5
Yishijua, top, practising, 1950s.
On tour in South America, 1990s.
YISHUJIA, aged sixty, a renowned acrobat, interviewed in Qingdao, Shandong province on the eastern coast of China, a lively harbour colonised by Germany before the First World War and later Japan. Yishujia's father was branded a counter-revolutionary and detained for five years, leaving her mother to bring up a family of five, so Yishujia joined a travelling acrobatic troupe before she was twelve. The Cultural Revolution changed the nature of their performances but the art survived. She became a first-class National Acrobat, performed around China as "a valuable artist" and travelled to many countries as a Chinese acrobat and cultural ambassador. Her son Hu, is a professional magician and musician working in Britain.
Hu is a professional magician, and also a performer on the Western saxophone and a Chinese folk wind instrument called the suona. In your first minute of conversation with him you get the feeling that China's three thousand years of etiquette have not yet vanished from the world: he is all polite enquiries after acquaintances, graceful thanks and becoming modesty. By the second minute you have difficulty following him: you have to concentrate hard to follow the tortuous route of his speech, carefully peeling away the adjectives and arranging all his conditional sentences into a logical sequence before the "naked goal" of his verbs comes into view. But in the third minute, all suddenly becomes clear, you want to follow his words, and he has already prepared a space in his thoughts for the words you want to say to him. This is what he has spent the last two minutes feeling for, preparing the ground with all those courtesies. I had never imagined that modern Chinese society, ravaged and made barren by politics, could produce such an "authentic Chinese" man who was not yet out of his thirties, a young man in whom Chinese folk customs remained pure, who could walk among the slurry of Western fast food and emerge unsullied.
I talked to Hu about some of the feelings and losses Chinese experience on coming to the West, hoping I could learn something about the values of the new generation of young Chinese who were making a living overseas. But he left me only with an unforgettable feeling of responsibility: guilt at having been unable to keep his father alive, anxiety at being unable to fulfil his responsibilities to his widowed mother, shame that China's fine, true elegant culture had gained no recognition in the West. In truth, in the decade and more since I moved to Britain, I have rarely met a young Chinese person with such a sense of responsibility.
I had been searching for some time for an opportunity to decrypt this "authentic Chinese" friend, but it was very hard. To me, there was a fortress of personality, made up of his age, his era and his gender: it was difficult for a woman of his mother's generation to enter his "kingdom of causes and effects". Then one day he told me that his mother was coming to Britain to see him, she did not understand English or have any idea how to get around London on her own, and he wondered if it would be possible for me to introduce a few Chinese friends to her.
Hu's mother, Yishujia, was a Chinese National Level One acrobatic performer and one of the few winners of the women's 8 March Red-Banner Pacesetter*4 medal. It was hard to believe from her limber, agile walk that she was a woman of over sixty, the youthful energy and interest that came from her years of training as a young woman were immediately noticeable. The first time we met, her smile and calm manner made me imagine a comfortable, tranquil life, which was a very rare form of good luck in the last century in China. I completely failed to detect what lay behind those smiles and jokes.
I invited mother and son to spend Christmas with us in London. At dinner, after the roast goose, we brought out a cheese plate. I was worried that Yishujia would not be able to cope with the taste, which Chinese people often find close to unbearable, but I watched her cut off a small piece of cheese, put it on her plate with a smile, partition off an even smaller sliver and place it in her mouth, still smiling. At this point I stopped worrying, and turned to the other guests, but when I glanced back at her place, she was missing. I hurried after her to the toilet, from which issued suppressed sounds of vomiting. I waited quietly outside the door until she came out, tears still glistening on her cheeks. "I'm fine, I was being greedy, I got something stuck in my throat, so I came to clean myself out. I've caused you a lot of worry for nothing." When I heard these words it suddenly hit me: this is a woman of remarkable self-control. That evening, as I said goodbye to her and her son, I fixed a time for her to come to my home for tea. She came as agreed, and brought me her real self: a daughter who had spent every day longing for her mother; a traditional Chinese woman whose husband was dead and whose son lived far away; a National Level One acrobatic performer who had struggled for a future of her own, with a father accused of being a counter-revolutionary, and who had grown up along with acrobatics in China as the status changed from amateur to professional; a mother who had raised a pure, authentic Chinese child. This was a Chinese story with no political window dressing, without the gilding and ornamentation of vanity.
Yishujia was the youngest person whom I interviewed. She agreed to come to Qingdao, which was some distance from her home in the city of Jinan, because she did not want the "past things that floated up from the bottom of the sea" to cloud the waters of her daily life. I hoped that by finding a space where she could distance herself from it all, she would be able to allow the unhappiness and griefs to settle.
We arrived in the summer coastal resort of Qingdao, on the Shandong peninsula in east China, on 14 August. It was unusually hot in Qingdao, which is as famous for its pleasantly cool summers as for its Tsingtao beer, with temperatures as high as thirty-nine degrees. However, this did not have any noticeable effect on the annual International Beer Festival: hundreds of thousands of beer lovers from all over the world were celebrating all through the night despite the heatwave, to the point where some people mistook a heaven-sent night-time fall of rain for "rivers of beer in the streets".
We held our interview with Yishujia in a government-run guest house by the sea. She had changed into a person who was both very strange to me and very familiar: this was no longer the lively, vivacious Teacher Yishujia whom the years had passed by, full of smiles and laughter. Instead, she was "standing ready for battle", as if for a political interrogation, with all her answers prepared and ready. This is a classic expression and posture in video interviews in China, and also a very tricky "bottleneck" stage through which you must pass before you can enter into a heart-to-heart dialogue.
I adopted a slow, measured tone, and asked the first question in a seemingly casual way.
*
XINRAN: Teacher Yishujia, after you retired, what did you think about the most?
YISHUJIA: I went over past memories, a bit of everything.
XINRAN: What's the earliest thing you remember?
YISHUJIA: That must be my mother taking me to visit my father. At the time my father was working on a building somewhere outside Jinan, and my mother took me and the eldest of my younger sisters over the mountains on donkey-back to see him.
XINRAN: Can you still remember where you father was?
YISHUJIA: I can't remember what place it was, I just remember that in the evenings you could hear wolves howling.
XINRAN: Do you know what kind of families your parents came from? I'm still rather hazy about my own family background, even now. I know my great-grandfather ran restaurants, as far afield as Malaysia, Japan and Singapore, though it wasn't called Singapore in those days. But nobody in my grandfather's generation wanted to run a restaurant, they all went to work in banks or for Far Eastern companies, so the restaurants were all sold off. In my father's generation, that big family split into two groups: one group went to America with the Western companies, another followed the Communist Party and stayed in China. So what kind of family was yours?
YISHUJIA: I can only remember that my paternal great-grandfather's family was from Hongsong village in Zhouping county, in Shandong. My great-grandfather died young, he was just fifty, and my great-grandmother lost her sight through illness, but she raised my grandfather and a great-aunt without remarrying. In those days widows remained faithful to their dead husbands by never remarrying. The fulfilment of duty was the only way their children could hold their heads up around other people. The impression I got when I was small was that my great-uncle had been to college, and that was why the whole family got an education. My great-uncle was a schoolteacher. My great-grandmother was supporting the family at that time, it was really hard for her. Once my great-uncle started teaching, he took all the boys in the family with him to Jinan to go to school, my great-aunt's boys, my father and uncles from our family. In our extended family, all the males in my father's generation went to school.
XINRAN: About how old were you when you went to primary school?
YISHUJIA: I was seven.
XINRAN: What was the school like?
YISHUJIA: My school was the best in Jinan – my great-uncle taught there.
XINRAN: How many boys and girls were there when you started school?
YISHUJIA: There were forty or fifty children in my class, a lot more boys than girls.
XINRAN: So many people in your family had been to school, did you experience hardships in the political movements after Liberation?
YISHUJIA: In those days our family owned a big, rambling house; we had livestock too, and hired hands to work our land. Just before Liberation, my great-uncle sold a lot of the family property. My great-grandmother was livid, she beat and cursed him, but later on she found out that he had been quite far-sighted: because our family property had all been sold, when the government determined class status after Liberation we were classified as middle peasants, otherwise we would have been classed as landlords and attacked. It wasn't just a question of a few houses, it was life and death.
XINRAN: It always surprises me, the way those old people could see the way society was going. My maternal grandfather donated a sizeable portion of his property to the government after the Liberation: banks, grain stores, shipping fleets, hardware factories, he gave them all to the common cause without a murmur. A good many of the people who had been classified as capitalists along with him came under attack, their children were implicated in their crimes, and this often ended in suffering or death; but in my grandfather's case, apart from the decade of the Cultural Revolution, which he spent in prison, he lived in peace until he died aged ninety-seven, without a stain on his character, and all his children alive and well.
YISHUJIA: Hmm, that's no easy thing.
*
I felt that Yishujia was very guarded in the face of my questions, so I tried to elicit some fellow feeling with stories of my grandparents' generation: after my grandfather died, crowds of people came to express their condolences, nearly a thousand in the course of a week. My aunts and uncles were flabbergasted, none of them knew why so many people who knew my grandfather would come.
*
YISHUJIA: Oh, I know why even your family didn't know.
XINRAN: Why? [I thought she had started to open up, but I was wrong.]
YISHUJIA: You say it, I like to listen!
XINRAN: Many of the people who came to pay their respects knelt in front of his picture and talked to him, telling their stories. Afterwards, my aunt said that when she saw all this she was filled with regret, she said she should have listened more to my grandfather's stories when he was still alive. But members of the younger generation never dared to ask their elders about their history, and old people seldom talked much about their past, especially those who came up from nothing through hard work, who had been manual workers, they believed that they were a lower class than others. There are also people who find it hard to get the words out, especially those who had a history of capitalism after the fifties – most of them avoid mentioning the past entirely.
YISHUJIA: You're right there, and those people are in the majority.
*
I didn't wait for her to say more, but continued to talk about my own family.
*
XINRAN: Kneeling in front of my grandfather's portrait, several elderly ladies who had been prostitutes in the 1940s had told my aunt that my grandfather had saved their lives when the Guomindang were rounding up economic criminals [which included prostitutes] and cleaning up society. He had let them enter one of his handicraft factories, giving them an opportunity to turn from their old ways and learn a few skills, otherwise they would have been shot like many other prostitutes under the Guomindang.
YISHUJIA: I've heard the old people say that the Guomindang were very harsh when they first came to power – they shot people dead in Nanjing, and called it "strict social cleansing". And afterwards our Communist Party used the same word and did similar things. A lot of women who had been prostitutes before 1949 were persecuted to death.
XINRAN: Actually, between the 1940s and the 1990s, both the Guomindang and the Communist Party had some very harsh policies. I think that perhaps 25 per cent of the population of China was treated unjustly or sentenced wrongly in that period, and more than half of those were educated people.
YISHUJIA: My father was branded an active counter-revolutionary just because of a little thing. When my father left home to go to school in Jinan, he became friendly with an underground member of the Party. He couldn't tell my father that he was a Party member, but he did tell him: "If a time comes when you don't see me, don't hang around, go back home." But my father forgot. Afterwards the Eighth Route Army came to Jinan, they had the city surrounded, he couldn't get out, but he had to eat. At that time the Guomindang had set up a San Qing Tuan – the Three Youth League – anyone who joined up would have work to do and food to eat. So, many young people in Jinan whose families didn't have a lot of money joined that society.
XINRAN: The San Qing Tuan, the one that was defined as counterrevolutionary in the fifties? That's serious.
YISHUJIA: He was just a naive student in those days, he didn't understand politics, he joined because he was afraid he would starve. Jinan was liberated after three months, but my father suffered a lifetime of bitterness because of those three months in which he didn't go hungry.
XINRAN: A lifetime of suffering just because of three months in the San Qing Tuan?
YISHUJIA: He hadn't done anything bad, he couldn't shoot a gun or fight, he was an architecture student, but just because of that San Qing Tuan, he became a "wicked man" who could never say anything right. To this day I don't know what exactly the San Qing Tuan was, I've no idea what was so terrible about it.
XINRAN: The Communist Party has a Communist Youth League, right? The Youth League was the first step to joining the Communist Party, and after 1949 you had to join the Party to get any of the important government posts. Similarly, the San Qing Tuan was the Guomindang's version of the Youth League, the first step to joining the Guomindang, which naturally made it the enemy of the Communist Party.
YISHUJIA: Yes, but even if it was a political organisation, it was all over in just three months, it was disbanded as soon as the city was liberated. My father really regretted it; if he'd just remembered what that man had told him, that if he couldn't see him he should leave, then he'd have been fine . . . Then he got in trouble again just after Liberation, when they were building the big City Government building. He was the project supervisor, checking that the work was carried out according to the blueprint, but he discovered that the stairs to the basement had been designed without a handrail, and the waterproofing hadn't been designed to deal with subsidence, so he reported it to his superiors, requesting modifications. But the leaders at that time were peasant cadres who'd fought their way to Jinan, they didn't understand, all they cared about was "more, better, faster, cheaper" and making revolution. My father asked them to stop work to put things right, but that was delaying the revolutionary task, out of the question! Then in the final inspection, a higher-ranking cadre who'd come to sign off the project almost slipped and fell into the cellar – and that staircase without a railing became evidence of my father's crime, a plot to injure revolutionary cadres. On top of that, leaks soon began to appear in the waterproofing, and that was deliberate sabotage! Nobody dared to testify on behalf of a counter-revolutionary in those days, so they arrested my father! I'll never forget that day. All these policemen came into our home, and there were more standing in the courtyard. My father didn't say a word, they just took him away, and I just didn't have a clue why. My mother didn't know the reason either, because my father had never discussed work matters with her. At that time everyone was very particular about "organisational discipline", it was forbidden to discuss work between husband and wife or family members.
XINRAN: After your father was detained in front of all those people, how did your neighbours and people like that treat you?
YISHUJIA: Some were pretty good, and still had dealings with us, but whenever there was the least sign of trouble I'd get called a jailbird's brat.
XINRAN: How long was your father detained?
YISHUJIA: Five years, I suppose, though he was sentenced to twenty. My father never accepted it, he appealed, and finally the high-ups sent someone down to examine the scene of the crime and recheck the plans. In the end he was rehabilitated.
XINRAN: When your father was in prison, how did your mother manage to make a living while bringing up you children?
YISHUJIA: She was a gatekeeper at a neighbourhood-run chemical factory; later on she did embroidery. We only had twelve yuan a month for a family of five, for food, clothes and everything else, it was very hard.
XINRAN: Was this the reason why you started work so young?
YISHUJIA: My mother had no choice – once I'd left home to work there was one burden less on the family.
XINRAN: After you left, how did the family keep going? Did your mother discuss this with you?
YISHUJIA: I know for certain that my mother had a very hard time, but she was a strong woman, she never talked about it. [Tears stream down her face.] Whenever I talk about my mother I feel so awful, she suffered so much! She suffered all her life, and she died early too . . .
*
We sat in silence for a while, but I didn't stop the video recorder. Seeing her weeping in front of me, thoughts of many other women I had interviewed welled up in my mind: how many women in China worked day after day, night after night, toiling away to raise their children in this desert of human culture? We Chinese use our mothers like candles, they melt themselves away to shine their light on others.
I didn't continue with the question of her mother. I knew it was a very, very painful subject.
*
XINRAN: I know you joined an acrobatic troupe before you were twelve – can you tell me something about your first few years? What was your training like? Where did you perform? What were your leaders like? I think it must be etched deeply in your memory.
YISHUJIA: At the very beginning I didn't perform, I just had lessons and practised my acrobatic skills – the waist, legs and the crown of the head are very important in Chinese acrobatics. I got up very early every day; in the morning after breakfast we had professional practice and lessons; sometimes in the afternoon we had school, or sometimes the school lessons were in the evening. In those days we could never get enough sleep, everyone was constantly nodding off – one time in somersaulting class I turned a few somersaults and then went to sleep on the spot. The first time I performed I was thirteen. It was the dance "Catching Butterflies" – I can still remember it. I turned three somersaults and very nearly somersaulted myself off the stage. In those days it was very dark at the bottom of the stage – once the stage lights were on you couldn't see anything below the stage.
XINRAN: What sort of places did you mostly perform in? How did the audience react?
YISHUJIA: We mostly went up into the mountains and to the countryside. The peasants had no cultural activity at all from one year's end to the next, and they loved acrobatics, which you could understand whether you'd been to school or not, so just about every family came to watch, lots and lots of people. There was no electric light in the countryside in those days, we used big hanging hurricane lamps to light the performances we held to bring cultural entertainment to the peasants, and to promote the Party's policies. Sometimes we'd move on very quickly; we'd put on two shows and then leave, then another two shows and off again. All our things went in two big horse-drawn carts, sometimes we even slept on the carts – from time to time there'd be a thump, and that would be someone falling to the ground. We often slept on the ground; if we did get a room there'd be no windows, you'd sleep over here, and over there the worms would be wriggling in and out. After a while conditions improved a bit – we got a tractor, later on it was trucks, ferries and trains, and in the 1980s, after the Reform and Opening, we even got to take a plane. When we retired we joked that we Chinese acrobats had been on everything except submarines and the Shenzhou VI.*5 Ha!
XINRAN: You said your troupe went to many villages to perform – how did you do those performances? I think it must be impossible for many young people to imagine: no theatre, no lights, no proper stage, how did you put on a show?
YISHUJIA: In the countryside we used the threshing grounds. Some of those big threshing grounds had an earth platform, others didn't.
XINRAN: What was the earth platform for?
YISHUJIA: I don't know, singing opera perhaps? The countryside was very poor, but you still used to get people who went there to sing traditional opera, trading and singing opera at the same time – I think it was a bit like going to market.
XINRAN: I've seen that too, a big acrobatic display on market day – hardly ideal conditions for a performance!
YISHUJIA: Too right! Take juggling stools with your feet: if there happened to be a strong wind, the stool would be blown to one side with one gust, and then, whoosh, it would turn over onto the other side, it was really difficult! If you were juggling umbrellas with your feet, whoosh, one puff of wind and you couldn't find your umbrella at all!
XINRAN: If you fluffed your performance, what would the locals do?
YISHUJIA: You'd have to have another go. If you got it right the second time there'd be clapping from the floor, otherwise they'd curse you for a clumsy fool – peasants are very down to earth, you know.
XINRAN: Did you get used to going to live in the countryside?
YISHUJIA: At that time I only knew to follow the troupe everywhere it went, I didn't feel anything really. It wasn't that comfortable in winter. I've always had pains in the joints on this leg, and why? It's from one year when it was snowing heavily outside, there was only a grass curtain at the window, we were all very tired, we just went to sleep wherever we fell, huddled in pairs for warmth. One quilt couldn't cover four legs, so our legs stuck out, and my leg got frozen, it itched and hurt like mad, and now I'm old it gives me trouble.
XINRAN: What did you do for food?
YISHUJIA: We brought our own kitchen along with us, pots, bowls, ladles, oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar, the lot, and we bought whatever vegetables they had locally.
XINRAN: Where was the poorest place you went?
YISHUJIA: There were no rich places in those days. Shangqiu in Henan would have been the poorest. The wife of one of the troupe's members lived in Shangqiu, her children never had a chance to eat any meat, or to buy fish. The winters were bitterly cold, and for New Year she'd make the children grope for small fish in the ditches, and their New Year feast would be the whole family clustered around a pot of simple fish soup.
XINRAN: How long did circuit tours like this go on for?
YISHUJIA: Right up to the Cultural Revolution. Before that we went to the countryside at fixed times every year to put on shows for the peasants, but after the start of the Cultural Revolution we slowly stopped going to the countryside, and stuck to doing revolutionary performances in the city. In any case, our wages from the state were the same wherever we were – I got 29.5 yuan every month for ten years, which nowadays is barely enough for a cheap family meal out!
XINRAN: When you think about the revolutionary operas, does it seem ridiculous? I find it very strange. I thought a lot about this before I came to hear your story, I suppose you can insert revolutionary slogans into things like opera, ballet or plays, but how do you add revolutionary slogans or quotations from Chairman Mao into acrobatics?
YISHUJIA: It was ludicrous really, we were all idiots. We acted out battles, or things like "catching a spy", or taking American soldiers prisoner, that kind of revolutionary stuff, all fighting and killing. Some of the acrobats had good voices, so they'd sing a revolutionary song while making showy gestures, but I couldn't sing. Sometimes we did fancy work with staves, and that was the PLA fighting a battle. And tumbling? Boys would do the big somersaults, girls would do the fill-in parts in the background, cheering "Ten thousand years of long life to Mao Zedong!" Basically, all the acrobatic skill was lost. When we went to the army units to show our support, we'd perform "In Praise of Men He", because we wanted to stick to the revolutionary model. This Men He was a hero of the Liberation, he died a hero's death to help the common people. Those of us who were playing the common people all had to wear Red Guard armbands.
XINRAN: During the time of the Cultural Revolution, nobody in China could avoid making a public statement of their position, including foreigners. Those who went along with it survived, those who went against it perished. What were your feelings when you had to change from performing in your national costume to Red Guard costumes?
YISHUJIA: Nobody dared to have an opinion in those days, we just knew we had to go along with the revolutionary image, it was the Cultural Revolution, you couldn't do anything else. And we really felt that national costume was old, we should smash the old and embrace the new, so we ought to wear something new. It's no different from young people these days who wear those rubbishy clothes to keep up with the fashion, at the time that's what we thought.
XINRAN: So what was the difference between what you performed then and the things you did before?
YISHUJIA: Originally it was pure skill and art. During the Cultural Revolution it was just revolutionary gestures, and you had to force words into the acrobatic numbers, to promote Mao Zedong Thought.
XINRAN: So our traditional acrobatic arts were just actions put to music, then in the Cultural Revolution you started talking, like in a play? yishujia [laughs heartily]: Yes, it was all talk.
XINRAN: I can't imagine what kind of acrobatic performance that would be! Who did the talking? How did they speak? Don't you need breath control for acrobatics? Could you control your breath while you were talking?
YISHUJIA: The movements didn't matter, the important part was shouting slogans and making revolutionary gestures. For example, when I was doing fancy work with a stave, after I'd completed a set, I'd say: "Revolution is not a crime, rebellion is just! " before I went on to the next part. Thinking about it now, it was truly ridiculous. At that time everyone was a lunatic, some were genuinely crazy, some pretending to be crazy; if you weren't crazy you didn't come up to the demands of politics, or match the current ideology.
XINRAN: You're a National Level One performer, what is your greatest accomplishment in the field of acrobatics?
YISHUJIA: How much do you know about acrobatics?
XINRAN: I don't understand it, I've only seen it, it's very mysterious to me.
YISHUJIA: Some people say that acrobatics is a catch-all designation for every kind of art that involves the human body surpassing its normal limits. Actually that's inaccurate. Acrobatics includes art, animal training, farce, vocal skills (including animal impressions and funny voices, puppet theatre, shadow plays and the like), and many other different types and varieties of strange techniques and skills, like sword swallowing, fire eating, cutting people or horses into pieces, everything of that kind. For this reason, the ancients also referred to acrobatics as "Strange Theatre", the "Hundred Acts" and "Juggling Theatre".
Compared with the acrobatics of other countries, Chinese acrobatics has its own special features: we attach a lot of importance to the skills of the waist, legs and top of head, this is what the phrases "artistic acting and lively fighting" and "tumbling from Peking Opera, skills with the head from acrobatics" are referring to. Seeking stability in the midst of risk, seeking peace in the midst of movement, seeking strangeness in the midst of the ordinary to attain perfection; the special characteristics of this art are displayed most plainly in gucai juggling: the performer wears a simple long robe, but can produce a thousand marvellous things from it; its philosophy is creating being from nothingness, light and heavy side by side, paper-thin flowery umbrellas, coloured balls, all kicked up high to flutter, twist and float.
Chinese acrobatics is very adaptable: you can set up a stage and put on a show in squares, theatres, streets or hotel rooms, for as many as a hundred people or as few as one. All this is the unique charm of our acrobatics, and China is internationally acknowledged to be the best country in the world for acrobatics.
My specialities were the diabolo, magic tricks and light and heavy foot juggling. Heavy foot juggling is juggling with stools, light foot juggling is with umbrellas. You could say my best skill was heavy foot juggling, that's the juggling with stools; after that comes "mountain country drums and gongs", which I invented, playing music with the hands and feet, the feet beat drums and the hands beat other drums, the feet play the music while the hands keep the beat. When I was young, I was at the top of a human pyramid, and they juggled me along with the stools; as I got older and heavier I moved lower down the pyramid; in the last decade or so I was the one juggling all the people and stools!
XINRAN: How many performances have you given in your life?
YISHUJIA: I can't remember how many performances I did in how many places, but I do remember clearly that in South America alone I was in over five hundred shows.
XINRAN: Your troupe doesn't have any records?
YISHUJIA: Hardly any records have been preserved from the Cultural Revolution, and they only started keeping records on the arts in the nineties. I must say, it was tragic, the way all those cultural relics were burned; in the palaces of the Tang dynasty [ad 618–907] Chinese acrobatics was as important as music and dance, there were said to be many records in the history books. After the Song and Yuan dynasties [tenth–fourteenth centuries ad], song, dance and music were less highly regarded, acrobatics gradually became one of the humble professions, a poor man's job. In those days, who would keep records about poor people? Apparently, our troupe didn't start keeping records until after the Liberation. It's a shame they were all burned in the Cultural Revolution, a sin and a shame.
XINRAN: Before we came here we consulted many reports on you in the media. How many countries have you visited?
YISHUJIA: Well, we went to Japan for the first time in 1981; after that we were flown all over the place: Pakistan, Japan, America, Sri Lanka . . . what country's Manila?
XINRAN: It's the capital of the Philippines.
YISHUJIA: The Philippines, that's right. And then we stayed in Colombia for over a year, but we never performed in Europe.
XINRAN: What were your feelings after going abroad?
YISHUJIA: I had the strongest reactions towards Japan and America, the other countries were pretty much like us. In America, there was such a distance between their country and ours. The people there were more civilised. I'll give you a practical example: when you get on a public bus nobody pushes you, people form a queue without being told to. The cities were cleaner than ours at that time too – after two months there, the soles of your shoes would still be clean. Nowadays our cities are a lot better, some are even cleaner than theirs. In those days we knew that life in the West was better than here, but when some foreigners asked us "Does China have milk candy?" we were furious. "How could we not have milk candy*6? We've got everything you have!" Behind closed doors we all admitted that they were advanced and we were poor, but we couldn't bear for anybody else to say that Chinese people were bad, or that we were deprived. How can I put it? Dogs don't hate their homes for being poor.
*
What Teacher Yishujia said was quite right. I have felt this very strongly myself: every time someone brings up China's problems or her dark side, I cannot stop myself from trying to rebut them – we need our national pride. This instinct for self-respect is as important to us as the pride of a mother who is convinced that her child is a genius before that child can even walk. In the same way, all of us feel that our home town is a special place, with a beautiful story to tell for every inch of it.
*
XINRAN: You've been to so many places, do you feel that people in other countries respect China?
YISHUJIA: Some places aren't so good. In South America people used to swear at us. I was told they were joking, but I could see they looked down on us Chinese. They liked white people. We just concentrated on our performance, we didn't have a lot to do with other people, as soon as the show was over we just went back to our dormitories or the hotel.
XINRAN: Where were the people nicest to Chinese?
YISHUJIA: The Americans were very friendly.
XINRAN: You mentioned spending a year in one country.
YISHUJIA: In Latin America, Colombia.
XINRAN: So what was your life like there every day?
YISHUJIA: We had one performance a day, and we did all our everyday things together in small groups. We went together to the supermarket to buy food, and we brought it back, cooked it and ate it together. We Chinese always stick together, wherever we are.
XINRAN: I understand that before 1995, when Chinese people went abroad on official visits, they were issued with special clothing for the purpose, is that true?
YISHUJIA: Yes, the first time we went abroad in the 1980s, we all went together to the tailors to get our clothes made, we all had the same clothes, from the skin out. We all had the same suitcases as well. After the 1990s they issued us with money instead, 700 yuan per person.
XINRAN: You started working in the 1950s, and a lot happened in Chinese history between the fifties and when you went abroad in the eighties, so what changes were there for you personally in all that chaos and upheaval?
YISHUJIA: To tell the truth, after the 1980s the country just kept improving, and things got better and better for us in every aspect of our lives. In any case, I had already experienced the humiliation of being a counter-revolutionary's daughter, so I passed over all these political movements and the rest of it in silence.
XINRAN: I've heard that you're still involved in training young people even though you're retired. Do you think there is any difference between students now and forty years ago when you were young?
YISHUJIA: Children now are cleverer than in my day. Back then we did whatever the teacher told us; with kids today, once the teacher has told them something, they'll think up a few ways to improve it on their own, and a lot of the time they improve on the teacher's own version. They're clever, but it's harder to teach them.
XINRAN: Why is clever hard to teach?
YISHUJIA: We were too obedient, we didn't dare slack off. Children nowadays can be lazier than we were, so they're harder to teach.
XINRAN: Are your teaching methods the same as the ones your masters used with you?
YISHUJIA: No, in those days teachers were just like your parents, they lectured you and beat you, but sometimes we'd spend our birthdays at the teacher's home, and get-togethers at the teacher's were a regular thing. Now relations between people have changed, all we have to do is turn up to class on time. There are rules about how to teach, we have to write lesson plans for everything. It was different then, we made it up as we went along, there was always the possibility of something new.
XINRAN: You said that they used corporal punishment on you back then?
YISHUJIA: In the past, when we Chinese studied acrobatics, it was beaten into us with a stick. By the time I was a student we'd been liberated, the teacher didn't dare beat us too much, but we all believed that corporal punishment was useful for training. The time I remember most clearly is once when I was being lazy and couldn't turn a difficult kind of somersault, then one blow high on my bottom, and over I went – the teacher had given me a taste of "dough drop soup". That's a knotted rope, a tool for corporal punishment, we called it dough drop soup, a blow from that really hurt.
XINRAN: And now?
YISHUJIA: We still give the students a taste if they're disobedient. Why? Sometimes they're just lazy – if they won't practise till they get it right, isn't that just a waste of their youth and ambition? So if somebody isn't prepared to keep practising and complains about being tired, I'll give him a taste, and up he goes.
XINRAN: So nobody objects to your corporal punishment, though it's against the law?
YISHUJIA: Corporal punishment while practising your art is against the law? So wasting life and time isn't against the law? Young people nowadays talk about "enjoying life" – how many children understand what the real enjoyment of human life is? If you have no skills for life, no success in your work, if you can't cook or do the housework, will you be able to "enjoy life"? It's enjoying other people's blood and sweat! That's what I call a crime!
XINRAN: I've known you for a while, but I've hardly ever heard you talk about matters of the home.
YISHUJIA: I was very young when I left home, and my family was nothing to be proud of, not like other people's, so the acrobatic troupe was like a family to me. Not only were we teachers and colleagues together for over forty years, the troupe took responsibility for everything: the flat I lived in, the children's schooling, work, medical treatment, all aspects of our lives. Even though I'm retired now, it still feels like a family to me. From the 1950s to the 1980s in China, most city dwellers were part of a work unit. Apart from the tiny minority who changed jobs or moved to another place to be with their spouse, the people in a work unit would generally stay there for the rest of their life. And since education, accommodation, medical care and even the next generation's jobs were all dealt with by the work unit, that next generation tended to stay in the same place, and work in the same professional circles. This gave rise to serious problems, as small, closed groups started to emerge, who in time came almost to form a monopoly.
XINRAN: When was your troupe established?
YISHUJIA: I can't say much for sure about our troupe's history. I know our predecessor was the acrobatic artist Guo Shaoquan's Tianjin Magical Troupe, which had started out wandering the roads and they finished up in Jinan, where they decided to stay. Guo's children trained up a batch of students, and the troupe expanded. After the Liberation it was nationalised, and a lot of dross got mixed in then – they brought in Communist Party leaders, administrators and the like, even though they didn't know anything about acrobatics. The people who didn't understand anything were put in charge of the ones who did – isn't that typical of us Chinese?
XINRAN: China's earliest acrobatics and magic tricks all had their origins in selling medicine, wouldn't you agree? In 1988 a painted brick decorated with two chariots pulled by galloping horses was unearthed in Nanyang city, in Henan province: the Eastern Theatre Picture. Experts say that this is the earliest picture of Chinese acrobatics, is that true?
YISHUJIA: I think it must be. They used to do acrobatics on a circular pitch by the side of the road, you'd find performers of the lesser acrobatic acts selling strengthening pills, in Shandong dialect they call them Big Strength Balls. There were also people who set broken bones and did massage during the performance, there was a lot of that, it's hard to give you a clear picture all at once.
XINRAN: Why didn't you find a husband in your work unit, the way so many Chinese people did?
YISHUJIA: At that time "introducing a partner" was all the rage, people used to introduce friends of friends to other young people in search of a partner, not like nowadays, when they take themselves off to a "party", or marriage bureaux and the like, not to mention lonely hearts ads in the papers, things we'd never even have thought of. I met my husband through my teacher, he was a soldier, studying parachute jumping in the Beijing Thirteenth Air Force School.
XINRAN: You were in different provinces, so how did you maintain a relationship?
YISHUJIA: We met once, when he came home on leave, we both agreed to the match, and after that we relied on letters. He was in the army, he could post letters for free; he used to write to me a lot – I only sent one letter for several of his, I was worried about wasting money.
XINRAN: So when were you finally reunited?
YISHUJIA: That was later on. He was in an air force unit commanded by Lin Biao's son, Lin Liguo. After the Lin family died in a plane crash on 13 September 1971, the whole unit was implicated in their crimes, they were sent away from Beijing to Bengbu in Anhui, and before long he was sent home. He felt terrible about that.
*
Lin Biao is one of the most controversial figures in Chinese history. To this day nobody has properly defined his role. Was he a loyal minister? Or was he a criminal?
The official story is that on 8 September 1971, Lin Biao, who was Deputy Chairman of the National Defence Committee, Minister of Defence and Deputy Chairman of the Central Military Commission of New China, as well as Mao Zedong's designated successor during the Cultural Revolution, personally gave the order for a counter-revolutionary armed revolt, in a vain attempt on Mao Zedong's life. The plot was exposed, and on 13 September he boarded a plane, fled the country, and died when his plane crashed in Öndörhaan in the Mongolian People's Republic. This incident became known as the Nine-Thirteen Incident. On 20 August 1973, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a resolution expelling him posthumously from the Party. On 25 January 1981, at a special sitting of the High Court of the People's Republic of China, he was declared the main criminal of a counter-revolutionary clique. The old feudal sense of punishment in which the criminal's entire family paid the penalty for one person's crimes, which I mentioned earlier as having permeated Chinese history to the bone, appeared once again after the Nine-Thirteen Incident in a particularly virulent form. According to those records that have been made public, over a thousand major leaders in the Chinese Army were purged or implicated, including the Chief of Staff and First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Chengdu military area, the Commissar of the Fuzhou military area, the Commissar of the Wuhan military area, the Chief of Staff of the Xinjiang military area, and the Commissar of the Jiangxi military area, to name but a few.*7 Some say that over three hundred thousand people were implicated in Lin Biao's crimes, and I do not believe that this is a random figure. In fact, even soldiers like Yishujia's husband who were only serving in local units under their command were exiled to poverty-stricken areas, and the families of soldiers in those units all had to bear a black mark on their record and all that this entailed because of it.
*
XINRAN: So do you still remember the scene when you got married?
YISHUJIA: At that time we didn't know anything, we just arranged with the Party to register our marriage, it wasn't a romantic wedding, not like nowadays. We got a letter from his army unit first, then we got the authorisation from my troupe, then after we'd registered, it was the custom here in the north to hold a banquet, so colleagues I was friendly with came in twos or threes on their bikes to our new flat for a wedding feast. And that was our wedding.
XINRAN: What did you wear that day?
YISHUJIA: I wore a blue Western-style suit, blue trousers and a blue top, that was very fashionable in those days.
XINRAN: After you married, did you quarrel much with your husband?
YISHUJIA: Yes.
XINRAN: Who won?
YISHUJIA: We quarrelled right up until my husband died, and neither of us could master the other, or give in to the other.
XINRAN: You've been outside China, you've seen the so-called English gentlemen, and men in other countries too, what do you think are the differences between Chinese men and Western men?
YISHUJIA: I haven't really had any contact with Western men. But I feel like I can see into Chinese men's hearts: no matter how well educated he is, or how smooth his tongue, we can see exactly what kind of man he is. But who can say for sure what's going on in the heads of those men who grew up eating bread?
XINRAN: Do you hope your son will become a man like those foreigners? Or retain his Chinese self?
YISHUJIA: Somewhere in between, I think, but not too Westernised. I still feel more comfortable with Chinese men.
XINRAN: In your life, have you met the perfect Chinese man, a true paragon?
YISHUJIA: Not yet, perhaps he only exists in my imagination.
XINRAN: You haven't met one yet? Not to this day? Including your husband?
YISHUJIA: When my husband got old I thought he was all right, but when he was young he wasn't any good. It was his smoking and drinking, I don't know how many times we fought over that. And then in the end he got cancer, I didn't try to talk him out of it then, but he changed anyway.
XINRAN: When you quarrelled about this, what did he say?
YISHUJIA: He knew it was wrong too. But he couldn't control himself, he just kept drinking and drinking, and then he had too much.
XINRAN: You didn't do like many wives do, running to the banquet and tipping over the tables?
YISHUJIA: I didn't, but I really wanted to! One time I made up my mind that if he was going to smoke I would smoke too, if he drank so would I. But I never managed to bring him round, so I gave up, I couldn't take any more. I even used to have dreams about making him cut down! I tried everything, nothing worked, it really hurt my feelings.
XINRAN: What do you think was the time when you were closest?
YISHUJIA: When we were courting. Once we were married and the child came along, things didn't go so well.
XINRAN: How did you fight?
YISHUJIA: I was both working and busy with the child, I was dog-tired, he didn't know how to help me with the work when he came home. So at that time I felt that there was no affinity between us, not like before we were married, I felt bitter inside.
XINRAN: Did you ever speak to your husband about this?
YISHUJIA: No, we never discussed it. Later on he retired, and so did I, and I felt everything was going swimmingly, and then before we'd had a year, he got cancer . . .
XINRAN: Have you talked to your son about these things?
YISHUJIA: Well, I've mentioned it. Sometimes he and his girlfriend quarrel and I tell him: When your father and I were courting, we never quarrelled, never fought, it was only later on when we had you that we fought; if you argue all day long while you're courting, what will your life be like when you're married?
XINRAN: When he was on his deathbed, did your husband have any last wishes?
YISHUJIA: He didn't say anything, I was the one doing the talking. He was just showing me that in the last days of his life he was prepared to listen to me.
*
Teacher Yi had once again come to a place of pain, and again she could not prevent her tears from falling. When I saw her tears, I wondered why people who are in the prime of life never have the time to connect with their feelings. Are they so busy with their craving for material things, fame and wealth and vanity that they have no time for each other? Could it really be that only death awakes a person's real self?
*
XINRAN: Before you had a child, did you want a boy or a girl?
YISHUJIA: A boy.
XINRAN: Why?
YISHUJIA: I thought a boy meant strength, a good reputation, the roots of the family. I know you'll tell me that's an old-fashioned, feudal notion.
XINRAN: So now your son is old enough to start a family of his own, do you hope he'll have a son or a daughter?
YISHUJIA: My ideas are more liberated now, either a boy or a girl would be fine.
XINRAN: Really?
YISHUJIA: Really, from the heart.
XINRAN: In our society many people say that their grandparents' generation was ignorant and foolish, and their parents' generation was foolishly loyal. How do you see this?
YISHUJIA: I don't see it that way. Young people take exception to the old, the old disapprove of the young, this is quite normal.
XINRAN: Back in your day, did you approve of your parents?
YISHUJIA: Not always. For example, once my mother saw that I had a new top, so she asked: Where'd you get that? I didn't dare say I'd bought it myself, at that time I handed over all my money to the family, in fact my fiancé had bought me that top. When my mother found out she was very angry, she said to me: "Silly girl, you can't go around spending other people's money! Young people these days don't care about that, they're very free with money, even the money their parents sweated and bled to earn!"
XINRAN: In your day, relations between men and women were rather traditional, now they are relatively open. Which do you personally prefer, and why?
YISHUJIA: I think the two things should come together – too traditional feels too starchy and conservative, but being too open makes people uncomfortable. In our day, couples used to cross the road – he'd be stood on this side of the road, she'd be over there. And watching a film, couples would sit there, all prim and proper; when the film was over, one of them would leave first, then the other – they couldn't get close, they were afraid their colleagues would see! And now? It's actually a bit much, so liberated it's shameless, it's embarrassing to watch! If the feeling takes them, they just start gnawing away at each other, even on the street!
XINRAN: In your whole life, what do you think have been the three bitterest things and the three happiest things?
YISHUJIA: The three bitterest things? That would be when I was small and learning my art, and when I was very small and my father wasn't at home, and when I couldn't solve difficulties with my colleagues. The bitterness when I was small and at home was because my family had no money, we couldn't even afford soap, you had to wash clothes with a fistful of salt. And it used to be appallingly cold when we did our practice routines – there were no carpets in those days, just a concrete floor, so when you went down in the splits you had to stay spreadeagled there for ages without falling over, with all your weight on your legs for such a long time, and you couldn't rest, it was a bit much! Then again, people like me who are children of Reform through Labour convicts still want to better ourselves, just the same as anybody else! "Join the Communist Youth League? Who said you could join the Youth League?" I often found personal relationships with colleagues unspeakably bitter – they could really wear you down.
XINRAN: What were your three joys?
YISHUJIA: When my father's case was solved, it was as if a great mountain weighing down on me had disappeared; when I won a big national prize and was raised to a third-grade salary, I felt I hadn't spent all that energy for nothing; the third is when I became a National Level One Performer – at that moment I felt I'd accomplished most of my goals for this life.
XINRAN: Do you have any unfulfilled wishes?
YISHUJIA: To see my grandchild. They're all very practical things, I don't have any far-reaching ambitions.
XINRAN: What changes do you think there have been in China in the last twenty years?
YISHUJIA: That's too big a question! It's changing everywhere, everything's changing. Relationships were different when I was young. We were more innocent then, there were conflicts, but they were just small conflicts, not big ones. People these days, they're all trying to outwit each other, it's exhausting.
XINRAN: What do you think was the cause of this?
YISHUJIA: I think it was especially bad after the Cultural Revolution, it wasn't like that before! Now, people's ideas are confused, they've picked up bad habits of mind, and they don't even try to learn good habits, all they care about is money, they don't care about people. This will hold the whole country back.
XINRAN: Teacher Yishujia, do you regret your life?
YISHUJIA: I would have to say no. My father and mother gave me life, this is a part of nature, my life was hard and full of frustrations, but isn't that true for all Chinese?
XINRAN: If you had your time over again, would you follow the same path?
YISHUJIA: I wouldn't want to go over it again.
XINRAN: Why not?
YISHUJIA: I'd want to study properly, to go to school.
XINRAN: If someone were to ask you what kind of a person Teacher Yishujia is, what would you say?
YISHUJIA: I would say Yishujia is a plain, simple, diligent person. Just that.
XINRAN: Thousands and millions of Chinese sacrificed so much for the revolution, they threw themselves into it so wholeheartedly, without a thought for anything else, like when you were young, so naive. Do you think it was worth it?
YISHUJIA: In those times it was just another way of staying alive, it makes no difference whether it was worth it or not. At that time if you didn't behave like that you'd have nothing to eat, you couldn't survive. Some people say that it really wasn't worth it, but I think, what difference does it make? Everybody had to survive those years somehow.
*
I knew what Yishujia was implying by "Everybody had to survive those years somehow." This was a society that was still suffering from shock, but its life and spirit had not perished.
After the interview, Yishujia showed me some photographs of her "survival in that part of history". She chose three family photographs, saying: "My son isn't as handsome as his father. Can you see? He doesn't have his father's spirit." "The child doesn't have the spirit we did!" These words of regret are often to be heard among the elderly in China.
In order to express my thanks for Yishujia's cooperation with my interviews and her unforgettable lessons on how to read her "authentic Chinese" son, I invited her for a meal at a dumpling restaurant. During our meal, I asked Yishujia why she was pining over the son not having his father's spirit, and things being better in the old days. She replied: "Now young people think a lot, they have plenty of ideas, but they don't do that much, and succeed in even less. In my day we were very naive, we obeyed our parents at home, obeyed our leaders at work, everybody obeyed the Party and the Party obeyed Mao Zedong. Everyone had a sort of get-up-and-go about them, we were all like one big family, we might quarrel and fight, but they couldn't break us apart. At that time, it seemed that a man could do everything, mend bicycles, change light bulbs and switches, pull coal in a cart, even make some kinds of furniture." When she spoke of her son Hu, the pride in her voice was mixed with regret: "My son is a filial child, but he's too good-hearted. He's very quick at study, he learned magic, musical instruments and a few acrobatic tricks from me as a small boy; he could do anything he turned his hand to, and some he could do without being taught. He did very well in the city acrobatics troupe, but he was determined to go out and see the world, he didn't want a professional title, wages or a proper home, he was determined to go abroad to drift about, study and do manual labour, with no settled home. He's over thirty, but he still has no plans to find a proper job and start a family. I asked him why he has to live this strenuous life, and he said that he wanted to improve himself and see the real world, he really expressed himself very cleverly."
For Chinese who have barely "explored" their own country at all, it is easy to talk about seeing the real world, but very difficult to actually do it. All Chinese who can leave the country have a definite "reason", whether it is economic conditions, talent, scholarship, language ability or some other cause (often personal). Those who can go abroad simply to indulge a liking for travel are rare indeed.
To the vast majority of Chinese people who live in the countryside, the real, genuine "Chinese history and the world" takes the form of legends of the most fantastical type, whereas in the towns and cities it is found on the Internet, and also the superficial "world tour records" which reckon to cover a whole country in three days.
Whenever I came back to China I often visited bookshops of all sizes in many places, and I saw a good few "records of overseas travel". Some were written by "sea turtles" (a pun on the Chinese haigui, which can mean both "back from overseas" and "sea turtle") who had spent several years studying in the West. In all their wanderings, and all their years of student life, they had never managed to tear themselves away from Chinese food, or their Chinese-speaking circle of friends; they did all their research on Chinese websites, apart from their exam papers, which were written in English; they obtained their degrees while immersed in a Chinese sensory environment. Much of their descriptions of culture in these "tour records" seemed very much like the idea of Western folk culture you might find in children's stories, but this is enough to satisfy the hunger and thirst of Chinese readers for world culture, giving people who don't have the money or time a chance to get their own taste of a different world. In the same way, many children believe that their own mother's cooking is the best to be found anywhere, and almost every mother has made countless meals, but it is very rare to see a mother wearing the big white hat of a professional chef.
I too left China because I wanted to see the real world, a world that was moving out of history and towards today, a world that you could touch, a world that had not been coloured by politics.
But will we see a greater number of young Chinese like Yishujia's son Hu, with both the courage and will to look at the real world, and who can survive and flourish on their Chinese roots? It takes more than sketching a few big characters with a calligraphy brush, or hanging a landscape painting or two on the wall, or putting up a few images of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, or eating Chinese food every day, or a few games of mah-jong a week, to make a Chinese who is still in touch with his or her roots.