Revolution in the study

Author: Zhu Xueqin / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: "Revolution in the Study," which is actually the author's irony. When mentioning the Frankfurt School, the author said: "The older critics were full of revolutionary spirit, and Engels even directly participated in street battles. By the time of the Frankfurt School, even though the critique was fierce, it was merely deploying troops in the study, closing doors to guide the world, and claiming superiority for themselves." This is also Zhu Xueqin's reflection on intellectuals, including himself. A low-probability event is an accident—unlikely things happen. Translated into the language of scholars, it would be "blessings never come in pairs, but misfortunes always do." From a street encounter to a sudden thunderbolt, my misfortune today began with an accident. In the spring of 1982, I took my last postgraduate entrance exam. Unluckily, I encountered a thief in the train carriage. He had already succeeded in stealing a letter from my coat pocket, but I was completely unaware. When he opened the envelope, he found nothing inside—only an admission ticket. He could have quietly got off the train, crumpled the paper, and thrown it away. But he didn’t. Instead, he risked being shouted at as a thief and returned the envelope to me, even humorously reminding me, "Brother, check what you lost!" This encounter marked a turning point in my life, which has continued to this day. I’ve had other thefts since then, even one that occurred in my residence, but I’ve never encountered such a chivalrous thief again. I love reading Gong Zizhen, and when I read his lines, "Left no capable minister, right no capable historian, nor capable thief in the alleys, nor capable bandit in the marshes," I feel a sense of resonance. I just find the old master a bit too agitated and somewhat overly surprised. Back then, I still had a bit of wildness left and was accustomed to traveling by freight train. Once, I took my wife and younger brother on a freight train to Xi’an. The journey was full of adventures, even an earthquake. The most peculiar scene was at a small station on the border of Henan and Shaanxi. The train suddenly stopped, saying there had been an accident ahead. Several trains stopped nearby, including the express train "No. 74," which had left Shanghai and was considered a local celebrity. Usually, such trains would disdain such small stations and zoom past without a second glance. But this time, it lowered itself to stop, though all the windows were tightly closed, with the interior brightly lit, contrasting the desolate evening of the poor mountain village. Seeing the sky darkening and realizing there was no village in sight either forward or backward, we had no choice but to get off the train and follow the light. As we walked, we finally got lucky—a boy around twelve or thirteen shouted my younger brother’s name from the window and opened it to let us in one by one. It turned out to be a childhood classmate of my brother’s, though they had long since stopped attending the same school and had transferred to a different school long ago. That time, he was traveling from Shanghai to Xi’an to visit his parents. Glancing down at the platform, he suddenly spotted a second-grade classmate from years ago wandering in the unfamiliar mountain ravine. Without hesitation, he shouted his name, and to his surprise, he was able to call out the name perfectly. How lovely and innocent are children’s words!
Near the Longhai Railway Line is a place called Lankao, which has the Second Party Committee Guest House, which we used to call "the second guest house." Filming scenes from the movie Jiaolülu revealed that many shots were taken in this courtyard. For example, Jiaolülu’s home, his decision to "make a mistake" and meet with the Minister of Armed Affairs under the lights to discuss purchasing grain from Dengfeng County to save his starving subordinates, and Li Ren Tang’s pretentious performance as the Party Secretary from Kaifeng arriving to investigate the matter—all were filmed in this dilapidated and dirty "second guest house." But at that time, if a sent-down youth needed to do something in the city and couldn’t return home, staying overnight at the "second guest house," no matter how lice-ridden, was already a luxurious treat from the Youth Work Office of the Party Committee. That winter, a teenage friend of mine came to visit me by train at my own expense. It happened to be a heavy snowstorm, so he couldn’t make it back to the countryside and had to stay overnight at the "second guest house." Back then, the concept of having a private room didn’t exist, so it was natural for us to share a room with another person. The two childhood friends, long separated, were young and full of energy, talking all night. We still had some self-awareness, trying to keep our voices low in our local dialect, thinking he wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t be disturbed. But the next morning, the old man wiped his face, laughed heartily, and then said to us in his rough Lankao dialect, "You two talked all night, and I listened all night. I understood every word of your hometown dialect!" He patted his empty trouser leg and continued, "This leg of mine was lost in your hometown during the 1941 anti-cleaning campaign. I fought a three-year guerrilla war there—how could I not understand those southern dialects?" The two of us stared at each other, wishing we could find a hole to hide in. Last night, amidst the snow and wind, we discussed revolutionary ideals, personal bourgeois talk, and even some highly subversive complaints about the current situation—all overheard by this old man who had lost a leg three thousand miles away. Ah, he was also a Jacob, just one whose leg was lost beyond Herzen’s vision. P3-4