From: xc17@cicero.spc.uchicago.edu ()
Subject: CND Books & Journals Review, August 25, 1992
Organization: U of Chicago, SSPPCC
Summary: CND Books & Journals Review
Reply-To: cnd-editor@sdsc.edu
Keywords: CND Books & Journals Review
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 00:53:07 GMT
X-Posted-From: cicero.spc.uchicago.edu
X-Posted-Through: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review )|_______/
                            
                             August 25,1992

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1. "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" by Jung Chang ............... 131

2. "China - A New History" by John King Fairbank ....................... 25

3. "After China" by Brian Castro ....................................... 50
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If 
                you encounter any China-related books or  journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in  
                comments, reviews from newspapers and journals and excerpts 
                etc to  cnd-editor@library.uta.edu
               
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1. "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" by Jung Chang ............... 131
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From: A CND Reader
Source: The Associated Press 8/21/92

"Wild Swans," an engrossing family history of China, was the book Jung Chang
didn't want to write. Her mother talked and talked and talked her into it.

"I came to England in 1978. For 10 years I didn't want to write this book
because, I mean, it was too painful my past. I simply wanted to forget about
China," Chang said.

But the 40-year-old scholar and adviser to the British Foreign Office was
convinced that the story of her grandmother and her mother, and her own 26
years in China, had to be told when her mother came to visit.

"Once she started she really couldn't stop. It was quite incredible because
we talked every day for hours. "We traveled around in Britain and then we
went to Switzerland, and my mother was almost obsessed with just talking. In
the evenings in the hotel, she would talk into a tape recorder and then she
had 60 hours of recordings for me by the end of it. And that sort of made up
my mind and I felt it was a story worth telling."

The vivid family saga supplemented by Chang's sound reporting and historical
research in China and her own experiences exiled in the Himalayas, joining
the Red Guards and doing peasant labor makes a lively journey through 70
years of Chinese history.

The 508 pages span the fading days of feudal warlords, the desperate poverty
during the Japanese occupation, the communists' civil-war victory and
finally the brutal and misguided excesses of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

The sweeping history is full of horrors. Chang tells of her mother being
taken away from her young family for six months while she was investigated
by the party. She gives details of the horrible famine which resulted from
the complete neglect of agriculture to meet Mao's goal of doubling steel
production in one year. Communist Party officials repeatedly beat her
parents, jailed them, searched their houses and burned their much-loved
books. Her father eventually went mad from the harsh treatment.

The book recently scooped the NCR Award, Britain's most lucrative book award
at $48,000, and has remained in the top three on British best-seller lists
for 17 weeks. Director Roland Joffe has purchased the film rights and the
British Broadcasting Corp. has commissioned a documentary based on the book.
A U.S. paperback edition will be published in the fall.

>From the binding of her grandmother's feet (to make her a more attractive
concubine for the powerful warlord), to the vicious beatings during Mao's
anti-rightist campaign, it is life invaded by politics.

Her mother's keen memory, kept fit by years of Communist Party
interrogation, helped provide the detail which makes "Wild Swans" so
compelling. But it is Chang's controlled telling, without preaching or
condemnation, that make the book so readable.

"It is basically a human story. It's a deliberate decision not to make a lot
of reflections in the book," she said over a cup of Chinese tea on a recent
afternoon at her light, book-filled apartment in London's Notting Hill.

"I like to think of myself as a storyteller who tells the stories of the
Chinese and in doing so tells people something about the culture, politics,
history."

Chang said much of her mother's information came spontaneously as, in one
instance, the two picnicked in Scotland.

"There were some weeds and one particular kind was this one that when she
was suffering from hepatitis in her camp (to re-educate allegedly corrupt
party officials) this doctor would go around for miles to collect some herbs
to cure my mother. My mother then recognized some of the herbs in the grass
and that brought back another story so she would tell me about her camp and
her hepatitis."

A central part of the book is the tension created by her father's
unremitting devotion to communism, even to the detriment of his family, and
her mother's more pragmatic commitment. "My father kept no space for the
private. He gave himself totally," she said. "My mother certainly kept a
very big space for her family, for her children."

Chang, who married an English historian last year, has no children. Her
mother and sister are frequent visitors from China and her two brothers live
in Europe.

Like any good, traditional Chinese, Chang explained, her windfall is spent
on them.

"If you are doing better than others you are absolutely obliged to help,"
she said. My mother has been through so much. I'd like her to have a really
carefree old age, although she's only 61. She's like me: She is full of
curiosity about the world. She'd love to see the world and I would like her
to have a lot of foreign travels."

The author has put her roots in the West. "I left when I was 26. I decided
to stay when I was nearly 30. So I was mature enough to make my own choice.
And I think different things matter differently to different people," Chang
said.

Excerpts:

"My grandmother's feet had been bound when she was two years old. Her
mother, who herself had bound feet, first wound a piece of white cloth about
20 feet long round her feet, bending all the toes except the big toe inward
and under the sole. Then she placed a large stone on top to crush the arch.
My grandmother screamed in agony and begged her to stop. Her mother had to
stick a cloth into her mouth to gag her. My grandmother passed out
repeatedly from the pain.

"The process lasted several years. Even after the bones had been broken, the
feet had to be bound day and night in thick cloth because the moment they
were released they would try to recover. For years my grandmother lived in
relentless excruciating pain. When she pleaded with her mother to untie the
bindings, her mother would weep and tell her that unbound feet would ruin
her entire life, and that she was doing it for her own happiness."

"One day in 1965, we were suddenly told to go out and start removing all the
grass from the lawns. Mao had instructed that grass, flowers and pets were
bourgeois habits and were to be eliminated. The grass in the lawns at our
school was a type I have not seen anywhere outside China. Its name in
Chinese means 'bound to the ground.' It crawls all over the hard surface of
the earth and spreads thousands of roots which drill down into the soil like
claws of steel. ... The only casualties were my fingers, which always ended
up with deep, long cuts. It was only when they were attacked with hoes and
spades that some of the root systems went, reluctantly."

"When foreigners first came to China in large numbers in the 1970s, many
were impressed by the 'moral cleanliness' of the society: a discarded sock
would follow its owner a thousand miles from Peking to Guangzhou, cleaned
and folded and placed in his hotel room. The visitors did not realize that
only foreigners and Chinese under close surveillance received such
attention, or that no one would dare to steal from foreigners, because
taking even a handkerchief was likely to be punished by death. The clean
folded sock bore no relation to the real state of society: it was just part
of the regime's theater."

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2. "China - A New History" by John King Fairbank ....................... 25
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From: Shuzhi Ge (SG11@UK.AC.LE) Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press Cambridge, MAssachusette London, England 1992

This is a very good book for us to look at our history from a different
angle throught the eye of J.K. Fairbank.

Excerpts from the book:

"Among all these bizarre and poignant ironies, one unanswered question
haunts all Chinese patriots today.  The Chinese Han expire had been
contemporary and bigger than the Roman Empire. Indeed, China was once the
superior civilization of the world, not only the equal of Roman, but far
ahead of medieval Europe. Albert Feuerwerker, an economic historian
disciplined against hyperbole, tells us that from 1000 to 1500  AD 'no
comparison of agricultural productivity, industrial skill, commercial
complexity, urban wealth, or standard of living (not to mention bureaucratic
sophistication and cultural achievement ) would place Europe on a par with
the Chinese Empire'. So why did China fall behind in modern times? How could
it be ignominiously contemned by Western and Japanese imperialists in the
late nineteenth century?

The answer lies partly in China and partly in the West. ............"

"Sivin also points out how, for example, the remarkable efficiency of the
Chinese abacus as a calculator was limited to a dozen or so digits in a
linear array and so was useless for advanced algebra. He suggests that the
relative lack of Chinese mathematical innovations from the mid 1300s to
1600s may have been the price paid for the convenience of the abacus.
........."

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3. "After China" by Brian Castro ....................................... 50
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From: XU Ming Yang
Published by: Allen & Unwin
Reviewed by: Michael Sharkey (The Sydney Morning Herald 8/22/92)

After China will annoy a lot of readers who are nostalgic for a good story.
On the other hand, it will cheer up everyone who's beavering away in the
academy to help us emerge from what Robert Scholes calls "the evil empire of
linearity". Castro's been there too. His previous books were reasonably
approachable by old-school readers and were distinguished, for me at any
rate, by a terrific barbed wit that played with constructions of suburbia,
society and the concept for fiction itself.

What's it about? Ask that and you're obviously still in the clutches of the
evil empire. The technique is part of the story. If you want the 'plot' in a
sentence, I could make up a lie about a Chinese architect who builds a
labyrinthine and partly subaquatic hotel hotel on the New South Wales
coast, where he meets a woman writer who's terminally ill. But it is nothing
like the full story.

The narration switches from first to third person, and you get gobbets of
apparent autobiography and biography variously relating to the architect,
the designer of the Crystal Palace, and ancient Chinese folk who were
interested in philosophy, art and sex.

The cut-up technique suggests everything in the novel operates in a sort of
simultaneity: this is the 20th century, but you can mentally shop about in
any century you like. Unless you're a bourgeois escapist in a revolutionary
society, in which case, you don't get to be quite so mobile as you'd like.
One of the numerous broad jokes in the novel is the architect's imprisonment
on his return to China from Paris: the authorities appropriate the model of
his dream hotel, which becomes the prototype of Stalinist railway stations
across the country.

There are more tricks in the like: the architect doesn't strike me as a
crash-hot semiotician: it really seems to come as a surprise to him that his
lady friend is not a well rabbit to begin with. He tells her great stories,
and she pops them into her fiction just the way Castro pops all the things
he's read into his own. He doesn't try to cover his tracks; he tells us what
he's about while he's about it.

The Chinese erotic yarns are interpolated into the first-person and
third-person accounts of the architect's life - or is it the other way
about? No matter, you can read the novel as a book of erotic bits, or a book
of bits about a love story that doesn't convey any real sense of physical
contact. Or you can see it as a seamless account of the process of design in
art. Up to you, really.

The book is cleverly written, though t may take some to to get into the
swing of it. I found it heavy going at the outset, because the expected
connections were absent. Upon reflection, ti comes together in provoking
ways, as an argument about the way we construct narrative. The openness of
the book doesn't preclude the reading of it as a tragedy, if you consider
the numerous fractures, changes of perspective, climactic abeyances,
temporal switches and engaging metaphors for the process itself to be a
deathly serious business.

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