What brought me to that hotel room in Providence, Rhode Island and to contrast--unable to do anything but contrast--the Olympic opening ceremonies in Barcelona, Spain, Western Europe and Beijing, China, Eastern Asia, was an Eastern Asian, Chinese, Beijinger named Song Binbin.
If my consciousness could be depicted in a pie chart with the various subjects accorded slices proportionate to the thought devoted to them in the last three years then Song Binbin/August 5, 1966/Bian Zhongyun/Beijing/China would form a a bizarrely large slice.
Part of the reason for that bizarrely large slice is my profession, certainly. The whole Song/Bian constellation is about murder and I work in a galaxy in that constellation.
But if Song/August 5/Bian/Beijing/China were a constellation about trading in pork belly futures and I did pork bellies the pork bellies constellation would not occupy the same part of my consciousness.
The real Song/Bian constellation is about some hardy perennials that tax us when circumstances force them on our brains. There are the obvious--crime and punishment, violence generally, accountability, morality. But more evanescent things too, like free will. Didn't we dispense with that in the one philosophy course we were required to take in college, the course that changed the trajectory of our education to something practical, like dentistry?
And free will gets all tangled up in other trajectory-changing subjects, like psychology, theology, and sciences like neurology, "hard" sciences both as a term of distinction from those soft others and as difficult ones, not required, and thus ones we didn't take.
When I began this whatever-it-is about China I thought I had bitten off a small enough piece of that beast of a feast for my digestion. It was a murder; I would investigate the murder; I would identify those responsible; I would be sated and would move on--to the Great Leap Forward maybe or who knows what but in terms of that driving hunger, if I had identified the perpetrators I could have pushed myself away from the dinner table and gone to lay on the couch. I went back to Beijing in November of 2008 to do just that, identify the perpetrators and move on.
I was not able to move on.
I asked a lot of questions in Beijing so I got a lot of answers but I didn't get the answer to who the perpetrators of Bian Zhongyun's murder were. I got a lot of information but the days in Beijing were so filled with interviews that I didn't have a chance to (continuing the metaphor) digest at night what I had learned--or un-learned--during the day. And the next day it was more interviews.
When I got back to the U.S. I went back to work, which piles up when one is away for ten days, and which inhibited reflection on things Chinese. Then I got a Providence-like stimulus to my frontal lobe and went to New York City for a long weekend because there were a bunch of American Maoists holding a conference at N.Y.U. and I thought it would be fun, and it was fun.
I never did write about the weekend with the American Maoists because I had to get down on paper whatever it was I learned in Beijing before it, and my memory, grew stale. My friends, Youqin Wang and Rongfen Wang, were able to get Open Magazine in Hong Kong to agree to serially publish what I wrote and a new friend Bei Su Ni assisted in the translation.
So I sat down and began to write. I knew that I had not had time to reflect and so, uncharacteristically, I did not know what I was going to write beforehand but I thought the multitude of facts floating around in my head could be brought together as so many metal filings to a magnet once the process of writing began. In this instance the focusing power of writing was no magnet and the metal filings continued to float free-form in the space between my ears.
It was not writer's block I had but understanding block. I didn't know what to make of it all and I was confused. Daniel Boone once said that he had never been lost but he had been "mighty confused one time for three days." I was confused like that. The result was what Open aptly re-titled a "Beijing Diary." I didn't have an overarching theme so I just faithfully recorded the facts as I learned them on a daily basis.
I remain confused like that. In the eleven months since I have tossed and turned and thrashed about like in a sleepless night. I have started "The Foreigner" and then stopped and started "The Anthropology of the Cultural Revolution" and then stopped and then started a series on Liu Shaoqi and family. I have been looking for the magnet.
Recently I gave up trying to write and went back to reading. I found two new books that may or may not be false starts but the titles seemed to get to what I was looking for. The first was written by a professor of law at the University of Kansas, John W. Head. The second by the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, Philip P. Pan. Professor Head's book is called China's Legal Soul. Mr. Pan's is Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China. I just got Mr. Pan's book but I have finished Professor Head's and what a wonderful book it was and how much it helped me.
The lure of the books was the presence of the word "soul" in both titles. It strikes me, in my present confusion, that to write thematically about Song/Bian/August 5, 1966, etc. as I had intended I have to get more soul.
After I finally turned away from any attempt at The Compleat History of the Murder of Bian Zhongyun to the more pedestrian "Beijing Diary" the writing came easier but near the end I bumped up against "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!" again. The wall I hit was in dealing with the mens rea of the murder and whether the insanity defense applied. Mens rea is the mental component of every crime. For theft, the intent to steal; for first degree murder, "premeditation" which is defined as "the conscious intent to kill." And so on. But, if a person is insane within the meaning of that legal term, then there is no crime, no matter how heinous, not just a lesser degree of the genus, nothing, nada as we say in America.
I got stuck on mens rea and insanity. Something close to frantic, I emailed all my Chinese friends with the legal definition of insanity (without the off-putting label) and asked them if they thought it applied to the behavior of this situation's analog to the Reasonable Man, which I termed "Generic Red Guard." The answers I got were all over the lot.
I had forgotten until I checked just now that I never ended up publishing a conclusion on this topic. In searching Publocc I saw that I ended the "Beijing Diary" series with installment XI which just laid out the definition of insanity. I don't remember exactly if I didn't finish because I got up against Open's submission deadline or if I gave up because of Daniel Boone-like confusion. In my drafts folder however I found five separate installment XII's, which points powerfully to Daniel Boone.
There was so much going on in Beijing in the spring and early summer of 1966 that played with people's psyches. The whole capital was confused, none more so than the C.C.P. leadership. Only Mao knew what was going on. Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping hadn't the foggiest idea what was happening and by the time they figured it out it was too late. Liu and Deng were purged before they knew what hit them. Imagine the psychic confusion among other Beijingers.
Trying to imagine what was in the minds of the Beijingers involved in Bian Zhongyun's Passion was the wall I hit. This issue befuddles even Chinese who were at the school that day. Given that, it's unlikely I'm ever going to understand it much less come up with an explanation that sounds plausible to Chinese who were there. But if it is to be understood and explained it may have to do with that thing the soul.
Mens rea and insanity get close to the idea of "soul" and the reason I found the two books mentioned above so intriguing. "Soul" also appears in the title one of Hu Jie's films, Seeking the Soul of Lin Zhao, the first English translation of which, by my friend Ye Weiyou, appeared in Public Occurrences. Maybe what this all comes down to is Seeking the Soul. Put that broadly, maybe I'm seeking my own soul. But certainly if I've now rightly conceived this thing I am seeking the soul of Song Binbin.
And that brings me back to Providence.
Cover: The Rothko Chapel, Houston Texas.
