A starry-eyed Canadian teenager, disillusioned
with the West, convinced herself that everything
in Mao Zedong's "Red China" was perfect. Several
spells of study and work in the Middle Kingdom
showed her the error of her ways.
How does this strike you? A well-brought-up Canadian teenage girl, of Chinese ancestry, becomes starry-eyed over Mao Zedong and resolves to visit mainland China at all costs. She gets her wish. Not only does she visit, she manages to stay on as a student and even do physical labor, so great is her determination to be a good Maoist in a Maoist paradise, where the workers always sing, everyone is equal, and nobody ever goes without a meal.
Then, shock-horror! Gradually she discovers that all is not well within the Middle Kingdom. One by one her idealistic, intensely held beliefs wither on the vine. She goes home but later returns to China, this time as a journalist, and her disillusionment becomes complete. She writes it up in the form of a book, gives it the snazzy title of Red China Blues (and the even snazzier subtitle, My Long March from Mao to Now). Everybody lives happily ever after, except possibly the denizens of the workers' paradise from which the author moved on.
The British have a saying for this kind of thing: "Queen Anne's dead." Tell me something I don't know, in other words; don't bother me with the same old stuff. Lots of people have gone to mainland China, dismantled a Potemkin village or two, and lived to tell the tale. What distinguishes Wong's efforts from theirs?
Actually, lots. But before turning to the merits of this racy, joke-a-minute, never-let-the-facts-get-in-the-way-of-a -teenager's-ideals book, it is worth noting that the author set herself an extraordinarily difficult task.
On the one hand, her journalistic mentor, Fox Butterfield, had several years previously written his magisterial Alive in the Bitter Sea, a fo reign correspondent's detailed account of life in mainland China as lived at every level. As far as reminiscences, interviews, and penetrating analyses go, Fox Butterfield went the distance.
On the other hand, if Jan Wong was aiming at the women-in-China market, she had to contend with one of the most formidable, some say forbidding, books ever to come out of Asia: Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. And there, it must be said, Wong is not in remotely the same league. Some of the problems she encountered during her stay were tiresome but, with one exception--the Tiananmen Square massacre--hardly life-endangering. To the reader, most of her difficulties come across as humorous, perhaps intentionally. Jung Chang really suffered, as did her grandmother and mother. Jan Wong may have ended up betraying her own ideals, but she did not betray her own father, as Jung Chang did, by helping consign him to a lifetime of misery and pain.
Given this frightening competition, Wong is to be congratulatedon having written an engaging, high-spirited, and absorbing account of one person's difficult odyssey through mainland China in the years following the Cultural Revolution. The success of her venture may be gauged by the fact that Fox Butterfield himself gave her book a glowing review, describing it as "a must-read for anyone interestedin China." Praise indeed.
Wong's father, a second-generation immigrant to Canada, is a self-mademan who opened a string of Chinese restaurants and made his first million by the time he was forty. Before that he had put himself through McGill, the first personfrom his mainland village to graduate from university. Jan Wong went to church and summer camp, skated and skied, and took music lessons. Nevertheless, "As a teenager, I was duty-bound to do whatever my parents didn't want me to do"-- a surprising statement for a Chinese girl to make.
This was no ordinary girl, however. She knew that her grandparents, and to some extent her parents too, had been given a hard time by the Canadian governmentin their quest for citizenship and stability, but "I imagined only harmony andperfection in China." So in 1972 she set off for Beijing, one of the first Westerners to set foot there since the Cultural Revolution began six years earlier. She sums herself up thus: "I thought I was a hard-nosed revolutionary, but I was reallya Montreal Maoist."
The book is full of this kind of one-liner, the journalist's equivalentof a sound bite. (Wong is currently a reporter for the Globe and Mail in Toronto.) In consequence, she sometimes strikes the reader as overly concerned to establishher credentials. She wants to get the jokey, self-deprecatory tone exactly right, even when there is little to joke about.
The first straw in the wind came fluttering past when she and a white friend applied for their visas. Wong, an overseas Chinese, was granted entry; the friend was not. "It seemed odd to me that we should be separated into categories,"she remembers. There were many more oddities to come. With the wisdom of hindsight,she can judge the Cultural Revolution in these terms. "In 1966 when it firstbegan, most Chinese were genuine believers. By 1972, many had stopped believing,but only a very few were unwise enough to share their thoughts with a loose cannon like me."
The "loose cannon" was recognized as such, even by her own relatives. When she went to visit her ancestral village in Taishan country, in the Pearl River delta, her aunt declined to confide in her about what life was really like. "We could see you believed it all," she later explained. The authorities also had her number. Zhou Enlai himself gave the order permitting her to study, regarding it as a logical followup to US President Richard Nixon's ground-breaking visit to Beijing. Besides, "Canada had never invaded China ." Norman Bethune, the doctor who had worked himself to death in the service of a much younger Mao, was Canadian. "And I seemed a good bet: a stark, raving Maoist."
She did not like her ancestral village. While was there, she asked to do physical labor, because Mao said it was good for you. "The Taishanese thought I was nuts. Avoiding hard labor was precisely why everyone left in the first place; hence it was dubbed the Ancestral Home of Overseas Chinese." She sawa Buddhist shrine in her relatives' cottage and was "chagrined" to findthem so "backward."
Beijing University was an unfriendly, depressing place, and Erica Jen, Wong's fellow student, was a real pain. She out Mao'd Mao, and was a math whiz to boot. Because she had grown up speaking Chinese she was fluent, and was treated better for it, but she nevertheless insisted they eat in the canteen with all the other students, on starvation rations. "As the daughter of a restaurateur, I never dreamed Chinese food could be so bad, "Wong reports, with feeling. At that time, she had not yet been introduced to other Chinese delicacies that later came her way when she was a journalist--white worms, pig esophagus, scorpions, and donkey penis.
The Jan Wong who appears in the first quarter of the book is in turns engaging and infuriating. "I took to heart Mao's dictum that physical labor was good for the soul. Of course, my mother told me the same thing, but I never cleaned up my room." Hah-hah! But a few pages later she is telling us how a Chinese girl asked her for help in getting to the West, and Wong reported her to the authorities.
She tried so hard to fit in, but being left-handed didn't help."Maybe she's retarded," she overheard someone say. Wong may have been a Montreal Maoist, but even then she was blind in only one eye. "China was likea never-ending Outward Bound course." Why did she stay? "I knew I would never forgive myself for quitting." Some days must have been harder than others. China was in the midst of a campaign against Beethoven, whose chief crime was "composing bourgeois music." The school opened her letters and passed them around for everyone to read. Trips to the capital afforded no escape: Mao had ordered children to uproot all the grass in Beijing, because he thought it harbored mosquitoes.
The surprises grew bigger and harder to handle. The chancellor of the university invited her and Erica to a Lunar New Year dinner which turned out to be sumptuous and was cooked and served by a maid. In April 1973 they attended a meeting where they were told that Deng Xiaoping had been restored to all his posts, after seven years as a non-person, and no one seemed to think that at all odd. But the beginning of her real awakening was when they tried to expel her for seeing her boyfriend, a Swedish diplomat. "This was real thought control," she was finally forced to admit.
She got out of that scrape, but only just. Strings were pulled on her behalf. Afterward, the chancellor was all smiles. "When the leaders give us an order, we just accept it and implement it," he said, in words uneasily reminiscent of Taiwan ministers speaking of pursuing a policy until told otherwise by their "superiors," not meaning the electorate.
Wong returned to Canada, but mainland China had entered her blood and before long she was back, enrolled in a Chinese history course at Beijing University alongside people with a junior high school education who had come up from the countryside with the help of connections. The Cultural Revolution might be over, but its consequences were going to hang around for a long time. One of the first things to happen was that the class was dispatched to the countryside, and the Chinese students rebelled.They felt they had already been "reformed" quite enough, thank you, and that now was the time for studying. Their first job down on Big Joy Farm was digging latrines. "For the men," Wong laconically adds.
There was a curiously restrained reaction to Mao's death in September,1976. Few people shed tears. Mao wanted to be cremated, but in a typical Wong phrase he instead became "a peasant under glass." Then the Gang of Four fell, and celebrations were the order of the day. According to one source, Deng Xiaoping himself downed twenty-seven glasses of 120-proof mao-tai on hearing the news. "Their purge was the turning point for me," Wong tells us. "Mao and Madame Mao were on the same team. Whatever she had done, it was with his blessing. ... Nobody believed in the revolution any more. They hadn't for a long time, and I had been too stupid to see it."
The extent of the former deception shocked her, but only when it ended. "After Mao's death, when everyone stopped play acting, I rarely saw anybody help anybody else, not even to hold a door for someone with a baby." At that point, the disillusioned Wong finally confronted her former self. "What did Chinese people believe in?" she wails; but it is not clear if she realizes the staggering weight of her own bewildered question.
She was briefly excited when Democracy Wall came alive in 1978, by which time she had developed "the slow, foot-scraping waddle" of the locals. But for her and her husband Norman (the only US draft-dodger to have sought refuge in mainland China) it was time to return to Canada--"I couldn't stand being among Maoists who reminded me of how dumb I once was"--where she becamea journalist. China was still in her blood, however, and given her background andqualifications the reader is not surprised to find her on her way back to Beijing, this time as a Globe and Mail bureau staffer.
Beijing was a different place, at least onthe surface. All kinds of foods were for sale this time around, and there was nomore waiting in line. Bars sold cognac. There were high-rises and tampons. China now seemed free and open. No one minded being interviewed or photographed. No one called anyone Comrade any more. Skin-whitener creams were popular and everybody wanted to be taller. She even had an obscene phone call, in English!
Wong proved a great success at the bureau. It helped that she just blended into the landscape and was frequently mistaken for a local, even though it sometimes led to trouble. By the time June 1989 rolled around and the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, she was ready for them.
This is what the reader has unconsciously been waiting for, the stuff that makes these memoirs truly worthwhile. Wong begins the buildup to Tiananmen with the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989.The protests began more or less at once, with the students playing a prominent role.They were ignorant of history. As Wong observes, "How could Deng not remember, when he gave the order to fire, what the earlier group of rebels had done to his son?" (In 1966, Beijing University Red Guards had dropped Deng's son out ofa window and paralyzed him.) She concluded quite early on that "neither sidewas really interested in compromise."
By the time the Soviet Union's President Gorbachev arrived on a state visit, Tiananmen Square was jammed with students, protesters were telling the truth, and even the state-run media were covering events more or less accurately. "Everyone seemed hysterically happy that their leaders were losing face big time." The authorities were no longer in control of their own capital, and Gorbachev's schedule had to be radically revised to take account of the fact that certain parts of Beijing had become no-go areas.
She is honest about the famous students' hunger strike. "I knew that during the hunger strike Wu'er Kaixi sneaked off for at least one meal with John Pomfret, an Associated Press reporter. At night, Wu also surreptitiously slurped noodles in the back seat of a car, bending over to hide his face, accordingto Andrew Higgins of the British Independent." (Higgins later distinguishedhimself by remaining in the square on the night of the massacre, shunning the safety of the Beijing Hotel where several correspondents, including Wong, were holed up.) Lots of students cheated during the hunger strike. "The protesters and the media fed on each other. ... Who wanted to let a few unromantic facts get in the way of a good story?"
Wong has obviously matured considerably since her first visit to the center of the world. She was exasperated by the childish posturing on both sides."An experienced mediator could have solved things so easily." Even the police demonstrated in support of the students' cause. She estimates that more than a million Chinese of all ages took to the streets to protect the students.
She then proceeds to give a sober, restrained account of the massacre,which she witnessed firsthand from a balcony on the fourteenth floor of the Beijing Hotel overlooking the square--the archetypal room with a view. Many people were shot in the back, in broad daylight, but the enraged crowd came back again and again."Dozens died before my eyes."
She had learned the art of piling detail upon telling detail. One hospital was secretly ordered to keep its beds empty for bombing victims. The diplomatic compound was fired upon and diplomats fled to the airport. China came close to civil war. It was the army's time. If her account does nothing else, it serves to makeit clear that the PLA is the only danwei (work unit) that matters a damn in China. This section of the book, incidentally, contains the sole refe rence to Taiwan."A Taiwanese journalist was hit in the mouth. The bullet smashed his teeth,went clean through his throat and just missed his spinal cord. He spent a year in a wheelchair, but survived."
The authorities set up a "snitch hotline," hoping that people would phone in with the names of the guilty, and indeed many did. The trouble was, they constantly reported two mass murderers called Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng.
She addresses the central paradox of Tiananmen. When the lead started to fly, the students had already voted to leave the square and many of them were drifting back home. Why didn't the government just let hot weather and boredom do its work for it? Why invade Beijing with tanks and armor-piercing bullets? Afterall, not even Mao had dared bring tanks into the capital. The answer: It was an old-fashioned power struggle, and it finished Zhao ("Heir today, gone tomorrow") Ziyang for good.
The other thing to emerge with grim clarity from her account is the Chinese leadership's obsession with secrecy. Some time later, she went to interview a top general in the provinces. Even he had been kept in the dark. Even he did not know how many had died. He said unequivocally that he didn't believe what the government told him any more.
"How many died was a question that particularly obsessed me," Wong says. She thinks about 3,000, partly basing herself on a Red Cross report that said 2,600. Several Western military attachés have concurred with her estimate,"based on crowd density, troop size, volume of firing, and the use of combat-type,[as opposed to riot-control] ammunition."
After her account of Tiananmen and its immediate aftermath, nothing is quite the same. During the massacre itself, Wong and her fellow correspondents were in considerable physical danger, a fact that she plays down with becoming modesty, and once your life has been on the line in such circumstances, pretty much everything else must seem like an anticlimax. She had Wei Jingsheng to dinner in 1993, during his first brief flirtation with freedom, also inviting a dyed-in-the-wool pro-Communist Western correspondent who engaged Wei in heated debate for most of the meal. One would like to know what was said; virtually nothing is vouchsafed.
There are a number of other interludes, suggestive of articlesfor which the Globe and Mail did not manage to find space, or recycled stories that could stand a little expansion. For example, she deals with the subject of removing organs from condemned prisoners and asks whether the rate of executions is up because important people need kidneys and corneas, which is an interesting reflection. When corneas are needed, the executioner is instructed to shoot through the heart, notthe head--a practice that used to be followed in Taiwan before the practice of taking or gans from the condemned was discontinued here.
She has some interesting things to say about the economy. What Marx had predicted for capitalist society--the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and a widening gap between rich and poor--was actually happening in communist China, and the gap was largely regional. The coast did well; inland Gansu was dirt-poor,with more than 1 percent of its population mentally retarded as the result of malnutrition and disease. In 1995, China admitted for the first time that 80 million of its people(one in fourteen) were so poor that they had neither enough food nor clothing. The World Bank put its own estimate at 100-110 million (one in ten).
Wong is also rightly cynical about grandiose projects. Even when she was an accredited foreign correspondent, the shower in her flat ran either scaldingor freezing with nothing in between. "I remembered [that] mystery plumbing everytime Premier Li Peng assured investors and environmentalists that the gigantic Three Gorges dam China was building on the Yangtze River was completely safe."
There is also plenty of good plain fun to flesh out the book. Onone occasion, somebody stole her Toyota and it turned out to be the work of a couple of cops. As one of the detectives in charge of the case morosely remarked, "No matter what we do, it's going to look bad. There's no good explanation for this one."By the end of her time in China, even her maid had a maid. She went to interview the aptly named Dr. Lung (pronounced "long"), whose specialty was penis enlargements and who clearly loved his work. She devoted considerable time and energy to skewering the Red Princelings, particularly the descendants of Deng.
So, whither the mainland? It must be clear by now that this is not a book of painstaking analysis, and Wong's perceptions tend to make few demands on her readers. She is particularly acute when it comes to describing modern consumerism on the mainland, but does not draw many conclusions from it. China is now a landof conspicuous consumption, and "communism hadn't even collapsed." Hadit not? The authoritarian rule that seems to be a necessary concomitant of communism had not collapsed, but the rest smacks of semantics.
China was not a nice place when Wong first went there and it is not a nice place now, but for different reasons. In 1972, nobody publicly owned up to having a servant. By 1990, lots of people did, but even the servants assigned to look after Wong and her family spoiled their own kids rotten. They "had to"wear foreign brand name shirts, for example. Not everyone regards this as a bad thing. A British friend told Wong, "If you have a populace of Little Emperors, youcan't have little slaves. Everyone will want to tell everyone else what to do. You'll have democracy."
When Wong left for the last time, "Great Ar chitect" Deng Xiaoping was still alive and she feared chaos, with regionalism the big threat. She frankly admitted that she did not know what would happen; "nobody does."But she thought the middle class, which no longer wants to emigrate en masse, would transform China. She noted that Western society is far more idealistic--and socialistic--than China's, offering free medicare, pensions, and other embellishments of the welfarestate that the Middle Kingdom is still a long way from being able to afford.
Does she have regrets? Not really. China taught her about lifeas no other experience could. At the end of December 1993, she attended a meetingin Beijing's Great Hall of the People to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the "Great Helmsman," Mao Zedong, and Jiang Zemin made a speech. "Here minded me of a grinning panda, with his rounded, black-rimmed glasses, his broad smile and his snugly tailored Mao suit.... The audience dutifully clapped nine times. Only once was Jiang disappointed when he attacked corruption among high officials.Then there was silence." The meeting concludes, and Wong writes the last words of her book: "I took off my Mao badge and went home."
This is a journalist's book, full of anecdotes and chance meetings and jolly japes, with enough figures to lend authority to the narrative. As a source book on modern Communist China it has the kind of value that only the personal touch confers. What takes it out of the ordinary run of such works is the Tiananmen Square material, which cannot be read without a shudder. Wong is alive to the need to bear witness. For this, if for no other reason, her book deserves to be widely read and appreciated.
Jonathan P.F. Chiang is a freelance writer based in Taipei.
Copyright © 1998 by Jonathan P.F. Chiang