Chinese Lessons
Author: John Pomfret
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 9780805076158
Year Published: 2006
These days, visitors to China will be captivated by the breathtaking sights and dazzling high-rise buildings as well as the high speed rails and magnificent flyovers of Shanghai, Beijing and other big cities in China. Or being greeted upon arrival at the new Beijing Daxing International Airport. The amazing transformation and development of the People’s Republic over the past decades can have an intoxicating effect of obscuring the contradictions and truths, especially of its past.
China’s progress also makes us forget that China did, in fact, undergo a socialist revolution, a protracted period of brutalising class warfare that now seem like a prelude to a new and invincible future.
Among the first Americans to study in China following the communist victory in 1949, Washington Post reporter John Pomfret looks back at his student days at Nanjing University in 1981 and the lives of his classmates in his book, Chinese Lessons.
Despite living in squalor as a student, he had nevertheless developed a deep affection for China.
Twenty years later, Pomfret returned to the university for a class reunion. His memories were revived, but as a journalist now. He was intrigued by current conditions - the changes that had taken place over those 20 years.
Chinese Lessons not only recounts the life histories of his five classmates - survivors of one of the most tumultuous periods in the country’s history - it also chronicles the changes taking place in China. It is hard to believe the manner in which the Chinese people were forced to live then, seeing how they live now.
Readers who were shocked and numbed by the catalogue of crimes offered in Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, will find these emotions evoked here with more personal touches to the lives of his five classmates: Big Bluffer Ye, Book Idiot Zhou, Little Guan, Old Xu and Daybreak Song. These are the children of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, convulsive political purges unleashed by Mao Zedong. They witnessed (and sometimes were forced to act as accomplices) the humiliation, torture and even deaths of their own parents and friends. Pomfret relates each of the five as he remembers them from college, including the story of his own student days. It’s his detailed reporting about their lives before and after graduation that makes this book interesting. While he can’t fully understand China’s tortuous history, the author has immersed himself in all things Chinese, enabling him to assess each of his subjects with remarkable empathy. He admires these former classmates, but he is also aware about the peculiar ways in which each has been marred by a political system that 50 years ago put “capitalist roaders” to death and today declares that “to be rich is glorious”. It’s fascinating to see how each has negotiated adulthood, love, family, and work in a country hurtling toward modernity.
Free to travel, Pomfret saw much of Chinese rural life and the appalling conditions in which some people lived during that time. The one-child family edict brought much heartbreak and anger. As did the forced marriages. And how things have changed today.
Chinese Lessons also offers a moving account of individual experiences, indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the precarious national psyche of the world’s most populous nation.
It gives readers a perspective on the sufferings and humiliation of the intellectuals, the administrators as well as the wealthy landlords during the Cultural Revolution. Those who had lived through that ugly period of China history would recall the painful memories. The younger generation today who now enjoy the modern amenities and easy lifestyle are blissfully unaware of or ignorant of the painful past. They need to reacquaint and learn the truth of the Cultural Revolution to understand the mistakes made, as well as to acknowledge the sacrifices and lives of those who had perished. As the British statesman Winston Churchill once said: "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
A revealing and insightful read.