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Ajay Singh

Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss and Hope in China
by Karoline Kan
Hachette Books
4/5 stars
The word “generation” can divide or unite, and in both ways informs Karoline Kan’s riveting memoir, Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss and Hope in China.
A former New York Times reporter who writes about millennial life and politics in China, Kan grew up in the countryside in the 1990s and early 2000s. She earned the nickname genpichong, or “bum beetle”, for her habit of following adults around listening to their stories.
She heard her grandfather confess to “crimes” he committed in the 1960s, during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, such as reading Confucius and listening to Peking opera. Her uncles spoke of how, as Red Guards, they had destroyed homes and tombs. “These were the first – and best – history lessons I ever had,” Kan writes. “And from these oral histories, I understand how my story is connected to China’s.”

Kan weaves the stories into a coherent explanation of the dizzying changes that have affected daily life in contemporary China. Her chronicle opens in 1988, in her ancestral village of Chaoyang, in northeastern China’s Tianjin municipality, in the midst of the one-child policy. .
Aimed at controlling the nation’s birth rate, the one-child policy is thought to have been responsible for the deaths or disappearances of 30 million to 60 million girls, Kan writes. The fact that rural families were allowed two children if their first child was a girl was of no consolation to Kan’s mother, Shumin, who already had a son when she fell pregnant with Kan. An ambitious, industrious woman who taught at a school when she was not working in her family’s rice field, Shumin managed to evade birth-control officials until the final weeks of her pregnancy.
Although allowed to give birth, Shumin was forced to pay a hefty fine her impoverished family could ill afford. Publicly scorned as “the second”, Kan grew up watching government officials take pregnant women from their homes and loot their families’ belongings if they failed to pay the fines for having a second children.
Throughout Kan’s adolescence, her mother worried that raising her in a rural environment would adversely affect her future. But relocation to an urban centre, where education and job prospects were better, was determined by the hukou, a residency permit that dictates where Chinese citizens can enrol in school, buy a house, work, marry or receive health care.
Kan offers a concise historical overview of the hukou system and its effect on migration. The system, she writes, was the handiwork of emperors and designed to prevent the free movement of people. After the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the founding of China’s first republic, in 1912, the government, led by Sun Yat-sen and his Nationalist Party, promised to end the restriction.
As Kan tells it, the first constitution of the Republic of China acknowledged freedom of movement as a human right. The Chinese Communist Party upheld that right for a time after coming to power, in 1949. But the hukou system was reinstated when Beijing’s relations with the Soviet Union soured and China’s border came under threat of attack. The aim was to ensure food production by requiring rural residents to remain on the land.
As an immigrant, you become an alien in a new land; to feel like an alien in your own country is another matter
Because she was born in a village, the hukou system effectively deemed Kan inferior. “It was disheartening as a child because all the adults in my life also instilled in me that hukou mattered,” she writes, adding, “As an immigrant, you become an alien in a new land; to feel like an alien in your own country is another matter.”
When the government relaxed hukou restrictions, Kan and her relatives went to live in the nearby town of Lutai. Kan was seven years old and her family were ambivalent about the move. “Chinese people have a deep attachment to the land,” Kan writes, evoking a nostalgia for a centuries-old way of life that is fast disappearing. “Tradition­ally, people believed they should remain on the land where they were born until they died.”
In 2008, after high school, Kan was accepted into the Beijing Inter­national Studies University, which focuses on foreign languages and culture, and moved to Beijing.
“My neighbours and relatives believed it was a real achievement for me to go to Beijing to study,” Kan writes. “I was proud, too, but wondered where the capital would take me.” Soon after arriving at the university, Kan learned that, like all college freshmen, she was required to complete junxun, military training that lasted two weeks to a month.
When politics was thrust upon me in school, I felt a need to respect it enough to try to care [...] but growing up with a mothering government all your life, there is only one thing to do: grow tired of it
“It was supposed to give us a tougher mindset,” Kan writes of the training, adding that the curricu­lum had been “expanded and more formal­ised” following the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989.
Any discussion of the “June Fourth Incident”, as the government called the crackdown, was prohibited. “I was curious about the move­ment, but our generation had no way of learning more, despite living with the consequences of it,” Kan writes.
Bused along with a group of other students to a military compound north of Beijing, Kan found herself in something of a time warp, “as if we were in a TV drama from the 1970s”. A large, red banner on the compound’s front wall read, “Welcome, Soldiers from Beijing International Studies University”.
Years earlier, “when politics was thrust upon me in school, I felt a need to respect it enough to try to care”, Kan recalls. “My friends and classmates felt the same, but growing up with a mothering government all your life, there is only one thing to do: grow tired of it.”
Kan’s prose is razor-sharp and it is easy to forget English is not her native tongue. She became proficient in the langu­age only after becoming obsessed with learning it. “Most of my classmates had grown up in Beijing, where English was often heard, or seen in advertising and in shops, so they had a head start because they talked to foreigners in the street and in their schools,” she writes. “No matter how many hours I immersed myself in English-language newspapers and magazines, it didn’t help; I was a mess.”
In these small places, you can see the real China – its beauty and ugliness, the weird and familiar, the joyful and sad, progressive and backward at the same time. I’ve learned to cherish every ounce of it
To improve her language skills, Kan visited “English corners”, where Chinese people discuss their opinions in English, often in the company of foreigners. At university, she formed an English-speaking lunch group, which included staff.
When Kan finally mustered the courage to tell her parents that instead of pursuing a career in a conventional profession such as accounting, she wanted to become a journalist, the reaction was predictable. “Why would you do such a ridiculous thing?” her mother exploded. “After all this studying you’ve done?”
On graduating, Kan landed a job as a writer with That’s Beijing, an English-language magazine, where she gained enough journalistic experience to join the Beijing bureau of The New York Times.
Returning to visit her hometown after years living in the capital, Kan was struck by how “many things had stayed the same in the 20 years since my parents had moved us from the village to the town”, but also by the fact that much had changed.
The homecoming had a profound effect. “In these small places, you can see the real China – its beauty and ugliness, the weird and familiar, the joyful and sad, progressive and backward at the same time,” she writes. “I’ve learned to cherish every ounce of it.”


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The former New York Times journalist draws on personal narratives to write a coming-of-age tale unique to contemporary China
It was through oral histories, rather than through textbooks, that she developed a connection to her homeland



Former New York Times journalist Karoline Kan draws on family stories to write a coming-of-age tale unique to contemporary China.


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Review | Under Red Skies: Karoline Kan comes to terms with China’s conflicted past through family’s story

The former New York Times journalist draws on personal narratives to write a coming-of-age tale unique to contemporary China It was through oral histories, rather than through textbooks, that she developed a connection to her homeland

The former New York Times journalist draws on personal narratives to write a coming-of-age tale unique to contemporary China

It was through oral histories, rather than through textbooks, that she developed a connection to her homeland