Synopses & Reviews
Jan Wong has returned to Beijing. Her quest: to find someone she encountered briefly in 1973, and whose life she was certain she had ruined forever.
In the early 70s, Jan Wong travelled from Canada to become one of only two Westerners permitted to study at Beijing University. One day a young stranger, Yin Luoyi, asked for help in getting to the United States. Wong, then a starry-eyed Maoist, immediately reported Yin to the authorities. Thirty-three years on, and more than a decade after the publication of her bestselling Red China Blues, Jan Wong revisits the Chinese capital to begin her search for the person who has haunted her conscience. She wants to apologize, to somehow make amends. At the very least, she wants to discover whether Yin survived.
As Jan Wong hunts through the city, she finds herself travelling back through the decades, back to her experiences in the Cultural Revolution, to places that were once of huge importance to her. She has changed, of course, but not as much as Beijing. One of the worlds most ancient cities is now one of its most modern. The neon signs no longer say “Long Live Chairman Mao” but instead tout Mary Kay cosmetics and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Places she once knew have vanished, bulldozed into oblivion and replaced by avant-garde architecture, trendy bars, and sleek condos. The people she once knew have changed, too, for better or for worse. Memories are everywhere. By searching out old friends and acquaintances, Jan Wong uncovers tantalizing clues about the woman she wronged. She realizes her deepest fears and regrets were justified. But Yin herself remains elusive–until the day she phones Jan Wong.
Emotionally powerful and rich with detail, Beijing Confidential weaves together three distinct stories–Wongs journey from remorse to redemption, Yins journey from disgrace to respectability, and Beijings stunning journey from communism to capitalism.
About the Author
An award-winning journalist, Jan Wong was the Beijing correspondent for The Globe and Mail from 1988 to 1994. She is a graduate of McGill University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is the recipient of the George Polk Award and other honours for her reporting. Wong has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others in the United States and abroad. She is the author of three books: Lunch with Jan Wong, Red China Blues, and Jan Wong’s China. She lives with her family in Toronto, where she is currently a reporter and columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Table of Contents
Contents
Maps
1 Mission Impossible
2 Life as It Has Always Been Lived
3 You Cant Get There from Here
4 No One Left Behind to Say Who Went Where
5 You Arent Allowed to Call Anyone an Idiot–in English or Chinese
6 Is That Why They Call It Chai-Na?
7 Alumni
8 The Decade of Disaster
9 Forbidden City
10 Building Beijing
11 Neither of Us Can Handle the Twenty-First Century
12 Seeing Flowers from a Galloping Horse
13 Made in China
14 Stand a Head above Others
15 Its Like Looking for Her in a Vast Ocean
16 This Is the Big Boss Culture!
17 Sex in Da City
18 Sometimes It Takes a While to Notice Whats Not There
19 The Ten Commandments in English and the Lords Prayer in Chinese
20 Women Hold Up Half the Sky; I Never Thought Their Arms Would Get Tired
21 Move Out Early. Realize Your Dream Early
22 My Deepest Apologies. I Have Wronged You
23 Theyre All Crazy
24 Stepping into Heaven
25 Straight to Heaven
26 Lu Yis Revenge
27 Lu Yis Revenge II
28 A Grain of Sand, Helping China to Change
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
1. Jan Wong uses details such as a shoe polishing machine or the prevalence of walls to give us an insight into the psyche and society of Beijing. What artefacts or features would you choose to exemplify your own culture?
2. How do you feel about Chinese city-dwellers current obsession with status symbols? Does it suggest a healthy society?
3. By using nicknames (“Fu the Enforcer”), colourful translations of names (“Fat Paycheck”) and emphasis of personal characteristics (Cadre Huangs giggle, Alfred Pengs “Write that down!”), the author populates the book with an almost Dickensian cast of characters. Does this help you through the narrative?
4. Does it seem natural to you that people such as Scarlet who were formerly the most ardent Maoists, are now the most ferociously acquisitive capitalists?
5. This book is written from an immensely complex perspective. Do you think there is any danger that Jan Wongs previous experience of China might distort her understanding of modern Beijing as well as enhance it?
6. When Yin (Lu Yi) is promoted to the publicity department of the oil field where she has been sent as a punishment, she describes it as “stepping into heaven.” What does this tell you about the human ability to cope with hardship?
7. Do you think that pretending the Cultural Revolution never happened might be useful for the generations who lived through it? Or is “truth and reconciliation” necessary? The comments about the “solace of silence” (pages 291-292) can be borne in mind.
8. Does the book give you an impression of a culture reinventing itself, or one that has survived despite revolution?
9. In China the Internet is censored; people in the West are told the web is impossible to regulate. What does this suggest to you?
10. What does the book gain from the presence of Jan Wongs teenage sons?
Author Q&A
1. What was your original stimulus for writing Red China Blues? Was it a project you had in mind for some time before you began work on it?I had always planned to write a book about China, even after my first sojourn there in 1972 and 1973. But I held back because I felt I never fully understood what I had experienced. By the 1990s, I was ready to write. Red China Blues took me one year to complete. The massacre of pro-democracy supporters at Tiananmen Square in 1989 made me feel that I had come full circle in my experiences in China that had begun when I was a fledgling Maoist. I wanted to figure out why I had gone to China in the first place, and why I had stayed there for so many years.
2. Much of Beijing Confidential is concerned with your search for Yin, the woman you “snitched on” to the authorities as a student. You say that you were heavily criticised as a result of recording that episode in Red China Blues, and in the newer book you offer an analysis of your student mindset, something you didn’t do explicitly in the earlier book. Why did you not do that eleven years ago?
When I wrote Red China Blues, I was not ready to confront that part of my past. At that time, I was ashamed of what I had done, and I was afraid to find out what had really happened to Yin. I also believe I didn't understand very well why I had reported on her. That understanding developed in subsequent years as I forced myself to consider my motivations.
3. It was brave for a newspaper reporter, an exponent of a trade that calls for a certain amount of cynicism, to write a book exposing the naiveté of her youth, even twenty years after disillusionment. Did you worry about that when Red China Blues was published?
Yes, I certainly worried about baring my soul, exposing my naiveté and describing all the stupid things I had done. Today I am often criticized for being a Maoist even though I am no longer a believer. But as a journalist, I think that honesty is extremely important. The whole point was to explain China to readers. To do that, I had to be truthful.
4. When, in Red China Blues, you return to China as a foreign correspondent, you say the working methods of the Chinese Communist Party remind you of the corporations you have investigated in Canada and the US. Is that comment tongue-in-cheek or serious?
People laugh when I make the comparison, and I like to make people smile when they read my books. Seriously, though, I do find that major corporations in the West are extremely hierarchical, secretive, thin-skinned and ruthless — just like the Communist Party. Many CEOs foster a personality cult, too. All you have to do is talk to his or her minions and read the annual report to see the similarities with Chairman Mao and the Communist Party.
5. Red China Blues has a clear four-part structure, but a very organic feel, as if it is growing naturally. Beijing Confidential has a simpler narrative structure, but actually feels more artfully constructed, weaving a detective story and a personal quest into a piece of informed travel writing. Does this reflect the creative process in each case?
Yes. In Red China Blues, I wanted the sweep of historical events to move the story forward. In Beijing Confidential, I wanted to show how the changes the city has undergone echo the vicissitudes of Yin’s own life. Beijing Confidential was a much tighter time frame than Red China Blues, four weeks compared to a span of several decades. But in both cases, I chose to tell the stories chronologically because I felt that was the most logical and compelling way.
6. We get some glimpses of Chairman Mao’s achievements and personal life in Red China Blues, but for most of that book and all of Beijing Confidential his presence is felt through quotations and the attachment of his name to ideology. Did he seem more of an idea than a person to you, even when you were there during his lifetime?
Chairman Mao loomed much larger as a man and a political leader in China when he was alive. His presence has receded dramatically in China today. His portrait is rare where once it was ubiquitous; people no longer quote him. However, I believe Mao’s influence remains quite strong psychologically, if not physically, partly because China has never confronted the excesses of the Cultural Revolution.
7. What would you like your readers to get out of the two books?
I would like them to gain an understanding of China’s past and present because I think this country is going to play an increasingly important global role.
8. In the early 1970s you projected your own idea of an ideal society on to communist China. As the West clamours to do business with modern China and we approach the Beijing Olympics, are people still seeing what they want to see?
I think people will always see in China what they wish to see. That is why I personally find it so fascinating.