We went to see the Chinese film "Call My Name Under the Hawthorne Tree". It is the Chinese version of Erich Segal's Love Story full of tear provoking unrealized love/horrible tragedy scenes in a Cultural Revolution environment. Who was the Western idiot that said that Chinese faces are unscrutable, unexpressive? Who said that Maoist patriotic dances are ugly? But the best are the children: delightful, beautiful, intelligent, funny.
This is the first time that I visualize the Cultural Revolution, and it is not what I imagined by reading the stories of the Chinese intellectuals in English. The re-education in the countryside is a long vacation, the party's rule is paternal, equality is liked by the common people. The history of the Cultural Revolution in English was written by pretentious, class-conscious career-obsessed intellectuals, who felt deeply insulted and depressed by having to share with ignorant and dirty peasants; teachers and university students that feared being taken by common working class people. For Chinese "Tiger Mothers" (there seems to be no other variety) the re-education was, at best, a terrible waste of time that should have been spent on passing exams and getting promoted in the state hierarchy.
In the story, Jiang is a 17 y.o. high school student, daughter of a declasse family (mother a "rightist" teacher demoted to cleaning lady) and the only hope of the family to climb out of "black political background" and economic misery. When the mother discovers that she had fallen in love with the son of a high class Party mandarin, she forbids the relationship because it could ruin her daughter's carreer. That is the core conflict of the story and it reaches it dramatic resolution when the boy dies of leukemia. As in all Communist propaganda, the end must be uplifting, so the epilogue informs that the heroine succeeded in her social climbing project and eventually was sent to study in America - the acme of success for Chinese intellectuals of that generation.
15 comments:
Zhou Dongyu looks like the typical Asian starlet - like a pre-pubescent girl. Asian men must be afraid of mature women - they prefer young innocent types. It verges on creepy.
K
Its actually interesting. In movies, especially historical ones, Chinese are far more expressive and emotive than in real life. I was just watching True Legend the other day and was amazed at how expressive the actors were, quite like Westerners.
Yet I know from experience that in Asia people are much more reserved and quiet. Although I will admit that the *inscrutable Chinese* idea has been taken waaay to far. They are a bit less emotional, but hardly inscrutable or robotic.
But I wonder if the conventions for expressing emotions in films - especially in historical films - are different from those governing everyday life, so as to create a misleading impression. Maybe the conventions governing films have even been lifted from Hollywood. I was struck in True Legend by how the actors conveyed the exact same emotions that you see in Hollywood films in the exact same situations, when I am under the strong impression that in real life Chinese react to these incidents far more calmly and with greater reserve.
I think the stories about the Cultural Revolution that you read in English are closer to the truth and that what you saw in the movie is more like Party approved propaganda. Taking skilled urban people and sending them to collective farms with primitive facilities is no one's idea of a vacation. It's one thing to go camping for 2 weeks, it's another to spend years in forced internal exile slopping pigs. Was your father's experience in the forced labor brigades of the Hungarian Army also a "long vacation"? A vacation is something you sign up for willingly, not something enforced at gunpoint.
K
J
I hope you are joking, otherwise I have to conclude that you might be losing your mind. "... re-education in the countryside a long vacation..." Next you will tell me that a stay in Gulag was like summer camp. Movies require one to suspend belief and critical reasoning while watching. That's what makes them such effective vehicles for propaganda, and why the Comintern infiltrated Hollywood.
Need I remind that China today is a mortal threat to the West. They have advanced nuclear weapons and MIRVed missile delivery systems. The next step will be nuclear subs. You do realize that China is helping Iran develop high yield-to-weight ratio warheads for missiles?
Wen Ho Lee's transfer of nuclear weapons design codes to China was the greatest security breach in U.S. history. He got away with it because the FBI screwed up, and with the help of some very good lawyers he played the race card quite effectively. He got away with high treason.
I may be losing my mind but the re-education in the film does not look so terrible, except for young careerists impatient to study and climb the social hierarchy. For intellectuals it is effecively time lost, sometimes years. For ambitious "tiger mothers" each minute not spent on some activity related to advance is accounted as wasted.
And it is not only loss of time. Conditions in countryside were primitive, no doctors and no remedies. But the food situation was better in the villages than in urban centers.
The film IS communist propaganda, no doubt. But the personal stories of bitter urban intellectuals we read in English are far from being objective and the complete story.
"... but the re-education in the film does not look so terrible,... "
What makes you think the film bears any relationship to reality?
J - I really feel like you have a double standard here. When Jews write about their camp experiences, are they also not being "objective"? Why don't we hear more about the camp experience written from the POV of the Ukrainian SS guards - it was no pleasure having to herd around those filthy lice infested Jews. One felt exhausted after a hard day beating the prisoners, etc.
K
The movie Farewell My Concubine has a pretty horrifying scene about the Cultural Revolution
What makes you think the film bears any relationship to reality?
There are many Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution so the film cannot falsify too much historical reality.
I'm aware the film is Communist propaganda and presents a romantic picture of that era, it could not be otherwise, and the film has many horror scenes like the heroine mixing concrete with bare feet or pulling a heavy cart uphill and no one helping. The film shows the terror in their eyes and they fear of helping a politically "black" individual.
But the Cultural REvolution affected primarily the educated classes while the peasants and workers were largely passive, indifferent. Therefore the story of the Cultural REvolution is, necessarily, biased when related by English speaking intellectuals.
I am sure the Great Leap Forward was a bigger disaster for the mass of the Chinese people, yet we hear little of it.
In China, like in the Soviet Union, the old revolutionaries settled down into a bureaucratic regime. Trostsky describes the best that tendency and he tried to recreate the revolutionary fervor, but was rejected by the bureaucrats led by Stalin. In China too a new bureaucratic establishment had taken power, protective of their privileges and thirsty for stability. Mao wanted to destroy these new mandarinate but he failed. China today is ruled by an hereditary class of mandarins, mostly descendants of old Long Marchers.
Don't confuse Mao's doctrinal BS with his real, unstated motives. Continuous revolution suited Mao because it kept him at the pinnacle of power and everyone else below him off balance and uncertain. Mao was a psychopath who cared nothing for anyone other than himself - if he had been given the choice between a million people dying and Mao missing a meal, he would have opted for the banquet. If the disease is the inevitable emergence of a new ruling class after a revolution and the cure for this disease is to keep the society in continuous turmoil, then the cure is worse than the disease. But Mao had no problem with being part of the ruling class himself, only for others.
K
K, I am simply shocked at your cynicism. You should spend your next vacation in a re-education camp.
Anon.
K, Personal power is important but I believe that these revolutionaries were motivated also by ideology.
Thay have sacrificed their lives for a classless society and what they were getting was a new class.
Cant you believe that they turned sincerely against this new class? I think Mao was sincere and Trotsky too.
Dr Zarkov,
It happens that my wife too had been re-educated in the former Soviet Union! At 16 her class was sent to the countryside to work in the fields, tying tomato plants and collecting potatoes. Food was good and much fresh air, parents were away, the work stopped at 2 PM and they enjoyed free afternoons. Yet she believes in the official narrative that Chinese educated youth suffered terribly in the countryside.
Trotsky yes, Mao no. That's why Trotsky ended up powerless and ultimately dead in Mexico and Mao died on his throne of old age.
The "volunteer" work done by schoolchildren at harvest time in the late Soviet Union was nothing like what happened in China during the cultural revolution. The two are not comparable at all.
K
The film describes EXACTLY the "learning from the peasants" re-education that was usual in the Soviet Union. My wife says the food was abundant in the countryside (not so in Kiev), the parents were away, work was not heavy, etc.
I understand that for an University Professor or an active political official - suspected of rightist tendencies or a bad class background, spending months and years in Yunnan feeding the "hayzerim" (pigs) was a trauma. Their bitter narratives reflect their experiences, not those of the schoolchildren to help with the harvest.
Post a Comment