Should I reach the tender age of 80, I wonder what I will say when asked about the things I've done and seen. Of all the lives that one could lead -- the potential, the opportunity, the choices -- there are among the memories a thousand more to dream.
I painted my own totem spirit in honor of Huang Yongyu, whose works are now on display at the Hong Kong Museum of Art until next March.
Follow the coyote to meet his counterparts -- those bed bugs take the cake.
My "Can of Worms"
by Huang Yongyu
I started writing these 'animal tidbits' during moments of boredom and frustation while in Xingtai in 1964. It was just before the earthquake and I'd been sent to a commune production brigage there as part of the 'Four Cleans' Campaign. Eventually, I found I had a collection of over eighty of them. Some comrades thought they were great fun, laughing so hard they couldn't stand up straight.
The ten year holocaust started out with over one thousand comrades in the arts being rounded up and confined in the western suburbs of Peking. Although comfortable enough, we were in a state of intense nervous anxiety. It was a time when one could find little joy in life. After a month or so they read our names from a roll and shipped us off to "school" to attend our first exuberant and magnificent struggle meeting, all done in the style of a Roman triumph.
On the second day I was called into a classroom which was completely empty apart from a row of young people seated like a panel of judges. As I stood before them I noticed one of them was smiling. It was one of the fellows who had thought my "Can of Worms" such fun back in '64, perhaps he was even one of those who laughed so much he couldn't stand straight...I was ordered to hand over the manuscript.
As a mentally stable person, I have been able to tolerate all manner of abnormality over the past decades. Yet even now, whenever I think of the smile on the face of that young man, a shiver of horror goes through me.
The great master Da Vinci painted that famous smile on Mona Lisa's lips, but I wonder if anyone would want to paint a terrifying, haunting smile as that young man wore? To paint the smile of a Judas, a Sha Wei, Iago or Haake; smiles that revel in murder, calumny and betrayal.
Over thirty years ago, I saw a film version of Eric Maria Remarque's novel Arch of Triumph. It starred Ingrid Bergman, and Charles Boyer played her lover Dr. Ravic. That marvelous actor Charles Laughton was Haake, the head of the Nazi secret service. He would smile while he tortured Ravic, licking his lips in pleasure.
I must have been too young and innocent then, for I thought that evil would have to appear ugly, instantly recognizable for what it was. How could they possibly portray such a terrible man smiling like that? And who would have thought that one day I would come across that very same smile in real life, or that I would have ten long years in which to reflect on their similarities and differences?
Those eighty or so epithets were once a cross which at first I had to bear and upon which I was eventually nailed. My release, however, meant that some people would not be smiling any more.
Nonetheless, it is my heartfelt wish that soon these people too will be able to smile or even laugh as other healthy and normal people do; to live like human beings and not as I had to, like a wild beast or an insect. How I hope they will never again attempt to feed off the lifeblood of others or even stir up trouble.
The original copies were all lost, yet thanks to the efforts of friends and strangers they have been collected and preserved - some people even copied epithets from posters once used to denounce me.
