partition off an even smaller sliver and place it in her mouth, still smiling. At this point I stopped worrying, and turned to the other guests, but when I glanced back at her place, she was missing. I hurried after her to the toilet, from which issued suppressed sounds of vomiting. I waited quietly outside the door until she came out, tears still glistening on her cheeks. 'I'm fine, I was being greedy, I got something stuck in my throat, so I came to clean myself out. I've caused you a lot of worry for nothing.' When I heard these words it suddenly hit me: this is a woman of remarkable self-control. That evening, as I said goodbye to her and her son, I fixed a time for her to come to my home for tea. She came as agreed, and brought me her real self: a daughter who had spent every day longing for her mother; a traditional Chinese woman whose husband was dead and whose son lived far away; a National Level One acrobatic performer who had struggled for a future of her own, with a father accused of being a counter-revolutionary, and who had grown up along with acrobatics in China as the status changed from amateur to professional; a mother who had raised a pure, authentic Chinese child. This was a Chinese story with no political window dressing, without the gilding and ornamentation of vanity.
Yishujia was the youngest person whom I interviewed. She agreed to come to Qingdao, which was some distance from her home in the city of Jinan, because she did not want the 'past things that floated up from the bottom of the sea' to cloud the waters of her daily life. I hoped that by finding a space where she could distance herself from it all, she would be able to allow the unhappiness and griefs to settle.
We arrived in the summer coastal resort of Qingdao, on the Shandong peninsula in east China, on 14 August. It was unusually hot in Qingdao, which is as famous for its pleasantly cool summers as for its Tsingtao beer, with temperatures as high as thirty-nine degrees. However, this did not have any noticeable effect on the annual International Beer Festival: hundreds of thousands of beer lovers from all over the world were celebrating all through the night despite the heatwave, to the point where some people mistook a heaven-sent night-time fall of rain for 'rivers of beer in the streets'.
We held our interview with Yishujia in a government-run guest house by the sea. She had changed into a person who was both very strange to me and very familiar: this was no longer the lively, vivacious Teacher Yishujia whom the years had passed by, full of smiles and laughter. Instead, she was 'standing ready for battle', as if for a political interrogation, with all her answers prepared and ready. This is a classic expression and posture in video interviews in China, and also a very tricky 'bottleneck' stage through which you must pass before you can enter into a heart-to-heart dialogue.
I adopted a slow, measured tone, and asked the first question in a seemingly casual way.
XINRAN: Teacher Yishujia, after you retired, what did you think about the most?
YISHUJIA: I went over past memories, a bit of everything.
XINRAN: What's the earliest thing you remember?
YISHUJIA: That must be my mother taking me to visit my father. At the time my father was working on a building somewhere outside Jinan, and my mother took me and the eldest of my younger sisters over the mountains on donkey-back to see him.
XINRAN: Can you still remember where you father was?
YISHUJIA: I can't remember what place it was, I just remember that in the evenings you could hear wolves howling.
XINRAN: Do you know what kind of families your parents came from? I'm still rather hazy about my own family background, even now. I know my great-grandfather ran restaurants, as far afield as Malaysia, Japan and Singapore, though it wasn't called Singapore in those days. But nobody in my grandfather's generation wanted to run a restaurant, they all went to work in banks or for Far Eastern companies, so the restaurants were all sold off. In my father's generation, that big family split into two groups: one group went to America with the Western companies, another followed the Communist Party and stayed in China. So what kind of family was yours?
YISHUJIA: I can only remember that my paternal great-grandfather's family was from Hongsong village in Zhouping county, in Shandong. My great-grandfather died young, he was just fifty, and my great-grandmother lost her sight through illness, but she raised my grandfather and a great-aunt without remarrying. In those days widows remained faithful to their dead husbands by never remarrying. The fulfilment of duty was the only way their children could hold their heads up around other people. The impression I got when I was small was that my great-uncle had been to college, and that was why the whole family got an education. My great-uncle was a schoolteacher. My great-grandmother was supporting the family at that time, it was really hard for her. Once my great-uncle started teaching, he took all the boys in the family with him to Jinan to go to school, my great-aunt's boys, my father and uncles from our family. In our extended family, all the males in my father's generation went to school.
XINRAN: About how old were you when you went to primary school?
YISHUJIA: I was seven.
XINRAN: What was the school like?
YISHUJIA: My school was the best in Jinan – my great-uncle taught there.
XINRAN: How many boys and girls were there when you started school?
YISHUJIA: There were forty or fifty children in my class, a lot more boys than girls.
XINRAN: So many people in your family had been to school, did you experience hardships in the political movements after Liberation?
YISHUJIA: In those days our family owned a big, rambling house; we had livestock too, and hired hands to work our land. Just before Liberation, my great-uncle sold a lot of the family property. My great-grandmother was livid, she beat and cursed him, but later on she found out that he had been quite far-sighted: because our family property had all been sold, when the government determined class status after Liberation we were classified as middle peasants, otherwise we would have been classed as landlords and attacked. It wasn't just a question of a few houses, it was life and death.
XINRAN: It always surprises me, the way those old people could see the way society was going. My maternal grandfather donated a sizeable portion of his property to the government after the Liberation: banks, grain stores, shipping fleets, hardware factories, he gave them all to the common cause without a murmur. A good many of the people who had been classified as capitalists along with him came under attack, their children were implicated in their crimes, and this often ended in suffering or death; but in my grandfather's case, apart from the decade of the Cultural Revolution, which he spent in prison, he lived in peace until he died aged ninety-seven, without a stain on his character, and all his children alive and well.
YISHUJIA: Hmm, that's no easy thing.
I felt that Yishujia was very guarded in the face of my questions, so I tried to elicit some fellow feeling with stories of my grandparents' generation: after my grandfather died, crowds of people came to express their condolences, nearly a thousand in the course of a week. My aunts and uncles were flabbergasted, none of them knew why so many people who knew my grandfather would come.
YISHUJIA: Oh, I know why even your family didn't know.
XINRAN: Why? [I thought she had started to open up, but I was wrong.]
YISHUJIA: You say it, I like to listen!
XINRAN: Many of the people who came to pay their respects knelt in front of his picture and talked to him, telling their stories. Afterwards, my aunt said that when she saw all this she was filled with regret, she said she should have listened more to my grandfather's stories when he was still alive. But members of the younger generation never dared to ask their elders about their history, and old people seldom talked much about their past, especially those who came up from nothing through hard work, who had been manual workers, they believed that they were a lower class than others. There are also people who find it hard to get the words out, especially those who had a history of capitalism after the fifties – most of them avoid mentioning the past entirely.
YISHUJIA: You're right there, and those people are in the majority.
