Trial of the Archangel
by Xianfeng Mou
December 31, 2010
From yesterday, the snow began to melt. After a night, almost all the snow have suddenly all melted.
The time was the end of 2010.
I was listening to the music titled Trial of the Archangel.
I have a few words to say, not too many, just a few.
The gist of it all is: I HAVE BEEN PUT IN THE SAME POSITION AS THE ARCHAGNEL ON TRIAL, metaphorically speaking.
I always like to speak metaphorically. Readers who cannot think or understand things metaphorically shall not attempt to read this piece.
Right now it is the morning of December 31, 2010, the last day of the year.
Tomorrow is another year. It is raining outside. Shall we take it as a cleansing rain, or a rain of new life? Please do not ask me.
I have happened to have written a good book. I believe it is very important both to the United States culture and to the Chinese culture. I call it a very strong bridge that I have built linking these two cultures with each other.
Every thinking intellectual in China and in the United States knows the two cultures cannot live without each other. Every thinking individual, even if they do not have a doctoral degree or even a college degree, would probably also agree with me, if they know and care about the situation.
However, what has never occurred to me is since my book is so good and so important, those that are jealous have started to play extremely vicious political games.
Since my book connects the Chinese culture with the U.S. culture, they have concocted an extremely vicious plan to villify me before both the Chinese government and the U.S. government.
That is why I say I have been put in the same position as the archangel on trial.
The U.S. government has never questioned the motive of those (I believe a few were involved in the political frame-up) who villified me. I only know the direct result is I have been subjected to close scrutiny for at least four years, from 2006 to 2010, because my dissertation project formally started in 2006, if I do not count in the fall semester of 2005, when I finished defending my prospectus, the outline for my entire dissertation.
The U.S. government only was able to make the final decision, or judgment on August 16, or on October 14, 2010, when I finished writing the first draft of my journal paper on Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples. It was only on that day was the U.S. side able to reach a definitive conclusion that I have never bad intentions towards the U.S. culture or the American public. On October 14, 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office issued me my Copyright Registration Certificate for my dissertation.
Am I finally allowed to be a little boastful and call my dissertation, an unprecedented, monumental project carrying extreme importance to both the U.S. culture and the Chinese culture?
However, what may hurt, more than anything else, is without my knowledge I might have also been put on trial by the Chinese government because the villifiers have remembered to use the more effective method by framing me up before the Chinese government.
Oh, they won’t forget that. I am more than sure.
I have felt the Chinese national security team might have also paid attention to me.
I have studied for three years in China Foreign Affairs University, for my Master’s degree. I pay attention to what I say and write.
One or two misuse of English words might be acceptable.
However, in my two hundred pages of dissertation files on the Chinese writers, I have decided I have not said anything that work against the interests of the Chinese people or the Chinese government. I do not have to follow the road of many who curry cheap favors from some Americans by bashing and battering China. I see that as a betrayal of the Chinese culture. The Americans who really have a sense of right and wrong will not take that kind of betrayals nicely. I think in this way. Maybe I have too high expectations. But I would not think positively towards those that betray their cultures easily, no matter which culture they come from.
That said, my dissertation does not give anybody an easy read.
The U.S. writers are facing their culture squarely, examining both its strength and its weakness. I have to do them justice and abide by the same principle analyzing both the strength and weakness of the U.S. culture.
That is the supreme responsibility of an intellectual. You have to stick to the truth, as far as you know it.
True words hurt. Of course! I have never said true words do not hurt.
True words hurt because the writers are curing the disease of their culture so that the culture can gain a rebirth, and become strong again.
Nobody has said that is easy. Curing a cultural disease is the most difficult task anyone can take upon.
Curing the disease of the cultural spirit is the most difficult among the most difficult. Few mortals are capable of doing that.
It so happens that some of the writers I am studying are the bravest souls in their culture. They dare to examine and cure the disease of the cultural spirit.
All the writers I have looked at are brave souls.
I have said a few words about the U.S. writers. Now I will say a few words about the Chinese writers.
Su Qing, Zhang Jie, and Wang Anyi dare to examine the cultual spirit. Su Qing appears to be an easy read, or she might appear not to have dealt with serious topics. But she is not. She is examining women’s spirit, women’s thinking.
Zhang Jie and Wang Anyi are very brave. They have not only examined what the Chinese culture should throw way, they have also found the way out, the way to strength the culture by cutting off the way of thinking that hinders the culture from moving forward.
Zhang Jie says she will not think in the unquestioning way. She says she will question and she will place her own emancipation onto her own shoulders, not on the shoulders of men or the shoulders of the country. She believes the problem with Chinese women is they like to depend on men, their men, or some other men, or as a collective they like to depend on the country to help them out, to liberate them.
A woman who always thinks thoughts of other people is dead.
Wang Anyi writers more carefully. She has taken another road but she has accomplished the same goal. Wang Anyi says the unthinking way of life, be it for a woman, for a man, or for a culture, will lead to death.
Wang Anyi kills off that unthinking way of life, symbolized by three characters in her novel, Chang hen ge (Song of Everlasting Sorrow, 1996).
Nobody has thought Wang Anyi is so brave that she has decided to kill off the unthinking commoner, the unthinking female intellectual, and the unthinking, weak male artist. They are all dead. Before this moment, I had thought Wang Anyi has only killed off the unthinking commoner.
Ah, you never know how much a writer tells in her text. Everybody has thought Wang Anyi is person of mild temper. But she loves the Chinese culture so much that she will not blink when as a writer she has to do what a writer has to do.
She never lies in her text.
Since I have studied her Chang hen ge in my dissertation, I have to do what she has to do. I have to do justice to what she has seen. I have to do justice to her proposed solution.
Catching the falling sky. That is what she is doing, metaphorically speaking.
Have I blinked when I have to examine what Wang Anyi has seen in Song of Everlasting Sorrow?
No. I have stayed faithful to her. She dissected the Shanghai culture. I have interpreted her dissection; she has dissected the Chinese culture from 1944 to 1986, I have interpreted her dissection faithfully.
She says the Shanghai cultural spirit is not healthy, I say the Shanghai cultural spirit is not healthy; she says we shall kill off the prostituting mentality, I say we must kill off that prostituting mentality; she says the Chinese culture must know what it really wants rather than listen to what other cultures say the Chinese culture should want, I declare the Chinese culture must know what it really wants, based on what it has and what it gets from the outside, rather than listen to what other cultures say what the Chinese culture should or entitled to want.
There is nothing wrong with Wang Anyi’s dissection. There is nothing wrong with my interpretation of her dissection.
I have stayed true to both the U.S. culture and the Chinese culture in my dissertation. I have always told truth as I have known it. I have filled my study with good intentions towards both the U.S. culture and the Chinese culture.
But your words hurt us so deeply, the U.S. readers say.
And your words hurt us so deeply, the Chinese readers say.
Of course, I know that. I have told the writers are doing surgeries for the cultural spirit. That is the most difficult task under the sun. Few mortals dare to perform those surgeries.
Mind you, the U.S readers and the Chinese readers are very high-level people. They are cultual ministers, and possibly the president himself.
I decide I can stand up to the trial.
Each sentence in my dissertation can be taken apart and reassembled; so does each paragraph; so does my interpretation of each writer.
My inadequacies are inadequacies. The ministers and the president will be able to tell whether I have done my best. They will be able to tell my inadequcies from my true words.
Shall I be afraid of some jealous competitors’ fabrications or twists of my meaning, because they either want to steal my dissertation or if they cannot then destroy it?
I have put my dissertation, my intention, and my purpose in front of the entire world. I am not afraid of a worldwide trial, if it has to come to that.
Trial of the Archangel.
It has not occurred to me I was put in that position.
I anticipate I shall win. I anticipate liars shall be defeated.
Here is the music, if the reader wants to listen to it.
Trial of the Archangel
All rights reserved. Xianfeng Mou, December 31, 2010.
