Red China Blues - Hardcover

Wong, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385476795 ISBN 13: 9780385476799

Publisher: Doubleday, 1996

Synopsis

Jan Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer--and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University--her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. In the name of the Revolution, she renounced rock and roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy fields, and turned in a fellow student who sought her help in getting to the United States. She also met and married the only American draft dodger from the Vietnam War to seek asylum in China.

Red China Blues begins as Wong's startling--and ironic--memoir of her rocky six-year romance with Maoism that began to sour as she became aware of the harsh realities of Chinese communism and led to her eventual repatriation to the West. Returning to China in the late eighties as a journalist, she covered both the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown and the tumultuous era of capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping. In a wry, absorbing, and often surreal narrative, she relates the horrors that led to her disillusionment with the "worker's paradise." And through the stories of the people--an un-happy young woman who was sold into marriage, China's most famous dissident, a doctor who lengthens penises--Wong creates an extraordinary portrait of the world's most populous nation. In setting out to show readers in the Western world what life is like in China, and why we should care, Wong reacquaints herself with the old friends--and enemies--of her radical past, and comes to terms with the legacies of her ancestral homeland.

About this title

About the Author

Jan Wong was the Beijing correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1988 to 1994. She is a graduate of McGill University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is the recipient of the George Polk Award, and other honors for her reporting. Wong has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications in the United States and abroad. She lives in Toronto.

From the Inside Flap

Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer--and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University--her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. In the name of the Revolution, she renounced rock and roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy fields, and turned in a fellow student who sought her help in getting to the United States. She also met and married the only American draft dodger from the Vietnam War to seek asylum in China.

Red China Blues begins as Wong's startling--and ironic--memoir of her rocky six-year romance with Maoism that began to sour as she became aware of the harsh realities of Chinese communism and led to her eventual repatriation to the West. Returning to China in the late eighties as a journalist, she covered both the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown and the tumultuous era of capitalist reforms under Deng X

Reviews

This superb memoir is like no other account of life in China under both Mao and Deng. Wong is a Canadian ethnic Chinese who, in 1972, at the height of the cultural revolution, was one of the first undergraduate foreigners permitted to study at Beijing University. Filled with youthful enthusiasms for Mao's revolution, she was an oddity: a Westerner who embraced Maoism, appeared to be Chinese and wished to be treated as one, although she didn't speak the language. She set herself to become fluent, refused special consideration, shared her fellow-students rations and housing, their required stints in industry and agriculture and earnestly tried to embrace the Little Red Book. Although Wong felt it her duty to turn in a fellow student who asked for help to emigrate to the West, she could not repress continual shock at conditions of life, and by the time she was nearly expelled from China for an innocent friendship with a "foreigner," much of her enthusiasm, which lasted six years, had eroded. In 1988, returning as a reporter for the Toronto Globe Mail, she was shocked once again, this time by the rapid transformations of the society under Deng's exhortation: "to be rich is glorious." Her account is informed by her special background, a cold eye, a detail. Her description of the events at Tiananmen Square, which occurred on her watch, is, like the rest of the book, unique, powerful and moving.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A crackerjack journalist's (she's a George Polk Award winner) immensely entertaining and enlightening account of what she learned during several extended sojourns in the People's Republic of China. A second-generation Canadian who enjoyed a sheltered, even privileged, childhood in Montreal, Wong nonetheless developed a youthful crush on Mao Zedong's brand of Communism. She first visited China in 1972 on summer holiday from McGill University. Although the PRC was still convulsed by the so-called Cultural Revolution, the starry-eyed author enrolled in Beijing University and remained in the country for 15 months. Emotionally bloodied but unbowed by quotidian contact with the harsher realities of Maoism, Bright Precious Wong (as she was known to fellow students and party cadres) mastered Chinese and searched for ways to express solidarity with the masses. Leaving the PRC only long enough to earn a degree from McGill, the author returned in the fall of 1974 for a lengthy stay that made her increasingly aware of Chinese Communism's contradictions and evils. Disturbing encounters with dissidents raised her consciousness of the regime's oppressive policies. Although her zeal diminished, Wong soldiered on, eventually acquiring an American spouse (perhaps the only US draft dodger to seek asylum in the PRC) and a correspondent's job with the New York Times. When President Carter pardoned Vietnam War resisters, the author and her husband came back to North America. She returned to China in 1988 as the Beijing bureau chief of The Toronto Globe & Mail. Experiencing something akin to culture shock at the changes wrought by Deng Xioaping's capitalist-road programs, Wong was an eyewitness to the bloody Tiananmen Square confrontation. She ferreted out long-suppressed truths about penal colonies, the use of prisoners as unpaid laborers, and the public execution of criminals. Tellingly detailed recollections of the journeys of an observant and engaged traveler through interesting times. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

" 'Tis better to have believed and lost than never to have believed at all." Concluding her memoir with a paraphrase from Tennyson,Wong vividly describes her 12-year experience in China. At first, as a confused teenager coming of age amid the tumultuous late Sixties and early Seventies in Canada, she became a devoted Maoist, believing China to be "Paradise." She studied and worked in China for six years as an ordinary citizen, going through the Cultural Revolution and the period of the "Gang of Four." Later, as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail, she spent another six years in China, witnessing the Tiananmen massacre, interviewing important dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng and Ren Wanding, and reporting on issues such as birth control and peasant riots in rural areas. The "insider" status gives her account a unique touch that set hers apart from numerous other "journalistic" writings about China. She is describing the people she knows and the events she experienced. Highly recommended.
Mark Meng, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chairman Mao's grandson was the fattest Chinese person I had ever met.  At twenty-three years old, Mao Xinyu (New World Mao) had the same moon-shaped face, the same jowls, the same Buddha-like bulk as his famous grandfather.  But his features were coarser, and he lacked Mao's elongated Mona Lisa eyes and inscrutably pursed lips.  And instead of slicking back his hair, he had a bristling brush cut.

In 1993, the one-hundredth anniversary of Mao Zedong's birthday was just seven weeks away when I slipped into a military hospital in Beijing to see New World Mao.  I had tried for months, without success, to interview someone from Mao's family.  Then I heard that New World was here.  Brandishing a bouquet of yellow roses, I talked my way past an armed sentry and three checkpoints.

New World was watching television in his private room.  I introduced myself as a reporter for Canada's Globe and Mail.  "Come in," he said, with a cheery smile, as if we had known each other for years.  "lt's a Chinese opera. Mind if I keep watching?"

His hospital room reeked of unwashed socks.  Rumpled and unshaven, he sat, his belly bulging, in a striped hospital-issue pajama top, which he wore like a jacket over a full set of street clothes.  His fly was half unzipped.  His brown nylon socks, visible under blue plastic shower flip-flops, had gaping holes.  New World had inherited the family disdain for bourgeois hygiene.  His grandfather Mao Zedong had been a crotch-scratcher, once dropping his pants during an interview in the 1930s with the American reporter Edgar Snow to search for lice.  After Mao took supreme power and moved into a golden-roofed imperial palace in Beijing, he never bathed; attendants rubbed him down nightly with hot towels.

New World was born in 1970, at the height of Mao's personality cult.  He grew up thinking it perfectly normal that people sang ditties glorifying his grandfather as "the red, red sun in our hearts." Or that everyone wore a Mao badge, and that some of the more fervent believers even pinned them to the flesh of their bare chests.  Although Mao was no model grandfather, he had taken time out from the revolution to choose a name for the only son of his only surviving son.  The Great Helmsman understood the Orwellian importance of names.  The choice of "New World" was a reminder to all that Mao was creating a Brave New World.

There were three other grandchildren, but they were the offspring of Mao's daughters and by Chinese tradition didnt count.  New World was the only grandson with the magic surname.  He grew up in a hillside villa on the western edge of Beijing, with a dozen nannies, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, private secretaries and aides catering to his every whim.  No adult or playmate dared cross him.  That world fell apart in 1976, when his grandfather died.  New World was still a little boy when Deng Xiaoping began dismantling Mao's personality cult.  New World's father, already mentally incapacitated, sank into depression.  His mother quickly toed the new Party line.

When New World was a toddler, his mother both indulged and disciplined him. She sometimes hit him so hard she broke sticks on his back.  At other times, she stuffed him with sugar, pork and fried foods, hoping he would gain weight. Still fretting that New World was too thin, his mother ordered compliant doctors to dose him with hormones.

Mao Zedong never cuddled him, never held him, never played with him.  Instead, New World worshipped his god-like grandfather from afar and tried his best to emulate him in the only way he knew how.  New World's favorite dish became the one the Great Helmsman loved best--Red-Cooked Pork, chunks of glistening pork fat, gelatinous skin still attached, stewed in a lip-smacking sauce of soy, anise, rice wine and brown sugar.

Over the years, New World ballooned to three hundred pounds.  To lose weight, he tried everything from diet teas to herbal medicines to slimming creams.  By the time I met him, thirty-seven days in Military Hospital Number 307 in the western suburbs of Beijing--the only place that could enforce a crash diet--had cut his weight to 250 pounds.  At five foot nine inches tall, he wasn't off the scale by Western standards of obesity.  But in a land where his grandfather's utopian policies had sparked widespread hunger and even famine, New World's ham-like thighs stuck out in China like Roseanne's at the Boston Marathon.

He lived in his own dream world.  When a college classmate once asked what he'd like to be one day, New World replied, "A leader," as if that were a job category, like electrician.  He harbored secret hopes that someone, someday, might see fit to anoint him general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1989, he had been a student at People's University.  When the Tiananmen protests started and his classmates hooded the square, his mother had her chauffeur drive her to the campus.  She bundled her son home for safety until everything was over.  The tragedy hadn't touched him at all.  He seemed scarcely aware that the People's Liberation Army had shot thousands of ordinary Chinese in cold blood.

New World had graduated, just barely, and was now studying for a master's degree in Mao Zedong Thought at Beijing's Communist Party School.  He dreamed of going abroad.  "My mom wants me to go to the United States because they do a lot of research into Mao Zedong Thought there.  I've heard that in the U.S. Chairman Mao is held in higher regard than George Washington.  Is that right?"

"Not exactly." I said.

New World didn't seem to notice.  He sighed, his belly heaving.  A school in Mississippi--he couldn't remember the name--had offered him a scholarship, but the Central Committee had nixed it.  "The government won't let New World Mao out of the country," he said.  "They're afraid I'll go out and my thinking will change.  Or I won't come back."

He turned back to the cacophonous opera on TV.  I asked him how long he planned to stay in the hospitals.  "I don't want to go home," he confessed.  "I don't want Mama to tell me what to do.  I'm afraid of her.  The time passes quickly in here.  I can watch television day and night."

Mao's grandson a couch potato? Mao's grandson dreaming of studying Maoism in the States? Mao's grandson a prisoner of communism? My head was reeling.  So the dynasty of Mao Zedong had come to this.

And to think that I originally came to China as a Maoist.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385476795
• ISBN 13: 9780385476799
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 405