Mr Ma and Son Read Free

of the Socialist bureaucracy, or implicitly compared censorship under the Communists with repression under their predecessors, the Nationalist government. And try as he might, he could not lose his internationalism. In May 1966 he received his last foreign visitors, a British couple called Roma and Stuart Gelder, in Peking. At the very heart of Mao’s brave new world, nostalgia for imperfect England welled up in him. He asked them to tell him about ‘Piccadilly and Leicester Square and Hyde Park and St James, and the Green Park . . . Peking is beautiful, but I shall always think of London in spring as one of the most attractive cities in the world. And the people – I received great kindness in England.’
    In the summer of 1966, Mao began his last purge: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Originally devised as a means of removing Mao’s enemies in the Party, the campaign rapidly expanded into a witch-hunt against anyone vaguely suspected of deviation from Mao’s anti-Western, ultra-modernising dogmas. Lao She, a writer steeped in the sights and sounds of old Peking, and also associated with foreign places and books, was an early victim. One day in late August, Red Guards – Mao’s teenage shock troops – dragged Lao She to their headquarters at the Confucian temple and there forced him to stand for hours in the dusty heat while they harangued him for his ‘criminal, counter-revolutionary’ past. Eventually they told him to return home: ‘We will carry on with you tomorrow’. That evening, Lao She left his courtyard house, made his way to the Lake of Great Peace north of the Forbidden City and drowned himself. (Some dispute the verdict of suicide, alleging instead that Red Guards beat Lao She to death then threw his body into the lake.)
    Lao She’s life and death share the melancholy ambivalence of Mr Ma and Son . Despite the titles and honours that the Communist government showered upon him – People’s Artist, Vice-Chairman of the Writers’ Union – and despite his professions of loyalty to the regime (it was rumoured that a copy of Mao’s writings in the chairman’s own calligraphy was found on Lao She’s corpse), Lao She was incapable of allying himself simplistically with any single cause. But Mao’s China was not a place in which a Chinese citizen could harbour doubts. Perhaps it was the realisation that his country would not tolerate his non-alignment – expressed some four decades earlier in Mr Ma and Son – that guided his final steps to the Lake of Great Peace.
    – JULIA LOVELL

PART ONE

H EAD BOWED low, Ma Wei made towards Marble Arch. After a few paces, he found himself coming to a halt and standing dazedly, glancing from side to side. What at? Nothing. He was looking at nothing, and nothing was what he saw. Like runny fish-glue, his thoughts had gummed up his mind completely, leaving not even a crack for matters of the outside world to creep in, and depriving him of all mental control over his physical movements. His glance shot out and came straight back in, bringing nothing with it. He’d long since forgotten the world, and fiercely wished for it to be destroyed, and himself along with it. Right now! So why bother looking at anything any more?
    He stood rooted there. It was a good two or three minutes before the scenes in front of him registered. ‘Oh, yes,’ he murmured to himself, ‘it’s Sunday today.’
    On Sunday afternoons, there’s always a bustle and stir around Marble Arch. All over the green lawns and gravel paths stand bunches of people. Workmen with red flags crane their necks, wave their big, rough, brown, hairy hands, and bellow at the top of their voices, like minor bursts of thunder, ‘Down with the capitalists!’, blaming the latter for all the ills of the world. Even last night’s bad sleep was the capitalists’ fault.
    Right next to the red flag stands the Conservative Party with a Union Jack. The men there hold their heads very high, because