XINRAN: What permit? We've come to pay our respects to former generations, and to share the glory of those times… surely we don't need a permit?
SECURITY MAN B: Why are you using a video camera?
XINRAN: To record our feelings and what we have found out about the 4 May Movement.
SECURITY MEN: It's not allowed. The rules say that the media can only film if they have permits.
XINRAN: Whose rules?
SECURITY MEN: The park administration. You're on our territory, you have to let us run it.
XINRAN: Your Huangchenggen Park, is it one of the municipal parks open to the public? Does it come under the Beijing Municipal Administration? Is it public property protected by the law of the People's Republic of China? If it is, then why can't Chinese citizens find out about one of our own historical monuments? And can't foreigners film a monument on a main street commemorating Chinese history?
SECURITY MAN A: We're not going to go into all that with you, you've got to show a permit, otherwise we'll call people to come and take you away!
XINRAN: Take us away? Why? Did you know it's breaking the law to arrest innocent people? Who's in charge of you? We'll talk to him, because you don't have the most basic municipal administration rules to back you up. What you're doing is going to be evidence for world opinion that accuses China of having no legal system or human rights. You're damaging our image of democratic freedom. Who's your boss? Get him here, or I'll go and see him!
SECURITY MAN A [pointing to B]: He's phoning the boss now.
XINRAN: Thank you. I think your boss will see I'm right.
SECURITY MAN B: The boss says he's too busy to come.
XINRAN: Then I'll speak to him on the phone. Like you said, if we've contravened your administrative regulations, then that's his job and he has to take care of it. Kindly ring him again and tell him I have an important matter to discuss with him.
I sounded so intransigent that Security Man B wasted no time in dialling again: 'That woman insists on speaking to you!' he said.
But he did not pass the phone to me – he gave it to A who listened, and listened, and listened. All at once, he went pale. When the call ended, I could see they did not know what to do. Obviously their boss knew something about 'media connections' and their fearsomeness, and wanted nothing to do with us. The poor administrators standing before us only knew that their boss was 'he who must be obeyed', and they had no way of relinquishing their responsibilities.
At that moment I remembered the saying that ''face' is the lifeline of the Chinese poor'. I did not want to make life too difficult for two almost uneducated young people, so I changed my tone:
XINRAN: Soon 2008 will be here, and this park is one of the sights of Beijing. There will be more people than ever from China and abroad who want to come and see this monument to modern Chinese history, and nowadays most travellers bring video cameras. If we keep stopping them, then it will make us look ridiculous. Go back and tell your boss to bring your administrative statutes into line with Chinese law. Otherwise the people breaking the law will be you. Your boss can't send you out into the street and wash his hands of you. He has to help you clarify some basic international rights and laws, otherwise you may become the criminals in the development of Chinese civilisation. I'm not joking. If I'd been an overseas Chinese with a foreign passport and didn't understand your sense of responsibility and patriotism, this incident today might have become a huge joke, and made us a laughing stock for foreigners. Fancy needing a news permit to video a historical monument in a Chinese street. You would become proof that there is no freedom of speech in China! [Brief pause.] What exactly are your powers and responsibilities?
SECURITY MEN [in unison]: We don't know.
XINRAN: So what regulations do you follow to enforce public security?
SECURITY MAN A: We've got documents, but I can't quote them to you.
SECURITY MAN B: They're all very old, we haven't got the new ones yet. We can't tell you, but our boss knows.
This was a typically Chinese answer: we don't know, our bosses know.
Do these leaders know? If they do but don't get things clear for those under them, are they real leaders? I recalled a friend quoting an old saying and complaining about people who 'out of their own ignorance, clarify things for other people'. That's terrible, but bamboozling other people when one understands things clearly is even more terrible.
At this point I want to quote the definition of a Chinese person taken from a British encyclopedia of 1842…
A Chinaman is cold, cunning and distrustful; always ready to take advantage of those he has to deal with; extremely covetous and deceitful; quarrelsome, vindictive, but timid and dastardly. A Chinaman in office is a strange compound of insolence and meanness. All ranks and conditions have a total disregard for truth.
How much has this image of 'the Chinaman' changed in the last 150 years? I don't know – I can't even tell in my own lifetime.
'I don't know' or 'I've no idea' appears to be the usual response to the almost completely opposed life values expressed by our interviewees in explaining who they are, and by the sons and daughters trying to understand them. In fact, almost every Chinese person has been through the 'I don't knows' and 'I've no ideas' of the last hundred years. Even surviving archives of the great events of Chinese history and Chinese yearbooks differ in the way they present that history. One hundred years filled with too many wars with all the chaos and strife they bring in their wake, together with the failure of our national saviours, dramatic changes in our beliefs and confusion in moral standards, have led to a kind of 'inflation and metamorphosis' both in the way Chinese people describe reality to themselves, and in the architecture of Chinese cities. In the search for their roots and for their self-respect as a nation, Chinese people have lost their way. The result is a historical map which lacks an agreed system of explanatory symbols and is forever being reprinted.
Afterword
It was hard for me to put down my pen and 'finish' this book. As I wrote, I kept asking myself: Are my experiences and even what I write also part of those 'things you can't say for sure'? The reality is just that: in all my interviewing, editing and tidying, I could not bridge the gap between the historical facts of that time and the gloss put on it by the people who came after them; I could not find any universally recognised standards of right and wrong in the last few generations of China's history; I could not figure out how to experience or express the delights and excitements of their childhood, the aspirations and pleasures of their adulthood and the joys of their old age. I had even wondered whether they had had any opportunities to experience 'delights'. The facts proved me wrong: our parents and grandparents had not only experienced 'delights' that we can understand, they had the will and the ability to search for, be moved by and comprehend delight in the midst of dire poverty and things that 'cannot be said for sure'.
I am in the process of searching for my heart's true motherland, among all the 'can't say for sures' of several generations of Chinese.
After I returned from my travels, I found myself unable to escape the stories in the books; unable to escape the voices of those interviewees; unable to escape my country as it revealed itself to me in the cracks between the
