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 hings
my kids know that they didn't know before coming to China.
- They are
beautiful and fascinating to several hundred million people.
- Ice cream
can be made from red beans. Jell-o can be made from grass.
- China is
a real big country, and the edges are — in more senses than one
— a long way from the middle.
- You don't
have to sit down to do Number One.
- Their family
is not limited to Mom and Dad. It extends further in space and
time than they ever imagined.
- There are
Tom and Jerry episodes (T & J are great favorites in China)
that they will never, never see in the U.S. — the ones that show
black people in a comical light.
- Two adults
can ride in comfort on an ordinary bicycle.
- It is possible
to organize a civilization in which nothing ever gets done without
a preliminary half hour of yelling and shoving.
- Dogs, snakes
and tortoises are good to eat. Or at any rate, they are liable
to turn up on your plate at a restaurant with Mom and Dad urging
you to try them. Adults are so gross.
- There are
places in the world where you can surf 25 channels of TV without
finding anything you can understand.
 When
the news about the success of Beijing's Olympics bid came through,
firecrackers were let off in the streets of Changchun. This woke
Ultimate Grandpa, who asked what was going on. They told him. "Ah!"
he said, joyful but a bit sleep-fuddled. "That means America
recognizes us!" What leverage we have with these people! How
carelessly we use it!
There
are few things more depressing than watching Chinese TV "news."
This is not news in any real sense of course: it is, as Vladimir
Nabokov used to say of Soviet literature, "advertisements for
a firm of slave-traders."
There is, for
example, the ludicrous cult of Jiang Zemin, China's current president,
a featureless functionary with the brain of an assistant sub-postmaster
and the charisma of an ashtray. Every effort is made to show Jiang
as being in apostolic succession from Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiao-ping.
(Mao's actual chosen successor, Hua Guo-feng, has been airbrushed
out of the official Party histories, along with other recent but
inconvenient Party leaders like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.) Jiang's
Thoughts — they currently center on something named "the
Three Represents", which nobody can explain to me because nobody
gives a flying foo-yung about them — pop up as little public-service
ads, backed by solemn music, in between TV programs.
Writing about Russia in the Brezhnev years, Hedrick Smith noted
that back in the Forties, when Stalin's voice was broadcast over
the loudspeakers in public places, everyone stopped to listen, because
they were afraid not to. When Khrushchev broadcast in the Fifties,
people did not stop, but they still listened, because he occasionally
said something interesting. When Brezhnev broadcast, however, he
was talking to himself — people just paid no attention. China is
now thoroughly Brezhnevized in that sense. Ask a Chinese person
for a Mao quote, and they can produce half a dozen without thinking:
"Take class struggle as the key," "Political power
comes from the barrel of a gun," "Revolution is not a
dinner party," and so on. Ask them for a Deng quote and, after
a moment's thought, they give you either "It doesn't matter
if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice," or
else "To get rich is glorious." (The well-known Dengism
"Seek truth from facts" is actually a classical tag from
the Han Dynasty.) Now ask them to quote something from Jiang Zemin.
Puzzled frowns, then laughter. Nobody can think of anything.
George
Orwell said, during WWII, that he didn't mind people dropping bombs
on him as much as he minded the prospect that the lies of the bomb-droppers
might prevail and truth be forgotten. Living in China, one sees
exactly what he meant. Recently, for example, it was the 50th anniversary
of, to quote from the TV news programs, "the peaceful liberation
of Tibet" — that is, of the moment when Mao's armies invaded
and occupied that nation, bringing to her all the horrors of Chinese-style
Leninism: slave-labor camps, man-made famines, the annihilation
of language, religion and culture, the terrible long Calvary that
Tibet endured in the second half of the twentieth century. There
was, of course, no mention of all that on TV, only pictures of happy
Tibetans in colorful costumes, celebrating their good fortune at
having been "liberated" from the burden of governing themselves.
Now, TV news everywhere is heavily doctored, of course. You would
never know from watching U.S. network news that, for example, black
Americans and nonblack Americans in the generality dislike each
other, and go to great pains to avoid living in each other's neighborhoods.
In the U.S., however, there are at least some news and opinion outlets
that contradict the official lies. An American who wants to hear
non-official versions of his nation's history and current condition
can do so with very little difficulty. A Chinese person who wishes
to seek out the truth about, say, the Tiananmen Square incident,
or the state of public opinion in Tibet, has a much harder row to
hoe, even if he has access to the Internet. To begin with, he must
master a foreign language — there is little on these topics in Chinese
(though a new breed of young Taiwanese journalists is doing some
brilliant work in this area).
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