A Beating

I saw a policeman hitting someone on the Bund, for no reason, simply because he felt like it. It was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, quite neatly dressed, in padded jacket and trousers, with a belt around his waist. I did not see clearly what the policeman was whipping him with—it seemed to be the long loop attached to the end of his truncheon. Down came his arm, thwack!, time after time, driving the boy up against a wall. The boy did not try to run away, though he could have. He looked up at him, screwing up his eyes, in the way country people squint against the glare of the sun in the open fields, and there was even the hint of a smile on his face. It had all happened too suddenly: people without stage experience often lag behind in adjusting their expression.

I have never had a strong sense of justice. If I don't want to see something I can shut it out. But this time I couldn't help it, I kept looking round at them. I felt choked. With every blow my heart contracted. When he had finished his beating, the policeman sauntered over in my direction. I fixed him with a venomous star, only sorry that I could not look real daggers. I hoped I could express my utter contempt and anger, the kind of disgust one feels for a leper. But he was only aware he was the object of attention, and smugly tightened his belt. He was a northerner with a long face and a big mouth, not at all bad looking in fact.

He walked over to the door of the public lavatory, and laid hold of a shabby looking man in a long gown who happened to be standing there. He did not set about him straight away, he just glared at him as he fingered his truncheon. Torn between panic and indignation, the man actually came out with a witticism: "Is it because I was going for a crap?"

Probably because of my lack of ideological training, I forgot all about the class revolution, and in my anger wished I were a high official, or else the First Lady, so that I could have stepped up to the policeman and boxed his ears.

In the novels of Li Hanqiu, written in the early years of the Republic, there would have come at this juncture the intervention of a public-spirited Western missionary or the concubine of the Chief of Police (the confidante of the heroine, the old flame of the hero). Momentary naivety is excusable, but systematic naivety is really not a good thing.