by Jan Wong
This is a remarkable memoir is subtitled, "My Long March from Mao to Now." Jan Wong was a 60's radical, a true believer in the superiority of Maoist thought. Or so she thought. As a Canadian of Chinese descent, she was in a position to apply to Beijing University. When China granted her the opportunity, she seized it, anxious to contribute to the Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Now, if you're like me, your understanding of Chinese history (even recent history) is shaky at best. For many Americans, our only of the exposure to the events of the late 60s and early 70s in China come from brief glosses in movies like Farewell My Concubine or the Red Violin. Perhaps surprisingly, Jan Wong's first-hand account supports the broad-brush impression that one gets from these films.
In reading the first half of this book, which covers Wong's years as a student and worker, I was mildly annoyed by her tendency to filter her youthful naiveté through her reaffirmed Western sensibilities. While describing her attempts to support her suffering comrades, she doesn't need to constantly remind us that she sees the world differently now. I would have preferred a more straightforward account minus the editorializing.
But then in the second half of the book, this is exactly the approach she uses as she relates her return to China after an eight-year absence in her new role as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail. This is particularly true of her eyewitness account of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the most arresting and heart-wrenching part of the book.
Perhaps the most valuable and interesting feature of the book is how clearly Wong is able to trace the incredibly rapid pace of change in Chinese culture. The cover of the paperback edition juxtaposes an image of Chairman Mao with one of Ronald McDonald. For China to embrace the most capitalist icon of the West so soon after Mao's death is mind-boggling. However, this isn't the whole story. Having shown both sides of the Maoist coin, Wong doesn't shy away from describing the hardships that Deng Xiaoping's capitalist reforms have visited on the countryside.
In the end Wong accepts the superiority of the capitalist model and expresses hope that the capitalist reforms will eventually drag political reform along with it. Wong's memoir concludes in 1996. I'm anxious to find something as enjoyable as Red China Blues that can fill in the last ten years of Chinese cultural evolution.
