Chinese Whispers,By Jan Wong, Atlantic Books, 318pp, £12.99
JAN WONG is a third generation Canadian from Montreal, whose father owned a prosperous Chinese restaurant. In 1972, after leading agitation and student sit-ins at McGill University, she set off for China as a starry-eyed Maoist. She enrolled at Beijing University and tried hard to fit in.
Jan Wong was then, she admits, “fanatical, ignorant and adolescent”. As part of the Maoist curriculum she dug ditches, hauled pig manure and denounced the capitalist world. She met and married the only American draft-dodger seeking asylum in China.
However her fanaticism dimmed with the unrelenting harshness of life in communist China. After six years she returned to Canada, finished her studies at McGill, obtained a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University, and in 1988 returned to Beijing as the Globe and Mail China correspondent. Maoist rhetoric gave way to a journalist’s cynicism. She made her name with vivid eye-witness reporting of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. Five years later, she returned to Canada and produced a best-selling account of her life experiences called Red China Blues. It became required reading for correspondents like myself who arrived in Beijing in the mid 1990s to report on China’s great lurch towards capitalism. In researching that book she came across a diary item from 1973 that reminded her that she had “ratted out” a Chinese student to the university authorities for expressing a desire to escape to the United States. The student, Yin Luoyi, was expelled at a department-wide meeting and disappeared.
Looking back, Wong realised “with blinding clarity” that she might have thoughtlessly destroyed a young woman she didn’t even know. She resolved to find Yin Luoyi, establish what happened to her, and apologise. But she left it quite late. It wasn’t until 2007 that she set out on her quest, using the cover of a month-long assignment from her paper to write a portrait of pre-Olympics Beijing.
The enterprise at first seemed “mission impossible”, trying to locate a middle-aged woman whose full name she did not know, whom she had encountered only fleetingly 34 years previously, who might be living in China or abroad, and who might not even be alive. Along the way, Wong explores her own confusing past and confronts the motivations behind her act of betrayal. She eventually finds that she wasn’t the only one who “ratted out” Yin Luoyi and that she may not have been wholly responsible for her banishment.
One clue leads to another until . . . well it would be unfair to give away the ending. This is, after all, a detective story. But it is more than that. It is an often funny and irreverent account of the Chinese capital yesterday and today, a city that has been bulldozed and rebuilt and whose former Maoist fanatics have become consumer-capitalists. In contemporary Beijing people cultivate amnesia about the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, when “ratting out” was commonplace, and about the Tiananmen Square bloodshed, taking comfort in frantic retail therapy.
Chinese Whispers is peopled with characters given nicknames by the author such as Fu the Enforcer, her doctrinaire former teacher, and Fat Pay-cheque, her husband, Norman, who accompanies the author and their teenage children, Ben and Sam, whom she uses unabashedly for comic content. They delight in their rented apartment with its blonde-wood trim and flat-screen TV, in contrast to the ox-blood varnish and hulking armchairs of the recent past.
The book is, inter alia, a terrific food guide to Beijing, with meticulous attention to the menus (a waitress brings “boneless fillet of yellow-croaker fish sautéed in a rice-wine sauce of fresh bamboo shoots and white cloud ear fungus . . .”). It becomes in places an architectural critique of the city’s reckless journey from hutongs to Hiltons. A chapter is devoted to a zany tour of the city with a professor of architecture who rubbishes Beijing’s “show-off” buildings and its new highway network, lit up at night “like a giant video-game”.
The candid, beguiling style is hugely entertaining but occasionally left me feeling a little uneasy. Might not her account of the professor’s cheerful boasts, that the high-level security pass on the windscreen of his Mercedes was a forgery and that he can access the police data base to erase his motoring fines, be another betrayal that could land him in trouble? Her frank, subjective accounts of old friends and teachers might also leave them feeling somewhat exploited.
But then who am I to talk? Reading the book stirred my own conscience about how I too might have got a Chinese student into trouble. In December 1999, at a conference in Hong Kong of the Falun Gong movement, which is banned as a cult in mainland China, a delegate defended its activities to me and a New York Times reporter, saying we could quote him by name, which we both did. He was 21 from Dalian in northern China, a student of international marketing at a college in Dún Laoghaire. He then travelled on to Beijing and was detained along with two other Falun Gong activists who had been studying in Ireland. Were our reports in any way responsible? Possibly. But he could have already been a target of Chinese state security, who have spies everywhere.
Still I wish I hadn’t used his name. He was eventually able to return to Dublin after the Irish government intervened. But as Jan Wong’s book makes clear, modern China is still a land of walls, secrets and security police, where an old Chinese curse remains relevant: “May you come to the attention of the authorities”.
Conor O’Clery was Beijing correspondent of The Irish Times from 1996 to 2001