book review
Title: China Witness
Author: Xinran
Translators: Nicky Harman, Julie Lovell, Esther Tyldesley
Year: 2008
Publisher: Pantheon Books
ISBN: 978-0-375-42547-9
"China Witness" is a compilation of interviews the author did with Chinese people aged 60-80 in 2006, that is, people who were 0-20 when the Communists took over China. Xinran has a highly sentimental way of reflecting on what her interview subjects say, which I found slightly annoying, but she more than makes up for it by finding very interesting people to interview.
Her introduction talks about a man she wanted to interview, who was a bandit on the Silk Road, and had told her about the culture of the bandits and the local villagers who supported them. He had unfortunately sickened between the time she first talked to him and the time she was doing her video interviews. The people she did interview were as follows:
-An herbalist (or traditional medicine practitioner) who got rich when the Communists started persecuting doctors
-The descendents of the "Double-Gun Woman," who is apparently a national heroine of China for shooting "the enemies of China" with two guns during the period of civil war between 1911 and 1949.
-A woman who moved from Shandong on the east coast to Xinjiang in the west to help build the city of Shihezi and became a teacher
-A man who went to Russia to learn how to find oil, and his wife who led the mapping brigade who scouted the land before the oil prospecting team arrived
-An Chinese acrobat who trained from when she was very young, and toured the world, and is now teaching
-A man whose family owned a tea house and who became a "news singer" -- like a town crier, but melodic -- when he was 10
-A number of people preserving the art of lantern making
-A man who participated in the Long March, and still has destroyed feet from it
-A woman with the rank of General in the army who worked on teaching foreign languages
-A policeman in Zhengzhou
-A woman who put her two kids through college from the income she earned mending shoes
Some of the interview questions that were repeated throughout the book were "How did you meet your spouse? What was the wedding like?" and "What do you think of the saying, 'your parents were foolish and ignorant, and your generation was foolishly loyal'?" The first question elicited more interesting responses than the second. For the most part, the marriages were not arranged by parents, the exception being the herb seller who married her teacher's other foster child because they were traveling and the teacher thought it would be dangerous for her to be unmarried. Other people were introduced to each other by friends or colleagues acting as matchmakers. The weddings were mostly simple -- they bought cigarettes and candy, passed them out to the guests, signed the paperwork and the wedding was over in an hour. It was also common for the interviewees to talk about their parents raising their children, or being separated from their spouse for years at a time due to their focus on building the country and due to the movements that sent people into the countryside to do hard labor. Another common thread was minor things in the interviewee's past coming back to haunt them during the Cultural Revolution. One interviewee had worked for the Guomingdang, and one for the Japanese when they were the only source of income in the interviewee's town. Though the job was minor - like washing pots, this was held against them. The man who had been to Russia kept a Russian-made radio. This was seen as evidence of him being a spy.
Some of the stories that made a bigger impression on me were as follows:
The shoe-mending woman was skilled at telling things about people based on their feet. For example, people who do manual labor have wider feet, or "if they tread on someone's foot and can step back and give way, then they're educated, good people. Then there are people who don't know how to give way, people who wear designer shoes, fakes too."
Xinran had experience with Zhengzhou, where the policeman lived. There is a radio tower there that used to be used to emit static that would drown out foreign radio stations like Voice of America or Taiwanese and Hong Kong stations, but which was later used as a radio station and she got to be one of the first broadcasters. She talked about how she learned through her work at the radio that villagers nearby had no chimneys in their houses and were going blind from the smoke, and when a group of people tried to convince the villagers to add chimneys it was a policeman from Zhengzhou who showed them how to best deliver the message (he invoked Chairman Mao).
This was a highly interesting history, and makes me want to try some of Xinran's other books such as "The Good Women of China" or "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother."
Author: Xinran
Translators: Nicky Harman, Julie Lovell, Esther Tyldesley
Year: 2008
Publisher: Pantheon Books
ISBN: 978-0-375-42547-9
"China Witness" is a compilation of interviews the author did with Chinese people aged 60-80 in 2006, that is, people who were 0-20 when the Communists took over China. Xinran has a highly sentimental way of reflecting on what her interview subjects say, which I found slightly annoying, but she more than makes up for it by finding very interesting people to interview.
Her introduction talks about a man she wanted to interview, who was a bandit on the Silk Road, and had told her about the culture of the bandits and the local villagers who supported them. He had unfortunately sickened between the time she first talked to him and the time she was doing her video interviews. The people she did interview were as follows:
-An herbalist (or traditional medicine practitioner) who got rich when the Communists started persecuting doctors
-The descendents of the "Double-Gun Woman," who is apparently a national heroine of China for shooting "the enemies of China" with two guns during the period of civil war between 1911 and 1949.
-A woman who moved from Shandong on the east coast to Xinjiang in the west to help build the city of Shihezi and became a teacher
-A man who went to Russia to learn how to find oil, and his wife who led the mapping brigade who scouted the land before the oil prospecting team arrived
-An Chinese acrobat who trained from when she was very young, and toured the world, and is now teaching
-A man whose family owned a tea house and who became a "news singer" -- like a town crier, but melodic -- when he was 10
-A number of people preserving the art of lantern making
-A man who participated in the Long March, and still has destroyed feet from it
-A woman with the rank of General in the army who worked on teaching foreign languages
-A policeman in Zhengzhou
-A woman who put her two kids through college from the income she earned mending shoes
Some of the interview questions that were repeated throughout the book were "How did you meet your spouse? What was the wedding like?" and "What do you think of the saying, 'your parents were foolish and ignorant, and your generation was foolishly loyal'?" The first question elicited more interesting responses than the second. For the most part, the marriages were not arranged by parents, the exception being the herb seller who married her teacher's other foster child because they were traveling and the teacher thought it would be dangerous for her to be unmarried. Other people were introduced to each other by friends or colleagues acting as matchmakers. The weddings were mostly simple -- they bought cigarettes and candy, passed them out to the guests, signed the paperwork and the wedding was over in an hour. It was also common for the interviewees to talk about their parents raising their children, or being separated from their spouse for years at a time due to their focus on building the country and due to the movements that sent people into the countryside to do hard labor. Another common thread was minor things in the interviewee's past coming back to haunt them during the Cultural Revolution. One interviewee had worked for the Guomingdang, and one for the Japanese when they were the only source of income in the interviewee's town. Though the job was minor - like washing pots, this was held against them. The man who had been to Russia kept a Russian-made radio. This was seen as evidence of him being a spy.
Some of the stories that made a bigger impression on me were as follows:
The shoe-mending woman was skilled at telling things about people based on their feet. For example, people who do manual labor have wider feet, or "if they tread on someone's foot and can step back and give way, then they're educated, good people. Then there are people who don't know how to give way, people who wear designer shoes, fakes too."
Xinran had experience with Zhengzhou, where the policeman lived. There is a radio tower there that used to be used to emit static that would drown out foreign radio stations like Voice of America or Taiwanese and Hong Kong stations, but which was later used as a radio station and she got to be one of the first broadcasters. She talked about how she learned through her work at the radio that villagers nearby had no chimneys in their houses and were going blind from the smoke, and when a group of people tried to convince the villagers to add chimneys it was a policeman from Zhengzhou who showed them how to best deliver the message (he invoked Chairman Mao).
This was a highly interesting history, and makes me want to try some of Xinran's other books such as "The Good Women of China" or "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother."