I try  to present a nuanced picture of my host country. I try to highlight its successes and also the built-in prejudices China often faces, especially over emotional and complex issues like Tibet. I try to distinguish between different parts of the Chinese government, to make it clear I know the government (like most governments) is not categorically evil, that many bureaucrats are doing the best they can to improve a country that faces daunting problems. I try to point out the economic impact of China’s rise and the extraordinary success of Hu Jintao’s ruthless, pragmatic and daring foreign policy strategy, how he has managed to re-stack the deck, and not the way America would like.

So the reason for the boring and somewhat defensive preamble is that I just came across one of those sickening stories that brings back all the animosity I felt for the CCP back in 2002-3. I know this is almost certainly the fault of local officials in Guizhou and not the central party in Beijing. And it’s one of those agonizing stories that we keep hoping will stop appearing as local leaders realize they can no longer contain and keep secret their malfeasances. And still, the stories appear.

The cause for hope: at least we are reading about it and it has made the world headlines thanks to the Internet. The cause for anxiety is that these things are often hushed up and forgotten.

And I know, we killed American Indians and kept slaves in the US, and we supported eugenics and gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan. And I know China’s a great country and has a lot to deal with. But when any country allows what appear to be acts of barbarism like this to take place, the story has to be told.

All of us living in Beijing know our landlords have been salivating for months over the windfall they just know they’re going to make by jacking up rents through the roof. Some were planning to rent out their not-so-special places for $40,000 (USD) just for the month of August. My own evil landlord told me he was inflating my already high rent by nearly 50 percent when my lease expires in July. 

So I’ve been watching the apartment market in Beijing carefully for the past three months, and one thing I can say with a fair degree of certainty: there is a significant apartment glut in Beijing and many of the greedy landlords (like my own) who rejected very reasonable offers because they had RMB signs in their eyes are going to be badly fucked, and they deserve to be fucked.

I’ve been watching Beijing apartments on Craigslist, for example, and in just the past two weeks there’s been something akin to a meltdown. Prices at Fortune Plaza and Central Park and Sun City and the likes have dropped dramatically. By waiting this long, 30 days before my lease expires, I was able to land a pretty good deal in a popular Dongzhimen complex, with 30 percent more floor space than my current apartment at just a slightly higher rent. And it’s a better location (I am so tired of living in the CBD). I move in on July 19. My current landlord, who insisted he could rent the place out for an obscene price, is going to be screwed. As of the past week, there are now many apartments the same size in the same building on the market for way less. The bubble is finally bursting. And with my not moving out until July 19, he’ll have a hard time getting it marketed and made ready for the next tenant in time for August. I always paid my rent early and offered him a very fair compromise. But no, he wanted the sun and the moon and the stars. As the old saying goes, pigs get slaughtered. 

Rents here are still high, especially when you think of what they were just two years ago. But a lot of landlords were fantasizing, and the reality is just dawning on them. Instead of wallowing in cash, they’re going to have to hustle just to get someone to move in at all. Well, they brought this on themselves, and I won’t shed any tears for them. 

Beijing is now so insanely over-built, I think after the Games it will once again be a buyer’s market for years to come.

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?

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.

I started deleting off-topic comments in the last thread and realized that there would have been virtually no comments left if I’d continued.

Well, maybe two. 

Consider this an open thread if you must. 

The fact is, I may not be able to post regularly until September. I am that busy, with meetings through the night and a constant deluge of tasks, some annoying, others pretty exciting. I go on vacation next week and will try to get back into blogging. But I haven’t been able to read any of the blogs on my blogroll, or even the comments on my own blog, for about three weeks now, and it’s only going to get worse. All dressed up, with this fantastic new site design, and no place to go.

In the meantime, for some light reading, I recommend you check out this brief post and Kaiser Kuo’s excellent comment. For the record, Michael Ledeen is the Antichrist. That is unarguable.