CHINA: Jerusha McCormackreviews Xinran China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, Translated by Esther Tyldesley, Nicky Herman and Julia Lovell, Chatto & Windus, 435pp, €20
IN THE WEST, a mile is a mile: the same measure always. By contrast, in traditional China, the li was less a measure of distance than a measure of effort required to cover distance; an uphill road would measure more li going up than it would going down.
Just so a generation, typically thought of in the West as 20/25 years, in China is calculated in terms of lived experience. Thus one commentator has distinguished at least five generations since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. My graduate students at Beijing Foreign Studies University considered that seven, or perhaps even eight generations now intervened between themselves and their grandparents.
In this book, Xinran, a Chinese journalist now living in London, returns to China to interview those now in their 70s to 90s. Within their lifetimes they have been witness to the chaos of the war-lord period; the civil war between Chang Kai-shek and the Communists; the Japanese takeover of China which resulted in the now notorious "rape of Nanjing" among other atrocities; the founding of the PRC and all Mao's ideological campaigns since then - as well as the disastrous Great Leap Forward (which resulted in tens of millions of deaths by starvation) and the even more disastrous Cultural Revolution. With the death of Mao in 1976, a new world emerged through the "Opening Up" policies of Deng Xioaping: one once almost unimaginable for those who give their stories here.
Asked what was the greatest influence on his life, one replied simply: "History". But what is "history"? Not the hodgepodge of events, usually evoked here with only minimal dates or context (indeed, a timeline would have been welcome for those not familiar with the events in China over the last century). History here is what one cannot control: a shorthand for the conflicting, successive ideologies, which render yesterday's right, today's wrong. To be caught up in such violent reversals is to find oneself, inevitably, betrayed; the difficulty is not to betray oneself. In one powerful story, a policeman explains how his attempts to be morally straight with himself have led to his present dire situation, living on the poverty line with a comatose wife, with no help other than what his hard-pressed family can provide. His daughter is even more explicit about what she sees as the betrayals of her own generation: "we were born during the Great Leap Forward . . . and there was nothing to eat. When we went to school, it was the Cultural Revolution and education stopped. We had to work and we were sent to the countryside. When we married . . . they came up with the 'single child' policy . . . [Then] we lost our jobs, across the board; everyone without a diploma or qualifications was laid off. Now we're old, and there's been a reform of pensions and medical insurance, and we don't qualify. It seems as if the whole of government policy is against our generation".
Reading stories such as this, one marvels at the capacity of so many ordinary Chinese people simply to endure. Although from vastly different classes, backgrounds, and regions, their accounts are much the same. Most begin with food: as children they starved. Sometimes a parent died. The children were given away or encouraged to join the army or take the first work available; at least, they would eat. When, with the new marriage law of the PRC, arranged marriages were forbidden, most young people allowed the head of their work unit to select a partner. Married, they were assumed to be bound by shared ideals, allowing them literally to sacrifice their lives - surviving in the most basic conditions, working prodigiously for pitiful pay, and expecting little else except a chance to contribute to the glory of the new republic.
Now their offspring think them foolish. That is, if the younger generations listen at all. Many of the stories here have been told only in part, or not at all, to others. The children do not understand or are not able to "take it in". They inhabit an alien world in which making money has become an obsession, officials are indifferent if not corrupt, and the old people are ridiculed for sacrifices made in the name of an outmoded idealism.
These stories bear witness, then, to a cultural earthquake that has left many of the older generations bewildered and spiritually homeless. In this new China, the generation gap is an abyss that widens with each successive decade. If their own children and grand-children, who are Chinese, are not able to "take in" these stories, how are we as Westerners to do so? Even reading them requires a suspension of disbelief, and only the transparent good faith of Xinran, the interviewer, allows one to credit them at all.
Indeed, perhaps only a Chinese reader can rightly comprehend their significance. And judging from comments of Xinran's native assistants to this project, it is the Chinese, both abroad and at home, who would be the most immediate audience for this book. As the Nanjing research team leader confessed: "I realized, as I worked with the team, that the stories the book told were going to be very different from those in our school history textbooks". Another said simply, "I never thought about what my parents' and grandparents' generation had lived through before this". For readers outside China, the author's determination to allow the most marginalised - particularly women, as well as those who practice traditional skills - to recount their lives makes this enterprise of particular value. Rarely would a Westerner engage with such people - or hear them speak with such openness or trust. Even now, reading their testimonies, one wonders at the price being paid for having their stories so summarily dismissed by those coming after. It is to Xinran's credit that they are preserved here, against the odds, to bear witness to what it has meant to endure this, one of the most traumatic periods in China's history.
• Jerusha McCormack is visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she helped found the first Irish Studies Centre in China