Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [43]
In 2006 he moved to Beijing, said he wanted to see what it would be like to be an Olympic volunteer. When we met again I learned that he had changed his name many years before from Fang Lijun to Fang Caodi. According to him, one day he was walking past the Temple of the Sun in Beijing, when he saw many parents picking up their children from the Fangcaodi, or “fragrant grass,” Elementary School, and so he decided to change his name to Fang Caodi. That’s just Old Fang’s logic—no logic at all. With his advanced age and his complicated history, I wonder if the Olympic Committee accepted his application.
I closed the notebook. After I published my Comprehensive Cultural Guide to Beijing well ahead of the Olympics, I wanted to write stories only about contemporary China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. I didn’t want to discuss past events anymore. I didn’t even want to look at the historical materials on the KMT–CCP Civil War, Land Reform, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward that caused thirty million people to starve to death, the Four Clean-ups or Socialist Education Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, the Tiananmen Massacre, the Campaign to Suppress the Falun Gong, and so on and so on … I just wanted to forget all those things.
If I could rid my mind of it, a new subject would come to me. My own interests had completely changed, and I didn’t believe that the new generation of Chinese readers wanted to read about all the wounds and scars of the past sixty years. I really wanted to write only about new people and new things, to write about the Chinese people’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.
3.
FROM SPRING TO SUMMER
A French crystal chandelier
Little Xi didn’t return my e-mail, so my happy life could continue. I went to the 798 Art District to participate in the opening ceremony for an exhibition of paper-cutting installation art by women from the Northwest. My friend from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was the academic cocurator, and she’d invited me to be one of the ten speakers at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. In my three-minute talk, I summarized the Taiwan New Communities Movement of the 1990s and discussed how Taipei artists and local craftspeople had worked hand in hand to bring cultural production in villages back to life. I spoke so well I got a little emotional myself. The curator also said this exhibition was a fine example of the vitality of Chinese folk culture.
A lunch was held at the nearby Golden Chiangnan restaurant, and I was placed at the same table as the representative of the China National Cultural Renaissance Foundation. The Foundation had sent only an assistant secretary-general. He told me how one of their most important projects was assisting Chinese around the world to locate and retrieve national treasures that had been stolen from the Summer Palace and other sites. Besides that, the Foundation was working to revive China’s ancient rites throughout the entire nation by, for example, providing financial subsidies to many elementary and middle schools to carry out initiation ceremonies at the beginning of every school year, usually requiring students to bow and pay their respects to their teachers. The Foundation was also working hard to have various traditional-style rituals declared “national statutory