History lessens

WHEN THE REGRETS of Sun Shuyun's life suddenly flooded back, they dragged with them 1,300 years of Chinese history and a fascination with a religion she loves but cannot accept. Even after spending almost a year travelling to research her book, explore Buddhism and resolve the qualms of her childhood, the filmmaker-turned-writer can neither separate nor fully unite the parts that make up her life.

Ten Thousand Miles Without A Cloud suggests the way forward for China is to remember that it led the world in the past by embracing other cultures and ideas.

But the other aim of her journey through China, East Asia and India is unfulfilled. Sun still cries at the mention of the father who rejected her and died disillusioned after fighting for the Cultural Revolution, and the grandmother who stood by her forbidden Buddhist beliefs despite the taunts of her family. Sun shared a bed with her grandmother from the age of two months until she turned 18, when she left to study English literature at Beijing University.

'I was so close to my grandmother, partly because I never felt that my father liked me. He was so disappointed that I was not a boy. He hated me so much,' a tearful Sun says. 'My grandmother was kind. She would try to go to the temple and my mother would be so rude. I thought my grandmother was strange, too. I was always on my father's side. My whole family were. I think my grandmother was so lonely and that now makes me feel awful.'

Sun, 39, recreated the journey of Xuanzang, the monk who travelled to India hoping to find scriptures in the home of Buddhism that would reconcile strands of the religion that had developed in China. He returned 18 years later with 600 books of sutras, seven statues and enough information from India and the Silk Road to write the Record Of The Western Region. Xuanzang's religious and secular writing was crucial to China's golden period, the Tang dynasty, whose emperors took advantage of the Silk Road to learn about the outside world and encourage envoys from other countries to visit China.

Sun contrasts the generosity of the Tang and the insularity of the revolution. Where Xuanzang helped create one of history's greatest empires by leaving China, Sun's journey was about discovering her homeland and finding a place for herself as an overseas Chinese whose father's death as a disillusioned cadre cut her last tie with the Communist Party. 'This book is really the culmination of me trying to understand my culture,' she says.

At her father's funeral in 1997, Sun noticed his elderly comrades had returned to some of the 10,000 temples rebuilt across China over the past decade. 'Seeing that my father's friends were going to temples made me think about the futility of the revolution and the things we attacked,' she says.