|
 he Central Funeral
Home on 41st Avenue in New York's Flushing district is, one of the
ushers told me, the largest Chinese-owned establishment of its kind
in the city. On Saturday we had its biggest room, but that was still
too small for the crowd of mourners who came to pay tribute to Wang
Ruowang. More than 200 were crammed into the dim, windowless space,
filling all the seats and standing against the walls all around.
Those walls were themselves covered with tributes, written out in
elegant Chinese characters on large sheets of white paper. Huge
floral displays were stacked here and there. The casket, open, was
set against the far wall. In front and to one side of the casket
was an easel bearing Wang's photograph, framed with flowers. Beside
the easel two tall incense tripods were set, in the fashion Chinese
people settled on 4,000 or so years ago. Above hung a mourning banner:
WANG RUOWANG — DEPARTED FOR EVER.
Wang Ruowang,
who died December 19th at age 83, was the senior living Chinese
dissident, and his life was a chronicle of the appalling history
of China during the middle and later 20th century. He was jailed
by all the major Chinese despots of that era: by Chiang Kai-shek
in the 1930s, by Mao Tse-tung in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s,
and then by Deng Xiaoping after the student movement of 1989, which
Wang — then aged 71 — vigorously supported, helping to
organize a march on Shanghai's city hall.
Having joined
the party in 1937, Wang would, by the time of his death, have qualified
for the revered status and handsome pension of an "old revolutionary"
if he had been able to keep his mouth shut. That, however, he could
not do. Having very early seen through the communist facade of "progress"
and "social justice" to the amoral thuggery beneath, Wang
enjoyed the distinction of having been expelled from the party twice:
in 1957 for "rightist deviation," then, after having been
rehabilitated in 1979, yet again in 1987 for referring to Chinese
socialism as "essentially feudal" and to Deng Xiaoping
(who is said to have personally ordered this second expulsion) as
"a senile dictator".
When, in the
early 1990s, it dawned on the Chinese Communist Party that the best
way to deal with nuisances like Wang was simply to throw them out
of the country, they threw him out. He spent his last years in a
tiny shared apartment in New York City, supported by his second
wife's earnings as a babysitter and by occasional gifts from admirers.
So far as I know, the only one of Wang's books that has been translated
into English is the autobiographical
Hunger Trilogy. When published in China during a brief spell
of liberalization in the early 1980s, this book infuriated the party
with its assertion that both Chiang's dictatorship and Mao's had
used starvation as a peacetime political weapon, and that of the
two dictators, Mao had been the more systematic and ruthless in
using that weapon.
I have occasionally
preened myself in these columns for my contrarian cussedness in
the face of all the petty dogmas and what Orwell called "smelly
little orthodoxies" of our age, but I sink to my knees in awe
and humility before cussedness on the Wang Ruowang scale. Wang was
not merely a member of the Awkward Squad; he was a mounted, armored,
helmeted, shield-bearing, and lance-wielding knight of awkwardness.
And this, not in the plump, mild, pampered world that I inhabit,
where the worst consequence a writer has to fear is a bad review
or a dispute over expenses, but in a very harsh environment indeed,
one in which an incautious word or a too-forthright opinion could
bring about public humiliation, long imprisonment, and death —
not only for yourself, but for those you love. Wang endured his
first spell of imprisonment at age 16, his last at age 72. He spent
most of his forties and fifties in jails and labor camps, and his
first wife was terrorized to death by the communists. Still he would
not shut up, still he insisted on bearing witness to the truth.
Wang is nearly
unknown in China, where of course the communists have done all they
can to erase any memory of his life or works. In the West he is
even more obscure: His book has Amazon rank 2,067,858. Among exiled
dissidents, though, his name shines bright. A bomb let off at the
Central Funeral Home on Saturday would have pretty much wiped out
the U.S. chapter of the dissident movement — by far its largest
component outside the Sinosphere. Everybody was there:
 Fang
Lizhi, the physicist who lived for two years in sanctuary at the
U.S. embassy in Beijing while the communists demanded his hide for
supporting the 1989 student movement;
Liu
Binyan, once the most famous journalist in China for his fearless
reporting of corruption, purged from the party and thrown out of
his job in 1987 for "promoting bourgeois liberalism";
Wei
Jingsheng, whose call for democracy in the "Beijing Spring"
of 1979 got him 17 years in jail;
Liu
Qing, who saved Wei Jingsheng's life by printing a transcript of
Wei's rigged "trial" — an offense that cost Liu years
in jail, including four years — four years! — of
sitting all day long on a "punishment chair" (the seat
made of hard rope that cut into his flesh) while common-criminal
prisoners were brought in in relays to curse and spit at him;
Wang
Dan, the 1989 student leader, expelled from China after 7 years
in jail;
Yan
Jiaqi, who was an adviser to party secretary Zhao Ziyang before
that gentleman was disgraced for his perceived sympathy with the
1989 students;
Harry
Wu, tireless exposer of the horrors of China's slave-labor camps,
in which he himself spent 20 years for being a "rightist";
Jiang
Feng, whose father is in jail right now for having had the temerity
to suggest that people should light candles on the tenth anniversary
of the Tiananmen killings;
Gao
Zhan, the U.S. resident who was convicted of "espionage"
in China last July because the communists needed a pawn to play
in some negotiations with Colin Powell, and whose 5-year-old son,
a U.S. citizen, was locked up for a month out of contact
with relatives and consular protection, in violation of all diplomatic
courtesies, not to mention civilized norms...
Being in a
room full of people with résumés like that makes one's
own life seem very tame and pointless.
It was, in
fact, extraordinary to see them all in the same room. The exiles
are a fissiparous lot, bearing countless bitter grudges against
each other that I myself can never keep track of. (Ian Buruma has
a go at it in
Bad Elements, his excellent new book about the dissidents.)
I would not have been very surprised to see a fistfight break out.
When I commented to a fellow mourner how remarkable it was that
so many people could be crammed into one room, he replied, sardonically
but correctly: "What's really amazing is that there's
space enough for all their egos." In the event the whole ceremony
— it lasted about 2½ hours — went off very well,
with no sign of rancor. All the leading dissidents made speeches.
A special envoy from the Dalai Lama (who cultivates the Chinese
dissident movement with great care and patience) read a fax from
His Holiness. A handful of round-eyes showed up: Andy Nathan from
Columbia and Perry Link from Princeton gave speeches, Andy in his
ripe American accent that makes Chinese people smile, Perry speaking
like an extremely well-educated and highly literate Chinese person.
Pretty much everyone else was Chinese, except for the two-man Tibetan
delegation.
For all the
mood of unity and comradeship, it made me sad to see so many exiles
all at once. There is something inescapably melancholy about them,
about their condition. Exile is not so bad for the younger ones,
who come to the West unencumbered with wives and children, when
their minds are still flexible and able to adapt. Some of the student
leaders from 1989 have, in fact, done very well for themselves,
easily picking up strings of degrees at America's dumbed-down universities
and launching successful careers and businesses. For someone like
Liu Binyan, though, who left China in middle age after being fired
from a useful and prestigious job, life in the West is tough. It
is too late for them to master English, or any new trade. Nobody
is much interested in them, or in what they have to say. They eke
out a thin existence on the fringes of American life, writing occasional
pieces for western newspapers, addressing ill-attended meetings
in draughty provincial college auditoriums, doing some ill-paid
work for one of the dissident organizations, or — in one case
I know of — selling insurance in Chinatown. The words "shabby"
and "émigré" go irresistibly together. It
would almost have been kinder for the communists to shoot them,
if kindness were a thing communists are into. What use are their
brave voices now, here, where those who can hear have little interest,
and those they seek to reach are not permitted to hear them? What
use is their pride, their patriotism, their integrity and superhuman
courage, in exile? No wonder they fall to bickering impotently among
themselves. Yet still they soldier on gamely, carrying shielded
in their hands the feeble guttering candles of reason, of justice,
of truth.
Wang Ruowang
has now been cremated. His wife will take the ashes back to the
Motherland, where his children live. Luo ye gui gen, say
the Chinese — "The fallen leaf returns to the root."
As obscure as he may seem from the merely worldly point of view,
Wang's life was, by comparison with most human lives, one of utmost
significance and luminosity. Never yielding, never bowing his head,
never submitting to the intense pressure — pressure you and
I cannot even imagine — to "reform his thinking,"
"confess his errors" or "correct his attitude,"
he spoke the truth, in the face of the most ferocious penalties
for doing so, and the most tempting incentives to lie. He never
mouthed falsehoods for the sake of a quiet life; he never agreed
that, yes, two plus two equals five, if the party says so.
Wang Ruowang
showed that the human spirit can remain unbroken even in jails and
camps and dungeons, even in the face of torture and starvation,
even under the cruellest of tyrannies. This does not count for much
on earth in this soft, dishonest, hedonistic, amnesiac age; but
it must count for a great deal elsewhere, if human life has any
point to it at all. As Samuel Johnson remarked on the death of his
friend Robert Levet:
"And sure
th' Eternal Master found
The single talent well employ'd."
Wang Ruowang,
rest in peace.
|
