Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic

by LORD, BETTE BAO

• ISBN13: 9780449906200
• ISBN10: 0449906205
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-07-20
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

Urgent and timeless, Legacies brings us closer than we have ever been to penetrating the great conundrum of China m the twentieth century. It could only have been written by Bette Bao Lord -- born in China, raised in America, author of the bestselling novel Spring Moon, wife of a former American ambassador to China, resident in Beijing during the "China Spring" of 1989. Lord's unique web of relationships and her sensitive insight have enabled her to observe Chinese life both high and low, Communist and dissident, intellectual and ordinary. Lord interweaves her own story, and that of her clansmen, with the voices of men and women who recall the tumultuous experience of the last fifty years, and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. In precise, subtle prose, Lord explores the reality of Red Guards and reeducation camps, of friends and families severed by political disgrace, and captures the individual voices of those caught up in them: the seven-year-old girl with a heart full of hate for her father; the journalist whose girlfriend believes the Party newspapers, not him; the imprisoned scholar who hid his writings in his quilt for years; the anti-revolutionary who tells his bitter story in a vein of high farce. All bear heartbreaking witness to the surreal quality of Chinese society today -- and to the astonishing resilience, humor, and heroic equanimity of the Chinese spirit.

Table of Contents

Bette Bao Lord's Clansmen	p. xi
Chronology	p. xii
Transitions	p. 3
Black Armbands, Red Armbands	p. 16
The Actress	p. 31
The Scholar	p. 44
The Joker	p. 60
The Long Marcher	p. 70
The Returned Student	p. 84
The Brick	p. 107
The Journalist	p. 120
The Peasant	p. 131
The Entrepreneur	p. 140
The Petitioner	p. 152
The White Dog	p. 163
The Cadre	p. 175
The Catcher	p. 188
Portraits	p. 201
Departures	p. 210
Lifelines	p. 219
The Vermilion Kite	p. 229
The Refrain	p. 232
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Transitions SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1989 ... Hu Yaobang, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, dies. A dear friend who, as I write, is in a Chinese prison once told me this tale: For want of something to do, a prisoner gleaned from the sweepings of the shop floor tiny bits of glittering wire, which he deposited in a bottle. Years passed. On the day he was freed, there was nothing to take with him to mark the passage of those years except the bottle, and so he carried it away. Back home, he rose and he ate and he slept at the exact hours the warden had decreed. Too old to work anymore, he spent his days pacing, the exact space of his long confinement--four paces forward, four paces back, four paces forward, four paces back. For want of something to do, one day he smashed the bottle to count how many tiny bits of glittering wire he had collected. He wept. At his feet lay broken glass, and a clump of wires rusted solid in the shape of a bottle. I was ready to leave Beijing. My life, after a stay of three and a half years as the wife of America's ambassador to the People's Republic, had become all too much like China, full of contradictions. I worked and did not work. I had changed and I was the same. I had scores of good friends and none at all. I was celebrated and I was suspect. I was an equal partner and not even on the team. I was an insider and an outsider. I was at home and I was exiled. I had never been happier, nor had I been as sad. Before the bits of my China passage fused beyond examination or shaped me irrevocably, I had to piece together the puzzle. I could not hope to do it in China, where unending activities were routine, where every Chinese had lived a life that tempted me to write a book, where my own life had become too complex and too difficult. I needed solitude and space. I needed to return to America. My husband, Winston, for his own compelling reasons, had decided the previous summer that he would be resigning as ambassador, though he would remain in the post until a successor had been appointed by the new president, whoever that might be. On the afternoon of the fifteenth of April, 1989, amidst the preparations for our party to bid farewell to our personal friends, the office called to announce the death of Hu Yaobang. Winston had met the former party secretary, at an intimate dinner in Zhongnanhai, the sanctum where China's revolutionary leaders live like royalty behind high garden walls. I had not. Out of power since 1987, when he was formally removed from the Party's top post by Deng Xiaoping at the urging of the conservatives, Hu Yaobang was that rarity among Chinese leaders--he was himself. He departed from the text. He succumbed to emotions. He was interested and interesting. A tiny man, shorter even than his mentor Deng, he literally and figuratively seemed to jump about. Sometimes he teetered on the giddy--as when, in the pursuit of hygiene, he advocated that the Chinese chuck their chopsticks and use forks instead. Sometimes he charged into forbidden zones--as when, in the pursuit of rectitude, he attacked corruption at the pinnacle of the Party. These qualities both endeared him to and alienated him from Chinese, one and the same Chinese. Since the reforms had begun, a decade before, Chinese had been, if anything, ambivalent. They were disgusted by the righteous masks that officials wore to hide their human face, yet they were used to having their leaders look a certain way. From the reign of the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, to the supremacy of Mao, the correct demeanor had been remote, rigid and reticent. These were hardly adjectives to describe Hu. Knowing of Chinese ambivalence, I did not expect his departure to affect our party that evening or China that spring. I had forgotten that death prettifies. True in any culture, this is especially true in a culture rooted in Confucianism, wh