What the Chinese Don't Eat (13 page)

I could see my husband had completely given up on trying to hear anything, he was just enjoying his food. My son couldn’t keep his eyes off the Chinese Christmas dresses. I felt so dizzy from all the moving colours. I needed more than a few days to recover from this rich feeling of overkill. But only the next morning a Chinese Father Christmas gave my 60-year-old husband a lot of sweets at breakfast.

‘This is unfair!’ a friend of mine shouted when she heard this story. ‘In a restaurant in ChongQing, a city of 30 million people, Father Christmas came up to my son, who is just four years old, and presented him with the bill in a very big colourful bag – no sweets at all!’

In 1976 an earthquake in China caused double the death toll of the tsunami. But no one talks of that

I was cooking in the kitchen on Boxing Day when my son PanPan ran over: ‘Ten thousand people have died in a tsunami!’ I could hardly believe it, and when I saw the aftermath of the disaster on television, I was shocked beyond belief: 10,000 lives swept away in a matter of seconds by a series of vast waves. Over the days, the death toll crept up to 150,000 and is still rising. Towns and villages were wiped off the map, entire communities swept away, and millions made homeless, then threatened by disease. I was deeply hurt as I saw children crying, orphaned by the disaster.

The word earthquake had reminded me of the one in Tang Shan – an industrial city near Beijing. That earthquake claimed up to 300,000 lives on a July morning in 1976, but how many people around the world knew? The question remains unanswered, but the event is still crystal clear in my mind.

One survivor once described to me the 14 days of misery that she had endured, watching helplessly as her daughter died in front of her. At 4am, Mrs Yang was woken by an earthquake so powerful it broke her apartment in half. She was lucky to have been in the safer half, but her young daughter had been in the other and had fallen four storeys into the rubble.

She made it down the collapsing stairs and began a search for her daughter. Amid the noise of chaos, the woman heard her daughter’s cry – the lower half of her body was sandwiched between two reinforced-concrete slabs. Her husband had died a year before, her daughter was all she had, and she was not going to let go.

She tried hard and onlookers helped, but the task of lifting concrete was no job for bare hands. So they waited and waited until the soldiers arrived, but they could not do anything either, as they did not have the necessary equipment as the roads into the city had been destroyed.

All they could do was give the girl water and some food. And so they waited. They waited until more and more people gathered to sympathise, until her daughter’s voice became more and more frail, until her mother’s heart was torn to pieces. For 14 days and 14 nights, her mother stood by her, until the little girl gave up her last breath. For Mrs Yang, the grief was too much to bear.

But that was just one sorrowful story in the whole of Tang Shan. Anyone who has been there would have heard about how the earthquake showed mercy only to a few buildings left standing, how the rest collapsed, swallowing their inhabitants with them. Deep cracks in the earth jolted open, sleeping people fell into the rubble. Roads contorted, the city became inaccessible, aid could not get in. Soldiers and survivors dug with their hands to rescue the dying; people kept scrabbling at the debris even when their hands were gloved in blood, but only those near the surface were fortunate enough to be rescued.

Days went by and the trapped perished in their thousands, either crushed by the weight of the rubble or dying of starvation. It became increasingly important to dispose of the bodies, so soldiers were ordered to douse everything – bodies and debris – with petrol and burn it, in order to eliminate the threat of disease. But the mental damage was phenomenal. The soldiers involved, whom I interviewed in 1995, were still haunted by those memories after almost 20 years.

No one I have met in the west has ever mentioned the disaster of 1976. The Chinese government tried hard to conceal
the event, thinking it could ‘manage it on our own’ and wanting to show the rest of the world that China was stronger than they imagined. That thought cost lives. At a point when every hand available was needed to help those people, China turned down the offer of international aid that might have saved so many more lives.

Money repaired the destruction caused, and the population was restored in a few generations, but even after 20 years when I interviewed some of the survivors, the memories of the earthquake were still there, and may never leave those mentally tormented minds.

Could we do more than giving international aid to the Asian survivors? Yes, they need the support for their hearts to keep them going for the years to come.

Receiving a handwritten card in this age of computers is one of the great pleasures in life

More than a month has passed and some of my friends still haven’t recovered from their exhausting Christmas work: writing dozens, or even hundreds, of cards (and always regretting it when someone is missed off the list), carrying heavy shopping bags, gift-wrapping, storing and preparing enough food to keep a big family going for at least three days, cleaning the house, digging out fresh ideas for the party; and all without the help of nannies and cleaners, who have gone on their Christmas break.

As a Chinese person living in the west, it is very simple for me to get away from such festivals, because the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter, just as the west doesn’t have Spring and Middle-Autumn Moon festivals. But there is one thing at which we are much busier than westerners – writing cards for all those festivals. Last year I decided to store all the cards so that I could see and record all the differences in culture and language – and people’s personalities as well.

On the last day of 2004 I counted up all the festival cards I had received during the year. I found that 273 were from westerners and 169 from Chinese. Most of the cards from westerners were similar: names and signatures with printed greetings on high-quality paper. Only about 30 have some handwritten scribble that is hard to read (on one of them I had to spend more than three minutes reading one sentence) and seven also contained family letters. Chinese cards are much more varied in quality and languages
– English, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, and even some that were a mixture of three or more languages. But I could read their 10 sentences in three seconds.

My son asked me: ‘Which is the best card you received in 2004?’

I didn’t take a second to answer. ‘Shenshen’s Christmas card.’

Shenshen is studying theatre production and playwriting at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the director of a show called
China Chopsticks
and works as a volunteer for the charity The Mothers’ Bridge of Love (MBL). I was, and still am, touched by her Christmas card in four colours.

‘I have nothing to give you as a material gift; I would like to write a letter to you in my handwriting as a present from my heart. As a poor student, this is the best way to get on with this expensive festival and with the one I respect and love.’

The first page is green. She told me why she likes green – it represents peace, life, creativity and her mother’s character, all her supports in her lonely life in this strange country. The second page is orange, and she tells me how she is inspired and energised by love, warmth, westerners and MBL. The third is yellow, which gives Shenshen an impression of wisdom and her interests in the daily life of the very different cultures that she encounters: sometimes she can’t help herself speaking Chinese to her non-Chinese classmates. On the last page, purple, there are a few greetings, with Shenshen’s name written in calligraphy.

I always respect handwritten letters, and admire people who spend time writing to their family and friends on paper, in this age of uniform computer writing. I miss that time. I would like to read letters as if I touched the writers’ hands and saw their personalities through their writing – they are never the same, as everyone is different in your life.

I don’t know many Chinese mothers and children who spend
time writing to each other instead of talking on their mobile phones. Oh yes, I know emails have become a part of family conversation. But I am quite sure many mothers would still love to open their children’s letters and cards and read handwritten words, even if some of them were damaged by rain or the author’s tea or coffee.

My son, who writes to me every week in Chinese handwriting, quietly heard Shenshen’s story while I was doing my Christmas cooking, then said: ‘Should I do one year’s washing-up at home, mum, as a Christmas present for you?’

‘Yes! No, wait, you are in boarding school and travel all the time on your holidays, don’t you?’

At Christmas, I got a card in his very good Chinese handwriting: ‘Little money, big love, to Chinese children from PanPan,’ with a £20 donation from his savings to MBL. And he had been doing washing-up all the time, as always.

Victorious Egg Festival, Sexual Hooligans’ Day? It was once hard to understand western festivals

In November 1989, my radio station had a directors’ meeting to discuss which western festivals we could mention on air. The meeting was held by a director in his 50s who had become a news broadcaster at the age of 15, as he had been one of the few people who could speak Mandarin in the early 1950s when the station started out in Henan. At that time, most people knew only their own local dialect.

The first festival we discussed was Christmas, which in Chinese sounds like ‘Victorious – Egg – Festival’. ‘What does that mean? Victorious Idiot Festival? Or just use some eggs for a victory?’ the senior director asked when he heard this word. We all laughed. In Chinese, any adjective plus the word egg means an idiot.

His anger quickly shut us up. ‘Why are you all so happy to hear about western capitalist culture? This is a defeat for China. Should we laugh at losing our revolution? Are you crazy? Improvement is not about changing our communism into capitalism. Open policy is not about opening up to our enemy. Have you ever thought which side you are on? Have you forgotten our duty as a political tool? What we are doing is helping people to get more knowledge of the rest of the world … so that we can unite all the poor people in the world against bloody capitalists … Not give up our principles and duties.’

No one dared to laugh again. We never dreamed of saying no to a political leader, even one who was uneducated and lacking any knowledge of the outside world. We had all been formed
into the same shape and colour – and political view – because we had been brought up with political propaganda. Everyone working in the media knew that rows could cause trouble: if you were lucky, you and your team would have your pay cut and the incident recorded in your personal file, which stays with you for life; otherwise, you could be sent to prison as an antirevolutionary.

Therefore, the biggest western festival, Christmas, was struck from our radio station’s ‘open policy’. (By the time I left, in 1997, Christmas still had not been discussed on air.) The next festival to be brought up was Valentine’s Day – ‘Lovers’ Day’ in Chinese. ‘You see why we say western society is rubbish. They are not only allowed love affairs but also give those sexual hooligans a date to celebrate. They should be sent to prison as they are here in China,’ said the senior director.

Good Friday. We didn’t know what to say about this religious holiday, so passed on. Easter in Chinese is pronounced ‘God Resurrecting Festival’. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No way. Our great leader Chairman Mao hasn’t risen again. How could we tell people that the western God has?’

He thought it was unfair that Mothers’ Day came earlier in the year than Fathers’ Day. ‘Why is the west still such a matriarchal society, despite its development? OK, admittedly Chairman Mao said, “Women make up half the sky”. So let Mothers’ Day be … but don’t make too much of it. Xinran’s late-night programme should be enough. The important thing is that Mothers’ Day shouldn’t be made a bigger thing than Fathers’ Day.’

Someone described Halloween as ‘the day before All Saints’ Day in the Christian calendar, when, according to tradition, you can expect to see ghosts and witches wandering about’. Our director sat looking at the ceiling, not saying a word. We all
thought Halloween would be frowned on. No superstition allowed. The next day he came into my office and said: ‘Xinran, you have read a lot. Is it true westerners can see ghosts and witches? My mother told me she had seen them as well. You won’t let other people know what I just said, will you?’

After a while he spoke again. ‘How different we are to the west. Why so different? If their God can be born again, why not Chairman Mao?’ Before he left, he told me he was going to borrow the only book at our radio station about western religions. Then he walked out, asking: ‘Why do they name a festival after a victorious idiot?’

Fifteen Christmases have passed since then. Even people like me who have experienced the Cultural Revolution can hardly believe how Chinese lives have changed. ‘Sexual Hooligans’ Day’ – or Valentine’s Day – has become popular. I can’t imagine how my old director, now in his 70s, is coping with the great speed with which China is changing.

The west ruined our self-confidence years ago. Now, finally, we’re getting it back

I can’t tell you how happy I was – and still am – after leaving the Chinese embassy in London last week. The long queue, which snaked along the street and was full of people with different colour hair and eyes, reminded me of queuing in Beijing for a British visa back in 1997.

We – who all wanted to have a look at the world outside China for various reasons – were nervous, ignorant and frightened: none of us had ever been abroad, some had never even travelled within China. We hardly knew what the differences were between Britain and China, we knew nothing of Britain’s religions, law, or social system, just that it was an ‘old, dying capitalist country’ built on centuries of plundering and the slave trade.