Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [63]
“Which Yang Jiang?” asked the manager.
“Qian Zhongshu’s wife, Yang Jiang.”
“Oh,” the manager said, as if he’d suddenly remembered, “you mean that Yang Jiang. Probably because nobody was buying her books.”
Lao Chen’s head began to pound again. He hadn’t read those kinds of books for a while himself, but did it mean that the tastes of the general public had changed, too?
Lao Chen turned to Zhuang Zizhong. “Master Zhuang, I have to leave now to attend to some business. It was wonderful to see you; do take care of yourself.” Then he turned to Mrs. Zhuang and said, “Take good care of Master Zhuang, he’s a national treasure.”
As Lao Chen left the Sanlian Bookstore, he was wondering if he had been too ingratiating, if calling Zhuang Zizhong a national treasure was a bit over-the-top. But then he remembered what the character Wei Xiaobao in Jin Yong’s novel The Deer and the Cauldron always said: “Of all the things that can go wrong, flattery will never go wrong. What does it matter if you make other people happy?”
“Blowing in the Wind”
As soon as Lao Chen got home, he took a couple of aspirins, went to bed, and slept until morning; when he woke up, he still didn’t feel like getting up. At midday, he made some instant noodles, one of the hundred flavors offered by the Master Kong brand, but he didn’t care which flavor he was eating. When he’d finished, he went on to the Dangdang and Amazon China Internet sites to look up Yang Jiang’s works—it was true, there really were no entries under her name.
He went on to look up June 4, 1989, and Falun Gong 1999, and just as he expected, no books on these topics came up. But then he found that there were no books listed either about the Yan-an Rectification Campaign, Land Reform, the 1979 Democracy Wall Movement, the April Fifth Movement, and the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution and Crackdown on Crime Campaign—no books on any of these previously frequently discussed topics of the 1980s and 1990s. The only books that kept coming up were The China Reader: Contemporary China and The Popular Edition of a Short History of China—two standard tomes on modern and contemporary Chinese history, both authorized by the government in the last two years.
Old Fang really could be extremely perceptive, and this time he was right on target. In all the bookstores and even on their Web sites, where they claimed to stock every book in the world, of all the thousands of titles listed, Lao Chen could not find one single book that might explain the true facts about contemporary Chinese history. Why hadn’t he noticed this a long time ago?
During the Cultural Revolution and at the beginning of Reform and Opening, there were very few books in the bookstores, and everyone knew that the true facts were being suppressed. But today, thought Lao Chen, there is a profusion of books everywhere, so many they knock you over, but the true facts are still being suppressed. It’s just that people are under the illusion that they are following their own reading preferences and freely choosing what they read.
Continuing his web search, he discovered he couldn’t find anything by using key phrases like “June 4, 1989,” “Tiananmen Incident,” and so on. Even the items that came up on the Cultural Revolution were terrible—just a load of nostalgic guff for an adolescence spent in the brilliant sunshine of the glorious past. The few items that discussed the history of the Cultural Revolution were only simplistic, officially sanitized versions.
Lao Chen was aghast. No wonder young people today cannot even say who belonged to the Gang of Four, he thought, and people born after 1980 have never even heard of Wei Jingsheng, the early dissident who called for democracy as the Fifth Modernization, or Liu Binyan, the most celebrated People’s Daily investigative reporter of the 1980s; and no wonder whenever the June 1989 student leader Wang Dan lectures overseas about the Tiananmen Massacre, there are