Reading Howl in China
My generation, once impassioned by the Western literature of rebellion, is now lulled by ‘Wealthy Socialism’
When I first read the Chinese edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1988, I was a skinny 15-year-old girl who had lived all her life in a southern Chinese province surrounded by stubborn bamboo mountains. I was shocked by its opening lines, even without understanding them fully: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…’. I repeated the three adjectives: starving, hysterical, naked. Beside me was my brother, who had read the whole poem already. So I asked him: ‘starving and naked, are Americans like our hungry and poor peasants without clothes to wear?’ He answered me dismissively: ‘Are you stupid, or what? America is the richest place in the whole world! The poem’s about spiritual poverty.’ He strode off to his room with a newly obtained copy of On the Road.
Alone, I chewed over the poem, line by line. At that time, like my
brother, I had been falling in love with any sort of Western literature I
could lay my hands on in Zhejiang province. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was also translated that year. Intellectual youth, fed on classical Chinese legends such as Dream of Red The Chamber, suddenly discovered new vocabularies from the West. Everyone was ravenous.
My father, who had recently been promoted to the position of state
painter in the local town bureau in compensation for his sufferings in
labour camps during the Cultural Revolution, had all these literary
magazines and Western music records in his office – chained to the
shelves so that no one could steal them. Every day after school my
brother and I would go to his office, just to read or look at this stuff
from the West. My brother told me that Ginsberg had visited China and
had spent a month touring and lecturing in our country. All the elite
youth would have read his new poem written during the China visit: One Morning, I Took a Walk in China. What a cool title! I dreamed that one day I would write a poem entitled One Morning, I Took a Walk in America.
The following year, abrim with idealism, my brother left our
typhoon-ridden hometown to study in Beijing and quickly found himself
caught up in the protests on Tiananmen Square. At home, we followed
events closely on our newly bought black-and-white television set.
Hundreds of thousands of university students occupied the square,
calling for democracy and shouting the slogans of their manifestos in
front of Mao’s mausoleum, addressing the then-General Secretary Zhao
Ziyang.
The whole nation was behind the students; even the peasants of my
hometown stood in front of the television, nodding their heads and
saying: ‘I bet your son is there on the square. He thinks like Mao and
he ought to be there!’ A few weeks later the hunger strikes began. Then
in early June, Deng Xiaoping decided to put a stop to things. The party
authorities declared martial law and mobilised 300,000 troops from the
People’s Liberation Army. First there were machine guns, then tanks: the
movement turned into a war.
My parents worried greatly about my brother. My mother kept calling
his student dormitory but the line was always busy. A week before the
massacre, they finally reached him. His throat dry, he informed us that
he had joined the revolution, explaining that he had been raising
banners and shouting slogans for weeks. He talked in a breathless
torrent with no time for domestic questions. Then he hung up before my
parents could respond.
The last news images we received in Zhejiang province were of the
tanks rolling in. Suddenly, Tiananmen Square became silent and mournful;
bodies sprawled on the ground, blood stained its bricks, tanks burned,
banners lay destroyed, the sea of students had receded.
There were no mobile phones or internet then, so we lost contact with
my brother. I remember my mother crying by the phone one morning.
Illiterate and politically ignorant, she was fearful of what might come.
Three days later, my brother called, his voice made inaudible by a
mouth stuffed with food. He was at a roadside store near his university.
‘I’m fine, just hungry,’ he said. As he swallowed his noodles he
explained that there were no classes that week because his professors
were all being called in for investigation. He’d lost his voice from
screaming slogans. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he croaked, signing off as my
father wrestled the handset from my mother’s tight grip.
In 1993, I left home for the Beijing Film Academy, thanking Great
Heaven that I had managed to pass the entrance exams. I would no longer
be stuck with old and wrinkled peasants who only ploughed, ate and
slept. Here, in the great capital of China, I studied Jean-Luc Godard
and Pier Paolo Pasolini and planned my leap to the West. Somehow, my
brother and I no longer talked about 1989. Nor did his interest in the
beat poets endure. He became passive and quite practically-minded. For
him, 1989 was a bad memory, a wound to his skin that would open and
bleed from time to time. The leaders of the movement were either in
prison or in exile. The much-respected Zhao Ziyang was sacked from the
party for his sympathy with the students. He remained under house arrest
for the next 15 years, until his death in 2005. Even today, many
Chinese citizens are reluctant to speak about the protests for fear of
possible repercussions.
It’s a familiar pattern. Chinese families are always punished by the
state. Take my family. My father joined the Communist Party when he was
18, believing sincerely in communism as the only solution for China. He
was a fisherman’s son, but he had discovered French Impressionistic
painting in his 20s. With that fatal cultural attraction, his desire was
to paint. He did produce a few paintings in the styles of Monet and Van
Gogh, until the whirlwind unleashed by the Cultural Revolution swept
him from his studio to the rice fields for ‘re-education’. The
punishment for his ‘anti-revolutionary bourgeois thoughts’ was severe.
He lost his left eye from heavy labour.
While my brother and I were growing up, my parents hoped we could be
apolitical and stay ‘safe’, finish our studies, get our degrees, settle
down. But how could children who had grown up reading Ginsberg’s Howl
be indifferent to politics? That was how we were then. Yet as the years
passed, we wore out our young and shiny dreams. The Beijing Film
Academy changed its aesthetic direction. It began teaching ‘How to
Become Spielberg’ and ‘Building a Chinese Hollywood’. I got into the TV
soap business, writing lengthy police-chasing-bad-guys series and
copying Western thrillers. Godard’s La Chinoise disintegrated in the market economy.
Now my brother and I have arrived at early
middle-age. He got married in 1997 – the year Ginsberg died – and has
worked in a government office ever since. He owns a house and a car, and
has a daughter under the One Child Policy – although he still writes
and paints, if he has had enough to drink. But he no longer shouts
slogans calling for China’s democracy. The last time he visited
Tiananmen Square was several years back, before his daughter was born.
Politics, for him, is a joke. He has put on weight, no longer the
skinny, hungry, long-haired young artist in my memory. His latest
passion is watching the rise and fall of the property market. The only
habits he has clung to are his chain-smoking and drinking. Does that
mean he still holds some angry but youthful thoughts, or are these the
signs of total failure?
Ten years of living in Beijing turned me into an angry young artist
trying to find my way in an ideologically rigid society. I churned out
novels vaguely attempting to impersonate Jack Kerouac; but my film
scripts were censored and couldn’t be made into films. As I approached
30, I decided to leave China; youth seemed to have lost its vitality for
me and Europe had always been my dreamland of Western civilisation. I
decided to settle in England. London is my adopted home, and London has
adopted me among millions of other immigrants. It rains most of time,
but whenever it’s sunny I take a walk in the parks and write my novels
on those old wooden benches. Sometimes I wonder if I should write a
humorous poem entitled One Morning, I Took a Walk in England,
just to pay homage to Ginsberg. And yes, I think about Western democracy
and the decline of European civilisation. And, I hear you asking, what
happened to my beliefs and dreams?
In the year of the Tiananmen spring, Francis Fukuyama claimed that we
were now on the path to the end of history, that liberal capitalist
democracy would satisfy us all. But are ideological differences really
dissolving as Western liberal democracy and market economics unify the
world? Perhaps.
If you look at what happened in China, starting at the end of the
1990s, the first Chinese editions of glossy Western fashion magazines
appeared in bookstores, even in remote provinces. A peasant’s daughter
who managed to obtain a copy of Elle or Harper’s Bazaar
would be electrified by the glorious-looking skirts and sunglasses and
the blonde models. Western women are the most beautiful people on earth!
The Chinese fell under the powerful spell of the Western lifestyle,
unaware that the fashion magazines were a first step towards
credit-stealing, market-monopolising global commercialisation.
I can still recite the beginning of Howl: ‘I saw the best
minds of my generation being destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked…’ But I wonder if my brother remembers those lines. In the past 25
years I have seen my generation in China come a long way towards
so-called freedom. And not only mine and my brother’s generation. Since
the abdication of the last emperor, Pu Yi, in 1912, post-imperial
Chinese society has been on a mission in search of democracy. It is a
long march and it seems never to end, egged on now by Western
materialistic freedom. That’s what’s really happened in China. Material
equality plays a big part in achieving democracy, and the Chinese
Communist Party believes in Wealthy Socialism. But it is hard to
see how much democracy has actually been achieved in China today on the
back of our material achievements. My brother still cannot talk about
1989 in public, and I still cannot publish a politically sensitive book
in China.
Each time I returned to China to make my films, there would be two or
three police officers standing around our film set, smoking cigarettes
and making phone calls in muffled tones. One gets used to the trappings
of surveillance. Public figures such as the poet and Nobel laureate Liu
Xiaobo still languish in prison. In this respect, not much has changed
since 1989. But, if one sniffs the current political air, it’s possible
to sense that subtle changes have occurred. The scandal of murder and
corruption embroiling the former politician Bo Xilai and his wife came
to light. And now, with the imprisonment for corruption of Xu Caihou,
vice chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, there is a
nervous atmosphere in China’s political circles.
When Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2012, the term ‘Chinese
Dream’ swept the yellow earth of the East like a new ideological
fashion. But what is this Chinese Dream? The expression is most
certainly a mutation of the American Dream grafted on to Chinese
socialism. It is about improving the role of the individual in Chinese
society. President Xi has described the dream as a ‘national
rejuvenation, an improvement of people’s livelihoods, prosperity and a
military strengthening’. He has said that young people should ‘dare to
dream, work assiduously to fulfil their dreams and contribute to the
revitalisation of the nation’.
Dare to dream! Since when do we need courage to dream? In China, it
depends on what sort of dream a young person is ‘given’. Our dreams are
so textured by the minds of our masters that it can sometimes seem as if
there is no true dream left in the human imagination.
Guo Xiaolu
20 August 2014
Pubblicato su: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/my-generation-in-china-forgot-how-to-foment-rebellion/
