Martyred or Murdered: Memories of My Flute Teacher

Memories of My Flute Teacher
Liao Yiwu

SIMA WAS the oldest inmate at Tumen prison, which is up in the Daba mountains in the southwestern province of Sichuan; he was eighty-four when I met him. He had a janitorial job at the clinic where, for more than a decade, he could be seen holding either a broom or a xiao flute with eight holes. His sweeping was precise, measured, and during breaks he would sit out in the courtyard and play his flute, as though emptying himself of desolation and loneliness. The sadness that came from that hollow bamboo stick seemed out of character for someone who was, or at least had been, a Buddhist monk, supposedly detached from worldly suffering. The other prisoners used to mock him as an illiterate, ‘That old monk probably doesn’t know how to read, so he thinks if he plays his flute it will make up for not studying scripture.’

Monk Sima’s past was a mystery to me and to the others, although there was much speculation; one version had the ring of truth: formerly abbot at a nearby temple, he was accused by the government of belonging to a huidaomen – ‘superstitious sect’ – that was rumoured to be still active in many parts of the countryside, even though huidaomen were declared illegal as ‘subversive’ cults after the Communists took over China in 1949. When Monk Sima’s case was first brought to police attention in 1982, investigators initially doubted a venerated abbot could be a cultist, but under interrogation Sima refused to speak, so he was deprived of sleep and tortured. After a month, he gave them just three sentences: ‘I have committed sins. So have you. We are all sinful.’ The court sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Our paths first crossed one winter morning in 1992, soon after I was transferred to Tumen from a detention centre outside a big metropolis in Sichuan. I had been sentenced to four years’ prison for condemning the government’s crackdown at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The prosecutor called me a counter-revolutionary.

It was a transitional period in my life. I was recovering from the injuries and trauma inflicted upon me during my incarceration at the detention centre and, as part of the healing process, I had begun writing what would become volume one of my autobiography, To Live. I was in prison and would need to look inward for freedom. As I hunched pen over paper on my bunk and immersed myself in my thoughts, what my mother called my wind-catching ears picked up the almost imperceptible sounds of weeping on the breeze that reached through the tiny window of my second-floor cell. I rose from the bed – not weeping, but a flute playing music unlike anything I had heard in concert halls.

I took a half-carton of cheap cigarettes from my locker and went down to the courtyard, where I bribed the guard to tell me where the music had come from – the clinic, he said, and tucked the cigarettes inside his jacket. Through an archway off the courtyard, I followed a long corridor that, after three turns, led me to an open space. To the right was the entrance to the prison clinic. I winced at the stench of pungent antiseptic mixed with that of a nearby ditch of excrement.

I found the flautist leaning against a steep wall topped by tendrils of barbed wire and ivy reaching into the sky. His big round bald head sat atop an emaciated body. He seemed oblivious to my presence. As he blew, his shoulders heaved up and down inside his blue cotton-padded uniform jacket. The tune meandered like a mountain stream, its volume surging in parts, then trickling away to become almost inaudible, drying up into virtually nothing, because while I could see him playing I could not, then, hear any sound. What I heard on that day was actually a short tune, but it wound on and on, unrushed, as if it would take a lifetime to finish.

Time glided by and soon I felt the dampness from the frozen ground travel up through my body, and seep into my bones. My knees began shaking, my teeth chattering. Though the upper half of the prison walls was bathed in sunlight and several sparrows perched quietly on the barbed wire, it was shaded and cold where we were and a sharp wind blew.

The old monk wiped away what seemed to be tears, from the cold wind or the raw emotion I could not tell, and wrapped his flute in a ragged piece of worn cloth. He raised his head and smiled at me, an idiotic young man shivering but happy. I smiled back. I guess that was karma.

‘You want to learn how to play?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘You need to find a decent flute,’ he said, then turned and hurried away. I guess, in Buddhist terms, I was to be his student and he my teacher. As it were always thus.

I walked back to my cell in what I can only describe as a trance, the monk’s bamboo flute dancing in my mind. For a whole day, that black shining wooden stick wouldn’t go away. I drew it on a piece of paper with some instructions and mailed it with a letter to my mother, who said she had run around the city for several days and managed to find five flutes of different designs, which she brought me on her next visit.

‘None of these works,’ the old monk said, barely glancing at them.

A month later, my mother came back with five more. The monk examined each of them carefully and selected one he said might make a ‘half decent’ sound. He had me soak the flute in water for seven days, scrape the paint and ornaments from the surface, bury it in the snow for a couple more days and then let it dry out in the wind.

On a sunny day following a big winter storm, we began. He was in the courtyard. I could see him from my cell. I put my hands in front of my chest, palm to palm, and prayed silently. When I opened my eyes again, I saw my teacher raise his flute to his lips.

‘Breathe …’ he instructed. I needed to take the air I inhaled and direct it to my ‘dantian’, a place beneath my lower abdomen, and then gradually let it out. The process, well paced and controlled, would transform the air inside my lungs into an energy flow, which could circulate through my body and heart.

I put aside my writing.

At the beginning, the bamboo flute was stubborn; no matter how hard I blew into it, no sound came out. When I finally managed to produce some awkward notes, they reminded me of the noise villagers make when they blow through a hollowed bamboo stick to fan the flames in the cooking stove. Even so, the noise brought me hope and encouraged me to blow harder. Soon I felt a pain in my chest, my head was about to explode. The monk stood outside my window: ‘Control your breathing,’ he said. I grew despondent.

I was focusing on my flute when my cellmates from the night shift swarmed in. As they disrobed and lay down on their bunk beds to sleep it was made clear that I should leave. I took my flute and went down to the courtyard where, looking directly at the dazzling sun, I saw seven or eight images of my teacher within the blinding fireball. The cold unceasing wind massaged his face. ‘You are such a wimp,’ he said inside my head. ‘You don’t even have the strength to make the flute work.’

An inmate I knew as Crazy Wino was jogging around the courtyard, his feet pounding on the snow-covered ground. He ran all year around, always wearing the same cotton-padded hat with ear flaps and a scarf. Everyone compared him to Hua Ziliang, a character in a well-known revolutionary novel about a group of underground Communists in the 1940s. In the book, Hua was imprisoned by the Nationalists but refused to betray his comrades and to protect himself feigned insanity by jogging up and down the courtyard all day long in all weather. I wonder what Crazy Wino was up to and decided to join him. I easily outpaced him and then began lapping him around the courtyard. We soon drew a crowd. ‘Wow, there is another crazy hero here, an iron man!’ They wooed and wowed. They applauded each lap I gained and I was basking in their attention when Crazy Wino turned around and began running toward me. Before I knew what was happening, a row of yellow teeth flashed in front of my eyes and sank into my forehead. Crazy Wino was an angry rabbit gone wild. We fell in a writhing mass into a pile of snow and a roar went up from the crowd. It took several of my fellow 1989 counter-revolutionaries to break up the fight. Crazy Wino wore a mad smile on his face, his protruding teeth showing traces of blood.

I picked up my flute and walked away tending the wound on my forehead, but felt nothing of what should have been its searing pain.

The fight got me into trouble with the prison authorities. ‘A country is governed by law and the prison is managed by rules,’ the warden told the assembled prisoners soon after the courtyard incident. ‘Liao is a political prisoner but he should be subjected to the same punishment accorded a common criminal.’

Amid thunderous applause, two inmates came forward, shackled my hands and feet and escorted me from the well-lit common areas of the prison to a section shrouded in darkness. I was pushed tottering along a corridor that reeked of mildew and urine. My escorts turned on a flashlight as we passed a row of doors, behind which those who violated prison rules were locked.

At the end of the corridor a door clanked open and in I went. My head hit the low damp ceiling, sending cold shivers down my spine, and as I reached up to touch it drops of water ran like a slimy snake into my sleeve. I was trembling. ‘Hello? Anybody in here?’

The door clanged shut and, after the sound of footsteps was gone, there was nothing but silence, and emptiness. I felt around me and touched on a stone bed. I sat. I could hear rats squealing and jumping, and as I swept the floor with my foot the shackles around my leg caught a metal toilet container, knocking it over onto the floor.

Several hours must have passed. The rancid air was stifling. Bugs were biting all over my body and my scratching became incessant. I grew as hungry as the insects.

We were fed twice a day – a small bowl of rotten rice – and the hunger gnawed at my stomach. I wrapped myself in a quilt, assumed the lotus position, and took to meditating. ‘Breathe,’ the monk whispered in my ear. I inhaled, trying to push the air down deep and then carefully exhaled. Again. Again. Again. Cold sweat trickled down my spine, the bugs droning around me. I suppressed the urge to gag at the stench as I held my imaginary flute, fingers pressed to the holes, and began to play. The world was nothing.

In ancient times King Wen, imprisoned in a cellar for three years, took to observing the movements of the sun and the moon through an air hole no bigger than his fist. His perseverance gave birth to a masterpiece, the I Ching, which revealed a comprehensive system of divination.

‘Am I to compose my I Ching in music?’ I wondered.

Between my exertions I lay down on the stone bed, at rest like a pool of still water hidden inside a deep dark cave. Inside this big stomach called the Universe the Earth was only a tiny pearl of undigested grain, human beings merely the grain’s molecules. Breathe. I drifted into unconsciousness.

I spent two weeks in the dark. Outside, there was nearly a riot as my fellow 1989 counter-revolutionaries went on a hunger strike in protest against my punishment. When I emerged, like a veteran soldier returning from the battlefield, I was given a hero’s welcome, my fellow inmates piling on my bed food they had saved for me from their daily rations. ‘We will always act as one,’ said Lao Lei, a big brother among our group, as he shook my hands. I was overwhelmed with gratitude.

I now had the cell to myself for long periods during the day and I directed my attention to the courtyard outside – everything seemed so familiar, the tall drab walls, the entangled barbed wire, the stern-looking guards and their patrol dogs. Once, for a moment, I saw the back of a woman flash by. It had been so long and I was tortured with desire. The woman’s buttocks inflated in my mind. Slapping myself, I took up my flute to the sound of a weepy tune in the distance. ‘Teacher,’ I called out.

It took three months, but I learned to master the flow of air and energy inside my body. If nothing else, my circulation had improved and my face glowed with health. My job was to get up early, register the names of inmates working at the prison factory and then deliver lunches of rice and soup to them. Under normal circumstances I would finish my duties by early afternoon and then devote the rest of my time to the flute. Every few days, Monk Sima would appear outside my window, gesture some brief instructions to me and then leave. Not long after I would hear a tune rising from the place where I first saw him. I would listen, trying to appreciate and absorb the essence of the piece.

* * *

When my younger sister, Xiao Fei, came to visit, bringing packages of food, before saying goodbye she told me, ‘Mum and dad hope you don’t give up your writing.’

Yu Tian, a poet friend, showed up unexpectedly, arguing and begging his way past the guards. He told them I was his cousin.

‘Your cousin is doing pretty well here,’ Yu Tian was told. ‘He plays the flute every day, like some free-spirited deity.’

I hadn’t seen Yu Tian for many years and his visit brought back a flood of memories. ‘You still have this long beard,’ I greeted him.

‘Where’s yours?’ he said, proudly playing with his own.

‘It’s all gone.’

Yu Tian filled me in on what news and gossip he knew of our former poet friends. ‘By the way, your old mistress has been asking about you,’ he said. ‘She insisted on coming along. It took me quite a while to get rid of her … Hey, how come you act so indifferently to everything now?’

‘All the things you just told me … don’t seem to have anything to do with me anymore,’ I stammered. ‘I feel like I have no past.’

‘No past?’ he barked. ‘You are in jail because of your past.’

I took in his dishevelled hair, his tired bloodshot eyes, not knowing how to respond. He had travelled thousands of miles to see me, a disgraced poet, who used to be like him. How disappointed he must have been in me.

* * *

In April, green vines crawled over the prison walls. The sky was a clear blue. And Monk Sima almost succumbed to an often fatal disease. I was not allowed to look after him, but I made sure he received some of the food my family sent. Returning one afternoon from my usual lunch delivery duties, I snuck into the ward to see him and was surprised to find he was sitting outside, dozing in the sun, his flute between his knees. He woke at the sound of my approaching footsteps. I bowed, gently shook his hands, and asked about his health.

‘I was about to play a tune to let you know that the illness has receded,’ he said.

He struggled to his feet and raised his flute, but seemed to lack the strength to begin. After failing several times to draw a sound, he flung the flute against his chair. ‘You and I have accompanied each other for decades. You, damn fucker, are now taunting me for getting old.’

When he tried again the flute came to life, the jagged and blunt notes conjuring up the image of an aging warrior sharpening his knife by the river; even though a glimmer of the setting sun highlights the rusty surface of the sword, the warrior’s mind remains sharp. As the tune wavered in the air, I cringed. ‘Teacher, don’t be too hard on yourself.’

The old monk sighed, ‘I don’t care if I’m alive or dead. I have to play a couple of tunes a day before I can calm down and rest. Oh well.’

And with that, he returned to his chair, placing the flute horizontal on his lap. Teacher and student sat silently, face to face. I could see he had reached the autumn of his life and thought to try to lift his spirits. ‘Teacher, the tune you just played was about autumn. Why not perform something for the spring?’

‘What are you talking about?’ he replied. ‘There is no season here. For the flute, it is always autumn.’

‘Can I name this tune, then, “Autumn”?’

The monk dismissed my suggestion. His laughter embarrassed me. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

‘You are flattering me. Secular tunes popular in the rural areas are what I play. They’ve been passed down from generation to generation; most don’t have proper names. I’m sure you will preserve them and pass them on. I am a monk, but you are a man with a heart and feelings.’

‘What do you mean “heart and feelings”?’ I asked.

‘Worldly feelings,’ he answered.

His words came as a revelation to me. ‘I understand. Thank you for reminding me, teacher.’

I thought about what my sister and Yu Tian had said to me. I knew that I probably should resume my writing, but the flute prevailed over my pen. I sensed a conflict within me, a conflict between spiritual yearning and worldly ambition.

With the arrival of summer my musical technique improved. I practised afternoon and evening, my repetitions annoying inmate and guard alike, to the point that the merest peep of a note was met with loud protests. I moved my practice sessions to the latrines, where I hoped to cause less of an inconvenience. One evening, someone squatting over the pit called out mockingly for a popular romantic tune to help ease his bowel movement. I took the request seriously and played ‘My Home Bathed in Moonlight’. Midway through the piece the moon broke through the clouds and those out strolling in the cool air, on hearing my music, were drawn toward the latrines. I was surprised by their applause when I reached the end of the tune. An inmate at the urinal slapped his stomach and went about his business.

A joke quickly spread about how my music ‘stinks’ and my sessions in the latrines began to draw crowds. Someone would ask for their favourite tune and, if I knew it, I would comply, if I didn’t, I promised to learn it for the next time. It was suggested that I join some of the other musicians among the inmates – players of the guitar, the erhu, and even the suona, though I couldn’t recall ever hearing any horns played in the prison. When we were asked to rehearse a concerto and present the piece at a holiday celebration party to showcase our talents and please the authorities I abandoned whatever dignity and principles I had left and performed like an ingratiating dog.

* * *

The first sign of trouble was a growing tension. It was sensed by all. Then came the armed guards, rounding us up, ordering us to sit. Minutes passed. A precise tromp echoed from the corridor and the warden emerged, accompanied by the Party secretary and a squad of police. He called out the name ‘Lao Lei’, a fellow political prisoner, who stood and was taken away.

The following afternoon we were summoned for a public meeting where Lao Lei was paraded along with several others accused of violating prison rules, their hands tied behind their backs, their ankles shackled. Lao Lei looked dejected and miserable as he stood before the podium. The Party secretary said he had been writing secret letters to a British spy agency.

How could that be? Was Lao Lei insane? Was he mentally ill? He had to have known that no letters left the prison unchecked, and even outside there was no respect for privacy; postal inspectors opened all mail sent abroad.

What had happened, we later found out, was this: Lao Lei had written a short letter in English to a foreign professor who used to teach at his college. The letter was no more than a few lines of simple greetings but, with the prison short on language talent, the Party secretary had sent it to the county tourist bureau for translation and, to protect himself, sent Lao Lei to the ‘dark hole’. That much we understood, but two weeks passed and Lao Lei was still in the hole. A secret meeting of the 1989 counter-revolutionaries was called during a break and plans were laid for a hunger strike.

The protest began on the day we received our only meal with meat for the week, a special day for everyone. My comrades each collected their lunchtime meal – fragrant rice and the saliva-inducing meat – and gathered in the middle of the courtyard where, one by one, they left their untouched bowls and retreated to their cells. I was not among them. A despicable traitor, greedy as a pig, I ate every last grain of rice, chewed every shred of meat, and even licked the bowl. I wiped my mouth and went to practise the flute.

It was Li Bifeng, a fellow counter-revolutionary, who snatched the bamboo flute from my hands. He was furious, and so, he said, were all the other political prisoners. I could only apologise. ‘I suffered acute hunger as a child and at the detention centre,’ I said, by way of explanation. ‘Just the thought of a hunger strike gives me headaches and an irregular heartbeat.’

Li was unimpressed and launched into an angry tirade. ‘When you were locked up in the dark room, everyone else showed solidarity …’

I cut him off. ‘I’ll do anything, anything, except a hunger strike.’

Li Bifeng glared at me, but could see the strength of my resolve and knew better than to waste his energy on my stubbornness. He was clever at finding compromises. ‘Right, then; you can represent all of us in negotiations with the prison authorities for Lao Lei’s release. We will not accept anything less.’

I was now committed to an impossible task, and recalled an old saying: ‘A man honours his credibility more than life.’ I abandoned all thoughts of practice and sat down to consider the problem, and that’s when I remembered reading something about prisoners’ rights in the People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper. I tracked down an old copy of the paper, and in it a report that said inmates found to have violated prison rules should be subject to solitary confinement for no more than fifteen days. I counted on my fingers. It had been eighteen days since Lao Lei was taken away. I was sure I had them.

‘Are you the representative sent by the 1989 counter-revolutionaries?’ the Party secretary asked as I stood before him.

‘I represent only myself,’ I said, ‘and under the law, every prisoner is entitled to question the actions of the prison authorities.’ I then set out my case, that our very own People’s Daily supported the argument that Lao Lei had been punished enough and should be released from the hole immediately.

‘Let me be clear. We will strictly apply the law to anyone who dares to organise and conspire to sabotage and undermine the rules and regulations here. How did you manage to become their representative? Is it because they like how you play the flute?’

‘I represent only myself,’ I repeated.

‘Then if it’s just you, I can have you locked up in the dark room too.’

‘If you try, I will have to dash out to the balcony and jump to my death.’

With both hands, I held above my head the crumpled copy of the People’s Daily and shouted, melodramatically, aping those revolutionary heroes in old Communist movies: ‘I’m willing to defend with my blood and my life the purity and dignity of our country’s socialist law!’

The Party secretary did not like being challenged, but at the same time he couldn’t suppress his laughter, clearly seeing the absurdity of my tactic. In the end, he relented and Lao Lei was released that night. My comrades proclaimed me a hero.

I often wonder if I have ever been in control of my own life. Always I seem to be led or pushed into doing things that, on reflection, were not altogether wise. Take the spring of 1989 and the protest movement that sprang up around Tiananmen Square. When students took to the streets I was merely an indifferent onlooker. But after the bloody crackdown, I couldn’t contain my anger. I worked through the night composing my poem, ‘Massacre’, then read it into a tape recorder and had copies distributed across the country. That tape formed the basis of the charges against me: counter-revolutionary instigation and conspiracy. The media crowned me ‘a poet with dissenting views’, but, to be honest, I wasn’t even sure what my political views were. I know now – four years of prison life have a way of forming and hardening one’s political opinions.

I must admit I got drunk on my new ‘hero’ status and the exhilaration of my unexpected victory. Brandishing my flute, I played light-hearted tunes with vigour, gyrating like a rock musician, eyes closed and head bobbing up and down, soaking up the applause. We human beings can be so frivolous.

Monk Sima was clearly not impressed by my new swagger; gently, he asked me to put my flute down. ‘You have established quite a reputation lately.’

It was like a bucket of icy cold water pouring over my head.

‘Life in prison is really no different from life outside,’ he said. ‘Here, the circle that confines you is merely smaller.’

I stared down at the mouth of my flute. A thousand words clogged my throat, but not a single one came out.

‘You can go now,’ my teacher said. I turned like an automaton and left.

For days after, I felt lost.

I don’t know who is blowing smoke, I thought. If the whole world is another prison, a bigger circle of confinement, what’s the point of living?

What I had failed to grasp was that Monk Sima had resigned himself to playing the flute. I, on the other hand, in my prime, my blood boiling inside my veins, had a choice. I realised that I could not hope to inherit his techniques and philosophy because we were on different sides of the river of age. We could build bridges to span that river, but there could be no crossing them. I began to approach my music from a different, if not opposite, direction.

‘Your music radiates vitality and energy,’ the old monk said when our paths crossed in the courtyard. ‘You must be serving out your sentence soon.’

‘Yes, teacher.’

‘What are you planning to do when you leave here?’

‘Find something to do so I can make ends meet, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Now that I have learned how to play flute from you, what else can I do?’

‘You are lighting fake incense in front of Buddha,’ he smiled. ‘Your music conveys a different story, one of more aggressive impulses.’

I was taken by surprise. ‘Please, offer your guidance,’ I asked.

‘I’m not blaming you for your worldly ambitions. I have had fourteen students. You are the fifteenth. They abide by the rules; none dare to commit blasphemy and step outside the boundaries. Therefore, none has gone or will go anywhere. You will preserve and pass down the tradition and carry it to fame and success.’

I bowed my head.

‘You are educated and intelligent. You still need practice and guidance in your technique, but you give meaning to meaningless tunes and vitality to the tired and familiar. That’s pretty good … really good. You can be on your own now.’

I buried my head between my knees. After that, I was too embarrassed to look my teacher in the eye. Our relationship had come to an end.

* * *

Monk Sima stopped coming to the courtyard to give instruction; I no longer heard his flute. He shut himself in his room, refusing visitors, and even my attempts to see him ended with disappointment. I practised alone in the snow, consumed by sadness, until my energy was gone and I lay shivering in bed, my temperature soaring. ‘Our lunatic iron man is finally wilting,’ the inmates joked as they exchanged news of my worsening condition, their concern tempered by the excitement my illness injected into the tedium of prison life. Old Yang, the nurse, came by and prescribed some herbs and antibiotics. He told Li Bifeng to give him regular updates.

Li Bifeng stood by my side for hours at a time, like a loyal guard of the imperial army, moistening my lips with drops of water, forcing me to swallow tonics of herbs to make me sweat out the fever. I was covered with a heavy quilt and several times my temperature climbed precipitously, then plunged. My undergarments were soaked and had to be changed every few hours until I simply wrapped myself naked in the quilt when cold, and threw it off when the heat became unbearable, at which Li Bifeng would climb up to my bunk bed, pin me down like a slab of meat to be butchered, and wrap me up again. Soon I would be too weak to struggle and, panting for breath, surrendered.

At one point I asked for my flute, which hung on the wall near my bed, and hugged it to my chest. Li Bifeng morphed into Monk Sima and I pleaded with him, ‘Teacher, you made me what I am now. When you play, you play you. I am me and can only play me.’

Li Bifeng told me I went on and on about ‘Su Wu Herding the Sheep’ and how Monk Sima played it back and forth with dozens of variations of rhythms, making it heart-wrenching, yet uplifting, and transformed the famous tune he had acquired from his own teacher by infusing it with his own life until it was not Su Wu, of the ancient legend, who tended the sheep while exiled in the remote enemy land, but Monk Sima himself.

‘I’m sure it made sense to you at the time,’ he chuckled.

My fever broke, but I was very weak and when I was finally able to slide off my bunk and stand before the window, I realised seven days had passed and I had been given an insight into life. I felt transformed, that I was starting afresh. I tried my flute but my lungs were weak, my wind little more than a wisp.

I thought I would jog around the courtyard but was gasping for air after only two circuits, then racked by a coughing fit. When it passed, my eyes streaming with tears, I heard the familiar flute music, but it sounded … empty, devoid of any worldly feeling or attachment. ‘The monk is only an illusion,’ I said to no one. ‘He doesn’t belong to this world.’

As my lungs recovered I resumed my practice, and gradually I felt my music rise more and more from my heart. ‘A tune is like a corpse,’ I told myself. ‘Once you blow your essence into it, it comes to life and dances at your will.’ I tried my hand at the popular revolutionary song ‘The East is Red’. Li Bifeng told me I had turned our Communist anthem into a memorable rural funeral requiem.

* * *

On January 31, 1994, a week before the New Year, I was informed I was being considered for early release. I emptied my wallet buying dried sausages and beef, and began planning a big party for my fellow 1989 counter-revolutionaries to mark the holiday. I heard nothing more until, late one evening, the guards fetched me from my cell and took me to a room packed with police. I was puzzled. ‘What crimes have I committed this time?’

An officer patted me on the shoulder. ‘No crimes; your family is here. Let’s go meet with them.’ I feared this was a trick. ‘Prisoners are not allowed to step out of their cells in the evenings,’ I said. Everyone laughed, and one of my guards said, ‘When did you start to understand the rules so well?’

I was escorted outside, through several check points and down a slope to the path that led to the outer buildings of the prison. It was a windy night and I crossed my arms tightly over my chest to hold closed my winter coat. My eyes darted among the shadows cast by the dim lights around us and I drew my head down into my collar, fearful I was being led into a death trap. When we approached the prison administrative building, I realised that I had stopped breathing. We took the stairs to the third floor and an office from which emerged a bright light.

I did not see my relatives in the room. Instead, the Party secretary sat behind a big desk, waving and beckoning me forward. I was thirsty and he handed me a glass of water. I gulped it down. I could feel the heat of the high-powered camera lights scorching my head.

‘How are things going with your flute?’ He had a big smile splattered across his face. He gave me no time to respond. ‘Do you want to spend the New Year’s holiday with your family?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But I still have forty-six days to go and, before I leave, I want my diploma.’

‘Diploma?’ The Party secretary looked puzzled.

‘Yes, a diploma, to show I have served out my sentence. In this life, I didn’t have the luck to attend a real university. Instead, I got this prison. I’ve been here for four years. That’s equivalent to an undergraduate degree. I want my diploma.’

‘You do have a good sense of humour,’ the Party secretary said, but his smile had vanished. He shuffled some papers on his desk. ‘Okay, let’s get down to some serious business. During the past four years, you have abided by the rules and done a good job in reforming yourself. Based on your good performance, the government has decided to grant you an early release. Before we proceed, we need your cooperation on a couple of things.’

‘I said before and I will repeat again: I refuse to write a confession.’

‘No one is asking you to give up your previous views and opinions, but you need to express your willingness to change.’

It is easy to say one is willing to change; whether one actually does so is entirely another matter. So, standing to attention, I said smartly, and the Party secretary took it as assent, ‘I am grateful to the government for releasing me ahead of schedule.’

‘What are you planning to do after you get out of here?’

‘Make a living and support myself.’

‘How would you describe your life in here?’

‘Better than life at the detention centre.’

‘Is there anything you want the government to do?’

‘I want to move in with my parents. I hope the government can transfer my city residential card from Fuling to Chengdu.’

‘But your wife and daughter are in Fuling. You also had a job there.’

‘My wife and children have left me, and that city has given me only nightmares.’

I don’t know how long the ‘interview’ lasted. We were being filmed the whole time and under the camera lights I felt like I was sitting too close to a fireplace. When I thought I could smell smoke, I removed my winter coat to find there was a charred patch on the back. I glared at the cameraman, downed another glass of water and stood. Sweat streaming down my cheeks, I asked permission to leave. The Party secretary waved his hands, said yes, and the show was over.

* * *

We didn’t return to my cell. Instead, two guards escorted me to the prison guest house where I was given a single room, all to myself. It was the first time I had slept alone since my arrest. It was a deep sleep. The next morning, I got up and went outside for my routine exercise. The guest house stood wedged between two parallel walls that separated the prisoners from the administrators and the outside – worlds within worlds.

Two of the inmates delivered my things and, while the guards weren’t watching, one of them slipped me a scrap of paper. ‘We have moved all your manuscripts to a safe place. Someone will deliver them to you later. Don’t worry about us. Your friend, Xu Wanping.’

I felt at once grateful, and guilty. I also felt solidarity with those brought together by the Tiananmen Massacre, bound by the same faith.

Three days and three nights passed. I played the flute, read, stared at the sky, at the tall walls that still held me. My mind was a jumble of prison memories so sharp and vivid that my head ached. Monk Sima, his flute as a walking stick, came to me. I grabbed the front of his shirt, but it changed into a long umbilical cord in a tangle of all my prison memories. Like a clam, heaven and earth sucked my whole being into its shell.

‘Teacher!’ I screamed, and woke from a high fall. It was nothing I had ever experienced before, nor expected to again, no matter how long I lived. The world outside my window resembled a mirror; the moon a placenta in a shiny glass bottle. There was frost in the air, whitening the leaves in the yard. I took up my flute, weathered with time, and wetted its mouth, innocent and tender like the mouth of a newborn baby. It tasted salty. Did amniotic fluid taste of salt? I sat facing the prison clinic and played a tune named ‘Guest’. A fat shiny bug squirmed up an old tall tree. My heart danced wildly and my ear drums popped. But all I could hear was nothing. I played ‘Yearning’, and sat still for a time, twenty minutes that felt like two centuries. I wasn’t sure at first of the faint sound that reached my ears. But floating out and over the mountain-high walls, the tune was unmistakable. It was ‘World Unity’, or ‘Opening the Gate’.

Tears welled in my eyes.

Go.

Go until you disappear into oblivion.

From The Editor