Reading

Deep Into Mao & China

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It’s cold and snowy outside and right now I am deep into the recently published biography of Mao Tse Tung by Jung Chang who also some years ago wrote the respected three-generation epic “Wild Swans.” Jung, born in China, was a Red Guard for a time during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by Mao. She soon after fled to Britain where she was educated. She and her British husband spent 12 years researching the Russian archives and interviewing many of the principal actors of the Cultural Revolution who are still alive.

The book answers my question about why most mainland Chinese still revere Mao after all the devastation he wrought. Apparently, it is because in the absence of a free press he manufactured his persona and made up the whole myth about the Long March (which he fed to the American journalist Edgar Snow who disseminated Mao’s lies in his book “Red Star Over China”) that most people in China still believe in today!

Mao began with no official party status and conscripted local “bandits” that he called an “army.” Then he basically stole a small army from a military commander through blackmail, manipulation and by taking advantage of a technologically ineffective communication system between Shanghai and the rest of China and Moscow where Stalin was pulling the strings. It was by creating an army and by that he was then able to gain credibility and ascend to party leadership. All the while he was carried over snow-covered mountains on a litter by mostly barefoot carriers so he could comfortably read his books.

Meanwhile, Stalin’s top agenda was China’s defeat of the Japanese. Mao’s modus operandi was to lead Stalin into thinking he was following the Soviet line but all the while outmaneuvering Chiang Kai Khek and the Nationalist Army and all other Red factions who were competing for power…no small feat! Moscow bought into Mao’s deception and protected Mao.

Chiang Kai Khek’s nationalist forces had been “chasing” Mao from the south (his wife raised millions of dollars in the U.S. for this war) but let Mao and his “army” go because Stalin was holding Chiang’s son hostage in Moscow. Ironically, for Chiang, the Reds took over China and it took Chiang 11 years to get his son back. As we know, Chiang eventually fled to Taiwan.

Another eye-opening book is the biography of Mao written by his personal physician of 25 years. After Mao died, his physician moved to Chicago near his two sons who had been university educated there. The biography was published just before his death around 1995.

When I was in Bangkok this summer, I gave the biography to a young Chinese woman in her early 20’s who was “visiting her boyfriend.” “He is very fat,” she said laughing, “but he is a very rich Texan!” She was by herself sitting next to me at a sushi bar. Her English was perfect and she was reading a Bangkok travel book in English! Since it is very unusual for mainland Chinese to get out of China alone, I suspect she was there to observe and report back. “Is it true, she asked, “that blacks have group sex?” Astounded, I answered that some may, but people are individuals and you can never say “all” people of an ethnic or racial group do anything! She looked puzzled. We talked for several hours the next morning in a busy coffee shop. I told her I thought Mao was worse than Hitler and she flew off the handle. “My mother (who is a university professor) loves Mao,” she yelled. She also embarrassed me to death in front of the Thais that were present: “I hate Buddah!” she yelled when I asked about Buddhism in China.

Meeting her reminded me of a young mainland Chinese “spy” in Australia who went public about a mainland Chinese spy network that apparently reports on overseas Chinese and asked for asylum when he realized that he had been duped by the Party leadership. Australia, trying to get along with China hesitated but finally gave him temporary asylum (the US refused). He said that if he returned to China he would probably be killed or at least jailed and tortured, a claim that China refuted.

It would have a profound consequence if these books became available to the mainland Chinese. Even better, the Chang book would make an incredible epic movie…and with all the pirated movies in China…it would spread like wildfire among the youth.

“An Uncommon Friendship”

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After getting through Phil & Adri’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal that arrive on our stoop every day it is difficult to find time for other reading.

However, Amy’s mom gave me a book I couldn’t refuse. It is a double memoir of the retired general counsel of the Safeway Corporation, Bernat Rosner, whom Debbie worked with before his retirement in 1993, and his friend, Frederic Tubach who is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of California, Berkeley. Bernat Rosner, an Hungarian Jew, and his German friend, discovered after 10 years of friendship that the former was an Auschwitz survivor and the other was the son of a Nazi German Army officer. The memoir is told in his friend’s voice at Mr Rosner’s request.

How to bridge the gulf and remove the power of the past to separate them becomes the focus of their friendship and together they begin the project of remembering. The stories begin with their similar village childhoods before the holocaust and their very different paths to America where they become men with the freedom to construct their own futures.

Poignant, honest, sincere…and proof of what good will can accomplish in the cause of reconciliation.

“An Uncommon Friendship”
Bernat Rosner & Frederic C. Tubach
with Sally Patterson Tubach
University of California Press

“11 Minutes” Outranks Mao

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On my way to my BTS Skytrain station, I stop for lunch at The Emporium, an upscale indoor shopping mall where there is a variety of restaurants on the 5th floor. A young Asian woman sitting next to me at a sushi counter is reading an English language travel guide. I wonder if she is from Singapore but to my surprise she is from Beijing. She is here with her “fat” Texas boyfriend, but “he is rich,” she says. I am impressed by the command of spoken and written English by this 26 year old woman.

Fascinated to find a mainland Chinese traveling outside the country, I said that I was told by many Chinese that the only way to get a passport was via an organized holiday tour or a business trip with associates. Her business card reads that she is manager of the contacting department of a cultural communications company but I never did understand what her job is.

We met the next morning for coffee…talking intensely for four hours. One of my questions related to the fact that even after everything that happened during the cultural revolution, I still see statues and big portraits of Mao everywhere in China. She said her mother thought Mao was a hero for China. I told her I thought Mao was worse than Hitler. She bristled and said that that wasn’t true. I told her that I thought that many people in China don’t really know what happened for the ten years of Mao’s campaigns in the countrysides where it is estimated that anywhere from 30 to 80 million people died.

Then we visited an English language bookstore where I recommended the shocking biography of Mao written after Mao’s death by his personal physician of 25 years, “Wild Swans,” a story of three generations of a Chinese family, “11 Minutes” by Paulo Coelho-a book that I think is being read by every traveler from Europe to Asia, and “Soul Mountain” by Chinese author Gao Xingjian who was the first Chinese to win the Nobel prize for literature. I have since received an email from her telling me she was moved down to her soul by “11 Minutes,” the true story of a prostitute who discovers love.

End of a Disastrous Experiment

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I want to emphatically state (and I think Bob would concur) that I have nothing but admiration for this proud and resilient people who have survived 70 years of this “ideological tidal wave that affected virtually the entire globe,” according to Robert Harvey in his “Comrades…The Rise and Fall of World Communism,” “that left maybe 100 million dead in its wake, as well as twice that number homeless and suffering, and more than 30 million as slave labor of one kind or another and that shaped the lives of billions.”

Robert Conquest in “Reflections on a Ravaged Century,” argues that a group of sub-intellectuals fastened upon Marx’s convoluted and half-baked theories because of the new turn-of-the-century faith in science as the answer to every problem, including human ones” which was one response to a bewildering new world of social upheavel and unseen forces as lost men sought to gain control over the destiny of their lives.

I mention to three of our homestay hosts that I see T-shirts with CCCP (USSR or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and hammer and sickle on the backs…black humor born of a young generation that did not have to live through the bloodbaths…and when I see the responses on the faces of these women, I know I will not wear this T-shirt. It is not funny.

Are not some Muslim men today, full of shame because they are jobless and without family also reaching from out of a medieval creed with a leveling response in a desperate attempt to gain control over their lives? From communism to this?

Who Would Have Thought…?

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Who would have thought that Poland in 1995 would have chosen the former communist bureaucrat, Aleksander Kwasniewski, over the former hero Lech Walesa, who, along with the Solidarity movement, led Central and Eastern Europe out of Communism?

Poland still has a post Communist president, as do most post communist European countries today, and our taxi driver, who has two university educated children, frowns when I mention this…”I don’t like!” he spats. He and his wife have a two-room apartment with a monthly rent of $200. Fewer tourists come to Poland in winter, so what he makes in the summer has to stretch year round. He has his old white Mercedes with 500,000 miles on it to maintain. (He didn’t laugh when Bob pointed to a bright orange car and suggested he paint his car the same color! “I don’t think so!” Urban dwellers in apartments pay very high taxes which rural people in their own homes do not pay and food is more expensive than in the country where people grow most of their own. But he is fortunate, he says, that in school, children are rewarded for good grades by not having to pay as much tuition…those with the highest grades are rewarded with full scholarships.

So even though it is more expensive to live in the city, where the communist government sponsored “milk bars” (with simple but wonderful home-cooked food) are now few and far between. The effects of economic growth are more visible there than in the country where Walesa surprisingly lost most of his support.

And for the young, communism and Solidarity are already ancient history…something they learn about from boring textbooks. In contrast to the uneducated electrician, who often appeared undignified and used ungramatical Polish, the smooth-talking yuppielike former communist appeared more modern and forward looking. And for some young voters, there was an element of conscious revolt, just because the parents identify so strongly with the post-Solidarity tradition, the children vote against it…a pattern we saw also in the former East Germany and the Czech Republic where, for example, the young waitress who went to school with her Prime Minister, says that it is popular now to study Russian as well as English in school. So Walesa lost 48% to Kwasniewski’s 51% with an amazing 68% voter turnout.
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Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)

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Photos

The Germans changed the name to Auschwitz but the Polish still call it Oswiecim. We hire an English speaking guide to drive us to Auschwitz and Birkenau for the day and are predictably blown away by the scene. Bob remarks that the Poles have maintained the camp in an appropriate-simple yet austere-manner…a glimpse of history and reality without an artificial sentimentality…the scene itself supplies ample information. I find out that the Polish resistance that tried to get information to the outside world were the first to be killed. I find myself scanning the pictures and names on the walls for Mroczynski…my mother’s surname.

The Death Block, a prison within the prison, was where the SS shot thousands of prisoners, mostly Poles at the Wall of Death. The Cellars, the Crematorium and Gas Chambers, the Assembly Square where prisoners were made to wait in the freezing cold while they were counted out…reality setting in by layers….minute by minute…still not into my head. Later more and more camps, Auschwitz II, III, IV were built when the decision was made to exterminate the Jews. Birkenau is the largest…10 to 15 times the size of Auschwitz.

Bob reads the memoirs of Dr. Mengele’s assistant who carried out countless experiments, many of which were cutting edge at the time, but others left many dead and maimed…especially the children-twins and dwarfs.

The curator of the Jewish Museum in Krakow warns that memory is a difficult thing…and many books of recollection are subject to hyperbole…but among the best of the Holocaust writing is surviver Halina Birenbaum’s “Hope Is The Last To Die.” She is a writer, poet and translator, born in Warsaw in 1929 who spent the occupation in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in the concentration camps at Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Neustad-Glewe from where she was freed in 1945. She emigrated to Israel in 1947 and now lives in Hertzliya with her husband and two sons. Her works are sad but devoid of hated. What emerges from them, according to the book jacket, “are peace, kindness and belief in man.” And if she can achieve this….

7/12/06:
Government officials said Wednesday that Poland and “historical truth” both had won a victory after the UN agreed to rename one of its world heritage sites “The Former Nazi German Concentration Camp at Auschwitz.” About 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were put to death at the facility outside Oswiecim, Poland, in World War II. The German and Israeli governments also agreed to the name-change. Poland requested the change on grounds that the previous name, “Auschwitz Concentration Camp,” left a “misconception” that it was Polish-run.

The fortified walls, barbed wire, platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and cremation ovens show the conditions within which the Nazi genocide took place in the former concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest in the Third Reich. According to historical investigations, 1.5 million people, among them a great number of Jews, were systematically starved, tortured and murdered in this camp, the symbol of humanity’s cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Young Czech Prime Minister

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The Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Stanislav Gross, is 32 years old and looks 20! We are realizing how little information we have gotten in the US in the last 15 years about the dynamics in and among Europe and the former communist satellites! “Our new Czech Prime Minister is very clever,” the young waitress says. “He and I went to the same school and we all liked his ideas and his speaking ability.” But I made the catastaphic mistake of calling her country “Czechoslovakia!” “You have made a big mistake, she says,” because we have been the Czech Republic since 1992!”

I have to quote a description out of “History Of The Present” by Timothy Garton Ash…written in the 1994: “The sleeping beauty of Central Europe has not merely been awakened by a prince’s velvet kiss. She has put on black tights and gone off to the disco. While Budapest developed gradually into a modern consumer city starting in the 1970’s, Prague has emerged from its time warp suddenly and explosively. Instead of the magical museum, lovely but decaying, there is color, noise, action: street performers, traffic jams, building works, thousands of young Americans…would-be Hemingways or Scott Fitzgeralds…millions of German tourists, betting shops, reserved parking places for France Telecom and Mitsubishi Corporation, beggars, junkies, Skpenritter of all countries, car alarms, trendy bars, gangsteers, whores galore, Bierstuben, litter, graffiti, video shops and Franz Kafka T-shirts.” We didn’t notice any American kids in this year of 2004…maybe they have moved on to other frontiers…the son of a friend brought one back to the US to marry a few years ago.

Built between the 11th and 18th centuries, the Old Town, the Lesser Town and the New Town speak of the great architectural and cultural influence enjoyed by this city since the Middle Ages. The many magnificent monuments, such as Hradcani Castle, St Vitus Cathedral, Charles Bridge and numerous churches and palaces, built mostly in the 14th century under the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV. The historic center of Prague is an UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We took a city walking tour and when I commented to our leader that she knew a lot about the city’s architecture and architecture in general, she shared that yes, she was a civil engineer…but that it wasn’t her first choice because when the new government vetted the former communist members, of which her father was one, she said she was kept, by association, from choosing what she wanted to study in school. (It was common for people to belong to the communist party in order to get a good job, but not believe in it.) She said she would have preferred social science and psychology but she was told she had a choice of civil engineering. Bob thinks there is more to this story but it is a fact that the Czech parliament voted in a “lustration”law, that Vaclav Havel reluctantly signed, to vet all former Communist members. In any case, her husband is an artist and she showed us little noticed public art and memorials…like the small burial plot of a student shot by police in an early resistance demonstration and who is now honored as a hero on each anniversary. We get the feeling there are cautious watchers of this new democracy.
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Former East Berlin

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I am off to Starbucks to spend an hour over coffee while checking my email but their Hotspot internet service is down. It’s a good time to revisit the former eastern sector of the city. Berlin’s architecture is stunning…old and new. Cranes hang suspended everywhere over the city. The Wall fell in 1989 and Germany has not looked back.

The West German Bundestag moved the capital of Germany from Bonn to the eastern sector of Berlin located in the middle of former East Germany and from a former wasteland has sprung a new urban district…a symbol of Germany’s Unity and the country’s success. The Brandenberg Gate is fully visible now with only strips of stone inset into the streets and sidewalks to show a new generation (dressed in retro east German clothing to tweak their parents) where the Wall once stood.

Concrete grey Friedrichstrasse in the former east sector is now the new hip place to be…hardly remembered from my 1965 trip to Europe. I asked a young English speaking guy “(I am German American,” he says) in a music shop to suggest some popular Berliner music but came away with two interesting “out there” Norwegian jazz CD’s.

Checkpoint Charlie that in 1965 released me and a friend from the American sector into the grey colorless landscape of East Berlin is now a tourist site.
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The Case For Solo Travel

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Inspired by and quotes from Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, (2002)

Friends often ask why we want to travel independently and when they do, it sets off a flood of thoughts and images.

Being a wanderer, crossing different lands among people who speak languages strange to one’s ear…meditating dreamily to the rhythm of train wheels, allowing the sounds of the world to be one’s mantra, enables one to grow…to transcend one’s known life. The silence of being alone (much like being on retreat in a monastery) without the ease of familiarity allows one to stand outside oneself… large sublime views and new smells revealing new thoughts and emotions…thrilling or disappointing aspects of oneself…heretofor hidden from one’s awareness.

If we find poetry in tattered old men weaving home on bicycles, a grateful charm in smiling young country girls… and a shared intimacy in the look of recognition in the eyes of kindred travelers we have found “an alternative to the ease, habits and confinement of the ordinary rooted world.”

introspective reflections revealed by large sublime views and new places may reveal thrilling or disappointing aspects of ourselves heretofore hidden from our awareness. Another travel writer says “it is not necessarily [only] at home that we encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we [think] we are in ordinary life…who may not be who we essentially are.”

Traveling companions can keep us tethered to our predefined idea of ourselves. They may expect certain reactions from us that obligates us…underneath our awareness…forces us to accommodate in a way that feels unnatural. Or in our companion’s desire to have their own experiences, they may not have the patience to reciprocate and share. In traveling alone we are free to connect with what and whom comes our way, as a friend puts it…”chasing a new flicker in the water or diving under it just for the pleasure, not knowing why, but just responding” to the spirit that moves…like the koi in the pond at home.

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in one’s attraction to people from another country, one’s underlying desire may be to acquire values missing from our own culture or in our own personalities. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home. For me, “home” is anywhere my heart feels connected to heaven and earth…sometimes a lot to ask for anywhere.

Yichang & Yangtse Dam

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As we were checking into our hotel, Joe Peng, 30-something young entrepreneur that was with us on our trip up the little gorges showed up with four of his travelling friends: “Most young people like me are in business. I am in charge of sales for a Christmas tree company and I also own my own business. Our sales keep going up…we can’t figure out how so many people could want so many fiber optic trees!” Nine foot trees go to distributors for $80 who then sell them to hotels and other businesses all over the world for $900. His boss for 8 years was Canadian and now his English is great so we jumped at the chance to go with Joe and his friends in a van back to the construction site.

The Construction Site
In 1995, when Winchester wrote his book, the journey from Yichang to the construction site took four hours. The road vanished after five miles and was replaced by a track clogged with every kind of construction vehicle, van, bus, taxi, tractor, crane, backhoe, bulldozer, motorcycle and ricksha imaginable, he says. The giant expressway that carried our bus for the 40 minute journey to the site was just being built halfway up the mountainside. Winchester was able to walk unescorted among the giant bulldozers and excavators, to talk to workers who slept in tents near their work sites. Some 20,000 workers toiled on the site and by the end of 1996 there was 35,000 many of whom were soldiers…some said to be prisoners, laboring on the project at no cost.

When we decided to visit the site this is what I had pictured. But all that is available to the traveller now is a viewing site on Zhongbao Island between the dam and the locks…China requiring each Yichang city Number 8 bus load, or “tour group,” to be accompanied by a “tour leader” that does nothing except ride along. The concrete has been poured and the locks are nearly finished and will be in operation by June of this year although the entire reservoir behind the dam won’t be completely filled until 2009.

The Controversy
The dam has it’s detractors…Dai Qing, a journalist trained as an engineer, earned herself a 10 month spell in prison for her outspoken book “Chang Jiang, Chang Jiang” that was published just a few months before the student uprising that culminated in the Tiananmen Square tragedy in Beijing. Dai was appalled at the risky business of building the dam and throughout the late eighties she carefully collected a series of academic papers by well-respected engineers and hydrologists, each of whom had competent, well-argued and sound reasons for opposing the dam.

Within months, according to Simon Winchester in his “The River At The Centre Of The World,” all of China’s elite and intelligentsia knew of the risks of the monster project. In 1992 nearly 180 men and women from what was called the Democratic Youth Party in Kaixian country were reportedly taken away by police and charged with sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity relating to their opposition to the dam. According to Winchester they have not been heard of since.

Friends of the Earth has said the dam will create a 480km long septic tank backing up clear to Chongquin. The rising water will cover countless cultural artefacts at over 8000 archaeological sites, many of which have not yet been properly studied. But almost all the criticism of the dam is based on on the assumption that it will not last for a franction of the anticipated time, that its effects will be minimally beneficial and possibly an environmental disaster and that it may turn out to be a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Dams break, and it is now known that at least two have broken with disastrous results because of either substandard construction or poor design. For example, The Banqiao, an earthen dam on a tributary of the Lower Yangtse in Henan province was long regarded as an iron dam-one that can never fail. But a rainstorm associated with a typhoon in August 1975 forced the reservoir behind the dam to rise nearly seven feet overnight and the heavy siltation at the base of the structure prevented the water from flowing away even when the sluice gates were wide open. The water finally overtopped the dam and the vast structure burst resulting in a lake that stretched for thirty miles downstream and whole villages were inundated in seconds. Various human rights groups have suggested that almost a quarter of a million people died. The Chinese said nothing about the catastrophe and news finally seeped out of the country only in 1994, nearly 20 years after the event…something not possible if the Yangtse dam were to go.