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hardback HK$250.00
Hong Kong University Press
Paddyfield.com
More reviews by Hilton Yip
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China Bound and Unbound: History in the Making -- an Early Returnee's Account by Frances Wong
When the Communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, many Chinese chose to flee. Hong Kong-born FRANCES WONG took the opposite journey out of patriotism, idealism and loyalty to her husband. For Wong, this would be the beginning of a long, agonizing experience for her and her family, as they would experience first-hand the worst excesses of the Communist era. In CHINA BOUND AND UNBOUND: HISTORY IN THE MAKING -- AN EARLY RETURNEE'S ACCOUNT,Wong tells her life-story which began in Hong Kong and saw her live through the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightists Campaign and the Cultural Revolution.
Born in 1923 into a solid, middle-class household as a second-generation Hong Konger (her paternal grandfather having come to Hong Kong as a boy), Wong enjoyed a comfortable, educated upbringing, studying at the famed Diocesan Girls' School and then Hong Kong University. Her studies were brought to a halt by the invading Japanese as World War II came to Hong Kong in 1941. For Wong, the occupation was a brutal experience: she tells of seeing dead bodies strewn across public streets, hiding from Japanese soldiers to avoid rape and even of cannibalism in Kowloon's Hunghom area.
As shocking as Wong's account of Hong Kong during Japanese occupation is, the book quickly moves on to her time in China, where she went to in 1943 and lived with relatives, got married and then returned to Hong Kong after World War II ended. Civil war broke out in China. Wong and her husband chose to sympathize with the Communists, having been disgusted by the corruption and inefficiency of the then-ruling Kuomintang regime. When 1949 came, the couple left decent jobs in Hong Kong to move to Guangdong, hoping to help build a new China. The couple began to work for the Foreign Affairs Bureau in Shamen, Guangdong and then Beijing, until the Cultural Revolution.
The couple's patriotic zeal and idealism was gradually eroded through the tumultuous periods of Mao Tse-Tung's rule, starting with the Anti-Rightist campaign, continuing with the Great Leap Forward and culminating with being sent to a remote camp in Jiangxi province during the Cultural Revolution.
The author doesn't dwell much on her personal emotions and thoughts or on those of other people, instead often using poetry to remember special experiences. The bluntness of the prose ensures that instead of deep examination of people's feelings or motives, she provides concise, direct observations. This marks a huge difference between Wong's book and mainland Chinese non-fiction books on the same events, in which the authors' sorrow or anger feature prominently in their writing.
There are a few particularly poignant parts, such as Wong's description of her husband's suffering during the Political Examination Movement. This was yet another political campaign undertaken by the party in the mid-fifties, intended to examine the past of party cadres to check for "wrongdoings".
During these movements, Wong often disapproves of the actions but tries hard to keep a low profile. Maybe it is this grim stoicism that, while it helped her endure, has a restraining effect on her writing. The book suffers somewhat from stilted, and at times simplistic, prose that is inadequate in rendering the true impact and severity of Wong's experiences, as well as by the unclear chronological order of some parts of the book.
However the spitefulness and brutality of those times are clearly captured as Wong details how careers were derailed and lives destroyed, with one colleague driven to commit suicide by stabbing his skull with a pair of scissors. Her eldest daughter, one of her four children, never recovered from illnesses incurred during house arrest during the Cultural Revolution and "applied for early retirement."
It is clear Wong has been greatly disappointed and suffered much sorrow from China's government. Besides the disruptive political campaigns under Mao, she also pulls no punches in pointing out the detrimental effects of the official one-child policy and criticizes local bureaucrats for the destruction of her family house in 1998 for scrupulous reasons.
Wong has lived through a lot, both literally (she'll turn 87 in 2010) and figuratively. Her biography contains flaws, but provides valuable first-hand glimpses in life during the tumultuous period of early Communist rule. Wong probably did not suffer as badly as many others during those times, but hers is an experience that definitely deserves to be known.
On the last page, she confidently proclaims that despite China's recent impressive economic achievements, political reform is needed for it to be "unbounded", most likely referring to China's poverty and upheaval over the last century.
Hilton Yip
23/02/2010
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Hilton Yip is a writer based in Taiwan and former book editor of The China Post. |
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