What the Chinese Don't Eat (2 page)

Each column I wrote provoked more questions and stories from my readers, driving me on to the next. One of my earliest columns started with how I got the first western kiss on my face from my students at London University. My writing is based on my own experiences and views, which have been ‘weathered’ by Chinese traditional culture and modern China. I have written about what the Chinese don’t eat; why we see washing feet every day as so important; how the Chinese fish philosophy really helped my life choices; how my Chinese knowledge and language is lost in a fast-changing motherland; my conversations with a wild-flower seller at Xian about the punishments of opening the Terracotta Warriors; the football craziness at my radio station and home; and what makes a good woman in men’s eyes. I have also written about many of
my interviews with Chinese women; about how some tried to commit suicide; how some of them are struggling with modern life – including how to see sex; and how some still treat Mao as a Chinese God.

It was Clare Margetson, the
Guardian
’s women’s editor, who started me on the path to this book. In the spring of 2003, she came to my office to talk to me about my first book,
The Good Women of China
. After just a few words from her, I opened my heart. She very successfully guided me to what she believed western readers wanted to know about China, without making me dizzy. (I still often get lost amongst the kind suggestions and guidance of westerners!) Clare and I went to China together in April 2005 with a group of western publishers and in Nanjing she asked me the question ‘What do the Chinese NOT eat?’

What the Chinese don’t eat … I had never thought about this. But I knew that there was saying about it: everything that flies in the sky which you can see, except airplanes; everything that swims in the river and the sea, except submarines; any four-legged things on the ground, except tables and chairs – that is what the Chinese eat.

Since I moved to London in 1997, and have travelled around over thirty countries, I have been asked so many questions like Clare’s, such as :

‘Are there any swimming pools in China?’

‘Why do Chinese women wear stockings in summer?’

‘Do Chinese people do Christmas shopping?’

‘Why are the Chinese so different when they are in the media?’

‘Why do the Chinese never say their own opinions in public?’

‘Why do Chinese mothers always say their beautiful daughters are ugly in China?’

‘What do Chinese university students think about where babies come from?’

This is a book about the answers in my
Guardian
columns to some of those questions, answers from a Chinese woman and the mother of a Chinese son.

Thanks to you from my Chinese heart –
XieXie!

Xinran, 2006

Chinese whispers: When radio presenter Xinran got a letter asking her to help free a kidnapped 12-year-old child bride, she realised how little was known about the lives of real women in her country. So she resolved to tell their stories in her book,
The Good Women of China

Early one spring morning in 1989, I rode my Flying Pigeon bicycle through the streets of Nanjing dreaming about my son PanPan. The green shoots on the trees, the clouds of frosty breath enveloping the other cyclists, the women’s silk scarves billowing in the spring wind, everything merged with thoughts of my son. I was bringing him up on my own, without the help of a man, and it was not easy caring for him as a working mother. Whatever journey I went on, though, long or short, even the quick ride to work, he accompanied me in spirit and gave me courage.

‘Hey, big-shot presenter, watch where you’re going,’ shouted a colleague as I wobbled into the compound of the radio and TV station where I worked.

My office was on the 16th floor of the forbidding, 21-storey modern building. I preferred to climb the stairs rather than risk the unreliable lift, which broke down frequently. When I arrived at my desk, amidst the large pile of letters, one immediately caught my attention: the envelope had been made from the cover of a book and there was a chicken feather glued to it. According to Chinese tradition, a chicken feather is an urgent distress signal.

The letter was from a young boy, and had been sent from a village about 150 miles from Nanjing.

This was the most distressing letter I had received since I had started presenting my evening radio programme,
Words on the Night Breeze
, four months earlier. During the programme I discussed various aspects of daily life and used my own experiences to win the listeners’ trust and suggest ways of approaching life’s difficulties. The programme was a new thing for everyone, myself included. I had only just become a presenter and I was trying to do something that hadn’t been done on the radio before.

Since 1949, the media had been the mouthpiece of the Party. State radio, state newspapers and, later, state television provided the only information Chinese people had access to, and they spoke with one identical voice. Communication with anyone abroad seemed as remote as a fairy tale. When Deng Xiaoping started the slow process of ‘opening up’ China in the 1980s, it
was possible for journalists, if they were courageous, to try and make subtle changes to how they presented the news. It was also possible, although perhaps even more dangerous, to discuss personal issues in the media. In
Words on the Night Breeze
I was trying to open a little window, a tiny hole, so that people could allow their spirits to cry out and breathe after the gunpowder-laden atmosphere of the previous 40 years.

The letter I received from the young boy Zhang Xiaoshuan was the first that had appealed for my practical help and it threw me into confusion. I reported it to my section head and asked what I should do. He suggested indifferently that I contact the local Public Security Bureau. I put a call through and poured out Zhang Xiaoshuan’s story.

The police officer on the other end of the line told me to calm down. ‘This sort of thing happens a lot. If everyone reacted like you, we’d be worked to death. Anyway, it’s a hopeless case. We have piles of reports here, and our human and financial resources are limited. I would be very wary of getting mixed up in it if I were you. Villagers like that aren’t afraid of anyone or anything; even if we turned up there, they’d torch our cars and beat up our officers. They will go to incredible lengths to make sure that their family lines are perpetuated so as not to sin against their ancestors by failing to produce an heir.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘Are you telling me you are not going to take responsibility for this girl?’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t, but …’

‘But what?’

‘But there’s no need to hurry, we can take it step by step.’

‘You can’t leave someone to die step by step!’

The policeman chuckled. ‘All right, Xinran, come over. I’ll help you.’ He sounded as if he was doing me a favour rather than performing his duty.

I went straight to his office. ‘In the countryside,’ he said, ‘the heavens are high and the emperor is far away.’ In his opinion the law had no power there. The peasants feared only the local authorities who controlled their supplies of pesticide, fertiliser, seeds and farming tools.

The policeman was right. In the end, it was the head of the village agricultural supplies depot who managed to save the girl. He threatened to cut off the villagers’ supply of fertiliser if they did not release her. Three policemen took me to the village in a police car. When we arrived, the village head had to clear the way for us through the villagers, who were shaking their fists and cursing us. The girl was only 12 years old. We took her away from the old man, who wept and swore bitterly. I dared not ask after the schoolboy who had written to me. I wanted to thank him, but the police officer told me that if the villagers found out what he had done, they might murder him and his family.

The girl was sent back to her family in Xining – a 22-hour train journey from Nanjing – accompanied by a police officer and someone from the radio station. It turned out that her parents had run up a debt of nearly 10,000 yuan searching for her.

I received no praise for the rescue of this girl, only criticism for ‘moving the troops about and stirring up the people’, and wasting the radio station’s time and money. I was shaken by these complaints. A young girl had been in danger and yet going to her rescue was seen as ‘exhausting the people and draining the treasury’. Just what was a woman’s life worth in China?

This question began to haunt me. Most of the people who wrote to me at the radio station were women. Their letters were often anonymous, or written under an assumed name. Much of what they said came as a profound shock to me. I had believed that I understood Chinese women. Reading their letters, I realised how wrong my assumption had been.
My fellow women were living lives and struggling with problems I had not dreamed of.

Many of the questions they asked me related to their sexuality. One woman wanted to know why her heart beat faster when she accidentally bumped into a man on the bus. Another asked why she broke out into a sweat when a man touched her hand. For so long, all discussion of sexual matters had been forbidden and any physical contact between a man and woman who were not married had led to public condemnation – being ‘struggled against’ – or even imprisonment. Even between a husband and wife ‘pillow talk’ could be taken as evidence of delinquent behaviour and, in family quarrels, people would often threaten to denounce their partners to the police for having indulged in it. As a result, two generations of Chinese had grown up with their natural instincts in confusion.

I myself was once so ignorant that even at the age of 22, I refused to hold hands with a male teacher at a bonfire party for fear of getting pregnant. My understanding of conception was gleaned from a line in a book: ‘They held hands under the light of the moon … In spring they had a bouncing baby son.’ I found myself wanting to know much more about the intimate lives of Chinese women and decided to start researching their different cultural backgrounds.

Old Chen was the first person I told about my project. He had been a journalist for a very long time and was highly respected. I often consulted him about my work, out of deference to his seniority, but also to draw on his considerable experience. This time, however, his reaction surprised me. He shook his head and said, ‘Naive!’

I was taken aback. Was I wrong? Why was it so naive to want to understand Chinese women?

I told a friend who worked at the university about Old Chen’s warning.

‘Xinran,’ he said, ‘have you ever been inside a sponge cake factory?’

‘No,’ I replied, confused.

‘Well, I have. So I never eat sponge cake.’ He suggested that I try visiting a bakery to see what he meant.

The manager at the bakery did not know why I had come but he was impressed by my devotion to my job: he said that he had never seen a journalist up so early to gather material. It was not yet fully light; under the dim light of the factory lamps, seven or eight female workers were breaking eggs into a large vat. They were yawning and clearing their throats with a dreadful hawking noise. The intermittent sound of spitting made me feel uneasy.

As I left the factory, I remembered something a fellow journalist had once told me: the dirtiest things in the world are not toilets or sewers, but food factories and restaurant kitchens. I resolved never to eat sponge cake again, but could not work out how what I had seen related to the question of understanding women.

I rang my friend, who seemed disappointed with my lack of perception.

‘You have seen what those beautiful, soft cakes went through to become what they are. If you had only looked at them in the shop, you would never have known. However, although you might succeed in describing how badly managed the factory is and how it contravenes health regulations, do you think it will stop people wanting to eat sponge cake? It’s the same with Chinese women. Even if you manage to get access to their homes and their memories, will you be able to judge or change the laws by which they live their lives? Besides, how many women will actually be willing to give up their self-respect and talk to you? I’m afraid I think that your colleague is indeed wise.’

This is an edited extract from
The Good Women of China.

Where the son shines. She is an icon in China, a pioneering journalist and its first radio agony aunt. In 1997 she moved to London to write the haunting stories she had heard into a book. In the first of a fortnightly column, Xinran finds out why for so many a boy is worth more than a girl

A few months ago I had a coffee and a chat with a friend, who mentioned that a friend of hers was unhappy because his wife was pregnant with a girl. This meant that his family’s first seed had not been properly sown. When I heard this I could not quite believe my ears: ‘Is he British? A modern, educated westerner?’ ‘Absolutely,’ she replied. This surprise set me thinking: so idolising men and degrading women was not a Chinese characteristic, or a problem in developing countries. Time, civilisation and modernisation had brought progress to the world, but they had not brought everyone’s education and consciousness into the 21st century.