2025年3月14日星期五

Chairman Mao Is Dead!

Tang Danhong (bio)

Translated by Anne Henochowicz

Translator’s Note: Mao died two months after the 1976 Tangshan earthquake killed anywhere from 240,000 to 779,000 in the northeastern port city of Tianjin (the far lower official estimate conflicts with the initial numbers reported by the Hebei Province Revolutionary Committee), and the “feudal” notion still lingered that natural disaster means the ruler has lost the Mandate of Heaven. As an “heir to the revolution,” Tang wasn’t aware of such portent, and as a child, her greatest lament was that the earthquake didn’t amount to much at home in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. The link between disaster and death had not yet revealed itself to her, nor to her peers. Decades later, in 2008, the Wenchuan earthquake would strike not far from her hometown, killing 70,000 and leaving another 18,000 missing. Over 5,000 of the dead were children, crushed under the rubble of their flimsy school buildings.

Tang writes in a deceptively simple style. I laughed out loud while translating some of the passages in this story. Sadly, most of Tang’s puns didn’t make it in translation. Her story opens with her staring at caterpillars, which in Mandarin are called máomaochóng 毛毛虫, literally “hairy bugs.” The character for hair, máo 毛, is the same as Mao Zedong’s surname, and being a bug (chóng) can also refer to obsession—giving máomaochóng a third meaning, “Mao fanatic.” I played with using “maomao bugs” instead of “caterpillars,” but decided it was too confusing. There’s a second beastly allusion toward the end of the story, when Tang’s aunt recounts how a woman from the country mourned Lord Mao (Máo Zhŭ) with such a thick rural twang that it sounded like máozhū (wild boar). I did my best to preserve this pun by having the woman lament “Chairman Sow.” I don’t know if “Mao” could really be misheard as “sow,” but I liked the rhyme. AH


When Chairman Mao died, I was looking at caterpillars.

Here’s what was going on when it happened: every summer break, my terrifying father went to the Aba Valley to collect botanical specimens and research the cultivation of the native yellow Himalayan fritillary. It was just my mother and me at home. As my parents used to say, when the cat’s away, the mice come out to play. I always liked summer best, but that summer was especially great, because everywhere it was all about the earthquake. Everyone was anxious. An “earth wind” even tore through Chengdu, and we all had to move into earthquake tents. So kids all sat around waiting for the ground to [End Page 96] move, not wanting to miss the chance for a good show. Finally the earthquake came to Songpan and Pingwu, and then the earth winds were done, and it was decided that all the children “might as well” be moved back into their houses. They wailed, “That was it? We didn’t even feel anything!”

I was happy, though, because my dad was in Songpan, which was the epicenter of the quake. He wrote a letter home that sounded like his last will and testament. He said he had to stay and suffer with the people, that he couldn’t abandon them at a time like this. If something should happen, he wanted my mom to raise me to be an heir to the revolution. Looking back on all their petty arguments about me, about my strengths and weaknesses, he told my mother that he had concluded I was like a rotten piece of wood—I could still be carved. While my mom tearfully read the letter to me, I thought, The “earth winds” are long gone, and everyone’s living in tents. Besides, the earthquake is over, and Dad can’t die. What’s there to cry about? At the time I thought they were just being dramatic. But when I heard that he would be coming home later than planned, I was secretly overjoyed! I also remember that the letter didn’t end with “I hereby salute the revolution” like I’d just learned to write in school, but with a strange character I hadn’t learned yet: “吻 you and Danhong.” 吻 looks like 勿, without, so I asked my mom, “What does ‘without you and Danhong’ mean?” My mother’s eyes bulged. “He wrote ‘kissing you and Danhong.’”

Speaking of letters, I once appointed myself representative of the people. When we were learning how to write letters, our teacher assigned us to write to the children in Taiwan. I racked my brains for every detail I’d seen in picture books. Brimming with sympathy, I described the miserable conditions of “you, the children in Taiwan”: empty stomachs, tattered clothes, bags of bones begging in the streets with broken bowls. Buffeted by wind and snow, corpses lying all around them as they struggled on the brink of death... At the same time, I wondered with regret, if the People’s Liberation Army had liberated the entire country, why couldn’t they liberate Taiwan? Then I solemnly swore to them that we would liberate the treasured island! We would plant the red flag at the summit of Ali Mountain, and it would wave over Sun Moon Lake! I hereby salute the revolution! Then, with a flourish of my pencil, I signed it “from all the children of China”! My mother and teacher both praised my florid letter, but they asked why I hadn’t signed it with my own name. How could I represent all the children of China? Hmph, I thought, indignant. Do you really think there’s a child in China who doesn’t want to liberate Taiwan?

I didn’t go to school on September 9. I don’t know why. It was just like any other day I didn’t go to school. My mom carried me to work on her bike and locked me in the break room. She was afraid I would “learn from bad examples.” Starting in kindergarten, I was often locked up.

I was bored stupid in the empty break room. Eventually, I found a stack of Soviet books piled under the cot. One was about “physiological knowledge,” and another was about “proper romantic love between Communist Youth League Members,” or something like that. I knew about “periods” from signs I sometimes saw posted in the ladies room. It was a grownup thing. That is [End Page 97] to say, when you are grown, you have your period, or maybe that when you have your period, you’re grown. As for Komsomolets falling in love, I confidently read the character for romantic 恋, as wild 蛮. The book gave a lot of examples of the “wild love” between Mr. Kov and Ms. Nya. Kov or Nya, ever vigilant, would discover that the other had a negative or backward thought, or had strayed from the guidance of the Party. Nya or Kov would then deliver a sermon on Leninism and Stalinism, whereupon the partner would reform. It was so obvious. Why did I insist on misreading that character?

I vaguely understood that “wild love” was a phase of life. First you went to kindergarten. Then you went to elementary school and wore a red scarf. When you were done wearing the red scarf, you went to middle school and became a Red Guard. By the time you joined the Communist Youth League, you had pretty much reached “wild love.” During wild love, you had to strive to enlighten someone. You inspected the other person for backward thoughts, and then you taught them morals. This point was clear to me. My dad was the more advanced one, and again and again his lectures moved my mother, heart and soul. When the backward one had finally reformed, you got married. After you got married, you had a baby. After you had a baby, you hit her and scolded her so that she wouldn’t learn to be bad. After that, there was nothing left for you to do. This didn’t seem like any way to live. Maybe during wild love, it would be kind of fun to compete for most advanced person; maybe it was more fun when you hit your baby, because if a grownup hits a baby, naturally the baby is bad, and grownups are always right. When you’re a baby, you get hit a lot, and when you grow up, you’re finally a good person. Then you can hit bad babies and feel righteous, too. That sounded about right. When I grew up, I would have to hit my baby, too. To confirm what I had learned, I asked my mother politely, “What is wild love?” She blinked and blinked until she finally understood what I was asking her. She looked at me sternly and said, “You’re too little to know about that!” She still didn’t correct my misreading right away, though, so I read it as “wild love” for a long time.

By the time Chairman Mao died, I was already fed up with those Soviet books. All I could do is stand on the chair by the window and look outside. There were only two things to look at. The first was under the parasol tree, where I could watch the kindergarteners snorting and screeching during their breaks. There was a grapevine there, dripping with emerald grapes. The children looked up at the grapes and jumped for them with all their might— just like I had done back then—but they could never reach them. The other was to look at the parasol tree itself, which was covered with puffy leaves like umbrellas. They fluttered gently in the early autumn breeze. And on every fat, fan like leaf lay one or two fiendish caterpillars.

These caterpillars were ferocious, about as long as a playing card. You couldn’t see the body, just a fire-red line down its back and dense black hairs that jutted like steel barbs from its two sides. If it weren’t for the fiery little sesame-seed eyeballs, you wouldn’t be able to tell the head from the tail. The caterpillars nodded their heads as they gnawed away at the enormous parasol [End Page 98] leaves, which soon dissolved into thin air. That day, the solemn voice of a China National Radio announcer blared from a loudspeaker on a nearby pole: “Our great lead-er, head of the pro-le-tar-i-at re-vol-u-tion... Chair-man of the Chinese Com-mu-nist Par-ty, Com-rade Mao-Ze-dong has died.” This isn’t exactly what he said. Actually, I didn’t listen that closely. It was just from his intonation of “great leader” and “head of the revolution” and from the gluey oozing of his words, and the dirge at the very end, that I suddenly realized, He’s dead?!

Dead?! I asked myself, stunned, as my eyes withdrew from the caterpillars and I collapsed into the chair. I haven’t even had my period yet, never mind wild love. How can Chairman Mao be dead? As these thoughts swirled in my head, I started to cry. I felt I had been gravely wronged. I hadn’t grown up yet. I was just in fourth grade, and I would have to suffer the second persecution and endure the revival of capitalism. I’d have to beg for food just like the little kids in Taiwan. I thought the enemy planes would bomb us soon. Chairman Mao had kept watch on them. Now what were we supposed to do? Images of bombers, artillery fire, and chaos from war movies filled my head. There I’d be, a broken bowl in one hand and a stick to defend myself from stray dogs in the other as shells exploded all around, and no idea where my parents had gone...

My mind buzzed with recollections from kindergarten: as a child in the top class, I knew clearly from the portraits everywhere and the instruction of grownups that Grandpa Mao, with the big mole at the corner of his mouth, was a beloved wise man whom none should offend. I had high standards as a child. For instance, once a neighbor teased me, “Who do you love more, your dad or your mom?” I almost blurted out “mom,” but then I had a clever little thought and said instead that I loved Chairman Mao the most, then the Central Party leadership, and then finally my dear mother. I chanted “Love Chairman Mao, love the Party” as if it were an incantation, until it felt real. I couldn’t tell if it was love or fear.

I also recalled some times when I had stooped low. Like the time when Li Qing’s and my parents didn’t pick us up from kindergarten right away. It was just us in the schoolyard, climbing a low-hanging tree branch and chatting. I asked Li Qing a lot of questions, proceeding step by step. Usually as soon as I started to ask grownups these questions, they would shut me up. When I asked Li Qing, I didn’t really expect her to answer. She was a few months younger than me. I asked her mainly because I’d kept these questions stuffed in my brain.

I asked, “Why does Chairman Mao have a mole on his face?”

Li Qing didn’t know.

I asked again, “Can Chairman Mao die?”

“No way!” Li Qing said.

I asked again, “Does Chairman Mao poop?”

Li Qing hesitated. “Um... no?”

“Hey, do you think Chairman Mao has a wee-wee?”

The air froze. Li Qing scratched at the tree limb like a clumsy cat and fell. She pointed at my nose and said, “Ooooh, you’re so reactionary, reactionary, reactionary! I’m telling on you!” [End Page 99] 

At first I was terrified and begged her not to tell. But then I realized I had something on her! Two days earlier she had eaten half of my banana. Before she did, she made me promise not to tell her parents. Every time she ate someone else’s leftovers, she always said the same thing. She said her dad didn’t let her beg and would beat her if he found out. Actually, I thought asking discreetly if Chairman Mao had a wee-wee was much worse than eating half of my banana. If Li Qing took advantage of my reactionary behavior and told the teacher or my dad on me, my dad would beat me to death.

My words spilled forth like water. The rice had been cooked. You can only cure a dead horse when it’s still alive. So I pretended to be relaxed and said, “Fine, go tell on me. Hmph, you ate half my banana the other day, so I’m telling on you, too!” She went on muttering “reactionary” in defiance, so I struck while the iron was hot and went through her old debts: the day she ate someone else’s walnut; the time she knocked over someone else’s soy sauce bottle. Li Qing went silent.

I learned early on that thoughts are not things you can control. They ran around wildly inside my head. If I pinned one down here, it would pop up over there. And a lot of my thoughts were fairly “reactionary.” The more ashamed and guilty you felt, the more tricks your thoughts would play. I assumed everyone else could control their thoughts, or that they were all better than me, and that I was just pretending to be a good person, pretending that I never had a “bad” idea. I took great care not to let people know what was in my head. I often thought how lucky I was: lucky that thoughts don’t project in midair like movies. Otherwise I would have been revealed as a counter-revolutionary long ago.

For instance, now Chairman Mao was dead. I should have earnestly cried. It was improper not to. Well, I had a pretty standard cry for the first two minutes because I was afraid we’d be beaten back to the way things were before liberation. But while I cried and cried, my mind drifted, and I thought of something else. I held this secret close. I was determined to let it fester inside me.

The short version of the story is this: I wrote a “reactionary slogan.”

At first I didn’t know anything about “reactionary slogans.” One day when I came home from kindergarten, my parents were whispering about something. They often spoke furtively to each other. Asking them was no use, so I would get bored and entertain myself with a toy. Maybe that day my mom thought this was something major, that she ought to teach me about it sooner rather than later. She pulled me close and said gravely, “Danhong, something happened in our building today!” All of a sudden, my mother thought I would “understand.” I was rather proud of myself.

A “reactionary slogan” had appeared on our building’s veranda. It was written in chalk, each character as big as a bowl. The handwriting wasn’t bad, my dad said. Gao Xiaoming, the neighbor boy two years older than me, saw it first. My dad didn’t go to work that day. Gao Xiaoming had gone to play on the veranda. When he saw the reactionary slogan, he went to tell my dad, who put Xiaoming on his bicycle and hurried to the People’s Public Security Office. [End Page 100] The people from Public Security came and took photos and filed a report. They commended Xiaoming on his revolutionary vigilance and his good deed.

“What’s a reactionary slogan?” I asked. Reactionary speech, my mother said.

“What speech? What did it say?”

My mother couldn’t take it. She lowered her voice and sputtered, “It said, ‘Down with Chair—’”

“Chairman Mao?” I blurted. She nodded.

“Oh. Can they figure out who wrote it?”

“I don’t know. Public Security is investigating it.”

“How?”

“Handwriting. They’re going to check everyone’s handwriting in the building. And fingerprints.”

“What’s handwriting? What are fingerprints?”

“Handwriting is... Fingerprints are...”

“What happens if they find out who it was?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the firing squad.”

This is how I learned what a “reactionary slogan” was. My first response was to rush to the veranda and see this reactionary slogan, but nothing was there. My heart sank. I had missed all the action. I had missed the thing that had shocked everyone and that stirred my childish heart!

A few days later, I asked my mom if Public Security had found anyone yet. She lowered her voice again. “Yes, they did. It was the boy next door, Gao Xiaoming. He wrote it and reported it himself so he could show off that he’d done a good deed.”

“Then will they put Xiaoming in front of the firing squad?” I asked.

“Children don’t understand,” my mother replied. “Xiaoming wanted to be praised, so Public Security sent his parents to be educated.” She didn’t want to say any more on the subject, and didn’t want me to say any more, either. She ended with what sounded like a threat. “What a shameful thing, to do that for praise. He’s lucky he didn’t get the firing squad.” But from the faraway land of childhood, I understood Xiaoming’s logic completely. It seemed like a big thing had been whittled down to nothing. The kids in the building kept away from Xiaoming for a few days. Whenever they saw him, they shouted, “You wrote it, you reported it!” sort of like saying he had dug his own grave. Xiaoming was very well behaved after that. Later on, the neighbors whispered that Xiaoming’s mother had gone crazy.

Soon after, I started first grade. Our first lesson was “Long live Chairman Mao!” The second was “Long live the Chinese Communist Party!” The third was “Down with American imperialism!” I could write all three of these.

One Sunday afternoon, I was wandering around by the common faucet in front of our building. I had a piece of pressed talcum powder jammed into my pocket, a precious thing we children called a “drawing stone.” It was about the size of an eraser, perfect for making a hopscotch board. I drew a few squares on the ground. Then I drew the cartoon character Old Mr. Ding. Everyone else [End Page 101] was napping. It was dead quiet, and I was bored out of my mind. Suddenly, a terrible thought wriggled into my head, a powerful urge. I had to write a reactionary slogan.

I’d been brooding ever since I missed all the excitement over Xiaoming’s reactionary slogan. I had to know: if they found a reactionary slogan, how would all the kids in the building react? What’s it like when the people from Public Security take photos? How would they remove the slogan? How do you inspect someone’s handwriting? What’s it like when they shoot the bad guy? And on and on. I wanted badly to see it all for myself. No one was around. I took out the drawing stone. My heart was jumping. I went up to the front door and wrote on the peeling paint of the doorframe the words I’d learned in school: “Down with Chairman Mao! Long live American imperialism!”

At first I was only going to write “Down with Chairman Mao,” but in the middle I realized I also knew how to write “American imperialism” and blithely added that, too. Who knows why kids do the things they do? When it was done, I groped my way back to the faucet and washed my hands so that there wouldn’t be any fingerprints.

A little while later my mother took me with her to run errands. I didn’t want to go at first, but my mother said she would buy me a meat pie. Then I asked if I could get a sugarcane, too, and she agreed. I forgot about the reactionary slogan for the moment, and off we went. While we were out, I fretted that everyone would wake up and see the reactionary slogan and call Public Security. . . We’d get back too late, and I’d miss the excitement all over again.

We stayed out for a few hours. I got my meat pie. When I had eaten half of it, a beggar knocked it out of my hands, picked it up off the ground, and ran off. I remember my mother said, “Oh well, at least he didn’t spit on it.” She said she’d once seen a beggar spit into the steamed bun someone had just bought. He also spit all over that person’s hand. Afterward, she bought me a sugarcane, and we carried it home together.

Everything was as usual. The grownups were washing rice and vegetables at the faucet. The kids had added squares to my hopscotch board, and another Old Man Ding next to my Old Man Ding, and also airplanes and missiles. I had wanted to wait for someone to find my reactionary slogan, but I’d written it the same size as in my school workbook, so nothing had happened. It looked like I’d have to find it myself.

Mother told me to go wash my hands at the faucet or she wouldn’t let me have the sugarcane. I scrubbed my “fingerprints” until they were pink and raw. Then I turned around and walked slowly to the door, where I “happened” across the reactionary slogan, and yelped in surprise, “What’s this? Hey, everybody, come and look!”

My mother came over, and the color drained from her face. “Look! Look!” People came and crowded around the mottled doorframe. There was the slogan.

The commotion I’d missed, and for which I had felt so aggrieved, turned out to be like any other commotion: in a burst of shouts the entire building [End Page 102] crowded around the doorframe. The grownups turned stonefaced as they leaned in to read the slogan. They argued. Naturally, someone asked who had found it. “Danhong,” my mother said, “after we came back from shopping. She’s short and sharp eyed, that’s how she saw it.” Someone said whoever wrote the slogan was clever to write it so small. Who knew how many days it had already been there? “Class struggle isn’t simple.” One of our neighbors was a Rightist, a “pre-liberation counter-revolutionary.” He went to wash his rice for dinner as a pretext to hang around and see the slogan. He was sheepish, as if he’d been caught in a suspicious position.

Everyone agreed that a child couldn’t have pulled off this prank. How would they know about American imperialism, let alone to wish it long life? My dad was enthusiastic, too. He bent down to get a good, long look, then stood up and declared, “Look at this handwriting. It’s pretty good. Whoever wrote this is highly cultured...” This appraisal exceeded my expectations. I felt rather proud of myself.

The children tried to imitate the seriousness of the grownups, but they couldn’t hide their excitement. Their eyes shining, their voices piercing the air, they shouted, “Woah, a reactionary slogan! So reactionary!” Their elation was so infectious that I almost forgot I had written it. I gnawed on my sugarcane while I jumped in among the children, spit flying as I huffed, “Yeah, so reactionary!” I made myself dizzy with excitement.

I don’t know who called Public Security. The on-duty officer came. He was the father of Liao Jun, my kindergarten classmate, and lived nearby. The crowd parted. Liao Jun’s dad looked sternly at the writing. He brought out a Kodak 120 and took photos. Then he asked someone to bring him a red letter seal, which he used to stamp over the slogan. Twilight came. The officer and the chattering crowd exchanged a few words. I didn’t pay attention. I just waited for the next wave, when they caught someone and shot them. For some reason, I was convinced that no one would figure out it was me. In the scene that played over and over in my mind, it was the neighbor kid Wu Zihua. They would tie him up and stand him on the red honeycomb brick in our building’s front yard. The Public Security people would raise their guns, and bang bang! To this day, as I sit recounting these events, I still don’t know why I thought of Wu Zihua. He was my friend. He was gentle, a bit dull. His mother was friends with my nanny, so we often played together. We never bickered or fought, unlike other kids. Why, in my heartless imagination, was he the one who faced the firing squad?

In the end, they never solved this case. My analysis goes something like this: they suspected Gao Xiaoming because he had already committed an offense, but the scene of his crime had been clean. There weren’t any other children playing on the veranda that day, so the writing had to be his. My motivation, on the other hand, was “pure.” I just wanted to see what would happen. I hadn’t planned to report the slogan, but was forced to “find” it myself. Too many people had scribbled their Old Man Dings and airplanes and missiles nearby before I “found” it. The scene of my crime roiled with the comings and goings [End Page 103] of children. Even if someone suspected a child, who wouldn’t protect their baby? Even Liao Jun’s father, the Public Security oOcer, would spare his son. So it was left a mystery.

That’s what was in my head as I howled over Chairman Mao’s death.

In the days after, every one of the living wore a white paper flower on their breast and a black armband over their sleeve. On every door (except for the doors to the toilets) hung a big white paper flower, or a big black silk flower. On every wall hung banners with words of mourning. On every electric pole and every tree were scrolls filled with tears, grief, and hopes for immortality. . . Black words, white paper, yellow paper fluttering in the breeze and catching the sunlight, so you couldn’t tell if they were signs of mourning or joy.

Funeral music played from dawn to dusk. I heard it so much that it stuck to my eardrums and squeezed in behind my forehead, so much that when I hummed, I unwittingly hummed dirges: I hummed them washing dishes, I hummed them emptying the chamber pot, I hummed them washing my face and my feet, and when it was dark and I went to use the public toilet, I hummed a dirge to drum up my courage.

The children made up a new rule: no laughing. If someone laughed, we would point at the tip of her nose and shout, “Oh, so reactionary! Chairman Mao has left this earth and you still dare to laugh!” Whoever had laughed would quickly take it back or deny it. Then everyone would keep a straight face while they played Chinese jump rope, a long face for playing guess-fingers and tossing beanbags, a straight face for hopscotch, a long face for hide-and-seek... But the most fun game of all was to catch someone laughing.

On the morning of the memorial, I carried a basket of paper flowers to school in my arms. They were yesterday’s homework assignment. Everyone had to make twenty and bring them to class to add to the wreath we had made for Chairman Mao.

As we went down the road, plastered with memorial speeches and funeral scrolls, a few classmates and I ran into the “little Tibetan savage.” His mother had come from Garze for training at West China School of Medicine, and they lived in a one-story house along our route to school. He looked to be about three years old. He would run into the street and try to get the other children to play with him. We often heard the grownups say that “Tibetan savages” were uncivilized and dirty, so we avoided the boy and didn’t play with him. As soon as we saw him, we would run off. He seemed like a little wolf ready to bite. On this day, he again ran giggling into the middle of the road, crying with joy as he came at us with open arms.

When we saw him, we screamed in our customary surprise, stomping our feet and hissing at him as if he were a dog. We were a little panicked, but very excited. My classmates deftly avoided him, running off; but because I was carrying the basket of paper flowers for Chairman Mao, I couldn’t run, and suddenly he caught me! In that instant, I don’t know why, I was scared to death. Hysterical, I threw the basket at him. It landed on top of his plump little head, the paper flowers rolling out onto the ground. The giggling “little [End Page 104] Tibetan savage” stood there, stunned. His grandmother came running out, hair braided and up on her head, apron tied around her waist. She gathered him in her arms and ran off, dodging the funeral scrolls dancing in the wind.

I picked up the white paper flowers folded for Chairman Mao. They were flecked with mud and dirt. While I tried to wipe off the dirt, a thought flashed through my head: He is so small, and I’m so much older; didn’t I just bully him? It didn’t feel good.

The memorial went like this: the teachers and students all sat in their respective classrooms and followed the instructions coming from the school loudspeaker. Mao’s portrait graced the blackboard. The wreath we had made stood on the dais, the twenty paper flowers I had thrown at the little Tibetan boy squeezed in among the others. From the loudspeaker came the memorial proceedings of the Central Party Committee, with Wang Hongwen leading. Whatever Wang Hongwen said, we did. If he said to have a moment of silence, we had a moment of silence. If he said to bow, we bowed. But children forget quickly. It was during the moment of silence that my wickedness came out.

As I bowed my head in silence, a feeling started to brew inside me, and I feared I wouldn’t be able to cry. But children are allergic to solemnity, including silent tributes: as I stood motionless, head bowed as if admitting guilt, I suddenly felt the urge to laugh; I suspected there must be other students who wanted to laugh, too. I furtively glanced left and right, then suddenly locked eyes with my deskmate, Fatty Peng. Startled, we both quickly turned away from each other. It should be fairly easy to suppress a laugh when mourning in silence, because it’s hard to laugh when you’re bowing: in ancient times people got used to bowing when they were young, so maybe they didn’t think it was funny. But for us elementary school students, educated after the destruction of feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism, this was probably the first time in our lives that we had bowed. The way we hinged at the waist and hunched our backs was absurd. It reminded me of when I was a baby and the grownups wiped my butt after I had done my business. I looked around again at everyone’s butt held up high. Even the teacher, who was usually so fearsome, had her butt out like a giant patch on tattered cloth. We all looked ready to have our butts wiped clean. I struggled to stifle the laugh, but it came out in a snort. I heard a similar sound from another corner of the classroom... Mercifully, we bowed three times and then were done with it. Otherwise, the consequences would have been too terrible to contemplate.

Chairman Hua Guofeng droned on too long for a child to take, but none of us dared say anything or show we were restless. We had to stay silent. I have no idea how I endured it. At last, the central leadership said their final farewells, and the funeral music blared from the loudspeaker. As soon as the music started, the classroom erupted in tears and wailing, as if on cue. I didn’t dare neglect my duty. I quickly bent over my desk, covered my face, and made crying sounds. Stealing a glance from under my armpit, I saw that some of the class leaders hadn’t bent over and were crying real tears; others fell onto their desks, their backs heaving with indeterminate sorrow. In fact, I wanted [End Page 105] badly to squeeze a few tears from my eyes, but I couldn’t get anything out. I thought of the terrible things that would happen without Chairman Mao, but I had thought of them so often I was numb; besides, there had been no sign of enemy planes and bombs the past few days. I even tried to feel sad about my father yelling at me. Unfortunately, he’d yelled at me so often that it didn’t hurt anymore. So naturally, I thought of spit...

With pretend tearful eyes, I slowly looked up and showed my face. By chance, I glimpsed my deskmate again. This time, Fatty Peng didn’t notice me. With head bent, he carefully extruded a thread of bubbly spit from his lips, wiped it on his eyelids with his pudgy hands, then lifted up his own tearful eyes. For a moment, I compared our spitty eyes. He didn’t know I had looked, but I felt like he didn’t believe my tears. We both choked down laughter, and since we now had tears, I looked confidently around the room. I hadn’t noticed it when my head was buried in the crook of my arm, but with my head now raised, I caught the distinct scent of spittle wafting through the classroom. I assumed more than a few students were looking around, protected by spit. Just then, Class Monitor Wang Ping bolted up. She was really crying. She raised a fist into the air as if making a vow, then rushed, sobbing, towards Chairman Mao’s portrait to say a few words. I could barely hear her over the reverberating music and the beastly wails rising in the room. “Great Leader. . . I will carry out your final requests... and be a successor to the revolution.” Or something like that.

________

The last time Chairman Mao’s death was mentioned was six months later, when my aunt came to Chengdu to find a husband for her daughter. She had just “removed her Rightist hat.” Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been allowed to stay with us. My mother had cut off contact with her nearly twenty years earlier. When I heard my mother’s Rightist sister was coming, I asked, “Wait, isn’t she a bad person?”

“She just made a mistake,” my mother replied. “She’s changed. She’s no longer a Rightist.” I couldn’t have imagined that this bad person would be the kindest adult I ever met, and the only one with a sense of humor.

When the sun went down and we’d had our dinner, we gathered with a few other relatives to chat. While my aunt wiped my face and washed my hands, she said, “When we mourned Chairman Mao at our work unit, that greasy old woman in the mess hall who feeds the pigs was just awful.” The woman must have been surnamed You 尤, but back then there wasn’t enough to eat and I was always hungry, so as soon as I heard “mess hall,” my childish ear heard you 油, “greasy,” and so in my mind she became Greasy Old Woman.

My aunt said, “Greasy Old Woman is from the countryside. She feeds the pigs. She has no culture. During the memorial service, everyone cried, including her. Ay, if you’re going to cry, cry to your heart’s content, but she followed her village custom of wailing in song at funerals. She suddenly started belting out, ‘Chair-man Mao, oh my Chair-man Mao, you left too soon, Old Man...’ She sang and cried, but she didn’t enunciate, so her song became ‘Chairman [End Page 106] Sow, oh Chairman Sow, how can you just leave us now? Chairman Sow, oh Chairman Sow, how can I live without you now?’ Think about it. She feeds the pigs, and here she was wailing about ‘Chairman Sow.’ We had all been so sad, but when she sang like that, we were all dying as we tried to keep from laughing! Isn’t that just awful?”

My father, ashen, glared at my aunt. My relatives smirked. My mother, stuck in the middle, was in shock. But it seemed my aunt hadn’t noticed. She was only concerned with producing a perfect imitation of Greasy Old Woman’s song. As she wailed a string of “Chairman Sows,” I heard a loud, honking laugh burst out of my childish mouth.

One day during the past few years, I asked my mother if she remembered the reactionary slogan I had found. “Of course I remember,” she said. I told her I had written it. She was shocked. “Ah, you monster! Didn’t you know the consequences? Luckily no one figured out it was you, or we’d have been done for! Your father had been declared guilty of involvement with the Capital 516 Red Guards and their opposition to Zhou Enlai. Of course he had nothing to do with them, but they were looking to catch him. If someone knew you had written it, they would have claimed your father had incited you to do it! Terrible, terrible, did you want your father dead? Oh, we got lucky. . . terrible, terrible...”

Today, Li Qing is the mother of two American devils and lives in the American imperialist city of Seattle. Her garden is a riot of flowers. When she wants to eat a banana, she eats a banana. When she wants to knock over the soy sauce, she knocks over the soy sauce.

Gao Xiaoming projects films at a movie theater. He does a little art in his spare time. I last saw him twenty years ago. He also sent me one of his woodcuts.

I heard that Liao Jun followed in his father’s footsteps and went into security. Wu Zihua has a stall where he sells cigarettes.

Class Monitor Wang Ping and I went to secondary school together. She liked to write letters to her teachers as if they were her mother. At the time, I thought it was weird. Now I know she did it because her mother passed away when she was just a few years old. The last time she saw me was before she left for Shenzhen, and the last thing I heard was that she had gone crazy.

My deskmate Fatty Peng, whose real name is Peng Tao, is still my good friend. He grew out of his pudge and is now quite handsome. He is a cameraman for a TV station and was the videographer for a documentary I made in China a few years ago. After the Sichuan earthquake, I called all my friends to make sure they were alright. Peng Tao picked up his cellphone and said he was filming in the disaster zone. His voice didn’t have its usual good cheer. He sounded exhausted and melancholy. Before I could ask him anything, he said, “Don’t ask me about it right now. Wait until you come back and see what I’ve filmed. All I can say is that it’s hell on earth.” [End Page 107]

Tarim, My Uyghur Friend


 On an interned intellectual in Xinjiang, 

by Tang Danhong – trans. Anne Henochowicz

Originally published in LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS CHINA CHANNEL


This essay, by Chinese-born, Israel-based author and documentary artist Tang Danhong, is a reflection on her relationship with the Uyghur scholar and poet Dr Ablet Abdurishit Berqi, called “Tarim” in the essay, whose name was later published on public lists of intellectuals interned in Xinjiang. Tang befriended Dr Berqi during his postdoctoral fellowship at Haifa University, Israel. The Uyghurs are a majority-Muslim ethnic group in China’s far northwestern province of Xinjiang and the primary target of China’s ongoing campaign of cultural genocide in the region; since 2017, China has put over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims into “re-education” camps, where their language, faith and heritage are forcibly suppressed. Tang confronts this unfolding horror as she searches for news of Dr. Berqi, a secular Muslim and political moderate who tried to work within China’s party-state system to improve the lives of his people. This is the first time the full translation is appearing in English, and the text is punctuated by excerpts of translated poetry by Dr Berqi. – Anne Henochowicz


1

I retweeted Erkin: “The president of XX University has confirmed that a research fellow in the College of Humanities, Dr. Z.B., has been arrested; his colleague, Professor G.O., a fellow in pre-modern Uyghur literature, has also been arrested, because he once attended a conference in Turkey. Their whereabouts are unknown.” The tweet included photos of the two scholars. They looked to be in their forties and both had a cultivated poise, the obvious bearing of respected intellectuals.

I thought again of Tarim. It had been two years since he left Israel and went back to Ürümqi. Regardless of their features or demeanor, neither of these men looked anything like Tarim. They were fair-skinned and lean, with expressions of worldliness, and weren’t wearing glasses; while Tarim looks a bit coarse, especially in his Facebook profile photo, with his close-cropped brown hair, high nose, and deep-set eyes, framed by wire-rimmed glasses. He looks like a brooding artist with that sad, reserved expression. If I could see him again, I’d tease him for that hipster photo. “Dr.,” “professor,” “fellow,” “literature”… These words made me think of Tarim. Of course, I didn’t just think of him, I worried about him. I feared that he, like these scholars, had also been arrested.

Erkin’s tweets and photos began to look more and more like a chain of interlocking nightmares. An endless flow of people who had been arrested: men, women, religious leaders, farmers, merchants; “re-education centers” with watchtowers, barbed wire, armed guards; the belated news of death, the orphaned children, the convicted experts, professors, artists. Oddly, this called to mind the words of Ezra Pound: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”

Sometimes, I thought I recognized one among the “apparition of these faces,” and I asked myself, isn’t that Tarim?

…Every day, I learn
I shouldn’t look like this
I shouldn’t speak this language
I shouldn’t have this faith…

  – Tarim, ‘Created’

2

Before he left Israel, Tarim messaged me on Facebook: “I’m going back home in a few days. For safety, I’m unfriending you. We’ll stay in touch through David.” He’d once asked my husband to help him find some medicine, and they had kept up an email correspondence. Tarim had also sent me poetry he’d written in Chinese, so we also had each other’s email addresses. Which is to say, he didn’t want me to email him once he had returned.

I post a lot about the issues of Tibet and Xinjiang on Facebook. Tarim never once liked, shared, or commented on any of my posts. He mostly posted music, and a few short poems he’d translated from English to Uyghur. It was all about matters of the heart, nothing I would ever call sensitive. I never liked anything he posted on Facebook, either. I think he unfriended me because he supposed, or believed, that just being Facebook friends with me could bring him trouble. I often joke that I’m a “splittist,” given my habit of dissent. In fact, I let everyone know that I’m political kryptonite, as a warning to any Chinese person I may encounter.

Could a note of greeting from Israel be the final blow that landed Tarim in a concentration camp?”

Many times, I talked with David about whether he should email Tarim, just to see how he’s doing? In the end, we decided against it. Because writing to him would not make him safer, and could in fact have the opposite effect. We were lost in a fog of indecision. Could someone be hacking into Tarim’s email? If so, did they know that David was my husband? How would “those people” judge Tarim’s association with us “splittists”? Could a note of greeting from Israel be the final blow that landed Tarim in a concentration camp? Since birth, I’ve been stalked by a shuddering uncertainty, inextricable from my experience, that makes me cautious and clumsy, and clouds my life with all kinds of absurdities.

…Every day, I learn
My body is constantly changing
Feet narrowed by shoes
Head flattened by hats
Clothes to choose, to wear or not?
Raped constantly by choices…

  – Tarim, ‘Created’

3

So, who is Erkin, who sent that first tweet? A person whose parents, naturally, gave him a name. But I don’t know if Erkin’s real name is “Erkin” – it’s a common Uyghur name, meaning “freedom.” People who are being smothered by a despotic regime don’t just choose usernames for privacy. Erkin’s Twitter handle and profiles emphasize his Uyghur identity, his fight against the perpetrators of damnatio memoriae, his hatred of and resistance to the occupation. I’ve never met Erkin; I don’t know where “Freedom” lives. This situation is the perfect metaphor for our relationship to “freedom.” Out of respect for freedom and independence, in this essay I’m calling him “Erkin” instead of using his Twitter handle.

Erkin must have been beside himself when he first direct-messaged me. “That PhD they took is my friend,” he wrote, and when I saw the photo of his friend, I thought of another PhD, Tarim. Before I knew Tarim, Erkin had once DMed about an influential Uyghur poet who had won a scholarship to study in Israel, but he didn’t tell me the poet’s name. After I’d met Tarim, I sensed he didn’t want people to know about his contact with me, so I never brought him up to Erkin. This time, though, I figured that Erkin had ways of finding out if Tarim was safe. “So many academics have been taken … Do you know what happened to that poet who went to Israel?” I asked.

Erkin replied, “He’s already applied for asylum in the US. He got there last year.”

“Oh, wonderful! I’ve been so worried about him.”

“He’s very active. The Chinese police tried to use his six-year-old daughter to get him to work for them, but he refused. Now he can’t communicate with her.” It didn’t sound like Erkin was talking about Tarim.

“Is his family still over there?” I asked.

“He divorced his wife in order to keep her out of trouble. Public Security is holding his daughter hostage.”

I thought, this is very different from the Tarim I know. Besides, if he’d made it to the US a year before, and had become active in the independence movement, he wouldn’t have to shun a “splittist” like me, would he?

“Have you met him?” Erkin asked.

“I’m not sure we’re talking about the same person.”

Erkin sent me a photo of the poet and told me his name. It wasn’t Tarim. I felt confused. Could it be that one of Israel’s few scholars of Uyghur culture, Professor Nimrod Baranovitch, had taken more than one Uyghur poet-postdoc under his wing? I couldn’t decide whether to tell Erkin Tarim’s real name.

It’s true, Tarim isn’t his real name. It’s the pen name he used in the poems he sent me.

…The books the Han can read
I can’t read
The words the Han can say
I can’t say
The things the Han can do
I can’t do
Because Xinjiang is special…

  – Tarim, ‘Autonomy’

4

So, who is Tarim? Should I use his real name? In Xinjiang, where growing a beard or keeping a copy of the Koran at home are indications of terrorism, what consequences would he face if I wrote about him? Come to think of it, when I DMed the names of universities and professors to Erkin, did our smartphones leak his information? Leaving the country is already enough to land him in the camps. My tangled fears will never match the range of barbed wire. But people tell the stories of victims after the massacre, not when the butchers are choosing the lambs for the slaughter. I’ve never shuddered as I write like I do now. Then again, how could I not write about Tarim? What is his crime? All I can say for sure is that his crime is being from Xinjiang – a “new territory” fertile with the blood of its native people, a land of police cars and tanks, of concentration camps – from the moment I began writing, I’ve been full of trepidation. But I have to write about Tarim, a Uyghur, in this dark time, whose path so briefly crossed mine.

All I can say for sure is that Tarim’s crime is being from Xinjiang”

One spring afternoon in 2016, before the “crimes,” the camps, and the desperate searches, I received a Facebook friend request from a Uyghur who was also friends with Erkin. His profile said he was at Haifa University. I assumed he was the Uyghur poet whom Erkin had mentioned to me before, and accepted his request.

Minutes later, we were chatting. He said that he’d seen my writing on his friends’ feeds and thought it was “very interesting.” I told him that I’d heard from a Uyghur friend that a Uyghur poet was studying at Haifa under a specialist in Uyghur music. He corrected me: “No, my advisor is a China scholar, but he approaches social issues from the perspective of music. Including Mongolians, Tibetans, and Uyghurs.”

I asked him what he thought of Israel. Were the people here friendly to him? “It’s not bad,” he said. “A lot of people here haven’t heard of Uyghurs, and they don’t really know about China, either. They just assume I’m European and leave it at that. Once they find out I’m from China, we have a lot to talk about.”

I told him that I’d once been stopped at the Bangkok airport by Israeli security because I had a Uyghur book in my luggage. The bright young agent said that he could read Arabic, and that my book looked like it was in Arabic, but that he couldn’t figure out what it said. I told him it was in Uyghur, and he asked, “What is Uyghur?”

As Tarim and I messaged, I’m sure the scene outside my window was the same as it is right now: dappled light, the distant sound of cars driving home. From the lush woods at the top of Mt. Carmel, Tarim would have seen the sun slowly fall into the Mediterranean, olives shaken from the trees by the wind.

I asked if he mostly wrote poetry. “I’m pretty wide-ranging. I also write fiction. In the past decade I’ve written a few essays on social issues. Right now I’m studying 20th-century Uyghur literature.”

I let him know that I’d like to read his work. He told me he usually wrote in Uyghur, but over the past five or six years he’d been writing more in Mandarin, because he was writing about Chinese people and wanted to express himself in Chinese. He sent me some of his Chinese poems. Among them were stories of personal humiliation: of a Chinese woman who fawned over him when she mistook him for a Westerner, then changed her tune as soon as she found out he was Uyghur; of sleeping on the street after a hotel refused him a room; of being harassed by the police.

…My hands and feet are made to work the land
to dance
My mouth is made to sing
To pray for peace on earth
Emit the light of love
I come from Xinjiang
Don’t mock my dignity
Dance is not weak or cowardly
Song is not endlessly patient

  – Tarim, ‘I Come from Xinjiang’

5

It was a Shabbat morning, at first light, and Tel Aviv was like a ghost town, our car alone on the road. I gave Tarim a call to let him know we’ve left, and he said he was already up. David and I, and two of David’s colleagues, often go hiking on the weekends, covering ten or twenty kilometers at a time, and we had invited Tarim along this week.

Tarim looked a bit older in person than in his Facebook profile photo. He spoke Mandarin with a thick accent. I wanted to give him a hug, but we just shook hands. It was our first meeting, after all. David greeted him in Chinese and opened the car door for him.

We took the switchback down the holy mountain, orange in the dawn, from time to time rustling past the scorched remains of trees from a fire several years past. Tarim said his Uyghur poetry focused inward. “It worries me that my Chinese poems are very political. I don’t particularly care for politics in literature.”

We got to the trailhead and met David’s friends. Just like Tarim had said, our Israeli companions assumed he was from Europe, which gave us “a lot to talk about.” I introduced him as “my friend, Tarim. He’s Uyghur.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say, “He’s from China.” They asked where he was from. “China,” Tarim answered nonchalantly. 

The two friends looks at Tarim and me, comparing my Eastern face to his Western one. “Where in China?” they asked, puzzled. 

Feeling a bit uncomfortable, I blurted out, “East Turkestan.”

Their faces went blank. David interjected, “Have you heard of Xinjiang?”

“Oh, Xinjiang, yes.”

David went on, “Xinjiang is East Turkestan. ‘Xinjiang’ means ‘New Territory’ in Chinese…” Then he switched into Hebrew to explain. We all laughed in mild embarrassment, a short laugh, a laugh touched by politics.

It was a bright and beautiful day. We walked fifteen kilometers along a section of the Israel National Trail. Tarim wore brown leather shoes, not the best for hiking, but the rainy season had ended not long ago and the earth was still supple and dustless. We walked across carpets of newly-green grass and gravel roads. We climbed to the top of a hill, we climbed down. We passed through vibrant brush, we passed a Christian relic, we passed pilgrims from Europe. As I write this, why is it that those two striding feet always appear before my eyes? Tarim from “Xinjiang,” a farmer’s son from a desert oasis, who had passed the university entrance examination in his native language, then gone on to get his masters degree, his doctorate, become an associate professor, and had come to Israel for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, all the while shod in those brown leather shoes. Those shoes were well-made. They kept their shape through the entire hike, and they didn’t end up with too many mud stains. They could still accompany Tarim to the library, to meetings with his advisor, or they could follow him back to the lecture hall in Ürümqi, and then on to his doorstep, where they would be neatly placed next to the rug… No, it’s not about the shoes, it’s about the owner of those shoes, someone who walked freely in a foreign country, while he was still bound to another..

…I come from Xinjiang
At airport security
Please let me go barefoot
I herd sheep in bare feet
I till the soil in bare feet
The grass likes when I fondle it
The crops like when I trample them…

  – Tarim, ‘I Come from Xinjiang’

6

The owner of those shoes has lost his freedom. 

There aren’t many Uyghurs who have studied in Israel. Erkin quickly found out about Tarim from a Uyghur poet living in exile in Turkey. “Is that person you were asking about named Ablet Abdurishit Berqi? He’s already been arrested. The poet in Turkey said a number of people have confirmed his arrest. They’re not sure exactly when it happened. They’ve heard he’s in a concentration camp. Every purge over there with the intellectuals. My friend who was arrested, the one who got his PhD in the US, he’s a cautious person. You could say he leaned toward the government’s side. And they still took him.”

Ablet Abdurishit Berqi is also a cautious person. He was careful when he sent me his poems, preferring to go by his pen name, Tarim. What does caution mean now? Despite everything, Tarim who wears brown leather shoes, Ablet Abdurishit Berqi who studied Uyghur literature in Israel, who once walked with us in the sacred wilderness, who took off his shoes in some airport in China to go through security and thought of the grass under his bare feet while herding sheep; who was turned away from a hotel in Zhengzhou, and ate an apple under the night sky; who urged me to tone down my critical writing, lest I stir up hatred; who wrote a subtle allegorical poem about the news that children in Shandong Province were given faulty vaccines; who gave me a collection of his poems titled Poetry, My Refuge; that man who walked across the thin ice of caution, walked straight into the concentration camps.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you write will be used against you,” a Chinese poet, Liu Changben, cried on Twitter. Now this is also my cry. I am writing down what Tarim said because this thoughtful, expressive person has been – as Chinese government propaganda says of internees – “implicated in terrorism,” and because he, along with others whose “thinking has problems,” has been shut up in a “de-extremification” concentration camp so that “twenty million people can sleep soundly at night.” This Uyghur man, whose path crossed mine in Israel, is also the only Uyghur I’ve ever spoken to at length and face-to-face. His arrest has pulled me across the distance between myself and fear, dread and despair. For this reason, by writing this, I am struggling against exhaustion and aphasia, because you never know who will read this, who will curry favor with the higher authorities, who will “fulfill their duty” and use something I wrote to give a name to his crime, to dig his grave. As I was writing this essay, the first person to tell the world what he went through in one of the concentration camps, the Kazakh man Omir Bekali, learned that his 80 year-old father had been killed in a camp. We understood the vicious message of his death: the right of the survivors to tell their stories, and the right of the victims to have their stories told, even those have been taken away.

…don’t curse the haze
it’s good for thinking
it’s good for falling in love
your cursed bright day and dark night
do not exist before my eyes
all I see is beauty
I’m the song of the mute
written to please the king…

  –  Tarim, ‘Gray Love Story’

7

When I run through, in my head, our conversation on the hike, I remember I was the one asking questions, which Tarim answered calmly and carelessly. Nothing provocative. I’ve forgotten most of what he said; what I do recall are the most divisive and extreme things.

Naturally, I asked him about the chaos of July 5, 2009, when the riotsstarted in Ürümqi. Tarim was at home, and the gunfire kept him up all night. He was sure that many Uyghurs died. The declaration of martial law kept his family inside, until their refrigerator was empty. He couldn’t stand for his young sons to go hungry, so he ventured out to find something to eat. He mentioned Patigul Ghulam, a mother who was running between the prison and the detention center in search of her son. She hadn’t heard any news about him since he was taken into custody. Later, she was tried behind closed doors for “leaking state secrets,” because she’d spoken to the foreign press. Tarim told me: “Thousands of Uyghurs were arrested or went missing after July 5. This woman dared to tell the public that her son was missing! Her fate is just the tip of the iceberg. You’re also a mother. Maybe someday you can write about this mother.”

In Xinjiang, besides the army and the riot police, Tarim said, there is also the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and those security teams at oil companies and mines, as well-equipped and disciplined as real troops. The most shocking thing wasn’t that unarmed civilians were called “Uyghur terrorists,” but that each of these armed groups were fighting amongst themselves, vying for control and turning Xinjiang into a powder keg.

I’d read in the foreign papers the suspicious details of the knife attack at the Kunming train station and the bombing at the Ürümqi station. So I asked Tarim what he thought. He granted that he had the same doubts. We talked about Uyghur refugees who were smuggled out of China. Tarim said he had in fact heard that some Uyghurs had joined the Islamic State, but the trouble was, most of the people crossing the border were farmers from the south of Xinjiang who couldn’t even read Uyghur, never mind speak Chinese, and who had never in their lives heard of Syria. What he didn’t get was how these people could manage to drag their children out of Xinjiang – where you need a “convenience ID” just to leave the house – past border patrols, across half of China, all the way to Thailand? And then detour in Malaysia to get to Turkey, and from there cross into Syria?

Tarim used the word Xinjiang. At the time we met, the Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, a moderate who did not support independence, was nonetheless sentenced to life in prison for the crime of “splitting the state.” Tarim said he agreed with Professor Ilham: he didn’t want independence, either, and Ilham’s misfortune didn’t change Tarim’s mind. Tarim’s argument was basically that he didn’t want to see any more bloodshed. In the 1930 and 40s, the warlord Sheng Shicai killed 500,000 people in the decade he ruled Xinjiang, out of a population of just three million or so. Too many people were killed in the Chinese Civil War and Cultural Revolution, including ethnic minorities. If the Han want Xinjiang’s natural resources, let them have them. If we can have true autonomy in exchange, what need is there for independence? Uyghurs are good at business. We don’t need oil and natural gas. What we need to preserve our people and our culture is education, so that we can reach our full potential as a people. In his poem ‘Self-Rule,’ Tarim wrote:

I want self-rule.
Don’t you know
Xinjiang already rules itself?
What more do you want?
You must be really sick.
Why don’t we take care of you?

These lines come from his memories, from immediate threats, and also, perhaps, from a premonition. Now that wealthy merchants and businessmen are also being arrested, there’s no room for being good at business, no simple answer like giving up resources. The poet Tarim, who puts his faith in education – Ablet Abdurishit Berqi, associate professor at the Xinjiang Education Institute – was put in a concentration camp for “educational transformation.” This scholar of Uyghur literature who completed postdoctoral research at Israel’s top university, what kind of “educational transformation” is he being put through?

Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, describedthe camps as “the instruction of schools, the order of the military, and the security of prisons. We have to break their blood relations, their networks, their roots.”

I don’t have a passport
I can’t leave the country
All I can do is smuggle across
But they’ll beat me to death at the border
And I don’t have money for the trafficker…

  – Tarim, ‘Refuge’

8

We hiked to a high point that seemed to be close to a village. A herd of goats looked up at us from the dense brush, their goatherd nowhere to be seen. The sun began to slant westward and the light turned gold. Tarim stopped to take a photo. This was the only picture he took that day, of the goats grazing on spring shoots in the light of the setting sun. Did this image, I wonder, of the land bathed in holy light, remind the poet of his home? “I herd sheep in bare feet,” he wrote. Did the ding-dong of the bells around the goats’ necks, and their gentle smiles, break his heart?

David got out his phone to take a picture of Tarim and me. Tarim looked concerned, as if the breeze that wafted the scent of frankincense trees and wild daisies had also wafted over the police. He didn’t say anything. David had already taken the photo. He just wanted to give us a souvenir. I didn’t know what to do, but Tarim turned to me and said, “Don’t put that photo online.” (His photo and name later appeared publicly, such as at 6:00 in this video listing interned Uyghur intellectuals.)

“Of course, Ablet, I won’t put it online, I understand.” Tarim worried that other people would find out that he’d spent time with me. According to Chinese law, the things I post on Twitter and Facebook are all crimes of “incitement to split the state.” I gave up my Chinese citizenship a long time ago, but for a Uyghur, if he wants to keep living in Xinjiang and wearing his brown leather shoes, walking in them to the lecture hall to teach Uyghur literature, going back home and placing them neatly on the rug, next to his wife’s and children’s shoes, how is he supposed to explain his connection to a so-called “splittist”?

Could you call ours a re-educational relationship? It’s not just that Tarim opposes independence. He asked me once: “I implore you, could you tone down your political writing just a bit? Sharp words can sow hate. Besides, you shouldn’t just concern yourself with ethnic minorities. Spare some thought for the rights of Han people, too.” Tarim and I met three times, and thrice he asked me the same thing. He didn’t succeed in “re-educating” me, though. On the hike, I started to tell him what I really thought of sharp words, and the Han people, but I said very little, because Tarim seemed to want the conversation to end. He shook his head and forced a smile, saying over and over, in a hushed voice, as if it were a prayer: “Tone it down, tone it down.”

An analysis of tenders for the camps in Xinjiang found 2,768 police batons, 550 stun guns, 1,367 pairs of handcuffs, and 2,792 cans of pepper spray. And that is just a fraction of the items on the procurement list. Since the beginning of 2017, the Xinjiang provincial government has made at least 1,000 purchase orders for the camps. The procurement lists include police equipment, such as uniforms, shields, and helmets, and riot gear, such as Tasers, electric guns, spiked clubs and tear gas. One camp placed an order for tiger chairs, which are typically used in prison for interrogations.

Such are the “toned-down” words of the “de-extremification re-education” camps.

I want rule of law.
Hold on
You’re not ready
To understand the law 
What is love?
Shut up
We know what it means to us.
What is hate?
Don’t play dumb…

  – Tarim, ‘Autonomy’

9

Professor Ablet Abdurishit Berqi, Tarim the Poet, what is language? What is literature?

China, that ancient state with “five thousand years of civilization,” has a high and mighty dream, and nothing is holding it back. Their system is so perfect, its operation so efficient, its equipment so advanced, its management so modern. Then there are the truncheons, Tasers, handcuffs, stun guns, spiked clubs, and torture racks, used without hesitation or thrift. And our language, utterly defeated, has no way to describe this vast, evil project.

“The poems I write in Uyghur are mostly about love. I like to write about emotions, about love.” Tarim used his native language to write about love, to write about the woman he loved. I haven’t read his love poems yet. I’m waiting for him to translate them into Chinese. Are there verses about gently caressing her skin? About the warmth and fragrance of her body? About her whirling long hair? There must be. No matter the language, when you write about love you write about beauty. But those women whose heads have been shaved, those women whose skin festers with sores, those women bound to steel beds in contorted postures, those are also the women Tarim praised in his poems, ravaged into non-humanity. No language can describe the suffering of the flesh. Only the flesh of the victim knows, only the screams tell their story, their sobs of blood.

For now, I’ll use my language to talk about dinner and wine and song. We had baked salmon with mustard sauce, served on a blue glazed porcelain dish edged with a delicate, undulating floral pattern; young chicken, braised and coated with sesame seeds, served on a yellow platter patterned with mint leaves. David made a salad dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, and pureed mango; Sichuan cold noodles are my specialty. I wasn’t sure if Tarim liked spicy food, so I put the seasonings and chili oil in two little cups on the side. Tarim was happy to see the noodles, and he loves spice. He took two spoonfuls of chili oil. Our home cooking has no need for rhetoric. I’m only writing about it to show the magic of language. This is the stuff of life.

But there are no words for “steamed buns turned to mush and gruel made from a single cabbage leaf,” as one Uyghur described the food in the camps. In the dreamland of China’s Great Rejuvenation, the meaning of words have changed. The places where professors, doctors, writers, lawyers, artists, publishers and entrepreneurs are detained are called “vocational training centers”; purchase orders for a thousand truncheons, stun guns, handcuffs and tiger chairs are called “caring for the collective”; children whose parents are taken away from them are called “kindness students”. “Splittist,” “terrorist” and “extremist” not only describe people who yearn for independence, but also those who don’t seek independence – who wear head scarves, who have been abroad, who send their sons to buy flour and matches, who have read banned books, who don’t eat pork, who don’t drink.

David opened a bottle of red wine from Jerusalem, and was about to pour it when he suddenly remembered – oh, Tarim must be Muslim, and Muslims don’t drink? David had even reserved seats at the Bialik Cafe to hear one of his favorite singers. We had only thought of treating our guest and had forgotten the rest. In fact, our carelessness added to the night’s levity. Tarim laughed and took a glass, comforting David, “it’s fine, I can have a little.” After dinner we walked over to the Bialik Cafe. This lively little space, cafe by day and bar by night, neighbors the Bialik House, the former residence of the great Israeli poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. 

Tarim, do you remember, David told you about Bialik, but the concert had already begun? The music didn’t leave much of an impression, but its volume shattered our conversation. Anyway, Bialik wrote in a resurrected language, modern Hebrew. He used his newborn mother tongue to write prayers for the return to Israel, laments of massacres, tender songs of winged love, poems of death amid summer splendor, and charming nursery rhymes. Tarim the Uyghur poet, you once wrote, “Poetry is my refuge / Where I am most free.” Did you make that refuge with your mother tongue? Where is your refuge now? When you change into prison clothes, when you sing red songs and recite ideology in Chinese, my mother tongue.

When people put on orange and yellow vests, when people sing red songs and recite ideology, a form of Newspeak is rejuvenated, a mutation of my mother tongue – a hard, stiff, mechanical language, a deranged command leading the march of history. Purge your mother tongue with my mother tongue. My mother tongue has no words for this shame.

…I’m a smuggler of love
Though love has no country
Poetry is my refuge
Where I am most free

   – Tarim, ‘Refuge’

10

There is Xi Jinping’s dream for the coming decades. And there is the dream of “waiting a few years.”

Tarim is someone who waits. He believes that those whom we see as dictators are in fact reformers, that the purpose of the concentration of power is to realize democracy. When Tarim first made this conjecture to me, I stifled my laughter out of consideration. If a dictator at last reveals that he is a benevolent sage, would we think a bit better of him? Would it give us hope for the future? I must admit that a wisp of a fantasy also rose up in my mind. I told myself, maybe Tarim is right. I’ve been out of China for too long. He, on the other hand, thought that we only had to wait a few years for this bright future. Just like his prayer for me to “tone it down, tone it down,” he told me: “Wait a few years, wait a few years, I’m sure that by then, I can host you and David in Xinjiang.” If Tarim still remembers that earlier promise, would he, as I do, feel all the more hurt?

On a scorching summer day, Tarim came to Tel Aviv from Haifa. A few days later he would go back to Ürümqi. I invited him to come say goodbye and was about to make Sichuan cold noodles for him again. He had already unfriended me on Facebook. He said he couldn’t eat, he was busy and had to hurry back to Haifa. He didn’t even stay for twenty minutes. I can’t even remember, did he sit down? Did he have a glass of water? All I remember is that he had to do something at the embassy, and that his parting words will never leave me. He said: “Maybe when I get off the plane, before I get into the airport, they’ll take me to a separate room and beat me up, and I’ll disappear.”

Seeing the shock on my face, he added, “and maybe nothing will happen.”

His expression was sincere. To be honest, the Tarim I know rarely smiled. Still, his words were beyond my comprehension. He’s a poet, a writer, and a scholar, I thought. He’s an associate professor at the Xinjiang Education Institute. He can get a passport and come to Israel for advanced studies. When he goes back he’ll have an offer from Sichuan University as a professor of literature. I asked: “They’d beat you at the airport? Disappear you? On what grounds?”

“That’s just how Xinjiang is,” he said, without any surprise. “When a Uyghur comes back from being abroad, that can happen.”

I went blank again, in even greater disbelief. I looked at him doubtfully. To soothe me, Tarim said: “First I’ll fly to Beijing, then from Beijing to Ürümqi. That will probably be a little better. If I went through customs in Ürümqi, that would be a different story.”

My thoughts slowed down, got tangled up in each other, then ripped apart again. Still, for the most part, I didn’t believe him. I thought, even if such horrible things do happen, they won’t happen to him. I even felt a bit like laughing. How could serious, sedate Tarim joke like this? Because you really could say he was a successful part of the system. The key was that he was able to get a passport and go abroad. Plenty of Tibetans and Uyghurs can’t get passports. Surely he has a few tricks up his sleeve?

I asked: “You’ll have a research fellowship in Israel to vouch for you. Why would they beat you? How could they disappear you?” Tarim had no retort for me.

Then he said, “I implore you.” Those aren’t words you hear every day. The question is engraved in my mind – was Tarim translating his words directly from Uyghur to Chinese? He said: “Just tone down your tweets and your posts, please please, they don’t have to be so … harsh.” He also asked me to tell the Tibetan activist Woeser to think about the oppression of the Han, not just the Tibetans, and to soften her words, to leave “hatred” out of them. That word upset me. “What hatred?” I asked. “I don’t think Woeser has any hatred.”

“Just tone it down, tone it down,” he repeated. If he went to Beijing, he said, he’d go to Woeser and tell her so himself.

Then Tarim said something that stuck in my mind and bothered me for the next two years: “Let’s see, in two years, I’ll invite you and David to Xinjiang.”

What did he mean? He had unfriended me on Facebook as a precaution; he had just told me he could be disappeared at the airport. How could he think of inviting me to Xinjiang in two years?

It’s been over a decade since I left China, and now I have Israeli citizenship. But – like an animal that has escaped from the forest but not lost its sense of danger – certain situations, sounds or senses make me panic. Right then, it flashed through my mind that the Xinjiang police had gone across the country to arrest Ilham Tohti in Beijing. I remembered Erkin’s tweets about Public Security recruiting Uyghurs abroad as informants. Half-refusing, half-probing, I said: “I won’t go to Xinjiang. Wouldn’t a splittist such as myself get arrested?”

“If you get caught, I’ll have my friends rescue you.”

“How?” I prodded.

“By lining some pockets,” he said. “Over there, a bribe will get you out of jail.”

Evening light scattered across the room like a ghost. My heart sank. Tarim seemed to be saying that he had connections with the Xinjiang police. I felt guilty, too, the guilt that comes when you don’t trust a friend.

“I don’t want to go,” I went on. “If a splittist like me can get past customs, people will think I’m a special agent, heh heh.”

Tarim shook his head and chuckled. “They say the same thing about me.”

As soon as he’d said all this he left, rushing to catch the train back to Haifa.

Time flies with the brutal speed of a bullet train in the night. Did Tarim also get on a secret transport train? What’s the difference between a train for Uyghurs and a train for Jews? The trains packed with Jews were slow, putrid, shaky, coal-burning and smoke-belching. The Uyghur transport trains are more modern, more high-tech. Do they use the “harmony” line of high-speed trains? Pulling families apart at 300 kilometers per hour in the long, sleepless night, some never to meet again. “Say, then, how have these lambs sinned?” asked Itzhak Katzenelson, a Jewish poet who died in Auschwitz.

When Tarim said he could be disappeared at the airport, he was speaking the truth that he knew, and the dread in his heart. But I refused to believe him. I preferred to believe he was exaggerating, to keep the illusion that there were logical, normal people over there.

When he uttered that incantation – “tone it down, tone it down” – he was explaining how he had survived: to walk along the knife’s edge, you have to be careful, and more careful still. But I thought he was “re-educating” me. Oh, my friend, forgive me: I still disagree with you. You are toned-down, and Woeser is toned-down, and Erkin is toned-down, and I am toned-down. We are all toning it down. None of us are extremists. Those millions of people put into camps, who among them isn’t also toned-down down?

When Tarim said he would invite David and me to Xinjiang in two years, he was telling me his fantasy. Because in his fantasy, a dictator will at last reveal himself to be a benevolent sage. But in reality, public security in China doesn’t rescue hostages. They take hostages, and let them go only if you can line their pockets. Two years on, the millionaires and billionaires have all been arrested, and there’s no more use for ransom. It feels so familiar. “Aryanization,” Jews, Uyghurs. Confiscation of property, vocational training in concentration camps, forced labor.

There is the dream of revitalizing China; a dream of waiting for democracy. And then there are the dreams of countless lambs. 

Primo Levi, the Jewish writer who survived Auschwitz, once described a dream he had in the camp: “Dreamt with body and soul, / Of going home, of eating, of telling our story.” Has Tarim had the same dream?

In Israel, Tarim talked to me about his two children, how he missed them. The older child would take the university entrance examination that year, and Tarim wanted to go home to help him prepare. The precocious little one had started writing stories at age nine. Now he was twelve and had already written a novel in Chinese, one million characters long. When Tarim talked about them, a smile of pride and affection appeared on his face. Where are his children now?

The last thing Ablet Abdurishit Berqi gave to David and I was a wish. It had been three months since he had left Israel. Fires raged in the urban centers and the forests of Haifa and Jerusalem, razing the homes of Jews and Arabs alike, lapping up enmity in its wake. David got an email from Tarim, the only email Tarim sent after he went back:

“My dear friends, are you safe? I’m so sorry to hear about the fires in Israel. May God bless and protect that holy place!” ∎


Header: The author and her friend, Dr. Ablet Berqi, hiking the Israel National Trail (courtesy Tang Danhong)

The original Chinese of Tang’s 
essay was written in November 2018 and first published in February 2019 by China Digital Times; an excerpt from an earlier translation draft was also published in March 2019.


Published by Tang Danhong

Tang Danhong is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Much of her work focuses on the Tibetan people and their political and cultural struggles under Chinese rule. Her film Nightingale, Not the Only Voice will be screened at the Guggenheim in October and November as part of Turn It On: China on Film 2000-2017