Chinese Lessons: five classmates and the story of the new ChinaBy John Pomfret
Published by Henry Holt, 336 pages
It is a good time to be writing your China memoirs. These days, China looms larger in the western consciousness than it has since the summer of 1989. Equal parts mystery, gold-rush, coming-out party, and flirt with epochal cataclysm, China today is more than just another country. People who don’t live here want the veil of mystery lifted, while those of us who do live here want to measure our own experiences against those of the people who preceded us.
John Pomfret is in a better position than most to ride the surge of China fascination, and to indulge it. We he first arrived, in 1981, the Cultural Revolution wasn’t the baggage of a previous generation, but a fresh memory as close at hand as the events of 9/11 are to Americans today. Through his studies at Nanjing University in the early 1980s and his later work as a journalist in and out of China over more than twenty years, Pomfret witnessed first-hand a transformation that most of us have either only read about, or experienced as snapshots. Pomfret’s new book,
Chinese Lessons, attempts to tell the story of that transformation both through his personal experiences, and, more interestingly, through those of several of his Chinese classmates from Nanjing University.
Thirty years after it ended, it is hard to grasp the enormity of the Cultural Revolution. It stands, like the Holocaust or the obscure tragedies of sub-Saharan Africa, as one of the twentieth century’s great bouts of human self-immolation, an event so large that it only ever feels captured in fragments and icons. Part of the problem is that China itself, under the continuing rule of the Community Party, steadfastly refuses to come to terms with Mao’s legacy. With national introspection constrained by doctrinaire limits, it remains the task of exiles and foreigners to tell the stories --or at least interpret them-- and to put China’s modern history into the context that the disaster of Mao’s terminal years.
Pomfret’s book isn’t about the Cultural Revolution, but it is about people who endured it and were shaped by their experiences. Thus the Cultural Revolution remains the touchstone for everything that happens afterward. Book Idiot Zhou, Big Bluffer Ye, Little Guan, Old Wu and Daybreak Song are survivors, overcoming humble origins and national turmoil to win university places at a time when they were surpassingly rare, and going on to make places for themselves in the New China. Through their recollections Pomfret makes the epic story of China’s transformation from the land of Mao to the land of Jinmao Tower both personal and intimate.
By making the book primarily about his classmates rather than himself, Pomfret illuminates China’s recent history from several different, deeply personal perspectives. That sets
Chinese Lessons apart from both the autobiographies of exiled Chinese authors such as Nien Cheng or Jung Chang, and the “stranger in a strange land” works of many other foreign memoirists. We learn how Little Guan, forced to denounce the woman who raised her during the Cultural Revolution, went on to work her way from a peasant village to a university place and prosperity but was touched by the tragedy of early widowhood. Book Idiot Zhou, named for his love of literature, became a member of a Red Guard team that terrorized his own village before making a life running a urine collection business. Daybreak Song broke one of China’s taboos by falling in love with a foreigner and moving to Italy, where he prospered as a sportswriter but found unhappiness as an exile isolated from the land that would always be his real home. Big Bluffer Ye bulled his way into party membership and built a name for himself as a cadre, prospering at the seedy intersection of politics and business by redeveloping Nanjing’s commercial district before corruption allegations slowed his rise. (In “rectifying” the uppity
Nanjing Daily, Ye hatched a scheme by which journalists would be rewarded for earning praise from officials and fined for annoying them, similar to an incident with
China Youth Daily that led to a
notorious protest letter from editor Li Datong.) Old Wu learned of the murder of his academic parents when a proud classmate told him how Red Guards had disciplined some “enemies of the revolution” without knowing that he was speaking to their son. Wu would later join the party and go on to teach at Nanjing Normal University, where his parents had died.
As personal stories they are all amazing, touching and fascinating. But therein also lies the weakness of the book. Pomfret’s own story is the thread that holds these individual narratives together. And while he has some spectacular stories to tell, from his university days, his early relationships in China, and his first-hand witnessing of the Tian’anmen Square massacre of 1989, they fade next to the experiences of classmates who embody all that has happened to China in the past forty years. The book never quite settles on whether it is a memoir or a biography, and the weaving of Pomfret’s own memoirs with those of his friends feels awkward. This is especially true at beginning, where he leaps from the happy-go-lucky recollections of his first arrival in China to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and at the end when he recalls meeting his wife. The style and habits of the newspaper journalist that Pomfret remains show through. As a teller of his own stories he lacks the lyrical touch and introspection of, say, a Peter Hessler, leaving an uneasy gulf between his own, merely interesting experiences and his classmates’ profound ones.
Nevertheless, Pomfret writes candidly and engagingly, especially when recalling conversations with his classmates. He tells their stories skillfully and with empathy, ensuring that they emerge as human beings and not just case studies of modern China. For anyone living in China or interested in its contemporary history,
Chinese Lessons is a satisfying read. It is especially interesting for those of us who have arrived in China relatively recently, and who have befriended a younger generation of Chinese for whom the Cultural Revolution is their parents or grandparents’ affair. The stories of five students from Nanjing, all about the age of my own parents, is a potent reminder that the glowing cities of modern China only recently emerged from dark times of struggle, and that a far poorer hinterland still broods at the edge of the light.
Note:
Imagethief was one of a few China blogs contacted by the publisher and offered pre-release copies of the book for review. You can find the Peking Duck review
here, and, via Peking Duck, Orville Schell’s highly literate (as you would expect) review from the
New York Times here.
Previous book review: Billions: Selling to the new Chinese consumer, by Tom Doctoroff