Quite why the author opts to concentrate on the agony caused by the Cultural Revolution in Yunnan rather than anywhere else is unclear. Obviously an event lasting 10 years and spawning many different kinds of writing in China — “scar literature,” “search-for-roots literature” and so on — couldn’t be treated complete. Yunnan had the advantage of being the location for Dai Sijie’s (戴思杰) novel and subsequent film Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (小裁縫) and Chen Kaige’s (陳凱歌) film King of the Children (孩子王). This is probably the least rewarding chapter in the book, but then the Cultural Revolution can hardly be said to have received inadequate coverage elsewhere.
The inclusion of Hong Kong’s handover appears problematic, but the author is well aware of this. What he points out is that it was an example of an event widely predicted as likely to be apocalyptic that turned out, on the surface anyway, as nothing of the sort. China’s experience of pain, in other words, which had almost become routine, led to vividly imagined expectations of a recurrence. It didn’t happen as anticipated, but the books and films were written and made in advance nonetheless.
Berry calls this phenomenon “anticipatory trauma,” but does point out that the emigration from the territory that took place before 1997 was real enough. This was representative of the mass movements of people that have often accompanied China’s recent convolutions — emigration, and student applications for asylum in the countries where they found themselves, after the Tiananmen Square events of 1989 being another example.
One of the characteristics of these traumatic events, Berry argues, is that they are disputed. Beijing disputes Tiananmen and Tokyo disputes the numerically far more terrible massacre of Nanjing. This is, of course, part and parcel of social groups wanting to control the representation of past events — how they are seen, how they are remembered and, particularly, how they are understood.
“Modern China’s trajectory has been one of discontinuity, displacement, social unrest, and historical trauma,” writes Berry. Taiwan has certainly been fortunate by comparison, though not without its own awesomely dark interludes. Despite the heady, bloodless early days of the French and Russian revolutions, happiness can be said to abide in times where almost nothing important (in a political sense) actually happens.
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