Haplessness and confusion

Jonathan Spence’s Treason by the book delights and terrifies at once; and in ways which are strikingly reminiscent of Burn After Reading: it describes a course of events which starts simply enough with two people taking up a daring, but hopeless, action in order to change their lives; and then explodes into a huge ado in which countless others across the world are affected in strange, unexpected, often deadly ways; a case of a moth flapping wings.

Both works succeed in creating the impression of the dangerous unpredictability of the world, in which numerous actors, each acting reasonably and predictably, produce surprising, unpredictable, apparently irrational, and dangerous consequences. (Like market panics, for example).

When, at the end of the book, the Qing bureaucracy puts a clamp on events (preventing anyone from offering comments on the imperial edict which specifically requested them) they are acting in a manner identical to that of the CIA director in the film who -- mystified by what is going on -- just wants it all to stop. He issues instructions: let him escape, burn that he body, pay her off, etc. – designed to just bury and forget the business. At the end of the film he says to himself: “What is the lesson of all this? Do not do what we did". Then he takes a double take: "But what the hell did we do?”

The Chinese equivalent of the two plotters who in the movie propose to sell CIA secrets (discovered in a Washington gym) to the Russians are the Hunanese Zeng Jing and his student Zhang Xi who set out sometime in 1520’s from their overcrowded, infertile corner of Hunan, riven by floods, droughts, and earthquakes, for Sichuan where land is plentiful and cheap. After much travel they arrive in the capital of Hunan, Changsha, where they are overwhelmed by the metropolis. While still in the country-bumpkin’s typical big-city-daze, they stumble upon an astrological prediction posted somewhere by someone of the beneficial effects expected from an imminent wonderous conjunction in the sky; they assume this means that things will get better and therefore – note the logic – give up on Sichuan and return home. But in South Hunan there follow more droughts and floods and the economic situation gets even worse. After some time, the two decide that maybe that wonderous conjunction is – about something else?

It is their second attempt to change their lives which will result in a 10 year investigation of hundreds of people, executions of dozens, wholesale book searches and destruction, and enslavement and expropriation of scores of people. But horrible and scary as that is, this is not the strongest impression of the book on me – which is why I do not discuss the plot here at all. The strongest impression is of the numerous stories of private lives, which is like the one above: of the hapless, half-hearted, stupid way in which ordinary people manage their lives.

An especially touching story is of the itinerant salesman who meets the old man called Wang Shu. It is winter and snowing and Wang Shu is selling his socks in exchange for a meal. Moved by pity, the salesman gifts him the money for the food; they begin talking; and Wang Shu explains that he is traveling to Hunan where he will perform great deeds. He proposes to hire the salesman at the exorbitant sum of 38 coppers a day, to accompany him on his journey and carry his luggage, with the proviso that the money won’t be paid until they reach Hunan; meanwhile he proposes that they should live off the salesman’s savings, which he, Wang Shu will borrow and pay back once they are at their destination. And so they travel, through the bitter cold of the mountains, for weeks, eventually running out of the salesman’s money and reduced to begging, until, at one of the mountain passes Wang Shu dies, without having revealed to his companion the objective of his travel. And thus the salesman finds himself out his savings, and stuck in some god forsaken nook of the mountains, no hope of ever collecting on his princely salary.

While reading this fragment I thought to myself how cinematographic it was – an old man in a purple jacket and his half-witted attendant in a red cap struggling through mounds of crane-white snow; how much like something you might expect to see tucked in among Kurosawa’s Dreams. And, of course, how much like the story of Zeng Jing and Zhang Xi, the never-came-to-pass Sichuan settlers: hapless, random, silly, meaningless, unproductive efforts to make something of our lives with only the vaguest hopes attached to them most insecurely.