What the Chinese Don't Eat (14 page)

We were so scared by what the ‘advisers’ and ‘immigration agents’ had to say. They told us that the British never believe the Chinese, that they would test us with many difficult questions in English, they would call our work unit and check out every single part of our application documents. If just one person said ‘don’t know’ when they were called up that could be recorded as a black mark on your personal file – which, since 1949, the government had kept on every member of the Chinese population. Then you would never be able to go abroad.

We viewed the world through our Chinese understanding. But, yes, we still wanted to take the risks because we thought we could have more career opportunities with a British degree or training. Most of us had done quite well in China, and were looking for new challenges in the west.

Eventually, I got in to the British embassy visa office: the waiting room was full of smartly dressed Chinese – who believed expensive clothes would show they were educated. Everybody was carrying huge files stuffed with endless certificates. They thought that the British officials valued membership of the communist party and party prizes as a mark of good judgment in China. Young people were madly practising their English.

The receptionist’s cold voice called out numbers and warned people not to talk. I felt like a guilty woman awaiting sentence. My pride and confidence plummeted. I saw another empty room through a big window, where there were comfortable chairs and fewer people – westerners were talking and laughing there, neither nervous nor frightened. And no cold voice stopped their noisy chat.

I did not feel uncomfortable with what I saw as I was used to being made to think that ‘foreigners were respectable’. I think that might stem from the Opium War in 1840 when westerners knocked down China’s door with arms and opium, burning down our spirit and self-confidence. Even the Cultural Revolution, when we were taught that every western capitalist could be a spy, failed to dim that notion of foreign supremacy.

One woman I interviewed in China had been in jail for nine and half years: she had been arrested in 1969 for catching a thief – a foreigner – on a Beijing bus. At the police station she was asked: ‘Why do you slander our foreign comrade? The people who come from capitalist countries do bad things in China as spies and thieves; this man comes from a socialist country. What you have done could damage our friendship.’

The poor woman, who had had her purse stolen, was then put into prison for ‘attempting to destroy China’s great image abroad’. After the 1980s, the west became God-like to many Chinese because of westerners’ wealth, and freedom to do what
they want. This is why I never dreamed that Chinese should take priority anywhere. But I felt it was really unfair that I, a Chinese passport-holder, had to queue with foreigners at our own embassy. After all, most nationals have preferential treatment in their home embassies.

Last week, I could not and did not believe the sign on the wall: Chinese passport-holders can go to window 5 without queuing. Not until I heard a warm voice say: ‘Please come to window number 5 if you are a Chinese passport-holder.’

Oh, thank you, Chinese embassy, you have made me feel better to be Chinese. I could see admiration in the eyes of those queueing in the Chinese visa office. Chinese people really need that after years and years of living with humiliation and discrimination.

The gap between western and Chinese paintings is as vast as that between the two cultures

My husband loves art and has tried very hard to improve me. He likes to show me how one can understand what it is to be poor from viewing Celso Lagar’s ‘A Traveling Circle’ and that women can comprehend the feeling of wartime defeat from Lotte Laserstien’s ‘After War’. He buys books, visits galleries and hangs artworks on every wall in our flat. However, I remain just as ignorant of western art works. I don’t like to be overwhelmed by the details in western drawing and the western fullness of colour. I want to be allowed to imagine and experience the artists’ feeling and thoughts in my own way, guided by the simple lines, economic use of colour and empty spaces in Chinese and Japanese paintings.

I want to share more with my husband, so I called our friend Lei Lei, a Chinese artist, who understands the painting of both our cultures and explores the differences in his work.

‘Come to our house, we could talk about this during a meal, I will cook for you.’ He spoke with the tone of a demanding Chinese man, but a man cooking for women is a western cultural phenomenon.

Lei Lei’s house could be described as a gallery or an artist’s workshop, but it is also a place full of Chinese culture. He welcomed us with western kisses and hugs, his wife Caroline appeared like a Chinese wife with apron and wet hands from the kitchen.

While Lei Lei cooked, he gave me my first art lesson. His knowledge was steeped in ancient Chinese philosophy – the
root of Chinese art – but my level of knowledge was too poor to understand everything. As a naughty student would, I decided to go to the bathroom. The walls along the stairs were full of paintings. I liked almost every one. I realised that the ones I thought were Chinese were painted by Caroline, and others, which seemed clearly western, were by Lei Lei. How could Caroline understand Chinese culture so well and how could Lei Lei so successfully influence his western wife? This is exactly what Toby and I wanted to learn from them. This was much more important than all that academic knowledge.

On my return, the lesson changed to women’s studies. Caroline told me the following story in Chinese: ‘It was years ago, about 1990, when I came back from China. My feeling was that I had had enough of it. I felt the need to be truly English and reconnect with my own identity. It was about then that Lei Lei came into my life and it was almost as if I was punishing him for the hardships I had endured. For instance, he spoke in English most of the time when he could easily have spoken Chinese. In his quest to win my heart, he invited me and some old friends around for supper.

‘When I arrived, he said to me: “I want you to serve the rice!” His voice was insistent. I shrugged and said it was fine. “I also want you to pour the tea,” he added, in a similar commanding way. Throughout the meal I did as he asked. I spooned out the rice, I poured the tea and as I did so he paused in his conversation to check that his friends had noticed. I felt self-conscious. I noticed that every time I performed these tasks he rapped his knuckles on the table – as if reproaching me or demanding that I hurry up. As his guests went, I picked up my coat to leave myself. Lei Lei looked at me: “What’s the matter?” I almost cried. “I am not your slave!”

‘“I need to tell you a story,” he said calmly. “Hundreds of
years ago there lived an emperor who was extremely good at chess. It seemed that no one was as good until one day a peasant was found who matched the emperor in ability, so the emperor could never get bored. There rose a small dilemma though, when both players would need to break for a meal or tea. If anyone dined with the emperor, no matter how informal the meal, they had to kowtow to him 100 times. This became extremely time-consuming and irritating. So the emperor came up with the idea of the peasant placing his index finger and the one adjacent to it on the table and rapping – like rapping one’s fingers on the table as if you were demanding something in a restaurant in an extremely rude way.”

‘It transpired that by rapping on the table, Lei Lei was kowtowing to me 100 times. I never did discover the significance of my serving the rice and pouring the tea. But I have learned that however occasionally frustrating and confining it is to be with him I will never get bored.’

How to bridge the gulf between Chinese and western painting

I asked my artist friend Lei Lei if there was a story that could explain the difference between western and Chinese painting. He gave me two. The first happened about 1,600 years ago, when the great artist Gu Kaizhi created ‘The Picture of the Ode to Goddess Luo’. He brought the idea of Chinese spiritualism to art, where the inner emotion is revealed through figuration.

The painting referred to the great war of 200AD when China was on the verge of being divided up. Cao Cao had north China under his control. He had two sons: Pi, his arrogant and domineering older son, later became emperor; Zhi, the younger son, made his name as a gifted poet and scholar. Though Zhi never showed any interest in politics, Pi was always suspicious of him, looking for excuses to kill him.

The heroine of the story, Lady Zhen Luo, was the daughter-in-law of Cao’s enemy. She was a legendary beauty and all three men in Cao’s family fell in love with her. According to Luo, only one man deserved her favour: Zhi. However life laughs at people’s expectations. After Cao won the war, Pi rushed into the enemy’s palace, and kidnapped Luo. Luo was forced to marry Pi but died soon after. For Zhi, it was bad enough having his beloved become his sister-in-law, but then he was parted from her for ever. In this inconsolable pain, he created the ‘Ode to Goddess Luo’.

The Ode was about a dream in which he met the Goddess of Luo River (the incarnation of Zhen Luo). They fell in love and had a magical time together. When morning came, the
goddess reluctantly had to leave. Astride her dragon, she turned back and waved again and again, sad and dolorous.

Gu Kaizhi’s painting was based on Zhi’s Ode and emphasises the unspeakable plaintiveness between the lovers, especially in their eyes. This plays on the viewer’s knowledge of literary anecdote. The idea of ‘conveying the spirit’ then became a principle in Chinese art and has been constantly developed and enriched by generations of painters.

The second story is about the man who brought western painting to China. Castiglione, 1688–1766, a Jesuit missionary and a good painter, entered China in 1715. His work was influenced by baroque art and chiaroscuro. He was made a court painter and later took part in designing Yuan Ming palace – the unmatchable palace that was ransacked and burned down by the British and French coalition troops in 1860, leaving just a few ruins on some desolate land outside Beijing.

When Castiglione painted the emperor’s portrait, the emperor asked him: ‘How come my face is half light, half dark?’ Chinese painting never depicts the sun, nor shadows. Chinese started to draw the link 3,000 years ago between the sun and the son of heaven – the emperor. When they couldn’t bear the emperor’s harsh repression any longer, they cursed the sun.

Castiglione soon learned from Chinese art how to use lines and rhythm. Combining western figuration with Chinese spirit, he created a new style of painting. If it had been a Chinese artist who had painted the emperor’s face half black, half white, he would have lost his job, if not his head.

When Chinese art meets western culture, an inner world is revealed

After all my artist friend Lei Lei’s stories of painting and art, I asked him whether he had worked out how to mix western and Chinese culture together in his paintings. As his answer, he took me to look at his work for a new exhibition.

They are a series of giant faces. You could describe them as large portraits, but I think they’re setting out to go beyond the portrait into a larger, unified piece of art. Each piece will not only portray the face, brilliantly drawn in Chinese ink on rice paper (this is extraordinarily hard to do since you cannot rub out, or erase, or change the ink once it has been applied. It’s much harder than oil painting or pastels. I tried once before: the ink ran away everywhere – where I didn’t want – and the tablecloth was completely destroyed. And what did I paint? A flower that looked just like a broken umbrella!), it will also contain a message from the sitter about what visitors to the exhibition can learn from their lives.

The whole art work is modelled in the Chinese style, which is extremely ancient in its origins. The faces will also be emerging from a window of larger papers in front of a collage. I felt that Lei Lei had talked with those faces, those sitters, a lot, otherwise I couldn’t imagine how he could draw them in so much detail and be so touched by their souls.

The idea that everyone’s life is of value is significant, he said. Things aren’t always how they seem. For instance, the woman in the chip shop probably lived through the world war. She may have lost a child. She may have found a child. I could see that
Lei Lei’s explanation of his many points could run well into the early hours of the morning. I believe that woman is more aware of time than man: Caroline [Lei Lei’s wife] mentioned that it was midnight already.

Before we said goodbye, I asked her about Lei Lei’s exhibition. She is so proud of it and said: ‘Finally, and far from least in importance, is the idea of combining ancient and modern concepts and ideas. In the ancient traditional Chinese markings – the writing on the image, and also at times calligraphy, and maybe at times the whole idea that everyone’s life is an epic – this can be seen. I’m sure there must be some philosopher who came up with that one, or is it original?

‘A last special thing that I think I like is that all the faces look as though they are peering through a giant door or window. The giant door or window is probably abstract and full of tensions, pulling our vision forwards and backwards and at the same time with the face itself. This blend of abstract with figurative is, I think, the last point of interest as well.’

Honestly, I have no idea how much I understand from a lesson of a few hours. From what Lei Lei has taught me, ‘conveying the spirit’ or ‘spirit visualisation’ means to reveal the inner emotion and hidden implication through ways of figuration; and combining the western figuration with Chinese taste and spirit. From Chinese paintings we can learn how to use lines and pay attention to their rhythm and charm, something that gradually created a new style of painting by Castiglione.

Certainly, I know that Chinese painters could not only use white, grey and black to draw colourful seasons, but also use very simple lines to inspire the imagination, so that different people could get different impressions from the same painting. It is a form of ‘demarcated art’ for everybody. Western paintings
are much more ‘official’ – the light, colour and line, every detail has been dictated by careful drawing.