Banished!

12. The Author

198 ~ TWELVE The Author 1 Tao wrote and published stories all his life, but the only book of his that was published was the Collected Works oj Tao Peiyi. Tao himself never even saw this book, with its black cover and flame design in the top left-hand corner. Its publication was arranged after his death by the Writers Association. The book was a little over 300,000 characters long. Gathered at the back, in the lengthy appendixes, were memoirs and commemorative articles written by relatives and friends. There was also a play that Tao had co-written with someone else, also quite lengthy It was only the rest of the book that was Tao's own work. Sixteen short stories-in all about 250,000 characters. Tao had begun writing just after Liberation and continued until his death in 1977, about twenty-five years in all. For a writer his output was very meager, a mere ten thousand characters per year on average. Not only was he not prolific, but he did not live long, and thus he was unable to make up for this deficiency Another point to note is that his book was ordered chronologically When I read it, it felt like I was reading the annals of the People's Republic. For example, the first story is about land reform, the second about the mutual aid teams, the third about village elections , followed by stories on the state grain monopoly and rural cooperatives. Then there was a hiatus for a couple of years; Tao and fellow writers had set up a journal for "kindred spirits," The Explorer, and this was immediately condemned as an anti-party publication. This naturally made the "Explorers" members of an anti-party clique, and they were either banished to their places of origin or condemned as rightists. By comparison, Tao got off quite lightly, with only his party membership being suspended. But this put him in a state of considerable anxiety, and, unsurprisingly, he stopped writing for a few years. This interruption did not last long. The longest gap in his writing was during the CultRev, when Tao and his family were banished to Sanyu and he did not put pen to paper for nearly ten years. Of course I am speaking figuratively While in the country, Tao never stopped writing, but what exactly he was writing, only he knew. In any case, it was not stories, and even if it had been, they were never published. Calculated in this way, Tao's writing career was only ten years long. In ten years he wrote 250,000 characters or, on average, something over 20,000 characters a year. He was still not prolific, but that could not be helped. When Tao took up his pen again, he wrote three stories straight off. One was about fish farming among the fisher folk of Hongze Lake; another was about a scientist persecuted by the Gang of Four; and the last was about a persecuted democrat who finally got redress . It was only three stories, but they were nearly as long as the previous thirteen. Clearly years of repression had given a boost to Tao's creative urges. It looked as if he was making up for his previously meager output. But then he got cancer. Let us return to Tao's book. As I have said, it reads like the annals of post-Liberation China. "Serving politics" was more than just something that generation of writers believed in; it was a principle that they were obliged to respect, a kind of trade regulation that had the force of law within certain spheres. Only by working within these confines was it possible to talk about freedom. Any irresponsible talk or action or artistic activity outside of those limits was naturally against the law. There was only one choice: if you worked as a writer, you had to stay within the law. Otherwise, you did not work as a writer. It was not possible for all those poor writers who were devoted to literature not to believe in "serving politics." Their only option was to do their very best to internalize this order from above and make it their heart's desire. Once this transformation was complete, they attained freedom-or at least felt that they were free. So it did not matter whether "serving politics" was an external command or one's own desire. The only thing that mattered, and mattered a The Author...