It’s All Chinese to Me

To be Chinese born in the 80s and thereafter is to live in a state of confusion of self identity and of one’s past and history.

Mao is at once a familiar name and a stranger. It was only in my twenties I read the first biography of Mao (in English written by a westerner. A Chinese biography of Mao, if there were any good ones, never came across my way and was never accessible to me).

I never questioned the propaganda songs or the Marxism dogmas I was handed down at school as a child. It never occured to me to doubt it. It’s the way children take the surroundings they were born into for granted. Of course everyone knows Mao, and at least for my father’s generation or maybe it could be said for my generation too, almost everyone worships him to such a degree that any personal story about him seems an impertinence. (When I bought a Chinese version of the same biography of Mao for my father, he could not read it, he totally rejected it. The western prospective was too much for him.)

The first time I realized “communism” is not a good word for some people was in a small village bazaar in France. An elderly lady, after learning that I was from China, looked at me in such a way and uttered the word “communist” with such contempt that there was no misunderstanding of her meaning. I was taken back not only by her attitude, also by her assumption that I was a “communist”. It never occured to me that I was a communist. The communist for me was the party that governed us, and I was always “the people”.

It was also the first time abroad that I realized, not as I had always expected by the teaching of Marxism, that the rest of the world, that outside China, it was still very much “backward” on religion. That we did not all agree on “religion is the opium of the people”.

In China Mao is seen as a saver, a hero, a leader that has no flaws. It would be impossible to open a frank and objective discussion over Mao about his life and thoughts between me and my father. It would be impossible to hold an honest discussion over the modern history of China between me and my father. To begin with, we do not know our history, not really, not honestly and objectively, not in a frank, open to discussion manner. So one is not to know one’s history. One is not to know oneself.

The authority, with good reasons, has always been defensively self-assertive and on edge. It has to be the direct opposite of the West, as the West has seen China as the opposite, at least in terms of government structures. And as Chinese, it seems that if you don’t stand blindly with the authority, you have to be for the West. There is no space to say “how about we learn our history, reflect and understand who we are?” To make things worse, the West does take every opportunity to make the Chinese authority’s nervousness and suspicion justified.

On one hand is the fiercely defensive self-assertiveness, on the other is the watching of American movies and TV dramas: it offers a refreshing change from the seriousness of Chinese personal and public life. As a result, there is something twisted in the view of the self in Chinese’s young.

The authority cannot forever tell the same tale of “Century of humiliation” and how the red army defeated the invading Japanese army and saved China from being the slave of an outside force. Wealth and education and travelling are opening more and more young people’s eyes and minds, already my generation and (maybe more so) the younger ones begin to look about and cast doubt about the “truism” our school teachers handed down on us.

Nationalism now becomes a word that has a bad taste. But there must be a positive nationalism: that one is reasonably proud of oneself, that one has a healthy amount of self-esteem.

The first step, maybe, is to know one’s history, to know oneself, and to shake up from the dead water of a culture of modern China. (After a violent depart from traditional values, China is yet to make his stand in the world in terms of culture.) Compared to the rest of world, China must have the least writers and artists by population. In China today still, you are to make yourself the object of derision if you are to tell you want to be an artist or writer.