The Visiting Suit: Arrest

The Visiting Suit

Arrest

At around three o’clock that afternoon, the van pulled up in front of the detention house, a three-story cement building with tiny windows reminiscent of the apertures in the ancient city walls through which soldiers had shot the Mongolians from their horse-backs with arrows. The building was encircled by high stone walls with barbed wire on top.

Under the August sun the surface of the asphalt road appeared to have melted into mud, upon which tracks of vehicle tires and soles of various patterns were imprinted. There was no wind, and the air was so hot you could see purplish smoke drifting across your vision. The buildings, the trees, the cement electric wire poles with heavy, greenish loudspeakers fastened to the tops, along with people walking in the street, were undulating as though a giant furnace was blasting away under the surface of the earth.

The street was seething with people. Nearby was a payphone where a young woman in a white blouse was shouting at the receiver, which she held in her right hand; in her left, she held a yellow handkerchief with which she was wiping her eyes incessantly. Beyond her, in the shadow of a parasol tree, an ice bar vendor wearing only a pair of shorts, with a towel over his bare shoulder, was tapping his wooden cooler, which was tied to the back seat of his bicycle, while he yelled listlessly for customers.

Across the street, people crammed in front of a movie theater, some of them wearing straw hats, some were raising their fans to protect their heads from the sun. All the loudspeakers on the 3

cement poles were playing “The Red Sun in Our Hearts.”

A guard ordered me to get off the van and line up with seven other prisoners who, like myself, were all taken from the Happy Commune. The dazzling bayonets on the guards’ automatic rifles reminded me of the captured men I had seen filing into the same entrance the month before, when I was on my way to a swimming pool. Looking at the people in the street, I wondered why I was no longer one of them, why on earth I should be wearing a pair of handcuffs and following the prisoners into the iron gate? I became oblivious to the handcuffs on my wrists.

I didn’t move with the other prisoners; it was as if I were still a free man who could cross the street to see what was showing in the movie theater, or go to the vendor to buy a green beanice bar to cool my burning throat, or to the swimming pool to plunge in the water with its temperature ten degrees lower than in the street…

Before I stepped over the threshold and passed the big iron gate that defined freedom, I reminded myself that I should be ready to fend off the charge of “viciously attacking the Great Leader.” I didn’t know, though, how to prove my innocence.

Should I tell them that I was born in New China and had been brought up under the instruction of the party and the Great Leader? Should I also let them know that as school teachers, both my parents, although they had already divorced, didn’t have any problem of a political nature in their histories that they had held back from the party organization? In terms of class analysis, there were no alien factors in my family background that would serve as an external cause to make me viciously attack the Great Leader.

Because I had been drunk when I tore the poster of Chairman Mao, I could never explain why I did it. All I could say was that it was merely an accident. But hadn’t thousands of such accidents ended up behind the big iron gate? There were quite a few of them in my neighborhood alone. The gatekeeper of my 4

high school, for example, was sentenced to a five-year prison term simply because he was carried away one afternoon by a local opera broadcast on the radio and accidentally knocked a bust of the Great Leader off his dining table to the ground where it broke. The crippled cobbler, who lived in the basement of a red-roofed house at the entrance of our lane, grabbed a piece of old newspaper for toilet paper when he hurried to a nearby public privy one morning, without noticing there was a portrait of the Great Leader on it. He was caught by another toilet-goer, and consequently sentenced to a seven-year prison term. The assistant civil engineer who liked to have his hair carefully waxed and enjoyed spending his holidays by leaning on his door with a cup of tea in hand and smiling at the young women passing in the street, had received a five-year prison term because he accidentally dropped a badge of the Great Leader in a urinary ditch. Even Old Wang living in the neighboring lane, who was mentally retarded, was arrested and sentenced to a three-year prison term for breaking a board with a poster of the Great Leader on it. *** One evening, when my mother had gone to the countryside with her students for an over-night trip, I invited my friends to my home for a party, during which I got drunk and accidentally knocked over my glass. I didn’t get a paper towel to clean the mess, as they told me later on, but turned around and tore from the wall a poster of the Great Leader with which I wiped the table and my hands. At that point Aunt Wu, the chief of the residential committee, came to do her routine check of the residents’ IDs. She urged me to turn myself in or she would inform the police and have me arrested. So I went to the police station the next morning.

They sent me to a political session organized by the authorities for those suspected of political crimes. After investigation, however, they believed my claim that I had been drunk when I 5

tore the poster, so they allowed me to return to the countryside.

As ordered, I reported my case to the party chief of the Happy Commune, where I was working as an educated youth with my schoolmates to receive re-education from the peasants for a year and a half. The chief of the human resources department of the commune wanted me to hand him written reports concerning my thoughts every month.

I had nightmares of being arrested, and through the night I felt horrible until I opened my eyes in the morning to find myself in familiar surroundings. It was said if they didn’t arrest me within the first year, they would erase my name from their list.

Nothing happened for a while, although I couldn’t sleep well at night. Then Linan, my girlfriend who lived in the next village, came into my life. Two nights before, I had laced her fingers with mine and we had walked along a riverbank, the two of us and our long, dark shadows on a moonlit path. Linan had been selected in early summer by the performing arts propaganda team of the Happy Commune to play the role of Sister-in-law Ahchin, a female lead in the revolutionary opera The Sha River, after the harvest season. Each of the nine production brigades in the Happy Commune had its own performing arts propaganda troupe and The Sha River was to be performed by all of them.

Therefore, besides Linan, there were eight other women who were also to play Sister-in-law Ahchin. But only Linan was going to represent the Happy Commune on stage in the county’s theater. She had already been released from her fieldwork for two weeks to take part in the rehearsals in the commune’s conference hall, from early in the morning till late at night, six days a week. As a result, people near the commune headquarters were familiar with her. Whenever we walked around I’d hear them calling her “Sister-in-law Ahchin.” *** Linan had recommended me to the head of the performing arts propaganda troupe to play a character in the opera. If so, it 6

occurred to me, I’d no longer have to worry about my political blunder, because to play a character in a revolutionary opera was considered an honor, a dream of all the educated youths. Latching onto the hope of being drafted by the commune’s troupe, I had practiced enthusiastically with Linan in her dorm and on the riverbank, and was able to recite most of the lines of the character I auditioned for. She told me the week before that the chief of the performing arts propaganda troupe had agreed to think about my application. “If so, you’ll have nothing to worry about anymore,” she told me.

“But I still think it’s impossible for a man who has just been released from political sessions to be picked up by the propaganda team,” I said.

“Why do you always worry about this and that?” she said.

“What you need is to relax yourself.”

I felt good after talking with her. A cool breeze, mixed with the distant smell of the damp hay, water-weeds, and manure from surrounding rice fields, blew in through the window beside my bed that opened eastward to The Grand Canal. Glittering in the light of a full moon, frogs, crickets, and cicadas had been singing restlessly, and I could hear the muffled drone of the diesel-engine cargo fleets passing in the river. Inside the mosquito net I lay on my back. I thought about Linan’s words, and tapped my chest with my fingers.

They pulled me from my mosquito net at five thirty the next morning and brought me to the central square of the commune, where seven other prisoners, six men and a woman, had already been sitting on the ground, facing the moss-covered brick wall of an abandoned barn.

Behind them were a crowd of children and three armed militia members who wore serious looks and constantly exchanged whispers. Several boys were pitching trash on the prisoners, and the other children jeered. When they saw me join the prisoners, they began to throw trash on me, too.

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I recognized a boy of about twelve as having been in the greeting team when I first arrived at the commune the year before. When we got off the bus that morning, I remembered, we met the leaders of the commune, and the children had pinned rosettes on our chests. We came to this very square to watch the commune’s performing arts propaganda team play drums and gongs.

The three militia members realized that the boys might get out of control if not stopped, and threatened to beat them if they continued. There were watermelon rinds, chicken bones, empty sugar canes, rotten tomatoes, and cast-off shoes in the trash pile. Beside the heap was a dead puppy, flies buzzing fiendishly around it. As I looked at the dead puppy, a broken toothbrush hit my forehead an inch above my right eyebrow. I rubbed my forehead with my hand and saw blood on it.

“Stop, or I’ll tell your father to beat you,” a guard yelled at the boy.

“Why?” the boy argued. “They are enemies. Chairman Mao tells us the enemy won’t step down on their own from the stage of history.”

The boys hit the woman and me more frequently than they did the other prisoners, perhaps because we both wore white t-shirts, or perhaps because we were younger and looked more frightened than the rest. The woman was in her early twenties, pale skinned, and had round black eyes. I had heard people calling her Donying, and spoke of her being friendly with men, including a ship captain, a substitute teacher in the commune’s elementary school, an educated youth from the city, and the secretary of the party chief who had lost his position because of her. Soiled and stinking of rotten fruit, both her garment and my t-shirt looked like abstract paintings. The more onlookers gathered around, the more excited the boys grew. No one could stop them until the leaders of the commune showed up. By then, the trash heap had disappeared; all that remained on the ground was the dead puppy and a pair of torn shoes.

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On the makeshift wooden platform, I was arranged side by side with Donying, facing thousands of people who were sitting on the ground across from us. A small blackboard, on which my name was written upside down, was hung over my neck with a length of galvanized wire. I thought it was a mass criticism, like one I had seen in my high school, when my Chinese teacher was put on the stage of the school auditorium with other teachers and the principal, all of them wearing three-foot-high paper hats like clowns in a circus.

Amidst many familiar faces in the crowd was my roommate Bao Lian, and his girlfriend Chen Ron, the Big Mouth, as we called her behind her back. She was the roommate of Linan.

They all looked frightened, and dared not look at me for long.

Only a few nights earlier we had gathered together in our dorm and eaten a sand-badger that had been killed by a hunter in the village. But I didn’t see Linan. Was the relationship between us over or not? Or was it an irony that a woman playing a revolutionary heroine on stage had a boyfriend receiving mass criticism for counter-revolutionary actions?

I scanned the crowd again, but still I didn’t see her. I only saw Chen Ron sitting in the second row and behind her, my roommate Bao Lian, the Bookworm as we called him, who was wearing a pair of thick eye-glasses. As thin as a monkey, Bao Lian couldn’t shoulder heavy loads, nor was he capable of working in the field with the rest of us. So he was assigned to work as an assistant accountant for the production brigade. In his leisure time, he would lie on his bed looking at the rafters of the thatched roof and heaving sighs in a hen-like voice. I didn’t believe it when someone claimed to have seen him and Chen Ron near the haystacks one night. Chen Ron had been a champion shot-putter in the city’s high school sports meet – her arms and legs, in sharp contrast with Bao Lian’s, were round with muscles.

Chen Ron and Bao Lian hadn’t gone back to the city during the Spring Festival holidays. On the morning of the Lunar New Year’s Day, when Chen Ron went from her dormitory to the riv9

erside a hundred yards away to wash rice and vegetables, a gang of young villagers, mostly militias who could enter our dorms without being invited, entered her room unexpectedly. Mostly they were men in new wadded jackets with chest pockets unflapped so one could catch a glimpse of the expensive cigarette packs in them, cigarettes that they wouldn’t touch during the rest of the year. By the time Chen Ron returned, the men had removed the quilts from her bed and stood gaping at Bao Lian, in his underwear, shaking on the bed. Because of the regulation that educated youths were prohibited to fall in love in the first three years, the Happy Commune noted their indecent behavior in their dossiers.

I heard Donying beside me gasping as though out of breath, and, from the corner of my eyes, watched her breasts rising and falling in a quick rhythm. Her eyes were tightly shut. Her face twitched. The sun grew hotter as the morning waned on.

It shone on our heads, and on our backs. My eyes stung from sweat trickling down from my forehead. The smell of trash on my t-shirt was awful. In an attempt to keep my nose as far away from it as possible, I craned my neck and tilted my head like a turtle to look at the sky. Suddenly I felt a strong arm push my head from behind. At the same time a high-pitched shriek piped out from the loudspeaker. I fell forward.

It was when they tugged me up from the ground that I saw Linan sitting with her friends in the corner of the third row, staring at me. I tried to rise on my own. I didn’t want her to see me under the control of the coarse hands behind me. Hardly had I managed to do so, however, when they pulled me back to the platform and pushed my head down to my knees. I heard a man’s voice announcing that I was arrested for viciously attacking the Great Leader.

The crowd dispersed. Linan was no longer there. On the platform, the three militia members were consulting the party chief about whether to parade us around the streets before the van 10

from the city’s detention house came to pick us up. The party chief ordered the guards to bring us to the headquarters instead.

Over the next two hours, the eight of us crouched in a courtyard, in the narrow shadow provided by a high brick wall, where relatives or friends were allowed to visit with daily necessities and clothes. I tried not to look at the other prisoners changing into their clean shirts. But I felt uneasy. I wished Linan would come to see me before I was sent away, but at the same time I didn’t want her to show up. How could I face her when I looked so woebegone, with rotten fruits all over my body? I shut my eyes and prayed for the van to come. Then I heard someone calling my name. It was Chen Ron, and behind her was Bao Lian.

“Don’t worry,” Bao Lian said. “We’ll visit you when we have time.”

I knew my friends wouldn’t leave me. Although we didn’t get along well back in school, in the countryside we cared about each other as if we were family. I felt tears in my eyes. I nodded at them.

At that point, someone shouted that the police van had arrived. Not knowing what to do, Chen Ron was wringing her hands and stamping in desperation. It was then I saw Donying, who had already finished changing her dirty garments into clean ones. She turned to me. “Take this if you don’t mind,” she said in a whisper, and took a blue garment from a woman standing beside her. There wasn’t time to think about it. All I could do was take my dirty t-shirt off and put on Donying’s garment. It was a bit too tight for me. I must have looked funny wearing it.

But they said I looked fine. *** In the hallway of the detention house we lined up before a short, middle-aged man wearing blue khakis who sat beside a table. He unlocked my handcuffs and ordered me to take off my belt, my shoelaces, and hand him all the money I had with me.

He counted the money, wrote something on a notebook.

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“Comrade, I want to talk to you,” I said.

“Squat,” he muttered, without removing his eyes from his notebook.

“I’m innocent.”

“Squat,” he roared, raising a finger to the white wall behind him, where three lines of large black painted words read: LENIENCY TO THOSE WHO CONFESS THEIR CRIMES AND SEVERITY TO THOSE WHO REFUSE! DO MERITORIOUS SERVICE TO ATONE FOR YOUR CRIMES! SOLEMN SILENCE! I felt my scalp prickle as I walked toward the second iron door, which looked more terrifying than the first because it reminded me that before passing through I was somehow still free. I soon found myself in a dark passageway. As I walked on, I saw many bare heads behind the bars on either side of me. It was all soundless, and for a moment I wondered if I was dreaming. I fancied I was in a dark cave. I was looking into it. I could see the curious wet stones far down where the wall disappeared in vague shadows. The iron bars gave me the illusion that I was wandering in a Buddhist temple I had visited a long time ago.

I felt my knees shaking. I wanted to shout. If only I could turn around and run out to the street! But I had to keep trudging in the direction of the darkness. In order to have a clearer vision of the surroundings, I squinted, and slowed my pace.

Keys jingled. A dark iron door on my right side clanged open.

The cell was darker than the passageway and was saturated with a foul odor that made the guard jerk away immediately as though he’d been slapped in the face. I stopped, and turned to him.

“Why do I have to enter this room?”

“You’d better ask yourself,” the guard said, and shoved me in.

The iron door shut behind me. I bumped against legs thrust out from either side.

My face crashed on the inner wall and stars flashed across 12

my eyes. When I turned around, I lowered myself and then stretched out my arms. In this manner I rubbed two bare heads on my right and two on my left.

“Take your dirty paw off my face, you son-of-bitch,” one said.

The cell was quiet again.

I looked around. Before my eyes could adjust to the darkness of the cell, I heard a boy’s voice from the iron door: “Come here, come here to the bars.”

And then someone nearby whispering: “It’s Wang, the little guard.”

Another voice said: “He’s unlucky.”

“Hold the bars with both your hands – like this,” the boy shouted word by word. In the dimness of the passageway I saw two hands grasping the bars from outside.

“Don’t you understand what I mean?” the boy bawled.

“Yes, but why should I do that?”

“Do as I say. I’m here every afternoon this week. If you don’t do as I say, I’ll beat you tomorrow afternoon.”

“Do as he said, or he’ll get you during walk-time,” echoed a voice behind me.

Turning around, I saw an elderly inmate huddling beside the door. He raised his arms as if to show me how to put my hands on the bars.

The boy guard shouted again: “They all did it when they first came.” He ordered the elderly inmate to push me to the door.

The elderly inmate rose, and was about to approach me, when someone kicked him from behind and he fell on his sleeping roll with a husky groan.

“Who did that?” the little guard screamed.

Nobody said a word. He started banging the iron door with his gun.

“It’s all because of you,” someone complained in the darkness.

“Better do as he said.”

13

I walked to the bars and stretched out both hands. The little guard pulled my fingers as if he were dancing with me. But then he quickly took from his top uniform pocket a pair of shoelaces, with which he tied my fingers to the bars, and then began to bash them with his rifle butt. His mouth was twisting with rage as he swore: “Don’t you know who you are? I’ll let you know who you are. I’ll let you know who I am.”

I jumped. I gasped quickly. But soon I shut my mouth. I bit my lips to keep myself from screaming. Nevertheless, I could hear groans like those of a beaten dog escaping from my throat.

Had the torturer been a man I would have screamed out. What humiliated me was the fact that the boy’s wrists were only the size of a twelve-year-old. And imagining that I could lift him up and snap him in two made me tremble all over.

“Squad leader Wang,” an inmate implored. “That’s enough for him. He’ll remember who you are. Now let him sit back.”

After one more hit, the boy hollered breathlessly: “Now you should know who you are. Go to your spot.”

I stared at him, with his childish face, small, indifferent eyes and a flat, under-developed nose, he looked no different than ordinary teenagers. I had once argued with my schoolmates about how to become a successful revolutionary. The answer was right in front of me. The boy soldier was the success of the revolution. As for me, who had once dreamed of becoming a revolutionary, I was but one of the innumerable targets of his brutal career.

Luckily my fingers, although they felt as if they were burning, moved well when I flexed them. I could now see the cell clearly; it was about fifteen feet long and twelve feet wide. Huddled on their rolled-up quilts and straw mats were ten inmates, five on each side of the two longest walls of the room. In the inner wall there was a high window, whose dusty windowpane transformed the sunlight into an amber square on the dark cement floor, like one of the washcloths the cellmates had laid there for drying. In one corner was a chamber bucket with a cracked 14

wooden lid. Until I saw it I hadn’t noticed this was where the biting odor came from. It was inconceivable to spend the night in such a cramped place with the other prisoners.

I grasped the iron bars again with both hands.

“I’m Sun Baoson,” said a man sitting in the center on the right side, a friendly smile hanging on his thin lips.

I didn’t say anything. All I knew was that I didn’t belong in this place.

“Young man, you’ll get used to it,” Sun Baoson went on calmly. He then announced that I should sit beside the bucket, for that spot was reserved for newcomers. When he said it, the inmates on that side moved closer, making room for me. The man who was sitting beside the bucket was so skinny, the ribs on his chest protruded. There was a pool of urine around the bucket.

I started pacing the floor. It only took me four full steps from the inner wall to the iron door, and then another four-and-ahalf back to the inner wall. I had to be careful not to bump the cellmates’ legs, twenty of them, stretching out from both sides.

“You’ll learn how to sit like us in two days,” grumbled another man, who sat opposite Sun Baoson. He introduced himself as Shen Yao, and the head of our cell.

“In two days?” I shouted. I stopped, gazing at him.

“Stop walking. You’ll feel better if you sit like us,” Shen Yao said.

“Let him walk if he likes to, he’ll sit when he gets tired,” Sun Baoson said mockingly.

“Once they send you here they won’t let you go,” Shen Yao said. He then told me that he had been in the detention house since the summer of 1968, more than three years. “I would have finished myself off long ago if I’d been as restless as you,” he declared.

I sat next to the bucket, but I rose soon, and again I paced the room.

Outside, the day was fading. The loudspeakers were still sing15

ing loudly. Now and then I heard a woman yelling, bicycles ringing, men and women’s voices rising and falling. I heard an elderly inmate complain that my pacing made him unable to sleep. Soon all the inmates began to scold me. Two young prisoners on either side of Sun Baoson rose from their bundles and threatened to teach me a lesson if I didn’t sit right away. At that moment the passageway became noisy. Immediately the two young inmates squatted, while all the others left their sleeping rolls and busied themselves with their enamel bowls. One of the two young men who had just threatened to beat me said that supper was coming.

Everyone was pleased when I told them I didn’t want my ration: a bowl of porridge with some cabbage leaves in it. The porridge was so thin the cellmates simply slurped it over the rims of their bowls. The sucking sounds were unbearable. It was equally unpleasant to watch their Adam’s apples bobbing. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine that I was with friends outside the prison.

In front of our dorm in the Happy Commune was a gravel yard shared by the surrounding peasants’ families and the animals they fed. In the center of the yard was a well. At that moment, I imagined the peasants would be squatting around the well, eating their supper and chatting; the dogs would be sniffing the ground, their tails lazily wagging; the chicken, looking for their feed.

I didn’t open my eyes until the sucking sounds subsided. I sat beside the bucket. I was glad to find that I was wearing Donying’s garment, from which her scent still tarried. While sniffing the garment, both hands on my knees, I remembered that not far from my home lived a man who had been arrested the previous spring, but was released a few weeks later because he had broken down during his imprisonment. I had once seen him talking to himself. I decided to imitate him. It seemed the only possibility for getting out. I looked around. Under the dim light of a bulb hung from the center of the ceiling, all the inmates were engaged in idle conversations.

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I started to worry that nobody would pay attention to me, when the skinny inmate sitting beside me asked why I was arrested. I turned to him slowly so that he could see my abnormality.

“How are you doing? Are you all right?” he asked. He then told the other inmates that I looked like a madman.

The elderly inmate bent forward to wave his palm across my eyes. When he was certain I had lost my senses, Shen Yao, the head of the cell reported to a guard that I had gone mad. Within five minutes the chief of the detention house came. I looked at him blankly and continued mumbling to myself. The chief yelled: “Do you want to play games with me?”

I didn’t look at him.

“You’ll only hurt yourself like lifting a rock to drop it on your own foot. Tomorrow you’ll regret not stopping this charade. Let me ask you for the last time. What’s your name?”

The chief handcuffed my forearms behind my back. He tightened them until the metal bit into the flesh on my arms.

The severe pain made me wriggle, and gasp like a mad dog.

I shut my eyes. My muttering transformed into groaning. My throat trembled. The chief ordered Shen Yao to watch over me through the night.

In less than ten minutes both my hands had grown numb.

The nauseating smell of rusty brass choked me. My eyes started tearing, my cheeks shivering. My teeth chattered and my groans sounded inhuman. I wet my pants. I could no longer think about anything. But all the same I didn’t want to give up, convincing myself they would set me free when they realized that my madness was real.

It was deep in the night. All the cellmates lay down on their mats. The loudspeakers in the street had quieted long ago. I wished I could take a nap so I could forget the pain in my arms.

My brain was spinning, and scenes deep in my memory rose up: I saw my parents fighting in the bedroom over the ownership of a radio that they had recently purchased; I saw my cousin and 17

me catching crickets in a melon patch in the countryside in the summer when I was in the fourth grade; I saw myself going to Beijing in the fall of 1966 with my schoolmates to be inspected by the Great Leader and his close comrades-in-arms. I saw the motorcade of the Great Leader passing by. I had been squeezed away from my schoolmates and found myself under two stout Mongolian women, and saw hundreds of thousands of shoes and plastic sandals on the ground when the cars drove away.

My thoughts ran faster and faster until at length I felt my head spinning.

At midnight I cried for help. I confessed to the guard who came to check what was going on in the cell that my madness was faked. He called his supervisor to unlock my handcuffs. I didn’t regret that I had given in. Oddly enough, I found that my desire to leave the detention house to see Linan had passed.

What remained was the gratitude with which I looked at the guard who unlocked my handcuffs. Then I lay down on the cement floor beside the chamber bucket. I didn’t even have time to look at the jagged wounds in my arms the handcuffs had made, but savored a good sleep for the first time since I was released from the political sessions the year before.

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