China Witness (21 page)

Y
ISHUJIA
, aged sixty, a renowned
acrobat,
interviewed in
Qingdao, Shandong
province on the eastern coast of China, a lively harbour colonised by Germany
before the First World War and later Japan. Yishujia's father was branded a
counter-revolutionary and detained for five years, leaving her mother to bring
up a family of five, so Yishujia joined a travelling acrobatic troupe before she
was twelve. The Cultural Revolution changed the nature of their performances
but the art survived. She became a first-class National Acrobat, performed
around China as "a valuable artist" and travelled to many countries as a
Chinese acrobat and cultural ambassador. Her son Hu, is a professional
magician and musician working in Britain.

Hu is a professional magician, and also a performer on the Western saxophone and a Chinese folk wind instrument called the
suona
. In your first minute of conversation with him you get the feeling that China's three thousand years of etiquette have not yet vanished from the world: he is all polite enquiries after acquaintances, graceful thanks and becoming modesty. By the second minute you have difficulty following him: you have to concentrate hard to follow the tortuous route of his speech, carefully peeling away the adjectives and arranging all his conditional sentences into a logical sequence before the "naked goal" of his verbs comes into view. But in the third minute, all suddenly becomes clear, you want to follow his words, and he has already prepared a space in his thoughts for the words you want to say to him. This is what he has spent the last two minutes feeling for, preparing the ground with all those courtesies. I had never imagined that modern Chinese society, ravaged and made barren by politics, could produce such an "authentic Chinese" man who was not yet out of his thirties, a young man in whom Chinese folk customs remained pure, who could walk among the slurry of Western fast food and emerge unsullied.

I talked to Hu about some of the feelings and losses Chinese experience on coming to the West, hoping I could learn something about the values of the new generation of young Chinese who were making a living overseas. But he left me only with an unforgettable feeling of responsibility: guilt at having been unable to keep his father alive, anxiety at being unable to fulfil his responsibilities to his widowed mother, shame that China's fine, true elegant culture had gained no recognition in the West. In truth, in the decade and more since I moved to Britain, I have rarely met a young Chinese person with such a sense of responsibility.

I had been searching for some time for an opportunity to decrypt this "authentic Chinese" friend, but it was very hard. To me, there was a fortress
of personality, made up of his age, his era and his gender: it was difficult for a woman of his mother's generation to enter his "kingdom of causes and effects". Then one day he told me that his mother was coming to Britain to see him, she did not understand English or have any idea how to get around London on her own, and he wondered if it would be possible for me to introduce a few Chinese friends to her.

Hu's mother, Yishujia, was a Chinese National Level One acrobatic performer and one of the few winners of the women's 8 March Red-Banner Pacesetter
^*4
medal. It was hard to believe from her limber, agile walk that she was a woman of over sixty, the youthful energy and interest that came from her years of training as a young woman were immediately noticeable. The first time we met, her smile and calm manner made me imagine a comfortable, tranquil life, which was a very rare form of good luck in the last century in China. I completely failed to detect what lay behind those smiles and jokes.

I invited mother and son to spend Christmas with us in London. At dinner, after the roast goose, we brought out a cheese plate. I was worried that Yishujia would not be able to cope with the taste, which Chinese people often find close to unbearable, but I watched her cut off a small piece of cheese, put it on her plate with a smile, partition off an even smaller sliver and place it in her mouth, still smiling. At this point I stopped worrying, and turned to the other guests, but when I glanced back at her place, she was missing. I hurried after her to the toilet, from which issued suppressed sounds of vomiting. I waited quietly outside the door until she came out, tears still glistening on her cheeks. "I'm fine, I was being greedy, I got something stuck in my throat, so I came to clean myself out. I've caused you a lot of worry for nothing." When I heard these words it suddenly hit me: this is a woman of remarkable self-control. That evening, as I said goodbye to her and her son, I fixed a time for her to come to my home for tea. She came as agreed, and brought me her real self: a daughter who had spent every day longing for her mother; a traditional Chinese woman whose husband was dead and whose son lived far away; a National Level One acrobatic performer
who had struggled for a future of her own, with a father accused of being a counter-revolutionary, and who had grown up along with acrobatics in China as the status changed from amateur to professional; a mother who had raised a pure, authentic Chinese child. This was a Chinese story with no political window dressing, without the gilding and ornamentation of vanity.

Yishujia was the youngest person whom I interviewed. She agreed to come to Qingdao, which was some distance from her home in the city of
Jinan, because she did not want the "past things that floated up from the bottom of the sea" to cloud the waters of her daily life. I hoped that by finding a space where she could distance herself from it all, she would be able to allow the unhappiness and griefs to settle.

We arrived in the summer coastal resort of Qingdao, on the Shandong peninsula in east China, on 14 August. It was unusually hot in Qingdao, which is as famous for its pleasantly cool summers as for its Tsingtao beer, with temperatures as high as thirty-nine degrees. However, this did not have any noticeable effect on the annual International Beer Festival: hundreds of thousands of beer lovers from all over the world were celebrating all through the night despite the heatwave, to the point where some people mistook a heaven-sent night-time fall of rain for "rivers of beer in the streets".

We held our interview with Yishujia in a government-run guest house by the sea. She had changed into a person who was both very strange to me and very familiar: this was no longer the lively, vivacious Teacher Yishujia whom the years had passed by, full of smiles and laughter. Instead, she was "standing ready for battle", as if for a political interrogation, with all her answers prepared and ready. This is a classic expression and posture in video interviews in China, and also a very tricky "bottleneck" stage through which you must pass before you can enter into a heart-to-heart dialogue.

I adopted a slow, measured tone, and asked the first question in a seemingly casual way.

*

XINRAN:
Teacher Yishujia, after you retired, what did you think about the most?

YISHUJIA:
I went over past memories, a bit of everything.

XINRAN:
What's the earliest thing you remember?

YISHUJIA:
That must be my mother taking me to visit my father. At the time my father was working on a building somewhere outside Jinan,
and my mother took me and the eldest of my younger sisters over the mountains on donkey-back to see him.

XINRAN:
Can you still remember where you father was?

YISHUJIA:
I can't remember what place it was, I just remember that in the evenings you could hear wolves howling.

XINRAN:
Do you know what kind of families your parents came from? I'm still rather hazy about my own family background, even now. I know my great-grandfather ran restaurants, as far afield as Malaysia, Japan and Singapore, though it wasn't called Singapore in those days. But nobody in my grandfather's generation wanted to run a restaurant, they all went to work in banks or for Far Eastern companies, so the restaurants were all sold off. In my father's generation, that big family split into two groups: one group went to America with the Western companies, another followed the Communist Party and stayed in China. So what kind of family was yours?

YISHUJIA:
I can only remember that my paternal great-grandfather's family was from
Hongsong village in
Zhouping county, in Shandong. My great-grandfather died young, he was just fifty, and my great-grandmother lost her sight through illness, but she raised my grandfather and a great-aunt without remarrying. In those days widows remained faithful to their dead husbands by never remarrying. The fulfilment of duty was the only way their children could hold their heads up around other people. The impression I got when I was small was that my great-uncle had been to college, and that was why the whole family got an education. My great-uncle was a schoolteacher. My great-grandmother was supporting the family at that time, it was really hard for her. Once my great-uncle started teaching, he took all the boys in the family with him to Jinan to go to school, my great-aunt's boys, my father and uncles from our family. In our extended family, all the males in my father's generation went to school.

XINRAN:
About how old were you when you went to primary school?

YISHUJIA:
I was seven.

XINRAN:
What was the school like?

YISHUJIA:
My school was the best in Jinan – my great-uncle taught there.

XINRAN:
How many boys and girls were there when you started school?

YISHUJIA:
There were forty or fifty children in my class, a lot more boys than girls.

XINRAN:
So many people in your family had been to school, did you experience hardships in the political movements after Liberation?

YISHUJIA:
In those days our family owned a big, rambling house; we
had livestock too, and hired hands to work our land. Just before Liberation, my great-uncle sold a lot of the family property. My great-grandmother was livid, she beat and cursed him, but later on she found out that he had been quite far-sighted: because our family property had all been sold, when the government determined class status after Liberation we were classified as middle peasants, otherwise we would have been classed as landlords and attacked. It wasn't just a question of a few houses, it was life and death.

XINRAN:
It always surprises me, the way those old people could see the way society was going. My maternal grandfather donated a sizeable portion of his property to the government after the Liberation: banks, grain stores, shipping fleets, hardware factories, he gave them all to the common cause without a murmur. A good many of the people who had been classified as capitalists along with him came under attack, their children were implicated in their crimes, and this often ended in suffering or death; but in my grandfather's case, apart from the decade of the Cultural Revolution, which he spent in prison, he lived in peace until he died aged ninety-seven, without a stain on his character, and all his children alive and well.

YISHUJIA:
Hmm, that's no easy thing.

*

I felt that Yishujia was very guarded in the face of my questions, so I tried to elicit some fellow feeling with stories of my grandparents' generation: after my grandfather died, crowds of people came to express their condolences, nearly a thousand in the course of a week. My aunts and uncles were flabbergasted, none of them knew why so many people who knew my grandfather would come.

*

YISHUJIA:
Oh, I know why even your family didn't know.

XINRAN:
Why? [I thought she had started to open up, but I was wrong.]

YISHUJIA:
You say it, I like to listen!

XINRAN:
Many of the people who came to pay their respects knelt in front of his picture and talked to him, telling their stories. Afterwards, my aunt said that when she saw all this she was filled with regret, she said she should have listened more to my grandfather's stories when he was still alive. But members of the younger generation never dared to ask their elders about their history, and old people seldom talked much about their past, especially those who came up from nothing through hard work, who had been manual workers, they believed that they were a lower class than others. There are also people who find it hard to get the words out,
especially those who had a history of capitalism after the fifties – most of them avoid mentioning the past entirely.

YISHUJIA:
You're right there, and those people are in the majority.

*

I didn't wait for her to say more, but continued to talk about my own family.

*

XINRAN:
Kneeling in front of my grandfather's portrait, several elderly ladies who had been prostitutes in the 1940s had told my aunt that my grandfather had saved their lives when the Guomindang were rounding up economic criminals [which included prostitutes] and cleaning up society. He had let them enter one of his handicraft factories, giving them an opportunity to turn from their old ways and learn a few skills, otherwise they would have been shot like many other prostitutes under the Guomindang.

YISHUJIA:
I've heard the old people say that the Guomindang were very harsh when they first came to power – they shot people dead in Nanjing, and called it "strict social cleansing". And afterwards our Communist Party used the same word and did similar things. A lot of women who had been prostitutes before 1949 were persecuted to death.

XINRAN:
Actually, between the 1940s and the 1990s, both the Guomindang and the Communist Party had some very
harsh policies. I think that perhaps 25 per cent of the population of China was treated unjustly or sentenced wrongly in that period, and more than half of those were educated people.

YISHUJIA:
My father was branded an active counter-revolutionary just because of a little thing. When my father left home to go to school in Jinan, he became friendly with an underground member of the Party. He couldn't tell my father that he was a Party member, but he did tell him: "If a time comes when you don't see me, don't hang around, go back home." But my father forgot. Afterwards the
Eighth Route Army came to Jinan, they had the city surrounded, he couldn't get out, but he had to eat. At that time the Guomindang had set up a
San Qing Tuan – the Three Youth League – anyone who joined up would have work to do and food to eat. So, many young people in Jinan whose families didn't have a lot of money joined that society.

XINRAN:
The San Qing Tuan, the one that was defined as counterrevolutionary in the fifties? That's serious.