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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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Lake with No Name by Diane Wei Liang
Does the June 4th "Tiananmen incident" still matter? This is the question posed, although perhaps not deliberately, by DIANE WEI LIANG's new memoir LAKE WITH NO NAME.
DIANE WEI LIANG had something more than a cameo and something less than a supporting role in those events: she knew many of the main players personally (and was Chai Ling's roommate for a while), did her time in Tiananmen Square and even climbed on a tank to talk to try to persuade the soldiers to turn back.
But this is story not of a political dissident, but of a bright yet rather simple young woman in her early twenties going to school and trying to sort out her personal life.
She has a number of problems of the heart, not surprising for someone that age. These include falling for Dong Yi, the roommate of a current boyfriend; Dong Yi is engaged to a local girl back home whom he later marries and whose marriage she almost breaks up. Wei also has a relationship with her Professor whom she later marries because he wants a way to get to America and a rather well-off diplomat who pursues her for years.
Wei comes across as something of a naif, but she is intelligent and sensitive and can hardly not be affected by heady whiff of freedom and the commitment of her fellow students -- and she takes us through a personal day-by-day recounting of the lead-up to, and denouement on, June 4th.
But Wei had already been accepted at William and Mary and received her passport just a few weeks later -- and leaves China. She ends up with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon and now teaches Business Studies in the USA. The erstwhile love of her life also left China and settled down for a similarly suburban existence as a physicist. They meet again in New York City, and in a somewhat anti-climatic conclusion, go for a walk in Central Park.
LAKE WITH NO NAME is not, I think, a political book: it is more of a "personal journey"-- perhaps a modern, Chinese version of Dr. Zhivago, told from the point of view of a Chinese Lara (Wei's first conversation with Dong Yi was, coincidentally, about Russian literature).
But no book on recent events in China, especially one with Tiananmen as its centerpiece, can avoid a political interpretation. By starting with her childhood in a labor camp in the mountains of Sichuan, followed by her travails at school as the daughter of an intellectual and ending with her life a modern multi-cultural professor at an American university, Wei seems to place Tiananmen more as the death throes of the Cultural Revolution than the start of a new era of a political struggle for freedom and democracy.
The "Lake with No Name" of the title is Beijing's Weiming Lake, in the middle of the Beijing University campus, a place where people, lovers, meet, walk and talk, through good times and bad, unchanging, a symbol of peace and hope. Tiananmen would seem to have caused hardly a ripple on Weiming Lake.
I cannot tell whether this was Wei's point, that life goes on and people change like the seasons, that students grow up, marry, become responsible adults with children of their own, and that short-term political tumult will pass.
But should Chinese officials ever read this book, one can well imagine them nodding their heads and saying "Precisely."
Peter Gordon
12/06/2003
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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