The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Revised Edition

Introduction to the Revised Edition

xi Introduction to the Revised Edition Perry Link When an editor at Indiana University Press told me that the press planned to re-publish Chen Ruoxi’s ‘‘Mayor Yin’’ stories, the idea immediately felt good. Indeed there was something strange about how good it felt. Why, I wondered, are these stories still so important? In the mid-∞Ωπ≠s, when they first appeared, the excitement about them was easier to understand: they were then unique windows into a mysterious China; they were also among the first signs the outside world had of the catastrophic failure of the Maoist experiments of the ∞Ω∑≠s and ∞Ω∏≠s. Later, however, there was a flood of writing on such themes. In the late ∞Ωπ≠s, ‘‘scar’’ literature, followed in the ∞Ω∫≠s by works of ‘‘reflection’’ and ‘‘root seeking,’’ turned Chen Ruoxi’s early trickle of truth into a broad tide. Criticism of the Mao years, which rose to a crescendo in the ∞Ω∫≠s, became so commonplace that by the ∞ΩΩ≠s many writers considered it passé. So haven’t the ‘‘Mayor Yin’’ stories been superceded? No, oddly. They continue to stand out, and for reasons other than their having been chronologically first. They stand out because no Chinese writing has yet exceeded them in looking squarely at the heart of the Maoist calamity. It is not easy to ‘‘look squarely’’ at disaster in one’s national past. Shock, pain, confusion, and shame can all erect barriers. As other cases in the twentieth century make clear, the e√ort to xii introduction look and to come to terms can take time—or, more precisely, can require the psychological distance that passage of time can provide. Anne Frank wrote a diary during the Holocaust, recording what she saw, heard, and thought in her immediate environment, but ‘‘Holocaust literature’’ of a kind that looks at history, that tries to see it squarely, to encompass it, to understand the un-understandable and somehow to ‘‘come to terms,’’ took decades to appear. Primo Levi’s writing, which began as a survivor’s notes about a death camp in the ∞Ω∂≠s, reached its maturity, indeed achieved a remarkable poetic grace, in ∞Ω∫∏ with The Drowned and the Saved.* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel not only exposed political prisons in Soviet Russia and Czechoslovakia but helped their readers to address moral issues that an entire oppressive system thrust before them. In Japan, ‘‘Atomic Bomb Literature’’ has sought to absorb the disasters of August ∏ and August Ω, ∞Ω∂∂, into the Japanese national psyche, but again, although poems and witness accounts appeared soon after the bombs fell, the kind of humanist transcendence that suggests Primo Levi—and had, moreover, to understand Japan as both aggressor and victim—came only with Ōe Kenzaburō’s Hiroshima Notes in ∞Ω∏∑,† while relatively full literary address of the devastation awaited Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain the following year.‡ Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia during ∞Ωπ∑–πΩ are recorded in several literary memoirs, but, as yet, only rarely do these show enough regaining of balance to address the unfathomable questions of ‘‘How could it *I sommersi e i salvati (Torino: Einaudi, ∞Ω∫∏); translated by Raymond Rosenthal as The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Summit Books, ∞Ω∫∫). †Hiroshima nōto (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ∞Ω∏∑); translated by Toshi Yonezawa as Hiroshima Notes, ed. David L. Swain (Tokyo: YMCA Press, ∞Ω∫∞). ‡Kuroi ame (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, ∞Ω∏∏); translated by John Bester as Black Rain (Tokyo and Palo Alto: Kodansha International, ∞Ω∏Ω). introduction xiii happen?’’ and ‘‘What does it mean?’’* In South Africa, the protracted disaster of apartheid has provided several writers time to reflect and to try to comprehend, and some have done it well, but none quickly. The human disasters just noted are of course incomparable in many ways. They involve genocide, class warfare, world warfare , empire and colonialism in complex and di√ering patterns. But human recoil from extremity also has its commonalities, and to ignore these might be as big a mistake as to ignore all the historical di√erences. So let me proceed, with caution, to suggest three broad commonalities: ∞) human societies seek psychological recovery from disasters, ≤) literary expression can play an important role in this e√ort, and ≥) the passage of time seems important in gaining perspective. By these measures China’s Maoist disasters—primarily the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—present some awkward questions: Is China able to look squarely at the worst of what occurred? Is the culture...