A Dramatic Monologue

Gary Moore

Excerpt: The Great Emancipator Meets The Monkey King

We took the train that weekend as Susan planned, to Suzhou, a nearby city famous for its graceful ancient gardens. And the gardens were lovely, but the big thing for me in Suzhou wasn't the trees and ponds and pavilions with moon portals, but a street performer: a shirtless boy of maybe twenty who shouted to attract a crowd.

He's ranting and pounding his pumped-up chest to a meaty redness, working himself into a frenzy. He reaches beneath a ratty purple cloth on the pavement at his feet to pull out a leather strap and he throws it around his forearm and pulls it tight. Is he making a tourniquet? He reaches beneath the cloth again, ranting, and pulls out a foul-looking yellow liquid and swallows it. He reaches beneath the cloth again, and comes up this time with some kind of white powder he pours on his arm. Then he pulls out the knife.

The crowd surges back as he slashes the air with its rusty blade. Susan and I look at each other then turn to get away, but then we turn back as if somehow we have to, just in time to see him slam the blade through his forearm, his blood spurting, the crowd shrieking and scattering. We hurried away nauseous, skipped supper, forced our way onto the train as you had to in the crowds of China, and stood in a packed and smoky car for the hour train ride back to Shanghai. On the ride home I thought about the boy who stabbed himself that afternoon, bleeding himself for a few coins from spectators, knifing himself to get along; but I was really thinking about myself. How long would I keep knifing my feelings to get along?

Back in our cold apartment I went to the closet and found it waiting. The box. The box my Casio had come in, and that still held the rest of its stuff. "Democracy in a Box," I’d jokingly called it. A hundred parchment copies of the Gettysburg Address in Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting. Was it OK to have it here? I’d never known why I brought it to China, and I didn’t know what to do with it. But I was thinking. Thinking.

"I can write anything I want?"

Knowing that I was a writer and performer in my country, a university official had invited me to create something "American" for a big arts festival the university was preparing for New Year’s Eve. He looked thoughtful, so I asked again.

"Can I write anything I want?"

I was thinking of my students, and how hard it was to work with them, and why. My first day in class I’d gotten started by introducing myself and having them each come to the front and introduce themselves and tell me something about their home towns as they pointed them out on a big map of China that pulled down over the blackboard.

I was so charmed by their halting explanations of smoky industrial cities and sandy regions where the finest melons grow, and then their blushing rushes back to the safety of their seats -- so charmed by their childlike reticence that I didn't see in it the hint of what was to come, or not come.

In our next class I asked questions about the assigned reading.

"O.K., in our story for today, an American woman is married, but her husband is cruel to her, and so she begins a love affair. What did you think of that?"

They gape.

"I know you thought something about that. O.K., when the woman's husband finds her in bed with her lover, he shoots the other man. And then what happens?"

Silence.

"O.K. Wait. I'm new here and I'd really like to know this: If a Chinese man shot someone, what would happen to him?"

Some students page rapidly through their texts where the answer clearly is not. Others study their desktops with deep concern.

"O.K.," I say, "Nobody’s going to talk to me?"

They look at each other and look down. All except the woman with the sad eyes at the back of the room, who stares as if trying to tell me something she can't say.

"O.K.," I say, "this is not O.K."

I lectured for the rest of the period, and when class was over, the woman from the back of the room stopped on her way out and smiled through her sorrowful gaze.

"I am Tong," she said. "I have enjoyed your class. You are a lively teacher and have much interest."

I wanted to ask her a question, but Tong put her head down and was gone. So there I was, wondering: If I have so much interest, why the hell won't anybody talk to me?

A couple weeks into the term, I still wondered the same thing. One day I climbed up and was kneeling on my desk at the front of the room -- a tall, battered mahogany-veneer thing like an altar, with slogans still carved in it maybe from the Cultural Revolution -- I'm up on this thing, maybe like a sacrifice I think, with my hands clasped in prayer, begging the solemn rows of yellow faces: "Please speak to me!"

I'm thinking: What if the Dean comes by right now for a surprise observation? Some students are blushing, some are looking down while still trying to look up enough not to miss anything. I sway on my knees on my desk, hands clasped: "Do not be afraid to make errors. If you will not speak and make errors I will have nothing to do, no reason to be here, no meaning in life. I love errors. Please speak and make many errors so I may correct you. Be wrong so I can help you be right."

I smile at my own madness, futility. Tong, the sad-eyed woman at the back of the room smiles back at me. I grin. They all grin back. It's alright! The American teacher is not angry! We're all grinning now, so I hop down and launch into the day's lesson.

But though these people were a wonderful audience, they were not going to perform.

The next morning I opened class with a question about the John Steinbeck story we'd read, waited five minutes in silence for an answer, gathered my books and walked out with no goodbye.

Ren Jing, the Monitor or class leader, hurried down the hall after me.

"Gary," he said, "please don't be angry with us. Maybe there is something you must understand." I smelled the reek of the concrete open-trench toilet down the hallway with its door always ajar. "It is because we are teachers," he went on. "We hate our jobs but we cannot change them. We are unhappy and so we are silent." And he explained that although teaching was once highly honored in China, in the new China where according to an official business-boosting slogan painted on walls, "TO GET RICH IS GLORIOUS," teachers are locked in jobs with low pay and no chance for change or promotion, no chance for the incentive earnings of peasants who can sell on the open market all they grow beyond their government contracts, the high production bonuses of factory workers, or the bribes of officials. No one wants to marry a teacher. Their work units are poor and cannot even provide housing for them. Their rich students own color TV's and tape recorders and look down on them. They could not change their jobs. Only the government could do that.

"Gary," he said, "We are flies in a glass bottle. We can see the better world all around us, but we cannot get to it."

A woman from the class, Xiao Wang, came to see me that afternoon with a peace offering of salted sunflower seeds. I was sitting in my office when Xiao Wang came in and sat down beside my big wooden desk under a big wide window looking out on ornamental trees, and she ripped open her cellophane bag and poured a hill of sunflower seeds out in the middle of my blotter. It was remarkable how proper the thin and thirtyish Xiao Wang – with her white blouse buttoned up to her neck -- remarkable how proper she could appear while cracking sunflower shells between her front teeth and sucking out the seeds. I followed Xiao Wang's lead on seeds as she explained the problem this way: "From early school days we are taught to be quiet and obey. Only the teacher talks. To be good student is to be silent. This is maybe as old as Confucius."

Xiao Wang agreed with me that new times needed new ways, and open times needed open expression, but in class the next day Xiao Wang was -- like all the others -- as traditional and mute as the long-gone Confucius.

I went to find my teaching colleague Mr. Sun, who looked up from trying to fix the mimeograph -- his blue permapress shirt somehow still impeccable despite the blotches of wet black ink staining his hands. He smiled sadly behind his gold-rimmed spectacles and said: "Yes, this is a pity. They are taught from very young not to be active and attract attention, because we have a saying in China: `The early bird -- gets shot.'"

And so each morning I went to class early to have my lessons shot down, as I struggled to get my students to do what their ancient traditions taught them should not be done and their experience of contemporary China taught them was not worth doing. But away from the classroom and the workplace and the party secretary’s office at the back of the gymnasium, there was a new wind blowing in my students’ lives – and blowing across the Chinese nation. A new kind of music, Xi Bei Feng, "the northwest wind," was sweeping across the country, combining passionate folk melodies from China's far northwestern provinces with synthesizers, electric guitars and drum machines to create a native Chinese rock 'n roll blowing wild and hard through the hearts of the nation's young and its young of heart.

The Xi Bei Feng singer did not stand stiffly in a prim gown or neat suit, motionless with their microphone before an erect head while only the faintly smiling lips seemed to move and only the nose seemed to produce any sound like the "pop singers" you could find on TV with any turn of the dial. No, the Xi Bei Feng singer in artfully disarrayed sports clothes pounded his high-top Nikes down stage platforms amid smoke explosions and whirling colored lights, growling:

Hao jiu -- hao jiu, hao jiu!

These lines were from a national hit song used in Red Sorghum, a bold new movie popular in China and soon to tour America.

Hao jiu – hao jiu, hao jiu!

When I drink this wine, my cold goes away.

When I drink this wine, the bad taste disappears from my mouth.
When I drink this wine, I never bow my back to the Emperor!

True, the ten-year-old socialist Young Pioneers still wore their bright red neckerchiefs to elementary school proudly on the proper days. But when I was asked in a classroom discussion what I thought of Karl Marx, and responded I thought diplomatically by saying he certainly had some good ideas, like a society that takes care of all of its people, one of my students went with her concern to one of my Chinese colleagues who told me later she said, "I am worried about Gary. He is a socialist!"

But it was all right to be a socialist. China, in the fall of 1988, was like that about political identification, and about opening to new information, new winds. It was all right to be a socialist. And it was all right to not be a socialist.

Zhao Ziyang, head of the Chinese Communist Party, restated the government's position on new developments in politics, economics and the arts, using that nature language so customary with Chinese people they can hardly say anything important without it: "Let a hundred flowers bloom," he said, "let a hundred schools of thought contend."

And now I had my own personal invitation to join the new flowers adding their fresh colors to the garden of the Socialist Motherland.

*

"So I can write anything I want?"

"Of course," the university official who invited me smiled, perhaps because he had at last found the reason sure to protect him, "you are American."

They wanted something American and they were going to get it, but they were going to get something Chinese too: the Monkey King. I'd been reading about him since the 1960’s, when the Grove Press published Arthur Waley’s translation of the Chinese classic, The Journey to The West. China's number one folklore hero, known to every child and grandmother, Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is a magical monkey, born long long ago from a mysterious stone egg. He never dies, he flies on clouds, he's the master of Martial Arts and the 72 magic Transformations of the Taoist sages. He's a learned, brave and hairy little guy, the fearless bad-boy trickster of the Chinese world.

And for something American I'd use a symbol of liberation from my culture -- Abraham Lincoln, more famous than he deserves, maybe, for his role in the process that freed America's slaves, but a guy who hated anybody’s domination of anybody else and spoke wisely about freedom in ways that all can understand. The Great Emancipator. Yes: The Great Emancipator Meets The Monkey King!

The Chinese love musical drama. The Chinese word for "drama" means "musical drama." They've got Beijing Opera, Shaoxing Opera, Nanjing Opera, Tianjin Opera -- but this was a new time, an "Open" time. And they were gonna get what they didn't have yet: Rap Opera!

We'd need actors who could rap, in Chinese and English, because we were going bilingual. We'd need a band, a singer for an introductory song, costumes, an artist to paint faces...but first, we needed a script.

So I write and I write, and then I sit through hour after hour of laborious translation sessions with a team of three translators struggling to do the impossible -- in rhythm.

"Gary," they say, "what does this mean: make your dream come true?" I try to explain.

"Well, we do not understand because in China a dream by its nature cannot be true: a dream is a dream and a true is a true." Oh, I think, changes will be necessary.

I make changes, I find students who can act and I teach them to rap; I find musicians and dig up horns and guitars, keyboards and even a drum machine; I write a song and find a soprano to sing it, recruit dancers, borrow classical opera costumes from the middle ages through a connection at the Shanghai Drama Institute, have convincing stovepipe tophats made of cardboard and painted black, and like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in an old movie musical we clean up a basement rehearsal space and we rehearse and we rehearse -- until at last we're standing in the wings waiting to go on, waiting to go on in the position of honor to close the week-long arts festival, and to close, because this is New Year's Eve, to close the year of 1988 and begin the year of 1989.

We're all in our places, I say -- except the Monkey King! Find the Monkey King! The Monkey King is found. He is tilting up the last of a tall green bottle of beer. He has taken his role too seriously. He’s drunk! He smashes his beer bottle against the brick wall behind the stage!

The curtain opens. Darkness. Soft music. A spotlight, and in the spotlight a tall Chinese woman in a long pale green gown sings of her life alone and afraid in a world of night until -- in a dream -- she meets one like herself. They join hands, and together can walk into the light of courage and freedom.

Zai yi chi, zai yi chi!

Together, together!

The whole world is better --

Together we all can be so free!

Spot out, singer off, stage lights up as the rap rhythm hits and there appears at one side of the stage a man with a beard and a top hat -- me -- rapping:

I'm the Great Emancipator, I'm the man from Illinois

I can free the slaves, I can bring you joy

But I can't do nothin for anyone

If you're the kinda people don't know how to have fun.

So throw away your troubles and get on down

Cause the Great Emancipator is in your town.

And at the other side of the stage appears a Chinese woman in a top hat and a "One World" t-shirt, and she’s rapping:

I'm the Great Emancipator, and I am here!

Yes, the Chinese Emancipator is over here, and the American Emancipator is over there, and verse by verse -- hers in Chinese, mine in English -- we make our way closer and closer to the center of the stage, meanwhile bringing the Great Emancipator closer and closer into the lives of our audience: on their street, on their block, in their house, in their room, until we're side-by-side at the front of the stage, and we're rapping:

You are the Great Emancipator, you are the Ruler of Yourself

Be free today, now's the time to start

Because the Great Emancipator is in your heart!

And here comes the Monkey King! Just a little before his cue! Stumbling, no – as if using one of the 72 Taoist Transformations he magnificently changes his stumble into a tumble and leaps triumphantly from the floor in his red and gold medieval warrior suit, proclaiming:

I'm the Monkey King, my heart is strong,

I'm not afraid of being wrong.

I never die, I fly on clouds

And I do things that aren't allowed

Because I can't keep from leapin into takin a chance --

I live by feel like a rock 'n roll dance.

And he boasts of his fearless triumphs over demons and authorities until he closes:

I'm wild and bold, I'm young and old,

I'm the secret in every Chinese soul.

But the horned black and orange Demon Fear is not impressed, as she demonstrates now by dragging onstage, in a crowd surrounded by massive chains of intimidation, the cowering Victims of Fear, a group of timid creatures masked with featureless white faces of anonymity -- too afraid to even be someone, much less do anything. And the Demon gloats to the audience:

My name is Fear, I've got control,

I tell people what to do.

See these ones here? I own their souls,

And I own every one of you!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

And she taunts her powerless Victims:

Remember when you wanted to disagree,

When you wanted to shout: It's all a lie!

You gave up when you thought of me --

Fear made your other feelings die.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

But as the Demon rejoices in the many ways that Fear rules the world, the Great Emancipators and the Monkey King leap to the aid of the Victims, rapping:

Fear conquers you and steals your dreams,

Fear ties your hands, rips out your voice.

But what if you could change this scene?

I mean what if you really had a choice?

And the heroes rap the Demon down:

Fear's just a monster in your mind,

You`re its master, now's the time!

And the Victims hear, and stand a little taller. The Demon snarls, cringing.

Fear's just a monster in your mind,

You're its master, now's the time!

The Victims stand up straight and begin to test their bounds, as the Demon weakens and begins to fall.

Fear is a monster in your mind,

You're its master, now's the time!

And the Demon Fear collapses in a heap beneath the heroes at the center of the stage, as the Victims of Fear spring free of the chains of intimidation, tear off their masks of anonymity and dance around the stage.

Now, as the dancers whirl and leap in celebration, there is a stirring in the tangle at the center of the stage and up comes the Demon, but with her back to the audience. Up also from that heap come the Chinese Emancipator, the American Emancipator, the Monkey King -- all with their backs to the audience. And as they turn to face the audience, we see that their faces are all now the face of the Monkey King who lives in every human heart, and forming a militant line, they advance toward the audience chanting:

The power within us will never be overcome!

The power within us will never be overcome!

As they continue to march chanting toward the front, a new sound is heard from the back of the stage. It is the voice of the Dreamer, singing:

In my dream we changed the world

I did, so did you

I said I thought dreams came true

You said that you did too

Together, together, the whole world is better,

Together we all can be so free.

And as the Dreamer comes forward to conclude her song:

the rappers and dancers part to include her at their center, all chanting:

And she sings:

Together, together!

And they:

The power within us will never be overcome!

And she:

To-ge-e-e-ther!

And the curtain comes down and the crowd goes nuts and the Party Secretary of the University, the middle-aged woman some say rules the President from her office behind the gymnasium, leaps up on stage and runs to me with her eyes flashing, grabs my hand and pumps it, shouting, "Hen hao! Hen hao! -- Very good, Very good!" And for thirty minutes we had liberated 1700 Chinese people and the Communist Party with words and music, and we were asked to perform our show again in four months for an audience of twenty thousand in a soccer stadium in May.

*

A month later, in a classroom lesson on political terms in English, I asked a student if she would rather be ruled by "liberals" or "conservatives," and she replied: "We do not wish to be ruled by anyone. We are the rulers of ourselves, as you taught us in the opera!"

"Tell us," another said, "about government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

"Let me prepare," I said, "and I’ll give you a lecture."

Enter the box of 100 facsimile copies of the Gettysburg Address on parchment I’d included in my university-funded shipment of household goods.

I arranged my Lincoln lecture for an elective course I was teaching on American Culture, a very popular course as it turned out, which a hundred and fifty students had signed up for even though its credit – and attendant study – was a technically needless addition to the work required in their degree program. This course met in a sizable lecture hall with banked seats, big enough that I was equipped with a microphone and sound system. Next to the mike stand on the day of my Lincoln lecture was a small table holding a pitcher of water and a glass, and the plain brown cardboard box of Gettysburg addresses.

I began by explaining Lincoln’s poor and humble beginnings, a status seemingly common to every Chinese person I met, many of whom said to me when I proposed that they live large: "But you don’t understand, Gary. I am only a small potato." I spoke of Lincoln’s youth, when the founders of the nation were still alive and running a government they saw as the opposite of the royal tyranny – did I dare say dictatorship? – they had fought against and escaped. Lincoln knew that people – white and well as black -- any color – could be slaves, if their rulers ruled against them instead of for them, and he thought that the best way to have the decisions of the government be for the people was to have the people themselves make those decisions. I briefly described the Civil War context of the Gettyburg Address, and then pulled a copy of the address from my box of factory-aged parchment facsimiles and closed with a ringing recitation of the final passage, ending with "…and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth."

"And," I added, "I have a hundred copies of the Gettysburg Address here, free for anyone who wants one."

The rush of bodies came down the banked seats at a run and flooded the stage. I was pushed off to the side. The first students to reach the box grabbed copies and swiftly folded and hid them and rushed away. A hundred more students were still crowding at the box now, shoving each other, and in the melee the mike stand went down and the microphone crashed to the floor and whined high feedback in the cattle-like crush.

"Wait!" I shouted. "Stop!"

Someone turned the box over then and shook out the papers and hands clutched and tugged against each other. The table went down. The pitcher and glass broke on the floor and their water engulfed the parchments, the mike wire, the microphone.

"Don’t touch the microphone!" I shouted and started shoving at my students scrabbling on the floor for wet parchments, forcing my way to the microphone, hoping to kick it away from them.

No, I thought, the wall connection!

"Don’t touch the microphone! It can kill you!" I shouted as I ran to the wall and safely pulled the plug, then looked back to see the last disappointed students leaving empty-handed and muttering that I’d failed to bring anything for them.

I cleaned up the room alone, thinking about what a good idea that had been, and how dangerous it became.

A month after that a man named Hu Yaobang died, a communist leader who when he was Prime Minister back in 1986 said that maybe it was time for China to drop its fear of Western ways -- in big things as well as small. He was the friend of the intellectuals, my students told me, and he was removed. And a wind pent up from that time was released across the nation when Hu died in March, 1989, a wind of students writing on walls the political graffiti known as da zi bao or "big character posters," like this one at a Shanghai university comparing Hu Yaobang with the maximum leader of the time, Deng Xiaoping:

Someone died but he should not have.

Someone should have died but he did not.

Yes, it was spring and death flung itself down and birth flung itself up, and the new flowers – not a hundred, but thousands, millions – sprang up as another opera began to play itself out on the streets of Beijing where it moved from the universities to Tiananmen Square, with something of the same characters and something of the same plot.

But this one was written by God. But this one was written by History. But this one – which would end on June 4 -- June 4, 1989 – this one was written by millions of Chinese 5,000 years weary of the Demon Fear and burning to rule themselves. But this one -- although it did not seem so at first -- this one would be a tragedy.