China Witness (23 page)

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.