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A Comrade, Lost and Found
by Jan Wong
Reviewed by Kerry Brown
Jan Wong's Red China Blues, her memoirs of being a student in China during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution, was a lively and amusing account of what was, for many, a very bad time. Her new book, A Comrade, Lost and Found, derives from one event which she mentions in her previous book, the encounter with a student one day while she was studying in Beijing in the early 1970s, who asks for her help in getting to the West. Wong, then a fervent Maoist, reported this event to the university authorities, and the student disappeared.
Over 30 years later, Wong is haunted by the betrayal she feels she had delivered on the head of the hapless co-student, and decides to go back, for a month, with her family, to try to seek this woman out. Finding someone you haven't had any contact for over three decades in a country as vast as China should be hard enough. This is made worse by the fact that Wong has no records beyond her own diaries kept at the time, and can't be certain even about the current name of the student or whether they are still in China, or, for that matter, even alive.
A Comrade, after setting out the scenario above, wanders between, on the one hand, being an account of someone returning to old haunts in Beijing, and describing how profoundly they have changed, and on the other tracking down through various old contacts this long lost acquaintance. A dinner at Beijing University with the people she had known back then conveys the extraordinary distance her ideological companions and mentors in the 1970s have travelled, becoming the new class of Beijing people, devoted to careers, business and the sort of life aims that people in the West. The past has left some stains though, and one of the attendees of the dinner, a humourless party cadre, provokes the same complex combination of unease, dislike and fear as she had so many years before.
Wong's narrative keeps up a good and lively speed. Her years as a journalist have given her an eye for the small but telling detail, and the way to set out the various contexts in which she finds herself. When she does find the wronged girl, as one senses from early on, despite the many hurdles, she will, there is the inevitable sense of anti-climax. Now married to an esteemed professor, the "victim" is back at the very university the she had been expelled from. And in their meeting, Wong goes to some lengths to make it clear that there were many other factors which had contributed to her expulsion. The Cultural Revolution was a complex time, and even someone who was there as a first-hand witness like Wong only really saw a tiny potion of what was really going on around her.
There are times in the book when Wong's hard-nosed professional journalist tone grate a bit. Her desire for a "story" makes the reader perhaps wonder whether her account hasn't been carefully crafted and manipulated in the same way as one of her assignments. She blithely admits a few times that her two adolescent children weary of her dragging them through various scrapes and experiences, sometimes using them as cover for her own attempts to get close to targets. At one point, she admits to plying her sons with alcohol (there is no underage drinking law in China), and at another, on leaving a bar, she says how she pushes her older son towards a dancer who has just leaped on top of a table and started to do a modest erotic dance. One starts to have some sympathy for her offspring after telling about all of this. Even so, this book is readable and, in its way, conveys something of the human cost of the Maoist events of only a few decades before.
--
Kerry Brown is Associate Fellow, Chatham House, and author of Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (Anthem Press).
by Jan Wong
Reviewed by Kerry Brown
Jan Wong's Red China Blues, her memoirs of being a student in China during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution, was a lively and amusing account of what was, for many, a very bad time. Her new book, A Comrade, Lost and Found, derives from one event which she mentions in her previous book, the encounter with a student one day while she was studying in Beijing in the early 1970s, who asks for her help in getting to the West. Wong, then a fervent Maoist, reported this event to the university authorities, and the student disappeared.
Over 30 years later, Wong is haunted by the betrayal she feels she had delivered on the head of the hapless co-student, and decides to go back, for a month, with her family, to try to seek this woman out. Finding someone you haven't had any contact for over three decades in a country as vast as China should be hard enough. This is made worse by the fact that Wong has no records beyond her own diaries kept at the time, and can't be certain even about the current name of the student or whether they are still in China, or, for that matter, even alive.
A Comrade, after setting out the scenario above, wanders between, on the one hand, being an account of someone returning to old haunts in Beijing, and describing how profoundly they have changed, and on the other tracking down through various old contacts this long lost acquaintance. A dinner at Beijing University with the people she had known back then conveys the extraordinary distance her ideological companions and mentors in the 1970s have travelled, becoming the new class of Beijing people, devoted to careers, business and the sort of life aims that people in the West. The past has left some stains though, and one of the attendees of the dinner, a humourless party cadre, provokes the same complex combination of unease, dislike and fear as she had so many years before.
Wong's narrative keeps up a good and lively speed. Her years as a journalist have given her an eye for the small but telling detail, and the way to set out the various contexts in which she finds herself. When she does find the wronged girl, as one senses from early on, despite the many hurdles, she will, there is the inevitable sense of anti-climax. Now married to an esteemed professor, the "victim" is back at the very university the she had been expelled from. And in their meeting, Wong goes to some lengths to make it clear that there were many other factors which had contributed to her expulsion. The Cultural Revolution was a complex time, and even someone who was there as a first-hand witness like Wong only really saw a tiny potion of what was really going on around her.
There are times in the book when Wong's hard-nosed professional journalist tone grate a bit. Her desire for a "story" makes the reader perhaps wonder whether her account hasn't been carefully crafted and manipulated in the same way as one of her assignments. She blithely admits a few times that her two adolescent children weary of her dragging them through various scrapes and experiences, sometimes using them as cover for her own attempts to get close to targets. At one point, she admits to plying her sons with alcohol (there is no underage drinking law in China), and at another, on leaving a bar, she says how she pushes her older son towards a dancer who has just leaped on top of a table and started to do a modest erotic dance. One starts to have some sympathy for her offspring after telling about all of this. Even so, this book is readable and, in its way, conveys something of the human cost of the Maoist events of only a few decades before.
--
Kerry Brown is Associate Fellow, Chatham House, and author of Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (Anthem Press).
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