Damn the Consequences

Remembering One Brave Dissident's Life

Is "it possible that one play can topple a government?" Chinese dissident writer Wang Ruowang asked just that, with a twinkle in his eye, in 1979. He was responding to a script then secretly circulating in Shanghai that was banned by the Communist Party.

The play, written by the type of young person who Wang liked to nurture, exposed, in hilarious fashion, the gullibility and corruption of Party officials, duped into opening doors of power and prestige to a nobody posing as a military commander's son. I had just finished reading, on the sly, a dog-eared copy of the text in my Fudan-University dorm room when a fellow American student ran in to share breathlessly this line that he'd just heard Wang ask the audience at a standing-room only lecture. Only a few months into studying modern literature in Shanghai, we were keenly aware of the daring of Wang's rhetorical query.

At the age of 83, Wang Ruowang - a tenacious and perennial thorn in the side of China's past two governments - died in a hospital in Elmhurst, New York, on Dec. 19, nine years into his life-in-exile in America.

Back in 1979, the writer and his wife, Feng Suying, lived in a typical nondescript, cement-floor apartment in the southwestern part of Shanghai. On my first visit, after being introduced by a friend of a friend, what struck me at once was his utter lack of affect. Despite his hero status among Shanghai's youth and his renown among intellectuals, he was entirely unassuming. Thin, with a brilliant shock of straight, white hair, he emitted child-like enthusiasm and prankish delight in goading the powers that be, which led some to call him a "naïve old man" and a "loose cannon."

But naivete and gall can drive some to do great things; they certainly fueled Wang's dogged commitment to democratic ideals. "I never could master the game of politics, the mutual trickery and intrigue," he told me then in his thick Jiangsu accent. His goal was "equality and freedom." Wang's short stories and satirical critiques of government officials from the bottom all the way up the line to Dang Xiaoping were attempts to insert his ideals on a system uninterested in political change.

Wang boldly indicted the Communist Party's treatment of political prisoners during the Cultural Revolution, which he portrayed as crueler than what he had experienced in a Nationalist jail in the 1930s. That he was the first to write about the barbarities of Mao-era prisons, still so rawly felt by many people in 1980, was no surprise. He had taken pride in prodding the establishment, whoever they might be, from an early age. After elementary school, he had been kicked out of a teacher's training program for participating in a student movement. As a teenager he joined the Communist Party Youth League and published what he called "toilet literature" in his factory-worker-directed tracts pasted to the walls of the employee latrines, where management wouldn't see them. He satirized Chiang Kai shek. After his release from a KMT jail in 1937, he eagerly made pilgrimage to the Communist base of Yan'an. He joined the Party there, but doing so did not stop him from editing a wall newspaper in the Shanxi enclave that criticized life in the politically sacrosanct setting.

I visited Wang throughout the 1980s. Feng Suying, by then "Older Sister Feng" to me, took time out of her factory job to make my favorite dumplings. He lent me his funny-looking girl's bike to ride around the French quarter where they lived. He gave my newborn sons Chinese names. He continued to incite the wrath of government authorities by exposing their hypocrisies through short stories and zawen, a traditional form of critical essay. Wang prided himself on popularizing zawen by using language and allusions easily understood by the broad public.

The life-long agitator refused to sit on the bench for any political campaign -and the democracy movement in the spring of 1989 was no exception. "Naivete" no doubt moved him to cast caution to the wind, as it always had. After June 4, he spent a year in prison for actively supporting the students. His release for medical reasons, brought about through international pressure, came with the understanding that he would not be allowed back in China under the current leadership. He assumed a visiting professorship at New York's Columbia University.

Some disillusionment awaited Wang Ruowang in the West. He was thrilled by the freedom to write and publish what he wished but greatly disappointed by the fractious state of the democracy movement among overseas Chinese. At a 1993 meeting held in Virginia to elect leaders of a new organization comprising two of the movement's contending groups, Wang resigned his presidential candidacy to protest what he called the "Mao Zedong-style backstabbing" that characterized the chaotic gathering. Being abroad brought him a more objective view of his homeland, he told me in 1997. But, as for many exiles, "watching the fire from the opposite side of the river" left him little new material to write about.

He and Feng Suying lived very modestly in a small apartment in Queens, 30 minutes by subway from Manhattan. They relied on her income from babysitting and did not have health-insurance coverage. Tennis racket and ball in hand, he strolled daily to a nearby playground to hit volleys against a wall. A few mornings a week he walked to a neighborhood church serving subsidized meals to area seniors. He read and found great joy in listening to his beloved Peking Opera tapes.

In early December someone informally representing the Chinese government told Feng Suying's sister in Shanghai that Jiang Zemin would allow Wang to return to China if he laid low by not discussing "sensitive'' topics. He refused the invitation.

Wang Ruowang was probably right: One play, or even lots of plays together, cannot bring down a regime. Since 1989, political dissidents, including writers, in China have not been successful in effecting political reform. Positive change has come, instead, from economic progress and the birth of a middle class. Most Chinese, burned by experience, don't believe in sticking their noses out to defend right from wrong. All the more so among China's young "me" generation, more taken with cell phones and fine dining than with fighting for democracy.

Wang Ruowang was one of only a handful of Chinese writers who stuck to his guns from beginning to end, who dared to speak out for those who could or would not, damn the consequences - which were not small for him or his family. I may have doubted the efficacy of some of the tactics he used to remonstrate the government. But that never for a moment eroded my admiration for the sheer grit of this "naive" dissident or my gratification for his friendship.

Ms. Rubin translated Wang Ruowang's autobiographical novella, "Hunger Trilogy," into English.