The Finish Line

China-born writer Sang Ye writes predominantly in Chinese but is frequently translated into English. He is perhaps best known in Australia's literary arena for his book of oral history, The Year the Dragon Came. Meanwhile, his The Finish Line is a collection of stories of people and places as observed and interpreted by Sang during his journey by bicycle in China and Australia in 1986-87.

Sang's exploration of how individual voices may be heard in a collective society such as Communist China began with Beijingren, a book co-authored with novelist Zhang Xinxin. After the publication of the book in English under the title "Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China" in London in 1987, Sang was invited to visit Australia by the Australian Council and the Australia-China Council in that year.

The result is The Finish Line, a book of literary journalism that compiles and compares stories of people and places that Sang had experienced throughout his bicycle journey along Australia's Stuart Highway and China's Old Yellow River. Australian writer Nicholas Jose, one of the two translators of the book, summarizes these stories: "Combining comparative tourism with comparative anthropology, [Sang] explores the different conceptions of the human being, in relation to community, the state and the land, that emerge in China and Australia."

But it is evident that Sang's focus is always on the history and people of his homeland -- China. As a result of Sang's "obsession" with collecting Cultural Revolution materials, his representations of Australia and its people serve as a sharp contrast to his interpretations of the history and consequences of the political events that took place in China between 1966 and 1976.

For instance, in "Old Guns", which is set in Darwin in northern Australia, Sang reflects on a hotel owner's personal collection of Chinese antiques. These include a "brick from the Great Wall" and a teapot which was given as a present to the hotel owner's grandfather who was in Tianjin in northern China "helping the Chinese fight the Boxers". The artifacts help ordinary Australians such as the hotel owner, who takes pride in his grandfather's and father's participation in battles in Asia, to imagine what China and Chinese people are like. They are therefore precious to him, and Sang accepts this, in spite of the fact that Sang knows very well about the common Chinese complaint: "Those bloody Australians are so bloody uncultured. They don't even have a history. Even rubbish they'll think of as treasure."

"How can culture be defined? How can history be defined?" Sang asks this question, then goes on to explore a "unique" part of Chinese culture in "Killing People", an article arranged to pair up with "Old Guns". Sang recalls the Communist Party's "achievements" -- from the execution of landlords during the land reforms at the end of the 1940s, to the termination of seventy two lives who were accused of being "rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists and their sons and daughters" during the Cultural Revolution, on October 1, 1967. He then concludes: "Not only along the Old Yellow River, but in the entire 9,500,000 square kilometers of China, there wasn't one piece of the Good Earth on which no blood was spilled."

A disturbing contrast between this aspect of Chinese Communist culture and that of contemporary Australian culture is further provided by Sang in The Finish Line:

That Day was 1 October 1967.

That day the Peking Daily proclaimed: "In the capital more than one million revolutionaries paraded through Tiananmen Square, festively dancing and singing, enthusiastically celebrating the National Day of the People's Republic of China. The revolutionary masses cried out 'Long Live Chairman Mao' to the great leader, teacher, commander and helmsman Mao Zedong, positioned atop the Tiananmen rostrum. Chairman Mao waved back at the masses, cordially shouting 'Long live the comrades'."

That day the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the eighth car accident of the year had occurred on the New England Highway. Two people were injured. 1 October 1967 was the same day. North and south of the equator.

The same yet different. The same in that each day before and each day after were different on each side of the equator.

It is through the deliberate emphasis on this kind of contrast between certain aspects of Chinese and Australian everyday experiences, that Sang's personal agenda in The Finish Line becomes more explicit -- to question, and perhaps further challenge -- a political system in which any individual's social and cultural position is determined by hierarchies of power. In Jose's words, individual realities are undermined by the "grand, empty rhetoric" that structures this political system, in the same way that individual views are dominated by the system's public policies and state-controlled media propaganda.

This observation clearly reveals the way in which Sang represents Communist China as a prison that oppresses and eventually murders individual identities and values, as a contrast to the "West" in general as freedom. Even though Sang now resides in Australia, what he perceives to be the "West", his representations of Australian society and people only serve as a backdrop against which his criticism of China's totalitarian political and cultural system is explicitly displayed.

Sang Ye's The Finish Line was published by the University of Queensland Press in 1994.

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Copyright: Christine Sun, Taiwan.com.au Portal, 2005. All rights are reserved.