On *Our Story* by Rao Pingru

This morning I wanted to write about Our Story (Ping Ru Mei Tang), and at the start of the book I read the preface by Chai Jing. I felt deeply that, if I wanted people to know this book, I could never write anything more moving or true. So I decided to simply share the preface in full. Here goes — enjoy:

Bones, Clean and White

Preface to Our Story

By Chai Jing

Every word I say is true,

every story is true.

As for the past,

all those pictures are in my mind.

Rao Pingru, photographed in 1945, aged 24

The year he met Meitang, Rao Pingru was twenty-six. A graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy, he was in the 2nd Platoon of the mortar company of the 188th Regiment, 63rd Division, 100th Army, fighting on the outskirts of Xuefeng Mountain in western Hunan, and he nearly lost his life.

A comrade beside him was shot in the belly; his intestines spilled out, and his screams were something Rao "couldn't forget for many years". Pinned down by gunfire, he lay flat on the hillside, gripping blades of grass, and looked up at the peak of the green mountain, where white clouds rolled across the deep blue sky.

"So this is where I'll be buried. That's all right," he said. "Back then I was alone. I wasn't afraid — didn't know to be afraid. A boy's heart is coarse."

When the war ended, in the summer of 1946, Rao Pingru's father sent him a letter, hoping he would use his leave to come home and get engaged.

"Father took me straight to the home of Uncle Mao Sixiang at No. 3 Zhoujialing, Linchuan... our two families were old friends. As we walked through to the third hall, I suddenly saw that the window of the main room on the left was open, and a young woman of about twenty with a lovely face was looking at herself in a hand mirror, putting on lipstick — this was my first impression of Meitang."

"Did you think she was beautiful?" I asked.

"Back then I thought every woman was beautiful," the old man said honestly.

The two of them barely spoke. His father went over and put the ring on the girl's finger, and just like that, the great matter of their lives was settled. Both young people found it funny; after the laughter, they went to sit in her room. Her little sisters played around the bed, Meitang rolled up a newspaper into a tube and sang, and she showed him her photo album.

He thought she probably liked him, and took a few photos from the album with him.

On the way back to camp, he stood at the bow of the boat in his uniform, watching the light glittering on the surging Yangtze, and felt that from now on he could not treat his life lightly, because there was now another person in it.

When the civil war began, he didn't want to fight. He asked for leave and went home to get married.

Meitang died at eighty. This year he is ninety, and he has painted more than a dozen albums, called Our Story. He had the black-and-white photo of her under the pomegranate tree reprinted, touched up her lips with a little red, and wrote beneath it: "This feeling might have become a memory to cherish, but even then I was lost in a daze."

Stroke by stroke, he painted her from her childhood — how, as a little girl in the classroom, she envied the young maids playing on the swing outside; how she and her best friend, with permed hair and qipaos, went dancing at the dance hall... all painted just as she had told him back then.

The photos of their wedding were burned in the Cultural Revolution. Relying on memory, he painted in the buildings, the scene and the people of that day. He had no particular intention as he painted; he simply felt that a panoramic view would let him paint everyone in, not missing a single one.

Those who look at it can't help feeling that the angle is like a gaze, across the years, at the backs of the two of them.

After their marriage, times were turbulent. Rao Pingru took Meitang to Guizhou, where he worked as a clerk; to evade bandits, they hid her jewellery inside the wheels of a cart. Then they went into business in Nanchang. He painted the details of that era, writing: "The noodle shop did poor business, I went to night school to learn accounting, interviewed at the grain bureau, sent my CV to a survey team, sold dried chillies and couldn't figure out the scales — Meitang laughed that I wasn't a businessman at all, and I thought she was quite right. To this day I still don't understand how you're supposed to deduct the weight of the pan on a pan scale."

Surprisingly, these were the happiest memories. He painted the young people with nothing to do, playing "suoha" — I had no idea what kind of card game this was; he explained it to me with great enthusiasm for ages, and I still didn't get it. I just saw that he had painted five people, with their seats clearly labelled, and like a child he had marked who each person was: "Old Wu", "Sister Ding"... and "Pingru" and "Meitang" sitting close together on a bench, smiling at each other.

The house the couple lived in was just a pavilion with boards added on four sides to turn it into a room.

"Back then it really didn't feel hard. It was fun. Why? Whenever it rained, the wind howled, the windows rattled and banged, there was thunder, the wind went whoosh — 'the wind fills the tower before the mountain rain arrives'. That poetry, that wild charm of the mountains, you can't experience in a concrete house."

"The Chinese like to say that for a poor couple, everything is sorrow. Why did you find it poetic?"

"I think it has to do with one's state of mind. No matter when, no matter where, no matter what life, a person with some poetry in them sees poetry in everything."

In 1949, Rao Pingru was supposed to go to Taiwan with everyone else, but then he thought: "My father-in-law married his daughter to me hoping she would always have someone to rely on. If I leave, I'm being irresponsible." So he stayed, believing there would always be a place for a humble family.

In 1958, he was sent to re-education through labour. No one told him why, and there was no paperwork; he was taken straight from his workplace. His work unit went to his wife: "You need to draw a clear line between yourself and this man."

At this critical moment, what Meitang said showed a crisp, sharp spirit: "If he were having an affair, I'd divorce him on the spot. But as I see it, first, he's not a traitor selling out his country; second, he's not corrupt; third, he hasn't stolen or extorted anything. I know what kind of person he is. How could I divorce him?"

Rao Pingru went to a factory in Anhui for reform through labour, until 1979. He could come home only once a year — for twenty-two years, always the same.

Over those twenty-odd years, none of the letters he wrote home were kept, but he kept most of the letters his wife wrote, and pasted them all into his albums. There are almost no words of affection in these letters; they are all about the hardships of life: how to get a bit of food, how he could bring back some eggs, how to get the children jobs, how to find them a match...

He pasted them in order of date, and where the letters had become damaged over time, he filled in the gaps with a pen.

The dozen-odd albums were heavy and large; laid on the table, they couldn't be spread out properly. So I lay on the bed to look at them, copying out phrases as I went, and in places I burst out laughing — Meitang had a fiery little temper. Sometimes she would write in a letter, "I'm so cross with you, I'm so angry, the more I write the angrier I get," then throw down her pen and write no more, and it would be a month or two before a new letter came.

"How did you feel when you read that?" I asked Mr Rao.

"I felt for her."

I hadn't expected that: "Felt for her?"

"She was usually very good to me. If she said something like that, she must have been under enormous strain."

He often thought of a woman with several children, her wages not enough, carrying twenty-jin sacks of cement to earn a little money, saving sweets from the children's mouths to post half a bag to her husband. He wrapped them in a handkerchief and kept them under his pillow, and took half a month to finish them.

Since she died, every time he passes the Shanghai Natural History Museum, he stops for a moment: "In these steps, I don't know which piece is the cement she carried, but I know that for the children, for our livelihood, she carried it on her back. Her back and her kidneys were damaged, and I'm afraid that's probably what caused it."

"You can't do anything!" — this was what Meitang said to him most often in her life. "Whatever I did, I'd be told 'you can't do anything' — like when my stir-fry wasn't good, when I didn't close a drawer, when I bought the wrong book for our granddaughter, and so on." He chuckled.

Sometimes their children thought their mother a bit harsh, and the old man would quickly wave his hand, meaning: "She's teaching her own husband — what's it to do with you?"

He said: "She was always grumbling at me, always laughing at me. But in that laughter there was no ridicule, no sarcasm. It was just as if it amused her: look at you, you can't even figure this out."

"Some men might feel that's a bit too picky, and feel they'd lost face."

"Not at all. What face? None of that."

All these years, whenever his wife went grocery shopping he went with her, worried she'd have to carry heavy things.

"I'd carry the basket and follow behind, getting some training. She'd teach me, like taking on an apprentice: 'How's this vegetable? How's that one?' I'd say, 'If you're not buying, why ask him?' She'd say, 'You silly thing. Ask at a few places, get a feel for it, and then when you buy you've got something to compare.' She thought I was too simple-minded. She'd pick and choose."

"Most men would say, 'I'm not going, you go and shop,' wouldn't they?"

"I never deceived her. I never told her any lies."

In 1992, Meitang's kidney disease grew worse. Rao Pingru was still working at the CPPCC at the time; he turned down all his work to devote himself entirely to caring for his wife.

From then on, he got up at five every morning to comb her hair, wash her face, cook, and do her peritoneal dialysis, four times a day — disinfecting, mask on, connecting the tubes, draining the fluid — as well as giving insulin injections and keeping records. He didn't trust anyone else to help.

"Were there times you felt irritable?"

"No, no, not at all. This was my hope."

In her pain she gradually stopped cooperating, and from time to time she would pull at the tubes in her body. Her hearing was poor and she could no longer see writing clearly, so he drew pictures to persuade her not to pull the tubes, but the pictures didn't work either. All he could do was stay up at night watching her the whole night through. But he was old, after all, and couldn't do that every day, so in the end he had to tie her hands. "She'd cry 'Don't tie me', and it hurt so much to hear it. What could I do... it was agony."

Meitang's confusion grew worse and worse. One day she claimed her husband had hidden their granddaughter away and wouldn't let her see her. Whatever old Rao said, she wouldn't believe him. Already in his eighties, he sat on the floor and wailed.

She watched him cry as if she couldn't see him.

He said: "Ah, this is terrible, I'm afraid it's the end. It's like what Yang Jiang wrote: 'Our lives were full of hardship, and only in old age did we have a settled home, but old age and illness press upon us, and we have come to the end of our lives.'"

Mr Rao's granddaughter said that after that, Grandma was rarely lucid: "When everyone else just treated what she said as nonsense, only Grandpa kept taking her words seriously. She had always been someone particular about quality. Whatever she asked for, Grandpa would still cycle a long way to buy cakes from a certain brand or cooked food from a certain shop. By the time he got back, she'd long forgotten what she'd said and wouldn't want to eat it any more. He wouldn't listen when we tried to talk him out of it. When Grandma asked where her black dress with red flowers had gone — a dress that never existed — Grandpa would absurdly say he'd go and find a tailor to make one."

I asked Mr Rao: "The younger ones tried to persuade you, saying there was no point in any of this?"

"If I didn't do it, my heart wouldn't be at peace, and I couldn't make it right with myself. It comes down to one phrase: knowing it can't be done, and doing it anyway. When I did it, I felt no guilt. If I didn't, it would be an eternal reproach. I'd never have a moment's peace for the rest of my life, asking myself: in this life, why didn't you do what you could have done?"

When I heard this, something moved in me; my heart sank, and I almost lost the courage to keep asking.

"On the afternoon of 19 March 2008, she died, at 4:23. When I went in, I saw her from a distance lying on the bed. She was already... her life had no strength left, it was used up, but she still had a little awareness. She saw me and shed a tear — that was all the strength she had. She saw me, but she couldn't speak, she couldn't move. Her life was just that tiny bit."

"Did you say anything then?"

"I didn't say anything. She could no longer speak. I stroked her hand; it was still a little warm. Later I realised it had truly gone cold, so I took scissors and cut off a lock of her hair, tied it with red silk thread, and kept it at home... This is the only thing of her that remains, so it's a keepsake. A ring, a very small ring, the one she usually wore. I don't usually wear it. Today I wore it to come here."

On his little finger was a thin band of gold. The ring his father had given the newlyweds back then had been sold when the family later fell into poverty; in her old age, he bought another and gave it to his wife.

The interview light, covered with a layer of diffusion paper, fell on the old man's face. He wore a white shirt under a dark checked jacket. His white hair was fine as thread, the ring gave off a faint glint of gold, and all around was darkness.

There was a passage in the interview that didn't make it into the final cut, and I've always remembered it.

Mr Rao said that one day last month he saw in the courtyard a black thing about twenty centimetres long. It was a bone someone had thrown away, with hundreds of ants swarming over it, gnawing. He said:

"In the past I'd have swept it away and dumped it and been done with it. This time I thought: my strength is greater than theirs. If I want to sweep it, I sweep; if not, I don't. It's no bother to me, so why? I won't touch it. I went inside and left it alone."

As I listened, I didn't know what he was getting at.

"The next day, I went out to the courtyard again and the bone had turned white. The ants had eaten every last bit of the flesh off it, leaving only the bone, and the ants were gone too. That was something I never expected."

I asked him: "What impression did that leave on you?"

"They are life, and I am life. Why should I want them to die just because I have the power, the right? One step and they'd be dead, but why? They don't affect me. They are life too, and they also need to live."

Several months have passed since that interview. I remembered these words but never thought about them closely, until one day I read Huang Yongyu saying in a book: "Beauty is better than prettiness, but goodness is better than beauty."

When I read that, I thought of that bone, clean and white. This is goodness.

A while ago, our director Wang Jin (nicknamed "Ant") brought in a letter. The old man had painted a portrait for each of the camera operators and directors, with a note: "I painted eight holes in Xiao Wang's trousers, for the sake of fashion."

The one he gave me was this painting: a man and a woman sitting by a window facing their books, with the words above: "When I push open the window, butterflies sometimes fly in."

For this episode, everyone involved — Ant, Xiao Yu, Tianshu, Lao Fan, Li Lun, Zou Gentao, Shen Chao, Chen Xi... — treasured the albums. Ant transported the albums from Shanghai to Beijing and back again. I'm usually careless, but this time I was afraid of losing even a single scrap of paper. After reading each one, I stacked them neatly on the little tea table. At three in the morning there was a loud crash: half the little table had collapsed, but luckily no albums were damaged. We packed them in big cardboard boxes, sealed them and moved them downstairs, and Ant and Tianshu, laughing and joking, carried them away.

This episode is nothing more than the ordinary sense and sentiment of everyday lanes and alleys, with nothing legendary about it — just the life of an ordinary man and woman across a century. We knew full well the ratings wouldn't be great, but we still had to make this episode. The old man's granddaughter Shushu wrote in a letter: "Times are different now. A line as heavy as the one on a page of his albums, 'Only in longing do I find the sea is not deep' — perhaps not everyone is fortunate enough, or brave enough, to apply it to themselves." Our producer Xiao Yu wrote back: "In my place, I would ask myself too whether I'd spare no effort, for a long time, doing something hopeless. But I think: because you love it, you're willing. Time can make one person unrecognisable, and make others ever clearer."

I once asked Mr Rao: "You've written so much in these albums. What do you most hope future generations will remember?"

"A person should be loyal and kind-hearted. Loyal, kind-hearted people always endure."

He lived those two words all his life, like a fine rain soft as butter, falling without form or trace, and only from afar do you see the grass turning green, endless and boundless.

After finishing the preface, I looked up Chai Jing's videos and Seeing to reread. I still welled up with tears, and I don't even know what I'm crying about.

Perhaps it's what Seeing showed me: in the profession of journalism, the questioning of life, the insistence on justice, the compassion for others that runs through it all;

perhaps it's nostalgia for the past — the reluctance and regret that has lingered faintly in my heart ever since I left my job as a journalist.

May I often see my own ignorance, and always be moved to tears.

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