BY THE END of the 1970s, the first group of 6.1 million children had been issued with only-child certificates by the Chinese government. These were to become the first generation of only children in China’s unique history. Because of the Cultural Revolution and China’s other, frequent political movements, many of their parents’ and grandparents’ marriages had been driven by politics and the need to survive. There were many cases of people denied the chance of an education due to their families having been made political scapegoats, forced to the countryside for re-education, married there and then returned to the city. Or of intellectuals and illiterate peasants coming together in marriage as no other choice was available to them. Or of husbands and wives forced to live apart on opposite banks of the Yangtze River or in opposite corners of the country. All of these were commonplace.
The children of these families were products of China’s final age of extreme politics, at a time when family and social education were still bound up within closed-off traditions and campaigns of political terror. Their textbooks did not mention a word about China’s real history after 1950. They experienced earth-shaking changes every day, snatching after definitions of right and wrong as best they could. As children, this first one-child generation had, to some extent, endured years of material deprivation, and through the quarrels and grudges between their parents they garnered but few faint hints about the past. All they had to accompany them through their lonely days and nights were overworked, exhausted parents, homes like empty nests, and the belief that if they were not spending their time in study or practice then they were bad children. Very many of these children became the ropes binding political marriages together, the only pretext for their parents to tolerate each other, and an analgesic for the pain of marriage. There were many such painful and humiliating cases to be found among my colleagues in the Chinese media, children who directly witnessed their parents’ extramarital affairs, or even became embroiled, acting out roles from a perfect holiday family for the grandparents and wider family. Their level of understanding and filial obedience towards their parents left me startled, moved and uncomprehending.
In my many years as a journalist, I did come across some love stories from the 1970s, although not many. Du Zhuang’s parents were one such couple.
In the early 1990s, even after nearly twenty years of Reform and Opening-up, so many things in China remained to be done. There was still no open cultural scene, with pop concerts, nightclubs and discos regarded as a few ‘novelties from the West’. All media programming remained strictly controlled by the Communist Party. However, one group of people in the media were not willing to act simply as a mouthpiece for the party. They saw that radio and television were just entering a transitional period from state to independent management, and made use of this. As journalists, they used their special powers to experiment with a few new cultural activities on the radio. At that time, apart from my evening programme for women I was also one of those in charge of planning cultural programmes at my radio station. My responsibility was to find ways, within the limits of what was ‘permitted’, to produce more commercial programmes, so that the station could develop and survive. Part of my plan for 1991 was a new programme for choosing and judging soft drinks through public vote. We arranged for soft drink manufacturers from all of China’s provincial capitals (over thirty in total) to take part, and organised three groups – listeners, experts and the media – to vote for their most popular beverage. At the time, drinks such as beer and fresh fruit juice had not yet entered mainstream culture, and people had to admire them from a distance as ‘sophisticated and Western’. Ordinary people considered them to be part of ‘elegant capitalist bar culture’, and few believed that soft drinks could feature in China’s culinary ‘weather’. I hoped that this programme would broaden people’s knowledge of soft drinks, and help the industry to expand in the domestic market. Du Zhuang’s father was one of the first pioneering captains of industry to be given the task of running a soft drinks factory as a Chinese–overseas joint venture with foreign capital. He was a man of outstanding achievements, and for many years had been considered one of the nation’s top ten businessmen. Through our radio station’s ‘Tastiest Soft Drinks Nationwide’ poll, we became good friends.
Not long afterwards, Du Zhuang’s father asked me to help him apply for a driving licence from the Traffic Control Office. At that time in China, people with a car of their own were as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns, but I had held a driving licence since 1989 (I may also have been one of the first women in China to ride a motorbike!). The Public Security Bureau was then in charge of traffic management and I was on good terms with the organisation as I had previously helped them with public awareness programmes on road safety for rural areas and primary school children. The upshot of this was that I could help a few friends through the back door, by simplifying the political checks and paperwork that had to be got out of the way before they could officially apply for a licence. I had never really been able to understand why everything in China, from the most trivial to important issue, was tangled up in politics. However, I reminded myself that it was not that long ago since children as young as three had had to declare their parents’ political status on entering kindergarten.
On the road to the Traffic Office with Du Zhuang’s father, I fell back into my old habit of asking questions, and quizzed him on his family and society in general.
‘You hold an important position, and you’re very busy, yet you want to learn to drive. Why don’t you just get a chauffeur to do the driving for you?’
‘I want my wife to see me driving a car.’
His reply was most unexpected, as at that time in Chinese society it was a rare thing indeed to hear a big man utter words like these.
‘When you say you want your wife to see you driving a car, what do you mean exactly?’
‘You probably don’t know this, but my wife is a peasant from the Shandong countryside. I was sent there during the Cultural Revolution, and as I was one of the Five Black Categories that were politically ostracised, everyone looked down their noses at me, anybody could pick on me. My wife’s father was the head of the Big Brigade, and he treated me very well. He moved me from the communal fields to teaching in the primary school, and married his eldest daughter to me. My wife’s an honest, unsophisticated country woman, who’s had no education to speak of, and from an early age she did all the housework and looked after her little brothers and sisters; she’s been through a lot. I brought her with me when I came back to the city. She had never left the countryside before, so life in a big city was like landing on another planet for her. She’s very adaptable though, and in no time found a job as an entry-level manager for a women’s clothes company. She’s very ambitious and highly competitive; she even hopes I’ll be the first captain of industry to learn to drive, so that her colleagues can see me come to pick her up in my car.’
I had met his wife before, and she seemed a good, honest, kind-hearted and frank woman, always dressed in red and black. Her favourite topic of conversation was where the cheapest goods were to be found. Close second was her husband, and how he could do anything. He always brought his wife along at public appearances, something that very few Chinese men do. Normally, Chinese men do not attend banquets with their wives, instead taking a secretary, a lover or a girl who they refer to as a student.
‘Does the difference in education between you two affect your feelings towards her? Does it ever cause conflict?’
At this question, he gave me a serious look and fell silent for a moment. Then, gazing out of the window, he said calmly, ‘Yes, sometimes it’s very hard, especially in terms of our temperaments and interests. But I believe marriage is a responsibility, a contract between two lives. Once you have entered into that contract with another person, you shouldn’t break it. I don’t want to do anything that will make her family feel that I’ve let them down. I owe them a debt of gratitude, I want to give her a happy life.’
To think that there are still such men in China! How I sighed to myself upon hearing these words as keeping a mistress had already started to become ‘fashionable’ among Chinese men, and having a lover was nothing out of the ordinary at all. There were even a few bars and karaoke clubs where large numbers of female workers, recently laid off from their jobs, would congregate. Sometimes even their husbands kept them company as they plied their trade.
‘Then how can you make your wife happy?’ I said. ‘The difference between the city and the countryside is like that between the earth and sky. The culture, all the different social classes in city life, the stylish clothes, how do you know that you can make her happy?’
‘To tell you the truth, Xinran, at the moment she still hasn’t fully got into city culture. The only way I can make her happy is by giving our child a good education. Country women take more pride in their man than anything else in the world, and after their husband comes their son. To a country woman a son who brings glory to the ancestors and the family is the biggest source of satisfaction in her whole life.’
Now, twenty years after that conversation, under the guidance and loving protection of her husband, Du Zhuang’s mother has become a successful businesswoman in her own right. Not only that, but after her retirement she took up the piano and ballroom dancing, and goes to weekly ballet classes to keep herself in shape. She enjoys a standard of living to which many city women can only aspire.
I have a lot of friends in China to whom I can open my heart, but not many like Du Zhuang’s parents. They give me encouragement and hope that the distortions of history and the cruelty of politics have not yet strangled the feelings and loyalty that Chinese people share. Because of my admiration for their sincere love, a sort of family feeling has evolved as part of our friendship, and these days many people assume that they are my older sister and brother-in-law.
Since I wrote The Good Women of China (published in 2002), I have observed an endless stream of China’s good women, but barely a handful of good men. Over the last ten years I have interviewed or come into contact with over a hundred bosses, men of letters, politicians, peasants and workers, but very seldom have I heard any of them say their wives are good women or that they deserve to be loved and cherished. Du Zhuang’s father has often appeared to me between the lines of my writing. Here at least was a good man who regarded his wife’s happiness as his duty.
In 1999, when I had finished my book and gone back to China, I heard from my friends that a major rectification campaign was under way against Chinese–foreign joint ventures. Many leading businessmen had already been imprisoned, and it looked uncomfortably like Du Zhuang’s father would be hard put to avoid a similar fate. I immediately telephoned his home, and he told me that while his foreign business partner was protecting him for the moment, there was no guarantee that he would not be in prison sometime soon. China’s economy was feeling its way blindly into unfamiliar territory, and lacked the oversight and protection of an independent civil legal system. Apart from bringing criminal charges, no one was sure what the authorities could or would do. Finally he sobbed down the phone, ‘If I go to prison I’ll manage, but I’m worried that my wife won’t be able to bear it, and my son’s still at university – I’m afraid he’ll be dragged down with me!’
‘Is there any way I can help you?’
‘Nobody can help. I know we don’t have the old system of punishment any more, where entire families were executed because of the crimes of one member, but we do still have punishment by association, and blood guilt is still deeply embedded in Chinese consciousness. The boy isn’t yet twenty; whether he will be able to come through this disaster and stand on his own two feet is a matter for fate now.’
Six months later on my return to China I visited the couple again, and was shocked by what I saw. Du Zhuang’s father was reduced to skin and bones, and his wife was dreadfully pale and drawn. Both of them lived in fear of a knock on the door, and whenever the bell rang they thought it was someone coming to take them away.
I remembered what he had once told me, about the safety, health and happiness of their son being right at the heart of their family, so I said to them, ‘I tell you what, my son has just gone off to boarding school in England. I still have a bit of energy left over, so send your son to London to study abroad; that way you can both rest easy, at least you won’t be living in fear for your son.’
And so in the autumn of 2000, the year he turned twenty-one, their son Du Zhuang became part of our family life in London. He also became the key to unlocking the doors of my interest in China’s first generation of only children, and the beginning of my serious attention to the subject.
The day of his arrival came, and I made my way to Heathrow airport to pick up Du Zhuang. This was before Chinese students had started flooding into the UK in the way they do now, and a tall, skinny Chinese youth standing at the airport exit was quite noticeable. Du Zhuang, thin, frail and as insubstantial as plywood, was pushing his suitcase with one hand, and talking to his mother on the phone with the other. He was not looking around for anyone, but instead was listening with single-minded attention to the phone. His expression was serious, almost devout, as if receiving an edict from the emperor. It was only when I was standing right in front of him that he finally stopped and looked at me with a smile. In those days Chinese people did not hug or exchange pecks on the cheek, and shaking hands was for grown-ups only. Clearly Du Zhuang saw me as part of his parents’ generation, and did not dare to make any such rash moves.
Just five seconds after I had found him, Du Zhuang passed his mobile phone to me, saying, ‘My mother’s been waiting to speak to you!’
Over the phone, it seemed as if Du Zhuang’s mother had jumped right out in front of me. I will never, ever, forget her first words, shouted at me down the phone: ‘Xinran, my son’s in your hands now! Remember to help him to open his suitcase, he can’t do anything . . .’
She had said something else to me, but I couldn’t remember it as I was totally stupefied by her words.
‘Xinran, did you hear me? You absolutely must help him open his suitcase! He doesn’t know how to deal with it! Hello? Xinran?’
I stood there in a daze, not knowing how to reply, and ended up just repeating what she had said back to her to be certain that I had not misheard: ‘Big sister, you want me to open his suitcase for him? Which suitcase?’
Du Zhuang’s mother was clearly irritated by my confusion. ‘His suitcases, his luggage, he doesn’t know how to open a suitcase, I packed everything for him!’
I was even more confused, ‘He doesn’t know how? But they’re all his own things?’
‘Yes, yes, yes! They’re all his things, everything in the case is his own stuff!’
‘Oh, is there something in the case you’re worried might get broken?’
‘Nooo! He doesn’t know what’s packed in the cases, and he doesn’t know how to hang up his clothes, so you’ll have to open everything for him, OK? Say you will! I handed him over to you, remember?’
It took me almost a decade spent with many Chinese only children before I fully understood the full implication of those three sentences!
Before I left China for the UK, I only knew that at some unknown point only children had become a focus for society, and had been given numerous pet names like ‘little suns’, ‘little emperors’ and so on. It was almost as if these children were seen as a different type of being, but I had no idea how they went about being emperors and suns. My only son Panpan was ten years younger than Du Zhuang, and in our family he was just the Pole Star at the very most.
On the way back from the airport I asked Du Zhuang, ‘Your mother says you don’t know how to open a suitcase or hang up your clothes, is that true?’
Back then Du Zhuang was just a big kid, introverted and shy. He lowered his head and muttered something in agreement.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know either.’
‘But you’ve graduated from university, haven’t you? How did you keep all your clothes in order at university?’
‘My mum would come to the dormitory every week and tidy up for me.’
‘She used to go to your university dormitory and put away your clothes? What, every weekend?’
When I heard this I could not make head nor tail of it: a mother clearing up her son’s clothes in a university dormitory?
Du Zhuang saw my astonishment, but seemed baffled as well. ‘Isn’t that what all mothers do?’
I was starting to feel scared. His mother wasn’t expecting me to tidy up his clothes for him every weekend . . . surely not?
Later on that evening, his mother confirmed my worst fears. Every weekend Du Zhuang was at university, she would descend upon his dormitory to organise things for him. She would change his bed, bring him fresh clothes and enough snacks to see him through the week, including several big dishes such as slow-cooked goose, roast duck and hearty stews. Her comings and goings often left all six of his dorm mates feeling awkward. Sometimes she would come charging in without even knocking, regardless of whether they were dressed. Seeing that they were embarrassed, she would say, ‘What’s the problem? I’m a mother! What mother hasn’t seen those things of yours?’
Du Zhuang was the first only child I helped after coming to live in the West. I had no idea or experience about the best way to be of use to him, and acted purely on instinct. Before Du Zhuang arrived, I thought that, like Panpan, who came to the UK aged eleven, any Chinese person coming to the UK to live and study would have three main hurdles to overcome: language, which would give them freedom; good eating and drinking habits for health; and making local friends, which would define their future lives in the country. Language could not be picked up in a day, and for friends they would have to wait for opportunities to arise, but eating and drinking habits could start from day one. So I decided to take Du Zhuang to a pub called the Black Lion for roast chicken, a meal that most Chinese people can cope with.
Just as we were about to go in to the bar, a horrified expression came over Du Zhuang’s face. ‘I’m not sure that this is a good idea.’
‘What’s wrong with it? I don’t understand.’
‘I shouldn’t be going to this sort of place,’ he said hesitantly.
‘Why shouldn’t you be going to a pub? What sort of place do you think you should be going to, then?’
My ideas were plainly out of alignment with his notions of good and bad, which had been formed by a Chinese education. When I saw how uncomfortable it was making him, I had no choice but to take him back home, get two large chicken drumsticks out of the fridge, and roast them for him. I did not give him any chopsticks. ‘You’ve come to the West, now you’re in Rome you should do as the Romans do, so start practising with a knife and fork.’ Poor Du Zhuang! That really was an exhausting meal for him; his face was coated in sweat, the knife and fork in his hands were a pair of tools that refused to obey his commands. But, like most Chinese children nowadays, he uttered not a word of complaint, nor a word of thanks (you just never know what they like and what they hate). Looking back on it now, I really put him on the spot that day. He had just come off a twelve-hour flight, and I dropped him into the jabbering world of English, and forced him into his ‘Western cultural training’ before he had any chance to recover.
That night I could not sleep. First, I was quite uneasy, as I had no idea how to help this young man acclimatise to an utterly alien world. Second, his mother had repeatedly phoned me from China wanting to know all the details of her son’s ten hours in the UK. She had left me with instructions and explanations: her son was delicate because he was a fussy eater, with little interest in food, so I had to think of ways to tempt his appetite. He didn’t dare to speak English because of his character, which made him shy away from people. I had to help him to get to know more people. When I asked her about his ability to live independently and organise his own life, she replied, ‘What does a child of twenty understand?’
I objected strongly to this. Chinese parents never believe that their children can grow up, or that they can take charge of their own future. Confucius did not believe it 2,000 years ago, and neither do parents nowadays, not even in this age of information technology. It seems to be ingrained in Chinese culture.
However, subsequent events proved to me that Du Zhuang’s mother was right and I was wrong. A few days later I went up to his room for a ‘visit’, and found the table, floor and every available surface covered in clothes and socks.
I asked him casually, ‘Why haven’t you hung up your clothes in the wardrobe?’
‘Hang up? In the wardrobe? How do I do that?’ he asked me in bewilderment.
I saw then that Du Zhuang really did not have the first clue about how to organise his own clothes. In his twenty years of growing up, had he never learned these basic skills at home? To be sure, in the past wardrobes had been rare and treasured items in ordinary households, with only senior family members using them. Children’s clothes were stacked in piles on simple shelves. But Du Zhuang’s parents were very modern. If Du Zhuang had never organised his own wardrobe at home, how was he going to do it in England?
Every couple of days I would make Du Zhuang a Chinese meal to take the edge off his pining for his mother’s cooking. One evening he mentioned that he fancied potato slivers in vinegar, so I bought two potatoes and told him, ‘I’m busy editing my book, chop the potatoes into slivers and steep them in water, then I’ll make them for you this evening.’
After about twenty minutes, hearing no sound or movement from the kitchen, I went to see what was happening. Du Zhuang was looming over the kitchen counter, knife in one hand, potato in the other, staring into space.
‘Du Zhuang, what are you doing?’
‘I’m wondering how to turn this spherical potato into slivers . . .’
At this I lost my temper. ‘If you don’t start by chopping it up, how are you ever going to turn it into slivers?’
‘How do I do that?’ he said, perplexed.
I got more annoyed. ‘You’re really telling me that you’ve never done any work in the kitchen, at your age?’
‘No, at home the only thing I did apart from eating and sleeping was homework, nobody made me cook anything.’
‘You managed to make it through university, you might just give it a try! Think, how would you turn a round potato into slivers? Can you cut it into slivers directly? Or do you first have to cut it into another shape?’
He mulled this over for ages. ‘I don’t know, strips? Or slices? I only studied economics at university.’
‘Then just pick up the knife and give it a try. First cut the potato into strips or slices or chunks, and then see what the easiest way of cutting them into slivers is.’ By this time I thought that my eyes must be radiating sparks.
He stood there, earnestly repeating, ‘Cut the potato into strips, slices or chunks, then cut into slivers.’
I really had no time to spend going over these most basic of cooking skills with him, so I returned to my editing. Several minutes later, I heard a very slow noise coming from the kitchen – he had started to cut the potato! However, that slow, measured chopping sound continued unceasing for a very long time; twenty minutes later it was still going! How could he possibly be taking so long? I went to check on him again, and did not know whether to laugh or cry at the scene that greeted me. The kitchen counter was very low, and Du Zhuang was kneeling beside it. As I hadn’t told him about slicing in batches, he was holding down a slice of potato with one hand, his eyes very close to the slice, carefully cutting it up, one sliver at a time! I took a photograph of him there and then. ‘This photo I’m definitely going to show your family, how you finally grew up when you came to London aged twenty!’
In order to help Panpan and Du Zhuang understand the British countryside, we would sometimes accept friends’ invitations to spend the weekend at their holiday cottages. One time we spent a long weekend at a friend’s house on the south coast. Soon after we settled in, Du Zhuang dived into their office, and we all thought he had got hooked on some computer game. On Monday morning, our friend’s part-time secretary arrived. She had only been in the office a couple of minutes when she started shouting, ‘Who’s been messing with my desktop? Where have all my files gone?’
We were all scared stiff by her violent outburst, but nobody knew what she was talking about. How could we have inadvertently moved her desktop files and messed up her system?
As we stood staring at each other in bewilderment, Du Zhuang very nervously announced, ‘I tidied up her desktop for her; it was too chaotic, there was no logic to the way it was arranged at all!’
‘You? You touched somebody else’s work computer? Tidied up her files? What did you think you were doing? How did you tidy them up? Do you understand her business? How can you know anything about the logic behind her work? Aren’t you afraid of being accused of invading someone’s personal privacy? That’s a crime, you know!’
Faced with reproaches in seven or eight different voices and in two different languages, Du Zhuang seemed bewildered and kept on repeating, ‘I meant well, I just wanted to help her quietly!’
True enough, we Chinese do believe in the virtues of the old story of seven fairy maidens visiting the mortal world and performing good deeds, and the morality of the revolutionary soldier Lei Feng, who did good deeds without leaving his name. Moreover, we have never really got to grips with Western cultures’ customs of etiquette and concepts of self and privacy. We are a confident race, and we teach our children these ancient codes of behaviour. Many overseas Chinese are full of well-meant, kindly advice for Westerners, through which they hope to convince them about their ideas of right and wrong, their methods for maintaining good health, and family education at home. I do not think that Du Zhuang was alone in not understanding what he had done; his mother would not have understood either, nor perhaps would lots of us who have spent many years living in the West!
After this incident, Du Zhuang said in an aggrieved tone, ‘When I went to my father’s office, nobody would say anything to me, no matter what I did to their things!’
I asked him, ‘Is the world your home?’
At that moment, I could really see the sun and emperor that people spoke of.
The first time Du Zhuang met Toby, who is now my husband, was shortly after Toby had injured himself falling from a horse in Argentina, and had been repatriated back to London. Before going to the airport to collect him, I repeatedly impressed upon Du Zhuang that Toby was seriously hurt, and that he should mind his manners when he met him, so as not to make Westerners think that young Chinese people are heartless and ungrateful. However, I neglected to point out to him the differences between Chinese and Western culture on meeting someone for the first time.
As soon as Toby and I got home, Du Zhuang greeted us warmly, and in his halting English proceeded to give a textbook example of how Chinese people express their concern and good wishes. ‘Hello, I’m Du Zhuang, you really have taken a terrible fall! Tut tut, your eyes are as black as a panda’s! Tell me, does it hurt dreadfully?’
As soon as I realised that Du Zhuang hadn’t the slightest clue about polite greetings in the West, I nipped behind Toby’s back and gestured for him to say no more. But to my surprise, he totally failed to catch on. ‘Yes, I heard you broke your shoulder, no wonder your lower back is all swollen up like a bear!’
I looked on helplessly as Toby blazed with fury at Du Zhuang’s ‘good wishes’, and hurriedly got him settled into bed to rest. Toby, who was in a lot of pain, said angrily, ‘Why are young Chinese people so cruel, making fun of my suffering?’ I knew this was not a good moment to explain the cultural differences; what he needed was rest and painkillers.
I returned to the living room with a heavy heart, yet Du Zhuang was sitting there, plainly very excited. ‘How did I do, I put on a good show, didn’t I? I’ve never shown that much concern even to my mum and dad!’
I looked at him. From his expectant gaze I could tell that he was waiting for me to praise him, but he had never given a thought as to how best to help me tend to Toby in his injured state. I really did not know what to say for the best. Was this a generation of young Chinese people totally bereft of the nurturing influence of close family relationships and feelings, with no awareness of our common problems in society, to the extent that they were both self-centred but also hollow inside? Their basic knowledge of daily life seemed copied and recorded from books, films and the classroom. The way they expressed their feelings was, in many cases, an imitation. As for entering into other people’s joys and sorrows, perhaps, to them, it was like coming into contact with an alien?
After spending several weeks coming to an initial understanding of Du Zhuang, I came to an arrangement with his parents that before he started his Master’s course he would spend one year studying language. During this time he would live in a British household, where he could immerse himself in the language and get used to British society and culture. Of course, he would still come back to my home on weekends and holidays, to speak Chinese, get his fill of Chinese food and discuss how he was doing with Chinese and Western culture.
We ended up finding an elderly lady in west London who took in students. Her kindness, knowledge and proper English were a priceless treasure for Du Zhuang as he learned about Western society. We agreed on three rules: he would eat three meals a day with the old lady; every day he would come up with a subject to talk about, with at least three questions; and he should take care of his own laundry. Perhaps this sounds ridiculous. To a Chinese only child just turned twenty-one, however, this is no small challenge. To put aside ideas of their own uniqueness and importance, and follow other people’s wishes is a concept that barely existed for them when they were growing up.
The day we were helping Du Zhuang move into the old lady’s house, his mother phoned just as we were opening the door to his room. Over the past few weeks, she had followed her son’s progress closely, so that she could issue her instructions at precisely the right moment. Sometimes I found myself wondering if she possessed some kind of sixth sense. How else could she keep track of her son’s movements so accurately from thousands of miles away and in another country?
On the phone his mother was not speaking, but shouting: ‘Xinran, whatever you do, don’t let him hang up his clothes for himself, he’ll hang them upside down and back to front; he doesn’t even know whether a coat hanger should go in from the collar or the sleeve!’
I was in a mischievous mood that day, and wanted to tease his mother for her determination to attend to everything personally, matters great and small. ‘Sister, you don’t really believe your son that incapable, do you? I’m sitting here today watching him open his cases, hang up his clothes and put away his own things!’
‘You don’t believe me? You’ll soon find out how ridiculous he is! By tomorrow he won’t be able to find any clothes to put on!’
‘His room is only the size of a shoebox, he’ll be able to find his clothes even if he has to turn everything upside down. I’m more worried that if he puts things away neatly as I would, if I take that first step for him, then at the next step, how is he going to be able to think to find his clothes himself?’
‘Aiya, Du Zhuang, thinking? You need to put the clothes together for him in sets, otherwise he’ll just throw them all together any old how! You really don’t understand, kids today aren’t a bit like in our day, when we did everything ourselves!’
‘But if you always do it for him, how is he ever going to get the chance to learn? Besides, he can’t always have his mother following on his heels. Anyway—’
At this point, Du Zhuang’s mother interrupted me. An aggressive tone had entered her voice. ‘I understand all those fancy principles! But I just can’t stop worrying about him. I’ve spent over twenty years worrying every day; the instant I can’t see him or touch him, how can I not worry? What mother’s heart wouldn’t ache if her son was cold or hungry?’
‘But all the same, we have to help them grow up, right? Otherwise how are they ever going to find a wife? I just don’t believe that he’d go out wearing two thick padded jackets and shorts. Besides, if he gets cold a few times it’ll teach him that there’s a link between clothes and the weather.’
That day she spent over an hour debating these points with me on the phone. She refused to let up until her son had given her a detailed report of how he had organised his belongings, by which time it was already two in the morning in China. I did not dare hang up the phone, as I told Du Zhuang, ‘I know the fears a mother has for her only child; we spend every moment in fear that our one-and-only might get hurt through some million-to-one unlucky accident.’
And so, Du Zhuang ended up shuttling between the old lady’s home and ours. A great change came over him during this time, one that none of us would have predicted.
First of all, Du Zhuang’s appetite seemed to spring to life, and almost all his fussy eating habits disappeared.
The first weekend he came back to ours, although it only felt as if he had been away three days, he was like a ravenous wolf. Before we sat down for the main meal, he had devoured everything in the fridge that would fit in his mouth, down to the stale bread! Pleased and surprised, I asked him where this new-found appetite had come from. He said that he had eaten everything the old lady put in front of him, out of good manners. However much she gave him was how much he ate, as he did not know if he was allowed to ask for more. On top of this, his language skills were not up to the task, so he often did not understand when the old lady talked about food. Still, there was some Western food, mainly cold and sweet dishes, that he just could not get used to. The old lady would ask him questions, and when he did not understand he would invariably answer, ‘OK, it’s fine.’ There were also no corner shops near where he lived, so he would often be famished at night. Chinese dishes he had never before given a thought to would parade themselves in front of him in his dreams. Now he was back at my place, he was determined to eat his fill!
Very soon, however, I discovered that Du Zhuang’s new appetite was like a bottomless pit. Every weekend, when I would go shopping for Panpan and Du Zhuang, it was like providing for a family of seven or eight. Incredible as it sounds, Du Zhuang could eat half a goose all by himself, or enough roast meat to feed three or four people. Besides this, he was also constantly snacking between meals. Once, before one of his weekend visits, he mentioned on the phone how much he missed braised pig’s trotters. Where was I going to find pig’s trotters in London? All my know-it-all friends shook their heads, saying there was no way they’d ever heard of such a thing in London. However, my colleagues at the School of Oriental and African Studies all said, ‘Of course there are!’ Following their directions, I managed to buy eight big fat pig’s trotters at Brixton market in south London.
On Saturday, when Du Zhuang came home and smelled the braised pig’s trotters, he was very excited. I told him that they needed to stew on a low heat until the following day, and that they were extra rations for him to take back with him to the old lady’s. That night, I thought I heard faint sounds coming from the kitchen, but dismissed them as just the neighbour’s cat come to visit us again. Who would have thought it, but when I got up early the next morning to check on the trotters, I lifted the lid and was amazed. There were only two trotters left in the pot . . . Where had the other six gone? Surely not . . . I could not believe that Du Zhuang had eaten them all, they were the fattest trotters imaginable, from huge fat pigs! How could one person . . . I really couldn’t believe that he had done it, but there was no trace of anyone breaking into the house. By the time Du Zhuang got up, I couldn’t wait to find out if he knew anything about the trotters.
As soon as I opened my mouth and said, ‘Du Zhuang, good morning! Do you know, the braised pig’s trotters—’
‘Stop right there, don’t even mention the “p” word!’ he interrupted testily.
I did not understand, and continued, ‘Some of the pig’s trotters have gone missing, I don’t know—’
‘Stop it! Don’t say another thing, I can’t handle that “p” word just now,’ he said in a very earnest voice.
First I was bewildered, then thunderstruck. ‘What? Why can’t I say . . . Good God, no, it can’t be!’
Du Zhuang clutched his stomach and nodded his head – his taste buds had got the better of his reason. During the night, he had crawled out of bed and quietly devoured six big, fat pig’s trotters! For a very long time after that, Du Zhuang did not let any of his friends mention the ‘p’ word!
Much later, after he left us to start his Master’s course outside London, whenever my husband and I saw enticing supermarket displays of delicious foods, we would always get nostalgic, as without Du Zhuang, there would be no way we could possibly finish such a feast.
When his parents came to visit him about six months after his arrival in Britain, they couldn’t believe their eyes. Their thin, frail son had metamorphosed into a great strapping lad with a back as wide as a tiger and a belly like a bear!
His mother asked me, ‘Xinran, I thought of everything in the world, brought it for him, and cooked it for him, but nothing I did was able to awaken Du Zhuang’s appetite. How on earth did you manage to feed him up like this?’
‘I starved him out,’ I said.
‘How is that possible?’ His mother flat-out refused to believe it.
Actually, many children’s interest in life and food is squashed by parents who pander to their every whim. Common sense tells us that where aspirations and longings are concerned, distance makes the heart grow fonder. But as parents, we do not have the heart to make our only children wait and yearn for things. Time passes, and our unrestrained over-indulgence ends up limiting our children’s ability to reach out for life, and curtails their interest in natural society around them. This tendency is particularly pronounced in one-child families.
Independent living changed Du Zhuang in another way too. For the first time in his life he became aware of his own ignorance.
At the end of the year, Du Zhuang celebrated his twenty-first birthday. In the UK, twenty-one is one of life’s milestones. From this age onwards, a person is fully admitted into society, and treated as an adult. To celebrate, we threw him a ‘coming-of-age dinner’, at which we explained to him the Western idea of twenty-one being the start of adulthood. We told him that we hoped he would be able to challenge his closed-off personality, and climb out of the deep and constricting ‘abyss of awareness’ formed by his Chinese conveyor belt-style education, so that he could learn how to think and ask questions for himself. Du Zhuang did not seem particularly inspired by all this, but still meekly nodded his acquiescence to this ‘edification from the elders’. Chinese people generally believe this to be proper behaviour in a good child, student or employee. But I believe that for a person to have vitality, their ideas must first have vitality. Only then will they be able to communicate with others in a flexible and lively manner, and only then can they have physical vitality. China’s centralised, monolithic education system is like an amoeba reproducing: it curbs the liveliness of youth, and hothouses for excessive knowledge at the expense of practical ability. What is this sense of isolation and alienation, experienced by tens of thousands of Chinese students in the West, but an after-effect of this ‘abyss of knowledge’?
In order to stimulate Du Zhuang’s interest in contact with others, and to get him thinking more about society, I helped him plan out a few topics of conversation that he could use with his landlady and classmates. Several weeks later, his thirst for human contact, and embarrassment at his ignorance, awoke in Du Zhuang a spiritual hunger. I took this opportunity to encourage him to read a children’s encyclopedia. First, he could read around topics that interested him and gradually improve his reading skills. Second, it allowed him to fill in a few gaps in his knowledge of history and society. Third, it made him practise how to think about issues, and forge links and comparisons between them. Over the course of three months, Du Zhuang diligently read his way right through the Oxford Children’s Encyclopedia, something that makes me proud and touches my heart to this day. That huge volume opened up endless new vistas of pleasure for Du Zhuang. He started to enjoy thinking and questioning, to the point that debating became one of his hobbies, and he was impossible to stop once he got going! I ended up bearing the brunt of this, and was his adversary innumerable times. He would argue with me until we were both red in the face. Du Zhuang, who had once been shy and retiring, politely acquiescing to everything, was now up and running, and never looked back. He had stood up on his own two feet, climbed out of that abyss, and started to live with his head held high.
From then on our conversations started to become more adult in nature. Why is Chinese history as Westerners know it so utterly different from what we learn? Why does China, as such a huge and populous nation, have so little voice in the world? What is democracy, truly? Could Western democratic beliefs be incorporated into China? Is the Western economic model out of date, and would the West consider taking the Chinese economy as a model?
However, just when I thought I had steered Du Zhuang into learning how to pack the luggage of his own life, his new flight led him into a pain I had not anticipated, one that followed his emotional awakening. He had run headlong into a clash of values and a collision between Chinese and Western cultures.
One afternoon in Du Zhuang’s first spring in the UK, I came home from teaching at the university to find him sitting anxious and fretful on the sofa. His face was flushed bright red, his ten fingers knotted, and his toes clasping together as if they were comforting each other.
‘Du Zhuang, today’s a weekday, how come you’re back? Aren’t you feeling well?’ I asked him in a deliberately casual tone as I took off my coat. I thought that if I made a big fuss I might make him too embarrassed to spit out whatever was bothering him, and scare him off.
‘It’s . . . it’s nothing,’ he stammered, as though he did not know what to do with his tongue.
‘Are you ill? Or has something happened?’ I sat on the sofa opposite him, leafing through some students’ homework, trying to assume a relaxed air while I got to the bottom of his problem.
‘I’m not feeling ill at all, I just can’t go out on the street today,’ he whispered.
When I heard these words I was baffled. I looked at him and asked, ‘Why can’t you go out on the street?’
He shot me a glance, then hurriedly hid his gaze behind his interlocked fingers, saying, ‘The Western girls on the streets of London wear so little, they jiggle all over the place when they walk. My heart thumps at the sight, as if it’s about to jump out of my mouth! All the blood in my body comes roaring to my head, and I feel like my skull is going to explode!’
When I heard Du Zhuang utter these words, I honestly had no idea what to say to him.
True, before 2000, very few Chinese girls wore spaghetti tops or short strappy dresses, and those who did were mainly confined to the two big international cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Even I found myself feeling a bit embarrassed at the sight of British and European girls going about all bare-backed and low-cut when I was teaching at London University. How much more so must it be for a Chinese boy like Du Zhuang who had never seen the ‘free women of the world’. But how was I to help him? Although we were not contemporaries, I too came from a culture where ‘one mention of sex and people change colour’. At the time, it was forbidden for our books, media and art to touch upon ‘yellow’ sexual content. Moreover, sex education in China was not made compulsory in primary schools until 2002, so both of us had missed the boat there.
I remember that before my son Panpan started school in the UK in April 2000 a teacher asked him if he had received any sex education, and not understanding English he just raised his hand and waited for me to translate. I went totally red in the face, as I had never even broached the subject of sex with him before. In Chinese culture, and in the times I had lived through, it was a word that we just couldn’t bring ourselves to say. I ended up having to admit truthfully that there was no sex education in Chinese primary schools.
The teacher replied, ‘Then we can’t take this child. British children start sex education from age ten; if he hasn’t had any sex education by his age, we have no way to guarantee his safety in this regard. We don’t have any Chinese teachers, so there’s nothing we can do to help. I suggest that you bring your child up to speed as soon as possible and then come back and enrol him.’
I was out of my mind with worry. I should say here that my own knowledge of sex only came after marriage and was based on practical experience. How was I possibly going to get my head around the concepts and ways of teaching a boy sex education? I was a single mother at the time too, but how could I allow a child to be held back from starting school because of his mother’s ignorance? In the end a British friend rescued me from my predicament. One day, his three sons took Panpan into their bedroom and gave him a lesson in sex education. I was puzzled as to how this was going to go, as none of the boys could speak Chinese. How were they going to explain things to Panpan? The eldest son replied, ‘That was a live-ammo exercise – all four of us boys just took our trousers off!’
However, Du Zhuang was not my son, so was I really justified in handing him over to British friends for ‘combat exercises’, with or without ‘live ammunition’? Toby suggested that Du Zhuang should go out and get some experience in mixing with girls. He said it was a necessary skill that Du Zhuang should be perfecting by diligent practice. I spoke to Du Zhuang’s mother over the phone about what her son was going through, again at Toby’s suggestion, in the hope that his parents might do some quick decision-making for their child. Instead, Du Zhuang’s mother said, ‘Don’t you go teaching the apple of my eye wicked ways!’
The weather got hotter and hotter, the girls on the street wore less and less, and Du Zhuang became more and more tormented. However, his mother’s advice became increasingly horrifying. Apparently, if he was just the tiniest bit careless for a moment, he would be devoured by sex! As before, I did not feel I would go against her wishes.
Seeing this, Toby eventually said that if practical lessons were out of the question, then why not try books? Maybe Panpan would be able to help him? With this in mind, we took Du Zhuang off to our country place at Stourhead, and deliberately left a copy of Africa Adorned on the coffee table. This was a large picture book about African culture, designed and promoted by Toby, which included a fair number of nude photos. We hoped to make use of Panpan’s weekend visit, and give the boys the chance to take a look and chat about the differences between men and women as they leafed through it. Later on that day, as Toby and I were returning home from a stroll through the fields, we saw the two boys looking at the book. Toby said to me quietly, ‘I first talked a bit about the book to them, then they came and joined in. We deliberately turned to one of the pages with nudes, and I talked about the human body from the perspective of a photographer. Just look at how they’ve reacted; as soon as they were able to start expressing their opinions it was all fine.’ That day, Toby did all the talking, and Du Zhuang and Panpan barely opened their mouths. However, several days later, Du Zhuang seemed to have got over his fear of going outside, and even gradually started to talk about girls.
Toby’s influence on Du Zhuang over this period was profound. He encouraged Du Zhuang to read and think, and to go out and get to know people, including going to nightclubs to dance with girls, and going to all manner of student parties. Toby’s idea was that at parties people had a bit of close contact, which would give Du Zhuang the opportunity to get to know about Western culture step by step.
One weekend, Du Zhuang told us he was going to an overnight party, held by some of the European students in his class. Toby said that it would help him to understand his European classmates outside the classroom better, and that this was the kind of thing that young people should be doing. However, when Du Zhuang came back it was barely midnight. I asked him, ‘How come you’re home so early? I thought it was going to be an all-night party?’ He gave me one of his looks, apparently not knowing where to begin. After quite a long pause, he blurted out that there was a very rich student in his class, whose relatives had a big house in London, and that was where they held the party. ‘There was a Spanish classmate of mine wearing these incredibly skimpy clothes, all transparent material. When we danced disco together, it was as if her shaking chest was calling out to me! I really couldn’t stand it, I was afraid I’d lose control!’
I knew what he meant by ‘lose control’. Du Zhuang’s forebears had been controlled by the personal wishes of emperors over many dynasties. The two generations before him were controlled by the family values formed in unique and turbulent times. What was considered good and bad had become very unpredictable in that political stranglehold. Elements of Confucius and Mencius still remained in people’s lives, but there were also Red communist beliefs, which crept imperceptibly into their thoughts through daily political study. I thought that the loss of control that Du Zhuang spoke of was a fear of going against the teachings of his parents, and a fear of losing a morality that he had once held dear.
Nonetheless, the very thing that Du Zhuang was afraid of was inevitably taking place in his life in the UK. It was not just a matter of men and women going too far, or a change in his habits. It was also a deep questioning of, and disappointment in, a family that he had once been so proud of, and a father he once worshipped.
Du Zhuang was born in the countryside, and when he moved with his parents to the big city, he was already seven years old. He told me that his first impression of the city was the buses. Those big cars that could hold so many people, bigger and faster than a tractor, even! He remembered how the morning after he moved to the city, he had noisily demanded to see the big cars. He walked up to a parked bus, raised his head and carefully examined the enormous object in front of him, staring until he toppled over backwards! To him, the city was synonymous with smooth, broad streets, a world away from the dirt tracks of the countryside, where he had jolted along on his father’s bicycle until his bottom ached. Although everything was bigger and further away in the city, sitting on the back of his father’s bicycle for the hour-long journey to and from school each day was still a great treat. He would stare contentedly at the colourful streets, and at all the streams of different people with their individual expressions. His father did not usually talk while riding, and would only occasionally ask him about school, his voice often swallowed by the roaring traffic.
Although later on he got a car, Du Zhuang never forgot these journeys to and from school with his father. Particularly on rainy days, the two of them would sing songs together all the way, their voices drowning out the sound of the rain. In those days Du Zhuang used to wish it would rain every day, so he could sing songs with his father! As he got older, Du Zhuang began to feel that his father was spending less and less time with him. He was gradually becoming less of a father and more of a public figure. Even Du Zhuang’s university often invited his father to give guest lectures. Gradually his father became a god in Du Zhuang’s eyes, his life enveloped in the shining halo of his classmates’ admiration. He seldom mentioned his mother, and when he did it was in a small, helpless voice.
After Du Zhuang came to study in the UK, I remained in constant contact with his parents by telephone. I am not sure how it came about, for I was close in age to his mother, and had received a more formal education, but I could never get the better of her in our debates about life. My theories always seemed like exotic greenhouse plants, and not nearly as fresh as her hardy, outdoor white cabbages!
When his parents came to visit Du Zhuang accompanied them on a sightseeing tour of Europe. One day I received an agonising phone call from him in France. ‘Xinran, I don’t know how to say this, but over the past few days the adoration I used to feel for my father has been shattered. I used to believe that he was a god-like figure, a great economist, a highly respected entrepreneur, one of China’s leading businessmen. But in Western civilised society he seems so uncultured. He slurps his food when he eats in restaurants, and when he smokes a cigarette he bares his teeth, all stained yellow. He brays with laughter on the street, with never a thought for how it might look. I took the chance to call you while they’re off shopping in a department store. How can they understand so little? My mother’s been trawling the streets for brand names, when in fact all her brands are tacky in Westerners’ eyes! I really can’t hold my head up high when I’m with her, it’s agony. I don’t want to spend the rest of the European tour with them, I want to come back to London tomorrow!’
When I heard these words I was stunned. For a moment I did not know what to say. How could Du Zhuang’s attitude towards the parents he had previously been so proud of turn completely upside down in the space of just six months? In his eyes and heart, had they now been transformed into country bumpkins who were causing him to lose face? I realised straight away that he could not drop everything and come home. He also could not let his parents know about this sudden change of heart on which ‘the dust had yet to settle’. This would be a blow that no parent would be able to face – that their only son, the son that they had toiled so hard to raise, was rejecting them!
‘Du Zhuang, now you listen to me,’ I said in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘You’re twenty-one now, nobody can force you to do anything, but, even if just for the sake of repaying the debt you owe your parents for raising you, you absolutely must see this European trip with them through to the end. Otherwise you’ll be sure to regret it in the future. As for your feelings, I think I understand what you’re going through, but this isn’t the time to discuss it. You mustn’t keep your parents waiting around in Paris while you sneak away to make long phone calls. Wait until you get back and we’ll talk it over then.’
‘Well . . . well . . . OK then,’ Du Zhuang reluctantly agreed on the other end of the phone.
After they came back from Europe, we had a long discussion by the banks of the Thames.
‘What brought about this sudden change in you?’ I wanted to hear his thoughts.
‘Um, it’s just that the difference is too great.’ He seemed not to know where to begin.
‘What is the difference, then? The difference between Chinese and Western culture? Come on, this is a feeling that everyone from the East gets when they come to the West. Why do you feel that your pain is greater than that of other people?’ As I spoke, I noticed that the tide was changing direction on the Thames – a strong tide was pouring water from the sea back up the river, even as it flowed day and night towards its goal.
Du Zhuang was watching the river too. ‘What’s the difference? They’re not cultured and refined like Toby is. They don’t take pleasure in daily life the way you do. And they don’t have the respect for ordinary people that Westerners do. I’d never noticed this before, but now I’m living independently in the West and can observe and think independently, the space and distance has given me a fuller picture of my parents. But with this more complete picture, I now recognise that my father’s god-like image is actually just a social halo perched on his head. Take away that halo, and he’s no different from any other Chinese father. Just like one of those ripples on the Thames, occasionally appearing then vanishing again among countless waves.’ He sighed as he spoke. ‘I used to worship my father, but now . . . how can I not be in pain? Xinran, can you understand this?’
Could I understand? I thought I could – his god-like father was a Chinese clay figurine. When it met the waters of the Thames, its substance washed away! In a similar manner, a great many Chinese people discover after they come to the West that their national pride starts to dissolve in the vibrant, colourful world outside. Actually, Westerners who go to live in China suffer similar pangs. The modernity in which they take such pride seems so naïve next to China’s thousands of years of civilisation. But I did not say any of this to Du Zhuang. What he needed right then was not an academic discussion on the progress of globalisation, but someone to guide him in understanding his Chinese mother and father. ‘I think I understand what you’re going through. But I think that what you believe to be the fuller picture is in fact not complete at all. The father and mother you saw were actually a flat two-dimensional surface seen at a distance. You could not see the history behind the picture, nor the society that formed its side faces. Six months of British education has shown you a fact: your parents, who in China are among the elite, the aristocracy, seem like Chinese peasants on Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping street as they walk along the Champs-Elysées, isn’t that right? But how many Chinese parents have the ability to set foot on those bustling Western streets?
‘In China where you were born, 90 per cent of the population are living either in the countryside or came from there not long ago. Several thousand years of agrarian culture have formed some “special characteristics” in Chinese behaviour and customs, and these can sometimes make us feel awkward, or even lose face, am I right? But you know, every country in the world has a similar agrarian culture in their not-too-distant past, and similar “uncivilised behaviour” that today has been transformed. Now you’re studying abroad in Europe, but a hundred years ago Dickens had plenty to say about noisy peasant markets, and Maupassant’s works are full of the unpleasant habits and backward customs of France’s lower and middle classes.
‘And your mother, who in twenty years went from being a peasant woman, carrying goods on a pole in the fields, to the official she is today. Who can just hop on a plane to Europe to see her son studying abroad, what a change in her life that’s been, and how fast it’s all happened! It’s like your mother still has a deep furrow on her shoulder from the weight of the pole she carried for over a decade, and it’s not going to be smoothed away just because your English is getting more fluent daily. How can she keep up with the struggles of life in a Chinese city, and be the way you want her to be as well, no different from any other Western woman, living among the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet? When she started out she didn’t talk like a city person, and only knew how to read a smattering of words, let alone knew anything about city life or urban civilisation. When she came from the countryside to the city, wasn’t she just the same as you when you came to the UK from China? But your mother fought her way through it all. She’s given your father a peaceful, happy family, and given you a Chinese and Western education. She’s even become a member of the local politburo. How many women from the countryside can stand in front of city folk, living strong and independent lives, the way your mother does?
‘And that’s not to say anything about your father. In society, he’s a successful entrepreneur, but very few people see his qualities as a family man. After the Cultural Revolution, how many educated young people sent down to the countryside discarded their country wives when they came back to the city? But not your father. Not only did he not discard your mother, carrying pole and all, he made it his mission to help her to lead a strong, independent and happy life for all the city folk to see. Moreover, his feelings of responsibility towards your mother and her happiness led him to help all her sisters to come to the city and travel the world. He also helped give all their children in the countryside a good education. In China, or even the world, how many men, how many husbands, give their wives this kind of love and responsibility?’
The more I spoke the more impassioned I became, and the surging waves of the Thames as the tide turned seemed to add their strength to my words. ‘What is nobility? Position? Wealth and fame? As I see it, how can someone who doesn’t even love their own family be noble? How can they be worthy of a good reputation? Just because you’ve absorbed so-called Western civilisation, can you no longer see the nobility of your Chinese parents, and your peasant mother’s greatness? What is education for? What is culture and civilisation? Every place has its own unique culture to go with it! Those people living in the desert, the mountains or the coast, with no education, still have the culture of their region. Our education is meant to help us understand different cultures. Civilisation means having respect for all cultures and being able to learn from them. Nobility is a giving heart and tolerance. By this logic, between you and your father, who is more cultured? Who is more civilised? Who is more noble?’
Du Zhuang wept when he heard me say this. I knew that these tears would water his parched Chinese soul and his feelings towards his family, which had come perilously close to withering away.
Later on, Du Zhuang told me that this discussion had been like a reforging, which had forced him to think long and hard, until gradually his dust-covered parents began to shine once more.
However, when he came to re-identify with his parents’ values, he once again became influenced by the family’s embrace in his daily life. Even three years later when he went back to China to begin his career, start a family and buy a flat, he still hadn’t managed to extricate himself from his parents’ all-encompassing and smothering love.
I later heard that when Du Zhuang got married, the two only-child families got together and bought them a 180-square-metre flat, with three bedrooms and two sitting rooms. Du Zhuang’s mother took full charge of supervising every aspect of decorating their new home, using as a blueprint her experience of what was most fashionable in her part of the countryside, as well as international ‘perfect homes’ she had seen in Chinese magazines. But she didn’t stop here. Every weekend she would think nothing of cooking a week’s worth of main meals for the couple at her Shandong home, then driving them all the way to Beijing, in order to make certain that her son was eating properly!
I once paid a visit to Du Zhuang’s ‘little’ newlyweds’ home. Although their names were swamped in a long line of doorbells within the sea of Beijing’s countless new-build complexes, as soon as I went through their individual door, this ‘old fogey’1 returning from being ‘sent down to the west’2 was stunned by the opulence of the flat. In the hallway stood ornate, expensive display cabinets full of gold and silver treasures, just like in a boutique. All manner of labour-saving gadgets gave the kitchen an ultra-modern, almost magical appearance. The main living room, which was almost one hundred square metres, had been done up with a stereo system and screen like a small cinema. One alcove was filled with dozens of silk-stuffed quilts and other bedding – wedding gifts from relatives. Standing outside the bedroom, listening to their proud tour, I thought of how much a Westerner I had become. All the bedding was of a five-star hotel standard, but why on earth would they want to live in a home like a hotel? At least there was one area not ‘perfect’. They had piled high their pretty semi-circular balcony with unused furniture, turning it into a storage space.
The bits and pieces littering the bathroom floor reminded me strongly of peasant households I had seen, where things were left lying on the floor as they had never been forced to tidy them away for lack of space. When I suggested tentatively that I would like to eat a meal that the young couple had cooked themselves, the two of them exchanged glances, and said awkwardly, as if in one voice, ‘In the six months we’ve been married we haven’t once cooked a meal.’ At this, I decided to make their first meal in their new home with them, each of us contributing one dish. When I opened their kitchen cabinets I was dazzled by dozens of sets of cooking pots, costly kitchen utensils, and every conceivable gadget for preparing food, enough to open a restaurant! However, when I went in search of herbs and spices, I discovered that they had all been put with the toilet cleaning things. I asked them why they had arranged them that way, and Du Zhuang’s pretty, elegant and gentle wife said in surprise, ‘They’re all bottles, right?’ Before we cooked she modestly asked me several questions: ‘Is it the oil that goes in first when cooking? Or is it the heat first? Or the salt? With rice, is it the rice or water that goes in first?’
Du Zhuang told me that the two of them hardly had any opportunity to cook, as both sets of in-laws took turns to send over food. Sometimes there weren’t enough mealtimes to eat it all.
I asked him, ‘Why don’t you suggest to your parents that you might try cooking for yourselves?’
He retorted, ‘In only-child families like ours? How could we? They’re afraid of us touching the hob or even using knives! Didn’t you say we should respect our parents? We have to accept their love and concern to keep them happy, otherwise they’ll get all panicky and keep phoning to see what we’re up to. My mother says that Chinese people care a lot about filial piety, and that filial piety means doing whatever they say in order to be a dutiful child. To tell you the truth, after I came back to China all the independence I learned from Western culture was soon twisted right back to where it started by the “status quo” of Chinese family life.’
What Du Zhuang said was quite true. We often find it very hard to get used to changing times and cultures.
In 2006 Du Zhuang went to America to work for a multinational company that made household goods, with responsibility for opening up the Asian market. Just before he set off I suggested that once he arrived in America he should send a few cards to thank all those who helped him when he was in Britain. However, Du Zhuang said, ‘But didn’t I thank them when I left the UK? Why would I want to thank them again?’ Well, what about the Chinese saying about a drop of kindness being repaid with a well of hope? But I did not argue the point. He was an adult now, and should have his own set of values. After that there was no contact between us for a long time, and we did not disturb his world just because we missed him. Perhaps he had found his sun again – an awareness that was all his own. In a person’s own solar system there can be only one sun in the sky; of what use would any other light source be?
But, like any mother who longs for the day when her child will understand all the toil and sacrifice she has been through for their sake, every time I threw away an old calendar to replace it with a new one, I would always pray for my son, for Du Zhuang and for all the other only children in China. At the same time I would comfort myself: that the new year might bring them the awareness so precious in human life, an understanding of the place for gratitude in life, because of all sources of happiness, gratitude is the most egalitarian, knowing no gap between rich and poor.
Just as I was coming close to abandoning all hope of hearing from Du Zhuang, in March 2011 I unexpectedly received a phone call from him. ‘Xinran, today I became a father! I have a daughter!’ His voice held that mixture of intense emotion and exhaustion that is perhaps common to all first-time parents. When I put down the phone I was overcome with emotion. Had that big kid whose mother used to do everything for him actually become a father? And was that naïve little wife of his really now a mother? Would this pair of big kids be able to hold up the sky for their own child? Would their own parents be able to stop worrying about their ‘still not grown up’ son and daughter enduring the perils of parenthood?
After three uneasy months, my worries were dispelled by two photographs of the baby and a text message. The baby was so chubby that her little round cheeks squeezed up against her small mouth until there was nowhere else for them to go but to bulge out even more. Her smiling, embracing parents looked full of health and confidence. Du Zhuang told me that, unlike many Chinese couples of their age, they had not asked their parents for help. Instead, they had trawled through books and the internet for the basics on child-rearing. Parenting classes in their American suburb were also a great help. He said that both he and his wife consider it a mark of maturity to be able to repay their parents’ nurturing with a healthy independence.
This reminded me of something that Du Zhuang once said to me: ‘We are different from other people, we have no brothers and sisters to talk about and share our parents with, or share family space with. We have to work through our feelings and insights into our parents and come to an understanding all by ourselves. Can other people ever really understand the loneliness and struggles of people like us, who will grow old with no other family members of our generation, caught between one extreme and the other, and hurting ourselves and others as we collide? In the family, we are like the sun and moon all rolled into one, and are given no time or space to grow by ourselves . . . Everybody is instinctively watching us with the eyes of tradition, and judging our generation, we who were born and grew up alone.’
Spending time with Du Zhuang and getting to know him really got me thinking about his generation, and the question of how China’s first group of only children will deal with that unprecedented transformation of the family when they come to have only children of their own. From Du Zhuang’s first words to me in 2001, to now, over a decade later, I am still trying to get my bearings amid the complex maze of baguazhen.3
How do you view the Yao Jiaxin incident? Why is Chinese society debating him (a post-80s man) so fiercely?
This incident itself is one of many reflections of the general belief of Chinese society that moral standards in modern China are deteriorating. His death penalty is a great tragedy for Yao Jiaxin who committed such an appalling crime, as well as for the public who influenced the imposition of the death sentence. Both are equally tragic.
The heated debate reflects the public dissatisfaction about the inequality widely existing in our society, the deep-rooted question over our education system, as well as the rights or wrongs of the death penalty itself. There is also the question of Deng’s famous policy: Let part of the Chinese become rich first, which will lead everyone to become rich. When will we see the second part being delivered? Can our society afford to focus only on being rich?
1 Laoxiu 
: roughly translates as ‘old fogey’. A modest expression that older Chinese people use to refer to themselves, meaning that they are old and no longer of any use.
2 Sent down to the west, yangchadui 
: Chadui was a Cultural Revolution term for educated young people who were sent down to the countryside. After the Reform and Opening-up movement of the 1980s, Chinese people often compared the hardships of studying or working overseas as yangchadui, or ‘overseas chadui’.
3 Baguazhen is an ancient Chinese divination system that uses the I Ching trigrams to navigate a safe path through the myriad uncertainties of life.