My race of people rose with the sun, welcoming its bright foray. Right from Shakshgam Valley, to the north of Hokkaido, we shared the same kind of visage. Similar eyes to be more precise. Wow, that just rhymed.
They called us the Mongoloid race, or Yellow-faced people, except that I couldn’t tell the yellow from the white. Was it just the eyes, or our written alphabet, or was it just segregation? It took a whole lot to be white, it seems. Not that colour was in any way associated to superiority, both in mind or in body. Thanks to the enormity of our region, our presence and influence is both discernibly resolute and indomitable.
Only if we weren’t divided by borders or separated by seas, we would be easily classified as one. One in language, culture and well evidently, race. It is believed that most people with features like mine are highly endemic to the region. Well, it isn’t difficult to comprehend why that is so. I live in a country where the Head of State gets to define his own political thought, uncompromisingly, with the help of a few kleptocrats, who make a mockery of the very meaning of communism, by swinging the winds of the economy in their favour. Blessed with a President, who is said to have photographic memory; and yet who fails to remember the geographical boundary of his teeming nation. It seems you can’t find Tibet everywhere.
Our information systems are doctored and manipulated, and to even acknowledge the existence of free media is preposterous. Luckily, I happened to be the only child my mother’s womb was able to conceive; as I would put it, and I was fortunate not to join a list of children of my demographic, whose futures remain undecided and statistically ignored. On the face of it, we are deemed to be the most rapidly rising economy in the world, but my fellow denizens would aver if I were to claim that the current model of polity in our country has increased the disparity between the bourgeois and the proletariat. There is no opposition in Government; there is no possibility of sedition, largely because of the absence of free speech. Right from the beginnings of Maoism to the existing Scientific Development Concept, each ideology has given the country its share of moments. But the fact remains – if you’re up there, you’re corrupt. At least, it happens here. The bureaucrats have the domiciles spinning in pirouettes, and education is one-dimensional.
I happen to study in one of the million schools, in one of the thousands of cities, and frankly, it isn’t all that bad. Somehow, we do manage to gather bits from all worlds, both regional and foreign. Shakespeare is a great influence to my countrymen, ironically, not for his ideas, but his ability to dissipate them. For every other reason, say grammar, he is portrayed as nothing less than inept. I do not quite agree. Failure is not the extinction of hope, but a reason for vindication. Words just are words thoughts, insignificant in this dominion.
Literature never seemed to lose its light. It has made bards out of the boorish, and indeed has helped enlighten lost souls by eliminating fractious inhibitions. Men, who once were known for their virility, now seemed to be entrenched in their new found literary acumen, than for their masculine tomfoolery. It was as if a cultural insurrection had begun, inspiring the politically misguided, to the beauty of language and art, of a world they knew very little of.
My very own girlfriend happened to find a new form of ludicrous contentment at writing lewd poetry, and then reciting it to me with dim-witted ribaldry. It took me a while every time to understand what it was that she meant. Most of it was simple, plain double-entendre beat. Here are a few lines I clearly remember-
Your pillar-like edifice,
Is at the precipice,
Of my twitchy orifice.
Won’t you unlace my bodice?
And claim your holy chalice.
Yours truly, Alice.
I was truly astounded at her diligence with words. And, in a language that she only began learning a year back, I was definitely proud of her, and was obliged to reward her in bed, and our intercourse was like homage to her poetry. I was careful to stick to the details, though.
Each one of us in our life waits for an epiphany, unlike any other. One moment, one burst of motivated adrenaline bound to take you where you belong. That very moment, where every account of greatness seems like destiny, when the possibility of one’s fate being written in the stars, seems like a long standing prophecy in waiting. This epiphany seems to augment with every passing second, and no drive like this before has ever given more meaning to life, and rationale to existence.
I never had such an epiphany.
It was intrinsic to most systems, not mine though. My cerebrum wasn’t attuned to familiarizing itself with new thoughts, ideologies. If there was one thing the leaders had done, was to make sure there were many like me who felt the same way, in every breath. Like it is to be impaired and decrepit, like the very eyes that distinguished me from the rest of the races, was homologous to theirs. For those who resembled me; we shared solidarity in the fact that we were together despite being different.
It is as though we all live in a yellow submarine, in a typhoon of despair, submerged in a sea of infinity, but we won’t make it there. That rhymed again; which isn’t surprising , simply because poetry is nothing but a depiction of living, an art in the truest sense, personal to each one, and yet collective. It is the voice of love, the ray of sunshine, the harp of tranquility, the clarinet of acrimony, the requiem of the departed, and the sepulchre of the deceased.
It was the poet within me that never let me sit in peace. Colliding antagonistic elements always got the better of me and I knew I wasn’t alone. It would be clichéed to claim that history was written, but the truth is, history might belong to the past, but emanates from the present.
It would be safe to reaffirm that I never had an epiphany, Somehow, my system, which was earlier unaccommodating , had found rancor and penury in the social strata. We were told there was no class, and yet segregation was natural.
My struggle was personal, an uprising against the very foundation and vision on which my nation was running. The promise of a united nation, solitary yet united, was nothing but irreverence not only towards myself, but those who had eyes like mine. This derisive connotation of the Government, where ideology after ideology came and went, but did little to live up to its promise, was something I could not contend with.
I used my most powerful medium, and the weakest of every other citizen- speech, and the power of language. I even asked Alice to use her brilliance to help propagate the idea.
She wrote on significance-
Everything statistically significant needn’t be significantly correct,
We are told repeatedly, what we know, we realize in retrospect.
Our world lies in an array of disarray, of significant lies.
And we, bound significantly in our web of doom, fail to realize,
We may be allergic to the counterfeit, significantly articulate,
But however tough we may seem, we are significantly delicate.
Our significant existence may seem insignificant to the masses.
But it does make a significant statistic to other backward classes.
We interpret as we are made to see, significantly gullible,
We interpret our decay, as we see it, significantly tenable.
Our education seems significantly poised in shreds of insecurity,
That we may see tomorrow, it is significant question of ambiguity.
We elude the man behind the mask, significantly hidden,
That we may don that mask soon, is a significant fate ill-ridden.
The voice of the people, the march of a nation towards significance,
Seems lost between our aspirations, our significant pledge to eminence.
She was patently growing leaps and bounds, and so did her beauty. Was it relative?
Alice was like a cork in a wine bottle for me. She housed a myriad of thoughts and ideas that were central to my mission. Never did her wit bring conceit to her character, and that was just the ideal personality for a woman. We would get married, have a beautiful daughter Tao, whom I named after her real name, and get divorced.
I couldn’t blame her for leaving me. Waiting for the day your lover is released from prison, is like a life time of sorrows that seem infinitesimal at first, but accentuate as the days go by. I am however, indebted to her insurmountable presence, one nobody can ever imitate or even resemble. I therefore, bequest my collection of poetry, in her name. Whether or not she is reading this, she knows she is equally a whistleblower in what transpired as a ground breaking movement in the country, nearly two decades back. Whether or not it will incite, or spur the youth today, to repeat a similar showdown, is a question that will get answered with time.
Nine years are too long to question. Till then I just live another day, in a yellow submarine.
My name is Liu Xiaobo, and I have no enemies.
(This piece won the First Prize at the Scribbling Rivalry Writing Competition hosted by Blah Magazine.)
