Xinran is no stranger to storytelling. In The Good Women of China, she gathered the lives of ordinary women she encountered in her 20 years as a reporter and radio host in China. Years after Xinran moved to London, she returned to China to interview her parents’ generation for her latest book, China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation.
Witness presents the testimony of men and women who reached their prime during the Cultural Revolution, the decade of radical reform from 1966-76 that resulted in political and social turmoil. Schools closed, university exams stopped, and Mao Zedong mobilized youth into Red Guard units that roamed the country to carry out his mandate of purging bourgeois counter-revolutionary influences. Red Guards ransacked homes and heritage sites, renamed streets, and denounced and attacked ‘class enemies.’
The Chinese Communist Party quietly laid responsibility at Mao’s door and acknowledged the failure of his policies, but open discussion is still taboo in China, and Xinran fears these stories will be lost with the older generation. She spoke with The Varsity about censorship, bridging the generation gap, and why she never spent a birthday with her mother.
The Varsity: None of your books have been published in China. If your books aren’t available to most Chinese, aren’t you missing the most important audience?
Xinran: Yes, very much so. When people ask me, “Do you think the book is for Westerners or for Chinese?” I say first of all the book is for myself, to get answers why my family gave me life, but couldn’t give me time and love.
Secondly, for Chinese children, because I am the mother of a Chinese son. Other countries have so many people to gather historical records. China only has the last generation [the youngest are now in their seventies]. They are voiceless. They are absent. If they’re gone, and we still don’t listen to them, our future could be could be cut off from our history.
And also it is for Westerners. I’ve been working in Western media—BBC, the Guardian—I can see their knowledge is very limited and very old. If people don’t understand this nation of 1.3 billion, a quarter of the people on this planet, how can we make peace between each other?
I had seven [Chinese] publishers interested, but they said it was too sensitive, too close to history. But of course I do want very much that Chinese can read it.
TV: How did the Cultural Revolution affect you?
X: This is very painful. I never get out of that part of my life.
The Cultural Revolution took place when I was seven and a half. Because my parents were highly educated and spoke foreign languages, they were arrested the first week. I became kind of a political orphan, along with my younger brother, who was two and a half years old. Fourteen of us slept in one room, on the floor.
In that six and a half years, I never ever had the chance to speak up, to have friends, to play. I was terribly lonely. During the night, Red Guards [youths who carried out Maoist principles for purging counter-revolutionary influences] picked up kids, took them next door, beat them, probably sexually abused them as well. I was so frightened. Every night I thought it was my turn.
That nightmare comes back again and again. I can’t sleep. At night, I jump up, scared, until I find out where I am. And then I confirm I’m grown up, I’m not in that childhood anymore.
TV: You dedicated this book to your mother and to mothers everywhere.
I’m over 50 years old, and I’ve never had a single birthday with my mom. I dreamed to be hugged, to be kissed, to be warmed by her. Obviously she struggled, she would say, don’t worry about birthdays, it doesn’t matter, but for me, I wanted one. So I think she always felt I couldn’t understand how difficult a life she had been through. I want my writing to show her that step by step, drop by drop, I’m reaching my dream—I just want to know her.
As a mother, I know I will have stories to tell my son and he will tell the stories to his children. I wish my mom’s generation could be comfortable with us and trust us. We’re not just living in just a material world or with Western beliefs. We are part of Chinese culture and history.
TV: You worked for a Chinese military university for 12 years, and another 8 at a radio show. Why did you leave?
X: During my radio show, we had a call-in program. So people came to me, very emotionally, and some women committed suicide after phone calls. That got to me. I felt hopeless and useless. It happened again and again. Policemen came to me and said, we found a body, that body has a letter to you. That made me so depressed. At that time, you can’t talk about freedom of religion, freedom of the press, or sexuality. But this is a very basic need of human life.
After eight years of the radio show from Monday to Friday, two hours every day, I felt so empty. I can’t tell you that feeling. So I just needed to recharge myself. I couldn’t sleep. I started taking sleeping pills, and the doctor said stop, you should go somewhere, keep a distance from your daily life.
TV: In the introduction to China Witness, you talk about “national dignity” and dignity comes up repeatedly as a topic. What does that mean to you and why is it important?
X: When we talk about dignity, democracy, society, or freedom, what does that mean? What’s important is how much we understand between each other, between generations, between history and the future. If we don’t have this capability to speak, understanding is impossible.
But in China—based on cultural reasons or systemic reasons—this new generation is the very first to open our conversation. Even if you are in America, in Canada, in U.K., you can see it’s very common: the Chinese don’t talk.
It’s not just political reasons. Political reasons are the worst, but there’s so much tact in our culture. I call it an abused culture. We have a beautiful, rich culture, but there is a dark side. Women are still under men’s control and the family tree is based on men. We say we have a different culture from others, actually I think that’s just an excuse.
TV: For the book, you interviewed people in their seventies to nineties. What about your generation? Will there be a follow-up?
X: This is part of my plan. I will follow three generations. I hope in my lifetime I could interview my generation and their children, and see how much this nation has changed.
TV: What difficulties did you have interviewing people?
X: People tell you the stories, but if you really question them, Why did you do this? What did you feel? Why didn’t you stand up? They can’t say.
People are confused how to talk, how to tell their story, even now if you tell a fact, you have to dress it into the sentence. People think you can get information very easily, from government documents. But what I want to know is something very personal, because through personal lives, you can analyze the texture of china’s past.
TV: In your book, you talk about the gap between written history and lived experience. Can we ever reconcile the two?
X: Most history is written by winners, not victims and losers. Real history is colourful and gives people enough space to talk in different ways. History isn’t made by politicians—it’s made by individuals and families. We’re giving the wrong message to our students and to ourselves. According to our culture, we have to be simplified into black-or-white.
TV: Are there any winners from the Cultural Revolution?
X: Yes, like Yao Puopuo, from the first chapter of the China Witness book. She’s the only one in my twenty years’ time who said she loved the Cultural Revolution. Anyone could travel, and they came to buy her herbs. She said, “I make huge money by Cultural Revolution.”
TV: Young people who became Red Guards also got a rare chance to exercise power.
X: In the Chinese tradition, young people never had a chance to question, to challenge, to oppose anyone higher than them. The Cultural Revolution gave young people a chance to challenge the old, to go against everything. But you need very basic respect for human beings, or for legal behaviour—you can’t take the damage or abuse of other people as your liberation. Many Red Guards told me in the past five years that they struggled quite a lot on how to see their past. But some of them still think what they did was somehow good for China.
TV: What do you think of the new generation of students? They’re often criticized for being apathetic or materialistic, for defending the Chinese government against all comers.
X: We can’t simplify this kind of situation. They come from a lost generation. Their parents were very poor and struggled all their life, so they want to give the best to their children. This happened in America, in 1930s and 40s when people used to be very poor. The new generation is brought up in such a fast-moving world. They are like plants who haven’t been given the time to go through the four seasons.
In other countries, even if the younger generation doesn’t care, one day they can go back to museums or libraries to dig out the family roots. In China, there’s not much left—their grandparents are their history. We have to urgently record that, as soon as possible. The Cultural Revolution destroyed so much. Over the last 30 years, the teaching methods in schools are very limited. Lots of teachers still don’t have very deep resources to open children’s minds. To solely blame the new generation is very difficult. It’s not their fault or their parents’—it’s just a certain period in history.
TV: Are you optimistic that dialogue is opening inside China?
With the central government, there’s control and censorship. But this government is trying to make the move smoothly—you can’t make change overnight, that’s what they tried in the Cultural Revolution. At the moment, I think they are going in the right direction. To open the conversation or freedom of the press, that could be a long march for Chinese society.
John Fraser, a former China correspondent for the Globe & Mail and the master of Massey College, will interview Xinran 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 3, at the Hart House Debates Room.
