A month ago I went to Nanjing for an internship. It wasn’t my first time in the city, but it was the first time I saw it up close. The weather is far better than Wuhan’s. Summer gets hot here too, but the streets are lined with thick plane trees, and the sun comes through the gaps in the leaves and lays a broken pattern on the ground.
It all looked like my hometown, a small city a thousand miles away. Three years ago I left it for school in Wuhan. The day before I left, in the afternoon light, I sat on a bus and watched the streets go by through the window. It was the same picture.
Maybe because everything around me keeps changing, I am always, half on purpose, looking for something familiar. Or rather: I let familiar things come and find me, and I only have to receive them. Since I was small, the same scene has turned up in different places and flashed back in my head, so that for a moment or two I feel time has come loose. I even suspect these scenes were built on purpose, for me alone—the same set and props used three years ago and now, the same actor appearing three years ago and in the future. Like The Truman Show: you cannot prove you are not living in a world like that. But turn it around. Even in a world like that, you would at least be the lead, and everything around you would exist for your sake. Is that really worse than the real world, where people keep telling you that you are an ant at the edge of things, until you finally see it and believe it?
Fake is not necessarily worse than real.
The Second Historical Archives of China, in Nanjing, was where I interned. It sits on the old site of the Nationalist government and holds the records of the Republic from the 1911 revolution onward. The department I was assigned to had nothing to do with any of that. What I could touch were the archives’ own files from 1949 on. Not exactly interesting, but a fine place to grow old. Three hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, lunch near the Presidential Palace, weekends counted toward the internship. So this is what “relevant to your major” means. Your job is to get through the morning, get through the day, get through the week to the weekend and the next loop. Around and around, day after day, until one day you become part of the archive.
To get through one half-day after another, I started reading. Honestly, an archive’s own archives are not much to read. Most of it is directives from above, retrieval logs, personnel changes. Only at a few turning points in history do you find a trace of something interesting.
I read for many days and got nothing out of it. I remembered one name.
Zhu Wannian was an ordinary copyist, right where I was interning. Seventy years ago, at this same moment, in this same building, he was living his life.
He was nobody important. The files hold only a few fragments about him, and nothing else can be found. The year the People’s Liberation Army took Nanjing, during the personnel review, he filled out his details on a few forms with a brush, and they have been kept ever since.
Zhu Wannian, native of Anhui, born in the seventh year of the Guangxu reign. Education: “juren under the former Qing.” Marital status: “married.” Currently a copyist at the Nationalist Party’s Central Documents Office—May 1949.
A late-Qing scholar, as typical as they come. I thought about it and tried to lay out his life.
He was born in 1881, the seventh year of Guangxu. When he was thirteen, the First Sino-Japanese War would break out. At nineteen he would watch the Boxer catastrophe. But before thirteen, who could touch his path? The outside world was too far away. He started reading as a child, then sat the imperial examinations. With luck he would pass: from xiucai to juren, from juren to jinshi.
He would hold office and become an instrument of the court; he would also write poems, paint, keep flowers and birds. A thousand years of scholars had done no differently. Early success: by twenty-four at the latest, he was already a juren.
In 1905 Zhang Zhidong petitioned to end the examinations, and a thousand-year-old system was abolished. He was twenty-four that year. A juren, and suddenly nothing at all. Six years later the 1911 revolution broke out. He was thirty, and now not even a juren.
Of his life from thirty to sixty-nine the files say nothing, and I know nothing. All I can do is put myself in his place. Thirty years steeped in the classics, turned overnight into waste paper. In all the wide world, where is there room for me?
But the journey had only begun. At forty he would come to Nanjing, then under the Beiyang government, looking for work, a wife, a life. At forty-six Chiang Kai-shek marched on Nanjing and set up the Nationalist government there. Ten years after that came the Japanese boots.
Was he in Nanjing? Or on the road?
In any case: the Japanese were driven out, Chiang came back, Chiang was driven out in turn, the PLA crossed the Yangtze. Zhu Wannian, juren under the former Qing, sixty-nine years old, an ordinary copyist at the Nationalist Party’s Central Documents Office.
In the column for “understanding of the current situation,” the old man wrote: “Willing, under the leadership of Chairman Mao, to give what little strength I have to the new-democratic New China.” Under “personal plans,” he hoped only “to scrape by,” and “would still be content as a minor civil servant.”
I hope he was allowed to go on like that, being his minor civil servant.
At the end of the file is the report left by the officers who took over:
“Zhu Wannian, sixty-nine, native of Anhui. Old and of no use. Has dispersed on his own…”
What you can escape is called fate. What you cannot is called destiny.
All our lives we fight fate and are ruled by destiny. Leslie Cheung’s note: “I have never done a bad thing in my life. Why is it like this?” But this world was never about cause and effect. Many nights after work I sat in the Starbucks at Xinjiekou doing IELTS reading. Many of those days it rained. I came out of the archive, got on the bus, passed the bar street and the Presidential Palace, passed the Nanjing Library, passed people under umbrellas and the plane trees in the rain, got off, and as usual bought a can of cold sugar-free Coke at the Lawson on the corner, drinking as I walked. The most capitalist place in Nanjing, I thought as I came out—same convenience store, same Coke, twice the price. I looked up. It was raining outside the window. Steam fogged the Starbucks’ huge glass wall, and I said some names under my breath. And some other things. Someone who has seen through life is not yet worth praising. Worth praising are the ones who have seen through it and can still live alongside it as if nothing were wrong. I left Nanjing, and no one talks to you anymore. My eyes swept over the people outside the window, and my own half-missing reflection.