Tuesday, March 13
What The Chinese Don't Say
Written for Outlook Traveller: This is the first book review I've written for publication. I was lucky that it related to my study of East Asia, and particularly on the One-Child policy, which Dr Tyrene White had written about with great acuity.
Xinran lived an extraordinary life – stolen from her parents during the Cultural Revolution and raised by the Red Guards, she became an influential radio commentator in the post-Deng era, then moved to Britain and became a novelist and columnist in the Guardian. But from the collection of those columns in What the Chinese Don't Eat, you'd never imagine it. These are utterly suburban observations of the cultural turmoil in modern China, and in immigrant Chinese life, like weekly emails from a kind but fragile aunt who wakes every morning to be surprised anew by the poverty of the poor and the mistreatment of women.
Each column is a mild-mannered anecdote, observative of human subjects, but shy of politics and uninformative about the bigger picture. In a typical chapter, Xinran meets a colleague who had "a beautiful traditional Chinese face" but now, with dyed hair and a nose job, is barely recognizably Chinese at all. But nose-jobs aren't a distinctively Chinese weakness and nobody, anywhere, needs to be made aware of them. One wonders whether the procedure Xinran meant to describe was blepharoplasty, the surgical modification of the upper eyelid to make single-lidded Chinese eyes look more Caucasian. It is the most common cosmetic surgery in China, and its popularity says a great deal more about new personal insecurities that are distinct to the swiftly-turning country.
Xinran's meandering is only tolerable because she writes with great compassion, and even with heartburn when describing women and daughters twisted away from each other by a superstitious patriarchy and the aloof force of the One-Child policy. But to write compassionately without even a stab at political criticism sounds naïve, and leaves the reader with nothing more than a hazy vision of wrongdoing, absent the people or policy regimes responsible for it. Here is Xinran at her most provoked, talking about immigrant cockle pickers in Britain who were trapped and perished at sea: "Yes, they may have been illegal, but they had basic human needs and should have basic human rights to protect them. Why didn't they?" You'd be right to guess that she does not answer that question.
Xinran lived an extraordinary life – stolen from her parents during the Cultural Revolution and raised by the Red Guards, she became an influential radio commentator in the post-Deng era, then moved to Britain and became a novelist and columnist in the Guardian. But from the collection of those columns in What the Chinese Don't Eat, you'd never imagine it. These are utterly suburban observations of the cultural turmoil in modern China, and in immigrant Chinese life, like weekly emails from a kind but fragile aunt who wakes every morning to be surprised anew by the poverty of the poor and the mistreatment of women. Each column is a mild-mannered anecdote, observative of human subjects, but shy of politics and uninformative about the bigger picture. In a typical chapter, Xinran meets a colleague who had "a beautiful traditional Chinese face" but now, with dyed hair and a nose job, is barely recognizably Chinese at all. But nose-jobs aren't a distinctively Chinese weakness and nobody, anywhere, needs to be made aware of them. One wonders whether the procedure Xinran meant to describe was blepharoplasty, the surgical modification of the upper eyelid to make single-lidded Chinese eyes look more Caucasian. It is the most common cosmetic surgery in China, and its popularity says a great deal more about new personal insecurities that are distinct to the swiftly-turning country.
Xinran's meandering is only tolerable because she writes with great compassion, and even with heartburn when describing women and daughters twisted away from each other by a superstitious patriarchy and the aloof force of the One-Child policy. But to write compassionately without even a stab at political criticism sounds naïve, and leaves the reader with nothing more than a hazy vision of wrongdoing, absent the people or policy regimes responsible for it. Here is Xinran at her most provoked, talking about immigrant cockle pickers in Britain who were trapped and perished at sea: "Yes, they may have been illegal, but they had basic human needs and should have basic human rights to protect them. Why didn't they?" You'd be right to guess that she does not answer that question.
