|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Century of Tears
| Article
# : |
19602 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,711 Words |
| Author
: |
Howard Goldblatt
Howard Goldblatt has written or edited four books on Chinese
literature and translated a dozen more, including Jia
Pingwa's Turbulence, winner of the 1989 Pegasus Prize, and Mo
Yan's Red Sorghum: A Family Saga. He teaches Chinese
literature at the University of Colorado, where he edits the
scholarly journal Modern Chinese Literature. |
The People's Republic of China holds a distinct advantage over other communist nations, owing to its cherished experience of the Cultural Revolution. Such was the claim made by Liu Binyan in a September 1986 speech at Harbin's Heilongjiang University (he is currently cooling his heels in American exile after gaining a reputation as China's most influential muckraker). Sensational, even sardonic, as that comment may sound, it isn't nearly as far fetched as it seems, for until the startling and tragic events of May and June 1989, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) constituted the critical juncture of communist rule in China, much as the Holocaust redefined, or underscored, the nature of the Jewish experience and Vietnam changed America. The appearance of institutional and economic breakdown, civic insanity, cultural disintegration, and physical brutality shed new and disturbing light on the nature of Chinese society and set the scene for intense national reflection and revised expectations.
Memoir as history
As with the Holocaust and Vietnam, the enormity of what happened is best captured by memoirs and biographies. What Anne Frank did for the Holocaust and Neil Sheehan did for Vietnam many have tried to do for the Cultural Revolution. Jung Chang's contribution, with its broader context and more elegant writing, is among the most successful.
Strictly speaking Wild Swans is not a Cultural Revolution memoir--at least, it is not just that. The vehicle for the narrative is a single matriarchal lineage--three generations of women in the author's family--that spans the entire twentieth century up to the time of writing. It does, however, make a deep enough foray into the genre to warrant comparison with other memoirs of the age. This seems particularly apt since the lion's share of Chinese nonfiction that has appeared in the West (excluding the Tiananmen books, a sort of cottage industry in themselves) seldom strays far from China's defining event of the second half of the twentieth century.
Perhaps it is too early to expect fiction that powerfully renders the process, impact, and human legacy of China's "misfortune," works in the mold of Elsa Morante's History: A Novel or Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. A substantial number of novels set in the Cultural Revolution have been written, but only a tiny fraction, represented by Zhang Xianliang's Half of Man Is Woman and Getting Used to Dying, are readily available in translation. So we in the West are left with personal memoir, itself occasionally bordering on the
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
