China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation, by Xinran

One of the few florists in Shanghai that doesn’t make bouquets out of dozens of small blue teddy bears lies in a small lane off Wukang Lu. As the sole employee prepared flowers for me one night recently I struck up a conversation with her boyfriend.

He was a student and hoped to marry the florist (who shook her head demurely at the idea) in a year or two when he graduated. He was young and ambitious and caught me altogether off guard when he said, “I think you have a better life than us.”

It would have been disingenuous to argue the point yet it’s a strange thing to consider. How do you weigh your lived life against the vague imaginings of another’s?

Xinran Xue attempts a similarly fraught comparison in her latest book, China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation. Which generation living in China today has had it best, and which has lived the worthiest lives?

Xinran puts these questions, among others, to 17 members of the generation of grandparents living in contemporary China, a group who have lived under a staggering range of social conditions. Many were born before the Japanese invaded in WWII, saw China ‘liberated’ by the Communist Party, endured the paranoia and destruction of the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, have seen their children and grandchildren embrace the admonition attributed to Deng Xiaoping, “to get rich is glorious.”

As young adults, many of the interviewees endured hardships that read like the unhappy beginnings of fairy tales. An acrobat named Yishujia, whose skills included juggling umbrellas with her feet, was so poor growing up that her family “couldn’t even afford soap, you had to wash clothes with a fistful of salt.” When attempts were made to populate China’s icy North West, Sun, one of the region’s first teachers, tells of sitting on her long plaits in the classroom to keep out the cold of her mud-clod chair.

Despite the deprivation and hardships they faced, most recall their youth with fondness and pride. Mrs You, one of China’s first oil prospectors, remembers working in the cold until her socks stuck to her skin and couldn’t be removed. Nevertheless, she says:

I feel a real nostalgia for our enthusiasm and cheerfulness under those conditions: we used to … start up a song on one mountain, and they’d pick up the tune on the next mountain.

Several claim their early efforts have given them boundless energy ever since and lament the failure of younger generations to display the same work ethic. The former acrobat shows Xinran some family pictures. “My son isn’t as handsome as his father. Can you see? He doesn’t have his father’s spirit … The child doesn’t have the spirit we did!”

Likewise, some prefer the social systems that were in place back in their day. Under Mao there was “not so much of a gap between rich and poor.” Also, they say, people were either too tired (before the Communist Revolution) or too frightened (during it) to commit crimes. In contrast, “a lot of people are sick with rage at the empty boasting, bribery and corruption we see nowadays.” While it’s difficult for Xinran to stomach, some tell her that “Mao did a better job.”

Xinran began her journalism career when a Communist Party transmitter used to muddy the reception of foreign radio shows was converted into a working Chinese radio station. She was chosen to host a late night radio show called “Words on the Night Breeze”, which formed the foundation of her first book, The Good Women of China.

Having thus honed her skills, Xinran approaches the interviews in China Witness like an expert interrogator, outlining her techniques for tackling her subjects’ caution and modesty. She doggedly pursues emotional responses, and one topic in particular consistently yields results. Tears fall almost reliably when Xinran raises the subject of her interviewees’ relationships with their children.

Like many Chinese now in their middle age, Mrs You’s kids were raised by their grandparents – concerns for family were seen as “petty bourgeois”, and the good of the country came first. Furthermore, her children were denied schooling when their father was ‘struggled against’ and imprisoned for having received training in the Soviet Union. “I want to make it up to them,” she says, “…and I don’t know if they’re grateful for what I’ve given up.”

There’s more to China Witness than this weighing of a generation’s merits and misdeeds. The book covers mammoth geographical and thematic ground. Xinran talks to a street-side shoe mender with two children in graduate school. She meets a retired prostitute from Nanjing who mocks current contraceptive methods, having put herbs in her clothes and burnt incense while bathing to stave off pregnancy. A man named Wu tells her how he became a professional news singer, and so on.

But again and again Xinran’s attempt to record the histories of a generation of Chinese hints at her need to understand her personal past. She doesn’t write about it in China witness, but Xinran didn’t meet her mother until she was five years old and when she did she called her “Ayi”, Auntie. Two weeks later, during the Cultural Revolution, her parents were arrested and imprisoned for 15 years. Thinking back on interviews with older Chinese who missed out on relationships with their children Xinran writes, “How many times have I dreamed that I was small again and my parents were making a fuss of their little girl…?”

China Witness is a sprawling collection of lives packed with historical curiosities. It’s also an ambitious, heartfelt attempt to better know the older generation as a means to celebrate their triumphs in tumultuous times and, where necessary, to forgive them.

The Gum Thief, By Douglas Coupland

In his 2006 novel Jpod Douglas Coupland gleefully cuts-and-pastes from contemporary culture. The narrative welcomes interjections from a crowd of textual flotsam: gamers’ chats, imaginary ebay ads, Chinese translations of words like ‘pornography,’ and 20 straight pages of pi. The characters, brilliant computer game programmers with woefully low Emotional Quotients, are made for the information-rich, spiritually impoverished milieu that he describes. In The Gum Thief Coupland turns his attentions to those who haven’t adapted so well.

Middle-aged Roger and goth-girl Bethany work dead-end jobs at Staples, an office supply superstore. They barely interact with each other until Bethany picks up Roger’s journal and reads an entry he’s written from her perspective. Though “creeped out,” Bethany empathises with Roger’s melancholy musings enough to write back, hoping to alleviate her boredom.

The story develops as a series of journal entries, letters and emails written by Roger and characters almost as gloomy – his bitter ex-wife Joan, Bethany’s distant mum Dee Dee and so on. Unlike the unfeeling nerds in Jpod, these more human characters have been raised emotional sitting ducks; if “you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.” Bethany and Roger search hard for solace after suffering the deaths of friends and family members, after cancers grow and marriages decay. To begin with, Roger doubts he even deserves his little remaining optimism: “Souls ought to have the legal right to bail once you cross certain behaviour thresholds.”

Unsurprisingly, The Gum Thief lacks the spontaneity and playfulness of other Coupland novels. It does, however, feature characteristic moments of singular description. On the formation of the asteroid belt, Bethany says, a planet and its moon got “too closely entangled in each other’s orbits and they collided and shattered. How romantic, in a Japanese manga kind of way”. At one point Roger writes about how little culture and technology poor Poe had to draw on for metaphors back in 1849. In the best phrases of The Gum Thief, Coupland really rubs this in.

That said, the author sacrifices much of his creative firepower in the attempt to write realistically as someone who isn’t really a writer. With Bethany’s encouragement, Roger embarks on the novel he’s long planned to write, ‘Glove Pond,’ chapters of which are strewn through The Gum Thief. Roger’s novel is terrible. The catty, alcoholic characters are mere sketches and the imagery often, well, sucks. Ultimately, Roger finds catharsis in the idea that his creations weren’t always caricatures but were reduced, like him, to semi-humans by their personal tragedies. While it’s a nice sentiment, in getting there Coupland shows just how difficult it is to sustain bad but interesting writing, however realistic Roger’s voice may be.

As Roger explores his emotions through his novel, it gradually becomes hijacked by events in his and Bethany’s lives. A creative writing teacher criticizes Roger for failing to lose his own voice in his writing, an argument that is meant ironically but, applied to The Gum Thief, rings true. Coupland struggles to create distinct voices for his speakers, a difficulty exacerbated by the novel’s reliance on written messages, rather than dialogue and action. The characters just aren’t vital and substantial enough to earn our sympathy, a must for a story so focused on the crippling potential of grief.