Here we go again -- yet another book about the horrors of China's Cultural Revolution, and the delights of a new life in North America.
There's nothing wrong with A Leaf in the Bitter Wind. In fact, it's a vivid and apparently honest account. Nevertheless, the assumptions that underlie such books need to be examined a little more closely.
No one doubts that the Cultural Revolution was a hideous experience for huge numbers of people in China, or that the general standard of living in the US and Canada is extraordinarily high. But these books do more than make this obvious contrast.
Firstly, they almost all include details pre-dating the 1949 revolution in their picture of Chinese life. Bound feet, arranged marriages, recurring famine -- these are all things that have a very long history.
Secondly, they automatically equate prosperity with political freedom. But the two are not the same, nor does one necessarily flow from the other. India has long been a democracy but prosperity has for many been slow to come. France was undemocratic for most of the eighteenth century, but many people lived comfortable lives.
Again, millions of PRC citizens would give everything for an American passport, but many Taiwanese don't exactly prove reluctant either.
Things are not as clear-cut as they seem, and the black-and-white oppositions offered by this genre of memoirs should not be swallowed without a certain amount of caution.
This is not to say that Ye's experiences were not grim by almost any standard.
She was born in 1952. She watched her father die as a result of a botched hospital operation. She was exiled to a prison labor farm at the age of 16, was denounced as a counter-revolutionary and attempted suicide.
Even after these experiences, however, she nevertheless continued to display considerable independence.
On graduation, she found herself assigned to the Central Investigation Bureau of the Communist Party in Beijing (which she describes as "the Chinese Secret Service"), despite the fact that she was not a party member. Her friends all considered this a wonderful opportunity, but two weeks before she was due to begin work she walked into the building uninvited -- the first person ever to do such a thing, said the guard -- and handed in a letter requesting work in Shanghai instead. Her request was rather surprisingly granted, and she was assigned to the Foreign Affairs Department of the Shanghai Municipal Government as an interpreter.
Even in this position, privations continued. After her marriage, she got into trouble for becoming pregnant without the prior acquisition of a certificate. When she went into hospital to have her child, her pain, and that of the dozen other women in the room giving birth at the same time, went unrelieved -- a deliberate discouragement of further pregnancies, she thought, in order to reinforce the one-child policy.
Overcrowded accommodation, rationing, constant criticism at work of all details of private life -- use of cosmetics, any departure from regulations covering ordinary clothes, how you spent your tiny salary -- all these added up to a life that many inhabitants of non-communist countries would consider barely worth living.
Eventually she went back to Beijing for further study, and there she fell in love with her Canadian English teacher. After returning home, she was sent on an official trip to San Francisco and Vancouver. Contact with her Canadian lover was re-established. He then sent her what she later realized were forged documents offering her a year as a sponsored student in Ottawa, and using these she left China for good.
What makes the book slightly different from other memoirs of Chinese life by successful emigrants is that Ye, as an official translator, came into close contact with visiting dignitaries. Nevertheless, the back cover leads you to believe that details of how celebrities such as Imelda Marcos and Queen Elizabeth were treated when they visited China in the 1980s form the most interesting portion of the book. In fact these passages have little interest and only occupy a few pages.
The main problem this book faces is that it has to tell the story of a woman who abandoned her husband and their five-year old daughter to go and live with another man, also married and with children, as a person of fortitude and courage. Because the author is leaving communist China, depicted as a waking nightmare, and making a successful bid for life in North America, depicted as paradise on earth, the tone has to be essentially one of a battle bravely won against the odds.
The domestic details, however, will stand in the way of this interpretation for some readers, and so have to be treated by the author with care.
The circumstances of Ye's first marriage were unusual. Her husband brought with him a friend who the author describes as clearly being gay. While not actually living in, this friend nevertheless did the housekeeping, cooked and later looked after the couple's daughter. He was undisguisedly happy when the author went back to Beijing, and ecstatic when she took up the offer of a year in Canada.
There is a sense that Ye is having her cake and eating it when, on the one hand, she gives this friend's presence as a reason for her satisfactory marriage, and on the other, cites her daughter's fondness for him in mitigation of her guilt in leaving for Canada.
Nevertheless, an interpretation that Ye is an unusually attractive woman (as well as a tough one) who has simply made the most of her advantages neglects the very real hardships she experienced at all stages of her life in China. This is an engagingly written book, and readers with a sense of the variety and unpredictability of life will be hard-pushed to criticize the author simply on account of her undoubtedly difficult decisions.
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