The Sheila Variations

The Books: "China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power " (Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn)

And here is my next excerpt of the day from my library.

My history bookshelf.

Oh, and a quick note: I get emails sometimes, angry emails, about the books I have on my shelf. My latest email was from an angry Muslim woman who wrote to tell me that The Hidden Lives of Muslim Women is a bad book, hated by Muslim women, and Geraldine Brooks is hated by Muslims. I am aware of this already - and in posting excerpts from my books, it is not an implicit endorsement of the ideas therein. The Muslim woman was extremely polite, and respectful - it was actually a nice email - but it made me do a double-take. I didn't write the books. I own Mein Kampf, for example. If you want to understand the rise of Nazism, and I do, then you kinda need to have that book. So don't bitch at me about the books I have on my shelves. I am glad for any discussion - but I own tons of books that would probably offend SOMEONE and ... I don't care. They're my bookshelves. This daily-excerpt thing is a fun exercise for me - and lots of readers seem to get a lot out of it. I do it in a ROTE way, because that makes it funner for me and less editorial. By that I mean, I'm not looking at my shelf and thinking: "Hmmm, what book is the best one here? What book do I like best?" No. For this daily-excerpt thing I just go book to book to book - and they're mainly in alphabetical order. I skip the books I haven't read yet. Again, any discussions of these books is awesome - that's the whole point - I have an incredible group of readers, who are all well-read, with different historical perspectives, who come from this or that walk of life - they all bring cool stuff to the table. I got an angry email from some frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic (funny how the people who email me like this rarely comment on the site - never heard of this dude before in my life) about my love of Clifford Odets, and how could I post excerpts from his plays WITHOUT denouncing his Communist views. This guy wanted me to say: "Clifford Odets, while I love his plays, had views I consider abhorrent". It offended him that I focused only on Odets' language, and plays. He was ITCHING to add text to my own post - he was TWITCHING through the keyboard with his own agitation - I could feel him thinking: "Why didn't she mention that he was a Communist?? Why is she misleading people?" Uhm - well. Many thoughts. Get your own blog is the first thought. Second of all: if, by reading the Odets-ian excerpts, people get interested in him - then they can go look him up and see what he was all about. I'm not trying to be encyclopedic here. Third of all: this is an exercise for me. For me, the appeal of Odets is his language (nobody better - literally) - his dialogue - and his place in American theatrical history. I am not trying to be all-inclusive here. I certainly don't like the thought that I might offend someone, but - I don't care, essentially. Especially with something like THIS - a daily book excerpt - which is just an interesting and invigorating personal exercise for me.

The comments these book excerpts have gotten have been WONDERFUL. I love the discussions that come up. But just a reminder: I did not write these books. I do not endorse many of the views in my books. But - DUH - I like history. I like to learn what people say about it, from all sides. And there you have it!!

Next book on the shelf is China Wakes : The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power , by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn. Married, both New York Times reporters - they won Pulitzers for their reporting during the Tiananman Square situation - I remember their articles from that time. Every day - you just had to open the paper (uhm - no cable news, of course!!) - and see if there were any new developments. It was gripping, and awful - to watch it all unfold. All of their articles are included in this book.

Anyway - they have now written, as a team, a couple of books on China - and this is one of them. It's what you would call a "sweeping" book - each chapter takes on a different aspect - Communism, capitalism, the peasants, the intellectual life, yadda yadda. It's good. I actually would like to read a nice big book solely about the Cultural Revolution in China - if anyone has any suggestions, please leave them in the comments. That would be great!

Sheryl Wudunn, a Chinese-American, only one generation removed from China - had quite an experience going back. She went back to her family's village - actually, she had never been there before - it was a pilgrimage for her, almost - she had heard about it, and then she traveled to see it. To meet her relatives still there, etc. I'm going to post an excerpt from that chapter.

From China Wakes : The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power , by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.

As I stood beside my second cousin in Shun Shui, I felt an abyss between us that cut deeper than our bloodline. As I watched him and his wife and his sons, I rested a hand on my smooth black leather bag, which all of a sudden seemed to boast of opulence. I had gone to private schools on the East Coast and taken jazz dance and French lessons. My cousin had dropped out of school before he learned to write. I had grown up shopping in Bloomingdale's and eating bagels. He had never even been to the provincial capital of Guangzhou. And now I carried $150 -- or four months' worth of his salary -- in my wallet. When I departed, I left half of my money with Ng Lap-ting, the village chief: "Use it toward buying a television for the village," I urged. And I left the other half with my relatives, stuffing it hurriedly into my second cousin's hand.

I wasn't the only one leaving piles of cash behind in China. Like my grandfather, millions of Chinese had forsaken their homeland from the seventeenth century on, fleeing poverty and seeking a better life. This diaspora embraces more than 50 million ethnic Chinese, now living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia -- and, of course, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. While Chinese in China remained mired in poverty, those abroad became successful traders and often did better than the local people. That's why -- at least until the Deng era -- Chinese always seemed far more dynamic when you encountered them in Jakarta or Singapore than when you visited Shanghai. Chinese ethnic minorities play a hugely disproportionate role in the business communities of Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Chinese dominate such dynamos as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapoer.

It has always struck me as odd that many nationalities should thrive abroad while seeming listless at home. India is a laggard, yet Indians dominate the Fijian economy. Tamils are far more impressive abroad in Sri Lanka than at home in Tamil Nadu. Perhaps it has to do in part with the immigrant mentality lighting a fire under people in their new homes. Perhaps they are bound at home by the burdens of caste and culture, finding themselves free only when they are far away. And perhaps it is self-selection: The risk takers are those who flee their homelands to work on plantations in Fiji, to work in construction in Sri Lanka -- or to open a Mandarin Restaurant in Manhattan.

In any case, the overseas Chinese have been a godsend to China. Beginning in the 1970s, they shuffled in through the door when other foreigners demurred; they traveled by rickety car and rackety bus through the rice paddies to see their laojia and invest in local factories; they brought in radios and camera and, over banquets of stir-fried pig stomach and sea urchin, told about life in the world beyond; they offered investment, expertise, modern manufacturing techniques, and a great desire to do business with their homeland. Today, they run all over China, their arms overflowing with gifts and hong bao -- red envelopes containing money -- for their relatives. They have become role models for the Chinese.

The Chinese diaspora is one reason China has been a great deal more successful than the European alumni of the Communist Bloc. How many overseas Bulgarian businessmen are there abroad to set up factories in their hometowns? No other country has had remotely as much support from compatriots as China. Some three-fourths of foreign investment in China has come from ethnic Chinese abroad, mostly in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The biggest single foreign investor in China is a Thai Chinese who runs an agribusiness empire. As labor costs soared in Southeast Asia, many overseas Chinese businessmen moved their entire assembly lines or their back offices into their ancestral hometowns in China.

The overseas Chinese brought other baggage with them as well. They lugged their Scandinavian furniture, their Persian carpets, their long-haired cats, their love of Western books and newspapers, and a large basket of Western values. They even brought their American husbands! Maybe it wasn't such a pity after all that the poor or the persecuted fled China, for they always seemed to return -- often as foreign citizens -- to the motherland, whether to tour, to live, to invest, or to die. And how intoxicating it was for many local Chinese to see this, and how puzzling! Were these overseas Chinese really Chinese? Or some weird hybrid? But the Chinese liked what they saw. For a time the top pop singer in China was Fei Xiang, the blue-eyed, six-foot-tall son of a Taiwan woman and an American father. Anything foreign had cachet. Companies began changing their names to sound foreign, as if they were translated from English, even if they weren't. Chinese began spelling their names in the Taiwan and Hong Kong way, like Chang instead of Zhang and Chow instead of Zhao. People gave themselves English names (sometimes with disastrous results, as when Miss Chow named herself Kitt). And these newly styled Chinese began asking their government for more. As the economy soared and the confidence of economists and intellectuals rose in the late 1980s, there was a strange sense, a wistful hope, that China was transforming into a new country, one more like the overseas Chinese communities abroad.

But it was going to be a battle, a tug-of-war for the soul of the new China. The revolutionary generation was not amenable to sweeping change, and to them this new orientation was tantamount to abandoning the nation's pride. The growing dependence on the West was too much for many of the old cadres, whose fathers and forefathers had spent their lives fighting off the foreigners. China's emperors, from Qianlong to Mao, had struggled to keep China an economic island unto itself, shunning Western help and advice.

"Our Celestial Emperor possesses all things in prolific abundance," Emperor Qianlong declared to Lord Macartney in 1793, explaining China's refusal to trade with the West. Ever since, Chinese have agonized over the merits of contact with the West. Some of them, like Mao, boasted of self-reliance, and those who took up his mantle wanted to believe that China could advance on its own, with limited foreign assistance. They were embarrassed, humiliated, by their country's mood. They disparagingly called it chongyang meiwai -- worshiping the West and fawning on foreigners.

I wasn't the only one with an identity crisis: China was in the midst of one, too. Would it be traditional or Western? Would it maintain strict controls on society or be bold enough to liberalize? Would it allow people to speak out more openly, perhaps even to criticize the emperor and his retinue? These questions bubbled in the atmosphere during the months before the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. The government's unequivocal answer came soon enough.

Posted by sheila