EXILE

Dissident's Dilemma

Like his more famous counterpart Wei Jingsheng, Wang Ruowang was allowed to travel

to the U. S. for medical treatment. Now, he wishes he had never left China.

By Kyna Rubin in New York City

Eighty-year-old dissident-in-exile Wang Ruowang whacks the tennis ball against the wall with a gusto that belies his frail frame. "Watch how many volleys I can do," he urges a visitor. The setting is a playground on a tree-lined street in Queens, New York, 30 minutes by subway from Manhattan. Surrounded by Chinese-American youths less than a quarter his age, his white mane of hair tucked under a baseball cap, Wang focuses on the ball with a fierce concentration not usually associated with octogenarians.

For more than half a century, Wang applied that same single-mindedness to wielding a pen against the Chinese Communist Party, a doggedness that has left him slamming a ball against a brick wall far from home. In 1992, Chinese authorities granted Wang, one of their most vocal and recalcitrant critics, permission to leave China for medical reasons and to lecture at New York's Columbia University. Wang's exit came just after he was released from a year-long stint in a Shanghai prison for his last, and perhaps final, indiscretion on Chinese soil: supporting the student democracy movement of early 1989.

A writer of satirical essays and short stories, Wang has spent his life pricking the sides of the establishment—whatever its political hue. At the age of 16, the Jiangsu native was thrown into a Kuomintang prison for poking fun at Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. After his release in 1937 and entry into the Chinese Communist Party at its wartime base of Yan'an in Shanxi province, Wang began aiming his barbs at the communist camp.

Wang's stubborn, almost childlike delight in baiting authority was to seal his fate. Since the 1940s, he has paid dearly for his outspokenness about the party's hypocrisy. He has endured struggle sessions, imprisonment hunger, the death of his first wife, and the suffering of their seven children, who were left parentless during the Cultural Revolution. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1987 for being a "bourgeois liberal."

In stark contrast to his tumultuous years in China, Wang's life in the United States is stable and quiet. He lives in a small, unassuming brick apartment building on a quiet street in Elmhurst, New York. Having obtained political asylum in 1996, he lives modestly, relying mainly on the income of his second wife, Yangzi, who is 20 years his junior. They married shortly after he emerged from a Cultural Revolution prison. She is an engineer who earns a living babysitting. They rent a three-bedroom apartment together with two young men from China.

Picture 2:

Family days: Wang in China before

His 1992 departure to the U.S.

before his 1992

But exiles like Wang pay a heavy price for freedom and material comfort, as the recently released Wei Jingsheng is doubtless currently pondering. When Wang was in China, before June 4, 1989, he spoke on college campuses to standing-room-only crowds. There, his courage in supporting political reforms in China was hailed. Now, far away, his influence has waned dramatically. Among Chinese as well as Western based advocates of China's democratization in the West, there is more respect accorded to dissidents who have remained in the motherland--such as student leader Wang Dan--than to those who have fled.

"If, once Wang Dan were released from his current imprisonment, he were to ask my advice," observes Wang Ruowang, "I'd tell him to stay in China if it's safe for him to do so, because, naturally, his influence will be greater there than if he were to come abroad."

Since coming abroad, Wang Ruowang has had to swallow more bitter pills than shrinking relevance within China. Notable among these is the failure of the overseas democracy movement. "With a few exceptions, Chinese democracy activists in the West operate exactly like the Chinese Communist Party," observes a fellow dissident-in-exile, Ge Yang. "Everybody wants to grab power.

They've made a mess of it."

Wang Ruowang experienced firsthand what he calls "China's old problem"—too many generals and not enough soldiers. Four months after his arrival in America. Wang--pegged as the elder statesman who could unify the movement's splintered voices--ran for president of an organization that was to have improved the tarnished image of China's overseas democracy movement. When a 1993 meeting to mark the formation of the new group disintegrated into factional chaos, Wang resigned his candidacy to protest what he viewed as unethical and "Mao Zedong style" backstabbing.

Is Wang angry about his waning influence in China? "No, I wouldn't call it anger. Actually, as the result of exile I am able to see China more objectively, like the Chinese saying, 'to watch the fire from the opposite bank of the river.'"

Like all exiles, Wang's separation from home has greatly shrunk the scope of his writing. "I can't write novels any more because I'm too far from China," says Wang, who used to travel throughout Shanghai's nearby provinces to gather tales of injustice to form the basis of his stories. "Everything I recall from memory I already poured into my autobiography; I can't keep repeating the same things."

Being separated from his children and nine grandchildren is painful, too. His daughter’s application to the U.S. consulate to visit him was rejected. To celebrate his 80th birthday, his family "had a two-table spread in a restaurant in downtown Shanghai"--without him. They later sent him pictures of "his" party.

Hong Kong's Ming Pao Publications issued the first two volumes of Wang's life story; the third volume, which he recently completed, covers the period from 1949 until his arrival abroad. He's now seeking a publisher. "Ming Pao rejected the final volume without saying why, but they don't have to." Though Wang Ruowang has had two articles printed in Hong Kong magazines since the colony reverted to China, he believes that publishers there have been forced to be more cautious since July 1.

Wang is not as prolific as he once was, due to age and distance from China, but he still writes, on average, two hours a day. "I was getting out 15 to 20 articles a year when I first came to the States," he notes, leafing through a small notebook in which he has recorded his output, "but I haven't produced nearly as much in the last few years." Wang's outlets have been Hong Kong, Taiwan and U.S.-based Chinese newspapers. Little of his writing has seeped into China, though he is heard through an occasional interview on Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.

But he remains active in other areas. In 1995 Wang founded the Chinese Democracy Party, whose mission is to "peacefully bring about the end of one-party rule in China." Its 100 or so members hold street rallies to protest Beijing's policies. "We are few in number but our anti-CCP sentiment is very strong," says Wang.

Wang, who once edited Shanghai Literature, also produces a monthly tract called Tansuo (Quest). The six-page leaflet is crammed with articles in tiny Chinese characters, designed to fit into a regular-size mailing envelope for sending into China. Contributors are well-known intellectuals in and outside China who cannot publish openly in the motherland. An article that appeared in Tansuo last year, for instance, was by Ding Zilin, the former People's University professor who lost her son at Tiananmen in 1989 and has compiled information on the victims of that massacre. Another piece by New York-based dissident Ni Yuxian is titled "Taiwan's Democracy is the Engine for China's Democracy."

Wang and his wife mail about 80 issues into China each month. Production costs, for the most part, come from their own pockets. "We send Tansuo to municipal libraries, which get a tonne of material every day, so it doesn't get pulled. If librarians do discard it out of fear, they generally read it first, and that's our aim." Wang also sends Tansuo to the Democratic Front offices of cities and provinces. "It's their job to collect information from democratic parties," notes Wang wryly. A line at the bottom of each issue tells readers to "Feel free to make copies, circulate, and post." Wang is heartened by news that some people do so.

Wang Ruowang's determination to speak up about what he perceives as injustice stems from his need to "speak for those Chinese people who cannot." But it is also born from an anger that resonates more personally: He blames the communist regime for the death of his first wife. She died in 1965 of mental illness brought on by government abuse. "This is an emotional burden that affects me to this day-," he laments.

Despite personal tragedy, at 80, Wang--who on several occasions personally assailed Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping--wears his persecution with pride. "I'm on a blacklist of individuals not permitted back into China," he boasts. Wang says that if the current regime were to allow him back home, only to rearrest him, "I'd be happy to re-enter prison; it would show the world that the CCP is beyond cure."

Wang remains optimistic that he will live out his final years in China. "I believe that within my lifetime I will be able to return home in glory. Maybe I'd have a few less comforts there than here, but

China is my home, and surrounded by my children any material problems would be resolvable.

Back on the court, after promising to strike his tennis ball 30 times without a pause, Wang Ruowang pounds 40 instead. Such stubborn determination bas helped him surmount enormous odds in the past, and may yet see him back in China as he predicts, taunting his foes once again.■