China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  CHEN: Basically they're still the same. But at that time the tables were long plank benches. Now they've started using little square tables. That has its advantages too. Small groups of people can drink tea and play cards together.

  XINRAN: Do you worry that now people are surrounded by the material trappings of modern life the tea houses will be replaced by modern materialistic things too?

  CHEN: Before the Cultural Revolution there were two tea houses; now there are sixteen. We can see from this change that tea culture has also changed. And there are more tea houses opening soon. Each one has two hundred teapots. Sixteen tea houses, that's over three thousand pots. It won't be easy to replace that many.

  XINRAN: Might modern teapots and teacups influence the culture of the tea houses? Aren't you worried that the Chinese tea culture you've been talking about will be changed, and people will start using pretty teapots with foreign words printed on them?

  CHEN: Definitely not. Foreign letters and tea just don't mix!

  XINRAN: In your childhood did you use tea bowls or teacups?

  CHEN: Little handleless teacups, little bowls.

  XINRAN: What I was drinking just now was in a little bowl.

  CHEN: There aren't any of the tiny bowls like eggcups that they once used left now – we have to order them specially. A lot of the little kilns that used to produce tea bowls and handleless cups have gone out of business. We're getting ready for a return to terracotta bowls. We want the real, earthy local culture, so earthy that you can see the mud dropping off it. We want to preserve that real, genuine, authentic tea culture.

  XINRAN: Do you think the young people support your attitude? Are they calling out for this "so local it's dropping mud" tea culture?

  CHEN: Some support it, others don't.

  XINRAN: Are there any young people who say that these ideas of yours and the things you're doing are ignorant and foolish?

  CHEN: Yes, lots! And that includes some of the local officials. They can't see that these ancient relics are our fortune. People talk about holding up a golden bowl begging for food, but we're holding up a golden bowl waiting for food. Why don't they find a way to develop our own cultural resources, and put them to good use? No, they want to run after the Westerners' rubbish culture.

  XINRAN: What's your children's attitude to you risking your life to protect historic sites?

  CHEN: They have their own opinions. I just think that our generation has a responsibility to preserve Linhuan's ancient things. We can't break off the family line, we must continue it. If we don't, then the line of inheritance will be cut off in this generation.

  XINRAN: Have you thought that this knowledge and awareness of yours should be continued in the next generation, and not just the tea culture? That your ideas on keeping ancient monuments ought to be carried on too?

  CHEN: It ought to be, but everybody's ideas are different, and everyone takes a different path.

  XINRAN: Can you persuade your children?

  CHEN: Before, nobody in the family supported me, old or young. Now they support me, but what it'll be like once I'm gone, I don't know.

  XINRAN: Those old men drinking tea – I noticed that there is a kind of contentment on their faces that you don't see in other places. Modern people, Chinese and Westerners both, live surrounded by tension and rush, with everybody seeking a good life in the future, leaving themselves no time to "live" in their own environment as a human being. Your Linhuan old people are not rich – very poor, even – but they live very peacefully in "their own" good life. This makes me wonder: What is a good life? Our Chinese tea can settle one's feelings, isn't that right?

  CHEN: Yes, Linhuan's bangbang tea can bring calm to people's hearts. Linhuan's old town wall can lead modern people to a dialogue with the spirits of ancient people from over a thousand years ago. And Linhuan people also want to understand the world.

  XINRAN: To me, you seem to be a fulcrum for local history, and you have made a great contribution to all of this. Just talking about you personally, in your whole life, what were the happiest and the most painful things that happened to you?

  CHEN: The old people say that being let down is good fortune, suffering is good fortune, but eating, drinking and idling away one's life in pleasure is not good fortune. There are many things that give me pain. For example, when I go outside the village for a meeting, and see all those people who work in architecture putting up tall buildings and skyscrapers next door to historic sites, vandalising the original scenery, I'm agitated and bitter inside. All those ancient places of culture have been pulled down, destroyed, never to be seen again!

  XINRAN: What do you think is the biggest difference between children when you were young and children today?

  CHEN: Will and values. Their sense of values is different from mine, my values are about changing our poor, backward state, or raising the standard of living. People these days are pretty good at their jobs, and they know how to live, but they have no work ethic. When I work, the hard part comes first, enjoyment and happiness come afterwards, I've just kept on fighting, fighting the heavens, fighting the earth and fighting people. Sometimes it's just fighting people. If I weakened I'd be finished.

  XINRAN: How do you fight with the officials? I've heard a lot of interesting stories about you.

  CHEN: It was all over this street. At the time there was a county road that was going to pass through here, and I was determined not to give in. I wrote our project manifesto, and I took it to the county head asking him to sign. Then I took it to the city, to the provincial capital, and asked the Office of Cultural Artefacts to support me. I went to the Construction Department too. People tried to persuade me not to make such a song and dance of it, but I persisted. To this day, this is a Historic Culture Preservation Area; you can't dig it up to build a road. Without the culture there'd be a road but no people. This is an ancient town, yet we're destroying it. We can't do this. The head of the Construction Bureau said that everything was in place for the road, it couldn't be changed, but I fought him with reason. They said this and they said that, but I said that an ancient town should have the face of an ancient town.

  XINRAN: And you won!

  CHEN: Yes, and it's not just that I don't like losing, I alerted the people around me too.

  XINRAN: I've also heard a story that there's a difference between your real age and your age as it appears on your official record, what's that about?

  CHEN: I don't know what all that's about! The people in the Construction Committee say that I'm a youthful OAP, they say the age in my records is very young, just forty-eight this year. I'm baffled. I didn't put that in there, so who did? Who told them to write it? I went to the City Construction Committee. They told me to go to the Provincial Construction Bureau, who said it was so I could work a few more years preserving these ancient ruins, so those local cadres could learn a thing or two from me. They couldn't let me walk away early.

  XINRAN: So how much younger are you in the files than your real age?

  CHEN: More than twenty years!

  XINRAN: Just now you said that no matter how the country changes, or the government changes, no matter how the policy changes, apart from the Cultural Revolution, tea houses have always kept their folk culture, which includes discussing everything. So what do people say about Mao Zedong?

  CHEN: To be honest, they very seldom discuss Mao Zedong. I believe they must have their own views, but a lot of people are sick with rage at the empty boasting, bribery and corruption we see nowadays. Compared to that, they believe that Mao Zedong did a better job.

  XINRAN: So what are your views on Mao Zedong?

  CHEN: I think that he was a national leader and also a human being. There's no such thing as a perfect human being, you have to be realistic. His contribution to the nation's development can never be erased: he overturned the Three Great Mountains of imperialism, feudalism and capitalism, and he built up the new China. At that time nobody but Mao Zedong could have brought stability to
a chaotic country like China was then. But there were problems with him too. The Great Leap Forward in 1958 saw the beginning of a kind of empty boastfulness within the Communist Party and led to the hard years of the 1960s. And he created the Cultural Revolution, which led to ten years of chaos. Although these things were eventually put to rights, the price was too high. It's just like taking a wife – many people act on a strong impulse at the beginning and end up miserable all their lives, but they can't say that they were wrong.

  XINRAN: That leads me to my next question: when did you meet your wife, and how did you get to know her?

  CHEN: In 1960. I was quartermaster at the Leinongzhuang Farm, she worked in the office at the middle school. I was taken over to meet her, and we got married. In those days, marrying when you reached a certain age was as natural for people in the countryside as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Nobody gave much thought to "feelings" or "sympathy" or "cherishing the same ideals and following the same path".

  XINRAN: Can you remember your wedding?

  CHEN: I can. It was five yuan. It was simple – we just bought a big box of cigarettes, a few sweets, and that was that. It was fine.

  XINRAN: With a personality like yours, did you come under attack in the Cultural Revolution?

  CHEN: No. In the Cultural Revolution there were loads of factions. They always made you join this or that faction, and whether you took part or not you always ended up in the wrong. Finally three of us put together a headquarters and set up on our own.

  XINRAN: Have you talked to your children about these times?

  CHEN: They know some of it.

  XINRAN: When they heard, how did they react?

  CHEN [laughs]: None of them took it in!

  XINRAN: I've heard that you have a serious stomach illness. You ought to get yourself treated as soon as possible by a proper doctor. The old tea houses of Linhuan need you to retain the health of a forty-year-old!

  CHEN: Mao Zedong once said, "You can only listen to half of what the doctors say – for the other half, they have to do what I tell 'em!"

  ***

  That night I barely slept. A feeling of oppression, of having no space to stretch out, welled up in my heart. I was both moved by "the peace and kindliness in every cup of tea" that the Linhuan people had derived from their poor life, and awed by the persistence of generations of local people like Chen Lei, looking for a future for their town, seeking the true value of their native land. I muttered a lot of these things to all the cockroaches and midges that were ceaselessly "exploring new territory" up and down my body. I think the blood racing through my veins that night must have satiated many of the mosquitoes and cockroaches that have lived side by side with Chinese peasants down the ages.

  The following day at five thirty in the morning, half an hour after the time Old Mr Wu had given me, I was knocking on his front door.

  Old Mr Wu was in the middle of preparing breakfast, and plainly surprised that I had kept my word, but he excitedly ushered me into his home, a converted store shed. This room was just like an antique shop or a junk shop, full of curiosities from his years of news-gathering: a magnetic Buddha, a clay statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, metal biscuit tins, plastic peonies, a long opium pipe of white jade, an agate snuffbox, a coarse pottery tea set and a redwood dressing table. On the wall directly opposite was a big row of portraits from Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the God of Wealth, a laughing Buddha and his grandparents and parents. He said that all of these were "gods" in which he neither quite believed nor completely disbelieved. His wife kept off to one side, smiling but never speaking. It was hard to see her as the first female Party member of Linhuan or that frighteningly competent female brigade leader.

  Old Mr Wu, his wife and I sat down on little square stools in the outer courtyard. I told them that I felt there had been words between the lines in our interview yesterday, and this was why I had made a special trip for an unofficial interview.

  When Old Mr Wu heard this, he suddenly knelt down in front of me and burst into loud weeping.

  "The government appropriated the 10.2 mu of land allocated to me. It was all agreed – I was going to get over 60,000 yuan for it, to be paid in full in ten years. That was the rule. They were going to give me six thousand every year, but it's been seven years now, and they haven't even given me six hundred. They don't give me money and they don't give me land. This is what makes me angry! I've gone to speak to the people in the township government, I've been to the county government, and I've been to see the head of the law court, but nobody would listen to me, only people with no real power, and when they'd heard me out, they just said: 'Plenty of people have this problem, your turn hasn't come yet.' To this day nobody's given me an explanation.

  "Where's the money? It's in the hands of the production brigade. They say they're borrowing it. The production brigade's taken it to dig ditches and roads, and I haven't seen a fen! I'm a peasant, with no money and no land. I'm old, and I can't do much business. How are my old lady and I supposed to live? That's what hurts me most. I'd like to buy a gong and go up to Beijing to shout out my grievances! I've been treated so unfairly!

  "I've had such a raw deal, fifty years a Party member, working all these years. Back in Land Reform they only allocated me three mu of land! It took another forty years, till Reform and Opening, before they gave me my ten mu, and I lived off that land. Seven years and no money! I've been treated so unjustly. I'm wronged! Officials these days aren't like in my day. If they'd done that, Chairman Mao would have had their heads chopped off!"

  Sitting opposite Old Mr Wu, the "written complaint" he had paid someone to write on his behalf clutched in my hands, my heart ached. These peasants who thought that young Westerners in fashionable "begging jeans" were poor, and that doing hard, ill-regarded labour in the city was to "enjoy life and make big money", did not even have the basic information or understanding they needed to live in the same era. But they had never made demands for a better life to the rich and powerful who requisitioned them into bankruptcy. Yet those "mother and father officials" who have survived until today only because the peasants kept to their work instead of throwing down their hoes to make revolution and class struggle apparently never paused in their daily banquets to consider the price the peasants have paid with their blood and sweat.

  China's peasants have been treated as a part of the 10,000 things of nature, a group that nobody notices. People are concerned about the melting of the ice caps, they fret over the disappearance of the Asian tigers, they fume at the desert swallowing up the green lands, they even have interminable discussions over the right combination of vitamins for every dish of food. But how many people are calling out for an improvement in the living conditions of the Chinese peasants? How many people pause to consider the bowls of weak vegetable soup in China's poverty-stricken villages, with just a few grains of rice added to stave off hunger? How many people would go to read a story like "The Gourd Children" or "The Monkey King" to the children of poor farmers who don't even know which end to open a book at or where to start reading from on the page, so that those hearts, whose first awareness was of days and nights of hunger, cold and disease, can have their share of goals and beautiful memories like the rest of us? How many people realise that helping those poverty-stricken, uneducated peasants begins with wresting power from local officials who in turn have no education and simply do not understand the law?

  China has become strong, China has stood up, but we cannot stand on the shoulders of the peasants for the world to admire how tall we are. We cannot let the peasants' blood and sweat water the tree of our national pride.

  7 Carrying on a Craft Tradition: the Qin Huai Lantern-Makers

  The Huadeng brothers in their workshop, Nanjing, 1950s.

  Interviewing lantern-maker Mr Li, at his workshop, 2006.

  MR HUADENG, born in 1934 of a poor lantern-making family and now owner of the Qin Huai lantern work
shop, and Li Guisheng, aged ninety, master lantern-maker, and his former apprentice, Gu Yeliang, interviewed in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu in eastern China by the Yangtze River. It is said that the first lantern fair was held here in 1372 when Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang ordered a spring lantern festival to celebrate both the coming New Year and the prosperity of the country. This tradition was passed down from generation to generation for centuries, but declined in the early twentieth century. In 1985 the lantern festival was revived. Mr Li is the oldest proponent of lantern-making and he and Mr Huadeng want to inspire a new generation to carry on this ancient tradition.

  In the Chinese world, there are many who are hostile to the way film director Zhang Yimou has presented China to overseas audiences in films such as Raise the Red Lantern and Hero. They feel that Zhang Yimou is feeding a Western appetite for the exotic with uncouth Chinese folk customs which are a relic from the past. He is pandering to the developed world by presenting to them the humiliatingly backward face of China. In other words, he's using our warm Chinese faces to cosy up to foreigners' cold bums!

  I do not know if these critics have any notion of the level of understanding of China in the rest of world.

  In my ten years of wanderings outside China, I have read the English-language press every day. I have conducted impromptu surveys and asked questions about things which concerned me during visits to scores of countries. It has taught me something which I dared not believe before and am unwilling to believe now: that perceptions of China in the world today are like those of a tiny baby's first impressions – limited to mother's milk. They know this mother's milk exists but, not being capable of enlightened reflection, they cannot envisage its form. As for the sound and the way it grabs their attention, well, they have practice in distinguishing it and reacting to it, but cannot differentiate between the classic and the popular versions.