Years of Poems and Spirits

I was waiting at a traffic light when I heard the news that David Halberstam just died. All I remember now was that for a long while after hearing the news, I just stared at the muffler of the car ahead of me, not even knowing while I was moving or not.

I thought the world of Halberstam: he was the one who introduced America to me. Through his books, The Powers That Be and The Best and the Brightest, I came to know so many things about this country and so many characters in its history. Today, writers like him are perhaps dime a dozen. However, when I was 17 or 18 still in China, he was like a mentor I never met. I read Chinese edition of The Powers That Be so many times I even brought it with other must-haves when I moved to the States.

Although my father is a journalist, he’s left a mixed impression on me: on the one hand, I know he’s a wordsmith for the authority. But when he is not working and let his guard down, things he says and stories he tells are just fascinating. Yet I never know what journalism really is until I read The Powers That Be.

Although Halberstam failed to inspire me to become a journalist, he’d succeeded in openning my mind. There was never any doubt whether to become a citizen here–I’d always wanted to join this polity thanks to the works of Halberstam.

Just read a profile in the New Yorker on a Chinese dissident, Zha Jianguo.

It is a moving narrative about a lonely man who is an outcast in a society he cares the most but is hailed a Prometheus in another he refuse to escape to. The saddest thing about him, though, is that even his little sister wrote him with much affection but little conviction. Ever so subtly, she casts doubts on who to blame on her brother’s predicament: afterall, the warden is friendly, the authority is accommodating, his sympathizer in the West thinks he should just pack up and run … and his mother thinks he has a “hero complex” since a kid. Even herself seems to imply that his conviction might have something to do with a succession of failed business ventures.

Zha’s problem is that he is a “professional” dissident that lacks originality. Solzhenitsyn was kind of the same in that he was an endogenous element of the discidence business (where as Andrei Sakharov and Garry Kasparov are outsiders hence an “exogenous” factor upon entry). But Solzhenitsyn had the good luck of being the first to document from within and did so at a time when the liberals in the West was seeking a good excuse to break clean from the Soviets. I read part of the The Gulag Archipelago, it was morally powerful but not a treatise on Communism by any stretch of imagination.

Zha, on the contrary, has neither the fame nor the fortune to be of any significance. The revelation of his failed business endeavors does not help either: he’s had the courage but one wonders whether such courage came from a strong conviction or an opportunitistic speculation that China will eventually liberalize through one of those colored revolutions. If it is the latter, the saddest part is perhaps that Zha hasn’t realized that he’d been victimized twice: once during the Cultural Revolution when he was tricked into Mao’s grandiosity. Once is now: he still believes in the promise of being a dissident–a mirage projected from the West.

It takes me great pain to write this down. I remember being very emotional while reading Anthony Marx’s Faith in Nation–he convinced me how brutal state consolidation is. It is a similar kind of feeling. The great patriot, 谭嗣同, once said: the reform business is going nowhere because no one is willing to die for it–allow me to start the tradition then. I can never have his courage but I wish one day I will have equally strong conviction.