Being No. 51

A review of "China in 10 Words"

China in 10 words is Hu Yua’s picture of China. Born in 1960, Hu Yua grew up with China.

Hu Yua explains China through ordinary events:

Daily life may seem trivial and routine, but in fact it contains a multitude of incidents, at once rich, expansive, and touching. Politics, history, society, and culture, one’s memories and emotions, desires and secrets—all reverberate there. Daily life is a veritable forest and, as the Chinese saying goes, “Where woods grow deep, you’ll find every kind of bird.

And so, China is explained through street brawls, boys coming of age, an execution, posters, watching neighbors, leaving the hometown, and recounting the stories of others.

Once Hua and his friend hounded a peasant illegally stashing a relatively low number of coupons and succeeded in overpowering him. His coupons had been borrowed from friends and relatives. The man said that “his parents and brothers and sisters had gone for half a year without eating a drop of oil, making do with vegetables boiled in salted water.” All the coupons were compensated. Hua does not know if the wedding ever occurred.

Mencius once said: “We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort.”

One gets a deep sense of contingency and arbitrariness while reading the book.

Contingency, because the cultural revolution uprooted so many lives. Many were rocketed to great heights only to fall a few years later. The fall of communism opened up a torrent of new opportunities and allowed for rapid change. With radical change, there is radical contingency.  The concepts of Revolution, Disparity, and Grassroots carry contingency with them.

Why arbitrariness? Perhaps this is just because I missed an overarching theme or value. There’s no call to virtue, politics, or artistic excellence. The work isn’t even nihilistic. It’s a reflection of arbitrary daily life. That’s all. The words Leader, Bamboozle, and CopyCat are all examples of arbitrariness of different kinds.

Both themes are reflected in the story of “51”. 51 refers to a man who was just at the cutoff for the new town bookstore. Until that point, no one had access to any non-maoist works. Hu Yua recounts another story of he and a friend feverishly copying down the entire La Dame aux Camelias in a 24-hour period. We should be grateful for books!

At any rate, many arose early and did not sleep in order to get a limited coupon for books. 51 was one of those who had been waiting since the early morning. Yet only 50 were given access to books. So, no dice.

Later I heard some gossip about this No. 51. He had played cards with three buddies until late the previous night, then come to the bookstore with his stool. In the days that followed he would greet his friends with a rueful refrain: “If we’d stopped just one round sooner, I wouldn’t have been No. 51.” And so for a little while No. 51 became a catchphrase in our town: if someone said, “I’m No. 51 today,” what he meant was “I’ve had such rotten luck.”