MCLC: China in Ten Words review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: jim dew <jameserwindew at yahoo.com>
Subject: China in Ten Words review
***********************************************************

Source: Wall Street Journal (12/7/11):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204443404577052602773530844.h
tml?KEYWORDS=ten+words

Cultural Lexicon
By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK

People, leader, reading, revolution, disparity, copycatand bamboozle-some
words that serve as a springboard for critiques of China.

==================================
China in Ten Words
By Yu Hua
Pantheon Books, 240 pages, $24.95
==================================

Yu Hua is one of China's most acclaimed novelists, hugely popular in his
own country and the recipient of several international literary prizes. He
brings a novelist's sensibility to "China in Ten Words," his first work of
nonfiction to be published in English. This short book is part personal
memoir about the Cultural Revolution and part meditation on ordinary life
in China today. It is also a wake-up call about widespread social
discontent that has the potential to explode in an ugly way.

The book's 10 chapters present images of ordinary life in China over the
past four decades-from the violent, repressive years of the 1966-76
Cultural Revolution, when the author grew up, to the upheavals and
dislocations of the current economic miracle. Along the way, Mr. Yu ranges
widely into politics, economics, history, culture and society. His aim, he
writes, is to "clear a path through the social complexities and staggering
contrasts of contemporary China."

And he succeeds marvelously. "China in Ten Words" captures the heart of the
Chinese people in an intimate, profound and often disturbing way. If you
think you know China, you will be challenged to think again. If you don't
know China, you will be introduced to a country that is unlike anything you
have heard from travelers or read about in the news.

The book's narrative structure is unusual. Each chapter is an essay
organized around a single word. It's not spoiling any surprises to list the
10 words that the author has chosen in order to describe his homeland:
people, leader, reading, writing, revolution, disparity, grassroots,
copycat, bamboozle and Lu Xun (an influential early 20th-century writer).
None is likely to appear on the list of banned words and phrases that
China's censors enforce when they monitor Internet use. But in Mr. Yu's
treatment, each word can be subversive, serving as a springboard for
devastating critiques of Chinese society and, especially, China's
government.

Take the word "people," which, post-1949, has been ubiquitous in China:
Think "People's Republic" or "People's Daily" or "the people are the
masters," as Chinese schoolchildren are taught to say. In Mr. Yu's telling,
the word becomes an opportunity to discuss the Tiananmen Square incident of
June 4, 1989, when Chinese soldiers fired on unarmed democracy
demonstrators. He movingly describes the dashed hopes of Chinese patriots
who longed for something more from their government.

In his view, the Beijing residents who marched in support of the student
demonstrators were less interested in democratic freedoms than in
eradicating the corruption they witnessed among government officials, who
got rich at the expense of the rest of the Chinese citizenry. For him,
Tiananmen Square marks the dividing line between "a China ruled by
politics" and "a China where money is king."

Mr. Yu argues that corruption infects every aspect of modern Chinese
society, including the legal system. Historically, Chinese peasants with
grievances could go to the capital and petition the emperor for redress.
Today, Mr. Yu writes, millions-yes, millions-of desperate citizens flock to
Beijing each year hoping to find an honest official who will dispense
justice where the law has failed them at home. What will happen when they
discover that their leaders at the national level are just as corrupt as
those at the local level?

The violence and deprivations of the Cultural Revolution are by now well
known, but Mr. Yu's reminiscences add color and texture to what the world
has learned in recent years about that lost decade. The youthful Yu Hua is
something of a wise guy and a schemer, pitting himself against bureaucratic
inanities. It is sometimes impossible to know whether to laugh or cry.

In "Reading," Mr. Yu describes his boyhood eagerness to find something
to read other than "grindingly dull accounts of class struggle." Works of
literature were routinely destroyed in book-burning bonfires tended by Red
Guards. But fragments survived and circulated in secret, passed from reader
to reader. One day, Mr. Yu and a classmate get hold of a pirated
Translation of a classic French novel and decide to hand-copy it so that
they can savor the pleasure of reading it over and over again. What ensues
is a hilarious description of the boys' frenzied efforts to finish the
transcription overnight-only to discover in the morning, in an O.
Henry-like twist, that they can't decipher each other's handwriting.

As awful as the Cultural Revolution was, in Mr. Yu's telling its horrors
sometimes pale next to those of the present day. The chapter on
"bamboozle" describes how trickery, fraud and deceit have become a way of
life in modern China. "There is a breakdown of social morality and a
confusion in the value system of China today," he states. He writes, for
example, about householders around the country who are evicted from their
homes on the orders of unscrupulous, all-powerful local officials.

Mr. Yu's portrait of contemporary Chinese society is deeply pessimistic.
The competition is so intense that, for most people, he says, survival is
"like war." He has few hopeful words to offer, other than to quote the
ancient philosopher Mencius, who taught that human progress is built on
man's desire to correct his mistakes. Meanwhile, he writes, "China's pain
Is mine."

Mr. Yu, who lives in Beijing, made the decision not to publish "China in
Ten Words" in his own country. Instead, it came out earlier this year in
the other China-Taiwan-and, now, in the U.S. It will be interesting to see
how he is received when, after his American book tour, he goes home again.

Ms. Kirkpatrick, a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page,
is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.