Yomei didn’t find the Russian original of The Brothers Yershov in the foreign language bookstore, but she bought a copy of its Chinese translation and read it over a weekend. She was impressed by its plainspokenness—it confronted the degenerate trends and official corruption in the Soviet Union, which were believed to have deviated from orthodox Marxism and Leninism. The latter holds that class struggle is a fundamental feature in a socialist society, so the proletariat must be firm and aggressive in suppressing the remnants of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. The novelist seemed truthful to the point of bluntness. Still, with Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov looming in the background because of its title, Kochetov’s novel felt like a piece of reportage, lacking in psychological acuity despite its vast canvas and large cast of characters. On the other hand, it did have magnitude, which Yomei always prized in a literary work. According to what she had witnessed in the USSR, she believed its descriptions of the bureaucracy and the corruption in the Communist Party there. She intuited that a dramatic adaptation of this novel in China might have international repercussions. In recent years, the CCP had been accusing the USSR of straying from its original vision—a move driven by revisionism and opportunism—and purposely slowing down in its advance toward a Communist society. Yet Yomei’s gut told her that this novel, as a literary work, might be too deeply entrenched in history, feeling more like a thriller that mainly served current politics, so she shelved the idea of adapting the novel into a play.
Then, to her surprise, Zhou Yang, the deputy head of the CCP’s Propaganda Department, called and invited her to a small meeting. On the phone, he didn’t elaborate and only revealed that they would like to see if she could stage a play adapted from The Brothers Yershov. Luckily she had just read the book and wouldn’t appear uninformed, and, knowing the novel now, she could form a professional opinion on the adaptation. She had known Mr. Zhou Yang long ago in Yan’an, where he had been a major literary theorist. He had published numerous theoretical essays, translated some critical writings by Chernyshevsky, a handful of Gogol’s stories, and Anna Karenina in its entirety. Since 1949, he’d been a tsar-like figure in the world of arts and literature in the new China, though Mao had never completely trusted him on account of his landowner family background. Mao and Jiang Ching believed Zhou Yang was too soft in his dealings with artists and intellectuals, in particular not aggressive enough in curbing the bourgeois trends among them. Yomei could tell that if Zhou Yang was now interested in adapting The Brothers Yershov, powerful people in the CCP’s high echelons must be behind it.
In Zhou Yang’s office, Yomei met two other men, one of them she had also known in Yan’an—Lin Mohan, who was in his early fifties, thin like a rail and wearing round wire glasses. Like Zhou Yang, Mr. Lin was also a theorist, having written a good number of critical essays and a handful of small plays. The other man was quite young, probably not thirty yet. Zhou Yang, his pudgy face smiling good-naturedly, introduced the slender young man, Shao Yan-hsiang, to Yomei, saying, “He’s an excellent poet, and he’s been adapting The Brothers Yershov into a play.”
Shao had seen Yomei’s drama productions and looked happy to meet her. He said, “Finally we’ve met in person. I used to watch you only from a distance.” He placed a hand above his mothy eyebrows as if it was a visor.
That made Yomei laugh. “Come on, you’re talking as if I were a celebrity, not approachable.”
“Of course you are a star—I mean in the field of spoken drama,” Shao said.
Both Zhou Yang and Lin Mohan threw back their heads and laughed. They said they had known Yomei when she was still in her midteens. Indeed, who could have known that their Little Mei would morph into such an accomplished artist, an iconic figure to young people in the field of spoken drama? The two men said they couldn’t help but feel in awe.
Seated around a table with a checkered top and gunmetal legs, they began to talk about the business at hand. Zhou Yang explained that the CCP’s Propaganda Department had been planning to turn The Brothers Yershov into “a political alarm bell” so as to admonish Party members against slipping into a capitalist track and becoming obstacles to social progress. Zhou Yang had assigned Shao Yan-hsiang to work on the play script two months before, so the young poet was already deep in the middle of writing. Both Zhou Yang and Lin Mohan believed that Yomei would be the ideal director for this adaptation. Hearing their suggestion, Shao was thrilled, saying Yomei would also be able to help him with the script, given that he was a novitiate in playwriting and needed some guidance.
Yomei realized this project was as serious as a political task, so she just accepted it, saying that the play would have to be entertaining in its own fashion, even though there were many exciting scenes and rich lines of drama in the novel that were impossible to present onstage, such as the accident at the smelting furnace and the machines that could handle a huge block of red-hot steel nimbly, “like playing on the piano,” and that were “celebrating the sublime rhythm of labor,” as the novel claimed. Above and beyond that, the love relationships among some men and women in the novel had to be made more engaging. She added, “The theater has limited space and time for such an immense story, so we must figure out how to compress it without losing its power. Our stage designs must be fresh and striking too, since the setting of the story is a coastal city. Maybe we can put a part of an open hearth onstage, with a backdrop of ships in a large busy harbor. We will have to figure out how to present the workshop scene, where molten iron sprays with flying sparks. There’ll be a lot of difficulties, but every challenge can be an artistic opportunity.”
All three men were artists and intuitively understood the particular needs of the stage adaptation. Yomei also suggested cutting the parts of the novel that were about staging a new play, called The Okunves, which eulogized heroic labor and the patriotic spirit of the workers in fighting the Nazis. Toward the end of the novel, the success of the play coincides with a victory over corruption and fraud in the steel plant. To Yomei, the most efficient way to vitiate theater was to have the drama business proper as a subject—a play must never become a piece of metadrama. She even believed that this part of the plot, strife and success in the city’s theater, might be a weak one in the novel, even though it might have been necessary, adding a dimension to the canvas of society that the story presented. Still there wasn’t enough space for such a presentation onstage, and to dramatize a play within a play would be too self-conscious. At least it might feel too artsy, a tad contrived, and she wanted to avoid that.
Zhou Yang nodded. “Yomei, you’re an expert. I trust your judgment. Why don’t you take part in preparing the script as well?”
“Yes, please give me a hand!” the young poet begged. His thin eyes lit up as he smiled good-naturedly.
Yomei agreed, feeling pleased about the arrangement. Before leaving the Propaganda Department’s office building, she chatted briefly with Lin Mohan in the foyer, where an old man with a spray bottle was watering potted plants lined up beneath lofty windows, and now and again digging his fingers into the wet soil. Mr. Lin, holding a vellum briefcase, was waiting for his car. He confessed to Yomei that he couldn’t fully participate in the adaptation of The Brothers Yershov because he’d been working on some projects for Jiang Ching. Yomei was amazed, but also a bit relieved. This meant Ching might be too occupied to bother her anymore. Mr. Lin said he’d been revising the lyrics of the Beijing opera The Legend of the Red Lantern. He added, with a smile bordering on self-amusement, “Believe it or not, I’m also working on a ballet for Comrade Jiang Ching.”
“You mean The Red Detachment of Women?”
“Right, that’s the project.”
“But do you know how a ballet is made?” Yomei asked innocently, her translucent eyes fixed on his thin face. “I mean the music, the choreography, the story, everything must be unified and harmonized in a ballet. It’s an art of high order, very hard to do.”
“I know.” Lin laughed, showing nostrils full of tufty gray hair. “Truth to tell, I’m a total layman. My job is mainly to make sure every part of the ballet is acceptable to our Party.”
“How can you predict whether it’s acceptable?”
“We can abide by the Party’s policy on literature and arts—from the people, about the people, and for the people.”
Yomei sighed. “It must be difficult for you to work like a censor, isn’t it?”
“I’m just trying to do my best. Comrade Jiang Ching encourages us to master the art through making it, so at worst this can be a unique experience.”
“Then I hope you enjoy it,” Yomei said.
“I do. We all feel like doing something original and significant. Comrade Jiang Ching always emphasizes that art must affect life and shape society, so in a way we feel we’re creating a new culture for the multitudes.”
“Like engineers of the human soul?” She quoted from Stalin’s instruction for artists and cultural workers.
“Somewhat like that.”
Yomei realized that theater may have become Jiang Ching’s gateway to power, the power to shape the country’s cultural life and its people’s minds. Yomei said no more, unwilling to throw a wet blanket on Mr. Lin. She knew that Ching was unlikely to produce original art. Most times Ching borrowed from different sources and even appropriated the work of others without acknowledgment—her productions usually gave no credit to the original authors and instead listed only Jiang Ching as the producer. Yomei was glad she had been able to stay away from that vainglorious woman.