While teaching my first modern Chinese history course this year, I have been chased by a guilty feeling that I haven't read as much about modern Chinese history as I should. Driven by the belief that I must be revered, as a teacher, for my knowledge that can be quantified by the number of books that I have read, I have sought no other books but those pertaining to modern China and have read them with great dedication and fervor this year. What I have received in return, is a tremendous new appreciation for history and deep sympathies for the sufferings of the Chinese people during the myriad vagaries of the twentieth century. I cannot recall how many times tears streamed down my face as pages and pages of these books are filled with sadness that resulted from the tragic (and bloody) twentieth century for China. One Sunday afternoon my boyfriend, having woken up next to me from a nap on the couch, found me weeping so hard that he wondered what could have possibly been wrong on that peaceful day. I assured him that I was fine, and it was just that the book was so sad. He nodded in understanding. However, I knew that even if he would read the book, he probably would not react the same way that I did, because his life has been far, far away from the life in China in its recent traumatic past. Although strictly speaking, I have not lived that traumatic past either, but from scattered pieces that I have heard from family members or seen in movies and documentaries, I feel I understand that trauma personally and emotionally. Emotions gushed out this year as I read and read, in a way that I have never felt before when I studied Chinese history as a student. I guess this is partly because my education in China never taught me any history that wasn't biased, and partly because being a teacher makes me a better student in learning history.
So these are the books that I have read (in some cases re-read) carefully this year in preparation for my course. By listing them below in an approximately reverse chronological order, but I am by no means ranking them by their worths, because each book sheds its unique light and they are all excellent.
Factory Girls - From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie Chang
This is a poignant book about young girls who migrate to cities to look for menial jobs. But more poignant for me is how the author, as a Chinese American, researched her own family history from Manchuria, to Beijing, then to Chongqing, Nanjing, Taiwan, and then the USA. Like many Chinese Americans, she used to be completely indifferent or even tried to avoid China, but by writing this book and finding out about about her own family's dramatic experience in and about China, her feelings for the country would never be the same again.
Country Driving - A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, by Peter Hessler
Peter Hessler is Leslie Chang's husband, and both of them write about China from the ordinary people's point of view. They see China from the inside, not an entity reduced to statistics. This book focuses on the author's life in a remote hamlet called Sancha at the foot of the Great Wall just north of Beijing, and relates the stories associated with the village in transition, especially the "development" of his landlord family whom the author has come to know well. The second part of the book relocates to the booming towns near Wenzhou and records the mindset of an economy in transition.
River Town - Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler
Although Peter Hessler is a China hand now, his first encounter with China happened on a Peace Corp placement when he spoke no Chinese. It happened in a small college in Yuling, a town on the Yangtze near Chongqing. It's another down-to-earth portrait of real Chinese people at the end of the twentieth century. One of the most impressive anecdotes in the book is how the students celebrated the Return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 as if they were celebrating their own family achievement, even though they had never been to Hong Kong and the people in Hong Kong may have never heard of Yuling at all. It was a nationalistic eagerness found upon, sadly, predominantly dogmatic education and little reality.
China Road - A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power, by Rob Gifford
Compared with the more sympathetic views of other others, this is a more critical book of modern China's development. The author travels on Route 312 from the modernities of Shanghai to the Muslim Xinjiang, covering a China much more diverse and disparate than what most people think. Shrewdly, the author points out abundant contradictions within the Chinese society and challenges to China's future, especially the blatant and pervasive human rights violations. The most outrageous episode is about the "sensitive" AIDS village of Shangcai, Henan, where people had become infected with AIDS from donating blood due to government negligence of safety measures and thus had become doomed to life in isolation, waiting for deaths, due to government irresponsibility and fear of letting the dire situation be known. Although the author does give the Chinese government credits for attempting to modernize a "continent," his criticism is sharp, zeroing in on the most challenging issues facing China today.
Chinese Lessons - Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, by John Pomfret
Everyone knows that China has undergone tremendous change over the last three decades, but how did China look like at the beginning of the 1980s and how did the Chinese people first respond to the call of Opening Up are not known by all. This book helps you understand some of that. John Pomfret was one of the first American students to study in China after the two countries re-established formal diplomatic relationship on January 1, 1979. Enrolled in Nanjing University in the early days of 1980s, the author enjoyed the relative freedom allowed for foreign students, but not other foreigners, became a part of that generation of Chinese youth, learned about their traumatic family history during the Cultural Revolution, experienced their frustrations in love and crushed idealism for their country, encountered the tumults with them in the restless 1980s, followed through their lives into the new millennium, and he himself eventually married a Chinese woman.
Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang
I have assigned this book for summer reading for my next year's Chinese history students. It is a heart-rending yet wonderful book, and perfect for the history of modern China from late nineteenth century to the end of Cultural Revolution. It is semi-fiction semi-autobiography I believe, recounting the stories of three generations of women and their uneasy lives in their different, but similarly difficult, times. Sorrow permeates the book through and through, and it isn't until the end of the book that there emerges a sense of relief when the author chooses to leave China for a new, free life. She has carried on her family tradition of fleeing for life, and given how tragic life in China has been for her and her family, that seems the only logical choice. However, enigmatically and shared by many overseas Chinese, even though she has left with a determination, she still feels the pull of China and admits that if she does not come back every half year or so, she feels restless. How true and how inexplicable.
The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Dr. Li Zhisui
There is a reason why I have put off reading this book for years. It is not easy to confront your own bias, even though you know you may be wrong. For me, years of orthodox Communist education has simplified Chairman Mao to a big, big image, so big that there is no second thought about him. What was he like in his private life? I did not know, and that just seems irrelevant, because the state's propaganda machine has for years orchestrated this illusion that Mao was all for the masses, all for the public, that almost no information about his privacy was ever made public. Dr. Li Zhisui's book is, therefore, revolutionary. It tells you about the Chairman Mao that you do not know, that he does not want you to know, and that some people may not want to know, like me when I first read the beginning few pages of the book. But to be true to history, and to be vigilant that the Mao madness will never happen again, you have to know. I finished this book feeling pitiful and wretched. What a shame that this once "paramount" leader just dispelled his own legacy.
The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
Misery continues in Amy Tan's
The Joy Luck Club. Indeed, misery was the theme for China's modern history. The Chinese people have lived too bitter a life. This book, again, tells from a feminine perspective the sufferings of women from China. Inferior by their status relative to men's and sensitive by nature, women suffered the most pains; yet they persevered and passed on their lessons to their daughters, born in a different country of the US but may not automatically grow the sense of independence until the mothers help them. The book also alludes to a similar, mysterious cycle, of how June (later changed her name to Jing-mei to affirm her re-gained Chineseness) travels from the US back to China to meet her long lost sisters, who were left behind in China during the war time before their mother escaped China for America. What Amy Tan, Jung Chang, and Leslie Chang have in common, I believe, is the weight of their Chinese identity that transcends time, geographical locations, and politics. Their Chinese identity, and mine, is intwined in families, the culture, the language, and even the 5000-year history, however sad history was. That's probably why all of them write such heartfelt stories about China, and why I was deeply moved by them.
I re-read this book for teaching my course, and I learned so much more as a teacher than when I first read it as a student. Professor Spence takes an impeccable academic approach and helps everybody understand China's modern history in a detailed and rarely nonpartisan way.
This is another wonderful book, a collection of many well-known works by many distinguished Chinese writers, including Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Ba Jin, Lao She, Yu Dafu, Xu Zhimo, Bei Dao, Wen Jieruo, Wang Zengqi, etc. The works of Lu Xun, and early works of Ba Jin and Lao She, are ideal for teaching the 1919 May Fourth Movement. Ba Jin's
Remembering Xiao Shan, and Wen Jieruo's
Living Hell, among others, are perfect for teaching the Cultural Revolution. All the works are beautifully translated.
Twentieth Century China - A History in Documents, ed. R. Keith Schoppa
Compared with other books, this one lacks in depth or breadth, but can be perfect as a textbook for students with little previous knowledge of modern China. It starts promptly from 1900 Boxer Rebellion and ends with human rights discussions, unquestionably the most challenging issue facing China going forward. The book collects short excerpts of primary sources and accompanies them with historical images and background information written by the editor. I have used it this year and the students have commented that this book is very informative - sounds like just the right book for them.
