A Message

Abstract“A Message” (“Yige kouxin”) is one of eleven short stories in the collection 1966 by mainland poet, essayist, and professor emerita Wang Xiaoni. The book was published to great interest in 2014, but was quickly pulled from warehouses for its controversial subject matter, namely the first year of the Cultural Revolution. All of the stories are set in the snowy, Russian-influenced, far northeastern province of Jilin, where Wang Xiaoni herself was born and raised. In 1966, Wang was eleven years old, just on the cusp between childhood and a semi-adult understanding of the world. The stories in the collection are told from the perspective of younger characters, ranging from a little boy barely old enough to left on his own, to young adults trying to make their way in a newly violent and chaotic society. None of the characters are given names, but instead identified by a role or profession or some other relative term like “sister” or “coworker,” emphasizing not only the universality of the lives depicted, but also the interconnected nature of the communities she explores in minute detail.In “A Message,” a male worker wants to deliver a warning to a teenaged girl who works at the same factory. Her parents have been accused of working as spies for the Americans—a crime for which the punishment could be death—and he wants to alert her of the terrible danger that she and her young brother are in. In an atmosphere in which paranoia is both ubiquitous and reasonable, the worker is worried that he will also be implicated in the parents’ crime if he is seen to be aiding the family. Wang Xiaoni brings in many elements specific to that political era, including the frequent political radio broadcasts that the population were required to listen to, whether or not they happened suddenly in the middle of the night. Her characters are subject to the whims of work units, which controlled everything from where one lived to whom one married, and of the dreaded neighborhood committees, which kept watch over the lives of regular citizens and harshly punished any perceived infractions against the revolutionary cause. Wang brilliantly captures the omnipresent and stifling fear, as well as how ordinary good intentions could go terribly awry, or simply be crushed under the deadly onslaught of the communal, interpersonal, and social upheavals wrought by the Cultural Revolution. Additional informationNotes on contributorsXiaoni WangWang Xiaoni 王小妮 was born in Changchun, Jilin, in 1955, and spent seven years as a laborer in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. In 1977, she was accepted into the Chinese Department at Jilin University, and in 1985 she moved to Shenzhen. Now retired, she works as a film script editor and college professor. Her publications include more than twenty-five books of poetry, essays, and novels.Eleanor GoodmanEleanor Goodman is the author of the poetry collection Nine Dragon Island, and the translator of five books from Chinese. She is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center and a recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.