Mao's Misfits

By Richard Bernstein

THE EXECUTION OF MAYOR YIN AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION

by Chen Jo-hsi; Indiana University

Press; 220 pages; $8.95

One of the losses of recent history is that during the long reign of Mao Tse-tung China produced almost no literature worthy of its tradition. Good living writers were silenced. Bookstores carried mainly the sententious classics of Maoism. That great modern political upheaval, the Cultural Revolution, should have provided the raw material for a thousand creative volumes. It produced not a single novel, story, play or opera published in China. Indeed, were it not for Chen Jo-hsi's collection of poignant stories set in the China of the '60s and early '70s, it is very likely that the entire epoch, during which the lives of hundreds of millions of people were profoundly shaken, would never have found its way into contemporary literature.

Chen Jo-hsi was born on Taiwan in 1938. After several years in the U.S., she emigrated to Communist China. She arrived in 1966 and left, disillusioned, in 1973. While in China, she never wrote a line. But once out, she set to work: all the traumas and hardships and lost hopes of her seven years on the mainland are in these stories of ordinary people.

In one, an elderly local official who, too unsophisticated to comprehend the twists and turns of the Cultural Revolution, is executed by a group of Red Guards. Unable to perceive that he has become a victim of irrationality and self-righteousness, he clings like some Chinese Billy Budd to the one bit of certainty he knows. At the moment of his unjust death, he shouts, "Long live the Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao!" Another less innocent victim is Jen Hsiu-lan, a proud, fanatical woman revolutionary who loses out in one of the revolution's murky factional twists. Rather than submit to the humiliation of selfcriticism, she drowns herself in a cesspool.

All these affecting stories are chronicles of personal trial. Keng Erh is a scientist, returned from America, who enjoys the privileged status of a leading intellectual: a maid, a small apartment of his own, even a refrigerator. But he is forbidden to marry the woman of his choice because of her "bad" class background. In "Chairman Mao Is a Rotten Egg," a young mother is virtually overcome by anxiety because her small child is rumored to have repeated a counterrevolutionary slogan picked up on the street from his playmates. K'uai Shih-fu is a common worker who, irritated because he cannot buy fish at the market, is provoked into a small but redeeming act of political defiance. These subtle, honest tales are apt to be considered literary oddities, parochial stories set in an exotic political landscape. They deserve greater esteem. The Execution of Mayor Yin is in the great tradition of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn; its true subject is the survival--and sometimes the defeat--of the human spirit in its lonely quest for integrity.

Chen Jo-hsi reserves a special scorn for devotees of those I've-been-to-China travelogues that portray a China far more unreal than her fiction. Nixon's Press Corps shows the enforcers of the Communist Party requiring entire neighbor hoods to tear down their makeshift laundry drying racks suspended from people's dwellings so that they will not be eye sores for the foreign visitors. In fact, the visitors never turn up. The lesson here is that often the most difficult struggles come, not in grand political arenas, but in the small and petty matters of every day life. With the American press safely out of the way, the people set about the tasks of reconstructing the details of their lives. But, "long after Nixon left China and arrived back in the United States," Chen concludes, "the drying racks in our dormitory had still not been completely rebuilt."

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