Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao To Now (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
A good book about a most bizarre life…sort of. Well, half of a good book.A young Canadian national wants to understand her roots, and returns to China…in 1972. At the beginning of the end of the Cultural Revolution she arrives a committed Maoist, and is soon allowed to enroll at Beijing University (one of only two Westerners given such permission, and explicitly by Zhou Enlai). When just about the last of the 700 million Chinese have abandoned any sense that Maoism is a system that could work, she is eager to reform herself through hard labor, and she craves the back-breaking farm labor that had substituted for education for so many years. And while her university comrades say what they know they’re supposed to say in order to bend with the madly swirling political winds, she earnestly criticizes herself, turns in others who ask her about how to get out to the West, and embraces the starvation diet—created by Party ineptitude, but proclaimed a proletarian virtue—as an appropriate tool of personal reform…it’s bourgeois to want to avoid hunger.The interesting part of the book is to watch the difficulty with which Wong, writing in the 1990s, comes to terms with her own thinking and conduct. It is heartbreaking and infuriating at the same time. Even Wong sees, now, the ridiculousness of one of her student comrades boasting, “I am a peasant. I have no skills. I’m not smart at my studies. My political consciousness isn’t high. But there is one thing I do well. I loyally, fervently obey the Party’s orders.” It seems clear that at the time, Wong would have been pleased if she could so boast.After 8 years, she leaves, disillusioned, but still holding out some hope that China has a chance to mark out a better path. What that path is and where that hope comes from isn’t exactly clear, but hope springs eternal….She returns in 1988 as a reporter and witnesses the demonstrations and massacres in 1989. (She had seen the demonstrations at Tiananmen in 1976 following Zhou Enlai’s death, and in 1979 at the so-called Democracy Wall.) From her hotel room right off the square she witnesses a substantial portion of the killing, and the details she offers are important and depressing.And for each death she saw, her former belief (naiveté?) turns into a rancorous antagonism, that makes the rest of the book much less satisfying. She takes great pains to now point out how corrupted and horrific the system really is. The problem is that her zeal is still abundant, but in the other direction, so she seems to lack perspective. Yes, it is useful and important to hear that China executes about 7000 people a year (more than 60% of the world total), or that drugs and prostitution have accompanied the capitalist expansion, or that amazing poverty persists in places where the capitalist road has yet to be built.These are not the same, though, as the disagreement she has with her nanny over whether her newborn should use diapers or the traditional hole in the crotch pants. Intent on diapers she finally convinced the nanny to use disposables, having decided against cloth because they ARE silly—her emphasis. “After all, who used cloth toilet paper?” As many people as use polymer fiber (i.e., plastic) toilet paper?Or her facile rationalizations about her cook. He was probably inflating the grocery bill, she says, but she kept him on because, “really, how many times in life could you find someone who made perfect roast chicken?” About as often as you find any useful information in reports of lunching with a celebrity guest and then deconstructing him or her in your column (as she now does for the Toronto Globe and Mail)?And, if only the awkwardly shallow analysis stopped there. Reminiscing with on old party cadre from her time at Beijing University, he notes that the foreign students don’t want Chinese roommates anymore. Is there still any open-door schooling (labor and criticisms, being the bigger part of that program), Wong asks. No, now students want comfort and factories want to make money (so aren’t interested in inefficient workers press-ganged from universities).“I felt a bid sad,” Wong writes. As difficult and crazy as my years at Beijing University had been, I had had a unique experience. Now, the students coming after me were having such a conventional time they might as well have been studying in Singapore or Taipei or Hong Kong.”Hey, hey, insane social distortions that ruined people’s lives are better experiences than conventional education. Just look at Comrade Wong, she’s done just fine for herself. It reminds me of when I was in Hungary in 1987 thinking it was “cool,” “fun,” “interesting,” or whatever to be in a communist country…knowing the whole time that I got to leave.Then she turns her weak insights to an explanation of how the one-child policy will create democracy because all sorts of spoiled little emperors will not cotton to the state telling them what to do. As one of her friends put it, “Everyone will want to tell everyone else what to do. You’ll have a democracy.”Interesting notion of democracy. I've always thought of democracy as requiring a commitment to a set of electoral procedures for selecting the policy decision makers (who do get to tell us what to do, in some degree) which involves accepting an outcome that you may not like.In any case, just like Americans, she says, the only children of China are growing up self-centered individualists. Where does Wong conceptually fit all those self-centered Americans who professed an intent to flee to Canada following a Bush re-election…but didn’t?Maybe those are the post-Vietnam Americans who have no sense of history, just like the post-Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Chinese, she notes. I guess that’s why we’ve been rehashing the Vietnam experience for the last 30 years, whereas Chinese have left murals of Mao’s revolutionary sayings plastered on their houses—the better to convince the passing Red Guards that you’re adequately revolutionary and so don’t need to be reformed by having your house ransacked—for the last 30 years. (Sure, I know people who marched around their backyards chanting about Ho Chi Minh, and they're usually sheepish about it now...and they're lawyers.)As Peter Hessler, the author of the consistently brilliant River Town, pointed out such a house to several of us, he observed that the Chinese have not taken any accounting of the social and political effects of the Cultural Revolution. Consider a google search of “syllabus Vietnam” to see how little accounting Americans have taken of Vietnam.I couldn't make it to the end...where Wong attends the official celebration of Mao's 100th birthday.
Goodreads recommended this book after I read Jung Chang's amazing saga of her family's Chinese history in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. Jan Wong's book is an account of her journey as a Canadian-raised daughter of Chinese descent, to a young woman who travels to China ready to embrace the Maoist ideal.Following high school in 1972, Jan Wong was selected by the Chinese government as one of two western international students to attend Beijing University. From the outset, although she thoroughly embraced the Chinese cultural revolution, she knew she was being treated differently. She and the other "foreign" students didn't have it nearly as rough as the native students, and it wasn't long until Wong started demanding equal treatment. (After relinquishing the private chef and eating in the cafeteria with the rest of the students, Wong admits it was the first time she realized there was such a thing as terrible Chinese food!) The Chinese government obviously thought they would be able to use Wong as part of their propaganda towards the west, and for awhile they were correct. Eventually, Wong's eyes to opened to the reality of the Maoist government, and then felt stabbed in the back when she learned that her Chinese friends didn't actually believe the communist nonsense they had been spouting in front of her for years. They were just too afraid to contradict Mao's platform.The book continues through Wong's marriage to an American who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, their subsequent repatriation to the west, and her eventual return to Beijing as a journalist. Her coverage of the Tiananmen Square Massacre was especially informative and moving.This was an excellent memoir, filled in insight, humor and drama. I highly recommend this one!
What do You think about Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao To Now (1997)?
The best part of the book was definitely the first half, which explored Jan Wong's completely unique experience of being a foreign student during the death throws of the Cultural Revolution. A Westerner at heart, Wong desperately wants to be part of the Chinese proletariat, and only the fervour of teenage radicalism can explain how she managed to keep hold of her idealism for so long in the midst of truly bizarre circumstances. This is an insight into the Cultural Revolution as told by a Canadian, and so it is an insight that Westerners can understand in a way that history books probably can't quite capture. The second part of the book, which documents her time as a Globe and Mail correspondent, documents her literally front-row seat to the Tiananmen Square massacre is riveting reading. The final part is a bit choppy, and definitely represents a summary of her most poignant stories post-Tiananmen, but it is still interesting. While the book at times lacked flow, I learned so much about China and Wong is a very engaging writer.
—Jill Campbell-miller
"A month after my worker-peasant-soldier class graduated, the Chinese Communist Party formally declared an end to the Cultural Revolution.... I felt betrayed, like the victim of a massive practical joke.... But from here on in, I promised myself, I would question everything. I wouldn't just listen to what people said, I would observe what they did and their body language while they did it." pg. 185 "For generations, Chinese society had emphasized the family, the clan, the collective over the individual. Now, for the first time in four thousand years of history, the relationship was reversed. Pampered onlies (single children in a family) were growing up to be self-centered, strong-willed, knife-wielding individualists like, well, Americans." pg. 384 This book was written by a Canadian of Chinese-descent who went to school in communist China because she felt it was the best government and she wanted to be a part of it. She quickly learned otherwise, and documented her experiences in this book. She was a journalist, and because she "looked" Chinese, she was privy to many people and situations that were closed to the western world. Jan Wong has a delightful writing style with quick wit and humor. For example, when she returned to China with her husband and two sons to write as a foreign correspondent, she describes her home thus: "We lived in a brand-new diplomatic compound of an architectural style best described as Post-Stalinist Instant Decrepitude." I appreciated the sense that even though lots of mistakes were made and tragedies occurred, there is still much good and plenty to hope for in modern China.
—Karen
Jan Wong is both a journalist and a storyteller, thus this book manages to provide a factual history of China in the late 20th century while also weaving together an extraordinary memoir of Wong's experiences in China during this period. I think that this is the perfect book for a Western audience, in particular an audience that is trying to understand the allure of Maoism. Wong explains to the reader, in a very human way, the hopes and dreams of Maoists and how that dream fell apart for so many. My one concern with her writing was how frequently she emphasized her youthful naiveté, as if paranoid that she could be accused of regime-endorsement in the present day. I'd rather live the story with her, experiencing naiveté right along with her as she trumpets the superiority of the Chinese system in the beginning, and then see my delusions gradually shatter as Wong is witness to the hypocrisy, corruption, and violence that came to define the PRC's political system. The book had me in tears at times, and in fits of laughter at others, which pretty accurately matches the bipolar emotions that I felt during the year that I lived in China. Criticism aside, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone, because it was highly informative and a truly enjoyable read.
—Sarah Wiley
