My Old Home by Orville Schell

Author:Orville Schell [Schell, Orville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Managers of state-owned enterprises were discovering they could make more profit with less effort by simply leasing out space to private entrepreneurs. One such business was Uncle Meng’s Dumpling Palace, where the Two Virtuous Ones often ate, because, unlike dreary state-run restaurants, it offered tasty food and was clean and efficient. Uncle Meng had been accused of “counterrevolutionary rightism” in 1958 and sent off to a “reform-through-labor camp” (劳改营) as a coal miner. Upon being released and “rehabilitated,” he leased a room in the Number 6 Foodstuffs, Native Produce, and Animal By-Products Export and Import Company building and opened a tiny restaurant. In the beginning, he did everything himself. A year later, Uncle Meng had a staff of twenty, and was renting the entire first floor as well as an adjacent brick wall that had once been covered with Mao quotations. He wasted no time in turning his new wall into a second profit center by leasing it out as a billboard. Now it featured a rendering of a Western woman with ruby-red lips touting Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium perfume. The alchemical powers of Deng’s reforms had managed to transform even the Opium Wars, long a quintessential symbol of European imperialism at its most rapacious, into an acceptable luxury brand.

“Any Chinese who can sell the idea of opium as an acceptable perfume brand in the People’s Republic of China is a true revolutionary!” pronounced Little Wang facetiously as he stuffed a capitalist dumpling into his mouth. “When it comes to squaring circles, few in history have equaled the audacious inconsistency of the Chinese Communist Party!” he continued. “Under Deng, capitalism is now rescuing communism, living proof that Chairman Mao’s theory of the unity of opposites is correct!”

For party overseers, history was an infinitely malleable narrative. Because they saw themselves as the “makers of history,” they believed that they alone had the prerogative to rewrite it so that even when they had been manifestly wrong they could end up appearing right.

“Our past history is always changing, because the party’s always rewriting it,” noted Little Wang acidly. “Only the present is certain, because you can see it in front of your face. The only reason people are still inspired by the future is because the party hasn’t yet discovered a way to get there ahead of them and screw it up!”

“So—what’s the party going to do about young people like us?” asked Little Li.

“Old Mao thought that everyone he ‘sent down’ to the countryside would just quietly give up and ‘take root for the rest of their lives’ [扎根一辈子] wherever he sent them,” scoffed Little Wang. “But who wants to stay in a dump like Ulan Suhai or Yak Springs? And now all of us returned ‘educated youths’ are being joined by the older generation, guys like your father. With millions of unemployed [无业] staring him in the face, now Old Deng’s come up with a less embarrassing term for us: ‘waiting for employment’ [待业]! And what’s the easiest way

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