After dinner I accompanied him home—he did not live far away, and it was a pleasant summer night.
'This humiliation you spoke of—"
I didn't quite know how to begin; but he knew what I was asking.
He said, "One night, in September 1966, forty Red Guards showed up at my house. Forty of them. They came inside—they burst in, and there were both men and women. They put me on trial, so to speak. We had 'struggle sessions.' They criticized me—you know the expression? They stayed in my house, all of them, for forty-one days, and all this time they were haranguing me and interrogating me. In the end they found me guilty of being a bourgeois reactionary. That was the crime. I was sent to prison."
"What was the sentence—the length, I mean?"
"Any length. I had no idea when I would be released. That was the worst of it."
"Forty Red Guards—that's very scary. And they were at your house for almost six weeks! Did you know any of them?"
"Oh, yes. Some of them were my students." He gave the same gentle giggle and said, "They are still around," and disappeared into his house.
On my walks in Shanghai, I often went past the Chinese Acrobatic Theater, a domed building near the center of the city. And I became curious and attended a performance; and after I saw it—not only the tumblers and clowns and contortionists, but the man who balanced a dinner service for twelve on a chopstick that he held in his mouth—I wanted to know more.
Mr. Liu Maoyou at the Shanghai Bureau of Culture was in charge of the acrobats. He had started out as an assistant at the Shanghai Library, but even at the best of times things are quiet at the city library, since it is next to impossible—for bureaucratic reasons—for anyone to borrow a book. The librarian is little more than a custodian of the stacks. So Mr. Liu jumped at the chance of a transfer and joined the Bureau of Culture, and he accompanied the Chinese acrobats on their first tour of the United States in 1980.
"We call it a theater because the performance has an artistic and dramatic element," Mr. Liu said. "It has three aspects—acrobats, magic and a circus."
I asked him how it started.
"Before Liberation all the acrobats were family members. They were travelers and performers. They performed on the street or in any open space. But we thought of bringing them together and training them properly. Of course, the Chinese had been acrobats for thousands of years. They reached their height in the Tang Dynasty and were allowed to perform freely."
Mr. Liu said this with such enthusiasm I asked him how he felt about the Tang Dynasty.
"It was the best period in China," he said. "The freest time—all the arts flourished during the Tang era."
So much for the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, but he was still talking.
"Before Liberation the acrobats were doing actions without art form," he said. "But they have to use mind as well as body. That's why we started the training center. We don't want these acrobats to be mind-empty, so after their morning practice they study math, history, language and literature."
He said that in 1986, 30 candidates were chosen from 3000 applicants. They were all young—between ten and fourteen years old—but Mr. Liu said the bureau was not looking for skill but rather for potential.
"We also have a circus," he said. "Also a school for animal training."
This interested me greatly, since I have a loathing for everything associated with performing animals. I have never seen a lion tamer who did not deserve to be mauled; and when I see a little mutt, wearing a skirt and a frilly bonnet, and skittering through a hoop, I am thrilled by a desire for its tormentor (in the glittering pants suit) to contract rabies.
'Tell me about your animal training, Mr. Liu."
"Before Liberation the only training we did was with monkeys. Now we have performing cats—"
"Household cats? Pussycats?"
"Yes. They do tricks."
It is a belief of many Chinese I met that animals such as cats and dogs do not feel pain. They are on earth to be used—trained, put to work, killed and eaten. When you see the dumb, laborious lives that Chinese peasants live it is perhaps not so surprising that they torture animals.
"Also pigs and chickens," Mr. Liu said.
"Performing chickens?"
"Not chickens but cocks."
"What do the cocks do?"
"They stand on one leg—handstanding. And some other funny things."
God only knows how they got these pea-brained roosters to do these funny things, but I had the feeling they wired them up and zapped them until they got the point.
"What about the pigs?" I asked.
'The pigs do not perform very often, but they can walk on two legs—"
