us are not great, but I should not let any opportunity go by. Look him up when you have time.

Lao Chen’s notebook on Fang Caodi

Little Xi, or feichengwuraook, didn’t return my e-mail, but Fang Caodi sent me one asking me to come and see him. I didn’t answer him immediately.

Recently all I’d been thinking of was Little Xi and I couldn’t seem to stop. But what was really weird was that when I thought about Little Xi, I also started thinking about Fang Caodi. I kept thinking about that time I saw him jogging near Happiness Village Number Two and all the mouleitao nonsense he kept spouting. For all the many years I’ve known him, I noted to myself, he’s always called me Lao Chen, but this time he actually called me Master Chen. I even started to think that Fang Caodi’s state of mind seemed to be in some inexplicable manner similar to Little Xi’s.

The other day I opened up a box that I have not opened since moving