Narcopolis

When he came home three weeks later he was silent about what had occurred during his visit to the headquarters of the communists. If neighbours asked he replied that it had been an instructional stay and he would say nothing more. He took to smoking opium with new vigour. For as long as Lee could remember his father had smoked a pipe on rare occasions. He smoked in the disciplined way of a connoisseur, rarely taking more than one at a time. He bought good-quality opium and stretched a pipe over the course of an evening. This was different. With his wife confined to her room and his mind full of questions about his work, he dedicated himself to the pipe, smoking six to eight in the course of a single day, and in between he smoked cigarettes. He lit a cigarette, left it in the ashtray and lit another. When he took a break, he went to his writing desk and worked for an hour or two, no more, and in this way he finished the last of the Ah Chu stories, The Eruption of Ah Chu, which centred on an outbreak of psoriasis suffered by the unfortunate old man. There are long descriptions of the virulent nature of the disease, of the different kinds of scratching that Ah Chu resorts to in the vain hope of finding relief. Throughout the book’s two hundred or so pages, winter darkness prevails. There is rain and sleet and never a chance of sunshine, because Ah Chu, plunged into insomnia and irregularity by his complaint, leaves his bed only at night. At the end, reduced to a puddle of bile and pus on a pungent sickbed, Ah Chu hangs himself from the chandelier in his dining room. Minutes later, the sun rises, which is the only moment in the dense and claustrophobic narrative that light appears in the gloom. The Eruption of Ah Chu didn’t sell many copies and it brought some unwelcome official attention. The People’s Daily said Lee’s father had flirted too much with metaphor and as a result his book was full of confusion. However, since it was the work of a writer who had established his reputation as a critic of decadence, a single lapse was excusable. This appeared to be the official line because other publications echoed it, as did those cadres who were considered knowledgeable about party affairs. Lee’s father paid no attention to the criticism. He was busy working on a real book. With Ah Chu dead at long last, dead with no possibility of resurrection, he was free to concentrate on a new kind of writing, a long-pending project he had put off for many years. He worked in his usual offhand manner, writing in half-hour bursts, as if his only aim was to take a break from the opium pipe. And in this way he produced a slim volume titled Prophecy, which disappeared from the bookshelves almost as soon as it was published. It was 1957, the year of the first purge, and when booksellers realized the nature of the book’s contents, they either destroyed their copies or hid them or deliberately lost them. The official reaction was swift. Lee’s father was a revisionist, it was said, and he should be sent to the countryside for manual labour. He was an opium-smoking bandit. He would be made to wear a placard that said: i am a monster. One self-described ultra-leftist, a writer of short stories, said the book was the product of a diseased mind ‘fit only to be a maggot on the corpse of its putrefied revisionist masters’. He recommended that the author be sent to prison. The most sustained criticism came from a novelist who was known to be a Party favourite. All his books shared a similar plot and similar characters, though names were changed from story to story. The hero was always a handsome young peasant who was persecuted at work by a superior. The peasant was a student of the works of Chairman Mao. His superior was a former landlord or government official, a smooth-talker and seducer, in short, a lecher and villain who has sabotaged a cherished village project, the building of a dam, say, or a bridge, or a telegraph office. After much struggle, the hero succeeds in unmasking his superior as the cause of the sickness that has plagued the children of the village and the reason the region has not prospered despite its hard-working inhabitants. The older man is ousted from his job and the young worker takes his place. At the end, the young protagonist quotes an aphorism of Chairman Mao’s concerning the permanent nature of class struggle: ‘What was taken from the peasants must be returned to them. That is the law, today and for ever.’ Or: ‘Revolution must follow revolution without interruption.’ Or even: ‘People say they’re tense because vegetables and soap are in short supply. I’m tense before midnight but I take sleeping pills and feel better. Try pills.’ The formulaic nature of the novelist’s work had not reduced his sales; in fact, they’d risen steadily over the years. The novelist was the first to publish a long critique of Prophecy, saying, among other things, that Lee’s father deserved execution because his book celebrated decadence as a virtue. He was ‘a stinky dog who likes to defecate in the dark’ and he deserved to be punished for his failings. The novelist also took advantage of the turmoil in the capital to put up a big-character wall poster that denounced Lee’s father as a ‘counter-revolutionary parasite of the Khrushchev type’. It was one of more than a hundred thousand posters plastered on the walls of Peking at that time, but even so it was noticed and some lines were quoted in the People’s Daily: ‘A fly cannot topple a giant tree. What can a decadent daydreamer and bourgeoisie do? We will not let you pollute the socialist future of China!’ This appeared to be the verdict of the Party, for it was clear that the novelist was only echoing what his masters told him. Lee’s father’s career was at an end but before he could be taken to prison he fell ill.