What the Chinese Don't Eat (11 page)

When I had finished signing books, I waited to see if she would come and speak to me. Finally she did, the last person to leave the bookshop. In a quiet voice, she asked, ‘Would you like to listen to the story of my life, which I have kept secret for 60 years?’

I could hardly say I did not have the time.

She told her story almost without pause. ‘I went to China with my parents when I was five years old in the 1940s. My father was a commander in the Japanese army. He showed me how he murdered the Chinese, so that I would grow up with ‘a man’s heart’. He never allowed my mother to hide me from this violence. Afterwards, the Chinese army came looking for him. He escaped, but they got my mother instead and killed her in front of me. I was six.

‘I was saved by a poor old Chinese peasant. He took me to his home town, a small village near the Great Wall, where I was
hidden and brought up by the whole village, by each family in turn, living in each of their houses. Until the 1950s I almost forgot where I came from; all I had was a memory of murder.

‘One day my Chinese father, the old peasant, said I should go back to my homeland, Japan. I was a teenager by then. Two months later, I was sent to the city with two men from the village. They handed me and a golden ring over to a very tall man, without saying anything. It seemed a deal had already been struck, and I didn’t say anything either. After all the years of murder and hiding, I knew when to keep quiet.

‘I arrived in Japan with no family. I had no idea where my father was, whether he was alive or dead, nor did I know how to speak the language. With the few words that I managed to pick up, I tried to ask people what had happened between Japan and China, but no one wanted to talk about the war. Still, in the home of almost every family there was a photograph of a dead relative with a candle in front of it, and that nearly broke my heart. I could not sleep for thinking about all the violence and murder.

‘I missed my parents, as well as the Chinese peasant who had given me a second life. The relatives whom I managed to trace said that I was mad and should leave Japan because it was so full of terrible memories.

‘So here I am. The country is different, the people are different, but in my heart, in my mind, nothing has changed. You cannot rid yourself of the memory of all that blood.

‘I watched you on television this morning. When you said that the Japanese and the Germans, like the Chinese, have the same difficult pasts, because of the war and because of the Cultural Revolution, I thought you would be able to understand my life.’

I was stunned that the woman could recount such a shocking
story in such a gentle voice. ‘Have you ever gone back to that village in China?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘How could I? How could I, the daughter of a murderer, ask anything of the Chinese?’

‘Do you hate the Chinese? They killed your mother.’

‘No. My father killed them, too, so we’re equal. I think in some ways I am half Chinese.’

‘I think you are right,’ I said to her. ‘We should leave hatred in the past: love and hope are for the future.’

She left the bookshop quietly, smiling slightly, but her stormy life story stuck in my mind long after the book tour ended. I am now going back to New Zealand for a second book tour (this time for my novel
Sky Burial
), and I find that the old woman’s story is inextricably linked in my mind with this country.

I hope I will see her again.

The young do not understand the madness and pain of the Cultural Revolution

Last month a friend asked me how much I really knew about China’s past, even the recent past – just 20 years ago. Had I read any Chinese books about the Cultural Revolution, for instance? He found it hard to believe that China could take an objective look at its Red Period while the generation that lived through it is still alive. I told him I had read two books on the subject in Chinese, published in China, two months ago. One of them was
Part One: A Hundred People’s Memories of the Cultural Revolution
by Feng Ji Cai; the other was
The Past Does Not Disappear Like Smoke
by Yi-He Zhang.

As someone who experienced this moment in history, these two books brought back such bitter, painful memories that – even though I was busy promoting my novel
Sky Burial
and setting up my new charity, Mothers’ Bridge – I just couldn’t sleep.

One of the stories in
Part One
was that of a woman who had killed her father with her own hands. She had tried to save him – an elderly academic – from the continual harassment of the Red Guards, but her parents had persuaded her to kill them both, one after the other. She killed her father, but there was not time to kill her mother: the Red Guards discovered that the family was trying to commit suicide. So she hugged her mother to her and they jumped from a fourth floor window. She survived but her mother died a few days later. She was charged with murder, and spent more than 20 years in jail. Her memories of her parents were very confused, she told the book’s author,
and although she ate three meals and went to sleep and got up every day, she hardly felt alive.

I completely understand these feelings of being dead and alive at the same time, and of having mixed emotions towards your parents. I was seven and a half when the Cultural Revolution took place and I, too, behaved as I thought a ‘good daughter’ should. My father was in prison and I wrote him a sentence in blood pricked from my finger. It said, ‘You must repay the blood of the Chinese people!’ I believed what I was told – that my father’s family had helped the British drink Chinese blood as if it were red wine (my grandfather worked for the British company GEC for more than 30 years). This letter was stuck on the wall next to the meal table in his prison cell. I never talked to my father about this; I knew I could never erase the letter from either of our memories.

In one chapter of the other book I read,
The Past Does Not Disappear Like Smoke
, there is a story about an educated westernised family during the Cultural Revolution. A mother and her daughter try to live as if nothing has changed: they wear beautiful clothes, use the best china, listen to English radio. Soon, though, to keep the Red Guards from these things, they decide they must destroy everything. I know about this; I saw it, too – my skirts, my books, my toys, my beloved doll, all burned and destroyed at the same time. The Cultural Revolution was a mad, unbelievable, and unforgettably painful moment in the lives of so many Chinese people.

But I was sad to read, at the end of Feng Ji Cai’s book, that when he went to interview young Chinese men and women about their feelings toward the Cultural Revolution, most of them had no idea what he was talking about. Some of them even asked why he would make these things up. Others said that China should have another revolution so that they could
get out of exams; they couldn’t believe that their parents had been so stupid as to sign up to Mao.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised by this: I have been asked the same questions by young Chinese ever since my book
The Good Women of China
was published two years ago. They, too, find it hard to believe that these things happened within the lives of the older generation.

China needs people like these two writers, Feng and Zhang, who are prepared to dig for the truth and to uncover painful facts. We need them so that a younger generation of Chinese can know how brave their parents were, and how much they owe them.

These books may not be 100% factual but, as Feng says, he has to protect the people who have told their stories, changing names, places, dates and other details. These people have suffered too much already to have their lives overturned again.

My friends in China ask me to look out for their visiting children – but I have to draw the line somewhere

Every autumn since I moved to London seven years ago, I have exactly the same phone conversation with my friends in China – parents whose children are coming to study at universities in the UK and Europe. I would love to tape them, but of course, I haven’t been able to persuade anyone. The conversations usually go something like this (me speaking):

‘Yes, you can buy duvets and pillows in London. Britain is a developed country; you can get anything you want from the shops here. Yes, even soya sauce and vinegar. In fact, there are at least 10 different kinds of vinegar in the supermarket. Chinese vinegar? Yes, you can get that from the smaller Chinese shops. Fresh vegetables? Not always directly from a farmers’ market, but still very good. Live fish? No, you can only get dead fish. The law doesn’t allow people to sell live fish. I know, I know what they say – that live, jumping fish is much better for your health … Is it expensive? Absolutely. London might be one of the great cultural centres of the world, but it is also one of the most expensive cities on the planet. But you can’t let your daughter carry everything with her from China …’

Then, the daughter will arrive with three huge suitcases, a rucksack and an enormous handbag. When I picked one girl up from the airport, the taxi driver asked me where everyone else was, the owners of all the other bags.

In the course of two years’ study, this girl received further supplies from a friend of her father’s, who came to London on business several times a year.

Before she went back to China last year, she shipped home two 50kg boxes of clothes, and left a number of brand-new, never-been-used things in my flat: a set of kitchen utensils; a rice cooker; 11 bags of cooking sauce (each of them big enough to cook for 20 people); three big bags of dried mushrooms; 12 bags of dried seaweed; 24 bags of instant soup; 16 bags of dried fish; 12 pairs of chopsticks; six food storage boxes; 22 bars of soap; four bottles of face cream; five bottles of shower gel; four new bath towels; four tubes of toothpaste; six bottles of body lotion; two mirrors; two handbags; 32 pens; 200 envelopes; eight hardback notebooks; three pads of paper … I’m going to have to stop there, before I run out of room. All of these things her parents would have bought for her in China.

This year, I have been talking to the mother of another girl:

‘Is the beef safe to eat? Of course it is. Mad cows? Yes, there was a problem a couple of years ago. You’ve heard a lot of people died of mad-cow disease in England last year – where did you hear that? I read a British newspaper every day, and I’ve heard nothing about it. You think I’m being deceived by the British media? Come on, we have a proper legal system here. You think Britain is full of terrorists? That’s not true. I am here and I don’t see that people are living in fear in the way we did in China. Don’t send your son to England if you are so worried. Really? He can’t get a good job in Shanghai without a western qualification?

‘OK, I will try my best to help him. But I won’t be able to cook for him and look out for him in the way you would. Yes, of course I know how you feel, I am the mother of a son myself, you know that. But I think the best thing for our sons is to help them to be independent as soon as possible. They can’t live under their mother’s wings their whole lives. It’s not a question of it being the western way of life, and I don’t think we
should let our children lose sight of their Chinese identity either – we just need to think beyond what’s traditional.’

She obviously didn’t think I knew what was best for her son. She called me soon after he arrived in London. ‘Xinran,’ she said, ‘I don’t care what you think is good for your son. Right now my son needs you to help him unpack! Can you please make sure he knows how to hang his clothes in the wardrobe? You’d be doing me a big favour.’

I couldn’t believe it when her son opened up one of his two huge suitcases and took out pages of instructions on ‘how to hang clothes’, ‘how to make a bed’ and ‘what goes where in your underwear drawer’.

‘How did you manage when you were at university in China?’ I asked him.

‘My mother visited my dormitory every week.’

If we want our children to grow up and enjoy their own separate lives, we have to let them go a little.

Eat them, catch them, or look at them in an aquarium. But what fish are really best for is explaining life

‘Why are you so different when you’re in the media?’ PanPan, my son, asked me once. I thought it was too complicated to explain to him, a 16-year-old student, the idea that, ‘Life looks different through different eyes.’ So I told him: ‘Your mum in the media is like a piece of fish served on a dish at the dinner table, after it’s been chopped up and cooked by the chef. It is still called fish, but it is not a fish that can swim. So your real mum is the one with a head, a tail and bones, living in the water.’

‘Why do you always use fish to illustrate your point?’ he said. Why? I had never thought about this … I have to say that fish have always meant more to me than a food or an animal, or a work of art.

I first learned that a lie could be kind and beautiful from a book called
My Mum Likes to Eat Fish Heads
. In it, a university student finishes his first year of studying in the city, and wants to go back to see his parents, who are fishermen, in their tiny village. He tries to remember what his mother likes, but all he can think of is fish heads, because he has never heard his mother say she likes anything at all. When the family has fish dishes, she always says that she likes the head. So the student buys two cooked fish heads from a city restaurant for her.

When he arrives home, his mother has just finished her supper and is clearing the table, while his father is having his meal at work. The student is just reaching into his bag for the two cooked fish heads, when he sees, to his surprise, his mother throwing fish heads into a bin.

‘Mum, don’t you like fish heads any more?’ he asks.

‘My silly boy, nobody likes the bony fish head,’ she says.

‘But, when I was at home, you always told me you liked them and you showed me how much you enjoyed those bony fish heads,’ he says.

The old mother looks at her big, tall son: ‘I knew you were such a kind boy and wanted your mother to have the best piece of fish, so I lied. You needed it to grow up … a mother likes to lie for the love of her family.’