Red Childhoods

The sweet spot in reading a memoir comes when the page dissolves and suddenly you seem to be living the life you are reading about. Fiction did that for me when I was young (and especially when I was a child), but now I have to search long and hard for the novel that can work that sort of magic. I don’t know whether the change is in the novels, or in me, or both.

Extreme memoirs -- such as Holocaust tales, or those of the Chinese Cultural Revolution -- intensify the experience. By definition, Holocaust accounts are written by survivors, and the reader survives with them, in triumph and relief (temporarily forgetting that the survivors were a small minority, and that those who died included many who were just as brave and resourceful, just not as lucky). As for the Cultural Revolution, most memoirs are the work of Chinese who have emigrated and generally found success, often amazing success, in their new lives.

Few of these rags-to-riches stories can match the one Ping Fu tellis in Bend, not Break. Now the CEO of Geomagic, an American software company specializing in 3-D printer technology, she tells us that she left school after the first grade. When she was eight, Red Guards in Shanghai snatched her from the loving woman she had called her mother and told her she was not that woman’s child and had no right to live in Shanghai. They stuffed her through a window into a crowded train going to Nanjing. She arrived in time to see her actual parents departing in a truck, while she was thrown into a bare dormitory room where her four-year-old sister was wailing alone. She had to find food, potable water, and furniture, and bring up her sister by herself. At age eight. The rest of her adventures are just as extreme. Can they be true?

Not according to a blitzkrieg of Chinese commenters on Amazon’s page for Bend, not Break. There is nothing new about this sort of coordinated patriotic rage at any book appearing in the West that presents China in a less than rosy light. Such comments have an effect opposite to their authors’ intent, as the vituperation and poor English reveal their source. In this case, however, they have some validity, since Fu herself has admitted that some episodes were exaggerated, and others omitted. Maybe she didn’t actually witness a teacher torn apart by four horses. In her defense, however, she notes that memory is unreliable and often it is the emotion rather than the facts that survive. Penguin, her publisher, has decided to stand by her after examining the evidence. 

Secret Piano, by Zhu Xiao-Mei, has kindled no such controversy. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to believe that Zhu’s mother could ship a piano to the miserable village where she was exiled during the Cultural Revolution, and that it could arrive in one piece and be tuned to usable condition. Zhu had been a piano prodigy before the Cultural Revolution, and after the forced hiatus during her exile to Mongolia, she moved to Paris and managed to resume her education. She specializes in Bach’s Goldberg Variations (you can hear her on Youtube here), and I owe her a debt of gratitude. I had never listened closely to the Goldberg Variations before I read this book, and now I can’t stop listening.

Huang Wenguang’s The Little Red Guard, despite its title, should probably not be in this company. It is not really a Cultural Revolution memoir, but a story of family obsession. Huang’s grandmother insisted that she must be buried with her long-dead husband in his ancestral village, and this at a time when burial was forbidden and cremation required. She directed her son to prepare her coffin, and young Huang slept beside it throughout his childhood. Large amounts of money would have to be found for bribes if the clandestine funeral were ever to take place. For twenty years the family of seven suffered even greater material privation than those around them, as every extra penny went to the burial fund. Ironically, Huang’s grandmother outlived her devoted and guilt-ridden son. The grandmother’s burial fell to the daughter-in-law who had endured years of misery at her hands. Chinese (and all East Asian) family dynamics are enormously alien to the western experience. This book, cool and measured in tone, is a fascinating introduction.

But for an honest, probing, unsensational view of the Chinese people and their dealings with their recent history, I must recommend not a memoir but a novel. It is not a novel you will have heard of, since the English translation is published by a small private press. It is Hu Fayun’s Such is This World@sars.come. Ruyan, a youngish widow, receives a computer and an introduction to the internet from her son before he leaves to study abroad. She joins a chat room of parents like herself, and finds her literary talents welcomed. In the real world she begins a romance with the mayor of her city. But then she encounters a group that questions the received narrative of Chinese history since the 1949 Revolution. At this point the SARS epidemic begins, and Ruyan sees for herself the gap between what her own eyes tell her and what may be publicly expressed. Throughout, Hu Fayun maintains respect not only for dissidents but for those who oppose them. No one is a caricature. To understand people’s motives, we must understand their lives.

No one else in China writes like this. The new Chinese Nobel Prize winner, Mo Yan, specializes in magic realism and “daft hilarity” (the description is Perry Link’s), precluding any attempt to see his characters as actual human beings. You won’t find Such is This World@sars.come on Amazon, but you will find it here at Ragged Banner Press. If you have any interest in China or in how people cope with difficult history, I urge you to read it. (A very few libraries have bought it, so you can probably get it through interlibrary loan too).