Poems from the past to the dead…
On a mountain slope, at the end of a flight of concrete steps, total count 240 because 2.4 millon (soldiers) is in Chinese script writing 240 wan 萬, the timber gateway is painted red, as it is always, and topped by a roof that says in hanzi and Korean “Martyrs Cemetery of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army”. There are dozens of these cemeteries spread throughout North Korea, a reminder of a war ignited 59 years ago by the United States, the United Nations in tow. The war still goes on today, though in different ways. At a Washington newspaper forum, they have described the martyrs’ cemetery as a consequence of the Korean war against the US. Yes, “against”, rather than a defense from US invasion.
But, here, it is Hoechang County, about 100 km east of Pyongyang. After the gateway, and still among the cypress and pine trees, is a hexagonal pavilion, the kind you see in Chinese gardens. Chinese porcelain tiles are hexagonal; traditional Chinese lanterns are hexagonal; the Chinese checker is hexagonal of two overlapping equilateral triangles. Why hexagonal? The answer is embedded in the naturalist philosophy of the Daoist yijing (易经) or Book of Changes where earth is symbolically three equally split lines of a trigram, like this: ☷. Beyond the pavilion a soldier, sculptured in bronze, stands alone on a 14-metre high stone pedestal. To the soldier, and to ten of thousands others, all dead, away from home, China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao offers a wreath laid in advance. He has come to pay his tribute, for Chinese memories are long and deep.
Behind the soldier are the grave mounds, shaped a globe split half, of 134 Chinese soldiers, Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s eldest son, among them. You could tell it’s him from the bust: name inscription, the farmer’s felt cap, youthful, but with perhaps a certain likeness of his father. Now in front of the bust, Jiabao speaks to him, dead at age 28 from an American napalm bomb that so badly flamed his body and face he was only recognized by the watch he wore then. It is as if Mao Anying was still alive, for such is Chinese honor for the past, the dead, the alone, the ones far from home:
“Anying, my colleague. Many seasons have come to past. I am here to see you on behalf of the Chinese people. China today has prevailed and is stronger. Our people have endured. Rest in peace then.”
Three times Wen Jiabao bowed; they are deep bows from the waist up.
There are in China, and elsewhere, many Anyings, the un-consoled, detached and alone in their dignity, sacrifice and suffering for such is the nature in the Chinese perception of the human heart, always impenetrable and more profound than reason. Kongzi has said: “You have not yet comprehend life, how then can you know death?” This is why life takes time.
Expect however the West to heap scorn on Jiabao’s visit to the cemetery as “propaganda”, for such is their cynicism and nihilism wrought from a self-centered culture – I think, therefore I am – begetting a self-righteous morality, now promoted as human right. How then to expect they will understand anything: here, a senior government official standing among the dead, talking with them. No White government in the world does that; they rather speak to those alive, to White reporters and their brown, yellow-skinned underlings (think of Malaysiakini and this), because only crowds deliver votes. Dead people don’t.
Even so, that is a minor point. White, democratic governments serve the present; but, here is a Chinese government reporting to the past about the present and this says, “we know our responsibilities, our duties”. The West can’t understand that an unelected government does have responsibilities. It is, variously, called tianming, and the Mandate of Heaven. So then, expect the Westerns editors and newspapers to say, instead, North Korea is “intransigent” and “provocative” while China, 60 years on, continued to support a “rogue state”, without “freedom”, without food and penniless.
Stopping at last among the mounds of graves, shaded by autumn trees of cypress, Jiabao say to the rest:
“It’s been a four hour travel. … I have come to see you. All the (Chinese) people (wish to) honor you. … They have not forgotten. But it’s been been more than fifty years. Life’s great where it excels / death stills where you may lay.” (浩气长存 haoqi changcun)
No White government official visits graveyard (Western reporters call Wen’s visit, a “tour”), let alone cite poetry to the dead. Democracy has no time for such pieties nor esthetics. Yet, all is normal. Wen Jiabao does what all Chinese are raised to believe and what a good Confucian does; democrats do not equal virtue, to the contrary. This “goose-stepping” country, so vilified by the West and its underling daily mouthpieces, possesses the qualities of virtue that they have yet even to see exist, much less understand.
The clip below has the underlying meaning, the essence in Wen Jiabao’s visit to those among the cypress trees:
