我相信会有一颗松掉的螺丝钉

在这一次辞职之前，我做过八年时政记者，其中有三年的时间每天都要去广州市中级人民法院听庭。有时候一个刑事案件的开庭时间也就两三个小时，过了几个月之后又用十五分钟宣判，我既见过大毒枭在庭上拼尽全力保护自己的妻子，也见过情侣为了让自己脱罪怎样恶毒地互相攻击，还见过因为带了几百张黄碟出境被判刑十年的非洲人，翻译几次告诉他刑期他都不敢相信，最后他终于痛哭失声，发出小动物一样含糊的呜呜声。
法院的空调不知道为什么开得那么低，女记者们都随身带着一件长袖衬衫，空荡荡的走廊里坐着脸色苍白的被告家属或者受害人家属，我不知道应该怎样去采访他们，所以稿子里总是缺少细节，种种诸如此类的碎片叠加在一起，让我记忆里的法院永远是那个冰冷的地方。没有想到过了好几年，我会觉得那种冰冷起码能够袒露在现实世界里，起码有我们这些不知所措的中国记者围观在周围，而我慢慢接触到的那个冰冷世界，在防火墙之内却是寂静无声的。
我一共参加过五次全国两会的报道，2008年那一次的总理发布会我在现场，虽然早上六点半就开始在人民大会堂外面排队，我和同事还是只抢到了很靠后的位置，温家宝总理的声音从一个遥远的地方传过来。我记得最后一个问题，总理表示想把这个机会留给法国记者，然后路透社的记者站起来，说有一个叫胡佳的人正在北京接受审判，他的罪名是“煽动颠覆国家政权”。这是我第一次听到这个名字，一个月之后胡佳被判刑三年零六个月，而在他正在坐牢的那三年里，我认识了他的妻子和女儿，我们在通州的家只隔一条运河，她们就经常过来做客，小姑娘在我家第一次吃到了梦龙雪糕，她喜欢我做的可乐鸡翅和蜜汁烤翅，在我们大人忙着聊天的时候她独立自主地学会了剥瓜子。有一年儿童节我给她买了条美丽的白色纱裙，最小码还是太长了，妈妈把它挂在衣柜里，她就每隔一段就要跟妈妈说：妈妈妈妈，我想看看小阿姨给我买的婚纱。



One day, one of the screws will come loose

I was a news reporter for eight years before I quit my job. For three of those years I sat daily in the gallery of the Intermediate People’s Court in Guangzhou, listening to cases. A criminal trial might last for two or three hours, with the verdict and sentence announced in a 15-minute hearing several months later. During that time, I watched a big-shot drug dealer do everything in his power to protect his wife. I witnessed a pair of lovers tearing each other to pieces in a venomous bid to get themselves off the hook. And I once saw an African guy break down in huge howls, then whimpering sobs, on getting 10 years for trying to smuggle a few hundred dirty movies out of the country. His interpreter had to tell him a few times before he took it in.
   
I don’t know why the air conditioning was turned up so high in that building. The women journalists used to bring long-sleeved shirts to wear. The families of the accused and the victims alike would sit, pale as ghosts, in those big empty corridors. I never had the heart to interview them, so my reports lacked colour. I have many more fragmented memories of this kind. But more than anything, I will always remember the icy chill that hung around the place. I never thought I’d come to think this years later, but at least that cold existed tangibly in the real world. And at least it was witnessed by those Chinese journalists, even though they couldn't see what was wrong with it. I was about to learn a whole lot more about that ice-cold world, which is never spoken about inside the Great Firewall.

I covered the annual parliamentary sessions in Beijing five times in all. I was there in 2008 when Premier Wen Jiabao gave his press conference. We’d joined the line outside the Great Hall of the People at 6.00 a.m., but I and my colleagues were still only able to grab seats at the back, where Wen’s voice seemed to reach us from a very great distance. I remember the last question. The premier said he wanted to give a French journalist a chance to ask something, but then a Reuters journalist stood up and said there was someone called Hu Jia currently standing trial on charges of ‘incitement to subversion’. That was the first time I heard his name. A month later, Hu Jia was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail.
   
While Hu Jia was in prison, I got to know his wife and daughter, who lived just across the Yunhe River from me in Tongzhou. They often came round to my place, where the little girl had her first Magnum ice-cream. She also liked to eat my chicken wings, which I would glaze with Coca-Cola or honey. She sat there and taught herself to crack open melon seeds while the grown-ups were talking. One year, I bought her a pretty white, floaty dress for Children’s Day, but even the smallest size was too long for her. Her mother hung it up in the closet, and the little girl kept asking every five minutes: ‘Mommy, Mommy! I want to see the wedding dress that Auntie gave me!’

开始她以为一直不在场的爸爸是“上学去了”，但是她渐渐有了疑心，我们大人再怎么努力也没法给她造出一个只有麦兜和加菲猫的世界，小孩子长大得太快，不知道什么时候她学会了“国保”这个词而且频繁使用它，我们为现实世界盖的那块遮羞布被这个词撕开了第一条缝，然后我们就再也不能制止它被展现在孩子面前。现在她去了香港，我高兴她推开窗就能看到带着咸味的维多利亚海港，而不是楼下几辆从不离开的黑色轿车，与那些穿着黑色衣服的人们，那些被我们称为“国保”的人们。
我花了一点时间才接受“他们”是真实存在，而不是东欧或者苏联电影里的拙劣情节，虽然已经见过一些人，他们在我心里的样子却永远是模糊不清，我想象着他们只是一个个拧得特别紧的螺丝钉，因为被拧得太快而有点昏头转向，并不真正知道自己的位置，螺丝钉的生活过久了，工作会失去对伦理的触觉。2009年的平安夜几个朋友来我们家过，当时他处于被我们戏称为“有专车”的境况里，两个国保开车把他送到了楼下，那一天北京冷到接近零下十度，又刮着五级大风，我和家人想了想把他们也请了上来，毕竟家里那个封闭露台上既有暖气，也有用电的壁炉，虚假的火焰可以带来真实的温暖，在浑身暖意的时候，也许一颗螺丝钉也会发现自己有柔软的心。
十二点的时候朋友们互相拥抱，我和其中一个体型巨大的国保也轻轻抱了抱，只有在那身体与身体接触的瞬间，他才从一颗螺丝钉突然变回一个正常人，当然我没有办法知道他的感受，也许他不过是在敷衍。还有一次他们来家里搜东西，刚好我父母也在北京，我妈妈怯生生地用四川话问其中的一个人：“你要不要喝杯茶嘛？”他没有喝我们家的茶，但是他似乎的确也没有办法用一颗螺丝钉的姿态对待好心邀请他喝茶的阿姨。可惜这些瞬间总是走得那么快，他们还是他们，尽职尽责的螺丝钉。我们还是我们，在外交部发言人的嘴中并不存在的“持不同政见者”。
前段时间我纽约看了《悲惨世界》，结束的时候电影院里全是抽泣声和掌声，我忘不了沙威的选择，在当他发现自己深深信仰的法律并不能真正公正地诠释这个世界，他唯有一死。要是有可能，我想请他们看看这部电影，我从来没有对人性的勇敢抱有太高期望，但是我真希望他们能悄悄把自己拧得松一点，再松一点，有时候一个世界的崩塌并不需要《悲惨世界》里的悲惨革命，它只需要一颗颗松掉的螺丝钉。


To begin with, she thought her father had gone away to study. But gradually she began to have doubts, and no matter how hard the adults tried, we couldn’t create a safe world for her, peopled only by the likes of McDull and Garfield. She grew up too fast. I don't know when she first learned the meaning of the words ‘state security police’, or when she first started using them, but it was the first rent in the veil we had tried to cast over such things in the real world. After that, we couldn’t stop her from seeing them. She’s in Hong Kong now. I’m happy that when she opens her window, It’s the salty tang of Victoria Harbour that greets her, and not a bunch of guys in dark clothes sitting in black sedan cars parked downstairs; not the guobao.
   
Even though I had seen them too, it took me a while to accept that They existed, and that They weren’t just something out of the convoluted plot of an Eastern European or Soviet-era movie. My memories of Them, what they actually looked like, will always be hazy. In my mind, they are just screws in the state machine, still dizzy from being screwed in too fast and too tight. They no longer know which way is up. And after they do this kind of work and live this kind of life for a while, they lose all sense of right and wrong.
   
In 2009, a few friends came over to our place to spend Christmas Eve with us. One of them got a ride to the foot of the building from a couple of state security police. We used to jokingly call this ‘special transportation arrangements’. It was about 10 degrees below freezing in Beijing that night, and there was a strong wind blowing, so we invited the cops inside as well. We had an enclosed balcony area with an electric heater, that was fairly warm. We thought maybe a fake fire would kindle some genuine warmth in the hearts of the screws, one of whom might even loosen up a bit. When midnight struck, we all hugged each other. I gave a brief hug to one of the state security cops, a giant of a man, and it seemed to me as if this screwed-up guy suddenly became human in that moment of bodily contact. Of course, I have no idea how he felt about it. Maybe he was just going through the motions.
   
Another time, they came to search our home while my parents were visiting Beijing. My mother asked one of them shyly in her Sichuan dialect: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ He declined to drink our tea, though it was hard for him to maintain his uptight attitude when this kind old lady was offering it. But such moments pass quickly. And then They are still Them, just doing their job, and we are still us, the dissidents, the people who don’t exist, according to a foreign ministry spokesperson.
   
I went to see Les Miserables in New York a while ago. By the end, the movie theatre was full of the sounds of sobbing and applause. What stayed with me was Javert, who, faced with the realisation that his beloved law was inadequate when it came to decoding events in the real world, could only choose death. I would love to take Them to see this movie. I have never had very high hopes of human nature, but I would like to see them unwind just a bit, and then maybe a bit more. Sometimes you don’t need a revolution like the one in Les Miserables to turn the world upside down; all you need is for a single screw to come loose.

这几年我算读了一些书，对我影响最深的人是汉娜·阿伦特，在《耶路撒冷的艾希曼》里她提出“恶之平庸”（evil of banality），这个概念已经被越来越多的人知晓，在我看来这本书里有两句话最能概括何为 evil of banality：一句是”极权主义统治的本质，而且恐怕所有的官僚制度的性质是把人变成官吏，变成行政体制中间的一只单纯齿轮，这种变化叫做非人类化”。另一句是“政治中，服从等于支持”。
犹太作家乔纳森•利特尔的《复仇女神》前两年出了中文版，他用一本长达七百页的小说阐释了阿伦特发明的这个词组：“国家机器是由沙子一样易碎的堆积物组成的…它存在，是因为所有人都同意让它存在，甚至，连它的牺牲者也同意，而且常常直到最后一分钟。没有了那些赫斯，那些艾希曼，那么果哥利兹，那些维辛斯基…一个斯大林或者一个希特勒就只是一个充满了无能的仇恨和恐惧的羊皮袋。”
就像我相信德国人中默默隐藏着一个奥斯卡·辛德勒，我也相信“他们”之中会隐藏着一颗松掉的螺丝钉。在这架庞大机器看起来运转依然如此良好的时候，我相信会有一颗螺丝钉从中脱离下来，它苏醒着伸了伸懒腰，周围的世界还是一片漆黑，但是它已经努力闪出了自己的那点光。

Lately, I’ve been doing a bit of reading, and I have been most impressed by Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she talks about the banality of evil, an increasingly familiar concept for a lot of people. She sums it up best in the following lines:

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

Another is, ‘in politics, obedience and support are the same’.

They published a Chinese translation of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones a couple of years ago, under the title Nemesis. The novel is a 700-page meditation on the above quotations from Arendt. Its narrator muses:

The machinery of the state is made of [a] ... crumbling agglomeration of sand [...] It exists because everyone – even down to the last minute, its victims – agrees that it must exist. Without the Hösses, the Eichmanns, the Golglidzes, the Vyshinskys [...] a Stalin or a Hitler is nothing but a wineskin bloated with hatred and impotent terror.

Just as there was an Oskar Schindler among the Germans, so there must be a loose screw among Them too, hiding. And just when the sprawling machinery of the state seems to be running well, that screw will fall out, stretch itself on waking, and shine its own small ray of light into the dark world around it.