A Comrade Lost And Found: A Beijing Story

by Jan Wong

A sequel of sorts to her maddening, fascinating, invaluable memoir Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now, this book chronicles Wong’s return to Beijing in 2008 to find the woman whom she denounced as a traitor at the height of the Cultural Revolution.  This betrayal has gnawed at her over the decades, and she makes the trip despite her fears that she will either find out nothing in the face of intractable Communist bureaucracy, or that the woman was imprisoned, tortured, or killed.  Bringing her family with her for support, she tracks down a lot of old friends and foes who seem happy enough to see her but aren’t exactly thrilled to talk about the bad old days, suffers through a banquet under the watchful eye of a humorless cadre, and marvels at the changes in Beijing since her college days.  (This last despite the fact that Wong lived there as a reporter off and on into the 1990s and made a few visits even in the early 2000s – this shows the tremendous rate of growth the city has undergone.) Little by little, and despite some obfuscations and lies from her sources, she gets a few hints about the woman’s fate – but then it’s time to come face to face and hear her story.

In my review of Red China Blues, I called Wong “deluded,” “naïve,” “blind,” “dangerously stupid,” and “an unrepentant spoiled fool,” which seems a bit harsh now that I write it all out like that.  Nevertheless, that book did seem like a personal apologia for her actions, while this one is, as she says, “tantamount to a Maoist self-criticism.” This is a much more palatable book in terms of the narration – Wong shows a little more perspective about truth and consequences here – and equally fascinating in terms of the human stories it tells from China’s tragic 1960s and 70s.  Wong’s own story is heartfelt and suspenseful, but what interested me the most was the historical whitewashing she encounters.  No country likes to talk about its black marks – America still celebrates Columbus and the Pilgrims as heroes, the Japanese don’t mention war crimes or the Rape of Nanking, Germany outlaws swastikas but would rather not talk about the extent of Nazism’s prevalence – but the ability of the Chinese to switch gears so drastically and with such equanimity is intriguing. As Wong writes, “It makes me wonder why, in a nation as vast as China, so few people try to come to terms with their past.”  Yes, it’s painful to revisit oppression, and no one wants to admit he was the oppressor, but the apparent wholehearted enthusiasm with which the Chinese have thrown their lot in with rampant capitalism and materialism is unsettling.  It’s as if the moral compass isn’t fixed; the Cultural Revolution was correct because it happened that way, and now laissez-faire capitalism is correct because it’s what’s happening.  It’s troubling to think in terms of such a collectivist mindset, but it’s hard to escape it as well.

four stars

Big In China

by Alan Paul
 
A music writer, Paul travels to Beijing with his wife and their three children when she is offered a job as the Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief there. He works hard at the language, gets a driver’s license, enjoys the food, writes columns, and becomes the stay-at-home parent in the foreigner’s compound, complete with servants. With a new perspective and perhaps more time on his hands, he takes up guitar again and hangs out in music clubs. After being called on stage and performing a few classic rock standards, Paul thinks he’s found a winning formula and soon puts together a band with another ex-pat and three Chinese musicians. After extensive practicing and touring, this band is named "Best New Band in Beijing" – a rather stunning feat in a usually fairly insular culture that gives no quarter to foreigners.

This is a fun, witty book about how one man’s enthusiastic embrace of the new led him to revitalize his passion for music, and to change the music scene of Beijing itself. I was bowled over by the enthusiasm and positivity in this book, something that is lacking in many Westerner-in-China memoirs. Where almost every other visitor and ex-pat dwells on the honking and crush of traffic, Paul sees it as an escapade. The exotic food, the language barrier, the culture clash – all is opportunity or adventure for Paul, not a challenge or hardship. Granted, his viewpoint could be called insular itself; as a member of a working ex-pat family and not a tourist, he probably didn’t deal with bureaucrats or xenophobes as much as some visitors. But regardless, his positivity and equitable understanding are refreshing and contagious traits. Whether it's attending to his young children's culture shock, his ailing father, his quiet and serious bandmate, or his tutor's worried vacillating about the life path he is meant to take, Paul focuses on human connections, not differences. Musing on the changed landscape and displaced people in the constant reinvention he notices in Beijing, Paul notes only, and very wisely, "everyone's view of ‘normal’ starts the moment they arrive" – he wasn't about to fret about what Beijing was "becoming;" he was too busy being involved in what it was. This is an inspiring and very unusual tale.

four stars

American Shaolin

by Matthew Polly

As a high school student in Kansas, Polly discovered the intellectual world and began to apply himself, getting into Princeton, where he became enthralled with martial arts and Chinese studies.  After reading Mark Salzman’s Iron & Silk, Polly became determined to go to Shaolin to study kungfu.  This was in 1992, when there was little information available on Shaolin, and no World Wide Web to initiate global contact, so it took a bit of courage and a bit of temerity for Polly to fly to China, without an introduction or appointment, and ask to sign up for kungfu classes at the legendary temple – but that is exactly what he did.  Arriving in Beijing, he discovers that even the Chinese are not sure if Shaolin still exists, but he presses on anyway, and to his credit, he manages to arrive.  Not understanding the Chinese tradition of haggling (or extorting the foreigner), Polly agrees to an outrageous price to be taught kungfu at Shaolin, and his journey begins.

The account of Polly’s time in Shaolin is both hilarious and informative; it’s a coming-of-age story blended with a travelers-abroad tale.  Polly experiences all the shocks that China gives the Western traveler (I was interested to see that he describes his personality as splitting in two, an American Matthew Polly and the dopey, grinning Chinese version, always struggling to process what was going on – a phenomenon similar to that described by Peter Hessler in River Town; he also describes the same resentful, helpless feeling in the face of emotionless, unspeaking, staring crowds), but takes them in stride.  Eventually he is quite at home in Shaolin, distinguishes himself in kungfu tournaments, meets a few wastrel and pretender Westerners who follow in his footsteps, and even does the unthinkable: he dates a Chinese woman.  Polly’s memoir is a terrific read, but it’s also valuable in two main ways.  One, it documents the training process and some outstanding martial arts techniques studied at Shaolin, such as the Iron Forearm or Iron Head or Iron Dong (they all involve focusing qi through breathing and then punishing the specified body part daily until it is as tough as steel), which are fascinating.  Two, in addition to all the cultural mores that Polly diligently records (the little rituals of polite language that I find enthralling), because Polly revisits Shaolin ten years later, he is able to document how China has changed – not just in the ease of transport or shopping opportunities, but the emerging confidence and higher expectations of the Chinese people.  It’s an insightful, first-rate memoir.

five stars

River Town: Two Years On the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

A volunteer for the Peace Corps, Hessler lived in Fuling, a little town in Sichuan province, on the delta of the Yangtze and Wu rivers, for two years teaching English. As one of the few Westerners in the town since World War II, Hessler becomes the focus of not always kind attention in town, but as he learns more Chinese and more of the Chinese way of doing things, he sees his place more clearly and almost, at times, seems to fit into the daily life there. Of course, nearly everything in China is political: the literature he teaches is used by his students as a springboard to analyze their own lives, even as Hessler learns how hard it is to broach certain subjects in a culture where everyone is brought up to believe the same things.

Written in calm, meditative prose, this is an excellent entry into the annals of the Westerner-in-China body of memoirs. Hessler is wise beyond his years, and his China (or rather, his Fuling) is never of the sadly typical “oh look how foreign everything is” variety. He recognizes full well how foreign he himself is, and even during his lowest points of cultural contact – when men try to pick fights with him simply because he’s a Westerner – he reports with a detached and reflective eye. He learns rather quickly how to deal with some of the illogical bureaucracy – I enjoyed his clever face-saving solution when confronted with the lie that he was required to get a chest X-ray to participate in a foot race, for example – but he is troubled and bemused by certain other aspects of Chinese culture. He cites the lack of empathy and collectivist thinking that he saw in Chinese crowds, and the disturbing lack of fixed individual values in a culture where “wrong” thinking can become “right” as easily as it takes for an authority to say it. In his own small circle of students and friends, he hears of two deaths, a suicide, and a kidnapping (of a woman to become a forced bride). Near the end of the book, he muses that he can only brush against “the slightest sense of the dizzying past” that informed the values and behaviors that he encounters. His Fuling is, as he says, “a human place,” and that puts his memoir in the top ranks of its kind.

five stars

Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now

by Jan Wong

The tale of the Chinese-Canadian author’s long path from a deluded, naïve red-to-the-core Maoist to a cynical reporter who sees just how wrong she was.  Wong’s life is enthralling in its sheer unlikeliness, even if Wong herself comes off as an unrepentant spoiled fool in the first half of the book.  Wong dismisses the concerns of her wealthy father (born in Canada, the son of an emigrant) to become one of only two Westerners allowed to attend Beijing University in 1972, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, and demands to work in the fields, so she can be “purified” by labor.  She is far too stupid to understand that Mao’s policies were insane and destructive, and actually believed what millions of Chinese knew to be madness.  If Wong were Chinese, she’d be merely naïve, or a tool of the system – as an educated Canadian who should have known better, she comes off as dangerously stupid, and her book is full of excuses and alibis for her actions.  She takes pains to cite the turbulent political times, the anti-American sentiment, her youth… but those are not valid excuses.  Millions of Americans criticized their government in the ‘60s and ‘70s  without swallowing Mao’s gnomish madness, and tens of millions of teenagers may have impulsive tendencies but manage not to be raving absolutists about things which are obviously untrue.

So the first half of the book is infuriating, though still fascinating.  Very early into Wong’s first visit to China, she started noticing that the Cultural Revolution had trashed standards throughout China, that “some people seemed more equal than others,” that food stores were sparse; but still she remains deluded and committed to Maoism.  What kind of mind must she have had to be so blind?  At one point she is so brainwashed (not, it must be noted, by anyone but her own faulty reasoning and stupidity) she denounces students who want her help to escape China.  Wong realizes that this was a low point in her     development, but she maintains a defensive attitude about even this, comparing herself to other Chinese denouncers.  (She doesn’t seem to realize that they, who had to live there, may have had practical reasons to denounce others, such as to avoid more severe punishment for loved ones who may have been implicated.)  As with all brainwashed zealots, it is only after her personal desires or freedoms are impacted that she truly begins to question what she believes: “I was sick of the double standard… How dare he interfere in my life.  I had changed… I refused to endure the same kind of humiliation every Chinese endured,” she writes about the authorities’ attempts to prevent her from seeing her future husband.  Wong’s stupidity and self-interest is rather pathetic, and she is a highly unsympathetic narrator – but as I say, the book is fascinating, if only because her experiences are so unreal and rare.  After her apostasy, the book gets even more interesting, because of Wong’s unique ability to blend in with the Chinese people and get stories for the New York Times.  She writes about the lead-up to the Tiananmen reprisals, when students went on “hunger strikes” in turns (with snack breaks), and how it suddenly turned from a rather jovial sit-in to a massacre.  She gives in-depth reports on execution fields and the practicalities of summary executions; she visits entire villages made retarded and dwarfed by pollution; she investigates modern women trafficking; and she marvels at the breakneck pace of China’s embrace of capitalism, with its McDonald’s run by ex-cadre leaders, the new extravagance of penis and breast reconstruction (though the former has roots in China’s early rural economy, when boys had their penises bitten off by feral pigs as they defecated in fields at night).  “Even my maid had a maid,” she writes, bemused at the changes.  At this point Wong seems very clear-headed, but even late in the book, she claims that China was “an unrelentingly pure country” in 1980 because guards didn’t take bribes, compared to the pervasive bribery rampant in China today.  But surely she realizes that bribery sprouts from lawlessness, and the lack of bribery is more likely rooted in fear of a mad despot than some ideological “purity” that never existed?  It left me wondering if Wong ever really learned a lesson, or just got tired of being treated like a Chinese person.  That aside, it’s a fascinating look at Chinese written from a unique perspective. 

four stars

China Wakes: The Struggle For The Soul Of A Rising Power

by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

The authors, married Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalists, write about the emergence of capitalist China in the mid-1990s.  Alternating authorship of the chapters, they analyze China in terms of its progress in the areas of civil rights and business in the face of government repression. The authors argue that the communist government is remarkably similar to those of past dynasties but that, given their entrepreneurial energy, Chinese people are living better now than ever before. At the time of the writing, the authors seemed unsure whether the communist government would last much longer, but their observations lead them to conclude that rotten as the whole system is, with its routine bribery and brutality, the slow change of Chinese culture indicates that the “dynasty” was not yet moribund.  On a positive note, they see China as a nation that is beginning to appreciate the benefits of law, as well as material wealth, over imperial rule.

A well written, perspicacious, trenchant series of observations, the book is an easy, accessible read that covers several issues of major interest to Western observers (human rights, pollution, energy production, women’s rights, modernization), relying heavily on "human interest" type stories; in this case, these are vignettes such as a retarded man who is beaten to death by police to clean up the streets of Beijing before the Olympics, a girl who is kidnapped and sold into slavery, a journalist friend who is jailed for criticizing the government, a political refugee turned smuggler, and so on. Their emphasis on the rotten aspects of the communist dynasty has drawn criticism from other reviewers, who say that a particular brand of corruption and specific scandals are hardly representative of any country, especially one as large and heterogeneous as China.  However, the authors themselves note the limitations of their “human interest” approach; in one memorable passage they imagine that the tables are turned, and a Chinese journalist who covered an American beat strictly in terms of its horrifyingly violent street crime would be scandalized that despite the high murder rate, most Americans simply go about their everyday lives not thinking much about it, and the journalist would go away with a very skewed understanding of America.  The book is also, inevitably, outdated, but remains a fascinating time capsule of the state of China watching post-Tiananmen Square. 

four stars

Lost on Planet China

by J. Maarten Troost

[subtitle: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid]

Troost, in no way a China expert but a veteran traveler, spends several months in China, from Beijing to Hong Kong, from small villages to Ferrari dealerships in Shanghai.  Troost does his homework and gives a good account of some of the history behind the places he visits, such as how the Yongle emperor, Zhu Di, exterminated his enemies’ families “to the tenth degree.”  His own personal observations, such as just how pestilential the polluted air of China’s cities is, are of more value than statistics about China’s carbon footprint.  Troost is a highly amusing and empathetic writer and has produced a very good resource for someone’s first book on Western travel in China.

If, however, if it is one’s tenth or twentieth travel book on China, this book offers mostly the same old same old: the language uses ideograms instead of an alphabet; Chinese people have no sense of personal space; they hack big nasty loogies on the street; they eat dogs and cats and live octopus; they drive at unsafe speeds and never stop laying on the horn; they don’t form orderly lines.  And so on.  Troost has no understanding of the Chinese language and at one point gives misinformation on how dictionaries are used.  It’s hard to imagine that anyone would go to, say, Poland knowing nothing about it and come back confident enough to write an entire book, starting with such wide-eyed ignorance as “their language has a lot of k’s and j’s and l’s!”  Yet this is exactly what every new Western traveler to China does.  This is a well-written and often funny book, but a non-essential addition to the endless parade of “China sure is foreign” books. 

three stars

Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China's Other Billion

by Michael Levy

The author recounts his experiences as  an English teacher sponsored by the Peace Corps for two years in China’s heartland, the city of Guiyang in the relatively poor Guizhou province.  Until then a vegetarian who kept a kosher diet, he soon realizes that in order to get the full experience, he will have to eat as his hosts do: fried bugs, maggots, lizard wine, and maybe even dog stew.  Of course, he also adjusts to the culture shock in a variety of other ways, mastering squat toilets, understanding guanxi (arranging favors for influence), working in an education system that favors memorization over interpretation, and maneuvering around (and sometimes slamming up against) the blind assumption that authority grants validity.  It feels like home eventually, though he never joins in the ubiquitous smoking, or that particularly Asian predilection for cruelty to animals (one scene in which Levy confronts a man who is punching a bag of puppies is particularly memorable).

Written in a conversational, easy style, the book highlights all the absurdities of modern Chinese culture, trying to balance between old Communist ideals and the new capitalism.   All of Levy’s references are to pop culture (Jor-El, TRON, Carrie Bradshaw), which grates after a while and makes him seem rather simple at times, but he’s an honest narrator, examining his own assumptions and beliefs and giving real thought to how absurd his own ideals might seem to his Chinese students.  From his student who names herself “Shitty” in English because she likes its sound, to young girls who must leave school and work long days due to a lack of a few dozen dollars, this is a funny, informative, and even touching memoir. 

four stars

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

The author, a journalist and old China hand, describes life on the road in a rural China that is rapidly developing, with new roads and factories being built every year.  At 420 pages, the book’s scope is much wider than the simple comedy of renting a car in a heavily bureaucratic society that nevertheless has a vibrant under-the-table economy, or the perils of driving in a country where most people behind the wheel have had very little training and eschew wipers and lights.  Hessler rents a house in a village, and describes one family's gradual rise to political and financial success.  He follows the Great Wall, visits an artist community in Lishui, and follows the creation, rise, and struggles of a bra-ring factory, and the workers who live in it.

So the title is only partially descriptive of the book, but so what? Hessler’s breadth of knowledge, empathy, sense for the human side of the story, and clear, witty writing make all his subjects interesting.  He unfolds the drama of an ill village boy, and the disjunct between his own Western eyes and China’s traditional medicine coupled with xenophobic doctors.  He shows the great cultural divide between East and West (citing “group impulse” twice to explain some Chinese behavior), but also zeroes in on the emotions and frustrations that all humanity share.  He keeps encountering a sort of superficiality in Chinese economic life, where appearance is more important than content, and where bribes and lies are a part of life, but explores the deeper currents that motivate the players.  Hessler is a gifted reporter of cultures, and this is a thoroughly fascinating look at a modern but still changing China.  

four stars

The Laughing Sutra

by Mark Salzman

An orphan, aided by a mysterious, probably supernatural man who may be the Monkey King himself, sneaks out of China to find an ancient text for his ailing teacher.  This is a funny book, a deft blend of history, fable, philosophy and adventure.  Salzman uses his piercing observations on the East-West cultural gap to show the follies and strengths of both countries, creating a highly enjoyable and quite exciting modern folk tale.  There are a few weaknesses, a few hints at later potentialities that are never taken up, but as a whole, great stuff.

four stars

From Heaven Lake

by Vikram Seth

As a graduate student in Nanjing University, Seth used his vacation to hitchhike home to Delhi via Tibet.  The result is a wonderful book, full of witty observations, good, clear prose and profound meditations on India and China.  It’s a fresh and interesting perspective to this American reader: there is very little comment on the lack of cleanliness or crowded conditions, as travelers in the West often harp about.  Also, Seth is happy to give the Chinese political system the benefit of the doubt: where an American traveler assumes the flaws and reports the good, Seth assumes that China works and treats the flaws as unavoidable as with any system.  He is as angered by the bureaucracy as Western travelers are, but at least he made it to Tibet.  His descriptions of that region are revealing and hopeful: the people seem happy when he talk to them, but great evils are in the very recent past, and they have not forgotten.  A rich, fascinating book.

four stars

Iron And Silk

by Mark Salzman

The author, a graduate of Yale in Chinese language and literature, went to China for two years to teach English and study martial arts.  This account is presented as a series of episodes, each with its own life lesson.  The book gives a clear picture of the variety of experiences he had, from the unsympathetic, even vicious, foreign-hating bureaucracy, to the incredibly open hospitality of those who had the least time to give.

The culture gap (and gape) is made readily apparent, in the student who thinks Americans must be cruel just to think up something like the Shirley Jackson story “The Lottery;” in the family of fishermen who wash and brush their teeth in the same river they use as a toilet; in the intellectual who calls The World According To Garp the most “unsuitable” book he’d ever imagined, then asks to keep it; in the man whose greatest wish is to eat and sleep well, saying Salzman’s dreams, to be liked and to excel, are easily attainable, but to eat and sleep well are beyond one’s control...  A beautiful, clever, unassuming book. 

five stars

The Dragon Wakes: China and the West 1793-1911 - Christopher Hibbert

One of the most lively and readable history books I have read to date. Drawing from dozens of first-hand sources, and many unpublished papers, Hibbert details the contact between China and England (other countries' stories are told too, but only in passing). From Lord Macartney's first meeting with emperor Chi-en-lung to open trade between the two countries, from the Opium War to the Boxer rebellion and the rise of Sun Yat-sen, Hibbert's book uses quote after quote to demonstrate the appalling gall and presumption of the plenipotentiaries of both nations. The Chinese, nationalistic and ignorant, were utterly purblind to the actual superiority of English power, while the official English reaction to wars with China was always to conquer more, not to attempt any comity. I had to admire the Chinese for adapting so rapidly, from fighting the English with gingalls to overcoming massive internal resistance and modernizing to meet the challenges of the West. A great book, with many vivid passages and anecdotes.