Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [64]
What a tremendous generation gap in knowledge of contemporary Chinese history there is. For people in their fifties and sixties, these important events are part of their general knowledge. When they get together now, they still talk about them, and they even have several books and periodicals about those times that are no longer available. Because they share this knowledge, they really haven’t noticed how they’ve become increasingly marginalized. They ceased representing the mass of society long ago. There is no longer any channel for them to pass their understanding on to the younger generation. Lao Chen reflected on Lu Xun’s “counterfeit paradise” and “good hell.” In a good hell, people are aware that they are living in hell and so they want to transform it, but after living for a long time in a fake paradise, people become accustomed to it and they actually believe that they are already in paradise.
All this was quite obvious to him—Lao Chen himself was a living example, he had to concede. In the last couple of years, he’d had no stomach for reading about China’s painful contemporary history; all he’d wanted to read were famous Chinese classics and romantic fiction. He hadn’t realized that history had been rewritten and the true facts had been airbrushed away. Lao Chen was a writer of fiction, someone who told stories. He also knew that reality could be regarded merely as a construction, and that history was subject to different interpretations. Truth itself could be a field of contested knowledge. Nevertheless, when it came to lying with one’s eyes wide open, squinting to deliberately alter reality, distorting the true facts of history without the least scruple, and nakedly falsifying the records—Lao Chen had to feel at least a twinge of uneasiness.
But it was only a twinge.
If Lao Chen had not been a reporter, he probably wouldn’t have felt any need to respect historical reality. Most people don’t care much about the truth, he pondered. There is, in fact, no way for the average person to care about these things—the price of maintaining a firm commitment to truth is too great. Besides that, the true facts are often painful to recall, and who doesn’t prefer pleasure to pain?
At this point Lao Chen wanted to lay down the heavy burden of history. Can we really blame the common people for their historical amnesia? he asked himself. Should we force the younger generation to remember the suffering of their parents’ generation? Do our intellectuals have a duty to walk through a minefield in order to oppose the machine of state?
Who has the leisure time to mess around looking up those few historical facts? And furthermore, it’s not that all eyewitness accounts and historical memoirs have been banned; there are plenty of books still available. Only those books that contradict the Chinese Communist Party’s orthodox historical discourse are totally banned.
Lao Chen then considered a new concept: “90 percent freedom.” We are already very free now: 90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough? The vast majority of the population cannot even handle 90 percent freedom, they think it’s too much. Aren’t they already complaining about information overload and being entertained to death?
The more he thought about it, the more Lao Chen felt he was right. He had a very long list of unread books that he wanted to read, including Chinese classical studies, such as the twenty-four official histories, and classic European fiction, such as the nineteenth-century Russian novels. He regarded these as the high point of Western fiction, but because the reading priorities of Taiwan and mainland China had been different back then, while mainland intellectuals of his generation read the fiction of imperial Russia, Lao Chen read American fiction. Lao Chen felt somewhat guilty about being a writer of