bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1991) — Fall 1991 // Automne 1991, pp. 41–42
Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic by Betty Bao
Lord, Random House of Canada Ltd., 1990,
246 pp. $26.00.
Chia Chen and Chia Jung were imprisoned in the Prefecture of Chin-yi while the Ning Mansion was confiscated, together with all effects and clothing.
A Dream of Red Mansions (18th century)
The tragedy that befell the Chia Clan in the eighteenth century, in what is China’s best known novel, does not surprise contemporary Chinese readers living under Communist rule, any more than it shocked their forbears whose lives were governed by imperial decree and feudal custom. The depredations inflicted on the Chinese people throughout their history have been due in equal measure to man-made, as well as natural, calamities. If official communist ideology explains the downfall of the Chia as well-deserved retribution for having the wrong class origins, it is left today to the Chinese people to draw their own conclusions about the causes of the immense personal as well as national suffering that the country has endured since 1949. As the events of June 1989 made clear, the Chinese are not about to get an honest appraisal from their own government.
Publishers in the West have been more forthcoming. Each ideological spasm and rectification campaign conducted in the PRC since 1949 has produced a wave of emigrants willing to tell their stories, as well as a plethora of political and economic analyses by the armies of China watchers hunkered in their academic and journalistic trenches. Much has been written on the murderous land reform movement, the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and more recently, Tien An Men. Books on these subjects have always found a willing audience.
The Chinese government, which has relied extensively on the art of mass mobilization for political ends, nevertheless, has failed to develop a formula for governance that does not rely on coercion. From the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” in 1957, to the campaigns against “Spiritual Pollution” and “Bourgeois Liberalization” in the eighties, not to speak of the bloody crack-down in 1989, it has modulated the intensity but never abandoned the indiscriminate use of force in exercising its power over its own people. Given the size of the Chinese population, it has had to rely on the willing participation of at least some of the citizenry to exercise its terrorism. In a country as poor as China, it has found many who are willing to oblige.
Of all the political movements in recent Chinese history, none has been more ferocious than the “Cultural Revolution”. The number of deaths probably exceeds half a million; the number of victims, in the millions. No one appears to have been spared its effects, whether they were members of the Red Guard, Mao’s chosen instrument of revenge against the Party, or those with the wrong class connections. A plethora of books and articles has been published which chronicle the devastation that was wrought by the Cultural Revolution on China’s institutions, its economy and its people. Liang Heng’s Son of the Revolution and Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, are among the most widely read. These and many other narratives of the Cultural Revolution owe their drama to the fact that they place the reader face-to-face and alongside individuals caught in the maelstrom. It is the human condition, not the abstractions of ideological debate, which continue to draw us to these books. The stories they contain are frequently horrific and Brechtian in their absurdity. More often than not, the protagonists are innocent of any conceivable crime. Those who have managed to have their stories told are often the most gifted: doctors, scholars, actors and journalists, people who draw envy and not admiration in today’s China, because the fate of those less talented and those without connections is not only to be ignored but to be used.
Now comes another set of stories from the Cultural Revolution, this one gathered together by Betty Bao Lord, a well-known Chinese-American novelist who also happens to be the wife of Winston Lord, a Kissinger protégé, who served from 1985 to 1989 as US Ambassador to China. Bao Lord, whose father was a Kuomintang official, was born in China in 1938 and followed her parents to New York in 1946. The family decided to remain in the United States after Mao’s victory. Betty graduated from P.S. 8 in Brooklyn before moving on to more illustrious studies in the Ivy League, where she met her husband.
Bao Lord, whose earlier novel Spring Moon had been translated into Chinese (badly, she says), used her position as the wite of the US Ambassador and her family contacts within China to maximum advantage, letting it be known throughout her three and a half-year stay that she was collecting stories and experiences to be used in a book on modern China. These stories were provided to her directly or frequently slipped to her on audio tape, which provided anonymity to those who sought it.
The result is Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic, an aptly titled book which weaves Bao family chronicles with a collection of narratives of pre- and post-Maoist China. Each chapter opens with a brief news flash covering events in Beijing between April 15 and June 5, 1989. These serve as a counterpoint to the descriptions of events that occurred 20 and 30 years earlier. The Bao family, once proud land-owners from Anwei province, had more than their share of the worst that was meted out to “class enemies” during the late 1960s and 1970s. Their stories have an intimacy and immediacy that comes from the fact that they were told first among family members. Bao Lord uses a narrative technique which allows the members of her extended family to speak largely for themselves. They are well served by their chronicler, who writes clearly and unsentimentally. There is little of the self-consciousness that mars Lieng Heng’s book (a sort of Chinese Born on the Fourth of July). We are also spared the notion that the Bao family, because of its origins, somehow suffered more than others.
The majority of the book consists of first-person narratives of a dozen individuals, identified only as the Peasant, the Petitioner, the Cadre, and so forth. Some were Party members; most were not. Their “crimes” varied: having the wrong class origins; being unable to meet Party-mandated quotas for turning in former landlords (there was only one landlord in the village); or criticizing Chiang Ching’s operas. A dedicated surgeon exposes himself to an infectious disease in order to avoid having to criticize his teachers; he is subsequently tortured, imprisoned and later sent to a village for eight years to raise pigs, all because the Red Guards judged his selfless commitment to his work as proof that he put it ahead of devotion to “the people”.
A Hui (Muslim Chinese) is caught in the middle of an internecine Red Guard battle, the kind that eventually brought in the PLA and ended the Cultural Revolution. He is imprisoned and beaten. Then, he is released. Later, inexplicably, he is rearrested, placed in solitary confinement, and spends three years in prison. He is eventually released atter the fall of the “Gang of Four” and then rehabilitated two years later. He cannot find work; he is estranged from his family, and his sanity is threatened as he ponders with increasing desperation his fate and the events that have brought him such trouble. He cannot fathom what crime he could possibly have committed, or why he was victimized.
In admirable, restrained prose, Bao Lord has conveyed the drama, the desperation, the absurdity and the madness of the Cultural Revolution. She has recorded the authentic and pained voices of the period. Through her pen, anecdotes take on apocryphal significance. A former political prisoner who cannot shake the habits learned during his confinement, breaks a bottle containing the bits of wire he had collected from the prison shop floor. The glass shatters but the clump of wires is frozen in the shape of the bottle. A Westernized Chinese tells Bao Lord that the Government should model itself on the wise counsels of Shang Yang, a noted 4th century official, who obtained the cooperation of his subjects. He neglects to add that Shang Yang subsequently became tyrannical and cruel, and enforced his decrees by means of secret police.
Fang Li-zhi, in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, praised the efforts of writers and publishers in the West who record and disseminate works on events in China since 1949. The Chinese Government, he asserts, actively promotes “the technique of forgetting history”, an imposed historical amnesia that requires that any detail of history that is not in the interests of the CCP be suppressed. Bao Lord’s book will help assure that these voices are not lost to us or to a future Chinese audience.
The answer to the question posed by the Hui Muslim however is one that Bao Lord studiously avoids: why did all of this happen? How could a civilization inflict such pain and cruelty on itself? Surely, someone in Bao Lord’s position had numerous opportunities to ask the current Chinese leadership how China could have plunged itself into such disorder. On the other hand, perhaps they do not know. Or, as Fang Li-zhi suggests, they have an institutional interest in keeping the answer to themselves.
Bao Lord does not attempt an answer, and perhaps for this we should be grateful. We are in all likelihood better off being spared the pop psychology and pop history that such writings frequently invite. As in the Dream of Red Mansions, the forces that ordained the fall of the Chia Clan are probably beyond our comprehension, as they were for them. Bao Lord after all is a novelist, not an historian. It is indeed the strengths of the novelist that Bao Lord brings to these Chinese Legacies, and for that, we and her kinsman should be grateful.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1991) — Fall 1991 // Automne 1991, pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
