“What was your father’s job?” he asked.
I had waited too long to answer. Standing beside my desk, the inspector’s imposing stature cast a shadow across my workbook. I was sixteen—old enough to recognize danger, and young enough to hesitate at the wrong moment.
My father once taught literature. The books were gone by then, burned or hidden, but the cadence of Tang poetry and the metrical pulse of Song lyrics persisted in his memory. Nightly he recited Li Bai, often stopping short of the endings as fears overpowered passion. In this period, intellect was death.
My mind raced through acceptable answers, each I thought insufficient and dismissed an instant before being spoken. Then, in a sudden and deliberate pause, the inspector closed his notebook.
“Read the words,” he said, gesturing toward the wall.
Mimicking my father’s style of poetic oratory, I rose to recite the Marxist mantra. Around me, classroom murmurs fell away into a practiced, reverent silence as the words resounded, eloquently hollow. When I finished, he nodded and moved on. The notebook remained closed.
In 1971, the inspector had been assigned to our neighborhood school. He wore the same gray uniform as did every Party member in Beijing, but the notebook in his hand set him apart. Its documentary pages waited keenly for what did not belong.
A pattern emerged after that first encounter. During weekly inspections, he lingered near my row, asked me to distribute papers, and piously corrected my classmates when they misspoke. Yet each time, his pen remained still. Documentations happened minimally. In retrospect, our district had been largely immune from the rumoured terrors that frequented the others. He never asked about my family again.
Weeks later, behind the school, near the storage sheds where broken desks were stacked and forgotten, I saw him crouched low, holding a torn page. The paper fluttered slightly in the breeze. I recognized the lines immediately: Tang classical verse. He noticed me and froze.
The silence stretched. Then he folded the page carefully and slipped it into his coat.
“You didn’t see this,” he said.
I nodded.
Truly, I never mentioned what I had seen, for I saw that he was not the inspector of the rumours. During inspections, he shielded my small mistakes before they became records, while I kept my gaze steady and my mouth closed. Each of us understood what the other was risking.
When Mao died in 1976, the Revolution ended as abruptly as it had begun, its violence dissolving into uneasy stillness. The inspector was dismissed. I saw him once more in the hallway. Without his uniform, he looked younger. We exchanged a nod—five years compressed into a single gesture—before walking away.
A month later, I checked my mail box to find a torn page of Tang poetry. It was the one he had been reading at that fateful encounter.
My father, seeing the signature, remarked passionately, “Han was a bright student of mine. He loved poetry as he did people.”