Free China in Ten Words by Yu Hua Page B

another would counter with an even more attractive deal: “Rock-bottom prices! Classics for 10 yuan a bundle!”
    Even the book vendors found this a bit unbelievable. “What kind of bookselling is this?” they said to themselves. “We might as well be selling wastepaper!”
    So their sales pitch would take a different line: “Come and get it! For what it costs to buy wastepaper you can get yourself a bundle of classics!”
    I cannot, however, let this story end amid the calls of the auctioneers at the Ditan Book Fair. I want to go back to that scene outside the bookstore in 1977. Although that morning thirty-odd years ago left me empty-handed, I see it now as the point when I began to embark on a true reading of literature. Within a few months new books did arrive on my shelves, and now my reading was no longer subject to the vagaries of Cultural Revolution politics. Instead, it grew abundant and replete, flowing on continuously like the Yangtze’s eternal surge. “What have these thirty years of reading given you?” I am sometimes asked. It is no easier to answer that than to articulate one’s reaction to a boundless ocean.
    I did once sum up my experience in the following way: “Every time I read one of the great books, I feel myself transported to another place, and like a timid child I hug them close and mimic their steps, slowly tracing the long river of time in a journey where warmth and emotion fuse. They carry me off with them, then let me make my own way back, and it’s only on my return that I realize they will always be part of me.”
    One morning several years ago, my wife and I were walking in the old town of Düsseldorf when we stumbled upon the home of Heinrich Heine, a black house in a row of red houses, even older, it seemed, than the old houses around it. It made me think of a faded photograph where you see a grandfather from another era with his sons on either side of him.
    That morning took me back to my early childhood, to the hospital grounds where I lived and to an unforgettable moment I experienced there.
    For my family to live in hospital housing was quite a common circumstance in China in those days, when the majority of urban employees were housed by their work units. I grew up in a medical environment, roaming idle and alone through the sick wards, lingering in the corridors, dropping in on elderly patients who knew me, asking new inmates what was wrong with them. First, though, I would wander into nurses’ stations and grab a few swabs soaked in alcohol to wipe my hands. I didn’t have showers very often then, but I would scrub my fingers with alcohol at least ten times a day, and for a while I must have had the world’s cleanest pair of hands. Every day too I breathed the smell of Lysol; many of my classmates loathed its odor, but I liked it and even had a theory that, since Lysol is a disinfectant, then breathing its fumes would be good for my lungs. Today I still find myself favorably disposed toward Lysol, because that’s the smell that surrounded me as I grew up.
    My brother and I often played outside the operating room where my father toiled. Next to it was a large empty lot where on sunny days laundry was hung out to dry. We liked to run back and forth among the damp cotton sheets, letting them slap our faces with their soapy scent.
    This memory, though happy, is dotted with bloodstains. When my father came out of surgery, his smock and face mask would be covered in blood. A nurse would often emerge with a bucket—full of bloody bits and pieces cut from the bodies of his patients—which she would dump in the adjacent pond. In the summer the pond gave off a sickening stench, and flies settled on it so thickly one might think it had been covered with a black wool carpet.
    In those days the housing block had no sanitary facilities, just a public toilet across the yard, next to the morgue. Neither of these structures had a door, and I got into the habit of taking a peek inside