Customer Reviews

A Comrade Lost and Found: A Beijing Memoir

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There are many biographical narratives about life in the Cultural Revolution. There is a whole genre for survivors who find a way out of the country. Another genre like the now classic, Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China puts the Cultural Revolution in a generational context. Yet another genre represented by Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China gives a then and now report. There is also fiction for each of the categories. I believe this book is unique because it is written by a former true believer, that is, a former persecutor who admits guilt.

The writer arrived in China in 1970, one of the first foreigners to study after/during the Cultural Revolution and participated in the denunciation of a classmate. While her act was small in comparison to what others had done, being on the persecution side, she is able to give clues as to the pshchology and temper of the times. As one survivor in Chinese Lessons observes, everyone claims to be a victim, but "do the math".

The breezy narrative ("Cult Rev") and the travelogue belie the serious content. This it the first volume I've read that compares this history to other mass hysteria movements like the Holocaust, where citizens were proud to inform, to destroy and to generally participate. This is also the first volume I've read that even mentions the psychological fallout, such as the compartmentalization of the persecutors and the damaged self of the persecuted.

Also important is that this is the first story I know of that reports on an every day (not a Deng Xiouping, etc,) fully persecuted survivor who is still in China. We learn about the many years she suffered, like an abandoned child, or a victim of child abuse and/or poverty, and of her careful steps in her own rehabilitation - it did not "just happen".

The author speaks to her own psychology of joining the movement. She wanted to fit in, to prove herself to the group. With the benefit of distance, life in Canada, knowledge of history and psychology she had the tools to understand what happened. China is collectively wiping this out today. In this book, many young people don't know much about the formerly life and death issues of "left' and "right". Wanting to leave China is not a crime and the youth probably don't know that once it was. Since so much of the literature of this time is created by the persecuted survivors who have escaped to the west, it may be that the whole sad generation of "Cult Rev" persecutors takes their stories to their graves.

In 1972 Jan Wong, born in Canada to Chinese parents, was among the first foreigners allowed to enter China to study after the Communist takeover. A fervent Maoist, during her time at Peking University Wong dedicated herself to learning Mandarin, digging ditches, and generally "making revolution."

At the school, Wong had a brief encounter with a young woman named Yin, who told Wong of her dream of going to America--a dream the Communist Party certainly did not endorse. In her revolutionary fervor, Wong informed her teachers of Yin's desire. Shortly thereafter, Yin disappeared.

Wong later left China, became a reporter, and let the past lie. Eventually, however, she found herself unable to ignore her feelings of guilt for ratting out the idealistic young woman decades before--and hence the trip recounted in "A Comrade Lost and Found," in which Wong and her family go to Beijing in hopes of finding Yin. Adrift in a country of a billion people with almost no leads, calling it a daunting task would be an understatement.

Wong's continual theme is the drastic reinvention Beijing has undergone since her days as a student there, from hotels built over the sites of former factories to the rate at which Beijingers change their addresses and phone numbers. Her method of developing this theme, though, is to dive into tangential, almost stream-of-consciousness reminiscences whenever she sees something or meets someone, which can make the narrative hard to follow as it is interrupted by Wong's reflections for pages at a time. She seems compelled to make these observations about everything she encounters on her trip, and while some of this background is interesting, some of it could probably have been cut to streamline the story.

Wong also likes to ruminate on China's relationship to its past, especially the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution. She learns that many of her former classmates and teachers are unwilling to talk about their roles in the persecution of "counterrevolutionaries," and she is further confused by her own part in it all. She sometimes asks--almost rhetorically, it seems--how she let herself get swept up in the excesses of the era, and how culpable she is or isn't for what happened to Yin. But her minimal reflections on the subject come off as superficial. Perhaps the Chinese are not the only ones who are reluctant to genuinely confront the past.

The whole book is a bit too scattershot to be a good travel memoir, and not probing enough to be a compelling moral exploration of life under Communism. Readers for whom this is a first introduction to China may be intrigued, but the book lacks staying power.

~

I found this book hard to put down. One reason is that the premise for Jan Wong's story is deeply inviting: a trip back to Beijing to search for the woman that Wong knew briefly, and betrayed, back when Wong was a radical leftist student in China the 1970s. Another is that she writes with a lively, likable voice, sprinkled with good humor. A third is that Wong's descriptions of contemporary Beijing are vivid and clear. She brings a journalist's eye to everyday observations, and she takes advantage of a network of old friends to show what life is really like in China's capital. Wong was a correspondent in China for the Toronto Globe and Mail and it shows.

Wong is honest and brave about what brought her to this point. She neither exaggerates nor belittles her youthful mistake. Yet it nags at her conscience. It is eye-opening to see the reaction from Chinese acquaintances who learn about her quest, and who themselves do not seem capable of self-exploration or an honest reckoning about past wrongs. Perhaps their crimes were so numerous, or so extreme, that complete denial is necessary for survival.

Wong dragged her husband and two sons along with her for this trip, they often provide comic relief. Wong is a comfortable, unassuming narrator. She grasps at her own anxiety, in a way that made me feel for her. I thought several times as I read: This is a book about middle age. About people who are looking back in time and can't quite fathom how much life has changed, while knowing that there is more change to come.

The real payoff comes when Wong finds her old comrade. I expected some catharsis. I did not expect a sensitive rendering of subtle emotions that criss-cross this territory: misery, relief, longing, wonder, patience, acceptance. Recognition of the familiar. Recognition of the different. It's very rich. I felt grateful to Wong, for letting it all seep out and mingle, for not pushing it. It's a deeply affecting book.

Jan Wong is profiting twice from the misery she inflicted on an innocent woman. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Wong was in China attending Beijing University as an exchange student from Canada. It was here that she ratted out another student who merely said she wanted to go to America. The woman suffered horribly because of Wong, but I guess the Red Guard put another gold star next to Wong's name. Later, when Wong found herself assigned to pushing wheelbarrows of manure on a farm, she decided that maybe the Cultural Revolution wasn't all that great and ran back to her middle-class existence in Canada. Now Wong has published a book about this betrayal and stands to profit a second time from this sordid act. The book is full of self-justification and excuses and she doesn't seem to accept responsibility for what she has done. She has a moral blind spot as large as her ego.

Jan Wong's latest work, "A Comrade Lost and Found--a Beijing Story," takes the reader on a trip to Beijing in the 21st century. Despite the window provided to the world by the 2008 Summer Olympics, one cannot help but be astounded at the changes that have occurred in China as a whole and especially in Beijing, China's capital and epicenter for China's cultural elite. The pivotal year was 1976, the year in which Mao died and the Cultural Revolution ceased, officially and un-officially. What followed quickly was the trial of the "Gang of Four," the return of Deng Xiao Ping and the re-emergence of a functional market economy--but not without the continuation of iron controls in the political arena.

Canadian Wong weaves her 2007 return trip into an odyssey of Chinese history and culture. However, she does not bind the reader down in long-winded historical narrative. Instead, the compelling reason that the reader will stay with this book is that Wong's guilt for denouncing a student colleague during her time as a foreign student at Beijing University in the early 1970's (at the height of the Cultural Revolution), is the reason for her taking this trip. Her search for this colleague is what will keep you in suspense.

The presence of her husband and two sons in the sturm-and-drang of the search provide insight and understanding into what China is today and how Chinese people see themselves as citizens of China and citizens of the world.

I would like to have given this book five stars. I gave it four stars because there is one central point in the saga that bothers me. Wong returns to China with guilt for having denounced her student colleague. She believes that her denouncement was the main reason her colleage was expelled from Beijing University and sent to the country "for reform through manual labor." She is uncertain whether her former student colleague is alive, much less whether she will be able to find her. In addition to her guilt, Wong, ever the journalist, is intensely curious about what happened to her colleague. But here is the rub: Wong claims to have "forgotten" about denouncing her student colleage and only "remembered" it when after many years, she re-read the journals she had written while a student at Beijing University. If she had forgotten about this incident, how was it that her guilt suddenly rose up thirty years after later?

There is something slightly disingenuous about her purported motivation for this trip. After all, she had been back to China and Beijing many times in the years since the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, in the biographical notes in the jacket of the book, it is prominently mentioned that for eight years in the 1990's, she was the Beijing correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Despite this reservation, Wong writes in a concise journalistic style. One will be amazed at the nuances and the outcome of the search. There is "Odyssey" appeal to this tale. For some, it will seem like the search for the Holy Grail. It is a fun read to boot. Best of all, Wong is endowed with a wonderful gift for finding humor wherever she goes.

Two people replied and gave the book a one star and a five star. I felt I had to reply. Just today there appeared a three star. I loved this book, and think Jan (the author) was a victim as much as the millions of other Chinese. The pace was just fast enough, with lots of history, facts, funny things to write about and of course sad things. I would recommend this book in a flash.

I think the "victim" (so to speak) brought much of her problems on to herself, as she stated that 25 to 30 people reported her. She was no angel. However, future readers, it has a happy ending. Not giving too much away, she became a lawyer and was busy planning her wedding. I don't think for a moment that the victim would accept anything from Jan, it isn't necessary and they all have tried to forget the past. As a matter of fact, the victim went to NYC and lived there for two years, the thing that she wanted to do at an earlier time did come true. But, politics got in the way.

The author lived in China for many years and even when she returned to Canada, she made frequest trips bact to Beijing as a well respected journalist. Her husband and two sons went with her. Today, teenagers have to be dragged everywhere, but after their month long trip ended, one son thanked his mother for taking him there. I believe they had a wonderful time.

What I especially enjoyed were the comparisons during the 35 years that Jan Wong lived in or visited China to today (2003). She is extremely knowledgeble.

If you read my review for Factory Girls (Jan. 2009), you will see that I wanted more information on the Cultural Revolution...hey, I got it from this book!

I read this book because it received an A rating in one of the magazines I subscribe to. Thank you Jan for writing it.

This book is a memoir covering the author's experiences in China when she was college-aged up until just before the Beijing Olympics. The frame story is about her month-long trip to Beijing to find and apologize to a woman she betrayed when she was much younger. As the author tells about her present-day trip, she segues into relevant information about what China is like now and what it used to be like.

It's China like you probably never imagined it. The descriptions of city life are vivid and made me feel as if I was experiencing the trip with her. From the party held in her honor by her old teachers to roaming the streets and looking into bars and massage parlors, the trip is a fascinating one.

The author has the ability to laugh at herself and all but the most serious parts are told with a touch of loving humor.

Overall, the book was well-written and very interesting. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in what China (or, at least, Beijing) is like now and how it's changed in the last forty years.

A Different Time, Different Place Book Reviews
http://differenttimedifferentplace.blogspot.com/


Note: For those who feel buying this book would be exploiting the victim, you should know that the woman who Jan Wong betrayed was found and DOES NOT blame Jan Wong for it. [spoiler] The betrayed woman explains exactly what happened and, while what Mrs. Wong did was wrong, the lady explains that Jan Wong was at the end of a long list of people who turned her in. She would have suffered exactly the same if Jan Wong hadn't turned her in. If anything, I was left feeling that Jan Wong wrote this book as penance for what she did.[end spoiler]

I bought this book after reading and enjoying Wong's previous China memoir, Red China Blues. This book builds on an incident Wong related in that first memoir about her time as one of only two foreign students to study at Beijing University during the Cultural Revolution. Wong "ratted out" a Chinese student who expressed a desire to visit the USA. Wong, at the time a starry eyed teenage Maoist from Montreal, says she was totally oblivious to the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, and only later realized that her actions could have had terrible consequences for her fellow student. In this book, Wong revisits China with her husband and teenage sons in tow to try to find her former acquaintance.

Originally, the book was supposed to be about the huge changes taking place in Beijing on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, so the narrative also covers Wong's reactions to the developing city. The "lost student" thread weaves everything together, and sometimes loses itself a bit. Her husband and sons feature prominently in the story and are at times amusing, but sometimes feel like filler. Wong's flippancies occasionally grate - calling the Cultural Revolution the "Cult Rev" for example is annoying rather than cute, but perhaps this is Wong's way of distancing herself from her feeling of guilt. Wong is not squeamish about her guilty feelings, and her frustration that her Chinese classmates are reluctant to discuss issues like this, as if they never happened.

Wong manages to track down the student - no mean feat - and does an excellent job of describing the awkwardness of their meeting. She doesn't shy away from describing what happened even when that paints her in a bad light, and the overall sense is one of sadness, incomprehension and frustration rather than a neat and happy ending.

Jan Wong was a third-generation Canadian of Chinese descent at Beijing University studying Mandarin and Chinese history during the early 1970s. In the midst of the Cultural Revolution she was one of only two westerners there at the time, and considered herself an enthusiastic Maoist. A fellow student (Yin Luoyi) asked Wong for help getting to the U.S. Wong, who would later marry an American living in Beijing while evading Vietnam-era draft boards, promptly turned Yin in to the department's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) representative, and Yin disappeared. Wong mostly forget about the incident for some 33-years while working in Beijing and Canada as correspondent for the Toronto-based 'Globe and Mail,' and purportedly losing her initial infatuation with Communism - along with most of China. In 2006 she returned to Beijing for month, along with her husband and two teenage sons. Her mission - find Yin Luoyi, learn what had happened, and apologize.

Jan claims that when she snitched on Yin, she didn't realize that there were labor camps for dissidents, and had assumed Yin would merely get a tongue-lashing. On the other hand, it seems incredible that she was not aware of the enormous turmoil enveloping the nation during the Cultural Revolution. Further, the disruptions had actually begun at Beijing University, education there largely ceased from 1966-1970, and even Deng Xiaoping's (very high ranking leader who later led China's economic revolution) son had been reportedly thrown out a fourth-floor campus window in 1968, causing permanent paralysis. Nationwide, an estimated 100 million were killed, imprisoned, and/or sent to labor. Undoubtedly this was well-known within the global Chinese community at the time. And both Jan and her American husband had participated in state-sponsored labor projects during the Cultural Revolution.

Regardless, finding Yin was not going to be easy. Beijing's population had risen to 16 million, there were then 400 million cellphone users (now 710 million) - all unlisted, about 40% of the population shares ten surnames, and Beijing residents had moved an average of three times during the past ten years. (In Mao's time most people remained in the same work unit for life - moving required permission, enforced by the issuance of food-stamp coupons.) Other possibilities included Yin Luoyi having died, moved somewhere else within China (1.3 billion total population), left the country entirely, and/or changed her name - either because of marriage or personal preference. Still another possibility - Jan had misspelled Yin Luoyi's name. Inexplicably, Jan did no preparatory work prior to arriving in Beijing - making the task even more daunting.

Early search forays included contacting the local journalists' group, and inquiries at Beijing University - both for Yin, and Jan's former classmates. Several former classmates were found, and ultimately they led Jan to Yin. During the interregnum, Jan and her family toured the rapidly changing city of Beijing. Readers learn that Chinese capitalists are not infallible - their six million square-feet 'Golden Resources Mall' (world's largest until 2006) in Beijing was completed in 2004 after only 20 months of construction (only four days late), opened to only 20 shoppers/hour instead of the anticipated 50,000/day. Problems included inaccessibility to both high-income Chinese and foreigners, most stores not taking credit cards, and downtown competition. Worse yet, the even larger (7.1 million square-feet) 2005 South China Mall is reported to be 99% vacant. While visiting a detective agency Jan learns there are 30,000 Internet police that quickly delete critical comments (if you're lucky). (The 'good news' is that Internet-users have much wider access to formerly forbidden topics - eg. 'tank man,' 'Cultural Revolution,' etc. compared to Jan's last visit in 1999.) Probably most surprising is that China, envisioned by Mao as a paradise of equality, has income inequality that slightly exceeds that in the U.S.! The really 'bad news' - the air pollution in Beijing.

In the middle of Jan's month-long stay her cell-phone rings - it's Yin Luoyi, now Lu Yi - after three name changes, two due to marriages, the other to avoid blackening her father's name. Jan is relieved that Lu believes her graduation-day expulsion from Beijing University was not due to Jan 'ratting her out.' Instead, it was the cumulative impact of thirty charges presented in a long department meeting. (Yin had assumed that Jan had been forced to testify against her, and was a bit taken aback though to learn that it was voluntary.) Lu was then sent home in disgrace to her parents in Mongolia, put under the watch of local CCP cadre there, and consigned to what appeared to be a lifetime of farm labor. However, after Mao's death, the Gang of Four's arrest, and three attempts, Lu was able to have her record expunged and given her diploma. Lu then studied to become an attorney, worked for the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and legally returned to live in and work at her new workplace in Beijing. In 2001 Lu left her secure PLA position, started her own business, and went to New York City to visit her brother. Returning to Beijing before 9/11, Lu then met and married a Beijing University physics professor. Between the two they have five residence properties. At least two are very nice by Chinese (and most American) standards, and one is near her former classmate tormentors. (Not surprisingly, no love lost there. One had also blocked Lu's first two efforts to clear her record.)

Bottom Line: Reading Jan Wong's journey to redemption was interesting and informative. Unfortunately, her integrity remains in question. First, there is the previously referenced question of whether she knew reporting Yin would likely cause problems. Second, she reports having renounced Maoism. Yet, at the end of her "Red China Blues" (1997) Jan describes being at a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Mao's birth, singing the 'Internationale' in Chinese while wearing a Mao badge and others looked strangely at her. It was "still one of (her) favorite songs" after witnessing the 1989 events at Tienanmen Square, interviewing numerous people who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution, and wondering what she had brought to Yin's life.

while the book contains some interesting areas, it drags on and on and many times the author repeats the same information. not much of an effort by the author,just writing because the need to publish another book.