Advertisement
Advertisement

Voice of the people

One of the key mainland voices in western literature has found that perhaps her most important role is revealing her homeland to her young compatriots. Xinran Xue, known as Xinran, says the significance of family and community in Chinese culture has had the incongruous effect of stifling conversation between the generations.

China's culture - from simple customs to political history - is in danger of slipping out of popular memory, and possibly from records, as those who lived through it

remain reluctant to talk while their grandchildren observe the custom of never asking their elders direct, probing questions.

Young Chinese are detached from basic cultural particulars, Xinran says, and the nation is losing touch with itself.

Over tea at a hotel on Sydney harbour, Xinran, who turns 49 next week, recounts a lecture she gave to university students, most of them the children of Chinese migrants, in Melbourne three years ago. Five students challenged her account of her experiences during the Cultural Revolution and the interviews with Chinese that underpin her non-fiction books The Good Women of China, Sky Burial and What The Chinese Don't Eat, which have made her a hit in more than 30 languages.

When still a girl, Xinran spent almost six years in a 'black school' after her wealthy, educated parents were jailed and their house burned down by Red Guards. She gave the five students her e-mail address and suggested they contact her after asking their families or relatives in China how they fared in the 1960s and 70s. The following day, she says, the five were back in the audience for another lecture in the same theatre. Some held a banner reading: 'Xinran, we love you.'

'They told me what their families had said ... the adjustment was overnight,' Xinran says. 'One of them said: 'My mother told me all this information is common. Everybody knows that.'

'My question is: why don't they know this? If you don't know about other lives how can you value anything? Even the overseas Chinese young people, they don't ask questions. They still live this culture [of not asking questions],' Xinran says.

'I met the poet Alison Wong, who was born in New Zealand. She has interviewed many older Chinese people and written a beautiful story about them. But when I asked her why she didn't interview her own family, she said they would never talk about these things.'

Xinran says she has begun to see the interviews she has conducted with Chinese for almost 20 years as an important record. Words on the Night Breeze, the Nanjing radio show that made her name in the late 1980s and formed the basis of Good Women, may be off the air but it still informs Xinran's view of her homeland.

She chats to as many ordinary Chinese as possible, brings western journalists and publishers to the mainland to help them appreciate the country's diversity, and has launched China Witness, a project devoted to interviewing a broad spectrum of mainland people.

'I want to educate myself, and also I want to keep the record because China is changing so much. If the older generation dies we lose the witnesses of the past 50 years. It is urgent to do this for the new generation.

'A few years ago I started buying all the Chinese history books I could find. Any new version, I will buy it. If one of these books has 200 pages, the years before 1950 will have 150 pages. After 1950, you will find only 20 or 30 pages. On the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, never more than one page. So think about it, where is the younger generation learning the real history? All they have are their grandparents. But in Chinese culture we never talk to the older generations.

'So I realised I had to do something. People in their 20s, even their 30s, don't believe the Cultural Revolution [happened].

'I ask so many of the older generation why they don't talk about these things. They say: 'It's our culture to never mention this. We don't want to pass on something so painful to the next generation.'

'They are ashamed about what they did. They don't want to talk about how they followed Mao and his little red book.

'The whole geography of Chinese culture changed. But we have to be very honest about it. China today comes from that time.'

Getting a country as complex as China on record means using as many formats as possible. After trying interviews, filming, journalism, her column in Britain's Guardian newspaper and her non-fiction books, Xinran's latest work is her recently released first novel, Miss Chopsticks.

Many of her interviewees had simple stories that lacked the epic drama of Shuwen, the Chinese woman who spent 30 years in Tibet looking for her husband and became the central figure of Sky Burial. But the less incredible stories often had more to say about China, the author realised. Miss Chopsticks combines the interviews of three migrant workers she met in Nanjing, Beijing and Shanghai.

Xinran says the novel stems from a visit to a village in Shanxi as the host of Night Breeze. She met a man whose wife had committed suicide by drinking pesticide because she had failed to have a son. Few villagers attended her funeral, Xinran says in the novel's introduction. She quotes the husband as saying: 'You can't blame them. They don't want her bad luck to rub off on them. Besides, it's her fault that she only managed to give birth to a handful of chopsticks and no roof-beam.'

The novel follows a family of six daughters whose angry father, a farmer outside Nanjing, has much the same lifestyle and beliefs as his ancestors 500 years ago. Women in rural areas have little hope of supporting a family in the same way as 'roof beam' sons. Like chopsticks, women are tools with a limited use. The farmer has so few expectations for his firstborn that he names her One, and continues the number-names until Six.

A trio of the daughters, Three, Five and Six - based on the women Xinran met - head to Nanjing and, despite failing to fully conquer the prejudices of urban Chinese, they find work, discover talents and prove their father wrong by sending home more money than the family has ever seen.

Xinran says she wrote the novel by remembering her arrival in London in 1997. Her first jobs were as a shop cleaner and waitress. 'Western people looked through me in the same way as city people looked through chopstick girls in China.'

She resisted writing a novel for years but found it was the only way to combine the stories of three women who impressed her as the new face of China. 'They are the witnesses of the changes in China, and I want to learn from them.'

Xinran remains in contact with the Shanghai woman who had inspired Five.

'I never imagined that I could write any fiction. It was harder to write than all my other books. I had to bring these three women into the same family and make them true to their culture and find a mother who could work for all three. I had to bring together all the real life and the struggles,' she says.

'I didn't want to write fiction. But their stories stayed in my mind a long time.

'I knew the stories of these people had not been told. They have their own values, culture and history. A lot of people around the world think of China in terms of the economy or human rights. That's all they get from the media. They don't think about the people, about human beings. I wanted to write about the daily life of these Chinese beings. I wanted to show the reasons that China has become what it is.'

Xinran says she will continue to look at the mainland from every aspect. Expanding the rest of the world's understanding has proven much easier than encouraging Chinese to explore their homeland.

'At the moment, China is like a hungry boy,' says the mother of one son. 'He has been starving for a long time. If you take him to a restaurant and give him the choice between bread and the fine food on the menu, I'm sure he will take the bread, because he can't see the value of the beautiful menu.

'After a few meals, when he is not starving any more, maybe he will start to think about the choice he has been given. He will start to learn about the menu.

'China is still at the second meal. In the 1980s they thought McDonald's was the best food in the world. That's all they wanted. In the 1990s they thought Starbucks was the best coffee in the world. Now, if you go back to the big cities, they realise Starbucks is not the best.

'The internet is the real cultural revolution for China. When they have educated themselves, they will start thinking about what changes have happened in China.'

And when they reach that point, Xinran's copious trove of records and anecdotes will be on hand to help reintroduce China to its people.

Post