by Jianying Zha
Table of Contents
ALSO BY JIANYING ZHA
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Part I - The Entrepreneurs
A Good Tycoon
Postscript
The Turtles
Postscript
The Barefoot Capitalist
Postscript
Part II - The Intellectuals
Beida, Beida!
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Postscript
Enemy of the State
Postscript
Servant of the State
Postscript
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
ALSO BY JIANYING ZHA
IN ENGLISH:
China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture
IN CHINESE:
八十年代 (The Eighties)
说东道西 (Speak East, Talk West)
丛林下的冰河 (River Frozen Under the Jungle)
到美国去, 到美国去！(To America, to America !)
To Siri
Tide players surf the currents,
The red flags they hold up do not even get wet.
弄潮儿向涛头立,
手把红旗旗不湿∘
—Pan Lang (?-1009), Jiu Quan Zi (酒泉子)
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “Memorial Day Address” (1884)
Introduction
Explaining China to Americans has always been a tricky business for me. Born and raised in Beijing, I have ended up, to my complete surprise, living between the United States and China for most of my adult life. But I will never forget the very first questions I had to answer about China, in 1981.
I had just arrived in Columbia, South Carolina. I was twenty-one, I had never been on an airplane before, and I spoke bad, broken English. China had started its reform and open-door policies, but there were not yet many Chinese students in the United States. And no TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) yet in China. So it was a small miracle that I, a student in the Chinese Department of Peking University, actually obtained a scholarship to study in the English Department of the University of South Carolina. Only much later did I realize that this was due largely to the fact that the English Department of USC had never in its history received an application from mainland China—meaning not Taiwan, not Hong Kong, but Big Red China! Evidently the curiosity and the temptation of offering this brave young applicant an opportunity was simply too great to resist. And I remember how much Dr. Ross Roy, chairman of the English department, enjoyed walking me around the campus and introducing me to absolutely everyone we ran into: “This is Miss Zha,” he would start, pausing dramatically before dropping the bomb, “She is from Beijing, China!”
It was in those first bewildering, exciting days of my new American life that Larry Bagwell, a fellow English Department student and a charming, bighearted, tall Southern boy who became my first American buddy, started asking me to explain China. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon, and we were sitting on the lawn drinking Coke after class. “Jane,” Larry said, using the new American name he had given me, at my request, to overcome the impossibility of being called Jianying, “is it true the Chinese eat fried grasshoppers dipped in chocolate sauce as a delicacy?”
“What?” I blinked, almost choking on my Coke. I knew the word “chocolate,” but “grasshoppers”?
If this was half pulling my leg, then Larry’s next questions were certainly more serious: “Does China have TV shows, you know, like soaps and sitcoms? Actually, do Chinese have home television?” Before I could answer, he added apologetically, “We just don’t know anything about China, you see, and some folks here think y’all don’t even have electricity out there!”
This conversation is carved into my memory as a moment of great relief. I realized that I was not the only one so clueless about another big country—about another people and their culture. And it didn’t matter that I thought “soaps” referred to a stack of cleaning squares. I knew what “electricity” and “chocolate” meant in English, which was a darn good start! I knew I would be fine in America.
What I didn’t know then, of course, was how much and how fast my homeland would change! Nor could I predict that, merely fourteen years after Larry so casually tossed the bizarre, alien word “soaps” to me, I would myself write a book in English and publish it in America under the title China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture.
In 2008, Larry finally made it to the grasshopper country. He and his daughter boarded that long transatlantic flight and “did” China. He sent me breathless letters about their bike trip through the Zhejiang countryside, the epiphany they experienced inside the meditation cave of the Tang monk poet Han Shan, the crazy shopping they did in Shanghai. “We are having a swell time here,” Larry wrote, “and the Chinese we meet everywhere have been wonderful to us: your folks are such a warm and generous people.” I was delighted, and wrote back, “I never had the opportunity to reciprocate your hospitality to me back then, but it looks like my folks are helping me to repay some of that old debt.”
I belong to the generation of Chinese who grew up during the Cultural Revolution. My childhood was punctuated with memorable events such as the terrifying night ransacking of our home, witnessing neighbors being beaten to death or jumping to their deaths from the rooftop, my father’s years of absence and receiving monthly letters from the labor camp, attending schools with daily political lectures and few books to read. I finished high school in 1977, and even though Mao Zedong had died the previous year and the Cultural Revolution had ended, we were still sent to do farmwork in a village outside Beijing. Everything was in flux as the Communist Party leadership scrambled to reverse Mao’s policies and put the country on a different track, including reinstating the university entrance exam, which had been suspended for over a decade. That autumn I made a trip back to the city to take the exam, and, months later, as I was plowing the field with villagers, the news came that I was accepted into Peking University!
I will never forget spring 1978, my first euphoric days at Beida, as Peking University is called. At eighteen, I was the youngest in my class, but many of my older classmates had spent a decade or more in factories or on farms. None of us had dreamt of this day—studying at China’s number-one university! To the individuals who remember the Red Guard and those who became the first beneficiaries of reform—disillusioned yet idealistic—the class of 1977 became a symbol and a legend in China. It was a generation burned by radical politics and loss of youth, yet fired up with a sense of mission for the country’s future. Many from that class have moved on to leadership positions in politics, business, academia, culture, and media. Many are near the apex of their careers and influence. They form an elite part of the new establishment in today’s China.
I have taken a slightly different path from that of my peers. My Beida classmates considered me a bit insane for going to South Car
olina—“the Guizhou of America,” as one of them put it—and missing out on the fabulous job offers waiting on our graduation day. But, whether it was a genetic connection to my grandfather, who had left his Hubei hometown in the early part of the last century to study in France, or just a wild curiosity about the outside world and a crazy thirst for adventure, I just had to leave. South Carolina proved to be an enchanting, idyllic first chapter of my American education; it was there that I discovered the charms of Flannery O’Connor and Elvis Presley, camping trips in the Smoky Mountains with guitar and marijuana, and horseback riding on a Southern farm. After transferring to Columbia University, I fell in love with New York, the city that would become my second home. By 1986, however, just as I was growing restless and ambivalent about the prospect of becoming an academic professional, I began to hear the calls from my homeland. Chinese visitors to New York and excited letters from my Beida classmates described a scene of great cultural and intellectual ferment; barriers were being broken down and new ideas and experiments were being put to the test. China sounded like a romantic place buoyed on bright hopes and full of possibilities. I had always wanted to be a writer and to be involved with my country’s change and progress. So in 1987, right after passing my doctoral orals, I left for China.
The next two years were truly exhilarating and memorable. I rejoined my college classmates, made a lot of new intellectual and artist friends, wrote and published novellas and short stories, participated in critical discussions on culture and politics, and helped launch and edit independent journals. Amid all the excitement, my dissertation research comparing the Chinese literature of the Cultural Revolution to the American literature of the Vietnam War got shelved. By spring 1989, I was working as an assistant at the New York Times’s Beijing bureau while adapting one of my novellas into a movie script at the request of Zhang Nuanxin, a leading Chinese film director.
Then, Tiananmen happened. In May 1989 I quit my Times office job to march with friends in prodemocracy demonstrations, and I signed whatever petitions or manifestos came my way. Almost all of my Chinese friends were actively involved in the protest movement. I was standing at the southeast corner of Tiananmen Square on the night of the massacre, watching with a crowd of local citizens while an armed personnel carrier (APC) burned brightly in the night sky below the Tiananmen rostrum. We left only after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers opened fire and a rain of bullets felled a dozen or so people among the loudly cursing and retreating crowd. Ten days after the bloody dawn that scorched my memory, I retreated to America.
The trauma of Tiananmen, the shock of abandoning a thriving Chinese writing career, and the sudden realization that I must now make a permanent home in the United States, where I’d have to try my hand in English if I didn’t want to give up writing completely, led to a period of depression and confusion. Through luck, perseverance, and the therapeutic sharing of reflections with a small group of exile friends, I gradually recovered. I was also extremely fortunate to be able to attend the forums at the Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago directed by Benjamin Lee, who was later to become my husband. The high-caliber discussions gave me a taste of the vigor of American intellectual life. The encouragement and friendship of two distinguished writers I met there, the journalist Jane Kramer and the novelist Lore Segal, inspired me to view writing in English not just as a forced challenge but also as an exciting adventure that would give me a new pair of eyes and wings. So, in the 1990s, between jobs, married life, and research trips to China, I produced my first English-language book (China Pop), wrote a monthly column for a Hong Kong magazine, and recorded essays for the Voice of America. After Ben went to teach at Rice University and our daughter Siri was born, we succumbed to suburban Houston. But I never forgot China.
In 2003, I received a Guggenheim Fellowship award, Ben was going on sabbatical leave, and Siri was turning seven in Houston, Texas, where our great plan of raising a bilingual, bicultural child was not happening. It was therefore with a good deal of excitement and anticipation that we packed up and moved to Beijing in August 2003.
Well, it turned out that seven-year-olds are far nimbler adapters of language and culture than grown-ups, even though in this case the grown-up in question was a home-returning native! Within a year, Siri went from speaking no Mandarin and crying “Chinese school is prison!” and “I was born to have recess!” to being at the top of her class and chitchatting in Beijing slang with our neighbors and her new friends. Meanwhile, I was still thrashing and groping. I had planned to write another book about China, but this new Beijing that was my home city, this new China that was my homeland, had again changed so much since I last lived there that I felt at once amazed, excited, intrigued, and clueless. What’s behind all these high-rises looming on the city’s horizon? How can new ones pop up every week? What’s on the minds of all these people rushing about with seemingly endless energy? Are they happy, excited, full of hopes and dreams, or upset, tired, and dazed? I, for one, wasn’t even sure sometimes if I was in a spell or in the clouds. But I was determined to find my way back into Chinese life, and I didn’t want to write about it like a foreign outsider.
I made every effort to engage in an authentic way with Chinese cultural life. While renewing old friendships and making new contacts, I also worked as a special feature writer and advisor for the Beijing lifestyle magazine Le. To feel the local pulse and vibe, I ran around the city with Le’s young reporters covering fresh and sometimes idiosyncratic subjects and characters. To get a sense of the new Chinese urban-middle-class experience, I did what every local homeowner did: I supervised the renovation of my apartment in Beijing. What really thrust me back into the Chinese public eye, however, was a book I produced in Chinese, The Eighties (八十年代). Written as conversations with a dozen of China’s leading creative minds, it was a cultural retrospective on the 1980s, the momentous decade that paved the way to Tiananmen. Many of the twelve individuals I interviewed for the book—artists, scholars, and intellectual gurus—were my old friends. Half of them had gone abroad and then returned, like me; for me and perhaps for them as well, the book closed a personal loop on a tragic, important era.
When the book came out in 2006, the maelstrom of media coverage and passionate reader response took me by total surprise. The Eighties ended up at the top of the sales charts in many bookstores, stirring up a wave of nostalgia and curiosity among young people about an idealistic era they hardly knew existed. A good deal of public discussion about the country’s memory gaps followed; critics argued that, as China rose as an economic powerhouse, the need to come to terms with the past and forge a cultural renaissance was becoming urgent. The interest in historical memory also spawned more books and television programs probing neglected and repressed areas of the country’s recent past. In 2010, The Eighties was voted one of the most influential books of the previous decade in China. In any case, public attention pulled me into the media circuit, and I was frequently invited to comment on all kinds of topics of public interest in the Chinese press and on television.
By then, I had drafted a portion of this book and also had taken a job as the China representative for an American research institute that sent me on regular trips to India and the United States and demanded increasingly more time and energy. I knew I was getting overextended. I was also aware of the danger of losing one’s head in the limelight of the public’s gaze. Yet the chance to join a community of kindred spirits to push for meaningful change and to build a more democratic, humane China was too enticing to ignore. The work also offered me an insider’s perspective on Chinese media and censorship politics. Working on The Eighties, I was upset and argued with the Sanlian Press editors who deleted sections of the manuscript and took out an entire chapter before they printed the book, and I was not totally consoled by the uncut edition printed in Hong Kong but banned from the Mainland. Only gradually, after working with various state media and becoming a regular guest on a popular television talk show on curren
t affairs, did I come to understand and appreciate those Chinese journalists and media professionals who are such seasoned veterans in the art of dodging censorship and playing guerrilla wars with the language police in their tenacious efforts to push the boundaries for freer speech.
Of course, I also learned more about the dark side, the everpresent shadows of Big Brother and the price of living with compromises in order to retain one’s option to speak. I could never forget the week after Boris Yeltsin died, and we recorded a talk show episode discussing Yeltsin’s legacy in Russia’s democratization. Before we even left the studio, the episode was killed by the censors, and everyone chain-smoked in the makeup room, angry and despondent. We had to redo the episode, talking about our love for Russian literature instead. Experiences like that, however, did not destroy our resolve to keep pushing, with patience and moderation, toward a better tomorrow. I was ecstatic to be no longer just an observer; I had found my way back into Chinese life.
Some of this experience and insight has helped me in writing this book—in rendering a cleared-eyed yet compassionate portrait of characters situated in all the subtle complexities of this fastchanging China. As I delved deeper into the Chinese mind-set and psychic space, and as I compiled a large amount of data and materials for this book, I also contemplated ways of devising a meaningful narrative form to depict a society and a people living in a space entangled in its own past burdens and future aspirations.
