Isham Cook
The first in a related series of novels culminating in the author's more fully fleshed out and satisfying That Man in Our Lives.
Shanghai 1930s by a contemporary American reporter, told through the eyes of a real-life friend and sex worker.
Classic account of Old Beijing of the 1930s, with a bit too much dry emphasis on temples and palaces to the exclusion of life and the people.
Brilliant, incisive essays on sex politics in the US in the last quarter of the 20th century by a lesbian firebrand who lived through it.
In his debut novel, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside, Quincy Carroll crafted an engrossing tale of foreigners teaching at a rural college in China's Hunan Province, a book whose vivid realism suggested an autobiographical component with the central protagonist, the young teacher Daniel, standing in as the author disguised. His new novel, Unwelcome, is not only more transparently autobiographical, it heaves with an eruptive, tormented force that appears to have been kept in check only by the stopgap measure of the earlier novel. I don't think I've ever read a book, whether novel or memoir, whose author deconstructs himself so mercilessly.
Part of this is symptomatic of the woke generation's fondness for male-bashing, in this case, self-flagellation, particularly when it comes to white males' penchant for sexually colonizing Asian females (the novel's protagonist, Cole, is of mixed Chinese and white American parentage, while the events alternate between the Bay Area and Changsha in Hunan Province). But what makes this novel a uniquely brutal reading experience from start to finish, and why it merits five stars despite a few gaping fissures I won't go into here to avoid spoilers, is the cognitive dissonance screeching across the narrative as to how Carroll was ever able to gain the distance and objectivity to pen the narrative at all, much less with such skill—the pitch-perfect multiplicity of voices and the tightly alternating, dramatically deft set-pieces—if he is indeed the same person as the protagonist.
For no one comes off as a more monumental clown than Cole, with the possible exception of Jacob Acerbi in his 2019 memoir of China, Chaos and Grime (a literary mess aptly expressed by its title), or Matthew Evans, the comic bumpkin of Tom Carter's entertaining romp of a biography, An American Bum in China (2019 – do we have a new school in the brewing—the China expat loser?). Carroll also sacrifices the satisfying closure of the rounded ending aesthetically demanded of the novel for the agonizingly open-ended, chasm-wide question: Was it RAPE?
My sense is that he will either have nothing more to say after this glimpse into the abyss or will next give birth to something even more monstrous and disturbing—and hence more evidence, precisely due to his searing honesty, of being a novelist to reckon with.
I try to keep abreast of expat fiction about China, being an expat author myself, and am especially interested in short story collections, given the relative dearth of them. This collection by writer and musician Kevin McGeary is, if not terribly innovative or pathbreaking, nonetheless pleasantly surprising and satisfying. One danger of expat fiction exclusively featuring Chinese characters is the whiff of unintentional racism that results, the idea that foreigners have no business involving themselves directly in the lives of the Chinese (read: we should keep to our own). Here I recall a similarly satisfying–and limited–collection by Jonathan Tel, The Beijing of Possibilities, who himself does not feature in any of his stories. While most of the tales in McGeary's volume present a wholly Chinese cast, the author does appear in two of them, the first, “The 27 Club,” containing some frank sexual touches. The stories are nicely imagined, and while the narratives tend to shift forward and backward in time, each has an arc and a dramatic development in which something happens, something explodes (figuratively speaking). My favorite is “Li Lei's Big Escape,” with its disarming and intriguing group of patients in a mental hospital, some of whom don't belong there but inevitably become psychologically disabled, rather than cured, by their very environment. We learn the awful trajectory that sends the protagonist, Li Lei, to a mental institution, originating with her father's uninvited visits to her bedroom during puberty. (The “naked wedding” of the title story, by the way, isn't what you imagine; it simply refers to a wedding in which the groom isn't required to have already purchased the obligatory house and car.)
Whereas most other contemporary expat China fiction tends to suffer from timidity, some of McGeary's stories are refreshingly disturbing. That's a good thing. (Lest you think the Chinese are themselves averse to unsettling or shocking fiction, look no further than Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars, or Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby.) The only major shortcoming of McGeary's collection is that it's too slim – only seven stories. Let's hope he keeps at it and we see another, longer book, perhaps a novel, come out down the line.
A couple THC-infused IPAs should put me into a loopy-enough frame of mind to approach this strange poetic animal sideways. If I'm having trouble making sense of the title, it's because my superego has already repressed its import; but it is indeed a pun. And more to the point, if I don't comprehend much of the poetry, I don't need to. Who says we must arrive at the “meaning” of something as shape-shifting as a poem, much less a poet who makes it her business to investigate the subliminal unconscious, the realm of literary riot where religious and sexual symbols freely fuse and couple? The surrealist poets also worked with primeval material, yet their singsong word collages seem banal by comparison: “...clean out your cockpit of intoxicated spiders / Tear the sexual leaves of grief from your heart / Pluck the feathers of nostalgia from your nipples / Push the slowmoving masochistic mudslide / of contralto voices / from your afternoon skull of anxiety” (Jayne Cortez, from the collection Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion). And then there's the likes of Sylvia Plath (echoes of which appear in Krieger), who mastered poetry as a musical vehicle, an oral art meant to be read aloud, an incantatory poetry of violence which while unconstrained by the strictures of suburban America was also unmoored from reality and sanity, but even Plath seems tame next to Krieger's serpentine cadences: “every sabbath eve in my rape dreams I swaddle christ's body in spray-on glitter & kitty litter as in, literal pedigree: we bred a savior from king David and a rainstorm spitting brain matter simultaneously baby, rave zombie, and crane-lifted detonator, watch how he weeps for the seepage to fall down....and all he could muster was bad manna & flames the size of a mustard seed” (from “swaddling plot”). For the benefit of the perplexed, she concludes the volume on a more conventional note with her “Sacreligion Manifesto”: “TODAY SOMEBODY ASKED ME IF I HAD ANY ‘INTEREST' IN WRITING ABOUT THINGS OTHER THAN GODDAMN! AND SEXUALITY....PLEASE. SO MAYBE THIS IS ME: THREE PARTS PUNISHMENT JUNKIE AND SEVEN TENTACLES SAD MONSTER-BAITING JUST TO MAKE YOU STARE AWHILE. BUT SERIOUSLY: LANGUAGE IS MY FUCKTOY” (all caps are Krieger's).
For starters I'd say a more apt title for this collection of tales set in Hong Kong than the redundant “Noir” would have been the upbeat “Hong Kong Fantasy” or “Hong Kong Rhapsody” or the like, only to drag the reader ironically down to the gritty reality the city has always represented. You don't need to end your Hong Kong story on a “dark note” (as the editors instructed the participating authors) when that's already the character of the place.
Co-editor Jason Y. Ng starts things off with the subtly wrought “Ghost of Yulan Past,” but the bulk of the collection is firmly grounded in the plausible, despite ample servings of the macabre: the cop whose member is sliced off by his prostitute-lover which opens James Tam's “Phoenix Moon,” the tourists dismembered in a horror costume shop in Shannon Young's “Blood on the Steps,” or the distraught 12-year old girl in Carmen Suen's “Fourteen,” who doesn't realize she's already dead after she drowns while drugged.
My favorites don't have much to do with horror or noir proper but are simply well-told psychological thrillers condensed into short-story format, involving ordinary couples and an inexorable explosion of pent-up rage. In Tiffany Hawk's “You Deserve More,” a husband colludes with his wife's lover in the most shocking manner to humiliate her. In Christina Liang's “A View to Die For,” a woman impulsively sleeps with her best friend's son, with more shocking consequences.
On a whole a satisfying collection, though it's too bad co-editor Susan Blumberg-Kason didn't herself contribute a story, as her spooky memoir Good Chinese Wife could itself be described as noir writ large, if we understand the term to include the perverting and twisting of the most conventional human relationships by destructive impulses.
Before buying a book I look at the long customer reviews in the 3-4 star as well as 5-star range (indicating the customer actually read the book and took it seriously enough to write the review), to get a more honest appraisal than the editorial reviews and cover blurbs. If you scroll through the reviews on the Amazon page of Good Chinese Wife you'll find one very long, angry 2-star review by Reader (“Just because you're from different cultures doesn't mean your differences are cultural”), which accuses the author of blaming Chinese culture for her failed marriage and of being racist against the Chinese. It's an unfair, one-sided review which does make the valid point that you don't need cultural or ethnic differences to explain relationship problems. I also notice that most of the negative reviews are by women, as if blaming the “whiny,” “spoiled” author for striking a nerve in their own lives.
There are clearly cultural reasons, on top of personality differences, for this marriage gone bad. These intercultural conflicts are precisely what makes Blumberg-Kason's memoir so readable and intriguing. One the one hand, Cai is by any standard a big baby of narcissistic proportions; on the other, he's very much a product of his culture, coming from a traditional family in a semi-rural backwater region, with the usual timeworn patriarchal prejudices favoring sons over daughters. He was spoiled as many males in China are, brought up to expect the woman in his life (his mother, later his wife) to take care of and baby him. The function of a wife is to produce a son, turn it over to his (not her) parents for up-bringing, and then get out of the way so he can get back to his partying and philandering (and porn watching in Cai's case). In this context, Cai's behavior was predictable and expected, or at least not surprising.
The sadness - and mystery - at the heart of this story, contrary to some reviewers, isn't just that the heroine stayed in her relationship so long (admittedly not a simple matter to leave when trapped in her husband Cai's regime of fear) but that she married the guy in the first place. Sure, he comes off as initially cultured, handsome and charming. One would think a guy finishing up his PhD in traditional Chinese and Taoist music and studying under famed scholars in Hong Kong would have something to offer as a soul mate, a Platonic or intellectual connection, if everything else is wanting, but Cai turns out to be a relentlessly, mindbogglingly boring person. I tried to give him credit and suspected perhaps an unacknowledged reason for his developing contempt toward Susan was her lack of appreciation for his academic specialty, her own possible lack of culture and interest in music. But nowhere in the story does Cai seem to show the slightest interest in his specialty himself (if that is, we take her account to be generally truthful and I see no reason it isn't). There is no music in the house, just television and porn, no discussion whatsoever of music in any way shape or form, no concert-going, nothing. Personally, I would soon sniff out the fact that a person I was dating had no interest in her purported life passion but was just going through the motions, and would drop her fast; if she couldn't take her own vocation seriously how could she take me seriously?
This conundrum aside, I give Good Chinese Wife 5 stars for its honesty, its clear, systematic, introspective and wholly plausible recounting of the author's tortured journey to eventual self-recognition and truth. It has a fairy tale-like appeal with its universal theme of the loving sweetheart enthralled and then entrapped in her dark prince's perverted castle. Susan does not come off in the least as ignorant or prejudiced, as some reviewers suggest; she was highly attuned to Chinese culture and fascinated by it in her own right, but with such a large, pure heart and naive belief in love she was inevitably tragic material, though with a happy ending.
There is a lazy, hidebound assumption that people who work as English teachers abroad lack the qualifications to hack out a career back home, and it's the only job the “losers” and “bottom feeders” can find. But it's a hackneyed cliché, one that obscures the real class of losers. Think about it. To be able to go abroad, all by yourself, is an impressive feat. You need, for starters, to have a certain imaginative capacity, a conception that there are other countries in the world, and that it's possible to visit them and even live in them. This is more than can be said for many Americans. On my occasional trips back home, I am thrust into a sharply different reality. There is a dim awareness of my just having returned from somewhere, though I no longer entertain any expectation I will be asked about my home of the past twenty-five years. Except for: “Beijing? Where's that again, Lebanon?” The conversation then reverts to the insular world of personal problems inhabited by family and friends. Then there's the smarts required to plan a trip: how to apply for a passport and whether you even qualify for one, and a visa, whatever that is. You need spare money, enough at least for international plane fare. For those seeking to find work abroad, you need the savvy to know how to procure a fake diploma and to pass for a college-educated person in your job application, not to mention where to apply for a job. To be able to do all of this requires a mental sophistication above and beyond a great many people. Yes, people back home, people around you, the real losers.
Tom Carter's An American Bum in China is the real-life tale of what happens when one has just enough native wit to make it to China but not enough to hold down a job. It is saying something, however, that Matthew Evans is able to wiggle his way into the country not once but five times (albeit twice illegally) and live out his days there in the most dramatic fashion. While it's painful to watch as the universities which hired him in turn, Nanjing Agriculture University and East China Normal University, realize all too slowly Evans had faked his academic credentials and had never taught a class in his life, nonetheless we cannot but admire his nerve, or should I say verve, in pulling off the ruse. Otherwise mostly jobless in China, arrested for vagrancy, penniless, sleeping in hotel lobbies, McDonald's restaurants and ATM booths while subsisting on ketchup packets, losing his passport while attempting to sell it in Burma after sneaking through a border fence, the guy indeed has incredible staying power and an unfathomable knack for living on the edge. We begin to root for Evans as little acts of sympathy enable him to extend his misery in the country a few more days without perishing – thirty dollars wired by his grandmother here, girls met online throwing a few coins his way there – though he'd have been better off back in a Chinese jail where he at least would have been fed before once again being deported directly back to Muscatine, Iowa, instead of sneaking over to Hong Kong and mooching off umbrella protesters and begging on a Macao sidewalk, after being spat out of the Mainland once and for all. Weeks without showering or a change of clothes are minor inconveniences; what's more enlightening is how many days one can survive without food before mental disorientation from extreme ketogenesis sets in.
I suspect many readers, U.S. readers in particular, will regard Matthew Evans as a disgrace. Carter's engaging narrative, at once wry and affectionately told, has a built-in liability, its distasteful subject matter, which may keep book reviewers at arm's length as well. To wallow in such a life and have it decked out as literature will not gain much sympathy from those of Protestant work-ethic heritage (those who read books anyway). Evans stands for everything people of all creeds, persuasions and lifestyles – from Christians to anarchists, all whose calling is the purposeful life – are mortally against. Even the publisher betrays uneasiness with its subject matter, gathering up the dirt and the mess within the confines of a neat and tidy cover design and carefully spaced rustic font. The fact that hordes of people do live like this, like tramps and bums, makes the narrative all the more disturbing – for serving as a mirror and commentary on the darker side of American capitalism. John Dobson's homespun illustrations nicely complement the text, but I would have preferred to see the designer take a more roughshod approach, more fitting to the content, one imitative, say, of a torn and frayed cover and stains and splotches on the interior pages, what a book would end up looking like in Evans' hands after a few days, now sitting uncomfortably on your coffee table.
Still, I have a different take on things. I see Evans' role and agenda as quite pointed and intentional, almost poetic and celebratory, even if he himself could hardly articulate it: that of comic protagonist, jester, in the staid court of Communist China. Evans caught the tail end of an era when lowlife expats were allowed in and indulged to a degree, before being spat out. He took this project to its logical extreme, seeing how far it was possible to push things, how low he could go, and to this extent was a pioneer, of a very special sort.
The novel gets off to an enticing and erotic start but can't sustain the sexual tension throughout.
Even before this book came to press it was already in the thick of polemic and controversy - for all the wrong reasons. Some advance-copy reviews by feminist editors in the expat zines of Beijing and Shanghai have been withering, particularly of editor Tom Carter's own “exploitative” and “juvenile” contributing story on a brothel visit (e.g. http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/features/Books__Film-Book_reviews/11883/Unsavory-Elements.html). It is actually one of the best pieces in the book, its slapstick style perfectly suited to the tawdry circumstances of a group of clumsy foreigners haggling in the shabbier variety of Chinese brothel. It is the only story in the entire collection, in fact, that merits the book's title. Before I came to the book, I was expecting and hoping for just that, something unsavory, stories of a refreshingly seedy and disreputable nature, peeling back a new layer of reality in Chinese society as more and more foreign pioneers venture deeper into the country. Inevitably, someone would take it upon himself to dredge up a collection of lascivious or discomfiting encounters and slap it together as a book. What we have here instead, alas, is a much more banal take on “unsavory elements”: “the communist propaganda machine” use of the phrase (as Carter first recalled it) to describe anyone of questionable, less than revolutionary morals. Foreigners - formerly “foreign devils” - are by definition unsavory; their mere presence in the Middle Kingdom unsavory. It is not possible to be a foreigner in China and not simultaneously bumbling, gauche, vulgar and unsavory. Thus any random collection of non-fiction stories of foreign devils wandering around or working and living in China will do. The 28 contributors represent quite a spread, scattered about the country in pretty much all walks of life, but what cannot be said about them (with a few exceptions) is that they are unsavory. They are, on the contrary, painstakingly polite, respectful and normal. They are strenuously family-friendly; nine of the stories - those by Levy, Paul, Muller, Bratt, Arrington, Washburn, Solimine, Watts, and Conley - concern actual families and children or the teaching of children. The pieces are all good clean fun, worthy of inclusion in Reader's Digest or those bland, antiseptic Intensive/Extensive Reading textbooks for freshmen English majors in Chinese universities. Inevitably, the collection is uneven. The pieces by Peter Hessler and Simon Winchester are predictably the most assuredly written, though they don't really tell us anything we can't get from their own books about China. Meyer, Polly, Earnshaw, Spurrier, and Kitto are competent writers but fail to particularly stand out, unlike Watts' piece on the German botanist and eccentric Josef Margraf, and Fuchs on Tibetan muleteers, which benefit from their intriguing subject matter. Stevenson mars his intriguing subject matter of life in a Chinese prison with snideness (here I direct readers instead to the extraordinary book [b:Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China 943934 Prisoner 13498 A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China Robert H. Davies https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1179672933l/943934.SY75.jpg 928870] by Robert H. Davies of his experience in Chinese prisons). Humes' horrific account of being violently mugged suffers from his gratuitous histrionics while recovering in the hospital; the tantalizing question and cliffhanger of how he was able to pay for the huge medical expenses (without any cash or insurance) is hinted at and then forgotten. Some pieces lack contextualization, like Eikenburg's account of her daring courtship with a Chinese male, but what decade is she referring to, exactly? Interracial relationships on the Mainland are far more ubiquitous and accepted now than two or three decades ago, when I imagine her relationship took place; a reader unfamiliar with China might wrongly assume things are as stringent and racist today as ever.If I had been given the same anthology project with the same title and the same contributors to choose from, I would keep three. I would start the book off with Winchester's piece as a prologue (instead of its current slot as epilogue), then proceed with the spicy if rather innocuous account of KTV escorts among China's privileged by Susie Gordon, followed by Carter's aforementioned piece. For the succeeding stories, I would have to find alternative, more intrepid contributors willing to challenge bourgeois readerly expectations and really get down and rock ‘n' roll in China's seamy, truly unsavory underside. After all, I would only be doing what China's own writers have already done, like Wang Shuo, Jia Pingwa and Zhu Wen back in the 1980s depicting life among hoodlums and lumpen elements at large or the graphic accounts of casual sex and drug use by Hong Ying, Wei Hui, Mian Mian and other female writers of the 1990s. Until that happens, pass on the word of Tom Carter's enticing new collection at the local bake sale or church group back home when queried on a latest wholesome introduction to China to curl up at the fireplace with.
Late in the book there is a disturbing account of a small-scale business operation in an apartment in Dongguan, Guangdong Province. The male running it keeps his female underlings working all day and forbids to them to leave the apartment except for a few hours once a week; they sleep in a cramped dormitory-style bedroom. Quiz: this operation is A) a brothel, B) a sweatshop, C) a religious cult, D) none of the above. D is correct: it's a private English language school for adults, mainly female factory workers between jobs who want to gain English credentials. Their teacher's notion of language learning is, like so much in China, quantitative-based and modeled on the factory assembly line: a machine he invented rapidly rotate words which the students must memorize as they flash by. This episode in Leslie Chang's book is representative in presenting two aspects of life in China for the hundreds of millions of migrant workers trying to achieve career stability or success in the city. On the one hand, there is the optimistic assessment, emphasized by Chang throughout the book, namely the freedom migrants now have to leave the village and go where opportunity beckons, with increasing numbers of success stories, primarily for female migrants, who often paradoxically enjoy greater freedom than males due to the obligations of male migrants to return to the village and care for their family. As Chang recounts with the stories of two migrants she befriended and followed for two years, Min and Chunming, the choices young Chinese women from the countryside now have at their disposal for upward mobility can be compared to the freedom and allure of worldwide travel young people from the developed world enjoy.
On the other hand, there is a powerful counterforce holding many Chinese back from freedom and autonomy: the imposing psychological control of group conformity. As a longtime American resident in China, I see this all the time in numerous guises among all social strata, not just migrants (and I write about this in my website attached to my Amazon profile). Although it is true that working conditions in factories have been improving over the past few years as workers learn about their rights and bargaining power through better communication (the internet) as well as negative publicity about labor exploitation at Foxconn, this still largely applies to skilled factory workers. For countless other workers in the service industry (restaurants, shop workers, the sex industry), working conditions remain awful - 12-14 hour days, 1-2 days off per month, minimum wage. Educated white-collar workers, for their part, experience a different kind of exploitation, hardly less grim: typically just as long working hours (though varying considerably from company to company) or 24-hour cellphone monitoring when off work, with elaborate penalty systems for failure to respond immediately to cellphone summons or other minor infractions (one highly educated female I know who worked as a journalist for a national newspaper quit because they were docking too much of her pay each month for largely unspecified penalties).
So returning to the aforementioned English training school, where Chang would describe the conditions experienced by these women as a matter of personal freedom and choice, we also recoil at the psychological coercion involved, which prevents them from rebelling, protesting and leaving. To be sure, this school is a bizarre exception, and most English schools in China, even unaccredited ones, are run like normal schools, with students present only during class hours. But another book needs to be written that deals with the dark side of China's economic success, even in these upwardly mobile times. It's good to have Chang's upbeat account, but for every migrant who achieves success like Min, how many millions of Chinese (including the educated class) remain locked and paralyzed in their internal cages of fear and anger, quietly spending their entire waking hours making superiors rich while they receive a pittance (not to mention the horrifying ongoing problem of companies that don't pay their workers at all, even an entire year's promised wages, folding up operations just before the Spring Festival and disappearing). After years of teaching in Chinese universities, I could see the mental slavery all around me on university campuses, which unlike universities almost anywhere in the world, are completely void of any signs of student protests. Largely enabling and ensuring China's economic expansion, in short, is group coercion and internalized fear on a scale few other societies know.
The idea of devoting a book not just to the history of China's Grand Canal but to its present state is a good idea, and I'm surprised no one else has done it (at least in English). It often takes foreigners to actually view Chinese history as something that includes the present, not just the musty past, as the Chinese themselves tend to see “history,” eliciting from them much yawning. Of course, the reason why history as it is taught in China does not include the present is that the present often departs from the carefully scripted official story, according to which modern China's history ends in 1949 and after which there is no more history to write, because the country's socialist destiny has been reached, apart from a handful of ongoing self-congratulatory milestones - the Beijing Olympics, the space program, etc. So to write a history that addresses the reality of something in the present is quite a radical idea in China. D'Arcy-Brown found this out in his numerous encounters with baffled and suspicious police along the Canal who wanted to know what he was doing there.
Most of the Grand Canal today, it turns out, is not a pretty sight. Only the southern length, from Hangzhou north to Jining, has enough water to continue to be used mainly for coal transport on barges, some of which the author was lucky enough to be allowed onto after bribing the captain. The northern length is largely bone dry, despite a few brief showcase stretches passing through Tianjin, the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou and a few other cities, that have been beautified with parks and monuments. Elsewhere for long lengths of the canal the author could not even gain access, stuck in hotels in nearby cities and monitored by the police. His intrepid attempt to chart the entire canal, while not an unqualified success, is impressive enough that I doubt anyone else will need or want to try to surpass it. And fortunately for the reader, D'Arcy-Brown writes well. There are many evocative descriptions, seamlessly weaving past and present to flesh out the geographical or historical context, where a more prosaic account in the hands of a less imaginative writer would have less to say.
My issue with the book has to do with strategy. If I were to write such a book, I would stick closer to the Canal, spending more time on technical particulars: what is a canal, how this canal is different from others, what exactly is involved in its construction, more again about the huge loss of life (comparable to the millions of laborers who died building the Great Wall), what future prospects for the canal are technically feasible, and so forth. While Darcy-Brown does touch on these issues, far more space is allotted to things that have nothing to do with the canal. Instead, he has cast the Canal as a metaphor for China itself in order to spin off a wide-ranging essay on all aspects of contemporary Chinese society. This might work for readers unfamiliar with the country and looking for the latest capsule account. What made many passages of the book virtually unreadable for me despite the general quality of its writing was the frequent denouncing of the Chinese Government by your predictable know-it-all Westerner, the Westerner who is needed to channel the secret aspirations of the Chinese people, who knows what's right for China. I don't have much of a soft spot for the Party myself. But when yet another “objective” reportorial travel writer goes through the usual laundry list of corruption, inequality, repression, etc., as if culled from Western media reports, the risk is smugness and sanctimony. Leave speaking out against the Government to the Chinese. There's enough in China to preoccupy, mystify, appall and entrance the rest of us without having to resort to the same old cliché-ridden Western narrative about China's lack of democracy and the common people's yearning for freedom. Spare me.
Based on the thumbnail image of the book's cover, even with the hot woman and the tasteful design, and knowing only it was some kind of photographic spread on China, I feared “coffee table book” - or worse, cheesy Chinese variety that would actually mar my coffee table, the sort you can find in the tourist bookshops with washed-out reproductions, incoherent English and sappy token displays of ethnic minorities dancing in their costumes.
The actual book, once in my hands, is unlike any other book I've seen, including those in the photojournalism genre. It has a surprisingly small trim size of only 6 x 6 inches, but at 638 pages and over 2 inches thick and weighing almost 3 pounds, it's not a small book (and probably better suited to hardcover than its fragile paper binding). The weight is legitimated on the inside with the high-quality paper stock and what I'd guess approaches 1,000 high-resolution photo reproductions, capturing the author's two years of traveling to every province of China frequently under spartan and the roughest of conditions. Each province is prefaced with a map and a concisely written pitch, along with beautifully succinct, haiku-like captions for many of the photos, demonstrating that the author's skills as a photographer are matched by appropriate writing talent. The descriptions and the variety of photographic subjects - rural and urban landscapes, ordinary daily objects transfigured by the camera, and lots and lots of unforgettable people - seem to form a narrative that pulls one along the lengthy book, though most readers will probably prefer to dip into it at random than go through the whole thing at one shot. Regardless, it fulfills its evident purpose in being a comprehensive and enticing introduction to the country for people who haven't been to China, and equally interesting as well for those conversant with the country (I myself have lived in China for 13 years).
Now for a more critical angle. The gold standard of “intrepid” or “hardcore” photojournalism books and one that will probably never be equaled is surely American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass by the Dane Jacob Holdt. Holdt arrived in the US in 1971 with $40 in his pocket and spent the next 5 years hitchhiking over 100,000 miles through 48 states and living with 350 families, taking 15,000 photos (selling his blood to buy film) and culling them down to 700 in his book, which are balanced by a substantial and moving narrative of his encounters with the many people he met, delving into their lives with a shocking empathy and intimacy (often sleeping with both women and men to dialogue at the deepest human level), and unflinchingly capturing with his lens the most horrific but sympathetic images of poverty and decrepitude.
Personally, I would like to see the Chinese equivalent of Holdt's book. I suspect Tom Carter may even have witnessed some such darker scenarios or ruder encounters with people and made an understandable strategic decision not to include them, inasmuch as he seems to be positioning his book at the more “polite” end of the photojournalism spectrum, calibrated not to ruffle any feathers in China, where only the positive side of things tends to be presented. Thus he does not refer to himself in the first person but adopts the “objective” reportorial “the author,” and when he almost dies during extreme weather on the 5,600-meter Drolma-La pass if it weren't for “a Ngari pilgrim woman” who “appeared as my own private Tibetan goddess of mercy, literally carrying me the remainder of the spiritual circuit,” that's all we're told. I want more; I want to hear the dark side of travel and see the underbelly of the country, not just the picture-perfect promotional product. The author is certainly qualified to do this, and I invite him to consider these possibilities for another project.
The author, a Norwegian who has spent two decades in China and is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin, certainly has the qualifications to write a book about this country and can be expected to have much of interest to relate. Unlike the usual more contemplative or journalistic accounts of the country, Cecilie Gamst Berg adopts a breezy, conversational, humorous approach, designed to elicit non-stop, uproarious laughter at the everyday “surrealism” (her operating term) of China.
From the Chinese standpoint, Berg's very presence is a bit surreal, in that she is regularly taken for an American, as all white foreigners are. She discovers locals at the many schools where she volunteers her services to be perplexed as well and unhappy to learn she's not an American or British native, as how could she possibly speak, let alone teach, English? (The reader can rest assured that the author's English is fluent to the point of being indistinguishable from that of a native English speaker's, or if anything better, as she sprinkles her text with a dexterous use of English idioms.)
Hong Kongers are more used to foreigners, of course, but despite her many years in Hong Kong and command of Cantonese, it is assumed by the locals there that no foreigner could possibly learn the language, and they obtusely refuse to engage her, regularly answering her Cantonese with English. I can attest the same occurs on the Mainland; my Mandarin is regularly answered with English, but the difference here is that they need to show off or simply have no one to practice with, in contrast to the much greater foothold English has in Hong Kong. But no matter how clearly I speak Mandarin (including nailing all the tones down), they fail to comprehend, as again, foreigners by definition can't learn Chinese, and therefore what is coming out of my mouth must either be insane gibberish or actually a strange form of English that is meant to fluster or mock their own limited English ability. Berg's many depictions of conversational breakdowns from the double whammy of a huge cultural and linguistic chasm will resonate with anyone who has spent time in the East.
At its best, Berg's style has spiciness to it, like the Sichuan cuisine she loves and declares “the best food in the world.” She does not mince her words at things that rile her: “today's Communist Party needs Mao as a rallying point for the nationalism they have been relentlessly pushing as China's new religion for the last few years....Because to be honest, the party hasn't of late been subject to the reverence and open-mouthed saliva-dripping awe from the masses that it feels is its due.” Elsewhere, however, her chattiness gets in the way and the narrative tension deflates into one too many stale card-playing, beer-drinking routines: “All right: I'd just have to go by myself. It would be fun anyway, I just knew it! Just like Sichuan or even better. Beer-filled dinners lasting long into the night, cards every day, teachers' psycho hour... I was ready to descend on Xinjiang province again.”
Perhaps because I've lived in China many years myself and all the hard edges and absurdities of the country no longer startle me, I found myself easily putting the book down and a bit of a chore to keep having to get through the rest. It does have a cast of memorable, mostly male, characters whom Berg meets, typically on trains, with her gift for gab and picking up strangers. Curiously, after so much socializing with Chinese men, one wonders where things are heading and why none of these encounters ends up deliciously in the sack. More frankness and detail in this regard might have spiced up the narrative even more, at least for me. Sex does occur between foreigners and locals and in my opinion is precisely the ingredient missing from so many Western accounts of China. In this respect they merely replicate in mirror image the Chinese penchant for being puritanical and morally fastidious when it comes to describing their own country. (I gather Berg's previous book Blonde Lotus is far more lascivious, in the guise of her semi-fictional protagonist, though I've yet to read it.)
But while not terribly informative for longtime China expats, I could see how this book, in all fairness, might be just the right sort of entertaining introduction for newcomers to China, particularly those contemplating a lengthy trek or sojourn in the country and want to know what they're getting into.
This memoir picks up where the last China memoir I read (and reviewed on Amazon) left off, Peter Liu's Mirror: A Loss of Innocence in Mao's China, recounting that author's 30 years in the Chinese penal system until his release in the late '70s (actually late '80s as he was kept in the prison another decade but given a livable salary for his labor). Robert Davies lived an exciting several years in Xinjiang running bars and tourism ventures and marrying a Uighur woman before he was arrested for hashish smuggling on partly trumped up charges and sent to a Shanghai prison for 8 years. These years were the height of the Xinjiang hashish trade with all kinds of foreign characters drawn to the area like a magnet, and Davies and those busted with him were the first group of foreigners to be made an example of. The continuities with Liu's earlier prison saga (also on falsified charges as a “Bourgeois Rightest”) are striking. The Chinese prison experience is all about regimentation and psychological control - but then so is the entire Chinese education system and workplace! “Re-education” camps from whatever time period in China, prisons, schools, etc., differ only in degree in the extent to which they seek not merely to change your way of thinking, but to erase your personality altogether and substitute sheer mindlessness. There is never any “re-education”; there is simply mass lobotomization achieved without invasive surgery. “Education” is not much more than “re-education.” I taught in Chinese universities for 11 years, including some of the best, and what they all have in common is their dulling, addling effect on students' minds, resulting in their incapacity to think, to grow knowledge, to develop long-term memory structures and critical faculties. This is accomplished by constant and incessant short-term memory tasks, continual repetition and recitation occupying all hours of the day (starting in early childhood by parental-enforced study routines), and various Pavlovian reward/punishment systems extended throughout higher education (even postgraduate students are fined for all manner of minor infractions). So why all the fuss about high-achieving Chinese high-school students? Of course they perform better than most students around the world on tests and exams because that's ALL they're trained to do; once out of school they forget everything they've learned. From the worst prisons and gulags to the best universities, there is an unbroken line of continuity in this psychological coercion and micromanaging of the population. I don't imply that the American prison system is much to brag about, with its cesspools of gangs, male rape, HIV and hepatitis C and the highest prison population in the world; by comparison the Chinese prison system is actually better in some ways, as it keeps prisoners busy at least (often employing them in slave labor to make toys for export to Western countries). This is why I'm pessimistic that China will ever really open up in any substantive way: they've been dumbed down to such an extent that they lack the imaginative capacity to change. However, the fact that both Peter Liu and Robert Davies survived with their mind intact is very reassuring and reason for optimism in the creative human spirit; I have met enough wise-eyed Chinese as well to know that the system doesn't destroy all minds. Apart from these lessons, I should add that Davies' account is very well-written and highly readable and an excellent general introduction to Chinese culture and society - from within the belly of the beast.
On opting out: there is an unforgettable scene in this extraordinary and harrowing autobiography of a man living through the worst of modern Chinese history. In an Anti-Rightist Campaign struggle session, the crowd suddenly grows hysterical in their denunciations of Peter Liu and takes away the normally allowed concession of smoking. Fearing they are about to become violent and might beat him to death, Liu asks the commander if he may briefly go relieve himself in the WC outside the hall. Permitted to do so, he exits the hall, gets on his bicycle, and rides home. The stunned interrogators are not too pleased when confronting him about it the next day, but that's not why he is sent off to over twenty years of hard labor in the Chinese gulag. This fate was already sealed years before when the Revolutionary Army discovered in the back of his family's property a firearm haphazardly discarded in a junk pile by the retreating Japanese army.
“Mirror” embodies the history of modern China's most turbulent era in one man's lifetime (hence the title). For three decades after the 1949 “Liberation,” the entire country was one big labor camp. Many books have recounted this story, from the perspective of personal tragedy (Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Anchee Min's Red Azalea) to more sweeping historical studies (Chang & Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story, MacFarquhar & Schoenhals' Mao's Last Revolution). What makes Liu's account unique is he was fortuitously well versed in English since his college days, with a keen interest in literature and a novelist's eye for detail already fully formed. Working for an American media bureau in Shanghai as a translator until they pulled out in 1949, he was offered the opportunity to join them in Taiwan but opted to stay on in the mainland to work for his country, only to be plunged into a “three-decade nightmare.” Liu's ability to depict the Kafkaesque workings of the Revolutionary government from Day One is fascinating, down to the smallest details of how life changed for the bewildered and hapless population (for instance, the sudden plunging into hard times of his pregnant and pampered first wife from a moneyed family and the consequent collapse of their marriage). What enabled him to keep going whatever the circumstances was an unwavering conviction in personal justice, all narrated in a lucid, calm and compassionate voice, a humble objective reporter's voice seemingly unaffected by the whirlwind of events of which he was both eyewitness and victim.
The experience of this time is unbelievable to contemplate. Unable to find employment in his desired career as journalist or translator under the new regime due to his tainted past, he is sent off to a “Revolutionary University,” where his entire waking hours are spent hauling human excrement from the latrines and then undergoing nightly political “self-criticism” meetings. The students vie with another to express how much they enjoy hauling feces. Liu's attempt comes off as forced and exaggerated, unlike the natural fondness a peasant feels for the same activity, as the leader describes it. His standing at the school deteriorates. He is then assigned to work at various remote rural outposts until his real prison adventures began after being branded a Bourgeois Rightist in 1957: hard labor on a controlled starvation (all-carbohydrate) diet, providing prisoners with just enough strength to engage in physical work but not enough to want to do anything else.
The real starvation diet begins during the “Three Bad Years” (actually five years: 1958-62; see Jasper Becker's Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine and Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962). Prison laborers weren't exactly privileged compared with the rest of the population during this time, but they were reluctantly excused from work, being all bed-ridden anyway, and Liu almost dies. We're talking 20-40 million famine deaths across a country run by a surrealist poet rather than a competent statesman, penning off-the-cuff sayings that were intended probably as a joke but taken quite literally by his underlings and accordingly applied in practice with dead seriousness and devastating results. And like all artists at heart, he was very much into himself and not much into anyone around him or the fate of the population, except for his harem of women whose yin essence he sucked out from between their legs each night (see Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao).
Once recovered, Liu is shuttled around from one labor camp to another, without explanation or any indication of how many more years he still has to serve. More insanity follows during the Cultural Revolution, and prisoners aren't spared, with many killed. A sudden decree in 1969 “frees” most of the prisoners, who discover, like many freed American slaves, that they have no options but to remain where they are, the only difference being they are now paid a paltry wage. Not until ten years later in 1979 is Liu finally officially rehabilitated.
I met Peter Liu in 2001 in Beijing when he was already 78, a warm, articulate man who still commanded the fluent English in which he penned his book (along with a Chinese version that remains unpublishable). At the time, he gave me his pre-publication copy, which I must confess finally and belatedly reading, some three years after the author's death (I have no excuse; the book got waylaid, as so many good books do). I don't know if editorial changes have been made to the published version here, but my copy is already so well written that I assume the book version could only improve on it. I couldn't put it down.