Happiness Village

in the age of ambition

Hello everyone!

Spring Festival was meant to be a time to fire off a backlog of posts, but the internet gods, aided by the wicked Omicron, willed otherwise.

So let’s get on with it: first, a classical Chinese text on sincerity and rationality, our master theme, followed by a tale of modern life in Beijing (full text).

The two texts were not deliberately chosen to converge on a point. Yet the memoir and the classic are both testament to universal themes found in Chinese society and our own, where reside good, bad and ugly human beings.

We lived in Xingfu ercun (Happiness Village no. 2) for over a decade until our departure from Beijing (mid-2019). Hard by the Workers Stadium, it lies within a walk of the Sanlitun shopping and entertainment area, and is handy to major embassies: Italy, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, the EU.

I wrote a number of stories by way of memoirs of people and events over that time. They reflect the last years of double-digit growth, prior to Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’. The title of Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition sums up the zeitgeist.

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1. The mind of Emperor Shun

                                         Emperor Shun (2nd millenium BCE)

A disciple of Mencius, Wan Zhang, had occasion to ask some searching questions about the conduct of the legendary sage and emperor, Shun. Shun had a vicious half-brother, Xiang, who tried to murder him. In full belief that he had succeeded, Xiang arrived at Shun’s palace to take possession of Shun’s wives and property.

To his dismay, Shun was relaxing unharmed on his couch, playing his lute. Blushing, Xiang announced that he had come ‘because I was anxiously thinking about you.’ But Shun made no accusation; in fact, he promptly offered Xiang the command of all his officers.

There was no question, said Mencius, of Shun’s having been ignorant of Xiang’s real intentions in coming to the palace: How could he have been ignorant of that? But when Xiang was sorrowful he was also sorrowful; when Xiang was joyful he was also joyful.

Wan Zhang asked, was it not hypocritical for Shun to rejoice in this way? ‘No,’ answered Mencius, citing a parable that ‘a superior man may be imposed on by what seems to be what it ought to be, but he cannot be entrapped by what is contrary to right principle.’

Xiang came in the way in which the love of his elder brother would have made him come: therefore Shun sincerely believed him, and rejoiced. What hypocrisy was there?

This account raises some questions about the meaning of ‘sincerity,’ a familiar word that has some unfamiliar connotations. There is no problem in the opposition of ‘sincerity’ and ‘hypocrisy’ implied in Wang Zhang’s question. Wan Zhang acts the role of the person in the street of all times and places in puzzling over Shun could have known Xiang’s real intentions, yet sincerely believed his lame excuse.

The words of the original Chinese text, cheng [诚] and wei [偽] are in fact heavy with philosophical overtones. It is no small matter to give an account of the English usage itself. ‘Sincerity’ turns out to have a number of overlapping senses, notoriously hard to define in both Chinese and English. One notable one is the venerable definition of James Seth:

Sincerity. Disposition not to mislead others either positively or negatively. The sincere person aims to be truthfully understood, whether he makes positive representations or not. Honesty is often used for sincerity in this sense.

This ‘disposition not to mislead’ fans out into a wide spectrum of forms according to what is considered misleading. Thus the antitheses of sincerity, so considered, include lying, equivocating, hypocrisy, and self-deception…

DK: The above is an excerpt from my PhD thesis (University of Sydney, 1982).

Problem: the impertinent disciple Wan Zhang suspects Shun of hypocrisy. If Shun’s (and Mencius’) rationalisation goes to some deep structure of the Han psyche, how could Wan Zhang have come up with such scepticism?

Feel free to propose an answer or comment, as the mood takes you!

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1. The Liao Sulin caper

Liao Sulin (Mr Liao to you – surnames first in Chinese!) is a chunky northerner, a type of person ideally built for a rugby backline but who has no idea of this fact—or what a rugby backline is no doubt. He loves to talk, to eat, and to drink, either beer or erguotou, the firewater of the north (but most often these days a red wine or two) but above all to talk.

Mr Liao is the proprietor of one of the best bookstores in Beijing, and now drives a current model Audi to and from his branch stores and his apartment near the Olympic Village. But I know the real, the authentic Liao Sulin, and we have a special backslap just for each other. I had a long stay in the city back around 1991. Liao was recently out of gaol, where he had been placed because of politics: he had worrisome friendships among the activists in the Beijing movement that ended on 4 June 1989. He had studied politics at Peking University, often called China’s best, and long a bastion of mad ideas like ‘speaking truth to power’.

With a political record that excluded him from other promising careers, Liao more or less stumbled into the book trade. I visited the first of his stores. It wasn’t much larger than the kind of neighbourhood general store selling smokes, drinks and erguotou in many a back street to this day. A hole in the wall would be apt enough a description, but the books were choice. A scattering of approved titles—the collected works of Marx, Mao and the like—deflected any official heat; these were confined to a back wall. Lots of Western literature and humanities in translation, and if you looked carefully enough, titles by troublesome types like himself, PRC 'voices of conscience’.

Over a string of visits, we had many a chat and a joke, and on the point of leaving for home, I handed him 100 Chinese yuan, in the region of USD 10 back then but with more buying power in Beijing at the time. We agreed I would write, ordering books to be paid for out of the sum until it was used up, after which we would talk again. It wasn’t a great scheme, as in those days there were no simple ways for him to keep up-to-date catalogues, or for me to lodge orders, let alone for him to send them to me. I forgot about the RMB 100, and on moving to a new job in Canberra, got busy with teaching and put research on the backburner.

Getting back to Beijing a couple of years later, I found myself at a prosperous, new-looking shop, Bewitched Books. A slightly broader Liao Sulin, more of your rugby forward now, spotted me walking in, immediately calling out, ‘Come about that 100 yuan? It’s still here.’ A hundred RMB no longer bought a boxful of books as in the old days—today it can easily go on one or two titles. But the camaraderie over a couple of hot-pot dinners felt good.

By the time I came to Beijing with my family to live for some four or five years from 1999 (it eventually became two decades), Bewitched Books had moved to handsome new quarters between Peking and Tsinghua Universi­ties. It had a nice coffee shop and meeting rooms, massive departments devoted to economics, politics, law, literature and much more. There were branch stores in other university neighbour­hoods and in particular in a lovingly refurbished grain store over my way, near the old Legation quarter. Mr Liao was now an entrepreneur, constantly cited in the financial press. Having starved for reading matter himself, he had a knack for presenting it to the public.

I got Liao’s permission to hold fortnightly ‘salons’ in the meeting room of this branch. Liao himself showed up once or twice to bestow a godfather-like blessing on my assemb­lage of friendly economists, political scientists, journalists and diplomats. We kept it all in Chinese and somehow failed to become ‘of interest.’ Not that there was any need in that era for cloak and dagger, state secrets or the like. Current events as reported in the press were enough to keep a discussion going. Sometimes there was a paper prepared by a member of the group, sometimes not. We discussed agriculture, the Chinese language, SARS. There was always good coffee or tea from Liao’s little bar next to the cashier in the main display room. After sessions we could stroll down to the Baku, an Azerbaijani restaurant, bypassing the North Korean Embassy, to lunch on grilled fish with a glass of vodka, served by moustachioed waiters who looked like real spies.

Then one day young Sarah Chu disappeared.

Sarah is the daughter of George Chu and his wife Yu Liao, two of my oldest friends in Beijing. They had lived in Canberra for years while George took a PhD at a university in Sydney, commuting the 300km for some years. He had come back to take up a senior appointment in an Institute of Sociology, where he had once scuffled as a masterless documentary filmmaker. Yu Liao, whose English had become fluent, got a temporary job in the ever-expanding Bewitched Books. Their two little girls, Hannah and Sarah, had been growing up Aussie, complete with the accent and nostalgia for fish&chips, but quickly switched back to being Chinese—not hard at all at their age. They could walk to their school from home, and one day Sarah was simply appropriated by someone on one of the walks home.

George and Yu Liao and all their friends were beside themselves. Suddenly Beijing had reveal­ed an ugly side, a realm where human beings were bought and sold. The police listened to George with something close to impatience. “Do you know how many children go missing every day here?” In other words, “them’s the breaks, brother.” National feelings had no traction now. My wife Philippa, then a diplomat in the Australian Embassy, and I were brought into the situation as useful chess pieces against the callous bur­eaucrats. Philippa got a resident journalist to run the story in Australia; the girls had Australian citizenship, after all. George needed me to join him and Liao Sulin in a threatening trio—a Peking university academic, a bookstore owner built like a rugby forward, and a Chinese-speaking foreigner hovering ambiguously in the background, licking a pencil and appearing to note things down. We scrambled, cruising from the Communist Party Office of Peking University to the Public Security Office of Haidian District, ruler of a big chunk of Beijing city. It’s hard to be sure, but we felt this tactic rid the air of complacency and “them’s the breaks.”

Before we could find out, but not before several harrowing days passed in uncertainty and self-recrimination by her parents, Sarah was brought back. George had pressed a local daily paper to report the case. They, like the Public Security cops, had at first been sceptical about its news value. Showing them clippings of the story that had appeared in Australia helped focus their attention. The whole gang of us had walked the blocks of the neighbourhood pasting up reward notices. A group of out-of-towners, migrant workers from the remote countryside, came forward and revealed that one of their group, a mentally handicapped woman, had been keeping Sarah in their house. To her mind, the fact that Sarah was not dressed up like a little doll meant she was uncared for and unwanted. So she took her in and claimed her for herself, dressing and feeding her in a witless but not unkind manner.

There were questions obviously about why the woman’s companions had failed to do anything about it. Had they taken a wait-and-see attitude, hoping later to sell Sarah somewhere out of town, where the market for stolen children had never disappeared? Perhaps, and more likely, as migrant workers they lived virtually at the whim of the local Public Security police. Around this very time, a migrant worker named Sun Zhigang was beaten to death in a detention centre in Guangzhou. This infamous case triggered a national outcry. It led to the state rescinding the laws on detention and removal of “beggars and vagrants,” but few in China took this to mean that country people now had enforceable rights. In such a situation, the woman’s friends (or family - we were never sure) were most likely terrified about coming forward until the pasted-up notes appeared.

It was quite a celebration at the McDonald’s closest to the Chu family apartment. Chips were eaten and the coca-cola flowed. Sarah was neither hurt nor fazed. She thought she’d been on a holiday. We held another party at our place for those who preferred protein and red wine, and there’s a great set of photos of the happy throng, including the ever-beaming Liao Sulin. When I go to the Bewitched Books these days I need to pack a lot more money for books than in the old days—such is economic development—but there’s usually a free latte with the boss in the back room.

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