Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China's Revolution and Reform (review)

The autobiography of the celebrated Chinese actor Ying Ruocheng (1929–2003), best known in the West for his role as the prison warden at the beginning and the end of Bernard Bertolucci's 1987 film, The Last Emperor, is a must-read for anyone interested in the performing arts. Furthermore, his life touched on fascinating aspects of Chinese history and society seldom discussed. What happened to the Manchus after the 1911 revolution? What was it like being a Catholic in those years? How did (and perhaps does) the government collect information on foreigners? How does it treat its political prisoners? How are personnel decisions made? This book is one man's attempt to make sense of cataclysmic events and an interesting endeavor in cross-cultural collaboration.

Ying Ruocheng's grandmother belonged to an impoverished branch of the imperial clan. Rising from a hardscrabble childhood, his grandfather, also a Manchu, converted to Catholicism, established a prestigious newspaper (the Dagongbao) and cofounded Furen University. He sent his only son, Ying Ruocheng's father, to Europe for an education. The son served as a university administrator most of his life, first at Furen in Beijing, then at the reestablished Furen in Taiwan, where he fled when the Communists took over China. Ying Ruocheng was then a junior in college, and he did not learn of his father's death in Taiwan until decades later.

Ying grew up in the Beijing palace of a Manchu prince who chose to live elsewhere. Prayers, hymns, and fasting were part of the family life. On Sundays, Ying's father took his large brood to the theater, and, upon reaching home, Ying would lead the children to stage their own versions of the Chinese opera or Western drama. While most boys of his age struggled during the Japanese occupation, the sheltered and precocious Ying Ruocheng managed to be expelled from three successive schools, the last of which was St. Louis College, a German-operated boarding school for international students. It was there, as one of the few Chinese, that Ying acquired his astounding command of the English language. After the war, Ying was admitted to Qinghua (Tsinghua) University, where he took advantage of the excellent faculty and library to study Western drama. He fell in love with his future wife when she was the female lead and he the male lead in an English play at the university.

After the "Liberation," Ying and his wife joined the newly formed Beijing People's Art Theater, where they worked closely with the eminent playwright Cao Yu. The couple were unscathed by the vicious political campaigns that ensued until 1968, when they were inexplicably arrested and held in prison for three years. Their daughter was sent to Inner Mongolia for reeducation, and their unattended eight-year-old son was reduced, at one point, to begging for food. For a year upon his release, Ying planted rice, alongside his theater colleagues, at a cadre school in the countryside. In search of more interesting work to do at a time when all artistic expressions were controlled by Mao Zedong's wife, he joined the Foreign Language Press writing for China Reconstructs.

With China's opening, Ying Ruocheng accompanied Cao Yu to Europe on a tour of the Teahouse in 1979—his first trips abroad at age fifty-one. He acted as an interpreter for visiting celebrities. When Arthur Miller arrived in Beijing as a tourist, Ying sought him out and eventually collaborated with him to stage Death of a Salesman, which he had translated into Chinese and in which he also starred. He was invited to teach at the University of Missouri as a visiting professor, and directed Death of a Salesman at the College of William and Mary, this time in English. He acted in the television...