I TURNED these pages with great curiosity. Jan Wong, the author of Red China Blues, seems so similar to me, in age, gender, race, and professional background. Unlike me, however, she is a foreigner to the Chinese. I wondered about her reflections on the country to which I have been tied in a hundred-and-one ways.
In 1972, a twenty-year-old Chinese-Canadian set foot in the country her grandfather had left a century before. A Montreal Maoist, fed up with the hopelessness of Western society, "a mess of racism, exploitation, and shopping malls", the young girl sought harmony and perfection in Communist China. Wong came at a good time. The notorious Cultural Revolution, which started in 1966 and threw hundreds of millions of people into years of killing, looting, smashing, and torturing, had cooled down. The violent period had passed and the revolution proceeded mainly in the form of verbal attacks designed to replace the "decadent ideologies" in people's minds with Marxism, Leninism, and Mao's Thought.
Her innocent eyes fell upon the "charming" part of the revolution, and the girl quickly fell in love with Beijing, where the women used no make-up and men dressed plainly. The fruits of the revolution, some of the "new-born things"-such as the enrolment of workers, peasants, and soldiers as university students and the substitution of factory work for classroom courses-seemed absurd to a newcomer. But they were crisp, stimulating, and not hard to accept.
I was reminded of my own early naivety by her genuine devotion to getting her "bourgeois" mind reformed by soiling her hands and feet in backbreaking labour. I too endured hardship in the belief, which Wong shared at the time, that "perhaps one day, as Marx predicted, we [would] eliminate the gap between mental and manual labour," as long as we followed the revolutionary path.
To the Chinese Wong was a rare breed, a foreigner with Chinese skin. Her appearance allowed her to mix with the people and discover, in a limited way, aspects of China hidden from those who were visibly foreign. Living with the masses, she discovered some of the unpleasant attributes of the "ideal society". She gives a detailed account of an informer who caused a classmate to be forced into internal exile in Tibet. This is typical of what she gained from first-hand observation. By contrast, I was reminded of a Canadian professor who said that the Chinese people were greedy for Tibetan land and eager to emigrate there.
As a Canadian raised in a free atmosphere, she found it hard to adapt to Chinese methods of teaching and learning. She thought that the tradition of rote learning had eroded the ability of many Chinese to think independently, and that the Communists intended this result. She was shocked to find that "the Communist party said black was white and white was black, and everyone agreed with alacrity, and there was not a single murmur of dissent." As someone who lived through Mao's rule of China, I feel that it was the reign of terror, far more than educational methods, that cowed the people into an appearance of unanimity. But an unexpected eruption, the Tiananmen incident in the spring of 1976, proved the people's ability to think independently: tens of thousands let loose their long-repressed agony in poems, couplets, and speeches. The events, and the ensuing government crackdown, had a big impact on Wong's faith in the Communist ideology. When she left China in 1980, however, she still cherished the principles of Maoism as just, while seeing there were shortcomings in practice.
When Wong returned eight years later as a Globe and Mail journalist, Deng's era had succeeded Mao's. The Tiananmen massacre the following spring served as a turning point in her "outlook on the world". Her coverage of the student movement proved her maturity. She sought to provide balanced reports, unlike some Western reporters who "loved to get their stories on page one" and tended to portray the demonstrators as flawless heroes. Very strikingly, Wong tempered her overall support of the student movement with a frank and penetrating description of the unprincipled behaviour of some of its leaders, whose activities became "mere aping of their oppressors." She courageously stayed on in Beijing after the killing started, when most foreigners fled in horror. She trembled to see the Beijing people fearlessly facing death, and shed tears as she buried the last remnants of her dreams for the Chinese Communist Party.
She believes the bloodshed could have been avoided by an experienced mediator, had the government been willing to negotiate. But dictatorships rarely negotiate; under Mao's rule, people were beheaded if they dared voice dissenting opinions. Deng was more tolerant only until he felt his rule threatened. In a country with a population of 1.2 billion but no proper legal system, force would decide everything. It worked for the Communist leaders, it still works, and it will keep working for quite a long time.
Unable to forget her Marxist education from the 1970s, Wong was pained to find all the old evils coming back in the 1990s. What Marx had predicted for capitalist society-the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and a widening gap between rich and poor-was actually occurring in a Communist system. Though foreigners still needed permission for access to some areas of China, they were now able to touch many aspects of the country long concealed from outsiders to save face. I felt heavy-hearted, knowing that Wong was writing about prevailing conditions, to read about her visits to poverty-stricken rural areas and women sold into marriage. With admirable courage, Wong travelled to a remote village and secretly interviewed the oppressed villagers. The local Party secretary was a "rapist, an embezzler, a tyrant, and a thief" who "typified the thousands of petty tyrants who made life miserable for millions of peasants." Chinese journalists knew of the sickening status of their country, but exposing cases to appeal for justice is simply beyond their power.
Wong's resentment of today's rampant corruption in the government and society as a whole left her nostalgic for what she remembered as Mao's "unrelentingly pure country". By the 1990s, she says, the children of China's leaders had become the "new robber barons", and "this small group made obscene profits from insider information and monopolies." She believes Mao was right in predicting that, without continuous class struggle, the old monsters would crawl back out. She felt depressed: "It was hard for me, with my old Maoist baggage and my Chinese ethnic roots, to stay detached and objective."
It is not hard to understand Wong's feeling of loss. I and many Chinese share her feelings about the corruption that has accompanied economic growth. Unfortunately, positive and negative phenomena often co-exist and mix, in the course of history. Wong and many Western Maoists had seen only the best parts of Mao's China. They didn't live through, and so were not familiar with the political campaigns in which millions gave their lives under the cruel banner of "class struggle". The world was stunned at the massacre in Tiananmen Square simply because that was the first time foreign reporters had been allowed to be present at such an event. Several hundred deaths in the square (perhaps more) were a small number compared to the death toll in the Movement to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries (1950-1952), the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969). Even more-tens of millions-died of hunger in the disaster caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward Movement launched in 1958.
I agree with Wong's criticism of today's privileged elite. But on second thought it is hard to detect a serious difference in this respect between Mao's and Deng's times. The privileges merely changed their form. In Mao's time, China's doors were shut to the outside world and the economy was strictly state-controlled. There was no opportunity for the elite to get in touch with foreign investors or run lucrative businesses. Privilege then meant a life of luxury: spacious houses and gardens, curtained limousines, servants paid for by the government, first-rate food at low prices, the chance to see banned foreign films, and weekends with beautiful young women. By sharp contrast, it was common for an ordinary family to squeeze three generations into a single room. The high officials' children were guaranteed places at the best universities and assigned the best jobs, while children of peasants were hopelessly doomed to be bound to their barren land.
I was drawn by Wong's humorous style throughout the book and I appreciate her straightforward comments with only slight disagreements. For example, her story about the penis-extension doctor may be appealing, but it hardly reflects mainstream life in China. The number of people labelled as Rightists during the 1957 political campaign was actually ten times more than the 55,000 recorded in the book. And I found it odd to see the word "swashbuckler" used twice to describe Dr. Norman Bethune. This Canadian doctor underwent extreme hardships and difficulty and sacrificed his life in helping the Chinese people survive the Japanese invasion in the Second World War. He remains forever a lofty, selfless, and admirable hero in the memory of the Chinese people.
All in all, Red China Blues is informative and absorbing, and benefits from its author's sharp observations and vivid strokes.
It was especially interesting to learn about the culture shock Wong experienced, particularly in the skirmishes with her Chinese staff that she recounts. Her skill in dramatizing these as well as more serious events prove her to be not just a chronicler of Communist China but a writer capable of dissecting human nature.

l Yan Li 's novel Daughters of the Red Land (Sister Vision) was shortlisted for the 1995 Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award.