This is an exceedingly engaging book, with far more detail than it’s possible to indicate here. The past and the present leap out with equal vividness because Becker combines library research with a good deal of oral history — seeking out individuals who remember things and writing down what they tell him. He finds, for instance, the wife of the famous architectural historian Liang Sicheng (梁思成) who, at Qinghua University, was severely persecuted by Red Guards. She shows him where the guard factions fought and where Jiang Qing (江青) addressed the crowds.
In his greatest coup, he tracks down the man who was almost certainly the last surviving imperial eunuch, aged 96 when Becker talked to him 12 years ago. He’d arrived in the Forbidden City in the last days of the Qing Dynasty, but had nevertheless been retained right up until the final expulsion of the eunuchs in 1924. Lean and unshaven, he bore little resemblance, Becker writes, to the “grossly fat, vain peacocks with rouged and powdered faces who cackle their way so prominently through Chinese literature.” But the old man’s memory was too poor for him to be able to tell the author much. Becker gives lurid details of the castration process, but whether they come from the man himself or from independent research is unclear.
There are times when Taiwan is tacitly evoked, at least in the mind of a reader living here. You’re reminded, for instance, of the proliferation of Taiwanese fortune-tellers and geomancers when Becker writes about the Chinese Communist Party’s prohibition of such things in his chapter on calendars ancient and modern.
The obliteration of old festivals and the destruction of former sacred sites tolls like a death-knell throughout the book, but here it’s especially intense. He cites Robespierre’s abolition of both Christian festivals and the old calendar during the French Revolution, and both of course have now returned to France. But this particular chapter ends with the eruption of Falun Gong in 1999. There is no question at present of such believers being given any tolerance whatsoever. But they represent a force of irrationalism that, Becker considers, could erupt and call into question everything that modern Beijing appears to represent, and at virtually any moment.
RSS