layers of history… I spent six months laboriously selecting, rejecting and editing 800,000 characters' worth of research, interviews and recordings into 300,000 Chinese characters. Every day I found myself in a state of emotional turmoil; it was often very hard to find textual proofs in historical sources to explain what the interviewees had experienced, for theirs was a time of history which even now has not been completed, a time which nobody can explain, much less fully document.
When after those six months I returned to my friends and appeared in public once more, many of my acquaintances were startled: 'Xinran, what's happened to you? Where did all those white hairs come from?' I replied: 'I got all those white hairs from months skulking at home!' But I knew that they were the sprouts of 'bitter thoughts and remembrances' in my heart. The cares weighing on the hearts of the old people I had interviewed had led me to ponder deeply on the last century of China's history, and had drawn me into the arduous journey towards understanding modern China.
On this journey I met over a hundred Chinese university students who lent me their support, acting as my assistants, doing research, word processing, selecting and editing extracts. They began to develop an interest just like mine, an intense curiosity about the nature of the cultural system and historic earth our modern-day life is rooted in. Why have we not paid proper attention to the history that is right next to us, which is disappearing as our lives and even our streets are transformed in front of our eyes? The stories of our grandfathers and grandmothers are doors that will close and be destroyed one day soon: how many of them have been passed on to their children and grandchildren?
In fact, the reactions of the university students were more powerful than those of my own – their parents' – generation. First, there was the gulf of language between them. The old people's variety of different accents caused considerable embarrassment for some of the university students who came from the same part of the world – 'You're from the same place, and you can't understand what that person was saying?' The scenes and objects that appeared in these narratives, things that had disappeared never to return, made life very hard for these bright students from the best universities: 'I don't know how to write this word, or what that thing's for…'
Then there was the confusion surrounding common historical knowledge. The great joys and sorrows of the old people who had been forced together into their shared historical experiences astonished and shocked those university students, whose own historical education had been delivered in disconnected fragments, misinterpreted or overlooked: 'How come we didn't know about these things?' Some of them could not even spell the names of the famous men who had ruled China and been the driving force behind major historical events… The old people's aspirations and sacrifice, their pure hearts and lack of personal ambition, caused the university students to ask suspiciously again and again: 'How could they have invested so much faith in a political party which had no economic knowledge and no understanding of human nature?'
Another typical response from the university students was an examination of their own consciences. As one of them said: 'Our own parents and grandparents have survived this time; do they have stories like these as well? Why haven't they told them to us? Once I know their stories, how will I judge their past? Will I still be proud of my widely read grandfather and my kindly, skilled grandmother?'
It is my belief that pain and questions are an overture to social progress.
In April 2007 I returned to China, for further confirmation of my experiences of a nation that was 'changing and modernising with every passing day' so that I would have another chance to come to understand the disappearing older generations of Chinese.
After almost four weeks of revisits to Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and small villages on the edges of the big cities, and further meetings with people I had interviewed, I was left with even more, even newer 'things that I couldn't say for sure'. Many different images of those old people's former battles and hopes, images that seemed almost impossible to reconcile with each other, were spinning before my eyes and jostling in my thoughts:
– A shopping street in a modern metropolis: men dressed in Western brand-name suits and women in evening gowns were wandering about in couples in the sunlight, shopping or simply taking a stroll. Countless envious eyes were following their progress; most of those eyes were set in faces that still bore the scars of hard labour in the fields, and in bodies carved by the years.
– A roadside snack stall in a small village: most of the men were talking business, and the women were all discussing their children's education; but the students were all talking about how to impress people with Korean hairstyles, how to play Japanese computer games, or how to go to the city to find the jobs that made big money.
– Vendors crying their wares in a tourist spot: a string of three small monkeys and a Buddha statue decorated with little flashing lights, which the vendor calls 'the quest of today's Chinese'. Those three monkeys were said to be a folk understanding of Jiang Zemin's 'Three Represents' policy. The 'Three Represents' is usually summarised as: The Communist Party of China represents the requirements of China's advanced productive forces, the progressive course of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese masses. One of the three monkeys on the string was covering its eyes with both hands – don't see; one was covering its ears with both hands – don't hear; one was covering its mouth – don't speak. The seller explained to the tourists that this was the 'wise' way for Chinese people to deal with Party leaders: look without seeing; turn a deaf ear; watch but don't say anything. But wisest of all was to be like the Buddha seated in the petals of a lotus – purge your mind of desire and ambition.
– A little bookshop in a small town: bursting with 'big bargain' books, 'stock- clearance crazy prices' CDs and 'guaranteed genuine promotional offer' DVDs. They had everything you could ever want, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, so cheap that only a fool would not buy them, even more elegantly printed and bound than those in the big state-run Xinhua bookshop. On impulse I bought over thirty volumes, hoping to catch up on my 'modern Chinese current affairs literature'. One of the books was called China's Twentieth-Century Disasters, which recorded fifteen floods along China's five major waterways, five major famines in the densely populated eastern region, four major earthquakes along the eastern seaboard and many droughts and fires, all between 1910 and 1998. Were they acts of God, or were they man-made, political disasters? The book gave no comment or analysis, merely stating that in each case over 10,000 lives had been lost. I sighed inwardly: this nation had suffered so much from faction-fighting and warlords, and the common people had had to endure so many viciously cruel natural disasters as well. However, this is a nation 'that wild fire can never burn, which rises again when the spring wind blows': 1.3 billion people had survived all the disasters and hardships of the century!
– Magazines: of all the publications in China, these are by far the fastest growing area. The major newspapers are still half official political articles, half advertising; the smaller local papers seem to have more of an 'eye for the money', and have more advertisements than anything else, with the rest made up of sensational or novelty stories, and just a sprinkling of major national current affairs stories and Party news. It is very hard to understand some of the things these advertisements are offering, often in a rather peremptory manner, such as 'international luxury leisure home living is the first choice for Chinese people', 'if you're looking for somewhere to live, live like a tycoon', 'life without a luxury house or big-brand car is not really living', and so on… In a mere twenty years of reform, can 1.3 billion Chinese people walk into an 'international luxury life' with a single step? And does this mean that all those peasants who earn less than a hundred yuan a year are 'not really living'? Is the journey from extreme socialism to extreme capitalism our only possible route to 'a strong nation and a wealthy people'?
– On Chinese television: the country has dozens of television channels, and on all of them peak time is dominated by beauty contests, talent competitions, historical costume dramas, lectures on history by big-name historians and other such programmes. News programmes remain dominated by interminable seas of meetings and still noticeably lack current affairs analysis. This is clearly a very sensitive area: in China, the further away something is in space and time, the safer it is for the media. Sometimes it seems that every Chinese is a nutrition expert or a gourmet: these are safe topics that have neither been made risky by government or dynastic changes, nor dragged into conflicts of personalities. Radio seems a little braver than television: once-forbidden areas such as sex, an independent legal system, freedom of the press, religion and so on, all 'briefly and evasively' show their faces in public; some have even become the 'trademark themes' of smaller local stations. But limited international knowledge leads many presenters to express highly ludicrous attitudes, such as 'only the ultimate world-quality Starbucks coffee can give the experience of true white-collar pride', 'all stars of international fashionable society crave a beautiful white skin', 'the USA is the cultural centre of the modern world', 'every single day, all the people in the world are watching China's development', and so on and so forth. I once heard an old man
