China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (review)

When western students of modern Chinese history contemplate the story of the Mao years—with its dramatic policy swings, its mass campaigns that created almost unimaginable social, economic, and geographical dislocation for ordinary Chinese people, and its extreme and often violent reprisals against those deemed uncooperative or insufficiently enthusiastic for the communist party's programs—they ask with incredulity, "What were they thinking?" Indeed, what were they thinking? Historians have been busy answering this question from the perspective of those who orchestrated China's modernization from the 1940s to the 1970s; Xinran's compelling and evocative book answers this same question but from the perspective of the ordinary men and women whose monumental efforts and painful sacrifices restored China's self-respect as a powerful and self-confident nation. What were they thinking—these men and women whose lives were both utterly ordinary and yet utterly extraordinary because of the time and place in which they lived? Chinese-born journalist Xinran, author of the highly acclaimed The Good Women of China, decided to ask them.

China Witness is all at once a narrative of a journey across modern China, an eye-opening journey into the past, a remarkable window into the hearts and minds of ordinary Chinese people, a portrait of a generation, and a revelation of the author's own story as a woman born in Beijing in 1958 but who ultimately moved to the U.K., married, and now lives in the English countryside in a seventeenth-century cottage. She first conceived of this project when she realized that the remarkable stories her parents' generation had to tell about China's modern history were dying with them. This was a generation that had learned the hard way not to reveal what one was thinking lest one become a victim of a political campaign. Launching an oral history project with this "silent generation" was a daunting task, but Xinran was dedicated to it:

For Chinese people, it is not easy to speak openly and publicly about what we truly think and feel. And yet this is exactly what I have wanted to record: the emotional responses to the dramatic changes of the last century. I wanted my interviewees to bear witness to Chinese history. Many Chinese would think this is a foolish, even a crazy thing to undertake . . . but this madness has taken hold of me, and will not let me go: I cannot believe that Chinese people always take the truth of their lives with them to the grave

(1).

She whittled down her initial list of interviewees from fifty to twenty and then incorporated several impromptu interviews that serendipitously unfolded during her travels. She avoided the famous and powerful, focusing instead on ordinary men and women from different walks of life and regions of the country. The map of her journey helps orient the reader—some of her subjects live in large cities on the east coast, but many live in outlying provincial towns and small villages where few journalists bother to go. Among those she interviewed were a high-ranking woman general born in America; a husband and wife team of geologists who pioneered China's oil industry in the Northwest; a top female acrobat; traditional lantern makers; a traditional teahouse "newsinger" in Anhui province who, as a cultural preservationist, saved the teahouses from government demolition; a couple who lived and worked in Xinjiang's huge prison complex in the Far Northwest; a veteran of the Long March whose feet still bear dramatic witness to what he endured; a shoe mender who sat outside for twenty-eight years plying her trade and observing the changing political and social landscape around her; an idealistic policeman in Henan province; an herbal medicine woman; and the son of revolutionary martyrs.

She presents the formal interviews as transcripts. The questions, answers, and interchanges reveal Xinran's deep respect for these elders and...