Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now

In her first book, Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Canada-born journalist Jan Wong recalls how she shocked everyone she met in China in 1972 by neither knowing the Chinese name of her ancestral village in Guangdong Province's Taishan County, nor speaking its local accent. Viewed as an overseas Chinese who "must really love Chairman Mao and have faith in China" to have come all the way from Canada to study in the "motherland", Wong greatly surprised those in Beijing University because she looked like a Chinese but did not speak any Chinese.

Meanwhile, as Wong was considered as "family", one of "us", by those Chinese around her, her romantic relationship with an American "Big Nose" was severely discouraged. ("Why can't she [Wong] find some Chinese friends? There are many nice Chinese here," one of her teachers questions. "The Communist Party was telling me who could be my friends," Wong complains.) In China where everything is "so relentlessly conformist that all lefties were forced from childhood to eat and write with their right hands", Wong, who is left-handed, was considered to be either "retarded" or a victim of her "Western penchant for female domination".

Wong went to study in China in June 1972 because she wanted to become more "Chinese". However, by the end of that year she had come to a realization: "As a visible minority in Canada, I always assumed I was Chinese. But in China, the more Chinese I learned, the less Chinese I felt. I had expected to find my roots here. Instead I discovered that the harder I tried to be Chinese, the more I realized I wasn't Chinese at all."

Throughout Red China Blues, Wong observes the political and social happenings in China from an "outsider" perspective - and "outsider" who tries to "fit in" but is clearly aware of the existence of the numerous cultural "boundaries" that distinguish her from the Chinese. For instance, Wong constantly refers to herself as a "foreigner", whose "Canadian forthrightness kept rearing its head". Reflecting upon how she was forced to accept what her teachers told her to do, she writes: "At home, I would have staged a sit-in at [my teacher's] office. But I had been in China too long I felt defeated." She admits that she was a "rebellious North American", but confesses that she felt most homesick during Western holidays. "I myself tried so hard to fit in, even learning Chinese body language", she proudly asserts. Then she complains that she and another Chinese-American friend were often treated rudely in China "until people realized we weren't Chinese".

Nonetheless, Wong's awareness of her capability of maintaining a Western mindset but in the same time looking and speaking like a local Chinese appears to have become her biggest asset as a Canadian journalist working in China. "After six years of living in China [1972-73 and 1974-78], I had perfected the local baggy look, a passable accent and the slow, foot-scraping waddle", she proudly announces. From 1988 to 1994, Wong worked as Beijing correspondent for Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, and had written for other North American publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. After the publication of Red China Blues in 1997, she published another book titled Jan Wong's China: Reports from a Not-So-Foreign Correspondent, which was published by Canada's Anchor in 1999.

While Wong is fully aware of her existence between to dramatically different cultures, the Chinese and the Western/Canadian, she explicitly attempts to present an objective view in her reports on China's political, economic, social and cultural developments. When she realizes that a balanced view is hard to achieve, she admits so, and therefore invites the readers to be the judge of her performance as a biased journalist.

For example, in Red China Blues, Wong confesses that after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, she has felt "a compulsion, an obligation" to examine the darkest side of China as a police state. Despite the complaints from academics and businessmen that her harsh reports cause damages to scholarly exchanges and trade prospects between Canada and China, as well as her own mother's constant scolding, "Don't tell people the bad stuff. That's just what lo fan [foreigners] want to hear" - Wong concludes that China deserves the same treatment as any other news beat she has covered as a professional journalist. More importantly, "if you don't like bad publicity, don't shoot people in cold blood".

This statement indicates Wong's awareness of her own more or less biased attitude towards China, the country of her ancestors - she clearly feels a sense of "mission" that with her journalistic coverage, she is able to expose and perhaps right the numerous wrongs done by the Chinese Communist regime. Indeed, some may suggest that this sense of "mission" derives from Wong's personal pride as an ethnic Chinese, that as an "heir of the dragon" she feels obliged to ask her "motherland" to do better. However, one needs to consider that Wong's capability and willingness to examine her own thoughts and feelings as a "not-so-foreign correspondent" well exhibits her awareness of the boundaries and/or limits of her "Chinese" identity. Where her self-identity as a Canadian and a professional journalist begins, her "Chineseness" stops.

Jan Wong's Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now was published by Canada's Anchor in 1997. It was first published in Toronto by Doubleday Canada Limited in 1996.

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