The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [98]
Wu was quite enthusiastic and gave Neal a thorough rundown on the history, physiology, and behavior of the giant panda, as well as on the government’s efforts to save it from extinction. This was followed by a complete history of the Chengdu Zoological Association and its tribulations during the Cultural Revolution. Even the pandas had not been immune from political analysis, and might well have been liquidated as a symbol of bourgeois preoccupation with pets had not it shared a name with the Chairman—the Chinese name for panda being “bear cat,” Shr Mao—and hence been immune from criticism. It was true that certain radical Red Guards had seen the zookeepers’ confinement of the panda as symbolic of the bureaucracy’s hemming in of Mao Tse-Tung, and demanded that the pandas be set free, but the zookeepers trumped them with an offer to release the pandas along with all the other mao, such as lions, leopards, and tigers, on the condition that the Red Guard open these cages themselves. The Guard declined.
“Too bad,” Wu muttered. “I would like to have seen those bastards try to put a dunce cap on a tiger.”
“Did they do that to your father?” Neal asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Neal didn’t answer, but from the hard, angry look on Wu’s face he knew that it mattered. Big time.
They strolled through the zoo for a while longer, eating peanuts in place of lunch as Wu described the natural history, habitat, and folklore of every animal in the zoo.
“I never knew my father,” Neal said as they neared the parking lot.
“You are a … bastard?” Wu asked. He was shocked, not only by the fact, but that Neal would choose to reveal it.
“Yeah.”
“I am sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Wu shook his head. “In China, family is everything. We are not so much individuals as we are family. A person will happily sacrifice his life to ensure that the family survives. Do you have no family?”
“No family,” answered Neal. Unless, he thought, you counted Joe Graham and Ed Levine, Ethan Kittredge, and Friends of the Family.
“No brothers or sisters?”
“Not that I know about.”
“That is very sad.”
“Not if you don’t know any different.”
I guess.
“Perhaps not.”
Wu was quiet as they drove away from the zoo, and he provided only cursory narration for the scenery of apartment blocks and factories that made up the northeastern part of the city. He brightened a little as they came to Sichuan University.
“What university did you attend?” he asked.
“Columbia, in New York City.”
“Ah,” said Wu politely, although he had clearly never heard of it. “What did you study?”
“Eighteenth-century English literature.”
“Qing Dynasty.”
“If you say so.” “I have read some Shakespeare.”
“Oh, yeah? Which?”
“Julius Caesar. It concerns the oppression of the masses by first a militarist dictator and then a capitalist oligarchy.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“Do you believe all that?”
“Of course.”
“So what is Huckleberry Finn about?”
“Slavery and the rejection of bourgeois values. What do you think it is about?”
“A boy on a river.”
“Whose thinking is correct?”
“You have your interpretation and I have mine. One isn’t any better or worse than the other. We’re both right.”
Wu chuckled and shook his head. “What you say is impossible. Thought is either correct or incorrect. Two different interpretations cannot be right. One must be right and the other wrong.”
“They’d love you at Columbia.”
“Yes?”
“Fuck yes.”
Wu laughed but then looked serious and said, “You are joking with me, but I think this is the difference between our two cultures. I believe that wrong thought leads to wrong action. Therefore, it is very important that people be taught correct thought. Otherwise, how will they know how to act correctly? I think in your society, you believe that it is bad to insist on correct thought, but then, because your people do not have correct thoughts, they perform bad actions. This is why you have so much crime and we do not.”
Neal almost answered that it is also why China could have a Cultural Revolution