1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies (Harper Perennial 2004)

CAFAM members may know that for several years a book by Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America , has been causing controversy. On January 19, 2003, Ed Gargan reviewed the book in Newsday . Here are a few paragraphs: "Gavin Menzies, a former British Navy submariner turned amateur historian...is convinced that fleets of Chinese ships [separated from one of Zheng He’s famous naval expeditions and] crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to the Americas, that their crews established colonies here, erected lighthouses, built factories, swam in the Caribbean and captured long-extinct animals, all in the year 1421. Wonderful stuff, except it never happened. "Menzies has assembled a 552-page Tinker toy assemblage of map-readings, snippets of medieval travel accounts, canned notions of history, and buckets of fantasy, wild guesses and wishful thinking...

"And unlike the animals, fruits, artifacts and ambassadors Zheng He brought back to Beijing from his voyages and of which there are detailed records, there are no accounts of a single nut, a lowly brick or an elegant gold vessel returned to the emperor from the Americas, something inconceivable to a Ming mariner. But Menzies cruises along, chapter after chapter, painting pictures of what the Chinese, in his words, 'must' have done. ...Hobbled by an inability to read either classical or modern Chinese or any European language, Menzies is chained to sparse translations while remaining oblivious to the sources that could have shed light on his task.

"As the distinguished Ming historian Hok-Lam Chan has noted, the Yongle emperor undertook seagoing expeditions "to display his power and wealth, to learn about the plans of Timur and other Mongols in western Asia, to extend the tributary system, to satisfy his vanity and greed for glory, and to make use of his eunuch staff." What the expeditions were not were missions of conquest and colonization..." [Review posted by Professor Donald Clarke on H-ASIA, August 26, 2003]

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Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China’s 100 Questions, edited by Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille (Univ. of Ca. Press 2008)

For people outside China, the Tibetan situation typically appears black and white. Probably most non-Asian Americans sympathize with the Dalai Lama and the exile Tibetans. Mostly it is a question of human rights and repression of Tibetan culture and religion. They see no problem with the Tibet reporting of Western media. They are probably unaware that, many people in the Chinese-American community are inclined to take a view closer to the Chinese government’s. It asserts China’s right to Tibet, points out China’s assistance to Tibet, and criticizes the intransigence of Tibetan separatists inside and outside of China. This view charges that Western media are almost always negative in their reporting on China.

Of course, as with all protracted confrontations, the issues are actually mixed and murky. Even simple questions — such as: What is "Tibet" and what are its boundaries? — are contested. The opposing sides urge starkly different facts and interpretations. So how can the interested fair-minded individual sort it all out?

A book that has just appeared in English is an excellent place to start. It began as a French publication (2002) Le Tibet: est-il chinois? Reponses a cent questions chinoises , edited by Anne-Marie Blondeau and Katia Buffetrille. An adapted and updated translation has come out in 2008, entitled: Authenticating Tibet: Answers to China’s 100 Questions (University of California Press).

The book is organized like a booklet published in 1989 by the Chinese government: 100 Questions about Tibet. That booklet was updated in 2001. Blondeau and Buffetrille recruited a group of academic experts on Tibet and assigned them these questions, according to their fields. They were to provide a synopsis of the official Chinese position and then add factual information and their own analysis.

The one hundred questions are in ten groups: historical facts, human rights, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan population, the right to autonomy, culture and education, economic development, living standards, and the 1987-88 riots in Lhasa.

Although partisans on both sides will not like what the experts say, the latter do attempt to remain even-handed and analytical. On balance, they correct the official Chinese claims more than the Tibetan ones, in part because some of the Chinese assertions are so dogmatic and ideological. But the Tibetans by no means get a free ride.

For example, the scholar dealing with economic questions assesses the government’s claim that, since Liberation, large amounts of investment have poured into the Tibet Autonomous Region, and also the Tibetan claim that Beijing has extracted more economic benefit from Tibet than it has invested. Both of these positions seriously overlook or misrepresent complex facts. The government glosses over the Maoist years, when political zeal and attacks on the wealth of monasteries greatly disrupted the existing economic relationships. By the time this devastation had run its course, Beijing was forced to start subsidizing Tibet’s economy.

In the reform period since about 1980, and especially in the 1990s, considerable investment has come in. But it has not resulted in increasing the productive capacity of Tibet. About 85% of Tibetans still live in the rural areas, and they remain among the poorest people in China.

As for the Tibetan view that China drains wealth out, the author points out that very little development of Tibet’s natural resources has actually taken place, in large part because geography makes such extraction too costly. The central government and other provinces have sponsored many projects which probably cost more than the benefits they bring. But from Beijing’s point of view, the overarching objectives are military and strategic.

The novice will find parts of this book fairly heavy reading, because it assumes a certain degree of knowledge about Chinese history. But with perseverance and a few Googles, the general reader will come away much better informed about one of the world’s more anguished disputes. [Review by Craig Dietrich from May 2008 CAFAM Newsletter]

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Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, by Zhengguo Kang (W. W. Norton 2007)

Not long ago I read the autobiography of a Chinese Christian pastor of a "house church" in central China. House churches are illegal and have been suppressed by the government. The book told of imprisonments and tortures.  More recently, I came across another autobiography, this one written by a Chinese Buddhist who finally escaped to the USA in the mid 1990s. He is Kang Zhengguo, and he now teaches language and literature at Yale University. His book is Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China.

Kang Zhengguo details his life as a man who only wanted to study ancient Chinese texts. He is expelled from high school and from college, sent to work camps, rejected by his family but not accepted by the peasants he is sent to live with. He has many run-ins with the local governments. It is an amazing story of a man who seems to bear no grudges against the system which set out to destroy him but did not succeed. It causes me to ask how much has really changed in mainland China during the last 60 years.

This is a good read about modern China. The well-known scholar Perry Link pays it a high complement in his introduction, saying that it "may be the best account of daily life in Communist China that I have ever read..." [Review by Cynthia Setchell from November 2007 CAFAM Newsletter]

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Journey to Xiamacun, by Mason Philip Smith (Provincial Press 2008)

Early in 2008 I received an email from my friend Ma Tongchun inviting me for lunch at his ancestral farm northwest of Kunming, Yunnan. So in May I returned to China, accompanied by Brian Dorsk a friend from Cape Elizabeth.

Before proceeding to Xiamacun, "Mr. Ma" accompanied us to Heijing, on the rail line between Kunming and Chengdu. This is one of the best-preserved, and little-touristed, towns in Yunnan. For over 1,000 years the surrounding hills were mined for salt. At its peak in the Ming Dynasty, Heijing provided more than 70% of the imperial salt. It is still small, with a single main street running parallel to the Longchuan River. The town combines a strong sense of history with a pleasing lack of commercialism. Popular with visitors from Kunming on weekends, it is a gem, a place lost in time, rarely visited by Westerners (although Marco Polo knew it).

We stayed in the Wu Family Courtyard, a small hotel, formerly the home of a rich salt merchant. In its prime the mansion had 99 rooms and 108 doors. Arriving by train, we found a two-horse "horse taxi" waiting to take us to the town gate. A second horse taxi took us on to the Wu Family Courtyard, on a small hillside in the center of the town. Locals said that Brian and I were the first foreigners to visit in months.

Chicken cooked in hot salt is a "five-star dish" in the local cuisine, and as suppertime approached the chef invited us to watch him prepare it. His kitchen occupied a room across a small garden from the main inn. We found the chef and an assistant standing before three huge wood-fired woks. In one of them they were heating 30 pounds of salt. He held a freshly killed chicken as the assistant was passed a large shovel back and forth through the salt. When the salt was hot the chef buried the chicken in it with the shovel, piling a large mound atop the bird. Forty-five minutes later, he uncovered the bird and brushed the last of the salt off. He cut it into pieces and then wrapped the meat in foil, leaving the bird’s hard baked head peering out. We ate most of our meals in the courtyard under an arbor of bougainvillea. Breakfast was usually noodles garnished with chili peppers in the southwestern tradition. On the second morning I ordered scrambled eggs and fresh tomato pieces. The eggs arrived hard as a rock, and Mr. Ma quickly plunged into the kitchen to show the chef how to cook soft scrambled eggs.

Brian and I roamed Heijing for two days, visiting the old salt works, the street market and the alleys and byways. Everywhere the locals greeted us warmly and never objected to being photographed. At a middle school at recess time, we were mobbed by students wanting to try their English and asking to be photographed. In the market Mr. Ma would buy a huge watermelon, which he carried to the hotel for the chef to carve for our evening’s dessert.

I saw a man in an open doorway painting something with an artist’s brush. I said, "Ni hao," smiled, and entered. He was painting guitar-like instruments in bold colors. I indicated I would like to photograph him. He nodded and put on a colorful jacket. After posing in his doorway with a brilliantly painted instrument, he then posed blowing on a reed-like flute. Imagine my surprise the next day when I encountered this very man in an alley on the other side of town wearing a conical straw hat and yellow vest. Straw broom in hand, he was sweeping the street.

Leaving Heijing, we boarded the train for Lufeng, the closest town to Mr. Ma’s ancestral village. Xiamacun is reached by a half road-half trail path passing through fields, across rock ledges and over crude roads. We could walk for two hours, or ride a horse taxi for an hour, or secure a vehicle that could handle the route. Mr. Ma telephoned a relative, who called someone else, and in a half hour we had a silver Mitsubishi SUV and driver courtesy of a local official. On the drive to Xiamacun, we passed miles of rice paddies, and since it was the May planting season, villagers were stooping in the flooded fields, transplanting rice. Water buffalos were plowing in the paddies. Further on there were rows of tobacco plants covered with plastic, resembling silver snakes meandering over the hillside. The earth was red and the houses in the villages we passed were adobe brown.

Xiamacun is one of five villages in Laomapo ("Old Ma's Mountain Slope"). Formerly there were three Ma villages: upper, middle, and lower. Xiamacun means "Lower Ma Village." Settlement began around 1630. Arriving, we parked the SUV and walked down a lane into the village. Eight families inhabit the hamlet in houses hidden by high walls. You can walk through the entire place in three or four minutes. We first encountered Ma Zhuxiu, 75-year-old second cousin of Ma Tongchun, standing in her doorway. Her son died three years ago at 50, so she lives with her daughter-in-law, grandson, and great grandson. Then we came upon Ma Ruhu, "Ma The Tiger," the village leader. Leaning on a hoe, he invited us to visit his home, but unfortunately we didn’t have time to accept.

At the gate of the ancestral home, we were greeted by Ma Xiaoli, daughter of Ma Tongchun's youngest brother, and her two-year-old daughter. Her husband Feng Xingyi was at the market seven kilometers away. Soon we were meeting the others who live there. Mr. Ma’s brother Ma Dechun and his wife Guo Zhengzhi, and seventy-nine year old matriarch Ma Conghuan. Ma Conghuan sat in the doorway of her bedroom repairing a jacket. Under the pile of quilts behind her was the black coffin she bought, so that the family will not be burdened by her funeral. From the front porch, we could look across the courtyard. On the left was a two-story bedroom structure; a hand water pump stood in front of it. On the right was a kitchen building. And beyond the gate at the far end of the courtyard, we saw a shed for a donkey and pigs, to the left of which loomed a large-dish antenna. Down the lane was the outhouse.

The living room walls were covered with photographs and posters. Couches lined the walls, and there was a large bureau facing the doorway. They had placed a microwave oven, a large screen television, an amplifier and sound system on various tables. The center of the room was largely taken up with a large, low, square table, surrounded by a collection of short stools and chairs. While we went off to see the rest of the village, Ma Dechun, alone in the dimly-lit kitchen, prepared a nine-course lunch in one wok. Returning to the living room we were joined by the rest of the family and our driver. What a lunch it was: soybean sprouts, cabbage, fried tofu, preserved pork, potato fried with egg, chicken, white cabbage, squash, and chicken soup. Ma Dechun had prepared two large bowls of each item. For liquid refreshment there was tea and Sprite. Of course there was plenty of chili sauce to spice up the food.

As we chatted and ate, I was surprised to see the small Ma Conghuan eating non-stop. Her chopsticks flying, she ate and ate and ate. She celebrated her 79th birthday on June 23 by doing what she always does, collecting vegetables for the pigs and cutting grass for the donkey. Her son Ma Tongchun said: "It was an old country lady's birthday day in the Yunnan mountains." Following the meal we gathered on the front porch for picture taking and Ma Conghuan, calm and aging, was the center of interest.

All-too-soon we had to leave. Nine thousand miles is a long way to go for lunch, but was not about lunch. It was about fellowship with people from a very ancient culture, and it is about ever so briefly experiencing their way of life. Another Chinese friend recently said to me: "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." The journey to Laomapo Valley and Xiamacun was certainly full of such moments.

Philip Mason Smith’s latest book, Journey to Xiamacun, based on the trip discussed here, has been published. It contains 80 pages and 79 images, telling the whole story of Mason’s visit. The price is $29.95 plus tax. For more information contact the author at mason252@mac.com [Review by Craig Dietrich from September 2008 CAFAM Newsletter]

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Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins 2006)

Hessler is a talented observer, researcher, and writer, whose first book, River Town, documented his two years as an English teacher in Sichuan province. (It is very much worth reading.) While teaching, Hessler learned Chinese and began his work as a reporter. His approach is simple. He lives in China and pursues interesting stories wherever they lead. He freelances these writings to various publications, while is also writing books. Hessler gives a view of China not found in most journalism or academic writing. Oracle Bones deals with a surprising range of subjects. One of them is Chinese archaeology, especially the “oracle bones,” those excavated cow scapula and tortoise plastrons which contain the earliest surviving examples of Chinese writing. Not merely do the bones themselves interest him, but also the fascinating and sometimes tragic lives of the scholars who work on the past in an era of revolutionary upheaval.

Another story line involves some of Hessler’s former students as they make their way in China’s rapidly changing society. One couple migrates from the economic backwaters of Sichuan province to teach in the go-go coastal province of Zhejiang. Lured there by fake promises, they thrive nevertheless. Another student has moved to the booming region between Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton) where she works in one of the innumerable small factories that churn out China’s flood of exports. Because of his relationship with these people, Hessler gains insights into the daily lives of Chinese coping with rising affluence, deracination, loneliness, and exploitation, and survival.

Also prominent in the book is a Uighur man. The Uighurs (also spelled Uygurs) are one of China’s Muslim minorities most of whom live in the far western "Autonomous Region" of Xinjiang (known to tourists as the Silk Road province). The twists and turns in the life of this man who views his homeland as colonized by Han Chinese, who has lost his teaching career and spent time in prison for separatist activities, who thrives as a money changer and then decides to emigrate to the US is endlessly fascinating. Living in Washington D.C., where Hessler visits him, he also provides an interesting vantage point for observing life in America.

As these paragraphs might suggest, the book is immensely rich in its geographical, cultural, and historical scope. From the Chinese film industry, to a cornstarch factory in the northeast called the Jilin Petrochemical Design and Research Institute, to the old hutong neighborhoods of Beijing being razed to make way for high rises, to the border with North Korea, to the Cultural Revolution suicides of scholars, to the academic institutes on Taiwan, to the Falun Gong, etc., etc., Hessler lays out a rich narrative.

What he reports is not always flattering, to China or to America. For example, any American who blithely imagines (as our leaders tell us) that the US is universally admired in the world should consider Hessler’s account of the reaction of the Chinese person on the street to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Peter Hessler is a major talent, this second book is an education to anyone who reads it. [Review by Craig Dietrich from September 2006 CAFAM Newsletter]

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Shadow of the Silk Road,, by Colin Thubron (HarperCollins 2007)

The "Silk Road" has taken on much glamour and romance as a tourist destination in recent years. One notable book that provides a glimpse into the halcyon years of the old trading routes between China and the Near East is Susan Whitefield’s Life Along the Silk Road (University of California, 1999). Another interesting take on the subject is Peter Hopkirk’s Foreign Devils on the Silk Road (University of Massachusetts, 1980). Hopkirk tells the story of the principal Western scholars, discoverers, and antiquarians who combed many of the ancient Xinjiang sites in the early years of the twentieth century and either "saved" or "looted" much of what they found, depending on one’s point of view. In his travel account, Thubron takes the reader along as he observes and ponders the meaning of things between Xian in China and Antakya (Antioch) in Turkey.

Xian, or Changan as it was known, was one of China’s capitals in the Han (c. 200 BC – c.200 AD) and the Tang (618 – 907) periods. This terminus of the Silk Road is where Thubron begins his journey in 2002, just as the potential SARS epidemic is sowing alarm among health authorities around the world. Consequently, for much of his travels, he did not have much company.

He moves into Gansu Province and its capital, Lanzhou and takes a side trip to the Tibetan Buddhist monastery at Labrang. Continuing on toward Dunhuang, he visits the famous grottoes there at a time when it is almost deserted of visitors.

From there he launches himself onto the southern branch of the route around the great Taklamakan Desert. In recent centuries this route has greatly declined, relative to what it once was, mainly because the increasing encroachment of sand and desert has made it very difficult to maintain roads there. Having left a remnant outpost of Tibetans and Buddhism at Labrang, he now enters the world of Uyghurs and Islam.

The ancient city of Khotan (Hetian in modern Chinese) is probably the most flourishing region on the southern rim of the Taklamakan, a place with great historical importance to the history of Buddhism, and incidentally historically the source of much of China’s jade. Then he comes to the westernmost city, Kashgar.

Throughout this trek through western China, Thubron encounters many ordinary people as well as historical relics. He is willing to endure almost any discomfort or even danger. And since he has come extremely well prepared with knowledge of the history and religions of the area, he is capable of making even fleeting and mundane experiences meaningful in the broader picture of the region past and present.

Those oriented more toward China, will find in Thubron’s travels, as he leaves the Peoples Republic and proceeds through Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and northern Iran, much that is surprising and helpful to understand (a little) the Turkic and Iranian Muslim world.

Thubron’s style is very personal and pholosophical, almost poetic. But the attentive reader cannot but learn a great deal indeed about this poorly understood part of the world. Given the relevance of this region to contemporary hair-raisers like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, clash of cultures, and the rest, it is a book that the citizen who tries to be informed will be thankful to have read. [Review by Craig Dietrich from November 2007 CAFAM Newsletter]

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War Trash, by Ha Jin (Vintage 2005)

Ha Jin, Professor of English at Boston University, is a rare writer who can work successfully in a second language. He learned English as an adult. His novel Waiting won the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award, and he has published books of poetry and short stories and won other prizes. War Trash will be his last “Chinese” novel, according to the author. It is an extraordinary book. As is the case with much recent Chinese fiction, War Trash evokes the Maoist years. But it takes up a forgotten subject, Chinese prisoners of war during the Korean conflict. It is both a novel and a kind of history. As the author says, "This is a work of fiction and all the main characters are fictional. Most of the events and details, however, are factual."

Ha Jin tells of Chinese combatants held in South Korea. Their interactions with fellow North Korean POWs and with their American, South Korean, and Nationalist Chinese guards constitute a story of loyalty, survival, suffering, and betrayal. They are under great pressure to defect to Taiwan and the fiercely anti-Communist Nationalists. And they are pressed and coerced with equal zeal to stay loyal and repatriate to the Motherland.

How the characters cope with the circumstances of confinement and negotiate the political shoals is the main thread of the book. The great irony is that in the end those who turn their back on home have good chances of thriving. Those who remain loyal to family, nation, and Party are but of momentary symbolic value to the leaders who sent them to fight and die. When they return, they find, not thanks and acclaim, but derision and oppression.

Perhaps, if we think about it at all, we suppose that captured combatants, confined in camps, are neutralized and of little importance. However, as we recently learned from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, prisoners of war have ways of popping into our collective attention. Those who care to think about such things are well served by Ha Jin’s engrossing account of a forgotten chapter in history. [Review by Craig Dietrich from May 2005 CAFAM Newsletter]

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