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朱天文：命名的喜悦是最大的回馈

  “你知道菩萨为什么低眉？是这样的，我曾经遇见一位不结伴的旅行者。”
这是朱天文的长篇新作《巫言》起首的第一句。在沉寂了近10年之后，朱天文再出江湖，《巫言》4万字的首章刊登在《印刻文学生活志》创刊号上。创刊号的《印刻》除了以朱天文的照片作为封面之外，杂志打头的还有侯孝贤策划导演的一组朱天文在夏日写作的图片集，侯孝贤表示这是“送给文学一个礼，一份盘缠，祝文学一路顺风。”创刊号的《印刻》还刊登了小说家舞鹤对朱天文的长篇访谈。

习惯晚上写作的朱天文推掉了一应社交活动，潜心写作。深居简出的朱天文平时最大的乐趣就是养猫。《巫言》断断续续已经写了4年，全部完成后的《巫言》将有20万字。

 朱天文档案：原籍山东临沂，1956年生于高雄凤山，毕业于淡江大学英语系。出身于文学世家，其父朱西宁、其妹朱天心、朱天衣均为台湾著名作家。1972年发表小说处女作《强说心愁》。曾主编《三三集刊》、《三三杂志》，并任三三书坊发行人。曾获《联合报》、《中国时报》文学奖。主要作品有《世纪末华丽》、《花忆前身》、《炎夏之都》、《荒人手记》。1983年将获奖小说《小毕的故事》与侯孝贤合作改编成剧本搬上银幕，获第二十届台湾金马奖最佳改编剧本奖。此后，与侯孝贤长期合作编剧，创作了许多为台湾电影带来巨大国际声誉的电影作品。 

小说家的写作 

王  寅：一个作家写一本新书一般都会全部写完再发表，这次你先发表了长篇的第一章，是怎样一种考虑？

朱天文：我打算写20万，现在报纸上看到的只有第一章4万字。我断断续续开始写差不多有4年了，这前面的10万字基本上不会动了。这份杂志是新的刊物，台湾原来算起来纯文学杂志就是《联合文学》。办现在这本杂志的初安民先生，他本来在《联合文学》差不多当了十几年总编辑。十几年下来，他觉得差不多了，大概再怎么样也是这个格式了，他希望自己还能有一些新的做法，所以就离开《联合文学》跟《联合文学》出版社，出来自己办一个印刻出版社。他凭本身的信用，这几年一直做纯文学，我们都很支持他。他出版书出版了一年，然后开始出杂志。我们把我们手边有的东西都压上去了，这个真是文学杂志，它的内涵、它的视野会比《联合文学》更好，又是创刊，所以我们就帮他。他希望如果是强的作家，或者是他的强项，或者正在写的作品，每一期能够发表，再作一个对谈。大概就从我开始吧，所以我愿意把首章4万字拿出来。  

你在《巫言》之前，差不多10年一直没有作品，是想休息一下，还是想作一个调整？有些作家在中年以后会有一个比较长的间歇。

上一本《荒人手记》差不多把三四十岁以前作了一次盘整，它是一次盘整的结晶。再写的时候，你觉得内部的东西够了，自然就会写，不够的话，很难。中间也试过很多稿子，东一个西一个，总之都没有进行下去。一直到4年前，写了3万多字的时候才确定：啊，就这样写下去了，没有错了。4年前到现在，10万字，算非常少。这4年断断续续，中间还去写电影剧本，一打岔，再回来的时候，要整个进入这种状态（很慢）。但是我觉得每个人创作情形不同，对我来讲，我不知道以后会不会1 0年有三本这样一个速度。比如像王安忆，她每年就有20万字，她像个做手艺的，每天早上9点钟起来，写到中午，固定的，我非常羡慕，我就没有办法这样子。 

我不知道你平时写的时候快不快？

不快。我写的速度不快，累积的东西不够的时候，你就没有办法。 

十年里一直没有出作品，你感觉到压力吗？这种压力可能是自己…… 对自己的交代。

前面不会啦。比如我在写完《荒人手记》的时候，我说，我可以当白痴，当个几年了。所谓当白痴，就是你爱看什么书就看什么书，吸收什么，四处去旅游、走走。可是在过日子的时候，我会觉得大概动员不到人的十分之一，感官的和知识的全部是表皮状态，等到你真的要写的时候，好像会一直逃避。很像你要潜水，潜到海底很深处，整个进入那个状态，那个状态就是非常不想跟外头接触，跟人来往，碰到人的时候，你就会觉得自己进退应对完全不会，好想变成哑巴。因为你在自己的状态里头，失去了对话能力。 

写一个小说要花很长时间，这段时间我们姑且说它是非白痴状态吧，但你总是要跟社会接触交流，总是要和人交流，难道真的很有洁癖吗？

 不会。也许，我想是因为女性对社会的现实感，喜欢看人，喜欢现实所有的物的东西。这部分我的好奇心一直不减，一个是生活里头喜欢看人，还有一个很大来源是写剧本，能接触不同的人，后来会变成很大的资产。还有就是阅读，到现在真正读文学作品兴趣没那么大，读的还是杂书。你的元素越多，可操纵的东西越多，你就走得越长。写小说的同辈，或者你认定喜欢的，他只要一出东西就会追他，不管这个东西是失败的，是实验性的，这个人厉害，你就会一直追他。其他的作家，你就会拿来这样看看，就像做蛋糕的，做包子铺的，其实自己是不大吃包子的，但你会开发材料，去找素材、找元素，找你做东西的这些东西，其实反而不怎么陷在文学里头。 

刚才讲追他，能激起你追的欲望的作家能举几个例子吗？

 现在活着的第一个，当然是马尔克斯，可是他得了癌症，现在他回归本源写他的自传。还有米兰·昆德拉。你会觉得同业和同行里头，能激起你的灵感其实没那么多。其他的，就像我们小时候会说“看破了手脚”，知道他哪些地方是混过去的，哪些地方是掩饰过去的，看看就知道。除非你看到他这个人一直在散发能量，他一直在追踪，一生里盯着什么东西一直盯下去，你对他盯的那个东西也非常好奇，非常惊讶。就像米兰·昆德拉他一生写了这么多，其实在写一个东西，一直在追问，一直在用不同的方式在进攻，不同的方式在打击，一生总是有个一念耿耿的东西。像米兰·昆德拉对布拉格那一场（事件）始终在问怎么回事，一直到最新的这本书，总算有一次比较正面的答复。你跟着一个人的时候，就像认识一个朋友，他一直在思索什么，你会一直跟着他去，他会得到什么答案，什么启发，你会很想知道。 

在写作当中有一种情况比较普遍，那就是你喜欢的那个作家往往是你无法超越的，所以才会把他放在很高的地方。

 对，对，对。因为很不一样，因为他写的我写不出来，比方像马尔克斯的小说，对大陆也是一样，他对小说家的启发非常大。有些小说是读者看了喜欢，可是大概对同业和同行不会受到那么大刺激，但马尔克斯好像对所有的小说家都是很大的刺激，我们说他好像是个自动取款机，在不同年龄看的时候，他一直会给你钱。不像很多东西我们年轻时候看的，后来再看：啊呀，很惆怅，怎么搞的，好像不够了。但马尔克斯你会觉得一直提款提不尽的。 

阿城与大陆作家 

阿城在你的内地版的作品集里有很精彩的序，当年你与阿城是怎么认识的？

 当时刚刚开放的时候，我们最先读到的大陆文学作品是伤痕文学，但那时候文学价值不是很高。后来读到阿城的时候：哇！惊为天人，怎么可能呢！基本上可以开放的时候，我们这边有个出版社出了一套10本，全部是大陆作家的小说，每人出一本，像王安忆的“三恋”、韩少功、张承志、史铁生等。那里面最厉害的是阿城，他的书在台湾卖到排行榜第一位。他的气概跟沈从文是一路的，已经是心仪甚久了。阿城先在香港看到侯孝贤的电影，第一个看的是《童年往事》，他一看也是惊为天人。后来认识其实是通过侯孝贤的。阿城在香港也有朋友，有一次侯孝贤去香港，舒琪拍个电影，叫侯孝贤在里面演个角色，吹萨克斯风。那时刚好阿城也在香港，朋友说他们在拍戏，他要不要去看，阿城像见偶像一样就去了。去了现场，他把手上本来要签给张抗抗还是其他什么人的一本书，签给侯孝贤了。侯孝贤拿回来以后，我说：哇！阿城的笔迹！我们就是这么互相崇拜。后来阿城看了《风柜来的人》，他也喜欢得不得了，在美国弄到带子放给朋友看，《风柜来的人》里面有一场戏，在阳台上要饯行送别，四个人喝醉了，大家就借酒装疯，里面镜头一直不动，对着一个椅子。阿城说，你看你看，这个椅子每个人都会来坐一下。他就是喜欢到这样痴傻的地步。我们第一次见面大概就是《悲情城市》吧，那时候我们要到美国去发行，所以发行公司安排我们去美国，到洛杉矶。就到阿城家，在他家后面有棵柠檬树。他一声不吭就这样包水饺。对我来说，我觉得他真的像个宝藏，他一生的生活经历，整个大江南北走遍，他从生活里得到的东西，对我们来说很缺乏的。我那次去，也带了很多书给他，他一看就说，我们那个时候在云南干吗？对他来说，我们好像是知识上的贵族，也不说家学渊源，但我们书可以读到这么多。他说，真是知识的贵族，想想我们那个时候在云南只能蹲在地上看蜥蜴，看了半天，蜥蜴的眼睛才眨一下。你们写出这样的东西，书读到这样的地步，我们还在看蜥蜴。但他的生活历练和经历，我们就没有这一块。等到他到台湾，一坐下来，抽个烟斗，他也要看人，不是都讲的，要人对的时候，他讲话真的是宝藏啊。所以我们常骗他，希望掏出他的活宝来。 

你对阿城的作品有什么印象？

 我觉得他是第一人。可能大家看法不一样，他真正的小说很少，后来写的《常识与通识》，后来他从生活里头写的这些素材，我觉得他最难的是他的角度跟眼光，这个我觉得非常厉害。你听他谈，可以从非常小的东西里头谈到非常大的，我觉得这是写东西写到后来最难的。你可能有很多素材，可是你怎么去诠释它，素材人人都有，就像你看一个数字，你怎么去解读这些数字，其实很要你的累积和你的眼光。不然大家手上都有一把数字、一把材料，我觉得这个东西可能不在小说（技巧）上头。他的书在台湾卖得太好了，那一批的书，对我们来讲，是第一次有系统的看到大陆的小说，就像王安忆我们也很惊讶，完全跟伤痕文学不一样，她写了个“三恋”还是很厉害，对我们来讲非常震惊。 

除了他们之外，还有哪些大陆作家会有这样的震惊？

 我们现在看李锐和莫言的，莫言和我都是山东人。李锐和莫言来，我们都变成很好的朋友，比如说韩少功，比较喜欢他早期的。最近的下一代的就是看一看，知道一下。 

家学、外省因素 

你父亲给你们三个孩子起名字当时有什么讲究？

 我名字是外公起的，开始好像还有天鹅什么的，你看这个天鹅多可怕，娥当然是女字旁的那个。所以我父亲就选了个文吧。人家都会问是不是文心雕龙啊？好像也没有，都是我外公起的。 

你和朱天心喜欢文学，开始写作的时候一定和家里的氛围有很大的关系。

 是啊。父亲的朋友，我们平常喊叔叔伯伯的，大多是文坛的核心，大人在聊天，我们就搬个小板凳坐在旁边。比如他们争辩的时候，写实主义他们会觉得现代派的苍白，注视自己注视个人的不同意义，总之他们会有很大的争辩，我们不知道他们在争辩什么，但会搬个小板凳听。父亲很好客。父亲当年是在孙立人的部队，他算是投笔从戎。1949年在南京坐船来的时候，有八个人同船，我们在台湾没有亲人，父亲来的时候就是一个人。他们当时都觉得待个两三年会回去的，没想到一下子四五十年这样下来了。他们八个人结拜了兄弟，按照年龄，父亲排行三，我们喊大伯父、二伯父其实都是结拜的。来台湾以后，父亲是最早结婚的。有了一个家以后，八个兄弟一放假就来这边，从小我们就觉得这些叔叔伯伯就是大陆的缩影，各省都有，有湖南、河南、四川的，口音都不一样，而且都是大兵，很豪爽。母亲一做都是大锅菜，大兵食量大嘛。所以从小就是在家里人来人往的环境里长大的。这些结拜兄弟只有我父亲做文字的，后来写武侠小说，用笔名写，他后来做到少将，算八个兄弟里面官衔最大的。他们觉得我父亲是兄弟里面写作的，有不一样的特别情愫。父亲觉得自己当年一路没有任何前辈（指点），完全是自己摸索，他觉得如果在摸索的时候，偶尔碰到一个人给你指点一下是不一样的，他一直觉得这是个缺憾。所以后来他自己在文坛上算是家喻户晓的时候，不管去演讲还是去做什么，只要有学生说要来家里，他都门户大开的，学生来，一谈就留吃饭。我妈就做一大桌，学生也多，再加上一些叔叔伯伯都是文坛的中坚分子。这种气氛吧很自然的，父母亲并没有要我们去从事这一行，我们很自然的开始写了，他们也没有阻止我们，完全很自然的。父亲他们从大陆来，真的是没有根的，没有财产，也没有亲戚。所以外省人来的时候，全部培养孩子去读书。我们从小蛮不能理解的，我们同学里面，本省人他们都有土地，还有祖先可以去上坟，我们无坟可上，这是一个很大的差异。每年到过节的时候，饭桌上父亲就会说老家的事情：李子又大又好吃，台湾根本不能比，我们都很神往。我们这一代，所谓外省第二代，对大陆的向往，大概是继承了父亲的乡愁，这种乡愁又跟诗词歌赋里头读到的李白诗、所有的（文学作品）结在一起，所以到开放的时候，你们很难想象，我们从小讲到长江黄河的时候那种向往和澎湃，有一天假如你去，你简直不知道该怎么样。想象中的中国和乡愁中的中国完全是从父亲这边来的。后来外省第二代整个挫折也是，等你一旦去了之后，你发现这不是你想象中的，也不是诗词歌赋里的那个中国，完全不是，你就会发现你大半生，你的启蒙，真的是……当你有一天踏上李白诗歌里的故土，当你发现不是书里写那样的时候，对我父亲他们冲击都比较大。你一直觉得这是你的家乡，回去的时候，啊！结果你发现连生活习惯都不一样了。原来你才发现你的下半辈子要活在终遭有一天你要回到的地方，那个才是你的家乡了。这几次的波折，结果在我们的写作上都会变成很大一个财产了。外省人小时候一定要读书，因为你没有财产，没有背景，只有读书还有希望，一路读上来，使用的都是中国的文字，一直没有断掉。但本省的人在当时日本统治的时候，汉文不能用，他们就使用日文，等国民党来了以后，日文禁了，才开始学汉文。这十年来，我觉得基本上外省人经过几次挫折跟返回，你就必须想得比较多，反省比较多。到了这十年来，本土意识台湾意识很高涨的时候，本土变成一个很安全的位置，大家要讲台语什么的，本土变成是一个主流，是一个族群最大，相对来说比较舒适位置的时候，文学成绩上就没那么出色。因为你比较舒服，你可以不必一直想下去。像我们自己一直有这种认同的问题，又一直被本土被台湾意识质疑，质疑你们不够忠贞，质疑你们到底爱不爱台湾。种种这些事情，会使得你想事情，你在族群比较少的时候，逼迫你往下想，不是那么舒服的位置啊。因此，在文学上进步跟挖掘的东西可能会比较出色。台湾文学整个外省第二代普遍的层次来讲都跑在比较前头，我想是因为有这个多重的冲击。历史的财富也比本省的多，到后来，我们常讲，有个双重的眼光，你的眼光不是单一的。我觉得还有一个很大的问题是现代化的遭遇战吧。我们曾经很长一段时间非常羡慕大陆作家，觉得他们题材很多，相对来讲台湾，尤其是台湾进入都市化、现代化，你一碰到都市，就像王安忆讲的：城市无故事。她也要开始碰到了。当你这个题材开始进入城市、进入现代化的时候，这个问题好像退回去了。我们这一批和现代化遭遇战的时候，时间又比较长一点，因为写东西要沉淀，不是马上反射就可以反射出来，因为你在城市里面大家生活方式差不多的时候，你就必须往深的地方走。也许我们写出来的东西会使我们的小说在台湾，不能说重要性吧，但是会有一席之地，大概跟这现代化的遭遇战的冲击有关吧，  对目前流行的“台湾文学”这种说法，不知道你方便不方便发表你的看法？ 我觉得最后还是看作品，看作品本身的强度和高度。我觉得这十年来，本土作家本省作家他们的位置太舒服了，位置一舒服，在文学艺术上的成绩就不行。国民党欠你们的这个债要还到什么时候？你们还在要债，伤得是你自己啊， 你的目标一直对着国民党，你一直把人家当成一个假想敌，人家已经不在了，你还一直把它当对象来说，你也一样小了，就是与汝俱小了，所以视野很难打开了。我们这样写作的其实蛮心平气和的，但学院的、学术里面蛮痛苦的，整个资源基本上是民进党的、绿色的，他们甚至想要改教科书、改历史什么的，在学校里，资源分配真的会打压外省籍的，本省籍的论述什么，他们就抢资源。所以在学术里面，我们一些朋友比较痛苦，被逼得常常说一些话，我们就讲真的好像文革。  

侯孝贤和电影剧本 

你写了很多电影剧本，但你在接受采访的时候曾经说过写剧本不是全身心的，这是什么原因？

 我想和我合作的对象有关系吧，因为我合作的对象是侯孝贤，他基本上是不需要剧本的。他自己是主动者跟发动者。早年的时候，我和杨德昌他们合作过，后来你越来越会觉得电影是导演的，剧本写得越多，你会觉得这是完全两回事。一个是用影像讲故事，一个是用文字讲故事。了解到这个，剧本我就不写了，剧本一年或两年写一个，可以维生。小说（维生）不行。我自己基本是单身，跟父母亲住，房子是家里的，生活很简单，一两年写一个剧本可以对自己交代，对家里交代，其他时间，可以阅读旅行，然后写小说。年纪比较大了，不想勉强自己，想最大的时间大量阅读，然后自己写小说。选一个导演可以维生。侯孝贤他自己编剧出身的，我跟侯孝贤合作频率最接近，我觉得我的贡献是长期的讨论中，他有什么想法的时候，当他的空谷回音。当空谷回音没那么容易，因为你频率要一样，你才能回得了。尤其是你在这种讨论的时候，你常自问自答，深入到一种思考状态当中，频率要一样，否则就构成一种干扰。发动者是他，他想要拍什么是他想要拍的，不可能你写好一个剧本给他，然后他来处理，他想要什么东西，和你讨论啊、讲啊。空谷回音完了以后，我就做秘书工作，把它整理成剧本。可是，剧本侯孝贤基本不看的，因为他非常清楚，他有一个烂本子，他女儿学校里写作业用的，他就在上头这样写。所以我写出来的基本是给工作人员看，工作人员要去执行，然后演员大致看一下。 

我们现在看到的内地出版的《悲情城市》是镜头记录本还是原稿？

 《悲情城市》是我写分场，讨论完以后整个统一写下去，但《悲情城市》的对白是吴念真，因为很多对白都是讲台语，台语我大致可以听，但不会说。吴念真是本省人，就由吴念真写对白。然后侯孝贤他拍的时候，要拍什么他大概知道。写了分场以后，工作人员就可以去执行，然后分场交给吴念真，吴念真就根据这个分场把大概的对白写出来。我们是给演员、工作人员大概有个东西，这些对白，侯孝贤的烂本子里面大致都有的，所以他基本不看。写剧本我就觉得是秘书工作，就是剪贴、整理。 

说得这么谦虚。我看到一个说法是说朱天文不是侯孝贤的御用编剧，而是侯孝贤是朱天文的御用导演？

 我是他的御用编剧吧，秘书工作嘛。（笑）电影是影像，影像是导演的。编剧的思路很不一样，编剧废话一堆，你老觉得要用对话来安排剧情，其实真正的影像是不靠对白的，整个是用影像在讲故事。 侯孝贤有没有让你改剧本的时候？没有，他会自己改，他用非职业演员的时候，他对白也不给演员看，他很怕演员去背对白。他希望现场是尽量很舒服的环境，希望这些摄影机都不存在。然后大致给你们一个状况，你们在里头，完全让你们自己去活动，他在旁边说。变动是非常大的。有时候你觉得是这样子，但演员拗不过去、很怪的时候，他也不会逼你，他就会看环境看什么的，随时现场就会改。所以，我觉得这种即兴和现场反应一定要是你的主体性很强，你才知道要什么不要什么，或是有没有。我觉得一个剧本对他来讲好像是个谱子，这个谱子你可以弹出各种（节奏），每个人的诠释是不一样的。他完全是看状况、看演员。有些演员现场很有活力，他就会被他带着走了，原来剧本就完全脱离了，这也是有的。有些环境是特殊有趣的，他就适应这个环境，剧本完全扔掉。我觉得这个之前准备要非常够，然后到现场，剧本扔掉，直接面对面，看演员、看环境，然后他在里头变化。 

你在影片剪辑完成之后，看到的电影是不是……

 常常变成另外一个东西，我已经司空见惯了。因为我觉得电影是导演的，从来不觉得是我的东西，我的战场还是文字。我一点不在那上面有野心，只是提供一个蓝图而已。很多作家从小说到电影，电影到小说都是同一个东西……你要在这一行都做得好，两个是非常不一样的东西。编剧往往要靠对白，用对白来说事情，用对白来说个不停的。后来发现影像有它的独特的时候，你在那一行里面做到顶尖的时候，跟你在小说里的顶尖是不一样的，因为它媒介本身形成的形式是不一样的。 

你感觉侯孝贤是怎样的一个导演？有些导演个性非常强，如果小说的原作者去为导演把小说改编成剧本，会觉得自己的小说只是嫁衣。

 那侯孝贤就是这样，千万别想他会忠于原著，没有。他拍拍就会变成他的东西，绝对不是你的小说。他自己创作力很强，风格很强。  文学的位置 

在这样一个影像盛行的时代，文字的位置到底在哪里？

 它还是不可取代的。我想这个载体本身不一样，你看影像是两个小时，那两个小时要说个东西，它基本上说到某种地步。电影能够载负的思想度，怎么讲，它也不在这里，它是另外一个东西。文字能载负的东西，装承量远远要超过电影。 

文字的包容量肯定要超过电影，但事实上目前这种快餐文化不可避免？

 这就没有办法了。（笑）我觉得这跟我们无关了。写作写到现在，其他事情也不会，一生里面做一样你可以做得最好的事情，外面怎么变，那就这样了吧。在这种变化里面，我们对现实还非常兴致勃勃，跟现实对话，现实还在影响你。所有发生的种种现象都在影响我们，但这种影响要经过我们的过滤，会出一些什么东西，那就是这样子了吧，我只会做这个，我也没有其他选择，只能在这上头把这件事做好。 

一直写作的话，其实会很辛苦，除了你说的不做其他事情，还有别的原因吗？比如写作本身的愉快？

 那是啊。平常你是靠你的感官在活着，靠你的常识在活着，吸收很多东西其实你并不知道。但是当你写作的时候，你会写到说，哎呀，这块我怎么知道，会把它开发出来，开发出来的时候，我觉得这就是最大的回馈。写到你自己都觉得你不可能知道的，平常我的日子怎么可能把它处理出来，我想这就是个命名吧。这个命名人类最早开始的时候，是神命名的，在世界非常新的时候，很多事物都还没有命名的时候，人有这种命名的喜悦。到现在，那个东西你自己不知道的，把它挖掘出来，赋予形状、赋予造型，这就是命名的喜悦，我觉得这是最大的回馈。并不在于你书卖多少，或者读者有多少，而是可以把自己都不知道的部分挖掘出来，给它一个形状，给它一个造型。这是个权柄，没有多少人有这种权柄，这种命名的权柄。 

在进行命名的时候，会超过写作自身的喜悦……

 会！米兰·昆德拉讲的话：“小说都要比小说家聪明一点点。” 他的作品都要比小说家聪明一点点。 

有时候神会不知不觉帮了你一把，帮助你通过了某个区域。

 是啊。绝对会超过作者本身，因为你平常自己累积到什么程度，你自己并不清楚，但你写的时候会把这些累计都消化了，那个东西绝对是超过（小说家），比小说家聪明一点。我们有时候就会讲，不要去看马尔克斯本人，看他的书就好。他的书就是他的结晶，那些书真是人类智慧的结晶。 

如果继续写作，存在障碍或者阻力的话，你觉得最大的是什么？是物质的诱惑，还是人的惰性？

 写小说到我们这个年龄，会写的就会写下去，就有这个动力。因为你在现实里头，你要养家，要什么，太令人忧烦，很难继续。这个你也了解，如果你够世故的话。周围的环境也不是在培养你的，自己本身要有源源不绝的东西出来，能够支撑你往下写。这就好像被选定，并命定一样的。已经不大是靠你努力，而是靠其他的什么了。我觉得一个是你本身的累积，要是你自己累积的东西够，或者是非常必要的时候，大概现实里有很多都还不会把你挡住吧。比如说你自己的累积不够的时候，到某种地步，你会觉得这么苦，你自己也给不出东西，然后有人找你去做东西，你自然就去做了。所以我们同辈人很多主持节目啊，在广播电台，就都慢慢转行了。 

转过去就转不回来了。

 就转不回来了。有时候你就会感谢，自己早年还算读了些东西，那个累积都还是让你可以写下去。写到后来，你还要非常非常用功，尤其是年纪大了。因为年轻的时候，人人都有才华，都有聪明有才华，用功到头来也会影响到你的整个质气，不够用功的话，就不够用了，就那两个元素一下子就用掉了呀。 

你说的用功除了阅读，主要指什么？

 阅读量后来是非常大的，而且是什么都读，阅读已经变成最重要的来源。接下来就是对现实非常好奇，不放弃对话，还是在关注现实。你虽然是在边缘，边缘不是什么也不干的，边缘是你一直在对主流的世界对话，在边缘是为了看得更清楚。 

台湾现在局势的变化这么大，会不会影响到你的写作？

 会！会！早上我第一件事就是先不要看报纸，冲了咖啡牛奶然后上楼去。看了报纸心情就不好，有人会把白的说成黑的，把黑的说成白的。 

时事会进入你的小说里面去吗？还是你有一条很清楚的界限？

 会的，我会消化过，你会一直在关心，在看，所以现实感的部分还是会渗透到你的小说里面去。你现在还不想退隐嘛，还不想沉浮浮于海，基本上还是活在脉动里头，这东西一定会在你的作品里面出现。到后来，差别就在于你的角度跟眼光，你怎么看他们，提供了什么角度，这是不可取代，为你独有嘛，每个人都有看世界绝对不同的眼光。 

我们暂且把这些现实的东西定义为不良的东西，你觉得对小说来说，有它好还是没它好？

 由不得你啊。我们写东西像在炼丹，烧柴火的时候，好的木头也放进去，坏木头呛了你，流泪鼻水的，也一样放进去烧，好的坏的都要放进去。平常看垃圾东西，影响你的心情一样啊，没办法，坏的东西也变成你的一部分。由不得你，不生今世生何世？你不活在现在，你要活在什么时候呢？你不能只要好的，坏的你不要，好像没有办法。 

张爱玲与胡兰成 

很多评论家都把你和张爱玲比较，你现在还会觉得受她影响吗？这可能是一个很老的话题了。

 写了《荒人手记》，我终于可以说：啊！和张爱玲平了。我们大概从五年级就开始看张爱玲的，一直看没有断掉。张爱玲在台湾的文学上影响非常大，大到有一度我们觉得她简直就是一个阴影、一个乌云，乌云盖着草都长不起来。曾经有一段时间模仿，不自觉地受影响，但到后来这个阴影你很想摆脱她。王德威讲，什么都把你当成张派的，好像一个祖师奶奶一样。你很想把这个标签或者乌云去掉，可是你从小看她，也很喜欢她，你要去掉这个阴影没那么容易。我想但凡每个作家都不喜欢把这个标签粘在一起。可是一直写，写到《荒人手记》的时候，终于你自己会觉得说：总算平了，终于有不一样了，终于逃离她的阴影了，会有这样的感觉。 

你曾经这样写道：“写完《荒人手记》，我跟天心说，是对胡爷的悲愿已了，自由了。”是不是对胡兰成的逃离更难一些？

 （大笑）对，我想是，而且不是逃离，就是还愿啦。就像你早年受恩于什么吧，你很希望把所受的还掉。我想最主要的还是胡兰成的遭遇跟他的际遇，你会替他不平，总觉得他在世到去世，他都没有获得他应该有的位置，他这个人始终还是争议性很大，无法定论，你看张爱玲已经是在庙堂里头了，但他还归不了档，争议性又这么大。我们曾经当面受教于他，也就差不多一年的时间，他在我们家隔壁，写书讲学什么的。但就在这一年，你会觉得开了你的眼界，看世界完全不同的眼界。然后你也觉得受他的启蒙，你看到他是一个人物，可是如此的为世人所不知，会有一种不平。我们办了杂志，然后又办了出版社，完全是因为胡兰成的关系。他的作品在台湾完全是被禁的，不能出版，只能用笔名。后来他回到日本去，也不再来，来的话会被攻击，影响到我们的刊物。到晚年，他的来信在纸上写得密密麻麻的，很薄，为了省邮费，减轻航空重量，写来我们誊清，一本一本出版。最后还没有写完的是《女人论》，我们在这边亲手校的时候，就觉得他的最后一本书没有写完，他最后的思想也都没有完，就这样去世不为人所知，你会替他不平。我当时许下诺言：你看着好了，哪天我一定要把这本《女人论》写完。我不可能用理论的形式来写，但是不管是用什么样的形式，一定要写完。《世纪末华丽》只是开了一个头而已，大大的东西在后面，就再追了一本。到《荒人手记》写完以后，你就会觉得当年受教的恩、所受的启蒙，把它还掉了。《花忆前身》好像把前生做了个盘点，把所受的恩都还掉了。再写什么，就是另外一个东西了。 

当时夙愿已了之前，是不是一直有心事在？

 会，会。你会觉得不平，应该有更多的人知道他，因为他被误解，他的东西不能被承认。 

是因为他受了误解，还是因为他的东西确实好？

 一个是他的作品本身文学性上头的，我觉得他的《今生今世》其实是超过张爱玲的。还有一个他自己的思想体系，不管你同不同意，对这个世界的吸收量，开了我们的眼界。一个小说家不只是做个小说家了，你那种吸收的来源（也很广），这也是胡兰成老师教我们的。 

胡兰成当时是怎样给你们授课的呢？

 我们那时的旧学部分，他那个教法就是带个头，要我们去读，我们同代没有人像我们这样“四书五经”读了大概的，你现在会觉得，你比你的同代多了这么一个八宝箱，多了这么一个宝贝。还有一个是对现代知识的了解，我们那时对理学、数学什么的觉得都是太遥远的事情，但胡兰成老师到日本有机会接触到大数学家，还有获得诺贝尔奖的物理学家，他们变成非常好的朋友。他有他的所得，他的所得开了我们的眼界，绝对不是我们念书的时候，那种一门小小的跟我们没关系的功课，反而你会看到真正好看的散文，生物学家写的散文、科学家写的散文，真的比那些所谓的散文家好很多。其实，你最后看文章就看一个人的见识，看他人的一生。你想想科学家本身有一门所长，甚至他还会画画做一个艺术家，那这个人怎么得了。他写了一本书，你不看，你还要看什么东西？文学家写的散文真是作文了，真是超级难看，他什么也不晓得，就这样风花雪月，那不是很难看吗？他根本没什么东西，就是文字上的演练，写个美美的美文，而且没有意思。科学家的散文好看，明白而有东西，那个好看啊。这就是那时候胡兰成启蒙我们的，眼界一下子打得很大，什么都可以看，什么拿出来都是文章，这范围比我们同代小说家文化养成和背景要大。胡兰成他自己政治学、社会学什么东西都可以看。你想想看，这样的话，怎么得了？每个人都变成朋友，古人跟你都是朋友，他一辈子弄了几本书，你等于踩在人家巨人的肩膀上，他一生的结晶，各行各业的结晶。比如画家、雕刻家的口述，我很喜欢看，比散文家的好看多了。一般的小说家除了几个写出来的，人生历练也不够，也没有什么货，写出来的东西，好像雕了一个小记忆吧，你这样看看就说，哦，知道了。仅此而已。当时的启蒙是旧学，还有开了眼界，各行各业的书都要看，还好我们在年轻的时候这个培养起来了，到现在我们什么都可以拿来看，所以，我说年轻的时候，没有阅读这个习惯养成的话，到后来有点来不及了。 2003年

9.04

9.04

Wife of blind activist says she was dragged off bus in eastern China
The Associated Press Published: September 1, 2007

BEIJING: The wife of an imprisoned blind Chinese activist said Saturday she was dragged off a bus to stop her from traveling to Beijing to speak out on his behalf.

Yuan Weijing said she was on a bus from Shandong province in eastern China on Friday when it stopped and she was pulled off by a group of government workers.

Last week, Yuan was blocked by Chinese authorities from leaving for the Philippines, where she was to accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia's version of the Nobel Prize, on behalf of her husband, Chen Guangcheng.

Chen, 36, was sentenced to four years and three months in prison in 2006 after he documented cases of forced abortions and other abuses by family planning officials in his native Shandong.

"I think the purpose of this was to prohibit me from speaking out," Yuan said by phone from her village of Dongshigu in Shangdong.

 "Three men and one woman got on the bus and they dragged me to get me off the bus," Yuan said.

She said she was going to Beijing to highlight her husband's case and to seek legal help after her passport was taken away when she was trying to go to the Philippines. She did not give details.

Yuan, 31, was taken back to her home early Saturday, and said about six people were standing in front of her house and another four were blocking the entrance to the village.

She said she recognized the people who dragged her off the bus as being from her local government office.

A duty officer at the Shandong police office, who refused to give his name, said he had not heard of the case.

The action against Yuan came the same day that a speech by her was read out at the Magsaysay awards ceremony in the Philippines accusing Beijing of violating human rights.

"In China, our government is often the biggest violator of people's rights," Yuan said in the speech. "Because Guangcheng engaged in helping peasants safeguard their rights, he became the target of a retaliatory strike by some corrupt government officials."

Yuan said her husband was convicted "based on trumped-up charges and a flawed trial process," in which villagers allegedly were kidnapped and tortured to testify against him.

Chen was convicted on charges of instigating an attack on government offices in Dongshigu. Police said he was upset with workers sent to carry out poverty-relief programs.

Chen and a fellow Chinese, Chung To, jointly won the Magsaysay emergent leadership award. Chen, blinded by a fever as a child, became a "barefoot lawyer," helping farmers file court cases, leading protests against a river-polluting paper factory and documenting abuses.

Chung was recognized for his AIDS Orphans Project, which provides children who have an AIDS-infected parent with school fees.

Each Magsaysay winner receives a gold medallion with an image of the former Philippine president for which the award is named plus US$50,000.

 

8.22

 

8.22

 

 

一名玩具商的意外死亡

【《财经》杂志记者季敏华 发自广东佛山 特派记者徐可 发自香港】8月2日，美国最大玩具商美泰公司（Mattel Inc.）向美国消费者安全委员会提出召回96.7万件塑胶玩具，并首次在外界压力下披露了制造商名字——佛山市利达玩具有限公司（下称佛山利达）。
      事发前，佛山利达的产量已居佛山玩具制造业第二。一夜之间，这家拥有十多年良好生产记录的合资企业成为众矢之的。
　　召回事件起因于利达公司生产的玩具表漆含铅量超标，美国环保组织塞拉俱乐部认为危及儿童安全。在美国舆论的不断声讨下，玩具厂商及其上下游供应、检验链上的疏忽被一一曝光和放大。最终，佛山利达被出入境检验检疫部门要求整改，中国国家质量监督管理总局宣布暂停其产品的出口。
　　事态不断扩大，事先疏于监管的地方商检机构采取了近乎封杀的做法。接近佛山利达的一位知情人士称，利达在事件发生后曾多次送检产品，但当地商检局拒绝检验放行。断然的关停和禁止措施，成为压倒利达经营者张树鸿的最后稻草。
　　8月11日下午3时许，利达副董事长、港商张树鸿在自己工厂的仓库内上吊自杀。自杀前，张在厂区内巡视一圈，并将工人工资悉数结清。张自杀不到一星期，利达下属三处厂房的工人已几乎遣散一空。
　　这家半个月前还蒸蒸日上的企业轰然倒塌，以不堪重负的断裂，成为“中国制造”安全大事件下的一个牺牲品，也给人们留下一个沉重的问号。
　　8月14日，美泰公司又公布了最新的召回事件，称因油漆铅超标问题和磁铁易被儿童吞食隐患，召回近1900万件中国产玩具。这是美泰历史上召回数量最大的一次。
     知情人士透露，美泰公司对中国产玩具的全面调查仍在继续，类似频发的玩具召回事件,已令国内玩具厂商噤若寒蝉。

召回后停业

     在佛山利达的帅盟厂区后面，新盖的三栋厂房已基本完工，占地面积颇广。就在半个多月以前，张树鸿还经常到这里转一转。“老板盖了新厂房，本来是有更宏大的发展计划。”一位利达的部门主管叹息着告诉《财经》记者。
　　张树鸿在员工们的描述中，是一个“重人情”、“从不拖欠工资”、与工人们打成一片的“好人”。很多员工都已在利达工作多年，对老板的死唏嘘不已。
　　张一手扶持长大的佛山利达，成立于1993年，佛山市禅城区汾江实业公司和香港利达实业公司（Lee Der Industrial Company Limited，下称香港利达）各占50%的股份。但根据约定，中方在企业中不分红，亦基本不插手业务经营。
　　香港利达的两位股东，是香港居民赵贵全和张树鸿，各占一半股份。由于赵氏年纪较大，这些年在内地的业务上已基本交由张树鸿负责。现年50来岁的张是佛山利达的实际管理人，未有家室，多年来居于佛山南海，以厂为家，“身边也没什么人”。平时，他几乎每天来工厂，有时周日亦不例外。“他这几年赚的钱，几乎都投回玩具厂。”一位利达中层告诉《财经》记者。
　　佛山利达上世纪90年代后期成为美泰的供应商，专门为美泰生产塑胶玩具，制造工艺并不复杂：原料是塑料件、胶水、油墨、天那水等，基本工序是给塑料件喷油、装配到最后包装。在张树鸿的勤勉经营下，有着上千工人的佛山利达多年来亦盈利颇丰。
　　一位佛山利达部门主管对《财经》记者表示，因为与美泰的良好合作关系，利达曾在1997年获得过美泰的信誉证书。1998年至1999年间，佛山利达进入高速发展期，生产迅速扩大。
　　2000年7月，香港利达的全资子公司佛山市恒景玩具有限公司（下称佛山恒景）成立，几年后租用了原佛山帅盟玩具厂的厂房进行生产，香港利达管理下的佛山厂区已达三处。员工总数增加到2500余人，去年的产值约2亿元人民币，产量已居佛山第二，仅次于中美玩具厂。
　　2007年6月中旬，美泰驻中国化验室开始抽检佛山利达的产品，发现不合格。7月7日，在获知其使用的油漆中含铅量超标后，利达工厂开始启用了符合美泰标准的油墨产品，但生产已经受到影响。利达陆陆续续开了一段时间工，终于在8月初全面停产。
　　美泰起初拒绝公布制造商名字，后来在美国舆论的强大压力下，终于在8月2日宣布对佛山利达近百万件“芝麻街”、“小探险家多拉”等种类的塑胶玩具实行召回，并强调与过往只透露生产国的方式不同，首次向外界公布了生产企业的名字。
　　更为严酷的是，处于召回事件中心的佛山利达所面对的已不是严格检验，而是停业整顿。8月9日，国家质检总局通报，佛山利达已经被暂停出口产品。
　　知情人士证实，在美泰公司宣布召回以后，佛山利达经过自身整改，启用了美泰公司认可的油漆供应商。张树鸿等一度积极采取补救措施，重新取得了美泰的信任。召回消息发出的当日，佛山利达已经获得了来自美泰的新订单。
　　佛山利达现任董事长谢煜光对《财经》记者表示，厂房里已经摆放着新生产的合格产品，价值约1600万港币。但检验部门的禁令打破了利达自救的希望。
　　“召回的损失，工厂还承受得起。老板年初时还准备大干一场。现在货品出不了关，他是看不到希望了。”工厂的一个管理人员告诉《财经》记者。

祸端链条

     确切地说，真正的罪魁祸首不是张树鸿，而是为利达供应油漆多年的东兴新能源有限公司（下称东兴）。
　　东兴是一个小型家族企业，成立于2001年11月，原来生产印刷品。东兴老板与张树鸿是多年的好朋友，佛山利达的彩盒、纸箱都由东兴供货。
　　2002年8月，东兴增加了油墨的生产项目，不久开始向佛山利达供货，当年的油墨、涂料产量为5吨。不少佛山利达的员工认为，东兴的发展很大程度上得益于张树鸿旗下利达、恒景发出的订单。
　　美泰有自己指定的油漆供应商。一位美泰油漆供应商的代表介绍说，美泰在中国共有八家指定的油漆供应商，东兴并不在其列。而佛山利达与东兴长达四年的合作关系，过去并未引起美泰的注意。
　　该油漆厂商坦承，事实上，有些为美泰生产玩具的厂家并没有选择指定的油漆厂商，产品也能被美泰接受。“美泰的要求是油漆检测报告要跟随产品给它，但不清楚东兴是否提供了类似的检测报告。”
　　召回事件后相关部门的调查表明，东兴供应的货品近四年来并没有出现质量上的差错。直至今年4月初，东兴称在黄色色粉紧急短缺的情况下，从网上找到一家东莞的色粉厂家购买补货。这家名为东莞众鑫色粉厂的企业向东兴提供了假的无铅色粉证书、认证证书，但东兴没有发现问题。4月10日，东兴向众鑫购买了500公斤色粉。
　　利达主管事后对媒体表示，按程序规定，东兴进了色粉后要到检测机构认定，但是广州的检验部门需要五到十个工作日才能出结果，东兴担心给佛山利达带来停工损失，所以省略了这个环节。这批问题色粉从4月19日起到6月中旬，陆续使用了200公斤。
　　佛山利达的一位油漆工证实，他在4月的时候就觉得油漆的味道和以前不同。
　　该厂一位内部人士对东兴方面的解释表示怀疑。他表示，供货商通常是在原料快要用完前就进行补货，不会拖到最后一刻。东兴怕耽误利达工期的说法，也不能解释为何此后使用的两个多月间都没有进行色粉检测。
　　知情人士称，鉴定色粉质量要经过五个检验环节，色粉厂和油漆供应商是其中两个。此后这个问题在玩具厂商、美泰和出入境检验检疫部门各处均没有引起注意，所有把关环节一一失灵。

失效的检验

　　国家出入境检验检疫局的前身商检局，曾于1992年9月1日颁布了《出口玩具质量许可证管理办法》，检验检疫部门对于出口玩具的监管，即基于此法规内容。该法规规定，玩具厂商要获得《出口玩具质量许可证》前，必须申请并由有关部门完成型式试验，即每出一种型号的玩具产品，要将首样送检。在日常监督方面，连续生产两年的出口玩具，应重新进行型式试验。
　　对于此法规的执行，多名行业人士向《财经》记者表示，在实际操作过程中，均以企业自觉汇报或者监管部门的抽查为主，规律性的检验检疫并不普遍。
　　“进出口检验检疫局因其自身局限管不过来，1992年法规本身就不足以对出口玩具的质量进行有效监督。”一名玩具制造业人士说。
　　“海关在操作中也只管进口，而玩具出口基本上就靠厂家的自觉，”另一位从事玩具外贸的人士对《财经》记者说：“从来没听说过国内海关停下来查重金属。主要是麻烦，那么多玩具，那么多型号，每个颜色都要去检验……”
　　2005年1月至11月，美国消费品安全委员会召回中国玩具产品27项。当年底，中国国家质检总局发出《关于加强进出口玩具检验监管的警示通报》，要求各检验检疫机构对不明确的出口玩具实施逐批检验，并根据情况做安全项目或型式试验，合格后方准出口。而广东出入境检验检疫局南海分局就在此后被检查出执行不力，曾一度为“未进行玩具产品型式试验”而进行整改。
　　此次美泰召回事件披露出佛山利达的名字，使广东当地检验检疫部门备感压力。
　　一位南海检验检疫的办事人员说，在今年8月以前，对于出口玩具的检查是抽检。此次佛山利达玩具被召回事件发生以后，当地检验检疫部门才开始大张旗鼓推行强制性检查。“现在的检查比以前要严格了。”

玩具商的冬天

     张树鸿自杀后，利达员工谈及此，多有感慨怀念。创业至今，这家埋头生产的玩具企业发展顺遂，并未受到中美贸易摩擦的重大影响。原计划今年产值达到3亿元的佛山利达，未曾料到噩运不期而至。
　　“这个行业我已经做了20多年，召回的事情经常听到，但从来没有听说过有工厂因此而倒闭。”一位油漆供应商说，“利达的事，这次是闹大了。”
　　2006年中国出口到美国的玩具约30万批左右，同期被美国消费者安全委员会召回的玩具案例近40项。而今年截至8月16日，该委员会公布召回的产自中国的玩具已有约35项。
　　虽然相对于中国出口玩具的总量而言，召回的比例仍然很小，但中国玩具被召回的绝对次数确实在不断上升。恰逢今春以来对于“中国制造”的质疑频频见诸美国报端，召回事件在宠物食品、牙膏、汽车等诸多产品领域均有出现。中国产品的质量问题受到全球质疑。
　　8月8日，中国国家质检总局有关负责人表示，中国政府将继续采取一系列措施，进一步提高产品质量和安全水平，进一步完善消费品安全控制体系的建设。但这位负责人亦指出，玩具出现问题，品牌商和进口商也有很大的责任。
　　有关出口玩具的检验新规由此应运而生。在佛山南海，针对利达召回以及其后引发的老板自杀事件，南海出入境检验检疫局于8月16日上午召集了南海所有玩具厂商，参与南海玩具企业检测监管工作会议，并研读由国家认证认可监督管理委员会同月最新制定的《出口玩具质量许可（注册登记）实施细则（试行）》。
　　新规将1993年适用的4种玩具类型扩大到11种，并强调玩具质量许可模式包括型式试验、企业审核、跟踪检查和日常监管。《出口玩具质量许可证书》的有效期从以前的五年缩短为三年，规定如果吊销证书，则玩具厂商一年内不得再次申请。
　　一位佛山利达的供应商说，至今不知出入境检验检疫部门何时放行佛山利达的产品。在张树鸿去世后的第四天，该玩具制造厂商的管理层已推介其上千名员工去其他企业工作。当日，厂区内已人去楼空，零星的一些工人收拾完自己的行李，准备离开。
　　而此时，美泰公司公布了其历史上最大数额的召回事件——由于存在磁铁易被儿童吞食隐患，在全球召回的约1820万件中国产玩具，其责任在于美泰自己的设计。
同时，因为中国制造商又一次发生油漆含铅量超标问题，召回另一种玩具共43.6万件，制造商和油漆供应商的名字一并公布于众。
　　美泰管理层对外表示，可能还有更多的召回将会公布。美泰公司65%的玩具产品在中国生产。美泰的首席执行官Bob Eckert在接受采访时说，美泰在佛山利达召回事件中的损失已经得到恢复。
     目前，广东玩具协会和相关商会正多方奔走，力图消除玩具召回事件对广东玩具生产厂商声誉的影响——但张树鸿已看不到这一切了。■

    （本文刊载于8月20日出版的2007年第17期《财经》杂志）

8.02

 

8.2

 

Michelangelo Antonioni

Director

Dies at 94

THE NEW YORK TIME
By RICK LYMAN
Published: July 31, 2007

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly depictions of alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today. He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday..

“With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen,” said the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. His office said it was making plans for Mr. Antonioni’s body to lie in state on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.

Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blowup,” a 1966 drama set in Swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a photograph he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, hidden in the background, evidence of a murder. But his true, lasting contribution to cinema resides in an earlier trilogy — “L’Avventura” in 1959, “La Notte” in 1960 and “L’Eclisse” in 1962 — which explores the filmmaker’s tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.

This vision of the apartness of people was expressed near the end of “La Notte,” when his star Monica Vitti observes, “Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

In a generation of rule-breakers, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most subversive and venerated. He challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for such mainstream conventions as plot, pacing and clarity. He would raise questions and never answer them, have his characters act in self-destructive ways and fail to explain why, and hold his shots so long that the actors sometimes slipped out of character.

It was all part of the director’s design. As Mr. Antonioni explained, “The after-effects of an emotion scene, it had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both on the actor and on the psychological advancement of the character.”

Mr. Antonioni broke other conventions, too. Many of his cuts, scene lengths and camera movements were highly idiosyncratic, and he frequently posed his characters in a highly formalized way. He employed point-of-view shots only rarely, a practice that helped erect an emotional shield between the audience and his puzzling characters.

“What is impressive about Antonioni’s films is not that they are good,” the film scholar Seymour Chatman wrote. “But that they have been made at all.”

Perhaps the defining moment in Mr. Antonioni’s career came on the night “LAvventura” was screened at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Many in the audience walked out and there were numerous boos, catcalls and whistles. The director and Monica Vitti thought their careers were over.

But later that night, Roberto Rossellini and a group of other influential filmmakers and critics drafted a statement which they released the following morning. “Aware of the exceptional importance of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, ‘L’Avventura,’ and appalled by the displays of hostility it has aroused, the undersigned critics and members of the profession are anxious to express their admiration for the maker of this film,” they wrote.

One of the great legends of iconoclastic filmmaking — how being booed at Cannes could become a badge of honor — was born.

“L’Avventura” went on to win the festival’s Special Jury Prize and become an international box-office hit, spurring furious debate. Some found the film pointless; others read reams of meaning into its languid predicaments. Mr. Antonioni’s international reputation was made.

The next year, Sight and Sound, the influential British film magazine, polled 70 leading critics from around the world and they not only endorsed “L’Avventura,” but they also chose it as the second-greatest film ever made, just behind “Citizen Kane.’

After burnishing his reputation in the early 1960s, Mr. Antonioni surprised many by trying to make movies with Hollywood’s backing. More surprising, perhaps, was that he then had his greatest commercial success with “Blowup” in 1966.

“My subjects are, in a very general sense, autobiographical,” he once wrote. “The story is first built through discussions with a collaborator. In the case of “L’Eclisse,” the discussions went on for four months. The writing was then done, by myself, taking perhaps fifteen days. My scripts are not formal screenplays, but rather dialogue for the actors and a series of notes to the director. When shooting begins, there is invariably a great amount of changing. When I go on the set of a scene, I insist on remaining alone for at least twenty minutes. I have no preconceived ideas of how the scene should be done, but wait instead for the ideas to come that will tell me how to begin.”

The world of an Antonioni film “is a world of people alienated from one another,” wrote Andrew Turner in his book “World Film Directors” (1968). “Their actions have no meaning or coherence, and even the most fundamental of emotions, love, seems unsustainable.’

Interviewers also found Mr. Antonioni to be a cool, combative subject. “Even when he is telling stories about himself, Antonioni’s face remains set in its habitually serious expression,” Melton S. Davis wrote in a 1964 profile for The New York Times Magazine. “Precise in manner, conservative in dress and quiet in speech, he could be taken for a banker or art dealer recounting an unfortunate business deal.”

But Mr. Antonioni could also be graciously charming. Sometimes, interviewers said, the director’s shrewd green eyes would soften and his lips would curl into a smile that some described as ironic, others as chilly.

Michaelangelo Antonioni was born on September 29,1912 into a well-to-do family of landowners in Ferrara, in northern Italy, a town that he described as a “marvelous little city on the Paduan plain, antique and silent.” Around the age of ten, his family remembered, Michelangelo began to design puppets and to build model sets for them. Later, as a teenager, he became interested in oil painting, favoring portraits to landscapes.

He attended the University of Bologna and earned a degree in economics and commerce in 1935. But it was at the university that he also began to write stories and plays and to direct some of them. He was a founder of the university’s theatrical troupe and one of the its leading tennis champions. He also wrote scathing reviews of both American and Italian genre films for the local paper, and decided to try his own hand at filmmaking.

Mr. Antonioni wanted to make a realistic documentary about the local insane asylum. The patients helped him set up the equipment. Then, he turned on the bright floodlights.

The patients went berserk, he later wrote, “and their faces — which before had been calm — became convulsed and devastated. And then it was our turn to be petrified. The cameraman did not even have the strength to stop his machine, nor was I capable of giving any orders whatever. It was the director of the asylum who finally cried, “Stop! Lights out!” And in the half-darkened room we could see a swarm of bodies twisting as if in the last throes of a death agony.”

Mr. Antonioni decided to give up filmmaking.

In 1940, at the age of 27, he moved to Rome to work as a secretary to Count Vittori Cini. The job didn’t last long. He worked as a bank teller and joined the staff of Cinema magazine, edited by Benito Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. During this period, Mr. Antonioni dropped his aversion to filmmaking and took classes at the Institute of Experimental Filmmaking. His wrote some screenplays, including “Un Pilota Ritorna” (The Return of the Pilot) in 1942 in collaboration with another budding director, Roberto Rossellini.

In 1943, Mr. Antonioni returned to Ferrara and found a local merchant willing to bankroll his first film, a documentary called “Gente del Po” (People of the Po Valley), about the wretched lives of local fishermen. The German occupying forces destroyed much of the footage, though a few scraps survived and became a nine-minute curtain-raiser at the 1947 Venice Film Festival for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.”

After the war, Mr. Antonioni wrote more film criticism and continued making short documentaries. All the while he became increasingly skeptical about the neo-realist movement, which dominated Italian filmmaking, and its relentless focus on substandard social conditions. He yearned to look beyond such things and into the hearts of individuals. “His films were about street sweepers, not street sweeping,” is the way the film critic Robert Haller put it. But no one would let him make the kind of films he wanted to make.

“For ten years, the movies forced me not to use ideas but empty words, cleverness, business sense, patience, stratagems,” Mr. Antonioni wrote in an introduction to a 1963 collection of his screenplays. “I am so scantily blessed with such gifts that I recall that period as being the most painful one in my life.’

At age 38, Mr. Antonioni found backing for his most ambitious, non-documentary project, “Cronaca di un Amore” (Story of a Love). Ostensibly about a man and woman plotting to kill her husband, it turned out to be the earliest example of Mr. Antonioni’s approach. In the film, the husband dies, but it is unclear whether he was murdered, committed suicide or died by accident. This whole plot line vanishes and the film, instead, focuses on the lover’s emotions.

As with later Antonioni films, the settings were stark, the scenes fussily composed, the shots held a few beats longer than necessary. The film won the Grand Prix International at the Festival of Punta del Este in 1951.

In 1954, his 12-year marriage to the former Letizia Balboni fell apart. She later told interviewers that the director had become increasingly remote. “We lived in silence,” she said. “We reached the point where we communicated with each other only through the characters he created and about whom he wanted my advice. He has only one way of expressing himself: His work. What he does is have his actors live out emotional crises in his films, by proxy living out the crises in his own life.’

Mr. Antonioni sank into a deep depression. His insomnia worsened. Often he spent the early morning hours writing screenplays.

In 1955, at the height of this crisis, Mr. Antonioni had his first important artistic triumph. “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends)” was about the mundane, loveless lives of a group of middle-class women in Turin. It won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Mr. Antonioni began experimenting more with improvisation on the set. “It’s only when I press my eye against the camera and begin to move the actors that I get an exact idea of the scene,” he wrote. He used this technique extensively in “Il Grido (The Outcry)” in 1957, probably the grimmest of his films.

It was while shooting “Il Grido” that Mr. Antonioni met a young stage actress named Monica Vitti, who would become his greatest and most enduring star, and his almost constant companion during much of the “60s.

For two years, Mr. Antonioni could not find a producer to back him. Finally, in 1959, he found someone and finished a screenplay that had been burning in the back of his mind for a long time. But “L’Avventura” almost died before it was born. Chronically short of money, his producer eventually pulled out of the project just as Mr. Antonioni and the actors were working on a craggy island near Sicily.

“It had gotten to the point where there was no food,” Mr. Antonioni remembered. “One crew deserted us. We got hold of another crew and they, too, left. I had 20,000 meters of film and the actors stayed, so I carried the camera on my back and continued shooting.” Eventually, a new producer appeared.

“L’Avventura” proved to be the turning point in his career and is widely regarded as Mr. Antonioni’s masterpiece.

As with most of Mr. Antonioni’s films, it focuses on the comfortable, enervated lives of well-to-do Italians, in this case a group of friends on a yachting trip. Without warning, during a visit to a wave-thrashed atoll, one of them, an emotionally distraught woman named Anna, simply vanishes. Had she drowned herself because her lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), seemed in no hurry to marry her? Had she hurled herself off a cliff in a fit of ennui? Had she been swallowed by the shark she claimed to have seen? Or had she fled on another boat?

The small island is searched. It rains. Police arrive. Then, gradually, Sandro develops an attraction to Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Ms. Vitti). She resists, then warms to him. Eventually, they stop mentioning Anna at all. The search is forgotten. Sandro betrays Claudia, for no apparent reason. We never discover what happened to Anna.

In “L’Avventura,” Mr. Antonioni’s singular technique can be seen in full flower. “The overwhelming sense of estrangement conveyed by “L’Avventura” is as much a product of the style of the movie as of its events or dialogue,” Mr. Turner wrote.

The director rapidly found backing for his next two films, which further explored the themes of alienation he introduced in “L’Avventura” and which he later said were meant to be seen as a trilogy.

In “La Notte” (The Night),” Marcello Mastroianni plays an author with writer’s block suffering through his loveless marriage to Jeanne Moreau. He meets a young woman at a party, played by Ms. Vitti, who he believes personifies the creativity that has abandoned him. The film won the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival.

“L’Eclisse” (The Eclipse)” most directly addressed the alienating effects of material wealth, following the love affair of a young woman of simple tastes, Ms. Vitti again, and a money-hungry stockbroker (Alain Delon).

The film’s ending is much discussed. Abandoning the principal characters, the film closes with a montage several minutes long composed of 58 shots, most of them on or near a street corner where the lovers used to meet. Water seeps from a barrel. The brakes on a bus screech. A fountain is turned off. An airplane zooms overhead. Finally, with the street corner dark and empty, the camera zooms in on the white, annihilating glare of a streetlight. The end.

Mr. Antonioni said he intended the ending to show “the eclipse of all feelings,” and saw it as a coda both to the film and to the entire trilogy. But he also wanted different people to read different meanings into his work. “There may be meanings, but they are different for all of us,” he told an interviewer.

In 1964, Mr. Antonioni made his first color film, “Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert)” with Richard Harris. It, too, starred Ms. Vitti, as a woman coming gradually unhinged. To mirror her mental state, the director used color in very unusual ways, having houses and even trees painted bright colors and then changing those colors from scene to scene.

By the mid-’60s, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most famous and controversial film directors in the world; his movies were screened regularly on the global festival circuit and the auteur was the subject of countless essays and magazine articles. Inevitably, a Hollywood studio, in this case MGM, came calling. Not so inevitably, Mr. Antonioni welcomed them, signing a three-picture deal.

“Blow-Up” was his first effort for the studio. Filmed in English, with the British stars David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave in the hip milieu of the swinging London fashion scene, “Blow-Up” became the director’s biggest hit. It was also, stylistically, different from his previous films, more conventionally plotted and faster-paced, though still fundamentally ambiguous.

Following its commercial and critical success, Mr. Antonioni came to America to make his first big-budget film, and chose the student protest movement as his subject. “Zabriskie Point” (1970) was the result and it was a disaster.

Though some foreign critics praised the film, it was almost universally panned in the United States. “To many critics, it seemed as if the director, who had begun the decade in absolute control of his medium, was ending it in something approaching total confusion,” Mr. Turner wrote.

“Zabriskie Point” was a box-office flop for MGM, one of the biggest financial failures of its day. Mr. Antonioni was devastated and, in many ways, his career never recovered. Certainly, his most fertile creative period was over. He had made six films in the 1960s, many of them regarded as masterpieces, but would make only three more films in the ensuing quarter-century.

But Mr. Antonioni recaptured some of his previous critical respect with 1975’s “The Passenger,” starring Jack Nicholson as a reporter in North Africa who assumes the identity of a gun-runner. The film closes with a famous, 10-minute continuous tracking shot in which Mr. Nicholson is seen in his hotel room, waiting to be killed. The camera pulls out of the room and meanders through the courtyard. People and objects move in and out of the seamless shot before the camera comes full circle and re-enters the hotel room to find Mr. Nicholson dead. “ ‘The Passenger’ leaves no doubt about Antonioni’s mastery,” wrote the film critic David Thomson, who called it “one of the great films of the ‘70s.”

Following “The Passenger,” Mr. Antonioni announced he wanted to take some time to study new technologies and spent five years doing so, before Ms. Vitti asked him to return to directing with a 1980 Italian television film called “Il Mistery di Oberwald” (The Mystery of Oberwald).” Shot on videotape and transferred to film, it was substantially lighter than his previous works. This, he said, allowed him to “escape from the difficulty of moral and esthetic commitment, from the obsessive desire to express oneself.” It was awarded a silver ribbon for visual effects at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, but made little international impact.

Mr. Antonioni made his final commercial film, “Identificazione di una donna” (Identification of a Woman) in 1982, about a man who has affairs with two women following the death of his wife. It won a Grand Prix at the Cannes festival that year.

In 1985, while working on a film adaptation of a short story he had written in 1976, Mr. Antonioni suffered a stroke and the project was put aside. He married the next year for the second time, to the former Enrica Fico, and they lived quietly in an apartment in Rome. She was at his side when he died, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. He had no children, The Associated Press reported.

After the stroke, Mr. Antonioni worked on an Italian television documentary built around the 1990 World Cup soccer championship, but did not work on a feature film again until 1995 when Italian producers lured him out of retirement to make “Beyond the Clouds,” based on a book of his stories. Because of Mr. Antonioni’s infirmity, though, German director Wim Wenders was brought in to help and is listed as its co-director.

Since his stroke, Mr. Antonioni had difficulty speaking more than a few words at a time, so much of the work was done by his wife, Enrica, who energetically interpreted the director’s demands. The film starred Jeanne Moreau and John Malkovich. The reemergence of Mr. Antonioni spurred the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to present him with a Lifetime Achievment Award in 1995.

Mr. Antonioni began directing again in his 90s. He collaborated with Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director, on a trilogy about love and sexuality called Eros, which was released in 2004. He also made a short film called Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo. To his champions, like David Thomson, “the predicament of the world’s greatest living filmmaker unable to work is a fit subject for one of his mediations.”

For Mr. Thomson, “The enigmas in Antonioni’s work are as subject to time as monuments are to erosion, and the achievements of some films can offset or explain the apparent, or early, limits of others. For example, ‘The Passenger’ helped us to see the longing for escape and space in ‘L’Avventura’ and illuminated the persistence of life at the end of ‘L’EcLisse.’ I suspect that Antonioni’s best films will continue to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert. In that process, if there are eyes left to look, he will become a standard for beauty.”

But for others Mr. Antonioni remained not only enigmatic, but also unreachable to the end.

One interviewer asked him to look back over his life. “In a world without film, what would you have made?” he was asked.

Mr. Antonioni replied: “Film.”

 

7.20

 

7.20

 

我一页页地将这篇沉甸甸地记述文字从newyorker上复制到这里，
这关于一个人的悲恸细节坐在我的对面，
我始终不能为此说些什么，
根本没有说话的力气，
字里行间把我紧紧地抓住，
历史，家，照片，
所有的一切会在明年结束，
并开始。

Enemy of the State
The complicated life of an idealist.
By Jianying Zha
April 23, 2007

Beijing Second Prison is on the outskirts of the city for which it is named, and you can drive past the drab compound without ever noticing it. It’s set about a tenth of a mile off the highway, and when I visit I usually have to tell the cabdriver about the exit on the left, because it’s easy to miss. The first thing you see, after the turnoff, is a heavy, dun-colored metal gate framed by a white tiled arch, and then the guards standing in front with long-barrelled automatic weapons. Electrified wires are stretched taut along the top of the outer wall; it’s a maximum-security facility. Inside the waiting room, adjoining the gate, I stow my purse and cell phone in a locker, present my documents, and wait to be called. The guards recognize me but maintain a professional remoteness. I’m visiting my brother, Zha Jianguo, a democracy activist serving a nine-year sentence for “subverting the state.”

Jianguo (age thirteen), with Jianying (age five), a younger brother, Jianming, and their mother.
Photograph: COURTESY JIANYING ZHA

Jianguo was arrested and tried in the summer of 1999, and I remember with perfect clarity the moment I learned what had happened. I was standing in the kitchen of a friend’s country house, outside Montreal, drinking a cup of freshly made coffee, and glancing at a story on the front page of the local newspaper. It was about a missile that China had just test-launched, which was supposed to be able to hit Alaska; in the last paragraph, Jianguo’s trial was reported. I was astonished and outraged, and, as his little sister, I was fiercely proud as well: Jianguo’s act of subversion was to have helped start an opposition party, the China Democracy Party (C.D.P.). It was the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that anyone had dared to form and register an independent party. Jianguo and his fellow-activists had done so openly, peacefully. Now they were going to prison for it.

My first visits, seven years ago, were particularly arduous. I had to obtain special permits each time, and during our thirty-minute meetings Jianguo and I were flanked by two or three guards, including an officer in charge of “special” prisoners. I was shocked by how changed Jianguo was from when I’d last seen him, two years earlier. It wasn’t just his prisoner’s crewcut and uniform of coarse cotton, vertical white stripes on gray; his eyes were rheumy and infected, his hands and face were swollen, and his fingernails were purple, evidently from poor circulation and nutrition. We sat on opposite sides of a thick Plexiglas panel and spoke through handsets—they were an incongruous Day-Glo yellow, like a toy phone you’d give a child. Our exchanges, in those days, seemed fraught with urgency and significance. After the first few visits, I also met with the warden, who turned out to be a surprisingly cordial young man. (“You expected a green-faced, long-toothed monster, didn’t you?” he said to me, smiling.) We discussed various issues regarding Jianguo’s health. Within weeks, he granted my two main requests. Jianguo was taken out of the prison in a van with armed guards to a good city hospital, where he received a medical checkup, and he was moved from a noisy cell with eleven murderers to a less crowded, quieter cell.

Four years ago, I moved back to Beijing, where I write for Chinese magazines and work for an academic institute; the monthly trip to Beijing Second Prison has become a routine. I try to make conversation with the officer at the “book desk,” where you can leave reading material for the prisoner you’re visiting; he excludes whatever he deems “inappropriate.” Anything political is likely to be rejected, although a collection of essays by Václav Havel got through: the officer peered at the head shot of the gloomy foreigner, but didn’t know who he was.

The so-called “interview room” is a bland, tidy space, with rows of sky-blue plastic chairs along the Plexiglas divider; you can see a well-tended garden outside, with two heart-shaped flower beds. Farther away, there’s a row of buildings, gray concrete boxes, where the inmates live and work. (They’re allowed outdoors twice a week, for two-hour periods of open-air exercise.) You can even see the unit captain lead the prisoners, in single file, from those buildings to the interview room.

These days, I’m just another visiting relative, and, though the phones are monitored, the guards have long ago lost interest in watching my brother and me. Time passes quickly. Jianguo and I often chat like two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while. I start by inquiring after his health and general condition, then report some news about relatives or friends. After that, we might talk about the books he’s read recently or discuss something in the news, such as the war in Iraq or Beijing’s preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Sometimes we even exchange carefully phrased opinions on China’s political situation. Finally, I make a shopping list. Each month, a prisoner is allowed about eighty yuan in spending money (about ten dollars) and a hundred and fifty yuan of extra food if a visiting relative buys it at the prison shop; this is for security reasons, but it also provides a source of income for the prison. Jianguo often asks me to buy a box of cookies. Another prisoner, who is serving a ten-year sentence for being a “Taiwanese spy,” has been teaching him English. The man’s wife left him, and no one comes to visit. Apparently, he really likes the cookies.

In the first couple of years, I kept asking Jianguo whether he was ever beaten or hurt in any way. “I’m on pretty good terms with all the officers,” he would tell me. “They are just following orders, but they all know why I got here, and they’ve never touched me. My cellmates have fights among themselves but never with me. They all kind of respect me.” He told me that the jailers let it drop when he refused to answer if he was addressed as fan ren (or “convict”) So-and-So; he objects to the title because he doesn’t believe that he committed a crime. He has also refused to take part in the manual work that all prisoners in his unit are supposed to do: packing disposable chopsticks and similar chores.

A family friend told me that Jianguo might be able to leave China on medical parole, and I asked him many times if he would consider it. He wouldn’t. “I will not leave China unless my freedom of return is guaranteed,” he insisted. I have stopped asking. Jianguo repeatedly mentions the predicament of exiled Chinese dissidents in the West, who, in the post-Tiananmen era, have lost their political effectiveness. “Once they leave Chinese soil, their role is very limited,” Jianguo says. But how politically effective is it to sit in a tiny cell for nine years—especially when most of your countrymen don’t even know of your existence?

That’s something I’ve never had the heart to bring up. The mainland Chinese press didn’t report the 1999 C.D.P. roundup, so few people in China ever knew what had happened. Outside China, there was some media coverage at the time, and some protests from human-rights groups, but the incident was soon eclipsed by the Falun Gong story. After almost eight years of incarceration, Jianguo is unrepentant, resolute, and forgotten.

Jianguo is the older of two sons my father had from his first marriage. He was seven when my father divorced his mother and married mine. Although my father had custody of Jianguo, the eight years that separated us meant that my childhood memories of him are mostly dim. As was the fashion at the time, he went to a boarding school and came home only on Sundays. He remained a gangly, reticent figure hovering at the edge of our family life.

Divorce was uncommon in China at the time, and no doubt it cast a shadow on Jianguo’s childhood. My mother recalls that, when Jianguo slept in the house, she sometimes heard him sobbing under his quilt. In letters written from prison, he described those weekends as “visiting someone else’s home” and said that he “felt like a Lin Daiyu”—referring to the tragic heroine in the Chinese classic “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” who, orphaned at a young age, has to live in her uncle’s house and compete with her cousins for love and attention. But his mother, whom I call Aunt Zhong, says that Jianguo was ambitious from a very young age. When she first told him the story of Yue Fei, a legendary general of the Song dynasty who was betrayed and died tragically, Jianguo looked up at her with tears in his eyes, and said, “But I’m still too young to be a Yue Fei!” She was startled. “I didn’t expect him to become a Yue Fei!” she told me.
She probably expected him to become a scholar. After all, the boy was surrounded not by military men but by academics and artists. My father was a philosopher. Aunt Zhong is an opera scholar and librettist from a distinguished intellectual family; her father was a university vice-president, her mother a painter who studied with the famous master Qi Baishi. In another letter from prison, Jianguo described those primary-school years as “uneventful,” aside from a vivid memory he has of a great summer storm that struck while he walked back to school one Sunday afternoon. In heated language, he recalled how he fought the wind and the downpour all the way, how he was drenched, alone in the deserted streets, but, oh, the awesome beauty of the thunder and lightning and the ecstasy he felt when he finally reached the school gate, the feeling he had of having beaten the monstrous storm all by himself!

Jianguo was also a voracious reader and a brilliant Go player. At the age of fourteen, he was accepted to an élite boarding middle school in Beijing, receiving the top score in his class in the entrance exam. Yet he felt restless. School life was confining, and he disliked the petty authorities he had to contend with. During this period, he began to worship Mao Zedong. He read Mao’s biography closely and tried to imitate his example: taking cold showers in winter, reading philosophy, and pondering the big questions of politics and society, which he debated with a group of friends. His first political act was to write a letter to the school administration attacking the rigidity of the curriculum and certain “bourgeois sentiments” it enshrined. This was something that Jianguo is still proud of: even before the Cultural Revolution, he had challenged the system, alone.

My own sheltered childhood ended with the Cultural Revolution. My parents were denounced as “stinking intellectuals” and “counter-revolutionaries.” Our house was ransacked. Under the new policy, I went to a nearby school of workers’ children, some of whom threw rocks at me and even left human excrement on our balcony. But Jianguo thrived amid the social turmoil, and became a leader of a Red Guard faction at his school. He seldom came home. When he did, he dressed in full Red Guard fashion: the faded green Army jacket and cap, the Mao button on the shirt pocket, the bright-red armband. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and, with his manly good looks, he seemed to me larger than life. I was shy and tongue-tied in his presence.

Two years later, in 1968, Jianguo left for Inner Mongolia with a group of other Red Guards. He was answering Chairman Mao’s call for the educated city youth to transform China’s poor countryside. My parents held a going-away party for him: I remember the din of a houseful of Red Guards talking, laughing, and eating, my mother boiling pot after pot of noodles, my father sitting silently in his study watching the teen-agers as though in someone else’s house, and Jianguo, seventeen years old, holding court like a young commander on the eve of battle. He invited his friends to take whatever they liked from my father’s library; many books were “borrowed,” including my mother’s favorite novel, “Madame Bovary,” never to be returned.

Aunt Zhong went to the railway station to see him off. When the train started leaving, she waved at her son. “But he acted as if I wasn’t there,” she told me. “He just kept yelling ‘Goodbye, Chairman Mao!’ The Cultural Revolution really poisoned his mind.”

Millions of urban youngsters went to the countryside in those days, but not all of them were true believers: some felt pressure to show proper “revolutionary enthusiasm,” while others went because there were no jobs in the cities. Most of them, shocked by the poverty and backwardness of rural life, became disillusioned. And as the fever of the Cultural Revolution waned, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, many returned home, getting factory jobs or going to university, which in those days depended not on your exam results but on your connections and political record.

Jianguo wasn’t among them. During the seven years he spent on a farm in Inner Mongolia, he had served as the village head and was popular among peasants. He was a good farmhand. He could drink as much baijiu, the hard northern liquor, as the locals could. He had married a former Beijing schoolmate and Red Guard, who stayed on because of him, and they were making a life for themselves in the countryside. The villagers ignored whatever “revolutionary initiatives” Jianguo tried to introduce, but his personality—honest, warm, generous—won him their affection.

In 1976, Mao died, the Cultural Revolution ended, and Jianguo’s daughter was born. Jianguo named her Jihong (“Inheriting Red”). The next few years were critical in China: Deng Xiaoping began to steer the country toward reform and greater openness. The university entrance exam, which had been suspended for more than a decade, was reinstated; I was among those who took the exam and went to university, a welcome change from the farmwork to which I’d been consigned. But Jianguo seemed stuck in the earlier era. He framed a large portrait of Mao with black gauze and hung it on a wall of his home; he would sit in front of it for hours, lost in thought. His wife later told me that Jianguo spent two years grieving for Mao.

Jianguo eventually took a job with the county government of his rural outpost, working for the local party secretary, a Mongolian named Batu, who took a shine to the bright young Beijinger. Then Jianguo criticized one of Batu’s policy directives, which he saw as disastrous for the peasants, and even took Batu to task in front of a crowded cadre assembly. Jianguo lost his post and was placed under investigation. Condemned as a “running dog of the Gang of Four,” he was locked up in solitary confinement, allowed to read only books by Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Two years later, Batu left the county for a higher position, and Jianguo was released. He was given various low-level posts, and was never promoted.

In 1985, when I was a graduate student in comparative literature at Columbia University, I went to visit him. After an eighteen-hour ride on a hard-seated train from Beijing, I arrived at a dusty little county station. The man waiting for me there looked like all the other local peasants hawking melons and potatoes from the back of their oxcarts. He was dressed like a peasant, spoke with a local accent, and had even developed a habit of squatting. His torpid movements suggested years of living in a remote backwater where nothing much ever happened.

It was early 1989 when Jianguo’s wife finally prevailed on him to move back to Beijing. She was a practical woman, and she wasn’t reconciled to a life of rural squalor. She was the one who, driven by poverty, sewed Jianguo’s last piece of Red Guard memorabilia, a faded red flag bearing the guards’ logo, into a quilt cover. Now she was determined not to let their daughter grow up a peasant. For Jianguo, however, their return marked a humiliating end of a twenty-year mission. The idea of bringing revolution to the countryside had turned out to be a fantasy. He changed nothing there. It changed him.

Four months after Jianguo’s return to Beijing, students started marching on Tiananmen Square. Going to the square each day, listening to the speeches and the songs, watching a new generation of student rebels in action—for Jianguo, it was a profoundly moving experience. Twenty years earlier, the Red Guards’ god was Mao. Now the idealistic kids in blue jeans and T-shirts had erected a new statue: the Goddess of Democracy.

I was living in Beijing at the time and visited the square daily. Jianguo said little when we met, though he was evidently in turmoil. One afternoon, I asked him to join me while I visited a friend who was active in the protests. Outside on the square, my friend greeted me warmly and invited me to come inside the tent where a group of student leaders were meeting, but when Jianguo followed me he frowned and barred him: “No, not you!” I explained that the man was my brother. My friend looked incredulous. Here, in his native city, Jianguo stood out as a country bumpkin. And, in 1989, the democracy activists were members of an urban élite. My friend’s snobbery must have driven home the message to Jianguo: Stand aside. This is not your revolution.

Soon, it was nobody’s revolution. What happened to the Tiananmen protesters on June 4th showed what awaited those who openly challenged the system. After the massacre, all government ministers were required to demonstrate loyalty to the Party by visiting the few hospitalized soldiers—“heroes in suppressing the counter-revolutionary riot.” The novelist Wang Meng, who was then the Minister of Culture, got out of it by claiming ill health and checking into a hospital himself. He was promptly removed from office.

During the spring demonstrations, reporters for the People’s Daily had held up a famous banner on the street: “We don’t want to lie anymore!” It was a rare moment of collective courage. Two months later, they were forced to lie again. A journalist at the newspaper described to me how the campaign to purge dissent was conducted there: meetings were held at every section, and everybody had to attend. Each employee was required to give a day-by-day account of his activities during the Tiananmen period, and then to express his attitude toward the official verdict. “Every one of us did this—no one dared to say no,” he said, recalling the scene seventeen years later. “Can you imagine how humiliating it was? We were crushed, instantly and completely.”

Among journalists and intellectuals, a brief interval of exhilaration had given way to depression and fear. Many withdrew from public life and turned to private pursuits. (A few, like me, moved to the United States or Europe.) Scholars embarked on esoteric research—hence the Guoxue Re, the early-nineties craze for studying the Chinese classics. A friend of mine, the editor of a magazine that had been an influential forum for critical reporting, turned his attention to cuisine and classical music. Meanwhile, Jianguo, whose residual faith in the Communist Party and in Mao had perished on June 4th, was adrift, both politically and personally.

The driver of the gypsy cab was a stocky man with a rugged, weather-beaten face, and wore a cheap, oily-looking blazer. He was leaning on a Jetta, smoking a cigarette, when I got out of the prison snack shop. On this particular afternoon, three years ago, I was the last visitor to leave. As soon as he saw me, he took one hard draw on the cigarette and flicked it away.

“Good thing you’re still here,” I said as I got into the car, “or I’d have had a long walk to the bus stop.”

“I was waiting for you,” he said simply, and started the engine.

I told him my city address. “Thirty yuan,” he said. I agreed, and we were on our way. At the end of the long asphalt road, the car turned right, onto a wider street, passing enormous mounds of construction material. In the distance, a line of silos was silhouetted against the horizon. Though we were just a forty-minute drive from the city, everywhere you looked there were old factories, low piles of rubble, industrial-waste dumps, half-deserted farm villages on the brink of being bulldozed and “developed.” The farm I’d been sent to work on when I was in my late teens was just a few miles away.

I was in my usual post-visit mood: tired and unsociable. I closed my eyes, and drowsed until a sharp horn woke me. When I opened my eyes, there were cars everywhere: we had got off the expressway and had entered the maw of downtown traffic. We were hardly moving. It was about four o’clock, the beginning of rush hour.

“You were visiting your brother, weren’t you?” the driver asked.

My eyes met the driver’s in the rearview mirror. “How did you know?”

“Oh, we know the Second Prison folks pretty well. My father used to work there. Your brother is a Democracy Party guy, right?”

“You know about them?”

“Oh, yes, they want a multiparty system. How many years did he get?”

“Nine. He’s halfway through.”

“Getting any sentence reduction?”

“Nope, because he doesn’t admit to any crime.”

The driver spat out the window. “What they did is no crime! But it’s useless to sit in a prison. Is he in touch with Wuer Kaixi?”

This gave me a start. Wuer Kaixi was a charismatic student leader of Tiananmen Square, who, after years of exile in the United States, now lives in Taiwan.

“No! How could he be?”

“But you know some foreigners, don’t you? You should tell your brother to get out, and get together with the folks in America and Taiwan. Most important thing is: get some guns! How can you beat the Communist Party? Only by armed struggle!”

“That’s an interesting idea,” I said, taken aback and trying to hide it. “But then China would be in a war. It would make for bloody chaos.”

“That would be great!” the driver said.

I was appalled. “If that happened, don’t you worry that the biggest victims would be ordinary people?”

“The ordinary people are the biggest victims already!” the driver replied, his face mottled with fury. “You look at this city—at what kind of life the officials and the rich people have, and what kind of shitty life we have.”

During the next ten minutes, while navigating traffic on Chang’an Avenue, the driver told me about himself. He had worked in the same state plant for more than twenty years, first as a machine operator, later as a truck driver. Then, a few years ago, the plant went bankrupt and shut down. All the workers were let go with only meagre severance pay.

“But they must give you partial medical insurance,” I said. I was thinking about three high-school friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch over the years: all three women were state factory workers now in their forties, all were laid off, but all have since found new jobs, and are making more money than before. Two of them even own their homes.

“The insurance is a piece of shit!” the driver replied. “It doesn’t cover anything. I’m scared of getting sick. If I’m sick, I’m done for. For twenty years we worked for them, and this is how they got rid of us!” He spat again. “You look at this city, all these fancy buildings and restaurants. All for the rich people! People like us can’t afford anything!”

On both sides of Chang’an Avenue, new skyscrapers and giant billboards stood under a murky sky. When it comes to architecture and design, most of this new Beijing looks like some provincial official’s dream of modernization. It’s clear that there is a lot of money in Beijing and a great many people are living better than before. But the gap between the rich and the poor has widened. I wondered whether Jianguo, or someone like him, could be the kind of leader that people like this aggrieved cabdriver were waiting for. Under the banner of social justice, they could vent their rage against China’s new order.

Despite the emotions that the Tiananmen massacre had awakened in Jianguo, he had a more pressing matter to deal with that year: he had to make a living. Legally, Jianguo and his wife were “black” persons: they had no residential papers, no apartment, no job. Worse still, they had no marketable skills. So for a period they stayed with relatives and took temporary jobs at an adult-education school that Jianguo’s younger brother, Jianyi, had started. Jianguo worked as a janitor, his wife as a bookkeeper. The school was a success, mainly because it offered prep courses for the Test of English as a Foreign Language. During the chill that followed Tiananmen, studying English was becoming ever more popular, and TOEFL was crucial for applying to foreign schools. Jianyi was growing rich, fast. It was an awkward reversal of roles. The two brothers had very different personalities: next to his serious, ambitious, and hardworking big brother, Jianyi was always viewed as a baby-faced “hooligan”: he goofed off at school, chased girls, and squandered his money on dining out and having a good time. But in the n