Xiao Dao

My post yesterday got me thinking about a few people I know, which got me thinking about Xiao Dao. This story's in three parts. 1) How Xiao Dao lost his leg to the Communist regime, 2) how I locked Xiao Dao in the attic with a TV full of porn, and 3) how the Chinese rep for Jimmy Walker unloaded me on Xiao Dao's doorstep.

1) In 1985, Xiao Dao lived in the apartment over us in Beijing, and him and my step-father became good friends. XD was 27 at the time, and I remember him in our ratty green chair, cigarette in hand, his half-leg, a stump that ended right above where his knee had been, twitching restlessly. He folded his pant leg over the stump, then pinned the remaining fabric to the material on the back of his thigh. XD and Gerry liked to drink and light fireworks off the balcony, or drink and talk about politics. XD looked and talked like a half-Chinese Oscar Wilde. He had a caustic wit, a frevent desire to be a capitalist, and an impressive ability to hop up three flights of stairs.

His father, Robert, had been a British intellectual and staunch Communist. He came to China and became the editor of the English Communist daily, married a Chinese pianist and educator, signed on as a member of the Chinese party. Fifteen years of dedicated service went by. Then Mao came to power and the Cultural Revolution began and an employee of his whom he had supposedly wronged ratted him out to the local for being forgein and not a devoted party member. The soldiers came to his office, made a big show of arresting him in front of his reporters, and took him away. He was placed in solitary for three years, a sentence punctuated by frequent torture sessions.

The rest of his family, his wife and two sons, were also arrested, and taken to a hotel room. The windows were covered with the same newspaper their father had edited, layers of it, so that the print barely glowed in the daylight. When it became clear they were going to be there for a while, XD's mother drew a keyboard of the sheets and taught them piano, humming the notes as they played. She delved into the deep recesses of her considerable memory and taught them everything she knew from her years in education. She kept them on a strict schedule - up at 5AM, breakfast at 6, kinesthetics at 6:30 - to keep them sane. This was harder for the older brother, Xiao Bao. We were told he left something in that room after they were finally released three years later, that his personality fundamentally changed. I remember him as being quiet, serious, not a frequent smiler, the opposite of XD.

In the last few months of their confinement, XD began to get very sick, sweating into the sheets, a throbbing pain in his leg. He couldn't find the energy to move, let alone play the sheet-piano or do kinesthetics. The first thing they did after being released was take him to the hospital, where doctors found that the cancer had spread up his leg. They immediately took him into surgery and removed it right above his knee.

I used to practice piano in their apartment, XD's mother gently keeping time with her long finger. She gave me cookies and smiled through my clumsy starts and stops. I remember down the hall from the piano there was a room that smelt like cleaning products and bitter herbs where a pale, sunken man lay in bed all day. Sometimes he would shuffle past in a brown robe, but for the most part, he was always in bed, staring at the wall. One day, there was a knock at the door, and a man asked for Robert. His wife went to fetch him, and as she helped him approach the door the man told him that he was very sorry, that he felt such a deep sense of regret for what he had done he couldn't sleep. He was a small man, but a humble man now and needed Robert's forgiveness. Robert collapsed, and was taken to bed, and died a short time after. At least this is how I remember it being told - the man came to the door, and Robert died soon after.

That's kind of a sad ending. But XD is literally one of the coolest people I've ever met. So totally funny and smart. At least there's that - at least he survived.