To the Storm: The Odyssey of A Revolutionary Chinese Woman, by Yue Daiyun and Carolyn Wakeman— University of California Press, 1985 (405 pp.)
Women now often have a special leadership attraction for man as well as other women. They are especially keen in this time and age because of so-called women's liberation, which is supposed to bring "equal rights" to all regardless of sex or gender.
In publishing, a clear trend in the U.S. during the past 20 years has been to more and more books and magazines exclusively devoted to women.
Ironically, those women generally known as "feminists" are also those who behave more like men: talking, fighting, living, and working as aggressively as their male counterparts. Even in physically demanding sports, such as football and wrestling, many American school girls have won the legal right to compete with boys. Nationally, American women are already serving with men in the armed forces, police and fire departments, and on construction jobs—all previously men-only occupations.
In such a cultural and social context, it's only natural that American publishers would also turn their attention to women on the Chinese mainland. Two of the most explicit recent titles in this genre are Halls of Jade, Walls of Stone: Women in China Today, by Stacey Peck, and To the Storm: The Odyssey of A Revolutionary Chinese Woman, by Yue Daiyun and Carolyn Wakeman. Whether or not there is actually "redeeming value" in these books for prospective readers is, naturally, a secondary publishing consideration to the prospects for profitable markets.
I don't mean to imply by this that the two books have nothing at all to offer readers. However, in Peck's collection of interviews with several dozen women from nearly all walks of life, for example, one could definitely get a general impression that (as the author rather self-consciously puts it) the women she had interviewed "made very few negative statements about life under the current (Teng Hsiao-ping) regime" and that "many personal convictions were left unspoken for fear of retribution."
With such formidable restraints, how can anyone determine whether the things these interviewees told the author are genuine or not? If there is suspect sincerity among the featured individuals, how can their words even be taken seriously?
It's certainly true that American journalists generally believe in objective reporting, and Peck, who used to write a weekly interview column for the Sunday magazine section of the Los Angeles Times and has also produced a weekly debate show for public television, is indeed a professional journalist.
She spent two months on the Chinese mainland and, with an interpreter, interviewed women in eleven cities and villages there to form the general basis for her book. Among her subjects are: two "women at the top" —a vice president of the" All China Women's Federation" and a "minister of water resources and electric power;" three athletes (including tennis player Hu Na, who is actually in the U.S.), six women scientists, five women educators and students, four writers, four visual artists, four medical care workers, eight businesswomen (including three "new capitalists"), and four foreign "expatriates" who "became enamored with Chinese Communist ideology" and served the Communists as "foreign experts."
The major treatment difference between Peck's book and that of Yue Daiyun is that each woman in the former was given only a few pages to tell about her life under Communist rule, while the latter provides a full-length autobiography with special details of Yue's personal experiences and observations during the Communist "Anti-Rightist Campaign," "Great Leap Forward," and "Great Cultural Revolution."
An associate professor of Chinese Literature at Peking University, Yue briefly visited the U.S. for studies at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley.
Viewed as a model Communist Party member in the 1950s, Yue was denounced as a traitor during the "Anti-Rightist Campaign," or as she herself puts it, "one of five types of counter-revolutionaries," because she tried to start a literary magazine and promote individualism.
Married to the son of a former president of Peking University, she is her most candid self when she describes the oppressive treatment of others under Communist rule:
In an effort to make the accountant admit that he had embezzled peasants' wages, for example, the three men from Peking questioned him around the clock, refusing to let him sleep. Finally, he became so exhausted that he said whatever they asked and admitted all kinds of wrong-doing although none of his crimes could be proved.
As for herself, her closest inference of criticism of the Communist Party in general is a quote she attributes to a fellow teacher, Lao Wei, who was sent to forced labor in the countryside with her. His words introduced me to a whole new way of thinking, Yue writes:
"Now we are enemies of the Party, " he counseled me, "even though for years we have devoted ourselves to the revolution. At present we must admit we are guilty and acknowledge that we really are criminals, for only in this way can we resume our normal lives and at the same time help the Party by confirming the correctness of its policy. There can be no absolute standard for truth and falsehood, for what is true depends always on necessity and circumstances."
If we make a direct comparison, there's no question that Yue's autobiography (rendered in English by Carolyn Wakeman, an American teacher at the Peking Foreign Languages Institute) has revealed much more of Communist persecutions of both "innocent" people and "not-so-innocent" Chinese intellectuals during the past 37 years, than the pretensions of a collective portrait of Chinese women in Stacey Peck's book.
Though there is much public information extant about the mass political campaigns in Communist China (which have been widely reported elsewhere), Yue's personal accounts of the same events invariably give the reader a greater poignancy, because they are now from a Communist Party member still living under that same system. A serving Communist, Yue expresses doubts about the system only with these words, concluding her book:
I had grown discouraged about the Party's policies and skeptical about its leaders.... I thought about Zhu Jaiyu, who had spoken out in 1956 ... now lying on the bottom of the ocean. I thought of Lao Shi, who had refused to flatter those in authority, first sent to the Yunnan border and then beaten to death by the Red Guards. I thought also about Lin Zhao and Ma Mingzhen, who had dared to query official policy and had voiced their beliefs, both dead from an executioner's bullet. So many had paid with their lives for telling the truth....
Apparently, the conclusion has to be drawn by each reader as to whether all the women in Stacey Peck's book, and Yue Daiyun herself, as current survivors under Communist rule, have been in a position to tell the truth to the Western world. —(Dr. Chiang is a senior researcher-reporter with Time magazine, specializing in Asian affairs).