China today

The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence, Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, and The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

book review by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, http://www.samizdat.com

Jonathan Spence's monumental 876-page history The Search for Modern China starts in the 17th century, with the change over from the Ming dynasty to the Qing (Manchurian). But about 70% of the book deals with the 20th century -- the republic, the war lords, Chiang and Mao, the Cultural Revolution, etc. The early pages are slow slogging -- jammed with names and dates. Tree after tree after tree, with little sense of the shape of the forest. You'd probably have to read that part two, three, or four times to come away with a memorable picture of what happened, when, and why. But the 20th century section does a remarkable job of clarifying that complicated historical landscape. I had seen many movies and read many novels set in China from 1920 to the present, and had been totally confused by the political situation -- who was in charge where and who was allied with whom when. This book does a remarkable job of providing a context -- particularly when sorting out the rationale and motivation of the rapid and bizarre shifts of policy in the days of Mao (the Cultural Revolution and what came before and after). You get the impression that Mao was curious -- an experimenter in the realm of human relations. He would unleash the passionate enthusiasm of the masses, then pull back to a more conservative stance, then unleash again. It wasn't that he would use tight central control to force society in one direction or another, but rather that he would personally encourage or discourage tendencies that already existed. Mostly, he'd watch the unfolding of the forces he had unleashed. As a result, since 1949, vast and fundamental changes have impacted Chinese society and daily life, which had been conservative and family-based and traditional. The changes over the last 50 years have been truly amazing. No one having carefully studied Chinese history before that time could ever have predicted that such extensive change was possible in such a short time.

I just wish that there were a book that did such a good job on Chinese history prior to 1900. I need a clear picture of what happened and why -- not just names and dates. I long for a book that would treat Chinese history with broad convincing strokes, taking account of fixed factors, like geography and climate, in the style of Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel. I strongly suspect that the East-West flow of rivers in China -- the Yangzi and the Yellow Rivers in particular -- had an enormous impact on the direction of Chinese history. But I get no sense of that here.

The novel Soul Mountain, by Nobel-prize winner Gao Xingjian, puts the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath into a human context of day-to-day life. On one level, this novel tells of a journey today along the Yangzi. The traveler is a writer who has fallen into political disfavor, but is free to move about. Under a variety of pretexts he gathers folk tales by and about various peoples who have been on the fringe of Chinese civilization. We see the consequences of the Cultural Revolution and other such waves of political action/reaction. We also see reconstruction, the salvaging and regrowth of old beliefs and values. Just as in Russia, after the collapse of Communism, we see the resurgence of old beliefs and antagonisms.

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro takes place mainly in Shanghai in the early twentieth century. It helps to have read Spence to understand the chaotic political situation in the 1920s and 1930s, up to and including the Japanese invasion. But China is just the background, not the subject of the story. What we have here is Kafka meets Raymond Chandler -- a modern mystery story with metaphysical overtones, where what happens in the narrator's mind is not always the same as what happens in the external world. Here we have an author born in Japan and raised in England, writing about an English boy who grew up in Shanghai, went to school in England, and then returned to China to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance. An amazing story, masterfully told.

But the most complete and enthralling picture of 20th century China comes through in the latest novel by Amy Tan -- The Bonesetter's Daughter. A double story unfolds. First and last comes the tale of a mother and daughter in America: the mother an immigrant from China; the daughter finding it very difficult to relate to her mother's bizarre attitudes and seeming lack of feeling. But the heart of the book is the story of the mother with her mother -- who she didn't know was her mother -- in a remote village in China and also in Peking. History unfolds in the background as personal mysteries and dramas are unravelled. You feel like you were there and lived through it. You come to accept and take for granted beliefs and values that at first seemed incomprehensible. You remember the story and the history surrounding it as experienced rather than explained.

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