more famous ‘Unnamed Lake’ (Wei Ming Hu), the Red Guards would fish you right out. You would face additional beatings for having succumbed to anti-revolutionary pessimism. Here, at least no one found you. Here you could die in peace.”8
When we reached site 14 on the map, marked simply as “building,” Dr. Yue revealed that this had been the home of his own parents, graduates of Yenching University, who were sorely persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. As distinguished faculty members, they had been given a gracious, one-story compound in the 1950s. By 1998, however, the Yue home had become a cluttered jungle of small rooms used by Beijing University’s manual laborers. Here, Yue Shengyang began to share some memories of his teenage years when he had watched his mother being dragged to the nearby “ox pens” by Red Guards. It had been the young boy’s painful duty to visit his incarcerated mother whenever possible. He was allowed to bring her a few necessities once in a great while. The grown man now recalled the humiliation, the swallowed rage. The Red Guards who tortured Yue Shengyang’s mother used the courtyard of Democracy Hall to spread their dogmatic faith in Maoism. This place is not marked on Dr. Yue’s map of ruins from the Ming He Yuan. It is inscribed in another, more durable fabric: that of historical memory. No sign appears on the Beida campus today to link Democracy Hall to the imprisonment of professors like Zhu Guanqian and Ji Xianlin. The building, used for the administrative offices of Beijing University, stands mute, almost innocent: a large, red building across the courtyard from the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology.
Figure 11. Site of the side entrance to the Singing Crane Garden, marked as “residence 79,” as it appeared in the summer of 1998.
It was a relief to turn our attention to the nearby site marked “small courtyard” (site 12), which housed more gracious remains from the nineteenth century. The past stood waiting here for us on that May day in the form of a worn wooden gate, topped with artfully carved lattice work and two marble pedestals. These were clearly Qing dynasty fragments—“used to dismount from horses,” Jiao Xiong explains. Marked as “residence number 79” (figure 11), this gate was a side entrance to the Singing Crane Garden. My companions take pleasure in identifying this concrete link to our subject and strain to read the faded couplet still visible on the cracked, reddish boards. Where we might have expected traces of Maoist slogans, we read instead: le tian zhi ming, an tu jiao ren (Rejoicing in heaven, know fate. At peace with earth, impart humanness). The beautiful rhythms of classical Chinese soothe us, even as Yue Shengyang recalls that this courtyard was once the home of Yang Falu, an expert in ancient cultural studies, who also suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution.
Figure 12. Entrance to the home of Wang Yao’s home, also identified as the entrance to the former Singing Crane Garden by Yang Chengyun in Gu yuan cong heng (The Journey of an Ancient Garden) (Beijing, 1998), p. 16.
The end of our stroll takes us to site 16 on Yue Shengyang’s map, the place that marks the main gate of the Singing Crane Garden. As I look up from the bluish paper, I stop in shocked recognition. This is residence 75—the home of my old teacher and dear friend, Wang Yao (figure 12). It was in this precise spot that I began my research in March 1979—when I went to visit for the first time China’s most famous literary historian, a man who became my guide and mentor in the study of modern intellectual history. Although I had earned a Ph.D. in Chinese history, it was as if I knew nothing. When I began to study texts with Wang Yao, when I began to hear the story of his own journey and suffering during the Cultural Revolution, I finally began to fathom what it means to live with China’s history.
I recall, as if it were yesterday, that chilly Thursday when I parked my recently bought bicycle near the marble bridge leading to Wang Yao’s house. My companion in 1979 was Yue Daiyun, who had told me, “Look well, this is a compound right out of the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber.”9 We had walked across the marble bridge and parked our bicycles near two stone lions—which even back then I knew were Qing period remains. Two decades later, I was quite literally back where I had begun. T. S. Eliot’s words from the end of the “Four Quartets” come back to me:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.10
The marble lions still stand at the entrance of Wang Yao’s house. Two smaller horse mounts are still in place. I recall the last time I saw Professor Wang here, in 1989, shortly before he died. Now, I am back with a new research project, but I do not have his trusted counsel, his seasoned view of literature and historical tragedy. I miss him as we cross the wooden threshold. To my great surprise, Wang Yao’s widow is in the house. I had heard that she had moved out. It just so happens that she is back this Sunday, to pack up old books, mementos of long years spent in scholarship—and persecution.
We are old friends. She had hosted me for meals many times. She knows that I have heard her husband’s stories of beatings during the Cultural Revolution. She greets me and my Chinese companions warmly. We speak about Wang Yao and the house that holds so many memories. I tell her that I am here to close a circle: I had begun my China studies with an abstract interest in intellectual history. I am back now to add flesh to the history that unfolded upon these grounds. I tell Wang Yao’s widow that I hope to write a book about the gardens that housed ideals of beauty and quietude for which so many suffered, including her husband.
“You want to see how far persecution went?” She asks me with quiet rage. Stepping outside the old, book-lined living room, she points to a cracked, stained, mold-encrusted outer wall. Getting closer, she points to a faint classical painting: A scholar on a marble bridge. “See that huge X through the face? The Red Guards did that when they came to take Wang Yao to the ox pens. It was not enough to drag him through mud. Not enough to strike his old body. They had to destroy any visible connection with the culture that once sustained him.”11
The faded, defaced scholar is a physical link to my old teacher and to the Ming He Yuan as well. Jiao Xiong clinches the connection. He points out that Wang Yao’s library/sitting room may well have been the site of one of the first buildings encountered after one entered the garden in the nineteenth century. This was a place known as the Studio for Rethinking One’s Career.12 Caught in very difficult times of war and rebellion, Prince Mianyu had created for himself a typical zhai, a secluded space for meditation where one traditionally abstained from meat, wine, and intimate relations before making offerings to gods and ancestors.13
This space of quiet, crane-like solitude did not survive the turmoil of twentieth-century China. Nothing remains today of the placard that hung in Mianyu’s library. What would Wang Yao think now if he could read its message: xi xin guan mian (cleanse the mind, take note of wonders)? More than a century after the death of the prince who built the Singing Crane Garden, I grasp how dangerously real words can be: xi xin was no metaphor during the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution had made “washing the mind” a literal, daily ritual. Wang Yao had been subjected to a brutal form of xi xin every day of his incarceration in the ox pens. Instead of meditating in the Studio for Rethinking One’s Career, highly educated intellectuals were obligated to write endless revisions of autobiographies filled with their “bourgeois crimes.” Cherished days, like carefully chosen words, lost almost all meaning during the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution had attacked buildings and gardens as well as the moral value of genuine memory.
Nonetheless, the ground has managed to outwit the ravage of time. On this May walk I realize that there are enough signposts remaining for those who
