Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie

Author:Dai Sijie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - General, French, Fiction, Romance, Literary, Historical, Foreign Language Study, General
ISBN: 9780307456731
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

NOTEBOOK

CHINESE NEW YEAR 1979

Ya An, “Exquisite Peace,” is the name of a mountain town which is now small and poor with barely sixty thousand inhabitants, but, if the regional annals are to be believed, it had a glorious past as the capital of the province, complete with bustling streets, a cinema, the governors palace, two decent hotels, its opium trade, its vegetable and spice market (where the heads of decapitated criminals were displayed), and its Tibetans and Lolos who made up part of the population. In 1955 Ya An was demoted, reduced to the status of principal town in a region of eight districts, each more dependent on the mountain economy than the last … in other words, extremely poor. An area from which Westerners were banned. Over several decades under communist rule this region achieved fame across the whole of China for the number of people who died, nearly one million between 1959 and 1961—that’s forty per cent of the population—anonymous victims carried off by famine, most of them dying long, slow deaths, too weak to stand upright, crawling on the ground like animals breathing their last. So Ya An became synonymous with a giant mass grave. After that scandal no one mentioned the sinister place again, the shameful wart erased itself from collective memory and all that remained were prison camps, lost among the dark silhouettes of its towering mountains, which curved bizarrely through the fog. One of these camps, on the River Lu, is known by millions of admirers of Hu Feng, a writer and great intellectual condemned by Mao himself, who always appeared extremely jealous of this particular prey, though no one ever knew why. (Hu Feng has been imprisoned there since 1955, a detention, I notice to my horror, which—give or take a couple of years—coincides with that of the French orientalist Paul d’Ampère, also incarcerated at the River Lu camp.) His sister Hu Min describes the camp in her memoirs, which were recently published in Taiwan:

When the main road from Chengdu to Tibet reaches Ya An it carries on climbing westwards for fifteen kilometres, and comes to the Pass of the Immortal Steering Wheel, a name which perfectly emphasises how perilous the topography is and reminds mortals how dangerous and difficult it is to pass. There the road forks. On the right is an uneven track of beaten earth, not to say mud, scored with deep ruts carved out and churned up by lorries laden with stones, a barely practicable eighteen-kilometre stretch along the River Lu, which carves its own bed at the foot of tall cliffs and is in fact not navigable because it has so little water and an infinite number of massive, dark rocks that have tumbled from the top of the mountain—rocks so macabre and ugly, so loaded with menace, they look like the bodies of the infirm, the deformed and the mad subjected to unimaginable tortures, screaming in pain, struggling, squirming and finally petrifying in the tormented shape of their final punishment, of death by fire or iron.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.