From: hassan@cup.portal.com (hassan monu alam)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american,soc.culture.bangladesh
Subject: China and Japan
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 92 17:52:12 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)

A somewhat poignant story which crosses cultural 
lines

Hassan

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Far Eastern Economic Review
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Robots and puppets Manchu princess remembers the 
past

At a Japanese Embassy reception, Japanese 
Emperor Akihito chatted about the October 
weather with Pu Jie, brother of China's last 
reigning Qing dynast. But Pu Jie's cousin, 
Aixinjuelo Xuanqi youngest of the 38 children of 
the Qing reformist Prince Shu, stayed home to 
tend her ailing husband, a Shanghainese labourer 
she met in the Tianjin work farm where she was 
sent during the Cultural Revolution.

Home for the couple is a two-room government-
issue flat just beyond the Third Ring Road. Her 
narrow room is dominated by a huge brass 
bedstead and a formica bookshelf full of 
Japanese paperbacks, old photograph albums and 
china dogs.

Her bearing remains as regal as ever, as befits 
a 1939 graduate of the Gakushum (Imperial Peers' 
School), a finishing academy for offspring of 
Japanese, Korean and Manchu nobility. At 74, 
Aixinjuelo is old enough to remember the gala 
Tokyo fetes that greeted Akihito's birth.

The newly arrived schoolgirl initially stayed at 
the consulate of Manchukuo, the Japan-sponsored 
pup-, pet kingdom in Northeast China nominally 
headed by Pu Jie's

brother Pu Yi. "Not that the Japanese Emperor 
Hirohito himself was any less of a puppet," she 
adds. "one of our classmates' father was a prime 
minister who killed himself when he couldn't get 
the emperor to turn away from the militarists."

The current emperor, too, she characterises as a 
"robot" under the control of politicians, 
businessmen and diplomats. Still, she favours 
Akihito's visit here and finds Japanese and 
Chinese opposition to it misguided.

"Let him come out. Palace life is so 
stultifying. One really doesn't know anything at 
all until one's experience has been broadened a 
bit. Let him see some of China for himself. If 
he feels moved to apologise, of his own accord, 
then it would mean something. And if he doesn't-
-well, no need."

Aixinjuelo's own "broadening" came the hard way. 
Leaving Tokyo in the grip of its wartime 
privations, she wound up-by the time of the 1949 
communist takeover of China--on her own in the 
family's Peking house with her brother's 
children to look after.

She sold off the family jewels, furs and 
furniture "for a pittance." In the early 1950s 
she launched a celebrated noodle shop in the 
family courtyard that catered to politicians, 
actors and diplomats. After selling the venture 
to the state, she worked briefly as a Japanese 
translator before she was caught up in the anti-
rightist campaign. She was jailed for 15 years, 
and then spent another decade in a reform-
through-labour farm in Tianjin.

She married her husband, a trustee of the work 
farm, chiefly in order to get out of the 
communal dormitory, she cheerfully admits. The 
marriage has proved durable. Their adopted son,   
a teenage hoodlum who had been sent to the farm 
for brawling, has now migrated to Japan.

It was not until 1979 that they managed to make 
their way back to Peking, securing a flat 
through the natural family of their adopted son. 
Three years later, one of Aixinjuelo's Gakushuin 
schoolmates tracked her down through the Peking 
contacts of Pu Jie's Japanese sister-in-law.

She was plucked out of her Third Ring Road flat 
and flown back to Japan for her class reunion. 
Staying in the mansions and palaces of her 
school friends, she found Tokyo "not much 
changed really; maybe coarsened a little." But 
most of the classmates greeted her by begging 
her pardon.

"Now, those were apologies--heartfelt and 
intensely personal." The one word subsumed so 
much history: "pardon" for the militarism, for 
the Manchukuo illusion, for the Japanese debacle 
that ushered in the communist takeover, for 
imprisonment, for the years of lost contact.

Only Japanese could load their words with such 
sincerity, Aixinjuelo is convinced. "They're 
simpler people, more direct. Chinese have been 
so long oppressed, they've been obliged to 
become selfish and more analytical. They seem 
submissive, but they're just waiting for their 
chance."

Lincoln Kaye 
Xref: sparky soc.culture.asian.american:10059 soc.culture.bangladesh:5845 soc.culture.indian:36880 soc.culture.pakistan:16613 alt.discrimination:4627