China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  MANAGER: Why is this paper dispenser so loose?

  CLEANER: I thought that it would make it more convenient for the customers.

  MANAGER: You can't do that, it has to be tight, or it's easy for the customers to pull out a lot all at once, and we're the ones who have to pay for it. Have you wiped down all the pictures?

  CLEANER: Yes, all of them, even the new ones they've just hung up. It's just that one over the soap dispenser, there's a mark on the man's face, I can't get it off.

  MANAGER: Don't you scrub that off, I put that tape over the man's eyes myself. Whatever were they were thinking of, hanging a picture of a man in a ladies' toilet? How come the floor in that cubicle isn't shiny?

  CLEANER: I've just mopped it.

  MANAGER: Not hard enough, you should mop the floor until you can see the face of the person in the next toilet!

  ***

  When I heard this, I congratulated myself that there was no one in the cubicles on either side of me; I could hardly imagine performing my private natural functions "face to face" with my neighbours.

  ***

  – Zhengda Shopping Centre, Shanghai, 12 May 2007:

  YOUNG WOMAN: This brand's no good!

  YOUNG MAN: It looks really great on you.

  YOUNG WOMAN: What do you know about it? Nobody takes this brand seriously, I'll crash and burn in the interview, for certain!

  YOUNG MAN: Well, can't you wear that one from Next?

  YOUNG WOMAN: That brand's too old-fashioned – as soon as the boss sees it he'll know that I'm behind the times.

  YOUNG MAN: Things are really expensive here, and money's tight for me this month.

  YOUNG WOMAN: So do you really love me?

  YOUNG MAN: Of course I love you!

  YOUNG WOMAN: Do you? Then you couldn't let me show up in clothes that aren't even brand names and lose face in front of a foreign boss, now, could you?

  ***

  – Shanghai Pudong International Airport, 15 May 2007:

  MAN A: Aren't you going to buy her that necklace?

  MAN B: It's too expensive. I can't very well claim the money back at my work unit.

  MAN A: Get the attendant to write you two receipts, one for books, one for souvenirs, and that'll be the end of the matter!

  MAN B: That brain of yours is good for something, anyway!

  MAN A: Oh, we all do it. You tell me, are there a hundred honest officials in our China, officials who've never used public funds to pay for private expenses?

  MAN B: Officials who've never claimed on expenses? A hundred? Not that many.

  ***

  On 16 May 2007 I was in the departure lounge of Shanghai International Airport, reading a Chinese newspaper and waiting for the plane for New Zealand, where I was going to start the launch tour for my fourth book, Miss Chopsticks. The main headline in the papers was still the China Petroleum and Gas Group's discovery of oilfields of up to 1 billion tonnes in the Tanhai area of the Bohai Gulf: apparently the Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, had been "too excited to sleep". This reminded me of the worries Mr You had mentioned in his interview, that China's future strength and economic staying power would be determined by its oil supplies.

  The most noticeable pictures in the illustrated part of the news were of the Chinese stock market, full of beaming faces after a series of rapid rises, juxtaposed with the gloomy faces of car salesmen; people were putting all their funds into the stock market. Many of the stock owners' faces were worn by the years, but the car dealers were all healthy young people who looked tasty enough to eat. By the side of a group of photos of ostentatious and extravagant "International Labour Day" marriage ceremonies was an old woman's face, full of grief and rage – another 91-year-old woman in Jiangxi province had made public her humiliating status as a Japanese "comfort woman". The old lady in the photograph looked agonised: why did they humiliate so many of us girls, and how can they still not admit it?

  I put down my newspaper, and a song that was being played on the loudspeakers drifted into my ears. This song, "Dyed with my Blood", was written for the soldiers who died in the China-Vietnam War in the 1980s, and it had been forgotten by many people, before international politics had once again painted it with fresh colour:

  Perhaps after this farewell I will never return,

  Will you understand? Will you see why?

  Perhaps I will fall and never rise again,

  Will you wait for me forever?

  If that is so, do not grieve,

  For the flag of the Republic will be dyed with my blood…

  I was thinking: is not the flag of today's China dyed with the blood of our forebears in the same way? Do China's young people understand this? Will the flourishing crown of leaves and branches that has grown up from their roots, watered by China's violent storms and rains of blood, retain any memory of the roots?

  ***

  The "Beijing Olympic torch storm" had been going on for three days in April 2008 when I did my final editing of China Witness with my London editor. I could see how much Chinese people had been constantly shocked and hurt by the mainly one-sided news "selected" by Western media in its coverage of China; only a very few exceptions, such as Frans-Paul van der Putten's letter in the International Herald Tribune on 6 April 2008, showed a real and all too rare understanding of China and its inherent problems in the last century.

  On the BBC website, which became accessible in China just a few weeks before the Olympic torch went around the world, Chinese emails flooded in, showing the confusion and passionate hurt experienced by young Chinese:

  – The Dalai Lama supports The Beijing Olympics, as he has stated many times, and agreed that Tibet could be a part of China. Why, I wonder, do both sides, Tibetan and Chinese, never listen to him? And why does this complication almost never play a part in the news I watch in the UK?

  – The 2008 Olympics was voted by the world democratically seven years ago, the UN recognizes China as a country including Tibet. How do we respect that democratic process, both UN and Olympic, when we see the sort of attacks on China's human rights record and democracy constantly reported in the news?

  – What will be said, I wonder, if someone points out that the London Olympics in 2012 should be cancelled because British troops invaded Iraq, are illegally occupying it?

  – What's the difference between "freedom fighters" and "terrorists"? By what standard are we judging? The Western news coverage on the Beijing Olympics seems to follow an agenda as clearly set as any propaganda.

  – There are hundreds of thousands, millions of people who speak English in China. I'd like to know how many British people speak Chinese. Most secondary school children in China know Shakespeare, Dickens and are aware of a wide range of Western music. How many Westerners know of Chinese books or music? Is this because of Western press controls, a deliberate policy by the government or simply arrogance?

  – Why Western media hate China so much? We are not living in the same China as our parents and grandparents had, even though under the same name as PR China. Why none tell this difference to the world from those highly respected and luxurious living foreign media in China?

  'Why' has become not only a word or a question, but symptomatic of a deeper questioning and shock in young Chinese hearts and minds… It could turn China towards a better political system in the future, or, simply destroy their trust in the developed Western world.

  I wonder how many people have realised that the naivety and ignorance of some Western media risks damaging the belief of young Chinese in democracy, and that it could also possibly force the Chinese authorities to slow down the faltering progress of the democracy movement which began in 2008. I don't think most Westerners have any idea how much the Chinese had suffered in the hundred years up to the late 1980s… Twenty years is a very short time for this nation to have the chance during relatively peaceful times to change its thinking, and to learn about freedom and democracy, including how to be with Tibet and Tibetans…

&nb
sp; I believe it would be a great chance for the Chinese people to touch and feel the world through the universal language – of sport and music – if the Beijing Olympics were to succeed. Otherwise, there is a risk that young Chinese may feel the same confusion about democracy and find themselves in conflict with the Western world in the same way as the previous three generations after the Opium War, when China lost its national pride.

  This world will not be in peace if we don't really understand and respect democracy everywhere, if we don't give people all of the information they need to make a choice, and then move on to a peaceful future. This is true all over the world. Humanity has paid so much for its past mistakes because we are too often taught to hate one another.

  As a Chinese media person I struggled with Chinese censorship for a long time before I moved to London in 1997. Now, I feel the same sense of struggle again, but in the West, not with censorship, but with ignorance about my motherland.

  Please, let us all think and work towards not producing more darkness with hate. Only light and the brightness of understanding can destroy darkness.

  ***

  At about 10.30 pm on 12 May 2008, as I was going through the mountain of emails that had built up while I was at a conference in France, one subject with many exclamation marks jumped out at me.

  "North Sichuan, Wenchuan, a 7.8 earthquake at 14:28 on May 12. The tremor was felt in all but three northern provinces but the whole of China has been shaken!!!!!!!!!"

  For the first few seconds, I couldn't believe what I had read, and then, almost immediately, I thought of the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, when nearly 300,000 people lost their lives. (Chinese government statistics list 240,000 dead, though I was told that figure does not include the military, those travelling through the area, or the un-registered migrants who worked in the coal mines.) I felt a chill through my whole body and I couldn't help my tears. Tangshan was a terrible blow to the Chinese people. In my book The Good Women of China, one chapter is about my interview with a group of mothers who all lost their children in that earthquake. Every single morning since then, those women have set an alarm for the time when their beloved children disappeared so that they could pray.

  At the time of writing this on the 18 May 2008, over 32,000 deaths have been confirmed in this latest earthquake, and over 17,000 bodies are still covered by rubble. Thousands of children will have died because the earthquake took place at 2.28pm during afternoon school time. One town, which had a population of tens of thousands, has only 2200 survivors, and their homes have been completely destroyed. Today, China's State Council has decided that 19-21 May will be a national time of mourning for the earthquake victims of Sichuan Wenchuan. It is the first time in China's history that a natural disaster will be mourned nationwide.

  I can see the huge difference from the government's response 30 years ago, when they banned news of Tansghan to save political face and refused international support out of a misplaced and distorted sense of national pride. This time, the Chinese government announced the Sichuan earthquake witness within 58 minutes and asked for international help immediately. The images of crying mothers in amongst the ruins of Sichuan on the front page of Western newspapers have drawn the world's attention from the political chaos of the Olympic torch and I sense a huge sympathy for China's loss. Also, many Chinese have learned and realised that human lives are far more important than any political or editorial angle, as the BBC and other Western media put the Sichuan earthquake as their top story.

  The Chinese internet is full of every kind of Chinese voice: sad laments for the lost and for those single child families, who will never have the chance to have other children; warm thanks to the rescue teams and the People's Liberation Army who have been fighting day and night to save lives; thanks and encouragement for everyone who continues to donate to the poor victims; hatred towards those who allowed the poorly constructed buildings; anger with the millionaires who haven't stood up to help the people lost in this natural disaster; worry about the China Engineering Physics Research Institute, located in Sichuan Mianyang near Wenchuan, because the research station is responsible for China's nuclear weapons – it is hard to imagine the consequences if the reactor was damaged; and warnings about the North Sichuan Dam, which, if it were to break, could flood at least 160,000 lives.

  These voices mostly come from the younger generation, I guess, because most of their parents and grandparents don't know how to use a computer – they are a generation who know, instead, of civil war, political madness, and queuing for food. In seeing those young Chinese united in such a way, in their care, their outrage and national pride, I realise I may be wrong about them. I used to think that they were too comfortable and too rich to understand China's hungry past, or those poor, uneducated peasants and the misunderstood last generations.

  All of this made me think of that song "Dyed with my Blood", again: why does the national flag have to be painted with Chinese blood? I pray for my motherland – I hope there will be peace and strength, rooted in love and happy families, and with friends around the world.

  Acknowledgements

  Before I write every book and after I have finished it, the names of many, many people come to mind, and all of them need to be thanked. Some of them may not appear in the text or form part of the book, but they are a part of what I have become today, the Xinran who is able to write books.

  Aside from my mother and the rest of my family, I probably owe most gratitude to the hands of the midwife who brought me into the world since she was dexterous enough not to drop me on my head and turn me into an idiot. Then there were the "aunties" of my kindergarten who constantly drilled into me that "tree leaves don't grow in the ground, and roots don't grow in the air". Then there were my primary and middle school teachers who taught me truths about nature like "What is red? The sun at dawn! What is black? Coal underground!" so I learned that as well as people, there were other lives that shared our earth. From them, I acquired basic facts such as that while I was fast asleep, there were other people busy labouring away. There is a Chinese orphan whom I can never thank enough: Yinda had never had a home, but he taught me that by imagining what people were doing behind every door, I could rid myself of the misery of being bullied. Then there are those chattering and twittering flocks of friends at university: among them, the weeping, snivelling "bad girls", severely punished for transgressing the rules, who were a spur to me to work hard to become a good Chinese woman. They all helped my Chinese heart become reflective and mature.

  When I was at the radio station in China, it was those listeners who felt I was talking only to them from their radio set that made me understand that China which I had never seen and of which I had no knowledge.

  As for my son, Panpan Xue, from the first Chinese sentence he babbled as a baby, to the first book in English he read about China; from the time, at the age of three, that he asked what China was, to his return to China as a fifteen-year-old volunteer, to teach English to poor mountain children; it was through his growing up that I explored my ability to be a Chinese mother. I want to thank him for being my assistant on the project.

  Then there is my husband, Toby Eady, who, although he can only say five things in Chinese (and one of those is a swear word), has gone in search of China's culture and history, and understands, encourages and supports my "China complex". Without him, I would probably never have had the strength to finish China Witness.

  All in all, the list of people whom I want to thank is enormously long. You could say that what these names make up is a book of my own life. When I thought that I might be able to write a book like this, I shouted my thanks – to life, to every tiny little bit, breath and ray of light around me.

  There is one other factor in these necessary thanks: what exactly is my role in this book? The author with twenty years of investigative achievements to her credit? The scholar who believes she understands China? A guide along the motorways with their forest of signposts? Or an attentive student an
d listener who, by dint of her familiarity with Chinese culture and her passion for its people, has opened one or two doors for Westerners, and walked into China with them? My head still teems, night and day, with the multitudes of things I saw, books I read and things I experienced. So what am I in this book? What is the information which I am so keen to give my readers? What do I hope that they will feel after they have made their journey through it?

  I am actually saying to those who want so much to understand and have things explained to them that time not only forms the construct of our lives, it creates space and clarifies our memories. What has actually happened is that an increasingly clear memory has taken me to the answer to these questions. In May 2006, Toby and I were invited to attend a workshop on literary translation in Holland. For two days, publishers, translators, writers and reporters from thirty-odd countries discussed our different national literatures and argued back and forth about how to get translated works published for the rest of the world to enjoy. The event, enthusiastic, liberating and endlessly thought-provoking, was organised by the NLPVF (the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature) and the chairman who brought us into this space and made it possible for us to enjoy it was Martin Asscher, a Dutch scholar. As we embarked on the day's agenda, and more and more people launched into what became a single-minded debate on literary issues, I realised that it was our conference "maestro" Martin Asscher who was guiding and controlling the way in which our three-sided discussions – on literature, translation and publishing – developed. Yet quite unlike most politicians, teachers and other figures of importance so keen to display their wisdom, he was entirely self-effacing. Instead, he became our "general", allowing each participant's enthusiasm for literature, translation or publishing to blend with his plans, and the needs of world literary thinking to be absorbed by Dutch scholarship. Two days of this and, thanks to Martin, my memory was steeped in debate – and I was just a foreigner and a novice! Through him, I learned to "mediate" my awareness of other cultures, and to contribute my own building blocks to a shared cultural "bridge-building".