In the US, I would nominate “subprime.” In China, my suggestion is “visa policy.”

With the Beijing Olympics less than two months away, hotel operators, travel agencies, and foreign businessmen say new Chinese visa restrictions are proving bad for business, casting a pall over Beijing during what was supposed to be a busy and jubilant tourist season leading up to the Olympic Games.

Chinese authorities acknowledged putting new visa restrictions in place in May — after foreign embassies reported fewer visas being granted and tighter, sometimes seemingly arbitrary, restrictions. The government did not release guidelines detailing the changes in policy; it often does not. But a foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said in May that they would be temporary.

On Monday, Hu Bin, a visa official at the foreign ministry, said the ministry had no statistics on the number of visa denials, but that the new policies were put in place for “security considerations.”

Travel business analysts had forecast that the Games would bring 500,000 foreign visitors and an extra $4.5 billion in revenue to Beijing this summer. But now, even though some five-star hotels are fully booked for the Olympics, many economists are beginning to doubt the city will get the kind of economic windfall it was hoping for.

Many hotels in Beijing are struggling to find guests; some large travel agencies have temporarily closed branches; and people scheduled to travel here for seminars and conferences are canceling. The number of foreign tourists visiting Beijing fell sharply in May, dropping by 14 percent, according to the city’s statistics bureau.

Beijing residents, meanwhile, are complaining that heightened security measures could spoil what was supposed to be Beijing’s long anticipated coming-out party. Despite years of careful preparation — including teaching taxi drivers English and instructing locals in how to wait in a line (not common here), and spending billions on mammoth building projects for these Games — Beijing is starting to appear less welcoming to foreigners.

“Business is so bleak,” said Di Jian, the sales manager at the Capital Hotel in Beijing. “Since May, very few foreigners have checked in. Our occupancy rate has dropped by 40 percent.”

I have been apartment hunting (finally found a new place) and there is now a sizable glut of places. Those landlords who’ve held up thinking that August would make them gazillionaires are in for a rude shock, largely thanks to their government’s ham-fisted policies. Prices are higher, for sure, but not outrageous, and as August 8 approaches they will have to drop further. I keep hearing how people are staying away largely due to the misery and complications of getting a visa. Foreigners I know who live here as freelancers are getting very creative (I won’t give away any secrets).

This seems to be the cocktail party topic of choice throughout Beijing, mainly because it’s simply bewildering. You can’t open the door and slam it shut at the same time. Yeah, you need to be careful and keep security top of mind. Getting through security at a US airport now is a descent into hell, but at least you know you’ll eventually get through in a fairly reasonable amount of time, ridiculous as the bureaucracy is. With getting a visa, the outcome is far less certain, and a high level of anxiety is practically guaranteed because there are so many unknowns and gray areas.

Most bewildering is that the self-inflicted visa mess flies in the face of all of China’s goals: to open up the country to the world; to show that they have emerged from a prickly authoritarian state defined by its mindless bureaucracy to a modern superpower defined by its adorable fuwas and slick skyscrapers; to give tourism the greatest boost ever and encourage the masses around the world to head over. So once again, the country I love mystifies me with its irrational, self-defeating, hopelessly confused rules.

And to add the balance we all crave, the US mystifies me as well, and every time I see airport security grab one of those lethal tubes of toothpaste and chuck it into the tall clear plastic bin I wonder just how nutty governments can be. At least with the US, I kind of see why they go through the ridiculous procedures. In the case of the visa policy, I see neither rhyme nor reason, only a murky, unthought-through self-imposed mess.

Two pieces in the NYT today on the misery of being selected by the state to train as an athlete, each driving home the inherent cruelty in this system. The article also make you wonder whether this is what sports was meant to be. They way you wondered about those East German athletes before the wall came down, the ones injected with hormones and looked like grotesque versions of Charles Atlas.

From the first article:

Yang, one of China’s most successful water sports athletes, has never lived in his apartment. He has not seen his parents in three years. At 24, he lives 250 miles away at his sport’s training center, where he is preparing for the Beijing Olympics.

Yang said he could not stand his life.

For nearly a decade, he has tried to quit canoeing, he told The New York Times during an interview at the training center. He said he would rather attend college or start a business, but acknowledged that he was ill-equipped to do either one.

Many Chinese sports schools, in which more than 250,000 children are enrolled, focus on training at the expense of education. Critics, like the former Olympic diving coach Yu Fen, are calling for changes. They say athletes are unprepared to leave the sports system that has raised them.

“I do not want to work as an athlete, but as an athlete here I have no freedom to choose my future,” Yang said, speaking through the team’s official interpreter. “As a child, I didn’t learn anything but sport, and now what do I do? I can’t do anything else. I have my own dreams, but it is very difficult. I don’t have the foundation to make them come true.”

The article notes, depressingly, that even champion athletes often end up miserable, having trouble paying their bills and having to deal with the effects of hormones they were shot up with. 

Article two is more upsetting, focusing on how Chinese athletes are pressed to keep on training and winning despite injuries. The story of the other Hu Jia – not the activist, but the gold medallist diver – who seriously injured his eye during training, is especially painful.

The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”

But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.

“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”

Gold medallists here become super-heroes and are showered in gifts and lucrative sponsorships; their faces are everywhere, at least for a few years. It was diver Tian Liang who was ubiquitous when I was here in 2002. Now it’s hurdler Liu Xiang. Is it worth winning all these spoils at the sacrifice of your eyesight? Apparently to Hu Jia it is.

I interviewed a Chinese medallist a few years ago, and it was then that I learned about the “medal factory,” about being torn away from your family and forced to train up to 12 hours a day and living a life essentially of a slave – often a pampered, well-fed and celebrated slave, but a slave nonetheless. Again, it makes you wonder about what it means to be an “amateur” athlete and whether this is what the creators of the moder-day Olympic Games had in mind. 

Read the two articles for the details. It is a good snapshot of the world of athletics in China, a topic that will win increasing coverage this summer as Chinese athletes win one gold medal after another.

We all know about China’s meteoric growth and super-duper-dramatic change and yada yada. Still, this article by a former China Daily reporter who worked here in the 80s and returned for the first time in a quarter of a century makes for splendid reading. Here, for example, is his description of the Workers’ Stadium, now surrounded by haute cuisine eateries:

Back then, the stadium had a much more sinister role: as a giant courtroom for show trials for criminals and subversives. The men – almost all were men – were rounded up during regular nationwide ‘crackdowns’ on crime. I saw them, shackled, handcuffed, heads shaven and hung in shame, being paraded through the streets in open lorries. Each had a placard hanging from his neck announcing his crime: murderer, rapist, thief. They were driven to the stadium where they were jeered at by thousands of workers bused in to witness the trials.

There were, in fact, no trials at all. The men’s alleged crimes were read out, they were declared guilty and the crowd bellowed, ‘Kill the criminals!’ The offenders were driven to a field outside Beijing where they were ordered to kneel, before being shot in the back of the head. As a final punishment, their families were sent a bill for the bullet. The next day, on posters around the city, a grisly red tick was placed next to each of the men’s names and photographs, signifying that they had been executed. I asked a Chinese friend how the authorities could be sure that these men were guilty. ‘They would not have been arrested if they were not guilty,’ he replied, surprised by the naivety of my question.

(In a few days I’ll be moving to a new place three blocks away from the stadium. I hope the ghosts don’t wake me up.) Lots of other good images in the article. Sobering to think that Beijing has changed that much, and even more so to remember that there are still plenty of places in China here where the exact same stuff is still going on.

I went to a party a few weeks ago where I was introduced to a woman who immediately struck me as someone who is determined – somebody with a strong will and an interesting story to tell.  What amused me afterwards was how whenever I brought up her name to one of my expat friends who’ve lived here forever, they all had more or less the same reaction: a smile; not necessarily the humorous kind of smile, but one that seemed to say, “I know Lijia Zhang well and she is someone you don’t want to mess with.” Could be; within ten minutes of knowing her, I had opened my wallet and ponied up a couple hundred yuan to buy a copy of her wonderful book, Socialism is Great, copies of which she was conveniently carrying with her in a bag for on-the-spot sales opportunities.

Is Lijia Zhang tough as nails and strong willed? Damn straight she is, and it is this toughness and resolve that allowed her to pull herself up from her proverbial bootsrtaps, teaching herself to learn flawless English and rising from a situation of utter grimness to become a writer and commentator to be reckoned with.

This is a different kind of book about China. It’s not about how China is rising, or about the business opportunities here or about guanxi or an exploration of the mysterious Chinese psyche. It’s the story of how Lijia Zhang was forced by her mother at the age of 16 to work in a factory that manufactures missiles, abandoning her dreams of going to university to become a journalist. It’s about China in the 1980s, a period some of us have a hard time visualizing.  I can “see” the Cultural Revolution, and I saw the students gathering in the square in the spring of 1989. What I have a harder time visualizing is the period in-between, that very painful time when people were adjusting to tectonic shifts in how they lived and worked. A time when many of the insanities of the CR persisted, such as spying on your colleagues and reporting on them, a time when the iron rice bowl was still the norm for nearly everyone, and the prevalent mindset was still one of conformity and uniformity.

The Liming Machine Factory in Nanjing becomes Lijia’s life, and it redefines the concept of bleakness.

As soon as the factory off-work horn sounded, loud broadcasts screech to life: the factory had its own propaganda studio. Breathless announcers told moving stories of model workers like Master Wang, socialist-minded and professionally proficient, who continued to operate his turning machine despite serious illness. Loudspeakers were the most widespread propaganda tool the Chinese Communists used, installed in every factory, school, village, neighborhood committee hall, and army camp – even in moving trains and aboard ships.

Everything about Liming is drab, gray, dreary and dispiriting.  And insane in a manner that seems unique to Communist dictatorships.  Everyone knows they are living a lie, that all the slogans plastered everywhere about hard work and the glories of socialism are utter bullshit.  For all the pious sloganeering, it’s a world of treachery and cunning, of keeping your “enemies” out of power so you can hold onto your own power. Now, there’s a little of that in every organization (it’s called politics), but here it’s carried to insane extremes because just about no one is actually doing anything. It’s all about making yourself look busy, knowing you are doing nothing while mouthing off about how socialism is great.  Everyone has agreed to play the same insane game.  Images of the surrealism of North Korea come inevitably to mind.

And yet Lijia stands up to authority, says what is on her mind and pays the price with demerits and public humiliation. But nothing can stop her. Reading classics like Jane Eyre she forces herself to learn English, joining classes and studying with an obsessive passion.  Her story is almost impossible to believe, her transition from a worker in the sulfurous and joyless Liming factory to a writer and commentator on BBC and NPR trumping just about every conceivable Cinderella story. When you hear her speak it is next to impossible to believe she taught herself English.

This is a family story and a deeply personal one. I won’t go into the details of Lijia’s uniquely dysfunctional family or the men she meets and falls in love with. Suffice it to say that she takes you right there, to their crowded house, to her lovers’ bedrooms.  You can hear her mother shrieking at her loser husband and you can feel her anguish as she briefly describes the public execution of a teenage boy she went to school with.  Like any good memoir, it offers an historiographic snapshot of its time, a period of almost unimaginable tumult as the Mao mentality collided with that of capitalism.

The book ends, rather mysteriously, with Lijia being arrested and fingerprinted for her “unpatriotic” behavior during the 1989 incident, during which she led a protest march outside her factory.  She makes you understand just how exhilarating this brief moment was, when everyone joined together to stand up to a cruel authority and why everyone joined in, with Lijia as always leading the parade, never sheepishly following.

The book isn’t perfect. I got frustrated with the writer’s tendency to embellish nearly every scene, even of events from decades ago, with details that she hopes will make it more real. Unfortunately, this sometimes has the opposite effect, making me wonder whether she is going out of her way to create an effect. For example, she recall a conversation with a friend from more than 20 years ago; the friend complains her house is too small, and Lijia adds, “Before sitting down on her usual chair by the window, she folded up a newspaper on the table.” Now, maybe some of us remember our conversations of two decades ago (I do), but do we really remember such fine details? They abound throuighout the book – a problem I had with another book by a forceful lady, Wild Swans, where every description of what happened decades ago is accompanied by a description of what kind of leaves are blossoming on a nearby tree.

But that is a very small complaint. This book will move you, and you will find new hope in the human spirit and man’s amazing ability to continue striving even in the face of insuperable odds. You’ll feel the claustrophobic and noxious spirit of the factory where nearly no one can be trusted. An amazing little book, and an amazing woman. Let her come across as tough and indomitable. That’s exactly why she has achieved her spectacular success, by refusing to let others do her thinking for her, and for standing up to those who were trying to hold her down, from her own mother to her co-workers to the police officer who fingerprints her after her arrest in 1989.

From Richard Spencer in the Telegraph:

The BBC, the only British broadcaster with access to stadiums this summer, says it cannot be expected to hide demonstrations if they happen at events where they have cameras.

Its decision, which it stresses will be applied “responsibly”, will increase Beijing’s nervousness as the Games approach.

The Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, BOCOG, has already had angry exchanges with the world’s leading broadcasters who complain of delays over permits to bring their equipment into the country and to deploy them around the city.

At stake is not only control over what sort of events can be broadcast, but also increasingly tight restrictions on shooting locations, with Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and other sites with important symbolic value on the list of those off-limits to broadcasters.

Despite promises of unprecedented access for the world’s media during the games, it is becoming clear to many journalists in Beijing that the government and BOCOG are increasingly wary of allowing in so many prying eyes, roving cameras, and possible hidden agendas. This has sparked tension between representatives of the foreign media and their Chinese handlers.

Dave Gordon, head of major sports events for the BBC, told The Daily Telegraph that Beijing had become “more difficult” for broadcasters than the Moscow Games in 1980.

He said international representatives had tried to get answers for two years on whether the Olympic broadcasting agency that provides the only feed of the actual events would show footage of protests if they occurred.

“They fudge the question,” he said. “They won’t commit to saying yes, they will cover it or no, they will not cover it. They put a lot of stress on the importance of covering the sport. I think we have to draw our own conclusions.”

Mr Gordon said the BBC paid a lot of attention to “responsible” coverage of protests and whether 24-hour rolling news meant coverage of individual protests might become disproportionate.

But he added it was unthinkable that if its own cameras in the stadium picked up a protest it would not be shown. “We have to cover the Olympics warts and all,” he said.

“Warts and all” is a standard worth discussing. For as much as BOCOG and the Chinese government love to whine about how ‘foreigners’ are politicizing the Olympics, only the most naive or disingenuous would deny that the Beijing games have always come with striking political overtones. For both the government and people, these games are about more than medals and celebrity hurdlers. On my television set nightly and in conversations around Beijing I inevitably hear the refrain of ‘celebrating new China’ and ‘demonstrating to the world how far China has come (back).’ There’s nothing wrong with that, but if one is inviting guests over to admire the new draperies, can we fault the visitors for whispering amongst themselves if they also happen to see your child has a black eye?

I remember the extensive coverage of the 1996 pipe bombing during the Atlanta games. It was news and it had to be covered. Atlanta received an enormous amount of scrutiny and criticism, not only for security but also for being–until 2008–the most commercialized games in Olympic history. Such was the antipathy that at the closing ceremonies then IOC president Juan Antonio Saramanch withheld his usual polite ‘best games ever’ compliment. Sure there were some bruised feelings in the Peach Tree State, but people got over it. If something similar happened in Beijing, what would be the response?

In terms of television feeds and media access, at issue is this: What are the rights and responsibilities of broadcasters covering the games? Should they only show sports or do they also have an obligation to take a broader perspective in the event of protests and demonstrations, or even a single act of defiance by an athlete with an agenda? Any thoughts?

When I clicked on the link this morning to my recent post on June 4, I was surprised when the page failed to load properly. It stopped loading after the first 15 comments or so. Then, when I tried to get back to my home page the connection died, with the usual “could not connect to server” message. Worse still, I could not get into the backend of my site, either, so I couldn’t post. This lasted for about 20 minutes. Then I could get back on the site, but when I tried to open the same post again, the exact same scenario ensued.

The odd thing is that this post is two weeks old, and it was fine until now. What makes the firewall suddenly snap into action, especially on a thread that’s basically dead?

I also noticed today that Anonymouse is blocked, and for the past couple of months my favorite proxy, Anchor Free, has also been non-functional.  If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know. The  Cybernanny has also seemed bi-polar lately in its blocking of blogspot and blogger.com.

A friend in America tells me the US media is now rending its garments and falling over themselves to show who can eulogize Tim Russert with the most pathos. It’s been all Russert all the time for days, from what I hear. John Cole sums up why this is so absurd, and why it’s a metaphor for just how fucked-up the US media is.

MSNBC has been running nothing but a 5 hour (and presumably it will go until 11 pm or beyond) marathon of Russert remembrance. CNN has done their due diligence, and Fox news has spent at least the last half hour talking non-stop about him.

But let’s get something straight- what I am watching right now on the cable news shows is indicative of the problem- no clearer demonstration of the fact that they consider themselves to be players and the insiders and, well, part of the village, is needed. This is precisely the problem. They have walked the corridors of power so long that they honestly think they are the story. It is creepy and sick and the reason politicians get away with all the crap they get away with these days.

Tim Russert was a newsman. He was not the Pope. This is not the JFK assassination, or Reagan’s death, or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. A newsman died. We know you miss him, but please shut up and get back to work.

Not only that – Russert wasn’t even that good a newsman. It’s a pity he’s dead, but people die. Let’s save the grief-a-thons for the real thing. When you take a look at all the issues we’re facing, from Iraq to earthquakes to recessions, the death of a news reporter from natural causes is a very, very small story. Or at least it should be.

Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China, and moved to the United States in the summer of 1988. After receiving a Ph.D. from MIT in the spring of 1995, and winning an award for her dissertation, she joined a small but ambitious high tech company. On Thanksgiving 2003, she gave up tech for writing. Her debut story collection Apologies Forthcoming won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award and was published in May 2008. You can buy the book here. 

The stories in Apologies Forthcoming deal with the Cultural Revolution, which defined the generation now coming to power in China. Xujun departs from the more typical “victim literature” about the CR, and the stories show a broad range of perspectives, actions and responses to the turmoil of the period.

 Lisa: Tell us about the title of your collection, “Apologies Forthcoming.” Why did  you choose it? 

 Xujun: I had considered calling the book Men Don’t Apologize, but some writer friends objected. They pointed out that people would probably expect a feminist treatise, while I’m not a feminist at all. And the stories don’t actually have any agenda other than realistically portraying human behavior and psychology at a particular time. While that namesake story is about several men and a woman, the idea of apologizing for, or even acknowledging participation in, activities during the Cultural Revolution cuts across the sexes. Apologies Forthcoming was actually the publisher’s suggestion and I like it, though I am not sure we will ever see the apologies.  ☺

 Speaking about apologies, two years ago I interviewed a few ex-Red Guard leaders in Chongqing, who had been in jail for more than a decade and now are businessmen. I wrote a short journalism piece about this, which you can read here.

Let me just quote one of the men here – he said, “We castigated the capitalist roaders for two years. They punished us for many more.” He didn’t think he ought to apologize to anyone at all, and you have to acknowledge his point.

Lisa: Related to this question of apologies…my first time in China was in 1979, so the Cultural Revolution was still very present in peoples’ lives. At the time I felt like the country suffered from a massive emotional depression from the after-effects of so much mass trauma. And a number of Chinese people I met told me about some of their experiences during the CR – some very traumatic and personal things. I’m guessing this was because I was a young foreigner, not involved and therefore safe to confide in. Did you talk about your experiences with fellow Chinese? To what extent did people feel they could honestly speak about what had happened to them and what they had done during this time? Did you talk to anyone about your own experiences?

Xujun: Oh, plenty of people talk about their sufferings, but few mention their roles as participants. One representative example is the memoir Wild Swans. I admire the book’s writing, but as I mentioned in my Amazon review for it, I wish the author were more honest. Readers relish suffering stories, but suffering stories alone provide limited insights into human behavior.

It also occurs to me that few westerners know the subtleties and nuance surrounding the participating parties in the CR. I once did an informal poll among writers I workshop with on what they thought of the Red Guards, and the answers were pretty much uniform with the representative one being “pretty much the same as the Hitler Youth.” This is quite baffling and at the same time very interesting. As we know (I’m aware of the pitfall of generalization) Americans hate the communist government of China; but did they know the biggest thing the Red Guards did was to break China’s state apparatus? Should a communist hater applaud or condemn that? There is just no simple black-and-white answer.

Another thing is that the Red Guards consisted of an entire generation of students from middle school through university, and though viewed as a collective by westerners, there were many different factions emerging, converging, breaking down and reorganizing over times.

The Red Guards did have a hand in lots of violence, yet the individual members were often idealists. This complexity seems beyond the average outsiders’ comprehension. It is very hard for someone to understand another culture without actually experiencing it. But the real problem is not the limitation in understanding – everyone has limitations; it is failing to recognize limitations. Too many people are vocally righteous about other cultures they know little about, that is the problem.

As a writer, however, I am more interested in human behavior and the mentality that leads to it. I’m not interested in pointing fingers because what does that do to increase understanding? I think as realistic fiction the story “Men Don’t Apologize” departs from the usual victim literature and takes one step further in exploring human nature and the different behavior that manifests between ordinary and extraordinary circumstances.

I don’t want to digress too far on this topic, let’s just say that, as far as political conflicts are concerned, victims and victimizers can easily switch positions. The distinction between victims and villains is very unclear and my stories show a broader range of behavior beyond suffering.

Lisa: “Snow Line,” the opening story in the collection, is set in Chengdu, a city I’ve spent some time in and really love. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, it felt a lot more relaxed and open to me than most of the cities I visited. It’s surrounded by a lot of natural beauty, and places like Qingchengshan, which is considered one of the birthplaces of Daoism.

I notice that flowers are a recurring motif in “Snow Line,” and I’m curious if this is something that connects specifically to Chengdu.

Xujun: Yes, Chengdu! My favorite city of all! (I hope my Chongqing townsmen will forgive me for saying this.) In the north it is Beijing and in the south it has to be Chengdu. Do you know a saying, “少不入川，老不出川” – “When young don’t enter Sichuan; when old never go out of it”? In this saying “Sichuan” actually means its capital Chengdu. Chengdu is such a relaxed and cultured city, a young man would only be spoiled there and never work hard, is what the saying means. But it is heaven for a relaxed and richly cultured life. Every year I go back for a visit, I can’t help but wonder how such a free and at leisure population make their livings. Yet they live leisurely on. All my close friends from Chongqing have moved to Chengdu by now.

And yes, Chengdu is a true flower city. Everywhere on the streets and in every season you see flower girls and flower stores. Even Chengdu’s air is fragrant and colorful. You don’t see or smell this in Chongqing for example. Don’t get me wrong, I love Chongqing, too, but that’s for its ragged hilly paths and two legend-filled rivers.

You can probably sense my love of Chengdu from descriptions in “Snow Line.” But the reason I placed “Snow Line” as the opening story is because of the artwork, “Dandelion.” The artist, Mr. Wu Fan, is a renowned “literati artist” in Sichuan, a very classic kind. “Dandelion” was his signature work and won a gold medal in the 1959 international block prints competition. During the CR the gold medal became a criminal indictment for him and nearly killed him.

Mr. Wu is a friend of my parents, and his daughter and I are friends. The genesis of “Snow Line” actually came from the daughter; she had modeled the little girl in “Dandelion.” I thought the artwork would add a nice dimension to my story, so I asked for permission to include it from Mr. Wu Fan, and he generously agreed. I ended up using three works from him, each fits nicely with one of the stories. His daughter did the sketch for “Men Don’t Apologize.”

When I was in college, every summer I would go to Chengdu and spend time with the Wu family. The mother, an oil painter, would bring her two daughters to paint from nature in Huanhua Xi – Wash-flower Brook, and I would go with them. Those were some happiest times of my youth.

Lisa: The first time I was in China, one of the phrases I learned right away was “work unit.” The idea that so many decisions about one’s personal life could be made by one’s place of employment was very foreign to me. “Snow Line” presents a typical situation in the China of the late 1970s to early 1980s, where a woman lives in the factory in which she works. The whole notion of privacy and personal space is very different from the West. So a two-part question – when you moved to the US, was this a difficult adjustment to you? And do you think that China as a society has moved towards more “Western” notions of privacy?

Xujun: Hehe, the phrase is still there, on everyone’s lips. And you ask an interesting question. When I am writing stories I wear the hat of the times, and this all seems perfectly natural. However, when I think about actually doing something like living in a printing factory it does seem pretty strange. It is curious how quickly I became accustomed to the easy (and private) life in the US. I don’t think I could make the adjustment in the other direction nearly so quickly. There is a Chinese word for that – xiguan – that would be used only in one direction.

China has changed a lot since the early 1980s, when I was in college. There is surely more privacy in people’s lives now. For example the question “How much do you make?” was as common as “Have you eaten?” in conversation when I lived in China. Now you hardly ever hear the former spoken. ☺
However I don’t think Chinese will completely adopt the Western notion of privacy – that would be very sad anyway. Neighbors still love to “chuan-men” (drop-by) without having to first set appointments, for example.

Lisa: “Feathers” tells the story of a girl losing her older sister. In a way it is a typically “Chinese” story, a Cultural Revolution tragedy. But on the other hand, the family dynamics transcend the cultural particulars and deal with universal themes of loss, denial and suffering.

Xujun: I think that is an important observation, and I think it may apply more broadly than just this story. People have a lot in common with one another, and a lot that sets us apart. “Feathers” is about family and dealing with tragedy, and this is an area where similarities are much stronger than differences. Still, the story tells a Chinese way of dealing with things, for example making up stories so the grandmother wouldn’t know about her grandchild’s death. I remember workshopping the story and some American friends just couldn’t understand why the lying was necessary. Some things that might stand out to a Western reader would simply be background to a Chinese reader.

You know, this story is close to my heart. And go back to your question earlier if I talked to anyone about my own experiences during the CR, I was a child when the worst thing happened to my family – my big sister’s death. She was a 16-year-old Red Guard. I had to safeguard my 75-year-old grandmother from knowing the bad news, just like in the third-person story “Feathers.” Imaging a 12-year-old girl running around bare her teeth like a fierce cat hissing at any gossipy neighbor who dared to mention the incident. That practice trained my habit of silence; for more than three decades I did not talk to anyone other than my diary book about the incident. I never shed tears either. I cried for the first time in 2002 when I began to write the memoir piece “Swimming with Mao”.

One question a reader raised was if my loyalty to my sister might have impeded my condemnation of the Red Guards. However, though my sister was both a participant and a victim of the CR, she foremost was my dear sister and no political identification could change that. This became never so clear after I started to write about her.

The story also reflects my aversion to heroism. When my sister died, her comrades called her a “hero.” As a child I was very confused by the notion that a life was tradable with the title “hero.” I just wanted my dear sister back – who cared what her title was?

Lisa: I particularly liked “Watch the Thrill,” with its two bored neighborhood boys who are looking for excitement. It’s not that they are bad or evil, they just seem to lack the capacity to make moral choices, and there are no adults around to guide them. This had a lot of resonances to me, both to kids growing up here and now without adequate parenting and to figures in classical literature – “Lord of the Flies” comes to mind.

Xujun: It is interesting you should mention this. There is a broader belief that youth and innocence should go hand in hand. In this story I wanted to portray not that the boys were bad, but that they really weren’t concerned about the concepts of good or bad, but just interesting or boring. Becoming invested in good and bad requires some reasonable landmarks of this type of judgment, and those landmarks were missing when these boys were raised. This makes the emergence of any sort of morality difficult.

There had been cautious hope that the initial responses to recent earthquakes in Sichuan were a sign of greater potential transparency in China, with officials allowing detailed media coverage and even Prime Minister Wen Jiabao arriving on the scene.

But it looks like, once again, such optimism has been misplaced, possibly fuelled by a desire to see change when the State was not going to proactively allow it.

China reins in quake school fury

China appears to be reining in anger over the number of schools that collapsed in last month’s earthquake. Officials initially promised a full investigation into the issue, but now seem to be discouraging parents from venting their frustration.

Parents are thought to have been prevented from filing a lawsuit against the principal of one collapsed school where hundreds died. And officials seem to be attempting to tone down public expressions of grief.

I’m certainly not jaded in that I can’t ever believe the CCP will change. But I was not surprised that the State is now moving in to shut people up. Yes, they can mourn – but they can’t seek justice or blame others if they’re linked to those in office. The ruling party believes itself to be more important than hundreds (maybe thousands) of dead children – even if they reportedly died because of official corruption in the building process.

Though sometimes the CCP can still shock me for being completely insensitive and selfish.

Since Monday, two of the city’s collapsed schools – scenes of moving memorial services – have been sealed off to most people. Grieving parents say wreaths left on the rubble at Xinjian Primary School were taken away by officials.

“They went too far. They have no consideration,” said Xu Yan, whose 11-year-old daughter Huang Ruiqi died when the school collapsed.

No senior official was available to explain why the wreaths were taken away. But Zhu Lin, who works for the local foreign affairs office, said: “The government wants to find a better way to solve the problem.”

What’s the better way? Shutting up and not rocking the boat. Those dead children are just too inconvenient for the Party at the moment. But it’s ok, because Wen Jiabao cried on TV, and that makes up for everything – apparently.

Raj

That time of year again. I remember my rage back in 1989. It was the first time I ever watched CNN, and I was glued to the TV set although I knew next to nothing about China at the time. I remember my shock at Bush I’s “punishment” of the dictators with blood on their hands – some all but meaningless sanctions. The man who stood up against the tank, the stranger who entered all of our living rooms and shook the conscience of the world. The moment of hope, when it seemed to so many of us that the students were really going to make a difference and force their corrupt leaders to reform. No one imagined the idealistic young men and women would be greeted with live ammunition, shot dead in the streets like animals.

Nearly 20 years later it seems so far away, so distant. But not at all forgotten. At least not for me. Talking with my Chinese friends in Beijing, it also seems so irrelevant, something they would rather not acknowledge let alone dwell upon. I only really began to understand the Chinese perspective on the tragedy five years ago when I held an extensive conversation with an actual demonstrator. His words sounded so strange to me. He had gone to demonstrate, to actively protest against his government, and now he looks upon the massacre as a practical and necessary business decision. Painful to make at the time but ultimately good for the country. And I believe it’s safe to say that his opinion is in line with that of most young Chinese people today. There is almost a sense of gratitude for what the government did, saving them from the anarchy that consumed Russia in its rush to democratize. Preserving the harmony that allowed the economic miracle to rise to undreamed of height. Surely it was all for the best, and your heart has to go out to the poor officials forced to make such a difficult decision.

I understand his argument, and I understand why my Chinese colleagues across the board tow the line on this topic. Many months ago I gave up hope of having a rational discussion with them on topics like this. The last time I tried was about two weeks ago, when I argued with a beloved colleague about whether Mao had been good for China or bad. When I recited the litany of his sins, which are nearly as bountiful as Hitler’s, I got the tape recorded message that still, he was good for China. You know, seventy percent and all that. At least now I understand why she says that.

If you read my other posts on Tiananmen Square, you’ll know I don’t see the students as angels. Nothing is ever that simple. Nor were the party’s players all devils. Forces inside the party were grating against each other and…well, no sense in restating what most of us know. For me, the bottom line was that the party showed us just how ruthless and obsessed with self-preservation they were, not that there was ever much doubt. And for that, I can never forgive them, even if their own people can. I see what they are doing today, stopping parents who lost children to the Sichuan earthquake from demonstrating, and I remind myself that for all the steps forward, theirs is still an authoritarian government that can easily morph into a totalitarian police state when it feels threatened. The script is so similar; all of our hopes were raised when we saw the relative media transparency the state was allowing in the earthquake’s coverage. It didn’t take long to bring us all back down to earth.

And so we can wring our hands and complain and blog and point out the hypocrisy and the two-facedness and the outright badness. But as long as the Chinese people refuse to call the government to account or even to acknowledge its selfish intentions, like my friend who insists Mao was a net plus for China, meaningful political reform will remain minimal and painfully slow. Some uplifting spurts forward, some painful setbacks. It’s gotten better, as the cliche goes, but let’s not fool ourselves: if a similar threat were to arise now or in the future, those in power would be willing to replay the ‘incident” all over again. Reluctantly, for sure, but in the end it would be “the best thing for China.”

I’m in America for my last vacation before the fall. I know I’ve disappointed a lot of readers with the sparse posting, and no one is more depressed than I am at the inanity of some of the recent comment threads. I simply feel I have no choice. A lot of emails have gone unanswered and a lot of topics I’ve been dying to post about have gone unwritten. That’s the best I can do for now, and it won’t get better until the autumn. Let me just close by saying my work has involved me in the relief efforts for the children displaced and orphaned by the earthquake, and no matter how the government may have infuriate me in recent days, and no matter how frustrated I feel with Chinese friends who refuse to see the world as i do, the rush to help and sacrifice and give has been one of the most inspiring and moving things I’ve ever seen. As usual with China, a flood of contrary emotions collide, from tearful joy at the selflessness and generosity of the people to anger and impatience at the cruelty of some in the government to indignation over the corruption that allowed the schools to crumble. Each of these emotions is equally legitimate, and one does not invalidate the other.

Update: And let’s not forget, the TSM remains the most taboo subject in China. And for good reason.