She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses

[Randy W]

She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World.
At 93, the memoirist Yuan-tsung Chen hopes that her recollections of China’s tumultuous past will help the country confront its historical wrongs — and avoid repeating them.

The author Yuan-tsung Chen at her home in Hong Kong in July. Her latest book is “The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao’s Court.”Credit...Anthony Kwan for The New York Times

from the New York Times
Jan. 13, 2023

Quote

 

Her voice drops, barely audible among the din of cutlery and diners in the restaurant: “When you do things in the spirit of Mao, that scares me,” she says, referring to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.

Her books, she said, are meant to add “blood and flesh” to the official party account and help readers empathize with the Chinese people who have suffered under an authoritarian system. But her efforts have raised questions about whose voice matters when it comes to narrating Chinese history.

 . . . 

Ms. Chen was a child of privilege who grew up in metropolitan Shanghai in the 1930s. She came of age in the early days of the People’s Republic of China, after Mao and the Communist Party took over in 1949. In 1958, she married Jack Chen, a Communist journalist who came from a prominent Chinese-Trinidadian family and had connections with top party officials such as Zhou Enlai.

 . . .

In 1955, not long after Ms. Chen joined the Central Film Bureau, Hu Feng, a well-known Chinese Marxist writer, was detained for penning a report arguing that literature should allow for greater expressiveness.

His words triggered a purge that rippled through Ms. Chen’s circle of friends and colleagues, some of whom were accused of being part of Mr. Hu’s “counterrevolutionary clique.”

Then, unexpectedly, Mao began to welcome criticism of the party, urging a “hundred flowers to bloom,” a phrase meant to encourage people to speak up and criticize the party’s shortcomings.

Feeling inspired, Ms. Chen began to write. But before she had a chance to finish, Mao started rounding up the critics who had dared to speak out, accusing them of producing “poisonous weeds” instead of “fragrant flowers.”

Critics were executed or sent to labor camps for re-education. Petrified that her manuscript would reveal “poisonous” thoughts, Ms. Chen lit a match to it. “I scattered that manuscript like ashes,” she said.

The act would come back to haunt her.

By burning the first draft of her own story, Ms. Chen participated in what Orville Schell, a China scholar, has referred to as the destruction of historical memory. Some academics have questioned whether Ms. Chen’s accounts can be trusted, or if she has exaggerated her access to party officials such as Zhou Yang, who, she said in her memoir, asked her for advice on how to handle Mr. Hu’s case.

 . . .

She held up yellowing copies of books by her husband, like “A Year in Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution,” and “Inside the Cultural Revolution,” about the period of political tumult when Mao, fearing that his revolution was being corrupted by compromise, unleashed young Red Guards to persecute officials, academics and others.

She also turned to manuscripts she wrote when she and her husband settled at Cornell University after finally fleeing China in 1971. “Cold Wind” is about her family’s experience during the Cultural Revolution. “The Dragon’s Village” was the basis for the chapters about the Great Leap Forward in her memoir.

“This is why I said I didn’t depend on my memory, and I have my own notes because after we came out, I took notes,” she said, holding a brown envelope with one of her manuscripts.

“The Dragon’s Village,” Ms. Chen’s first book, was published in 1980. Though it is a work of fiction, it is based on her experiences living in a village in 1960 during the Great Leap Forward.

 

 

Edited January 19, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)