Cathay / Legacies
Bordewich, Fergus & Lord, Betty Bao
BOOK REVIEWS W hen, two years ago, I first peered upon the remains of Chairman Mao in his mausoleum on Tianamnen Square, I was taken aback. I had seen Lenin and Ho Chi Minh, and was not...
...And she would not let anyone else do so for her...
...Finally, she told me...
...19.95 William McGurn THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 35 child entered the mansion as a playmate of the last duke, seventy-sixth in the line of direct descendants of Confucius...
...Then they hitched a truck to the bronze images of Confucius and his disciples, pulled them out like tree stumps, and dragged them in a procession through the streets of Qufu, shouting, "Down with the Confucian curiosity shop...
...Lord has come closest to bridging that gap, stumbling at the muffled horror that has stunted so many Chinese spirits...
...Lord shows, the victims survived the Cultural Revolution better than their persecutors, who, having been told (and having believed) that the Great Helmsman was the source of all knowledge, learned nothing else...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991...
...In short, the real enemy of any Communist society is not the dissident, the intellectual, or even the student...
...I never kept a fen but gave it all to Mother...
...Yearning for relief from the tedium of the Brave New Peking, Bordewich began to notice hints of another time, whether it be in the "buried courtyards and upswept eaves of an older city" or "the gray stalks of a pagoda that rose with pristine grace amid the smokestacks of a factory...
...Wrong...
...In the audience were thousands of students pelting me with slogans, calling me a snake spirit and a cow demon...
...Showing Bordewich around Qufu was a member of the clan who as a CATHAY: A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF OLD CHINA Fergus Bordewich/Prentice Hall/304 pp...
...The author was George N. Kates, who, after a degree at Harvard and a stint in Hollywood, moved to China and went native, wearing silk robes and even having an operation on his tongue to facilitate his speaking Chinese...
...I shouldn't have experienced a hate so unnatural that it could sever the bond between a loving father and a loving child," she says...
...the Emperors wrote in vermilion ink...
...Lord began to cry...
...By then Bordewich had discovered, to his great astonishment, that Kates was still alive...
...Bordewich, Mrs...
...I had seen Lenin and Ho Chi Minh, and was not unaccustomed to the Communist penchant for mummification...
...Each time he would bring me candy and fruit...
...For Kates had left Peking when World War II finally intruded on his peaceful courtyard in the shadow of the Forbidden City...
...So ashamed was I of my father that I wished he would leave and never come back...
...The scale of both popular discontent and the govenment's reaction took most experts by surprise, perhaps because, as Bordewich observes, few Westerners have ever really penetrated "that hidden courtyard of the self where every Chinese lives his real life...
...But I did...
...When George Kates visited Qufu in the 1930s, he found it a village "where everyone knew his place and took pride in it...
...Or the man who thought his wife a mousy homebody incapable of larger concerns, until the April day in 1989 he returned home to find she had been out carrying food to the students on Tiananmen Square...
...They scoured the tablets of Confucius, of the sage's parents, of the four great disciples, and of the seventy-two sages from their crimson altars and, like so much kindling, burned them to cinders...
...Each time he came, Father would ask me if he could take me somewhere...
...Kong Fanyin saved the mansion and clan archives by arguing that they should be preserved as "evidence" of the "criminal atrocities" the Kongs had committed...
...With him is a Filipino named George, who has been stuck in China because he has no papers to prove his real nationality, a man whose whole life thus reads like a sick joke...
...Nor is he blinded by romanticism: "Old China was also a cruel land where dwellers bartered their children for food, deliberately crippled women's feet to please the eye of connoisseurs, and endured a conformity so tacit that a man might be arrested for wearing odd-colored clothes...
...Then they smashed the statue to pieces with sledgehammers...
...Those who were second class were condemned to hard labor in Xinjiang...
...evidently, the one thing Mao was unable to change at all was the Chinese capacity to endure...
...Lord thought sympathetic to reform only to emerge among the most vocal supporters of the postTiananmen crackdown...
...Its great flaw has been not so much.an espousal of any vices but an inability to draw the line on virtue, so that order becomes the justification for tyranny, filial piety for a rigid hierarchy, and conservatism for a militant resistance to innovation...
...Her story, then, is part of the subtitle's mosaic of stories, fantastic not so much for their fabulous plots as for the horrible contortions forced on people whose only crime was to think and behave as their ancestors had for almost five millennia...
...In takeoff position...
...I know: watching a play at the theatre...
...On vacation...
...My niece, always remember that in the end even my worst enemy called me Tie Ren"—Steel Woman...
...No fools," he reports, "they diligently ignored most of what I had to say...
...My arms were raised above my shoulders and behind my back, like the wings of a jet plane...
...All Communist countries, of course, paint themselves over in a coat of collectivist drab, lending them a sinister aura quite apart from their totalitarian politics and secret police...
...Interwoven with tales and half-remembered incidents from her own life, Legacies is based on stories from the Chinese themselves, confessed to in private and delivered on cassette tapes to her door...
...Hearing this, Mrs...
...U nlike Mr...
...As a fruit-vendor in Qufu tells Bordewich, it made the people more "civilized...
...Those who were first class were sentenced to prison...
...In 1946 she left for New York on what was to be a short trip—leaving behind the infant sister whose story (including their ultimate reunification in America) Mrs...
...Lord is not one to clamber up the side of a mountain on a donkey or retrace Marco Polo's steps along the Silk Road...
...Other stories in Legacies are similar, recalling that the Chinese, whatever their cultural differences, are neither free from original sin nor strangers to grace...
...I was so terrified that my friends would see him that I became ill...
...There is the cadre, for example, whom Mrs...
...Her aunt interrupted her, to recall that throughout all the indignities of imprisonment, including having half her head shaven, not once did she shed tears...
...She soon got her wish...
...Takeoff position...
...The Red Guards publicly tortured him anyway on the Drum Tower at the center of town...
...At a banquet...
...They were the uncensored stories of their lives...
...She paused, flashing a wicked smile...
...Left to their own devices, the Chinese favor brilliant reds, rich golds, and vivid purples...
...Not exactly...
...He became obsessed with these intimations of suppressed beauty...
...There they looted the tombs and threw the shriveled corpses of the sage's descendants on the ground amid their jades and ivories, and yellowed and crumbling silks...
...The Chinese newsmen he was hired to instruct had longer experience of their system than he, and they knew that not so far in the past they would have been clapped into prison (as well again they might be in the future) for adopting the journalistic standards he taught...
...Its real enemies are the beautiful and the good, each of which answers to a higher authority...
...Bette Bao Lord was born in Shanghai in 1938, into a China wracked by civil war and soon to be brutally incorporated into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere by the Japanese...
...The silence lengthened painfully...
...That's not a bad synopsis of Confucianism itself...
...Was the chairman aware of the mockery involved in offering as his most lasting monument a carefully preserved corpse...
...I refused to touch it...
...She begged me again and again to guess, like a child enjoying some wonderful secret...
...Things were abnormal," Li replied...
...And so I remained for eight hours on my fiftieth birthday...
...Although they approach China from different perspectives, each uncovers the same astounding reserves of resiliency, good humor, and dignity—what Simon Leys called the "faculty of organizing small islands of happiness even in seas of the direst hardship"—that four decades of ruthless suppression have not effaced...
...Yes . . . yes, in takeoff position...
...Like an experienced craftsman restoring a preWilliam McGurn, a former editor at the Asian Wall Street Journal, is the Washington bureau chief of National Review...
...Among the more engaging spots he visits is Qufu, birthplace of the man the Chinese know as Kong Fuzi ("Reverend Master Kong") but who is more popularly known as Confucius...
...My feet were placed together...
...toward the end of his own book, Bordewich, searching for what was left of the house, stumbles across both Kates's former rickshaw driver and an acquaintance who recalls that when the Japanese came Kates defiantly ran up a huge American flag over his home...
...Mrs...
...His book consequently opens in a New Hampshire nursing home, with a resident who had just stepped out of 1940s China...
...Li, the party official in charge of the Confucian Foundation, putting questions to him in a direct (and most unChinese) way: "What happened in Qufu during the Cultural Revolution...
...Later, they marched to the clan cemetery, where every Kong for the last twenty-five centuries has been buried...
...Wrong...
...Still, nowhere was the task of whitewashing so immense as in Mao's China...
...Or the prisoner, prohibited visits from his family, who arose each morning—winter, spring, summer, fall—to the sight of a bright red kite, a sign from his family that he hadn't been forgotten...
...Everyone in the room was staring at it...
...This obsession was fueled by his discovery, in a second-hand Manhattan bookshop, of The Years That Were Fat, a long out-of-print volume about life in Peking between the two world wars...
...I shook my head...
...The actress whose father was driven to take his own life speaks for many here...
...I asked...
...Li's whole leg was bouncing wildly, almost out of control...
...18.95 LEGACIES: A CHINESE MOSAIC Bette Bao Lord/Alfred A. Knopf/245 pp...
...I was introduced to this memoir in 1988, when Bordewich turned in a lovely review of it for me at the Asian Wall Street Journal after its re-release overseas by Oxford University Press...
...There were complications...
...Nonetheless, Confucianism lent the Chinese a certain majesty...
...cious piece of furniture after a number of dubious refinishings, Bordewich peels back layer after layer of the People's Republic in hopes of revealing the classic forms below...
...Less a religion than a code of worldly behavior, Confucianism, for good or ill, has helped define the Chinese psyche for centuries...
...But there was something oddly pathetic about Mao, whose head, illuminated by a sickly greenish light, protruded from under a dark blanket...
...I did not understand...
...I guessed...
...Within memory, he adds, women of Peking could be seen each day dropping starving babies from a certain spot on the city walls...
...Now come two books that attempt a reclamation...
...Lord told in Eighth Moon—onlyto return in 1985 as the wife of Winston Lord, Ronald Reagan's choice as ambassador to the PRC...
...My body was bent at the waist...
...It made monsters even of those too young to understand, such as the actress who dutifully turned her back on her father when so instructed: Father had been branded a rightist, third class...
...She recalls the thrill of riding through the land of her birth with the Stars and Stripes fluttering over the right fender, silently vowing "to be worthy of the honor of representing my adopted country...
...How Chinese that makes him...
...I was alone," she explained, "on a huge stage...
...But Bordewich reveals more about China through the recorded evasions of a Mr...
...Yet in the space of one decade, the Cultural Revolution against the "Four Olds"—old things, old culture, old beliefs, old behavior—left one-quarter of the world's people severed from their history...
...The father who once delighted in reading his only daughter poetry committed suicide, leaving her with a crippling sense of hollowness that time has not managed to dissipate...
...In many ways, Mrs...
...Later still, Bordewich arrives on Christmas Eve in Shanghai, in its day the most awesome of contradictions: a cosmopolitan Chinese city...
...the name was latinized by Jesuits in the sixteenth century...
...Lord communicated some of the shock by recounting a 1973 conversation in Shanghai with her Aunt Goo Ma on the seemingly innocent subject of birthdays: "Guess, my niece, where I spent my fiftieth...
...I waited for an answer...
...What historian Jan Morris says of Fergus Bordewich applies equally to Bette Bao Lord: that "by searching so assiduously, so affectionately, and so understandingly for the legacies of the Chinese past, [they] may paradoxically be giving us some foretastes of a China yet to be...
...In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger suggests the ailing Mao grasped that in the long run the overwhelming force of Chinese culture will "transmute his upheavals into a mere episode in a seemingly eternal continuity...
...They were the most costly gifts any Chinese could give," she says, "the most precious gift a writer could receive...
...athay is infinitely the richer in description, not least because the travelogue furnishes a more appropriate vehicle for loving detail...
...Father was assigned work among the peasants in the nearby countryside...
...The truth is, the Red Guards invaded the Temple of Confucius...
...He was paid only 32 yuan a month, fifteen of which he would save and leave in my pencil box each time he visited home...
...Bordewich's past experience as an adviser to the English-language features section of the official New China News Agency serves him well here...
...Father told me you love the stage...
...His knee was now pumping violently...
...They were part of a truly lost generation, to whom taking part in the beating of an innocent neighbor was what accumulating merit badges is to our Boy Scouts...
...He describes Midnight Mass at the Jesuit Cathedral (also scarred by Red Guard wrath), which, despite his unbelief, he finds "as plain and comfortable as an old garment unworn for decades...
...In Cathay, Fergus Bordewich travels from the Westernmost borders, where the People's Republic meets the Indian subcontinent, on a pilgrimage to China's "forbidden past...
...Bordewich devotes the rest of his book to a delightfully haphazard trip into all the nooks and crannies of old China...
...Don't tell me you were performing...
...You are almost right...
...I could not...
...In Legacies, Bette Bao Lord focuses on the people caught up in the tumult of Mao's would-be Marxist Eden...
...What exactly did that mean...
...A s fate would have it, the Lords left China in the midst of the Peking Spring, before the dream was bloodied...
Vol. 24 • April 1991 • No. 4
