China Bound and Unbound: History in the Making - An Early Returnee's Account

Appendix

Appemdix 147 Appendix p An Interview The following article was written by Kevin Sinclair and published by the South China Morning Post on October 1, 2004. IN THEAUTUMN of 1949, hundreds of thousands of people were pressing down through Guangdong, desperate to enter Hong Kong. Walking against that flow of humanity, Frances Wong and Li Zhao-xin tramped in the other direction. The young idealists didn’t know it, but the seven-day trek from the border to Guangzhou was a journey taking them not only into the promise of a rejuvenated nation, but into peril. Wong was one of the true believers who left Hong Kong in 1949 to answer Mao Zedong’s call to help build a New China.Adaughter of wealth and privilege, she studied at the Diocesan Girls’School and then arts at the University of Hong Kong. She and her husband turned their backs on a comfortable middle-class life in 1949 to march with 1,000 other young idealists over the border. They wanted to work towards creating a new, fair, honest society. That decision branded their lives. The idealism turned sour for the young married couple.After years of faithful service they were branded “evil ghosts” or counter-revolutionaries, in the Cultural Revolution. Wong was separated from her four children, who were sent down to the countryside in widely scattered provinces. She was banished to learn from the peasants, labouring on a Jiangxi farm for eight years. Looking back on what happened to her and her family, would she make the same decision? “I’ve thought about that a lot over the years,” Wong says during a recent trip to Hong Kong. “In my 20s, I was naive, adventurous, romantic 148 China, Bound and Unbound and a little patriotic. The four decades of experience in China were not without advantages and gain. I can say I know China, really know it, and that’s not easy. But I didn’t learn that without paying a price.” “Was our decision right in 1949 to march forward with the New China? Honestly, I haven’t thought seriously whether it was right or wrong. For myself, there are no regrets. For my children, well, they could have had a better education.” Wong believes everybody has a story.At the age of 82, the English literature professor at Guangzhou’s Jinan University is writing 10 short novels based on the lives of people she has known in Hong Kong, China and the United States. She’s already written her own life story, China Bound, a saga that embraces the extremes of love, horror, belief, politics, upheaval and tragedy. And hope. Wong says she wrote it to explain her life story to her grandchildren. The book is being printed in Guizhou and she’s looking for an international distributor. Her silver hair immaculate, her English faultless, Wong is the picture of ageless, Chinese beauty. At her computer, she’s busy writing-and-talking. She does both very well. She teaches the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. What relevance do these have to students in 21st century China? She throws back her head and laughs. “Not much,” she says. “Most of the students want to make money, and Shakespeare doesn’t make a financial profit. But I use his works to help younger students polish their English.” The fact that she can teach the writings of the English bard in today’s China is significant: if she’d thought of doing that 35 years ago, she would have been severely punished by censorious Red Guards. “Just being able to read Shakespeare is one sign of how China has changed,” she says. “I officially retired years ago, but I still hold regular short courses at Jinan. I can’t stop working.” In her gripping autobiography, Wong recounts horrific details of looting, rape and butchery during the Japanese invasion. The 18-year-old fled her home in Nathan Road and headed across the border. Her English Literature studies abandoned at the University of Hong Kong, she enrolled at Sun Yat-sen University, then situated north of Guangzhou. There she met Li Zhao-xin, a master degree student one year her senior. They fell in love, married and had Appemdix 149 two children in China during the war, then two more when they lived in Beijing during the 1950s. Today, one son lives in Hong Kong, two daughters live...