Free China in Ten Words by Yu Hua Page A

into the store to collect their coupons. For them, the fewer the coupons, the greater the value of their sleepless vigil.
    Many of us remained huddled outside the bookstore and watched as people came out, proudly brandishing their purchases. We would gather around somebody we knew and enviously reach out a hand to touch their reprints of Anna Karenina, Le Père Goriot , and David Copperfield . Having lived so long in a reading famine, we found it a matchless pleasure just to feast our eyes on the new covers of these classics. Some generously held the books up to our noses and let us sniff their subtle, inky smell. For me that odor was a heady scent.
    Those immediately behind No. 50 were anguish personified. They let loose an endless stream of foul language, and it was hard to tell whether they were cursing themselves or cursing something else. My neighbors and I in the last third of the queue felt only a pang of disappointment, whereas those who had only just missed out on a coupon were like people who see the duck they have cooked flap its wings and fly away. Particularly No. 51: just as he was putting his foot inside the door he was told the coupons were all gone. He stood there for a moment, then shuffled off to one side, head down, clutching his stool to his chest, watching blankly as others marched out with their books and we gathered around to touch and sniff them. He was so strangely silent that I turned my head several times to look at him; it seemed to me he was watching us with a look of total nonrecognition.
    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.”
    Now, thirty years later, we have moved from an age without books to an age when there is an excess of them—in China today, more than two hundred thousand books are published each year. In the past there were no books to buy, whereas now there are so many that we don’t know which ones to buy. Once Internet outlets began to sell books at a discount, traditional bookstores soon followed suit. Books are now sold in supermarkets and newspaper kiosks, and pirated books are peddled by traveling salesmen by the side of the road. Once we saw pirated books only in Chinese, but now we see them popping up in streets and alleys in English as well.
    The book fair that takes place every year in Beijing’s Ditan Park is as lively as a temple festival. It combines book sales with lectures on classical literature, demonstrations of folk arts, photography exhibitions, free film showings, and cultural performances, along with fashion, dance, and magic. Banks, insurance companies, and asset management firms promote their financial products. Loudspeakers blare music one minute, lost-person bulletins the next. In this cramped and crowded space, writers and scholars attend book signings while quack doctors take pulses and dispense advice, scribbling prescriptions just as rapidly as the authors sign their books.
    A few years ago I was involved in just such a book signing. An incessant din drummed in my ears, as though I were in a factory workshop with machines humming and roaring around me. In a row of temporary tents was piled a huge variety of books, and booksellers held microphones to their mouths and hawked their wares much as small vendors in a farmers’ market call out the prices of vegetables and fruit, chickens and ducks, fish and meat. What was most memorable for me was to see bundles of books worth several hundred yuan being sold off for a throwaway price, for 10 or 12 yuan. No sooner did one salesman yell, “Bundle of books for 20 yuan,” than