Book #03 - Once Upon a Time in the East by Guo Xiaolu
Once Upon a Time in the East by Guo Xiaolu
Also published in the United States with the title Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
This is an autobiography by Chinese writer Guo Xiaolu. She tells her life story, from growing up with her grandparents in a poor fishing village, through her adolescent years in a factory town and her film studies in Beijing, until her emigration to Britain, all in very direct words - she doesn't spare either herself or the reader.
This is a fucking hard book to read, and I absolutely think everyone should read it. But since most people probably won't want to, I am going to pick all the best parts out of it here and quote them for you.
The book (and my list) has a ton of content warnings: abortion, abuse (physical, emotional, sexual), neglect, rape, starvation, suicide
The main point of the book - for me - is the part about self-censorship: "We in China had undergone a proletarian revolution under Mao, and yet there was barely a free thought allowed in our heads. The layers of self-censorship we had to engage in before the official censorship came to get us had already strangled any creative work. In China, creativity meant compromise. Creativity no longer bore its original and intended meaning. Creativity under a Communist regime requires the struggle to survive under such rigid rules, and for all creative thoughts to be kept to oneself."
And this isn't only relevant for people working in Chinese entertainment, or their fans. I think people don't realize how much we censor ourselves at the slightest hint of opposition, and how much worse it would be if we, too, were threatened with prison or death or the end of our careers.
This book shows China as it is - or was. (Don't think it got better since. It got worse.) Of course it's only one woman's perspective, but it's honest and doesn't hold back.
* The casual violence between her grandfather and grandmother: "he beat her almost every day, for small things [...]. Or he beat her for no reason at all. He kicked at her short, skinny legs, and pushed and punched her to the floor. That was a normal sight in our house. She wept only after he had left. And then she wouldn’t even get up from the cold stone floor. Despite my young age, I was already numb from having witnessed this sort of scene too often. [...] I didn’t think he was in any way a monster, because where I grew up, every man beat his wife and children. In the morning, in the evening, at night, I heard our neighbours’ sobs. First a male voice shouting, the sounds of furniture being thrown, and then the weeping of a mother or a daughter. That was village life. It was normal."
* The fact that her grandmother couldn't read, had bound feet, and no first name.
* The way her mother didn't care about her at all, only about her brother.
* How the women weren't supposed to be interested in the men's lives. Men talk about men things and women talk about women things.
* The fact that she was so myopic she couldn't read anything at school at all, but still didn't get glasses. "I had my first eye test at the age of nine. The eye doctor told my parents that I had severe myopia - both eyes registered minus ten. By the time I had turned twelve, they measured minus fifteen. But for some reason, I didn’t wear glasses until I was twenty"
* The fact that her father, an intellectual and a painter whose favorite motif was wild nature, of which he preferred to make black and white inkwash paintings, was forced to paint communist propaganda posters all his life. (But only after he was almost killed, spent time in labor camps, and was finally rehabilitated.)
* That she was sexually abused by an employee of her father's for years and nobody noticed.
* That she had a secret relationship with one of her teachers, got pregnant, and had to have an abortion.
* That after all of that she somehow managed to claw her way back to a "normal" sex life.
* The interesting points she mentions about Confucianism's influence on Chinese society: "The more I studied what Confucius had said, the more I loathed this ancient man and his rotten words. It was a philosophy as depressing as the fates of my suicidal grandfather and my hunchbacked grandmother. I felt bored and imprisoned at school, and wondered how such a book had managed to root itself so fundamentally in the lives of the Chinese people for the last 2,400 years, even in the Communist so-called New China! 'Wei nu zi yu xiao ren nan yang - ‘Of all people, women and petty servants are the most difficult to deal with. If you are close to them, they lose their humbleness. If you maintain a reserve towards them, they grow discontented and complain.’ - The boys often quoted this at the girls in my class. I detested those lines, but they had been used as weapons like this for over two millennia. No wonder women had been so brutally treated and nonconformists so relentlessly prosecuted."
* That she spent two years doing nothing at all but studying for the exams for film school, failing the first time and getting accepted the second time, one of 11 students to be accepted from over 7000 applicants. (Btw, that was the same school Chen Minghao was a few years later. There are two film schools in Beijing.)
* That she was able to publish poetry and a book, but all attempts at getting a movie through censorship failed, and she eventually settled for writing tv scripts.
* How extreme the underground art movement was, and how dangerous it was to even attend art shows. And how it all ended in 1989. "One thing was clear: after 1989, young people became noticeably politically indifferent and pragmatic. Everyone wanted to just get on with life, to finish their studies, find a stable job and survive." The wonders of a massacre...
* That she jumped on the chance for a scholarship to study in Britain, without knowing any of the language, or in fact having been brought up to survive in any other society than the Chinese one. It's not explicitly mentioned in the book, but it often shone through that she was very naive in a lot of respects, which I personally blame on the Chinese education system. It's just not intended to produce people who think for themselves. But it did produce someone filled with so much hate for the system that none of that mattered.
* The part of the story that takes place in Britain is more personal and more of a story of healing than the first part. It's still interesting, and it's deeply satisfying to see how she emerged from all the terrible things that shaped her life in China to become her own person. For me the first part was just more interesting, because I am simply more interested in China itself, but the last part provides the necessary distance for her to write her autobiography, so it is important for putting the rest of the book in perspective.
* All in all, the subject matter is extremely depressing, but made a bit better bearable by the fact that at least she escaped to tell her story. I'm glad I read it.
5 stars - Great insight into Chinese life in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
This is my final book rec post of 2021. (Sorry it took me so long to write this one up.)
1 - * stars - private novel draft
2 - 4 stars - All the Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders [DW link & LJ link]
3 - 5 stars - Once Upon a Time in the East by Guo Xiaolu [DW link & LJ link]
4 - 3 stars - Whispers Underground (The Rivers of London #3) by Ben Aaronovitch [DW link & LJ link]
5 - 5 stars - Chimes at Midnight (Toby Daye #7) by Seanan McGuire [DW link & LJ link]
6 - 1 star - Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota #1) by Ada Palmer [DW link & LJ link]
7 - 3 stars - Dragon Wing (Death Gate Cycle #1) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman [DW link & LJ link]
x-posted from dw (comments:
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