Daughter of China: Meihong Xu and Larry Engelmann

I have to salute Larry Engelmann (who also co-authored Feather in the Storm" ten years later) -- he's a bit heavy handed in making his stories feel dramatic -- but he really seems to disappear behind the voice of the storyteller whom he's enabling -- while when I do a similar thing -- I make the storyteller speak through me.

Larry Engelmann in 1988, the time of this story

But then -- he's a serious oral historian -- and I am only a dabbler.

And I also have to salute Meihong Xu -- because her story is chock full with the kind of details of 20th C. Chinese life that fascinate me - as she weaves back and forth between a foreground drama of arrest, interrogation, and escape, and a background fabric of childhood life and family history in Jiangsu province.

There are so many extreme, dramatic stories in the 20th C. -- and her little peasant village, on the road between Shanghai and Nanjing seems to have had its share.

One thing that distinguishes Meihong from all the other Chinese writers that I've read: she's not an intellectual. Not that she isn't smart -- after all, she was one-of-ten girls chosen out of the entire country to be the first class of female graduates from an intelligence officers' training school in Nanjing. But there's no teachers - writers - artists- lawyers etc in her background. She is completely outside "the stinking ninth class" - and though she's a wonderful story teller -- she mostly just wants to get ahead in the world - to be safe, prosperous, and a good daughter of her family and country.

I especially love the stories about her peculiar relatives: her poor aunt who was divorced for being childless, but then accused of being "not a woman", and
then accepting the guilt of being a village troublemaker -- but eventually finding true love with a retired businessman. And her maternal grandfather who was an early
supporter of the communists, made a local leader, got revenge on the bandits who had boiled his father alive, and died of exhaustion while touring the country as
a speaker on behalf of communism. And of course -- her paternal grandmother -- who was not her biological grandmother -- as she let her own child be switched for another woman's. Not to mention that grandmother's husband --
who drowned the author's infant aunt and owned a factory in Shanghai that he ran so well that the communists let him stay in charge -- and even let him badmouth the Communist regime whenever he felt like it. Who could invent these kinds of situations?

And finally there's the central story of Meihong the cadet and Larry the American English professor -- and there's something very wrong about it.

Not that it didn't happen the way they tell it -- but that Larry's behavior really wrecked Meihong's life. She may have escaped death and prison -but
she didn't escape an exile that separated her from her family and country -- and what else was she going to live for ?

Yes -- she does tell us that her 4 years in the academy had left her disillusioned with the army, state, and party that she served -- and she had already proven her disobedience by pursuing a relationship with her first husband, an older cadet.

Her story about the rebellious academy graduates who were angry about being posted to Tibet was very revealing. The sons of high ranking officers, they didn't expect to get this graveyard posting -- so they rioted -- deserted -- left the army -- and immediately were given lucatative jobs in the civilian sector. The following year, the school administrators realized their mistake, and this time sent the sons of peasants to that unpleasant outpost. No wonder that Meihong, coming from a peasant family, had become disillusioned.

But she had specifically told Larry that he must not process the film that pictured her in uniform -- and that his facility was was not secure from listening devices -- and he willfully - recklessly - and maybe even intentionally went ahead and ignored her. Was it just a coincidence that his actions made her dependent upon him by ruining her career ? I just don't think so. And there was someting creepy about how he moaned about his miserable lonely life the first time they were alone together.

This is the photo of Meihong that got her in so much trouble

So first he trashes her life -- then he redeems it -- and I'm not too surprised that she left him after a respectable 7 years together in sunny California.

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Some other favorite details:

*the quota for executions that the party gave to each district -- and the eyewitness accounts of them through a small girl's eyes
*the smart little girl who stood up on tables to belt out communist songs -- but wouldn't begin until she was offered peanuts
*the madhouse scenes in the train stations where people are packed onto trains and those trying to leave can't get past those trying to enter --and people waiting on the platform shit in place rather than surrender their place in line.
*the kindness of the train conductors toward our ticketless heroine as she flees across country.
*the petty thievery that seems to be endemic in every project.
*the cheesy hotel in the far-west oil city where the electricity is only turned on a few minutes each day so that tenants don't waste it -- where there aren't any locks on the doors -- and the sheets are changed every few weeks or so. NOT a five-star hotel !
*the kindness of the soldiers who were sent to help each village in the 60's -- but how they became unwelcome in later decades.
*the incredible events of 1976 seen from village eye-level: the death of the three top Communist party leaders, including Mao, all accompanied by an earthquake that killed half a million people -- changing history as the personal and national levels.
*the amazing bureaucratic hassles involved in marrying a foreigner -- and the amazing ways that our protagonists got around them.
*the loyalty of the "12 Pandas" (the first class of female cadets) towards each other -- when paranoia, suspicion, and betrayal are the norm for secret police intelligence work.
(and how none of them served out their 15 year commission - while three of them left the country)
*yet another story that came to a climax in Tianamen Square in 1989 - this time we get a general's viewpoint - as he knows the troops will be firing into the crowds.
*and I really worry about that poor general -- whose father had crossed over from the Kuomintang -- and who seemed to be a ringleader of the progressive "capitalist roaders" He's really very loyal to Meihong -- he warns her -- his connections help her get married -- he gives her 5,000 Yuan to help grease the wheels of the bureaucracy in her favor-- and eventually he is cashiered and disappears. (and given his close connection to Meihong -- if she really can't get in contact with him -- he's probably not alive any longer)

In Conclusion: this was my favorite contemporary Chinese book to date -- tedious as it became during the recitation of all that interrogation -- it throbbed with history and life.

And it's probably worth a second read.