From Rice to Riches
By Jane Hutcheon
Pan Macmillan, $30
Both of these books are about journeys, both by women born in China. But there, it has to be said, the similarities pretty much begin and end.
Sun Shuyun's journey begins as a child growing up during the Cultural Revolution in central China. But this is not yet another example of "scar literature" - the seemingly endless outpouring of writings exposing the pain of that savage period in China's recent history.
Sun's father was a military man who had fought in Korea and an ardent communist, although in time the Party would fail him as it failed so many Chinese of his generation. Her grandmother was a Buddhist, who despite the dangers this entailed, retained her faith throughout the darkest revolutionary years, much to her son's disdain.
Only when Sun grasped the opportunity to travel and study abroad did the significance of the stories her grandmother told her become apparent. She became captivated by the tale of the seventh-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who spent 17 years travelling through what is now western China to India and returned with the sutras, the founding scripts of Buddhism.
Xuanzang recorded all of this in A Record of the Western Regions, which some claim became the foundation of the Tang dynasty's expansion. Nine centuries later Xuanzang's story became the foundation of Journey to the West, one of the most famous Chinese novels, more familiar in the West as the story of the Monkey King.
Sun's journey retraces the monk's footsteps, in a matter of months rather than years. Almost 13 centuries later it still takes her through some of the world's most inhospitable and sometimes dangerous territory, especially in the sparsely inhabited western Chinese region of Xinjiang and the more lawless parts of the Indian sub-continent.
This is at once a deeply personal, spiritual journey and an interesting insight to some of the roads less travelled in China and India. For Sun Shuyun herself it is about finding meaning in the complexities of China's and her own history. While its focus is on the past, it tells us much about the present China and hints at something of the future.
Jane Hutcheon's journey is a different, less contingent one. She has written an engaging and accessible account of modern China. Hutcheon was born and grew up in Hong Kong, the daughter of a Eurasian mother and an Anglo-Saxon newspaperman, both from Shanghai. Her family's connection to China goes back 150 years.
After studying in Australia, she began her career as a journalist in Hong Kong. From 1995 to 2000 she was the ABC's television correspondent in China. Her brother Stephen was this paper's correspondent there in the mid-1990s.
Despite the depth of these links, the China of her family's past was one in which they remained outsiders. Hutcheon remains a waiguoren in mainland China, an outsider looking in. That makes her journey quiet a different one to Sun Shuyun's. It is less directly personal and less a spiritual exploration of self, but in many ways no less interesting.
For about a year, Jane Hutcheon and I were contemporaries as members of the tiny band of Australian correspondents based in Beijing, so the China that she describes is a very familiar one. By and large she tells the broader China story well. Those familiar with her television reportage will recognise the device of using the seemingly small and insignificant story to draw the bigger picture. In many ways, in a vast country of 1.3 billion people where the incomprehensible is commonplace, this often is the only way to make China comprehensible.
Some of the stories here will be familiar to ABC viewers, but they have been fleshed out and given context. There are themes that are central to the story of modern China - rapid economic growth, religion, Taiwan, political suppression, Tibet. Interwoven into the chapters on Hong Kong and Shanghai, in particular, is the story of Hutcheon's own family past. There is a place for this sort of book on China, if only because the country is changing so rapidly. Hutcheon's account is lively and well-written.
It is popular - especially for journalists - to tackle China head-on. There is much to revile about China, or more precisely the autocratic Chinese leadership and the system it has imposed. There is suffering and injustice and exploitation that sometimes beggar belief. For journalists intent on making their mark, it is a big, easy target.
But to tell the China story intelligently, with insight and even - when appropriate - with sympathy, is a much tougher task.
Sun Shuyun discusses autobiography with Eva Hoffman and Sarah McDonald at noon on August 30 at the Malthouse. John Schauble is a former China correspondent for The Age.
|Print this article Email to a friend||Top|
Also in Books
China's roads less travelled
|text | handheld (how to)||
Copyright © 2003 The Age Company Ltd
|advertise | contact us|